by Stephen Laws
“Hallucinations,” said Alex, “don’t bite chunks out of you. They don’t savage you to death.”
Jay stooped, picked up a piece of paneling and threw it into the flames. A cloud of sparks flew up into the night. “And they don’t bring dead people back to life.”
“Wayne’s dead,” said Damon again. The chunk of wood slipped from his fingers to the ground.
“Those words,” said Annie. “The graffiti that was all over the place. They’re clues. Bad people. Bad places.”
“It was him!” Candy ignored her. “It was!”
Alex had seen his son with his own eyes. There was no denying it. But as Candy stared hard at him, wide eyes reflecting the light, he found that he had nothing to say. His silence seemed to enrage her. She turned and stared into the flames.
Annie was about to speak, but bit her lip. She had remembered the dead bodies that had appeared the previous night. The bodies that had somehow been made to look like people they knew. Whatever these bizarre children had been, could it be that the same trick had been repeated on Alex and Candy? Had they been made to see their dead son? Was this all part of the same insane game, trying to drive them all mad? Speaking her mind now was not going to help matters.
Everyone was silent then, not knowing what to say.
They stared into the night and looked into the fire.
“Wayne’s dead,” said Damon quietly.
And then there was a hushing sound in the darkness. Like a wave rushing up on to a beach and breaking against the sand. It came again, and again. The darkness was filled with the sound, now like a wind, although there was no motion of the air.
“It’s back,” said Jay.
When he spoke, they all saw it at once, out beyond the gleam of the bonfire.
The Black Stuff was flowing up over the ragged rim of the chasm, pouring up from the impossible depths in pulsing black waves. It glinted like tar or oil as it came, now flowing across the parkland towards them like some vast ebony sea. There was movement and agitation on its surface, as if the firelight reflecting there was causing turmoil and pain in its inky vastness. And as it came, rippling waves began to spread across its immensity, flowing hungrily towards them. Defying gravity, it continued to surge and lap up over the cliff-edge.
“Oh Christ,” said Candy. “It’s going to get us this time.”
“No it’s not,” said Annie. “Not if we keep close to the fire.”
“Annie’s right,” said Jay. “It doesn’t like the light. Gordon and me saw it all again back at the meat mart. Just like last night.”
Carefully, slowly, they backed off from the oncoming black sea, closer to the fire.
Just beyond the edge of the bonfire’s flicker, where the light met the darkness, the sea suddenly halted, rippling and bubbling softly like hot tar. It began to flow around the periphery of the light, spreading on either side to encircle them like some vast living, liquid creature.
“It’s trying to find a way in,” said Alex.
The Black Stuff reached the dumper truck. They saw the oil flowing and lapping behind it.
“My God, look!” Lisa pointed unnecessarily as black streamers of oil suddenly appeared on the cab roof, trickling down the windscreen. The Black Stuff had flowed over the rear of the vehicle, where it was in shadow from the bonfire. But now, with the firelight shining full on the front of the truck, they watched as the streamers hissed angrily, like black water on a red-hot stove. Suddenly they slid back from the windscreen and into the safety of the darkness behind. The waves kept moving past the truck, still on the periphery between light and dark, still searching for a way in.
Silently, they watched as it flowed around them on either side of the bonfire. Jay and Gordon walked with it as the black sea moved, edging around the left-hand side of the bonfire; watching the Black Stuff flowing and lapping over the cracked earth, flattening the grass in its oily morass. Alex and Annie followed their lead, moving to the right, around the fire.
On the other side, they watched the black tide as it joined itself again, flowing together and forming a glinting ebony surface way back into the night.
They were surrounded.
Just as they had been stranded on this bizarre half-mile crag in what had once been the centre of Edmonville, they were stranded again. Cut off on a burning island, in the middle of a black and poisonous sea. They stood watching as the black waves roiled and swirled, the hideous tide lapping at the edge of the light, testing for a way to break through and engulf them. Jay looked back at the fire. It was burning well, and they had enough fuel stacked close by to see them through the night.
