The War in the Dark

by Nick Setchfield

  For a moment he had been afraid of himself. It had felt surprisingly good.

  ‘You’re more than you know,’ she hissed, hunching in her weeds. ‘So much more. But I’m done with you now, boy.’

  The storm broadsided the carriage. It hit with a brute thud against the windows, making ragged cracks in the glass.

  Winter turned. He had to get back to Karina. He ran to the door of the dining carriage. It refused to open. He hit his hand repeatedly against the glass but the automatic mechanism had frozen.

  The wind pummelled the train again. This time the carriage lurched. Glass and china tumbled from the tables, smashing to the floor.

  The wheels facing the storm had been torn from the tracks. Now they fought to regain a grip on the rails. There was a screech of steel grinding against iron, its pitch almost unbearable. Sparks spat against the windows in a fiery drizzle.

  There was another furious volley of wind, even more violent than before. This one ripped the train from the bridge.

  The locomotive reeled and shuddered over the edge of the viaduct, slamming through brick and fencing.

  Winter clung to the edge of a table as the carriage tilted around him. He felt his stomach plummet as the room upended. There was a hail of plates and cutlery. Bottles and glasses hurtled past his head, smashing against the opposite wall. For a moment he was almost weightless, his legs kicking against air.

  The body of the train howled. It was a wounded, protesting sound, the cry of metal wrenched out of shape, twisting and shredding, enduring the absolute limits of what it could withstand. The chain of carriages was on the brink of tearing apart, its couplings buckling, pushed to breaking point.

  Gravity seized the express. Winter heard the screams of passengers as the flailing locomotive plunged past the cliffs below. There was a rush of rock outside the windows, passing at sickening speed.

  He let go of the table and landed on the upturned ceiling. Falling to his knees he wrapped his head in his arms, bracing himself as best he could. The train hit the water. It felt like a fist in his gut. Winter’s lower jaw slammed against the upper part with a crack of teeth.

  For a moment the carriage bobbed, suspended. And then the windows began to darken as the water stole the light. The wall lamps had already expired in a shower of sparks. The carriages were sinking. Soon they would be buried in the murk, engulfed by the silence and gloom of the lake.

  Winter knew he only had seconds. The windows would shatter at any moment, pulverised by the pressure of the water. They were already beginning to rupture, cracks spreading like veins in the glass. The carriage was on the verge of flooding. The water would seize it, fill it, claim every last inch of air.

  He looked around. The faceless creatures lay in a sprawl of limbs around him, their hands reaching for his legs. He kicked the quivering fingers away. The Widow had vanished.

  The light from outside was almost gone. He had to squint to see his surroundings.

  He was standing on the ceiling, among the tiles and light fittings. The rows of dining tables hung above him as if poised to fall. It felt wrong; nauseous. Winter’s senses instinctively rebelled but he made himself focus. He saw the long, rectangular skylight, close to his feet. If he could just break the glass then when the windows shattered the inevitable rush of water would act in his favour. The pressure, he reasoned, would propel him out of the carriage.

  He stamped a heel against the centre of the pane; stamped it again. And again. And again. The skylight refused to break. It was reinforced glass.

  Winter grabbed his gun and took aim at the skylight. The bullet made a hole the size of a shilling. This time the glass cracked, chipping around the point of impact. He stamped once more but it remained maddeningly intact.

  Winter’s eyes chased around the darkening carriage. He saw an emergency fire axe on the wall, secured next to a bright red extinguisher. He seized it and hurled the axe-head against the skylight. The cracks deepened.

  The windows burst in a shock of glass. Water roared into the carriage, sweeping the shards ahead of it in a jagged tide.

  Winter heaved the axe again. This time the skylight shattered beneath his feet.

  The torrent overwhelmed him, cold and fierce, pounding his body. The force of the water thrust him through the broken remains of the skylight and out into the grey depths of the lake. The Alpine water felt sharp as pins against his skin.

  Winter swam. He kicked away from the train’s wake, fighting to escape the grasping vortex. He had snatched a breath a second before the carriage had flooded but he could already see it leaking away in a silver chain of bubbles.

