The River Dark

by Nicholas Bennett

  John-o saw it first and tried to push Mary to the side of the oval opening in the wall. Instead Mary fell against the creature that awaited them, her head bouncing back off its narrow chest and against the jagged rock of the tunnel. Collins saw the blur of a naked arm snake out of the darkness towards John O' Connell. The policeman stopped abruptly and Weaver collided with his back knocking them both to the ground. Both men looked at the scene before them. John-o fell to his knees and looked at the cause of the icy coldness in his chest. He half-turned to Collins and Weaver, his mouth trembling slightly but a look of mild amusement around his eyes. In the darkness of the tunnel behind him, there was a movement of limbs and Mary was hoisted out of sight and in to the darkness. John-o looked at the jagged flint that protruded from the centre of his chest and back to Collins.

  "He was right," John-o whispered. "I ignored the sign. He said-"

  John O' Connell fell onto his face in the mouth of the tunnel. Collins got to him first and turned him over. His eyes were already looking at another place. John-o was dead. Weaver stepped passed the policeman as he closed the young man's eyes and squinted into the darkness. He remembered the torch that John-o had held and stooped down to retrieve it. Collins looked up at him and said: "I can't run. If you want to catch them, you better run on ahead. I'll do my best to catch you."

  Weaver nodded and ran into the tunnel.

  Weaver sprinted up the incline, his teeth clenched together, the torch beam dancing furiously before him lighting dips and downfalls moments before he reached them. The sound of his boots hammering at the solid ground and his ragged breathing filled the tunnel around him. As far as the torch beam would cut in to the darkness, there was nothing ahead. The creature had whipped Mary away into the shadows with breathtaking speed. He remembered the strength of the thing that Davies had become and knew that he had to move fast. He bore down on the tunnel and ran harder, the adrenalin pumping around him. He saw the look that Mary had given him in that instant before she was snatched away- yet again- and knew beyond a doubt that she had entered the darkness for him. He no longer felt fear, only the absolute conviction that he must get to her. He saw nothing ahead but darkness beyond the joggling light. He saw no movement, no other sign of life until he saw the bare leg kick out of the side of the tunnel before him. But he saw it too late.

  His shins connected with something hard and then he was sailing through the air, the torch gone from his grip, the certainty of pain immediate.

  Weaver put his hands before his face just before they made painful contact with the ancient walkway. He rolled to his right instantly aware of what was to come. He was blind without the torch but knew instinctively that the man in the dark was about to pounce. He drew back his feet and kicked out as hard as he could feeling the glorious satisfaction of the feel of yielding flesh and bone and at the sound of another's pain. The figure fell back into the darkness. Weaver got to his feet and headed for the torch, face down but miraculously unharmed up the slope a few steps. He swung the light back in the direction of the man in a tattered hospital gown as he approached purposefully, joyous murder on his face:

  "Stick it in your eye," he said and lunged at Weaver his fingers hooked into claws as they headed for his eyes. Weaver did not hesitate. He launched an almighty kick at the attacker's shin, causing the other man to scream in agony and crumple before him. He stepped back and looked down at the whimpering man. Weaver couldn’t kick a man while he was down. It was wrong. It was what separated the good from the bad. Then the face of the battered and defiled Susan came into his mind followed by the pale and drawn shocked expressions of her daughters. He saw the face of Callaghan in his final moment of repentant clarity before his horrible suicide. He saw the body of a young girl, bloated and bitten, hauled into a police launch.

  Weaver kicked the gowned man in the face. Then he lifted his boot and stamped down hard on the bridge of his nose. There was a sickening crunch of skull as the back of the madman's head collapsed against the uncompromising granite of the tunnel floor. Dead eyes looked up at him. He did not contemplate what he had done. There was not enough time.

  He turned uphill and continued to run.

  *

  Chapter Eighteen

  1

  Weaver pulled himself out of the earth and into the half-light. The sky was clearing; at last the rain had subsided. Dawn was approaching; the blackness of the previous night had been replaced by distant vermillion skies, spreading the beginning of sunshine into the world for the first time in God knew how long. The skyline of the town was ebony against this new light but would not remain black. David Weaver felt the first glimmerings of hope in his abdomen as he jogged down the bank towards the river, scanning the bank in either direction for a sign of movement. He realized too late that he was running too fast on the mudslick ground and, despite pinwheeling his arms could not avoid the inevitable. Weaver slid the rest of the way to the river on his backside. The river drew closer. He dug his boot heels in to the turf creating parallel furrows in the grass but managed to slow to a halt before he could slide straight into the moving mire of the river. He wiped his filthy hands on his trousers and squinted into the east. It was no good. At water level it was still too dark. However, the Black Bridge of his youth was plainly visible a mile or more away in that direction. Downstream the river wound off to the North West as it veered around the outer ruins of the abbey and into the Cotswold countryside. No movement, no sign, no Mary.

