South of Darkness

by John Marsden

  I lay there in a state resembling insensibility. After some time I heard footsteps approaching and saw the glow of a lamp reflecting from the dark walls. I feared that it was the man returning, but a woman’s voice gasped, and I heard her say: ‘My God, what’s he done to you?’ I attempted to twist around so I could get to my feet, but it was difficult to move, and before I could succeed I felt her hands on my nether regions, cool and soft on the burning flesh. ‘Stay there,’ she said, and went away again. When she returned it was with some sort of ointment, which she spread onto me. The ointment was soothing but any contact with my body was painful. Still, I endured it, and when she had finished I got to my feet, though not without some difficulty. With even more difficulty I hauled up my pants and shuffled towards the staircase, determined to escape this house of horrors.

  The woman helped me up each painful step. I emerged into the kitchen, the place which had for a few moments promised Quentin and me such riches. Seeing the door to the street I made for it. ‘Wait,’ the woman said. Up until now I had not glimpsed her face but I stopped and turned to look at her. ‘Thank you for your kindness, ma’am,’ I said, perceiving her to be an older woman, plump, with small eyes, and dressed in the uniform of a cook, but not the same woman I had seen run out into the street at the cry of ‘Fire!’

  ‘Oh Lord,’ she said. She glanced up at the door, which I surmised led to the main part of the house. She seemed frightened. She pushed away the grey hairs that straggled down under her cap. ‘Wait,’ she said again. She went into some sort of storeroom and emerged again within a minute, holding a substantial cloth-covered bundle. ‘Quick,’ she said, thrusting it at me. ‘Begone with you, before he comes back. He’s got a black heart, that one. Be off with you now.’

  ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ I said again, but it was not easy for me to make a quick escape, as I could hardly walk. I shuffled awkwardly to the door. She was there before me and opened it. I noticed that her eyes were full of tears. I laboured out into the street and hurried away as best I could. I turned around once only, to see if the woman was still there, but she was gone, and the door was closed.

  Chapter 4

  And so Quentin and I got our feast after all, half a chicken instead of the whole one I had tried to purloin, and a loaf of bread, and some sweet biscuits. I did not get as much enjoyment from it as I had hoped, for I felt sick, and pain had the freedom of my body to go where it wished. It made merry play with me too, running up and down my legs and my back, spreading to every part of me, so that I was nothing but pain. My buttocks burned and burned. There was blood through my clothes, and every time I passed water it was red with blood. Quentin said the skin on my rump was broken in many places. He fetched Uncle Bert, for Uncle Bert had the reputation of being a healer, and the big man tut-tutted over me and made up some mixture from herbs growing along the banks of the river, which Quentin painted onto me three or four times a day. I believe it consisted mainly of comfrey, and it may have done some good.

  As the bruising healed, Quentin said it was as good as a painting to see all the colours change. Orange and blue and green and purple, laced of course with red and black – I was sorry I could not twist around enough to get a full view of the exhibition for myself.

  Gradually I was able to move more freely again and the time came when I could walk almost normally. I hobbled around Hell, finding it a little more difficult for a while to avoid collisions and accidents. Quentin never left my side and I came to appreciate his kindness and the devotion he showed in nursing me, for without him I know not how I would have fared. Neither of us ever made reference to the fact that the beating I received may have been more severe as a result of his escape, but perhaps it helped explain the fidelity of his attentions. I didn’t care; I was just glad he had not been subjected to such a terrible experience.

  From gratitude I showed him my hiding places in St Martin’s, but he did not like the church much. To me it was a sanctuary; to him it was too quiet. He complained that it gave him bad dreams. So for the sake of keeping company with him I spent fewer nights there after this deepening of our friendship.

  However, there were still many periods when Quentin and I were separated, sometimes for several days, and on those occasions I continued to use the church as my refuge. I remember distinctly one spring morning when I listened to a sermon by the Revd Mr Haddock, who was preaching in a side chapel to an early morning congregation of five or six people: not an unusual number at that time of day, in the middle of the week, when only the most devout could be expected to attend.

  I cannot in all conscience call myself devout, for my motives for being in St Martin’s had, as I have made clear, little to do with an attraction to the Christian virtues preached therein. However, I was curled up in the high pulpit, an eyrie never used for these Matins services, and an eyrie never graced at all by Revd Mr Haddock, who was rarely invited to preach anyway. It was no doubt thought by his ecclesiastical superiors to be a challenge beyond his intellectual or spiritual powers, or perhaps they considered him simply too dangerously clumsy to be entrusted with such a responsibility.

  He started his sermon with a story. From my earliest years I have never been able to resist a story, so I listened quite attentively. It was the story of Job. I had heard his name before, at funeral services especially, when his utterances were frequently read from the Book of Common Prayer: ‘Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.’

  Or, ‘Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not.’

