Written in Darkness

by Mark Samuels

  Firstly, its multitude of petals, filaments and stamens were a leprous white colour. Secondly, across the whole of the surface of them, there ran a series of tiny circular suckers, as are found on the skin of Cephalopoda.

  I randomly opened the stopper on the jar a fraction. A fishy odour, like that of something washed up from the sea and left to rot in the sun, wafted over me.

  I felt nausea, as if drugged. Then there flashed into my mind’s eye a nightmare vision.

  I saw a succession of such decomposed flowers rising from a watery abyss, their filaments oozing black ink and forming incomprehensible sentences in a spidery script on the surface of the ocean. The symbols intersected one another in spirals and whorls like fingerprints, forming a non-successive narrative that was being constantly dissolved in the foaming spume, only to be reproduced all over again.

  Suddenly I was gripped by a sense of hideous panic, as if I were on the verge of passing out. I knew, with a terrifying certainty I could not account for, that the diseased rose of the depths had sought to communicate with me telepathically. But to submit to its intent would be an act of suicide; and only by being driven insane could I possibly comprehend its meaning.

  I stoppered up the jar with a tremor of revulsion and then gazed at it stupidly for several moments.

  There could surely be no doubt now; my reason was in danger of tottering. I was suffering from some form of mental illness. Still, there was one thing I could do to alleviate a symptom, if not the cause.

  I went up to the deck, clutching the jar, and then hurled it as far as I could into the depths of the roaring sea and the black night.

  A ferocious headache assailed me, almost making me lose my balance and tumble overboard, but I managed to grope my way back into the cabin and collapsed, insensible, into my berth.

  *

  When I awoke hours later it was still dark outside. My headache had passed, and the sea was calm. The Pulsar scarcely moved and there was no sound of wind or waves. I went up on deck and saw a sky full of brilliant stars, crystal clear in their intensity but strangely unfamiliar. Perhaps I was now in the southern hemisphere, and this accounted for the lack of recognition on my part, or else the appropriate part of my memory was a lacuna, obliterated by the damage done to my mind. Nevertheless, with a clear sky, it might be possible for me finally to get a fix on my position.

  I hurried back below deck to retrieve my sextant and star charts, but stood dumbfounded when I discovered that there, on the small bookshelf, rested the same jar I had recently tossed overboard.

  Moreover, the flower inside had grown, filling the jar and displacing the stopper until it had wrapped its filaments around the adjacent item, a book. I thought of hacking away the threads and throwing the whole thing overboard again, or else burning it on deck, but turned my attention to the more pressing matter, retrieved my star atlas and sextant and went back on deck.

  After more than an hour of effort I was no closer to determining my position. The stars in the night sky corresponded to none of the charts contained in the atlas. Consequently, my sextant was useless. There was no sign at all of the moon. All I could hope for was that the sky remained clear until dawn, when I could get a rough fix with the sextant from the rising sun.

  At least I could be sure of one thing, I was neither in the tropics nor close to either of the polar regions. The temperature was too moderate.

  I was about to make my way below deck to the cabin in order to destroy that maddening flower when I spotted a series of objects floating about a hundred and fifty yards off the starboard bow. They were pale, grouped together and floating aimlessly in the currents like a shoal of jellyfish. The faltering breath of wind in the air was scarcely sufficient even to pilot my vessel across the short distance, but eventually I coaxed the Pulsar alongside them.

  Looking over the side I saw that they were all human corpses, more than a dozen of them, bloated by the gases of decomposition, and doubtless these gases had brought them to the surface from the depths of their watery graves. As I gazed at the sight, more and more began to bob up to the surface, their numbers increasing with each passing moment as if some Atlantean necropolis were giving up all its dead.

  I was now surrounded by bodies on all sides and the charnel stench was appalling.