  He had one thought. He had to get to Karina.

  Winter turned in the water, his eyes tightening as they peered through the murk. The express had drowned, contorting as it sank. Every window in every carriage was shattered and dark, as empty as eye sockets. Winter saw the lifeless bodies of passengers floating in the flooded compartments. They drifted like weeds in the water, their faces oddly serene.

  He had to find her.

  Winter felt a sudden, wrenching spasm in his lungs. It felt like they were being wrung with razors. That last breath had just expired. He had run out of oxygen. His vision began to blacken as carbon dioxide swamped his blood. He felt himself floundering, drifting away from the wreck of the train.

  Every instinct told him not to breathe but as he slipped to the brink of consciousness his brain triggered an involuntary inhalation. His mouth flooded with foul-tasting water. It filled his nostrils, surged into his throat. He felt his windpipe contract, trying to repel the rush by reflex.

  Winter saw absolute darkness. Then he saw a familiar white fire in the darkness. It was distant but it was growing brighter and closer. He surrendered to it as the lake prepared to take his life.

  Karina took him instead.

  She took him by the collar of his jacket, hauling him up through the weight of the water. She kicked her long, muscular legs against the current, arcing towards the daylight that shimmered like a promise above them.

  They broke the surface of the lake, smashing into light and wind and air. Winter spluttered, choking up water. And then he filled his raw lungs with huge, hungry breaths.

  The lake was calm now. The storm had receded. The sky was bruised but it had begun to lighten to the east. A squabble of mountain birds circled above them, the only movement in the landscape.

  Winter lay his head against Karina, watching the birds as they wheeled. She placed a hand beneath his chin, extended an arm and swam, sidestroke, for the bank.

  29

  The ocean met the desert on the Skeleton Coast.

  It was an uneasy truce between land and sea. The urgent Benguela Current brought the chill of the green Atlantic to the fierce heat of the Namib dunes. This union created a sea mist that could shroud the barren coastline for days, rolling in from the icy breakers. It was the only source of moisture in the sun-punished landscape and the jackal packs that prowled the black lava ridges licked its salt dew from the rocks.

  ‘Cassimbo,’ said Bagamba, keeping the wheel of the jeep level. ‘It’s an Angolan word. The fog of the sands.’

  Hart nodded and held the edge of the windscreen as they sped across the shoreline, scattering a dawn parade of ghost crabs. He watched as the terns wheeled above the surf, the mist beading on his face. Early mariners had feared this remote and hostile coast – the gates of Hell, the old Portuguese sailors had insisted – and it still had a reputation as a maritime graveyard. Seal skulls and bleached whale ribs littered the dunes like votive offerings placed before the remains that had truly earned this place its name.

  And there they were, saw Hart, as the banks of oceanic fog thinned and retreated. The wrecks of ships that lay like spectral carcasses. Tugs, liners and tramp freighters. Scores of them, colossal, rusted statuary now, their crumbling hulls and blackened anchors claimed by the sand in an act of burial that would take an eternity. The Eduard Bohlen, the Dunedin Star, the Otavi. All o
f them run aground, victims of the rocks concealed in the waves. An arch of whale bones stood in the shadow of one vessel, clearly a makeshift grave.

  The old military jeep tore past the wrecks, moving at speed, its wheels cutting deep tracks into the damp sand. Bagamba fell back into silence, his eyes on the fiery granite massifs that rose in the distance. The Angolan had barely spoken on the journey north from the Ugab River. Absorbed in his driving, he would offer Hart the occasional scrap of local knowledge or folklore, facts about geographical phenomena or bush magic, each aside delivered in a minimum of syllables. Hart had a natural curiosity about the magic but he met the rest with an ill-disguised colonial disdain. In truth he was grateful for his guide’s reticence. It was already a wearying journey and small talk, he knew, would make it hellish.

  They had met in a clammy, surly bar in Windhoek, two nights before. Hart had arrived in South West Africa looking for a guide, someone with transport who knew the Namib wasteland in forensic detail. Bagamba had been introduced to him by a friend from the high commission, an habitual drunk and weekend occultist by the name of Albert Tattersall. Hart was sure he had seen something shift in the Angolan’s guarded, bloodshot gaze the moment he had shared the name of their destination but the pair had shaken hands and blessed their deal with the first of many whiskies bankrolled by the British taxpayer.