  From the mouth of one such as Revd Mr Grimwade these words were full of woe indeed and I fear gave little comfort to those who had come thither to mourn friends or relatives recently departed. But Revd Mr Haddock spoke quite differently, and in simple words that even I at my tender age could understand. He told the story of Job: how he had been the wealthiest and most powerful man in the land of Uz, with seven sons and three daughters, seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred oxen, and many other beasts and servants. He was an upright and God-fearing man who served the Lord with devotion. One day, when Satan visited God, the Lord said to Satan: ‘Have you observed my servant Job, and are you not impressed by his purity and sanctity?’

  And Satan said to God: ‘It is easy for Job to be pure and sanctified when you have showered such blessings on him. Take the blessings away and see how he will curse your name then, aye, curse you to your very face!’

  So God said: ‘You are wrong, and I will prove it! I will grant you the right to test Job by doing whatsoever you like with him and with his possessions, only provided that you do not hurt the man himself.’

  Armed with this power Satan visited fearful torments upon Job, destroying his ten children with a great wind that caused a building to collapse upon them, burning all his sheep with a fire from Heaven, and having enemies slaughter his servants and carry off his camels and oxen.

  Job was torn apart by grief, yet he maintained his faith in the Lord and his devotion to Him.

  When Satan returned to visit God again, God said to him: ‘Now do you see what a perfect and upright man this is?’ But Satan sneered and said: ‘He remains steadfast only because he himself has not been harmed. Let his bone and flesh be smitten and you will see him turn upon you.’

  So now God said: ‘I tell you, nothing will shake his faith, and I will prove it to you. I grant his body to you also; do with him as you will, only you must not end his life.’

  Satan caused Job to be covered with boils, so that he suffered greatly, but he still would not renounce the Lord, even though his own wife told him to curse God. Job responded by saying: ‘We cannot expect to receive nothing but good from the Lord; we must expect dark times as well.’

  Curled up in the pulpit I nodded; ye
s, dark times, it was true. Life for such as those who lived in Hell had a tendency to be full of trouble.

  Revd Mr Haddock went on to describe how God then spoke to Job from inside a mighty storm. He roared forth like a tempest, asking Job if he truly understood the power of the Lord. ‘Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth, while the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? Who shut up the sea with doors, when it brake forth? Who said to the sea “Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further: and here shall thy proud waves be stayed?”’

  Again and again He spoke to the man of His powers, saying to Job: ‘Have the gates of death been opened unto thee? Or hast thou seen the doors of the shadow of death? Hast thou perceived the breadth of the earth?’

  He spoke of the war horses, asking Job: ‘Is it you who has given the horse strength? Hast thou clothed his neck with thunder? Canst thou make him afraid as a grasshopper? The glory of his nostrils is terrible. He paws in the valley, and rejoices in his strength: he goes on to meet the armed men. He mocks at fear, and is not affrighted; neither turns he back from the sword. The quiver rattles against him, the glittering spear and the shield. He swallows the ground with fierceness and rage: neither believeth he that it is the sound of the trumpet. He says among the trumpets, Ha, ha; and he smells the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting.’

  Thus did God instil in Job a terrible fear of His awe and majesty, so that Job fell down upon his knees, recognising that the universe was infinitely more powerful and far-reaching than he had ever conceived. And that the One who had brought it into being could be held accountable to no mere mortal. Job expressed his humility, saying: ‘I know that Thou canst do everything, and that no thought can be withholden from Thee. I uttered things that I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not. I had heard of Thee before, by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye sees Thee, wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.’

  And so God rewarded Job for his new and more profound understanding by restoring him to his previous station in life, doubling the wealth he had earlier possessed and granting him ten new children, seven sons and three daughters as before, but this time his daughters were described as the fairest in the land.

  If Revd Mr Grimwade had preached upon the story of Job, he would doubtless have abjured the congregation to approach the Lord in fear and trembling, lest His wrath be visited upon them. This was not in the nature of Revd Mr Haddock, however. He was a mild man, and he spoke mildly upon this occasion, saying simply that we must conduct ourselves modestly, aware that the infinite power of the Lord surpasses our understanding. ‘This is a proud God,’ he said, ‘a God who on this occasion entered into an arrangement with Satan to test a seemingly devout man to his very limits. We cannot hope to understand our Creator’s motives, nor should we presume to do so. We can only be aware that when suffering descends upon us, when we are struck down by a seemingly malign fate, God is acting according to His own reasoning. He who is proud requires from us not pride but humility.’

  I am sure that Revd Mr Haddock did not intend the visible members of his congregation, let alone the invisible one crouched like a lion cub in the den waiting for succour, to be terrified by God’s behaviour towards the devout. Yet for the first time in my life, a great fear, seemingly of the universe itself, came over me as I considered this story. Unlike Job, I was riddled with sin, and my soul was black indeed. If God was willing to enter into a covenant with Satan whereby a righteous man could be punished so mightily in order for God to demonstrate the full reach of His majesty, what hope was there for one such as me? I felt that I was a helpless cub indeed, and that at any moment the heavens might be rent apart by a great thunderclap and the huge weight of God’s wrath fall upon me. As the eagle pounces without mercy upon the unprotected lion cub, so it seemed God was likely to crush me without regard to justice or reason.