  Then I noticed something that had been partially obscured by the various states of decomposition the corpses displayed. They were all alike, with closely cropped white hair, males of the same age, as alike as a series of dead clones. I suspected then the monstrous truth about them, and lowered a grappling hook over the side to haul one of the cadavers on deck in order to confirm my fears.

  I managed to snag a body after a few tries and hauled it on board. It did not seem as badly decayed as some of the others and must have perished quite recently. It was not bloated with gases, as were the others, and I was glad of it, for I did not think I could have brought myself to handle some of the foulest specimens.

  Turning the body over, so it was facing upwards, the truth was evident. My own features confronted me.

  I was about to toss my double back over the side when, to my amazement, his eyes flickered open and revealed leprous white roses blossoming in the sockets. A mixture of blood and seawater bubbled from his mouth. He was not yet dead after all. His hands grabbed my shoulders in a feeble grip and he drew me down closer to him. A watery gasp issued from his throat as he choked out his dying words.

  “ . . . flowers sing in the gardens of madness . . . ” was all that I could make out of the sentence he uttered before he expired. Doubtless he had swum up from the depths and, if it was not a death by drowning, then the nitrogen bubbles forming in his bloodstream during the ascent had finally finished him off.

  He was not breathing, and there was no sign of a pulse, so I rolled the body over the side of the deck back into the sea, where it floated.

  Again, that damnable flower! It was the key to this nightmare series of events and, I thought, only by its certain destruction might I bring an end to the horror.

  I went below deck and found that the thing had grown during my absence. Its filaments and stamen had now spread over the whole of the bookshelf, whilst its bloated central mass had burst from the confines of the shattered jar.

  It pulsed with an obscene life, oozing filthy spume from its puckered white surface. I hacked at it with a serrated knife, cutting through its pulpy form, until I was covered with its black nectar, and then gathered together all the fragments and dumped them into an empty oil drum. I carried it up on deck, poured petrol into the container and set the contents alight. As the flames consumed the mass of diseased pulp inside, I heard it sizzling in its death throes, its nectar spitting and splattering against the interior of the metal drum.

  And then I was seized again by a recurrence of that ferocious blinding headache, blotting out the world entirely, and I stumbled and fell at the foot of the mainsail, grasping at it for support.

  *

  When I awoke and had recovered my senses sufficiently, I found I was still clutching the mainsail. The drum had vanished, but now there were titanic flowers all over the deck, and toppling over the sides into the ocean.

  They had entirely expelled all the cabin’s contents and forced them overboard, so that the waters around the Pulsar were full of shattered debris, now mingled with all the decomposed bodies floating around the vessel.

  The wind had picked up and, as I turned my face in the direction of the breeze, the glare on the horizon told me that it was just before dawn. I saw an unearthly motley of intensifying colours as the minutes passed before the disc of a sun rose above the rim of the earth.

  My eyes were now itching horribly and I thought that they were deceiving me, for the object I saw was of such a vast extent that its visible radius encompassed a full quarter of the horizon.

  Inexorably, the totality of that gigantic multi-coloured sun rose into view, its sickly rays casting a spectral reflection on the ocean.

  As I wat
ched, hypnotised by the impossible vision, with black ink dribbling down my cheeks, I heard dead laughter, and realised it issued from myself.

  Outside Interference

  Most of the staff had already been transferred out of the old Bloy Building. Only a handful of the company’s employees remained, located in a single office on one floor, amidst the thirty other storeys that were now vacant except for the dusty debris left behind in the course of the removal of the building’s contents. Constructed in the early 1960s, in the then-fashionable Brutalist style of architecture, it had now decayed to a point past the possibility of further renovation. Just to look at it was to suffer the feeling of gazing upon a corpse in steel, glass and concrete. One instinctively wished for a controlled explosive charge to blot out the sight of it for good, as one would wish for the cremation of a badly decomposed body discovered by accident.

