Written in Darkness

by Mark Samuels

  *

  On the way down, we heard movement through all the doors connected to the other storeys, as if heavy objects were being shifted by an army of unknown visitors who could only have travelled up from the depths. We heard, too, the pinging sound of the lift. It seemed to be much in use, although we did not stop to investigate. Certainly Fodot had appeared to be engrossed when we had quit the seventeenth floor office, so it was unlikely to be him travelling up and down the shaft. It had to be more of the unknown visitors arriving. In any case, our descent was undertaken in complete silence, for we feared alerting those strangers to our presence.

  We reached the ground floor and Kartaly cautiously opened the door to the lobby.

  “There are half a dozen burnt men with white eyes out there, blocking the exit,” he said.

  “Do you recognise them? Did they work here?” I said in a low voice.

  “Hard to tell. Their features are pretty ravaged, but I don’t think so,” he replied.

  I peered over his shoulder.

  Would they try and stop us or be indifferent to our attempts to leave?

  Popov didn’t wait for the answer, but pushed past the both of us, his great bulk rushing across the lobby towards the glass exit doors, trying to take them by surprise. In doing so, he had not only revealed his presence to them, but also our own.

  He didn’t make it very far. Two of the things bore down on him, their lips pulled back in hideous grimaces, while the others sluggishly began to approach us. I just had time to glimpse the first two dragging Popov towards the lift door, and briefly caught sight of the mangled remains of Olek on his knees, trying to assist the assailants by thumping the call button with the stump of his left hand.

  Kartaly slammed the lobby door shut. Miss Krug tugged at my arm.

  “There’s a fire door just around the corner, remember?” she said.

  We set off for it, the possibility of escape not yet remote.

  Our hopes were dashed, however, when we rounded the corner to discover another three of the things stationed at that exit too. They had completely taken over the building.

  Miss Krug’s mind snapped. She began laughing manically, backed up against the nearest wall, and then slid down it, refusing to budge despite the advancing forms of the three burnt men with white eyes.

  “Let’s go,” Kartaly cried, “before it’s too late.”

  “We can’t leave her here!” I shouted back.

  “No choice! She’s cracked up! She’s already gone, man!”

  He pulled me away, and I didn’t look back.

  We gained the stairs and hurtled up them. The shuffling sounds of our pursuers were not far behind.

  “There’s another way to get out,” Kartaly said. “We smash one of the first floor office windows and jump for it. It’ll be a short drop.”

  “How do you know the first floor isn’t crawling with them?” I replied.

  *

  We entered cautiously. The first floor corridor was deserted, and I managed to jam shut the access door behind us by pushing a table right up underneath the handle. I was just in time, for no sooner had I done so than heavy blows began to rain down on the other side.

  Kartaly was in the doorway to the office. I came up alongside him.

  Inside was a complex range of machines, the likes of which I had never before seen. It looked as if someone had turned a huge series of mainframe computers and televisions inside out and mixed them up with engine spare parts from a motor vehicle repair shop. Snaking tubes and wires ran from the ceiling to the floor, and, amidst all the chaos, several of the burnt corpses manned work stations. A few were pulling levers or making adjustments to wiring, but the majority were in front of static-ridden display screens, tapping away in the same bizarre fashion at their keyboards as we had previously seen with Leszno and Fodot. Like them, their eyes positively glowed with living static interference.

  The lift doors pinged on this floor and three more operatives advanced, carrying strange equipment up from the depths below. They took no notice of us, but I shook Kartaly by the shoulder. The jammed door to the first floor was giving way. The burnt men who had pursued us would be breaking through any second.

  Kartaly sprang into action. He crossed the floor of the office, picked up a heavy engine part that was lying around and lifted it over his head. He stood directly in front of the wall window on this storey, ready to hurl it through the plate glass.

  A couple of the burnt men turned their heads in his direction, distracted momentarily from their tasks.

  Kartaly dropped the engine part and sank to his knees, burying his head in his hands. Our pursuers were upon us and dragged us towards the lift. I did not resist them. There was no point in struggling anymore.

  For outside, instead of the blizzard that had been raging around the Bloy Building, there now rolled a seething ocean of living static, stretching into the distance as far as the eye could see.

  And it was only when I returned to the surface and saw it through new eyes that I appreciated its incomparable beauty.

  My Heretical Existence

  I had long dwelt in that European metropolis that is known as the city of exiles, and it is appropriately named, but, hidden away amidst its deepest recesses, there is also a continuity amongst certain of its inhabitants. There are entire dynasties who have never left the metropolis, and whose historical authenticity is made apparent to one another only through the exchanges of secret signs handed down through the centuries. They are few in number, it is true, but their existence is certain. I have stumbled across the proof, although you will find no confirmation in any of the works of anthropology that fill the shelves of university libraries.

  This is a subject upon which I am the sole authority; for no one else has taken any interest in it. Survivals of far-off tribes in Asia or Africa will produce fascination amongst the general run of anthropologists, but here, under their noses, another tribe exists; one secret, unregarded, and undiscoverable by anyone who had not travelled across the vast expanse of the city’s grey endless streets in search of heretical existences.