There was a noise from the other side of the fire. One of the others, crying out in alarm. Keeping their eyes on the Black Stuff, their backs to the fire, they ran around to the other side. Wave ridges chased them as they moved. The liquid was watching their every move, waiting for someone to make a mistake and step out of the circle of light.
“What’s wrong?” Jay scanned the others. But no one seemed hurt, everyone was still close to the relative safety of the fire, looking out across the black sea that had engulfed the entire park.
“Someone’s coming,” said Lisa in a flat voice, and she pointed into the darkness.
Was it more of the dead? Perhaps bodies they hadn’t been able to retrieve, buried in the ruins and hidden from sight? Now finally dragged free and brought back to taunt them again?
“We got rid of most of them,” continued Jay, moving forward. The Black Stuff seemed to surge and ripple at him as he did so, bubbling and swirling on the edge of the light. “But we might not have got them all. If we didn’t, it’ll be like last night. But they won’t like the light, just like this Black Stuff. And they can’t get us. Not as long as we stay close to the fire. Just remember that.” There you go again, Jay. Taking charge. Why not just shut the hell up…?
A single figure was walking through the night towards them.
Unhurriedly, and without the staggering gait of the living dead that they had seen before. At first, it was a vague man-sized shape, but now, as he drew nearer to the light (and they could see now that it was a man, not a woman), his silhouette was becoming more clearly defined. Head down, arms swinging casually at his side, he came on.
“He’s…” began Lisa, and her voice dried up. She coughed to clear it, a ridiculously ordinary sound in this hellish night. “He’s…walking on the Black Stuff.”
And yes, they could all see now that the silhouette was walking on the tide of rippling ebony. He was not splashing through the stuff, not kicking up plumed gouts of black water. It was as if he were walking through the night on a rain-washed pavement. Beneath his feet there was no liquid; only the glinting solidity of hardened tar.
The figure came on.
Damon groaned.
When Jay looked over at him, he was rising from his knees. His face was still blank, but his attention was riveted on the approaching figure. Jay looked back out into the night. The figure had stopped, right on the shoreline of the Black Stuff. Waves lapped around his feet now. His head was still down, but everyone knew who it was, even before he looked up.
“Wayne,” said Damon, relief in his voice.
It was as Candy and Alex had told them. They could see the chunks bitten out of his arms and legs. The ragged tears where savagely sharp teeth had ripped the fabric of his shirt and trousers. The dark gleaming of exposed wounds beneath. The flap of skin hanging down from his cheek. The blood on his face. His hair awry, as if he’d just woken from sleep.
Even from here, they could see the dark boiling movement of the Black Stuff in his eye sockets.
“Wayne,” said Damon again, and began to move forward.
Alex took him by the arm, holding him back.
“Stay there, Damon!” snapped Jay. “It’s not him.”
“What do you mean, ‘it’s not him’?” Damon yanked his arm away from Alex, whirling on him. “You were lying! You and that drunken bitch!”
O
n the edge of the firelight, the thing that had once been Wayne grinned.
“He’s not dead,” Damon went on. “You just left him there, in the mart.”
“Look at him!” shouted Alex. “You can see it for yourself. He’s not alive.”
“Liars!” screamed Damon, and he began to run towards the silent figure.
Gordon brought him down in a rugby tackle before he’d gone two yards. Damon screamed and cursed, thrashing and kicking. Jay and Alex ran to help. Pinning his arms, Alex tried to reason with him. But the sight of Wayne had snapped something inside. Twisting his head furiously from side to side, yelling at the top of his voice, Damon refused to listen.
“They left me, Damon,” said the figure on the rippling shore. “They just left me there.”
“Let me up! Get off me, you fucking dummy!”
“They hate us. They all hate us. Right from the beginning. Just ’cause we’re young or something.”
“Help me, Wayne! I’ll…I’ll…fucking kill you, O’Connor!”
“There’s a way out, Wayne. A way off this place. Just come to me, and I’ll show you the way…”
“Wayne! Help me!”