  I did not lose my faith, but from then on I saw myself as nothing more than an insignificant creature crawling across the face of the world, liable to be extinguished in the blink of an eye, with God capable of deliberately staying His hand rather than protecting me.

  Chapter 5

  I was not able to articulate even to myself the new understanding revealed to me by Revd Mr Haddock’s exposition on the Book of Job. The views I have described were only dimly perceived by me in the years of my childhood. Yet perceived in some shape or form they were. I already, as a result of my early experiences, had a jaundiced view of human behaviour. Although I had been pleased to recognise kindness when I found it, I never trusted fully in the goodness of humanity. Now I sensed that God, like so many of His servants on Earth, was capable of inflicting casual destruction. I could not rely on the New Testament promises of God’s mercy. The occasional kindnesses of others were not enough to change my sense that we are subject more to capricious impulses and behaviours than we are to immutable universal laws. Not quite ‘Jeder fur sich und Gott gegen alle’ (‘Every man for himself and God against all’) but ‘Every man for himself and take your chances with God’.

  In the crush of the streets of Hell I could be snatched to safety from under the wheels of a carriage which threatened to annihilate me, but equally I could be pushed under the wheels of another by a casual passer-by. Indeed, one evening I annoyed a bigger boy, a lout of eighteen or so, by knocking into him as he was about to take a swig from a bottle. The bottle fell to the ground and shattered, spilling his gin across the cobblestones. With a snarl of rage he turned, picked me up and flung me, as one might fling a stone, across the wall that separated the path from the river. I spun as I travelled through the air, got a confused view of faces and upside-down bodies and a tree and a boat, then landed in the river and sank quickly in its depths. The foul limpid water swallowed me as it had swallowed many bodies before mine, and did so with complete indifference. As I sank further and further I felt that I would never reach the bottom because it had no bottom. Something soft and huge caressed me. Although I opened my eyes, the water was so filled with muck that I could not tell what manner of thing it was, but then its head bumped mine and I realised it was the corpse of a horse. The horror of this apparition caused me to go into a frenzy of movement, and although I had no more idea of swimming than a fish does of walking, I somehow fought my way up again.

  My head broke the surface and I opened my mouth to draw breath, only to find myself in a large pool of turds slowly making its way down the river. I struggled to get into a clean patch of water but my clothes were waterlogged and my strength was going from me already. I could see a piece of wood – half of a door possibly – floating a few yards away and I struck out for it but could not close the gap between me and it. It seemed to be in a faster current and it soon drifted away.

  I had seen bodies being dragged out of the river on more than one occasion and I was now a fair way to joining their company. A glance at the bank showed no one taking the slightest interest in my plight – the gin-drinking boy and his friends had disappeared already.

  I knew then something of the despair of Job. I wondered idly how it was that Job’s ten dead children could be replaced by another ten, and whether God believed that thus could Job’s misery be assuaged. Was that how the world worked? Did the beauty of Job’s three new daughters console him for the loss of his first three? Who would replace me?

  I started trying to swim towards the bank, with a feeble paddling motion, but almost immediately a large swell washed over my head and under I went. Up I came, although I fancied I would not survive another such dunking. Another wave quickly followed the first one, with the same result. This time, although I waved my arms and kicked my legs, I could not rise. I found myself going down instead of up, into the endless depths.

  Something hard poked into my back, prodding at me as though pushing me down even further. I could not resist it, even as I wondered what it could be. Then quite suddenly, like a scrap of foo
d picked up by a seagull, I found myself rising at great speed. I burst out of the water and hung in the cold night air, coughing and spluttering. Something slimy had draped itself across the top of my head and was trailing down my forehead; I tore it away. It dropped into the water and as it disappeared I realised it was a dead rat. Behind me I heard a loud guffaw and a man’s voice exclaiming: ‘Now there’s a good catch: two dead rats with one poke.’

  It took me several more moments to understand that I was hanging in the air at the end of a long boathook. The waves which had washed me under were caused by an approaching boat, and a man in the boat had fished me out. He pulled the pole in, with me on the end of it, my rags miraculously holding together long enough to enable the hook to keep me safe.

  He dropped me onto the floor of the boat. ‘Good fishing, Silas,’ another voice said. It sounded like a younger man. I lay there shaking and trembling and no doubt looking very much like a fish that had just been landed and was twitching its life away. However, my position was somewhat different. My life had just been saved.

  Someone threw a blanket over me and I clutched it gratefully, but I seemed unable to stop shaking. I was dimly aware that the boat was in motion once more and that the men were conversing in occasional grunts, but I could not make out the words. In time the comforting fragrance of pipe tobacco drifted into my nostrils, but I remember little else until the boat bumped against some obstacle and I was commanded to get to my feet. I found myself unable to do so, managing only to roll over and get onto my hands and knees, but a strong arm hauled me up and presently, still wrapped in the blanket, which indeed I was unwilling to forego, for it seemed like my best friend, I was carried along some sort of jetty, onto land and up a steep hill.