  Those of us left inside were engaged in the last rites of the transfer to the new premises on the other side of the country. All of the old company paper records (housed in rusting filing cabinets) were being made digital, and it was our task to transcribe and then forward them electronically. It was tedious, mind-numbing drudgery, and only the most unfortunate and ill-regarded of the Bloy Company’s staff, of which I was one, had been assigned the duty.

  Each of us resented having been singled out in this manner, and having been left behind as our fellow employees departed, and the dissatisfaction manifested itself in our general listlessness, absenteeism and slow rate of progress. There was also a widespread suspicion that, once our task was finally completed, forced redundancy, at the minimum legal rate allowed, awaited us.

  Moreover, to compound our misery, we were trapped not only in the prison house of the old Bloy Building but also in the middle of the coldest winter snap for a century or more. Although the leaden skies and arctic temperature continually threatened heavy snowfall and the happy chance of our remote work location being cut off from the outside world, preventing our attendance, the expected blizzard did not materialise. Daytime consisted of a few hours of murky twilight, followed by the onset of a mid-afternoon darkness, without sight of stars or even of the moon. A freezing and bitter gale continually battered at the Bloy Building, whistling through its structural cracks, and running in swirling draughts along the abandoned stairways and corridors. It almost seemed as if the dying edifice was gasping in the icy air.

  The heating had been cut off when the central boiler had been decommissioned and we sat around in our scarves, hats and overcoats, with only a few emergency and ineffectual electric bar heaters dotted around the remaining functioning office. All of the smaller surrounding buildings in the industrial park having been deserted months ago, we were left in a tenantless wasteland, and even had to bring in our own meagre pre-prepared meals for lunch, what with the shops and cafés (as well as the Bloy Building’s own internal staff canteen of course) all now closed.

  And so the grim routine went on, day after day, with the company minibus picking us up in the mornings at 8 a.m. from the nearest railway station forty miles away, before depositing us at the Bloy Building, and then dropping us off back at the station in the evening at 7 p.m. Olek, the driver, was a taciturn and bald old man with a drooping moustache, who we all knew was a secret toper. He would often put to his lips a tarnished hip-flask, even while at the wheel, and, though he claimed it contained nothing stronger than an indigestion remedy, his breath and glazed expression told the true tale. Thankfully, however, there was an almost complete absence of traffic on the route to and from the station to the industrial park and Olek seemed incapable of driving the company vehicle even minutely in excess of a top speed of thirty miles an hour.

  *

  I had been desultorily chewing on a cheese sandwich and inputting the contents of a folder twenty years old into my computer when I glanced up and saw the first flakes of snow outside the window. Within minutes it had become a blizzard of frenzied intensity. It was Popov who first voiced all our fears, Popov who, amongst us all—we adepts of slacking and daydreaming—was the undisputed master of work-evasion and idleness. His ability to turn what was normally a few hours typing into a task of Sisyphean magnitude was legendary.

  “Unless we get out of here now,” he cried, “we’re going to be stranded! Perhaps for days!”

  “We need to find the driver Olek and quickly,” I replied, “before the roads are completely impassable.”

  A general murmur of agreement passed between the half-dozen of us in the office.

  Just then we heard the ping of the lift door opening in the corridor outside as the machine announced its arrival on our floor. As one we rushed towards it.

  Slumped in the corner of the cage was Olek. A thrill of horror passed through us all like an electric shock. He presented a hideous sight. Although his crumpled grey suit was untouched, it appeared that he had recently passed through a searing inferno. His face and hands were monstrously burnt, the skin blackened and peeling away from the flesh. His formerly bushy moustache was charred and patchy on his upper lip. It seemed impossible that he could be alive. We managed to drag his body into the office and propped him up in a chair.

  As I fumbled for a pulse, however, a tremor ran through his frame and his eyelids popped open.

  His eyes were blank white, as if boiled in their sockets.

  And then, slowly, with a nightmarish air, his features composed themselves into an expression I can only describe as a fusion of insanity and mockery.