Wayne held his arms wide as the black waves flowed and surged over his feet, around his shins, always flinching back from the direct light. He grinned then, a ghastly rictus. The blackness in his eyes writhed and squirmed like boiling pitch.
“Give him to me,” said the Wayne-thing.
“Here,” said Annie, striding forward. “Have this!”
In one swift and angry motion, she flung the burning tree branch she’d taken from the fire directly at him.
The result was instantaneous as the branch whirled through the air and landed at Wayne’s feet. He screeched in a voice that was not human. It was the scream of some terrible, primordial creature, up from the depths of the Chasm. His bloodied white hands flew to his face as he recoiled from the light, the Black Stuff at his feet hissing back into the darkness. Bent at the waist, hands and arms covering his bowed head, Wayne was suddenly travelling backwards at speed. It was a bizarre, surreal sight. His legs weren’t moving, yet he was speeding away from her. When Annie looked, she could see that the black liquid on which he was standing was carrying him away with it, suddenly solid again beneath him as he was borne off on the surface of the retreating black flood.
“Wayne!” yelled Damon from beneath his captors. “Don’t leave me.”
Annie shook a fist defiantly in the air, watching the tidal edge of the Black Stuff shrinking back on all sides.
Jay made sure that the other two still had a tight grip on Damon, and stood back. They had made the Black Stuff retreat the previous night by throwing torches into the darkness. Why the hell hadn’t they just started doing that straight away? Realising that the relentless approach of the Black Stuff from the edge of the Chasm, and the sudden appearance of Wayne, had frozen them with fear, he strode to the fire. Was it always going to be like this? The first sign of something to fear, and fear itself would make everyone forget what they had to do? He remembered how the fear had overwhelmed him at the meat mart, making him unable to function and bringing him close to the edge—and he hated himself for it. Anger flaring he jammed his hand into the flames, felt pain as the fire blistered his wrist. Yanking out a ragged, flaring chunk of firewood, he ran to where Annie was standing and flung the firebrand underarm into the night. It sputtered in the darkness, arcing through the air and throwing out sparks like some failed firework. When it hit the ground, the hissing and screeching came louder in the darkness. The Black Stuff fled from the burning wood on all sides, retreating into the darkness and leaving the grass around it with no evidence that it had ever been there. Unsmeared, unstained, no sign that it had been engulfed by the sickening black mass.
Wayne’s figure suddenly came to a halt, so far out that he was barely a silhouette on the black water. His body straightened from its contorted and doubled-up posture. Even though they could no longer see him clearly, they could tell that whatever he had become, whatever was inside him, was engulfed by a ferocious rage.
“You’ll all die! Every one of you! Not quickly. But in agony! Slowly, and in AGONY!”
Suddenly, Damon was quiet, no longer fighting Gordon and Alex. The voice that emanated from Wayne’s silhouette was no longer his voice. It was a hundred voices, all filled with abominable hatred for them. It was all the hatred and evil that existed at the bottom of the Chasm.
“You want to know? You want to know what’s happened to you and your world? You want to see? You want to UNDERSTAND? Then…then…SEE!”
The silhouette flung its arms wide in a gesture of rage.
All around it, the black sea had been infused with the same rage. It swirled and eddied around his body. Glinting black waves funneled and sped through the darkness. Whirlpools swirled and sucked, even though the Black Stuff that covered the parkland could be no more than two or three inches deep. The blackness boiled and blistered, churned and raced around the bonfire. The effect was at once terrifying and dizzying. Annie clung to Jay’s arm. He held her, feeling that he too might fall. Behind them, Candy threw herself flat on the ground, arms outstretched as if she feared that she might suddenly be spun up into the air by some dark and powerful centrifugal force.
“Jesus…” said Alex, in a hollow voice.
“SEE!” screamed the silhouette, as if in some body-racking contortion that was summoning up all this hate. “SEE!” The black tar swarmed quickly over Wayne’s legs, slopping around his torso and greedily engulfing his entire body as he remained standing there, arms flung wide.