  "Come on, come on," he muttered impatiently. Mary had entered the bowels of Hell in pursuit of him and had found him. They had been denied the contact that they both knew to be inevitable. She had returned from death at his call; she had dreamed of him; they were linked by the death of a child, a death that had followed them as faithfully as a shadow as the years had passed; his absence was ever present. Grant.

  Weaver looked across the river and déjà vu overwhelmed him.

  Grant Moran stared back at him from over the water. Weaver could not see the boy's face in the dimness of the morning light but he knew that that old bad boy grin would be there just the same. The Wellington boots, the hand-me-down jeans sagging half way down his thighs because his parents never seemed to notice or care but- more than that- it was the posture that was all Grant. His cocky, ready-to-do-mischief way of standing- ideal for being still as he watched a freshly hatching chick but ready to launch in to an all out sprint in less than an instant.

  "Grant!" Weaver called across the River Meas and, as though waiting for Weaver's voice to sound before moving, Grant broke into a trot along the river, beckoning with a casual jerk of his arm, hardly breaking stride. Weaver jogged along the river bank, unfit and ungainly in the presence of Grant's easy grace. Grant Moran could run faster than most boys when wearing his wellies, Weaver remembered and followed the shadow that skipped over the swirling waters as it jauntily headed towards the Black Bridge.

  Of course.

  Where else?

  The boy hopped with fluid movement over the pools of water that had formed next to the river as a result of the flood. By contrast, Weaver lost his footing continually and skidded in the waterlogged grass. Once he had to pull his right foot out of bog-like river mud. It came with a squelching farting sound that would have sent the child he had been into gales of helpless laughter but, as his awkwardness indicated, he was anything but that boy now. Even then, it would have been difficult to keep up and it- was too hot to run but he was struggling to keep up with that bad boy, Grant Moran- was now nigh on impossible.

  As he skidded along the waterline, it occurred to him briefly that he should find it odd that he was following a boy who had drowned and died over twenty-five years before but after everything that had happened, it seemed only right and fitting. The wheel continued to turn.

  The ferry boat idled against the broken-toothed, splintered mooring. The boy had stopped running and stood in the shadows of the woodland; he waited on the other side. Weaver stepped onto the old ferry and looked for
the pull rope until he saw the heavy line angling down into the water; it had submerged having come away from its guide holes. He reached into the river and retrieved the line, shuddering at the subzero temperature and at the thought that a hand would encircle his wrist. He pulled the rope out of the water and heaved the boat away from the riverbank towards the Ross's side of the river.

  It was all over there: long grassed areas ideal for making dens, the abandoned corpses of domesticity in the shape of old fridges and stinking mattresses (he remembered, with adult embarrassment, how they had played among other people’s rubbish regardless of where it had come from or how long it had festered there); the edge of the wooded area that had long been known as Fuck Forest to the locals and with good reason; the sewage plant ("Oh shee-yit!) with its high corrugated fencing rusted orange and tangled among the creeping weeds that thread through places where, here and there, it had rotted away completely. And closer now, brooding over the river as it always had done- the Black Bridge. Light broke through the criss-crossed girders of the catwalk and highlighted two moving shadows as they climbed the steep embankment.

  Mary was shunted up the sidings by the creature. Weaver's heartbeat picked up pace. The rope worked easily through his hands. His shoulders ached with the strain of pulling the boat across but it was a pleasure despite his urgency; his palms burnt slightly as the rope passed through them. Artist's hands. He didn't take his eyes off the two figures as he pulled, so the jolt of reaching the other bank came as something of a shock. The speed of the crossing added to his surprise. He looked up expecting to see the elf-like, grinning face of that bad boy but he was no longer standing beneath the trees.

  Grant had gone.

  Weaver felt a pang of grief that his friend had left him alone but it was soon followed by the sure knowledge that Grant had been at the heart of his involvement in all of this. He’d led Weaver to this moment. Since the moment of apparition in the bathroom, since the painting of the reaching figure, perhaps even before, long, long before when he had led a terrified boy out of the darkness of the dreaded undercurrent. Forever leading him, leading him to this very moment.

  Weaver's boots splashed in the mud as he scaled the edge of the boat. He sprinted towards The Black Bridge.

  As he passed the sewage farm, he saw that the creature had pushed Mary all the way to the top of the railway embankment. In the seconds it took him to cover the distance to the bridge, Weaver’s mind reeled with questions: why here? Why take her on to the bridge?

  He could smell the oily heat of the bridge as he launched himself into the inclining garret next to the bridge, grabbing at clumps of grass as he scrambled up. Cold earth lodged painfully beneath his nails causing him to wince and he fell back several times but in a few moments he reached the summit and crawled onto the railway siding.

  Weaver stood upright and looked down the track.

  Sure enough, as he had known it would, the creature had pushed Mary onto the bridge and they made their way to the centre. He didn’t have time to study the tracks for tell-tale signs of pulverized stones, nor to feel the track for the thrum of an approaching train. Nevertheless, these thoughts entered his head for a fleeting second before he stepped onto the track and began to trot after the creature.