  It was in a tavern in an obscure quarter of the capital that I first confirmed the existence of one such dynasty. I might have discovered it by accident, had I lived in that area, but I did not, and several years of haunting drinking holes in the city had instead brought it to my attention; and even then only via a chance remark I overheard.

  Certain families, it seemed, had dwelt in this quarter for generation after generation, never leaving, and never having intermarried with outsiders: their entire existence consisted of separation. It was a region of great antiquity, merely two streets last recorded in the nineteenth century, overlooked by developers and having escaped all the ravages of both world wars. An ancient rusty gate in a brick archway between a series of sunken back-gardens marked its entrance, and a lone inn of immense age stood at the intersection of the two streets.

  Only in the anonymity of a vast and ancient city could such a bizarre district have persisted virtually unnoticed down the centuries, an urban survival like a single, monstrously strange mushroom in a damp, half-forgotten cellar.

  “No one, other than the locals, goes to Sartor Street,” I overheard someone say a few minutes shy of closing time in a pub on one of the main thoroughfares of the metropolis. “My father made the mistake of going there once, and he never went back.”

  The speaker was in his cups, and burbled out the remark over the top of a foaming tankard of ale. He seemed alarmed by his candour, and left immediately after draining his drink to the dregs.

  I made a note in pencil on a slip of paper, though later found no current reference to the street. Nevertheless my curiosity was piqued. A street did exist with that name, but it had been a dead end, was pulled down decades ago and was surrounded on my city map by a series of yellow blanks, apparently leading nowhere.

  Much later I sought out the inn just after midnight, at the culmination of an evening’s drinking, when it s
eemed to me that the legend I had heard might start into life as a consequence of my disordered imagination. I had long been subject to a forlorn passion for a beautiful and much younger woman named Adela who frequented the place, and, though I knew the infatuation to be hopeless, I often spent evenings slowly drinking alone whilst weaving romantic fantasies that were never to be acted upon. Doubtless it was her very unattainability and the lack of affectation often found in the young that so attracted me; since what little conversation we had actually exchanged showed an insurmountable gulf between our interior lives, quite apart from the disparity in age. But it amused me to think that I was in love with her.

  The hostelry in which she drank, and where I began my search, was, I recalled, supposedly only a short, albeit cryptic, distance from the spot where the antique street was located. Once the pub had shut its doors against the night, and the belle jeune fille sans merci exited with one of the young men who often hung around and who openly courted her attentions, I struck off into the streets in an indeterminate direction, not remembering exactly which way I was meant to go.

  Perhaps, I speculated at the time, this was the only way for outsiders to gain entry into that particular area of Terra Incognita, with no admittance for the sober.

  I had wandered through a maze of spacious and well-tended public gardens, and then a series of untended, private, sunken gardens located somewhere behind the more general run of neglected and half-abandoned streets.

  Well, I soon found myself, without being able to recall exactly how, at the rusty gates within a brick archway. I gripped a single bar of the frame, pushed, and one-half of the trellis swung open with a metallic groan. I traversed a passage of dripping shadows and then found myself at an intersection of two unlit streets that might have had existence in the modern age only in a labyrinth of ancient memory.

  The sound of chatter and laughter spilled out onto the thoroughfare, and, turning towards the noise, I soon found myself in sight of a tavern. It was of ancient aspect and looked to have stood unchanged on the same spot for a period of indefinite years. I was extremely familiar with some of the older, still-standing taverns and bars of the city, though my visits to them had been infrequent.

  This particular hostelry had a faded wooden sign suspended from an iron frame that projected above the bowed front window announcing it as “Under the Sign of the Hourglass Stilled”.

  A low doorway admitted entrance to the place, the two worm-eaten panels within thrown open like a vertical maw. I could see, by the flickering play of light and shadow in the space immediately past the entrance, that candlelight provided the tavern’s source of illumination. I heard the muffled sound of conversation, before passing into its confines.

  In crossing that threshold, I went further back into antiquity. I assumed at first that I had stumbled into someone’s elaborate jest; such was the confusing sight that confronted me. But, as the clientele turned, baffled amusement became stark terror.

  I could hear the creak of wooden sinews, the flexing of wooden muscles and the grinding of wooden teeth. Their faces were painted garishly in a motley attempt to convey the human, but, oh, the deadly lifelessness of their expressions! Their glass eyes were without lustre, like grey flowers.

  Stifling a terrified cry, I made to turn back the way I had come, but, before I could do so, was seized by another of the things that had crept up behind me. Its grip was vice-like, and I was borne towards a table and forced to sit. The others then proceeded to crowd around me, in motions spasmodic and half-coordinated, utilising limbs that mimicked those of man but which had not been designed for movement at all.

  Cold fingers were at my throat, my mouth and my eyes, probing the living tissue.

  I cried out, and there came by way of response a horrible parody of that cry from all of the things assembled, a distorted creaking of wooden lips and the clattering of wooden tongues.