All around him, the Black Stuff suddenly reared up into huge obsidian waves of frenzied activity. The twisting, roiling tar seemed to be struggling to take shape, squirming masses of black muck churning to form grotesque images. Four columns emerged from the undulating mass, two on either side of Wayne, perhaps twenty feet apart and twenty feet high. There was a groaning sound now, from beneath their feet. As if the Black Stuff were putting all its energy into this new activity, and the vibrations were drumming into the very soil of the parkland. The air was filled with the hissing, gabbling voices again. A horde of the damned were howling their hatred at those who crouched by the bonfire.
And then, at almost exactly the same time, the four undulating columns of grotesque black mud found their shape. Exultant with hatred, the four shapes became living statues of hardened black tar and oil. They writhed and twisted and exuded Hate.
They were four black horsemen.
Astride four gigantic black horses.
The horses reared and pawed at the air with their forefeet, now dropping back to the tar, now rearing again and spinning as the black-garbed riders, with expressionless faces like carved ebony, clung tight to their steeds. The riders pulled hard at the reins, dragging the huge horse heads around time and again to face the bonfire. Their flanks glinted, their nostrils flared. The jet-black harnesses and spurs stretched and jangled in the night. Cloaks fashioned from tar flapped and dripped around the riders’ shoulders, swarming and reforming around their torsos, as much a part of the riders as their newly fashioned black limbs. The night was filled now with the screaming of human voices, the shrieking of maddened wild horses. But the black faces of the riders were impassive and implacable, somehow more deeply terrifying than if they had been screaming the same hatred that emanated from the black sea and the thing that had once been Wayne.
“The sun has become like coarse black cloth!” screamed Wayne. “And the moon is red with blood! The stars have fallen and are no more, the sky disappeared like a scroll rolled up and every mountain and island moved from its place!”
“Fuck this,” said Jay, pulling away from Annie. When he turned, he could see that Gordon and Alex were no longer holding Damon down. They had risen to their feet, standing over him, and all three were gaping out at the four lunging figures in the frenzied ebony sea. Jay held Gordon’s eye as he strode to the fire. His fixed expression seemed to br
eak Gordon and Alex out of their trances. As he began to yank another firebrand out of the flames, they hurried to him and began to do the same.
“Now you know!” screamed Wayne in his hundred voices as the horses reared and lunged on either side of him, the black waves undulating in their mad frenzy. “Despair, before you die! Despair, despair, despair!”
“Go to Hell!” yelled Jay, and in the next moment three firebrands were blazing through the darkness towards Wayne and the horsemen.
The screeching grew louder.
The firebrands fell short of the figures, but suddenly the horsemen were gone and four dissolving pillars of darkness flopped and fell apart in writhing torrents on either side of Wayne. Screeching, the Black Stuff dissolved all around the impact of the torches. Funnelling waves fled from the sparks that showered on impact.
This time both Annie and Candy—galvanised by terror—were at the bonfire, pulling out makeshift torches in clouds of sparks. The boy clung tight to Lisa. If not for his need to hide from the nightmare shapes, she too would have grabbed something from the flames.
More fire arced into the night, falling into the black ocean.
Patches of dark green began to appear in the blackness as the sea retreated.
Suddenly, Wayne had fallen forward, both arms above his head. He vanished into the Black Stuff, and when it recoiled from where he had been standing, they could see that he had been taken with it as the blackness fled away to the edge of the park. The screaming and hissing began to die away, growing fainter as the Black Stuff began to pour back over the edge of the Chasm, disappearing into the bottomless depths below.
Relentlessly they kept up their bombardment with blazing firebrands, Jay and Gordon moving around to the other side of the bonfire to repeat the exercise. There was hardly any need. Already, most of the rippling black liquid had slid away, anticipating their move.
In minutes, the black ocean had gone. There was no evidence that it had ever been there.
Damon remained where he was, sitting and staring into the darkness.