  ‘To the desert,’ Bagamba had toasted, with a wide but wary smile, one that clearly respected the region’s formidable reputation. ‘May the land be kind to us.’

  ‘Bottoms up, old pip,’ Hart had rejoined.

  With a rattling chassis the jeep took them inland, away from the shore and deep into the dunes, outrunning the darting lizards that scurried across the parched plains. Soon all trace of the coastal mist had gone and a dry heat made the salt flats shimmer. Hart unscrewed the cap of the canteen and took a swift swig, just enough to slake his thirst. The water was warm and tasted faintly of steel but he was grateful for it. The sun was climbing in a viciously bright African sky.

  ‘This place,’ shouted Bagamba, above the straining thrum of the engine, ‘the bushmen call it the land the creator made in anger.’

  Hart tore off a strip of spiced dried meat and contemplated the ochre canyons of volcanic rock that towered above the sands. The Namib was said to be the oldest desert in the world but somehow it felt outside of time, too absolute an emptiness to be constrained by clocks or calendars or any of the apparatus man had created to govern the years. This was a true wilderness, a place where names fell away and lives seemed immaterial. It was brutal and desolate but it endured. Above all, it endured.

  The jeep crested the spine of a dune. Engine gunning, it ploughed down the incline, tyres whipping up a storm of sand.

  It was then that Hart heard it. A low howl, almost like thunder. It echoed around the vehicle and rolled across the plain, gathering in volume. Bagamba had told him to expect it. They had reached the fabled roaring dunes of the Namib and this phenomenon was simply the sound of air trapped between sand grains, agitated by the jeep’s passing. It still unnerved the Englishman. There was something ancient and wounded about it.

  ‘Christ, that’s a mournful noise,’ Hart remarked.

  Sunlight flared on the driver’s sunglasses. ‘The desert does not mourn, my friend. It barely knows you have lived.’

  An hour later the jeep slowed to a halt beneath a rocky outcrop. Hart looked up. Centuries of sun had scorched the side of the escarpment a dark shade of amber. Black cracks in the cliff-face hinted at the network of caves concealed within. He felt a rush of anticipation. This was the place he had sought for nine years. He was here.

  Now that the engine had stopped the silence of the desert felt total. It seemed to weigh upon the land. Bagamba stepped from the vehicle, the slam of the driver’s door as loud as a gunshot in the gorge. His khaki shirt was blotted with sweat and his head gleamed like polished onyx. He reached into the back of the jeep, retrieved a stubby, industrial torch and casually slung a rifle over his shoulder. The pendant of porcupine quills at his throat glimmered in the sunlight.

  ‘This way, Mr Hart.’

  The sand was treacherously soft. Hart felt his boots sink as he walked around the jeep. He took the other torch and glanced behind him at the undulating ridges of the dunes. From a distance they had an intricate natural pattern, almost like animal stripes. The desert, he saw, had already erased the vehicle’s tracks.

  He set off after Bagamba, climbing past rocks and scrub and scrawny trees whose shrivelled branches belied their obvious hardiness. As he climbed he inspected his left wrist, alerted by a throb of pain. The skin was blistering either side of his silver-link watch strap. Tilting his straw panama against the sun he kept walking, breathing air as brittle as dust.

  A boulder awaited them on the cliff path. It was taller than the surrounding rocks and had a sullen, solitary quality. It was daubed with a petrograph of a hand, the red ochre fingers spread wide in an obvious symbol of warning. Hart knew that this pigment would have come from human blood, mixed with the powdered remains of a rock rich in iron oxide. All tribal ancestor cults used this method to create paint – it wasn’t so much art as a summoning of their forefathers’ souls. This was a sentinel stone, part guardian, part deterrent.

  He struck a match against its side and lit a cigarette. He needed one very badly.

  Bagamba stared at him, mouth turned down, clearly unimpressed. And then the Angolan pocketed his sunglasses and led the two of them into a black crevice in the side of the mesa.