  The naked, yellow man turned and grinned at Weaver. It was light enough to discern features from twenty paces now. It held Mary in a head lock and squeezed slowly at her neck as Weaver watched. He could hear the strangled choke that this caused and stopped. That was what it wanted. It wanted him to keep his distance.

  Weaver held up his hands and stopped walking.

  "Put her down and you can have me," Weaver told her calmly. "Just let her go."

  The creature's mouth flapped open and the whispers began.

  "What do you think makes you so special, Master Weaver? Do you really think that we care who we take down with us?" It was the cultured entity- he recognized it from the taped voices in the police station. "We could take you too. I think you know that, don't you?"

  Weaver didn't doubt it. But there was something nagging at him. There was more to this. He’d survived the river before. Whatever the creature said, there was something about him that they wanted, something that they couldn't touch. He remembered the screaming voices out of the void in his bathroom down south and the face of Grant in the bathroom.

  When Grant had appeared the voices had stopped.

  There was a thought. Grant was not part of the malevolence that gripped the town. He was something else. Grant had appeared to him and led him to Mary. A boy that had looked like Grant had guided John O' Connell to the aid of his friend, Tom. Grant. It all came back to Grant, the boy who had given his life out of an act of selflessness- made the ultimate sacrifice to save his friend.

  Grant had snatched him from their grasp all of those years ago. Grant had denied them. Do you think that we really care who we take down with us?

  All at once, Weaver knew why they wanted him.

  Love had saved him- one moment of absolute selfless love in the torrent of filth that had caused death and misery in and around the river throughout the generations of Measton's history. Weaver shook his head.

  Madness.

  He stepped forward and the creature tightened its grip on Mary. Weaver was close enough to see that she was unconscious now.

  "Why not just take me then?" Weaver asked and his mouth twitched into a sardonic smile. "If I'm so meaningless, why didn't you kill me when you had the chance or possess me or whatever it is that you do?"

  The creature's head inclined to the side and, in an effortless movement, it lifted Mary high above its head. It stepped towards the edge of the bridge.

  "No!" Weaver lunged at the creature but too late.

  It tossed Mary over the side.

  "No!" Weaver looked over the rail in time to see her unconscious rag doll body hit the water. The creature's hands closed around his throat. He looked up into its lifeless eyes. It opened its mouth revealing teeth coated in unspeakable filth. Its foul breath filled his senses. He struggled to loosen the dirty yellow fingers from his windpipe but it was too strong. The creature widened its jaw towards his throat. Weaver closed his eyes against the inevitable, the weight of defeat beginning to become resignation. Mary was dead any way.

  How could he live with that?

  The creatures face jerked painfully into his neck and fell away. The grip on his throat slipped away. He opened his eyes and saw that the creature had slumped onto the tracks. Collins raised the house brick again and smashed it into the creature's skull. Sure that it was dead, Collins dropped the brick and put his hands on his knees panting, the pain in his shoulder causing him to swoon. He sat heavily on the track. Weaver nodded briefly at the policeman and climbed onto the railing.

  "David-" Collins gasped but before he could say anything else, Weaver had stepped out into the air above the River Meas.

  2

  Paul turned on Weaver's high intensity spot light and directed the beam at the central figure- a figure that had always reminded him of the shape of the Holy Spirit from the illustrated New Testament stories he’d seen as a child- the apostles anointed with Pentecostal fire after the resurrection of Christ. He wouldn’t have dared to make the comparison to the fiercely atheist Weaver but it was there all the same.

  Now there was something new.

  Within the flame, new forms had been added. Paul scrutinized the fine detail of the faces within the Pentecostal fire. Weaver at his best. The almost impossible dexterity of the brushwork to capture life in such microcosm; that was Weave's gift. They didn't discuss each other's work- that was their unspoken rule- but Paul felt an exception coming on. He was going to tell Weaver that this was excellent, the best thing he had ever done. During their recent argument he’d told him that the figure reaching out of the darkness had been his best work but that was a vicious lie told in the heat of the moment. No. That had been good; it was unusual. This was outstanding. How his friend had come in to fini
sh his long overdue project in the middle of the night was a mystery but this was his work. No doubt about it. Paul examined the miniscule- impossibly detailed- faces within the central figure.

  His eyes widened again. There, at the heart of the being- a being, Paul now saw, comprised of a multitude of people's faces- was the self-portrait. Weaver had captured himself- the pale, boyish face- with a professional ease that was breathtaking.

  "Fantastic," Paul muttered. “Beautiful.” Inspired, he went to the window opened the blinds letting in the first rays of sunlight.

  *

  3

  In the darkness beneath Measton, the creatures that had once been shopkeeper and factory worker, lollypop man and estate agent, mothers, fathers and children, began to file into the tunnel. They moved in easy unison, unblinking in the darkness until they spilled out of the rent in the earth and onto the meadow. No longer needing to maintain single file, they made their way to the water's edge and without hesitation or thought slipped into the freezing river.