  Suddenly, the figures all drew back, making way for the advance of a female mannequin. She tottered forward in ungainly fashion, and, to my horror, I saw that it was a simulacrum of Adela.

  Her white-painted face, like porcelain, pressed close to my own, her glass-dead eyes stared without emotion, the red slash of her mouth fixed itself to my own. I felt vitality draining out of me, and could struggle against her embrace only feebly. There was a sensation as of drowning in unfathomable depths, and I lost consciousness.

  *

  When I finally awoke it was to find myself in hospital. The doctors advised me that I was paralysed, and my only means of communication with others was via a low whisper from the back of my throat. I was told that there is no such place as “Sartor Street” and that the nerve damage to my spine and limbs was caused as the consequence of a fall whilst in a state of extreme inebriation. One of the nurses has agreed to take down this account in writing.

  Her name is Adela.

  She promises me that there is a perichoresis, wherein two worlds overlap, and that the agony I endure is but a process of transformation. She says that the stiffening of my limbs is merely a means to prepare me for that new mode of heretical existence whither I am rapidly departing.

  In Eternity—Two Lines Intersect

  A week after my release, I finally found accommodation. It had not been easy, and I had viewed several flats which, though suitable, were beyond my limited financial resources. The doctors had advised me that my re-integration into society should be gradual and unhurried, for it was likely to be still some time before my nerves began to fully recover and I could once again feel comfortable interacting with strangers. They gave me pills to assist with the anxiety attacks to which I was subject, and assigned me a psychotherapist whom I was to visit on a weekly basis.

  The flat was located on the top floor of one of a row of three-storey buildings set slightly back on a busy trunk road in the north of the city. The hum of its passing traffic produced a constant background noise. The structures dated back to the 1890s, and must once have formed a series of houses owned by tradesmen, for the frontages of single-storey shops abutted onto the outside pavement in front of the houses. All had been divided into flats during the passing of many years. They were uniform, nondescript, dreary and depressing, like a set of ill-fitting dentures.

  The particular flat into which I was to move my few belongings had been vacated some weeks previously, its former tenant having apparently quit the place giving no notice. The rent had been several months in arrears and when the owner came to serve an eviction notice he found no sign of the property having been recently occupied. The gas, telephone and electricity supplies had all been cut off due to non-payment. There were a few tins of foodstuffs remaining in the makeshift larder, but the refrigerator was empty.

  There was little chance of his having committed suicide; certainly no body fitting his description had turned up and there was no evidence of foul play by a third party. The owner told me it was his personal opinion that the former occupier must have fled the country. This made sense since he had left all of his personal belongings behind, such as his clothes, his small library of books, furnishings etc. Naturally, it would normally be highly disconcerting to have moved into a place wherein all the contents were a reminder of the tastes and presence of a man no longer there, but, in my case, it proved a welcome distraction. I had virtually no possessions of my own and advised the landlord to leave the flat as it was, and not to clear it out, since I had no qualms about occupancy in its current state. He made no objection. There could be little profit to be made from selling off the remnants the former tenant had left behind, unless one specialised in the secondhand trade.

  Therefore, with my own past consisting of events painful for me to recall, and with scant prospect of any meaningful future, I slipped instead into the past of another man, one who had vacated his own place in the universe.

  I passed my days looking for a job, but found the stigma of long absence from regular employment to be a near-insurmountable barrier. Eventually, I managed to secure a part-t
ime position stacking shelves in a local supermarket, where I worked alongside a group of people considerably younger than myself. It was robotic and intellectually undemanding labour, and my imagination battened on the life of the man whose past existence I now partially occupied.

  *

  In the evenings, when I returned from my employment, I would sit gazing out of the window and read one of the books left behind or else listen to his radio set. I had not adjusted the frequency dial, so presumably it was tuned into the station he too would have last heard. He had not owned a television set.

  The immediate view out of the window was uninspiring. Below, an endless stream of traffic passed along the dual carriageway. When it rained, which was often, there was a hissing sound as the vehicles’ rubber tyres gripped the tarmac, and the wet surface reflected back the sodium-orange haze cast by the lofty streetlights.

  On the opposite side of the trunk road there loomed a Neo-Gothic church. Its dusty and cracked windows were invariably dark and there were no signs of human occupancy. It appeared services of religious worship had been abandoned there some considerable time before.

  In the expanse behind this building there arose a massive hill covered with yew, silver birch, sycamore, elder, oak and hornbeam trees. It was a survival of immemorial woodland that had somehow escaped the encroachments of urban development that had sprung up all around it. My attention often turned to this reminder of the past when I sat at the open window, to watch the enormous mass of trees swaying in the wind, and hear the rustle of innumerable leaves—as if the trees were whispering secrets to one another in the night.

  I had not been subject to such strange ideas before, and could only put them down to the influence of the books I had been reading, drawn from the small library of the former tenant. They were books of myths and legends, chronicles of ancient history and a series of pamphlets relating to rural spaces that still existed within the metropolis.