  The crack in the rocks took the men into a tight, winding tunnel, part of a cave complex that threaded the interior of the cliff. The dank chill came as a relief after the heat of the land. The pair pressed on into the passage, their torches illuminating an agitated flicker of sandflies. The air, already stale, was soon soupy with the scent of sweat.

  Antelope. Springbok. Jackal.

  Torchlight trailed across the rock walls, revealing crude representations of desert animals, daubed in the same earth-red hue as the hand on the boulder outside. And there were other shapes painted on the pitted limestone. Slashes of ochre pigment made circles, squares and triangles, the symbols overlapping, conjoining, creating new shapes. They were spaced at precise intervals along the length of the tunnel.

  Hart recognised them at once. They were runes. Primitive, but unmistakably runes. So his theory was quite correct. These markings were six thousand years old. Those Elizabethan alchemists hadn’t been the first after all.

  The passage widened into a cavern. Solid rock surrounded them now, removing the last splinter of daylight from the tunnel’s entrance.

  ‘Here,’ said Hart, urgently, his torch picking out a final petrograph, one that filled an entire wall.

  It was the outline of a man, painted in the colour of blood. The neck of the figure was curiously elongated while its fingers tapered like talons. The eyes were simply circles, empty and sightless. Hart imagined they had stared out of this rock, stared into darkness, for millennia. He brushed away the blind termites and toktokkie beetles that were crawling across the surface and let his hand follow the lines that rose like wings from the figure’s shoulders.

  Paintings like this were more than just decoration or illustration. They were shamanic, Hart knew, the result of trance visions by medicine men. This art was part of a ritual, an attempt to pierce reality, to summon spirits through the rock itself. It was a dialogue with the unknown, just like Dee and Kelly’s angels, the ones they had glimpsed in a scrying glass. Something had been seeking entrance to this world for a very long time indeed.

  Hart heard a pounding in his head. It was the pulse of his temples, throbbing at the lack of oxygen, but just for a moment it sounded like the insistent tattoo of ancient drums.

  ‘The Tall God,’ said Bagamba.

  Hart slung his cigarette to the cave floor. ‘That’s a nineteenth-century mistranslation. This is the Rising God. The one who ascends. The Ascendance, if you will.’

&nbs
p; He glanced at his guide, the edge of his mouth curling with scorn. ‘You should know that, shouldn’t you?’

  There was silence in the stale, heavy dark of the cavern. And then Bagamba spoke again.

  ‘And you, Mr Hart, should not know that.’

  Hart felt a searing flare of pain.

  He looked down, wordlessly, his mouth hung open in shock. Bagamba had a blade in his hand. It was thin as a reed and crowned with a porcelain handle, sculpted into a garland of leaves. The Angolan twisted the weapon, deep between Hart’s ribs. And then, equally swiftly, he extracted its slender, bloodied length.

  Hart tore at the man’s sleeve, clutching at the khaki. As he scrabbled for a hold the stitching split, exposing an arm inked with a coiling pattern of leaves, darker than the skin.

  Bagamba turned, leaving Hart to crash to his knees, one hand clasping the wet agony of his wound, the other reaching after his assailant. A vein on his forehead tremored as he fought to conjure a hex – a desperate blood bane or a shadow scythe, anything he could hurl – but pain flooded his body, killing his concentration.

  Hart collapsed to the ground. He heard Bagamba walking away, his boots echoing through the ancient limestone gallery. The Englishman lay there, snatching at breath, his face close to the still-smouldering cigarette. And then, summoning what strength he could, he began to crawl along the slick belly of the cave, dragging his body through the grime and the beetles and the dark.

  At last the magician hauled himself up, one hand seizing the gnarled grooves of the rock wall. He staggered forward, hunched double and a mess of blood. He could see the entrance to the cave. A crack in the blackness. The light was close now, the desert bright as fire. He impelled himself towards it.

  It was August 1947 and, in a land majestically indifferent to his fate, Tobias Hart was about to die.

  30

  The Basilica of Saint Cenric lay like a pyre of bones upon the lake.