  He turned his head from side to side, regarding us with those dead eyes, before getting to his feet.

  Despite the horror of the thing, Popov boldly took a step forward and said,

  “Olek, what has happened to you? In God’s name! We must get you to a hospital, we must all . . . ”

  In a voice whose words were like the rustling of dry, dead leaves Olek cut in.

  “Leave me alone!”

  With a sudden motion he darted past us, gained the corridor, and was within the lift, the doors closing before any of us could catch up with him.

  “The stairs! Quickly, we can’t let him get away. He must be making for the minibus,” Fodot, the office junior, said, his high-pitched wail echoing down the corridor as he took the lead.

  We took the stairs down as quickly as we were able, with Popov puffing away some distance behind us, his vast bulk uncertain on the steps. After a few minutes we emerged into the raging blizzard outside, and were almost knocked off our feet by the force of the wind. The snow stung our faces with icy barbs and it was difficult to make out anything in the white-out. But we heard the noise of the mini-bus engine starting up and the low grumble as Olek put it into gear.

  And then, from the sound of its approach, we realised that it was being driven directly towards us, and Olek intended to mow us down in cold blood. But the poor visibility worked in our favour, not his, for he careened wildly, having finally accelerated some considerable margin beyond his customary limit of thirty miles an hour and crashed with a deafening impact into the side of the Bloy Building, turning the front of the minibus into a crushed wreckage of metal and glass.

  *

  Popov was the first to try his mobile phone to contact the emergency services, but all he got was a blast of unending static on the connection. We all tried in turn on our own phones, having retreated to the lobby of the building, but with the same result. Any number that we tried to reach was dead except for the sound of loud static.

  Fodot was shaking and pale with fear, Irena Krug (the sole female in our party, a spinster of sixty) had begun sobbing out prayers, Popov seemed to be in shock, and the two other men, Kartaly and Leszno, were conducting a fierce argument between themselves as to the next best course of action, whether to flee into the snowstorm or return to the office and await assistance. My own mind was racing and I tried to put together the pieces of the unearthly jigsaw in which we had been enmeshed.

  Obviously, the first question was how it was that Olek had come to be so horr
ibly burnt and yet apparently alive. Could he have set fire to himself in a fit of madness? And yet why was his clothing untouched? It made no sense. And did his behaviour relate to the fact that our phones had ceased to function properly?

  Leszno, meanwhile, after nearly having come to blows with Kartaly, dashed into the lift.

  “The landlines upstairs may still be working,” he said, “if we try . . . ”

  His words were cut off by the automatic doors closing themselves. We waited a moment, expecting him to push the button to re-open them manually, but instead the lift began moving. We watched with bewilderment, for the floor-level indicator showed that it was descending to the basement rather than ascending to the seventeenth floor where our office was located. Despite frenziedly pushing the call button to return the lift to the lobby, there was no response, and the floor indicator winked out, showing nothing at all after remaining fixed on the basement sign for a short while.

  Miss Krug suggested we take the stairs down to the basement and force open the lift doors, thereby freeing Leszno.

  Accordingly, we descended via the flight of steps down to the basement level. After banging on the lift doors and receiving no reply from Leszno, we managed to lever them apart via a combination of forcing open a gap using the blade of an emergency fire axe and then pulling from both sides at once.

  Beyond the doors we saw nothing but the lift shaft itself. The cage was not on this level. I put my head into the gap while the others held the doors apart. Looking up, I could see nothing but darkness, but from the unfurling movement of the cables close at hand it seemed that the lift cage was still descending and had reached a considerable depth below the ground. Then, faintly, but unmistakably, I could hear the distant and muffled sound of frantic screams issuing from deep down in the vertical shaft.

  My thoughts inevitably returned to the fact that we had found poor Olek in the lift after he had suffered his hideous burning, and I could not help but speculate that a similar torture was now being experienced by Leszno leagues below.