The River Dark

by Nicholas Bennett

  That was Measton for you.

  He’d stayed though. Through the sixties, seventies, eighties, the nineties and in to a new millennia he had remained behind his bar in a town that would never regard him as anything more than a Brummie. No-one ever asked him why but, if they had, he would have lied to them and told them that this was home. It was a lie because, if it was true that home was where your heart resided, he belonged in another town, in another time. His heart was not in Measton but a good portion of his soul was there- weighed down with bricks and rocks and sunk in the river that ran through the rotten place.

  He drained the whisky and slotted another large one into the glass. It was the same all over, he thought. The madness that swept this town was sweeping the world. Any semblance of morality that had held their society in place had gone with the advent of no-holds-barred media intervention and the Internet. He really believed that. How could a society that produced children capable of killing an infant after torturing him argue any other way? Society was diseased and Measton was in the advanced stages. He was sure of it. Perhaps this town had a head start because of its very nature, its cold under-current that towed the innocent down. It always had been rotten, rotten to the-

  "Always has been, would be always," said a voice from the darkness in the far corner of the snug; St. John jumped in fright and dropped his glass onto the floor where it smashed over his shoes. He reached over with a shaking hand and flicked the snug lights on. There was no-one there. Of course. He picked up the main fragments of the broken glass and decided to leave the rest until the morning. Let Betty do it; that was what she was paid to do, he thought. If she came in to work that was. It was hard to imagine that life could possibly go on normally after what he had heard that night. Gunshots and stories of phantoms at the river bank; the forest full of the walking dead.

  St. John shook himself and smirked. Pissed and spooked, he thought. Pissed and spooked. He flicked the lights off and stepped through the back of the bar into his hallway. He remembered well the night that he had led that motley crew up to his spare room. Deserved it, the little yellow bastard, he thought defiantly and started up the stairs. They were all dead now weren't they? All dead except for himself and Al Pinchin and Pinchin hadn't stepped into The Railway Inn since that night or through the door of any other pub either he would wager.

  He wheezed and coughed on the stairs; his lungs complaining after close on sixty years of heavy smoking. Big man McMahon had died of cancer in his late forties. He remembered how the disease ate the gregarious McMahon until the last time St. John had seen him- shrunken, jaundiced and frail, his eyes already turned towards the grave. St. John had seen guilt there even if McMahon's own family mistook it for the regret of a man taken early. McMahon had the look of a man awaiting judgement. Weren't they all? Another hacking cough caused the landlord to bend double on the stairs.

  Alright, but we don't do it here, he had told them. There are enough fuckin' ghosts here without adding another.

  Johnny Spiers- the cruel and spiteful bastard that he was- had been hit by a car, in the late eighties. The driver had been well over the limit. St. John had gone to his funeral- an obligation to his lifelong regulars he believed- and the few people there bore testimony to a man that had gone through life hurting people. Of his children, only his oldest son had attended. He had nodded to St. John as he passed, dry-eyed and with the look of a man having completed an unpleasant but necessary task. Spiers' long-suffering wife and daughters were nowhere to be seen. Only a few pissheads from the less prestigious establishments in town accompanied them and they were probably only there hoping for a decent free drink at the wake. No such luck. No-one raised a glass to Johnny Spiers. Paul Hart had moved his family away from Measton in 1966. He had stepped into The Railway Inn for the last time and had a drink on the house. Before he left he had looked over at the table in the corner and shook his head. I can’t stay in this town, he had told Dave St. John. Two years later he had heard that Hart had died of a heart attack. He had been forty-five years old.

  Only Tommy Phillips had put up any objections. Only Tommy.

  Don't you think that everyone's paid their dues by now?

  St. John reached the top of the stairs and stood outside the room where the Jap had slept albeit for a brief time before they had taken him. It was Tommy that had said that but had they all paid their dues? Had he? Had Albert? They were the only survivors of a club that required you to stab a bound and gagged man in the heart as an initiation rite. Old Freddy March had died peacefully in his sleep in the early seventies. Poor Tommy.

  Tom Phillips had lasted for one week, give or take. They’d found him hanging by a well-tied noose in his allotment shed. Tommy had paid his dues early.

  He looked at the door of the guest room and swayed. Too much scotch, too late in the evening. He stepped towards his own room. Voices came out of the dark.

  "Tommy Phillips? As we agreed?"

  "Yes."

  The voices had come from the spare room. St. John stopped dead still and looked back at the closed door. He listened but heard only his own laboured breathing and then- as clear as at the water's edge all those years ago:

  "Who's going next?"

  St. John felt panic rise up into his chest from the pit of his stomach. He had to get out. He turned around and stepped back to the stairs. As he passed the door, the handle clicked and it swung inwards. St. John looked into the room, his face frozen in a study of fear. There was someone lying on the bed; he could make out the shape of a man, clearly discernable in the light cast into the darkened room by the hallway light.

  "I'll stab the little Jap bastard," the voice- surely Johnny Spiers- whispered from the bed. The figure sat bolt upright.

  St. John lurched away from the open doorway and headed for the stairs.

  In his haste his feet crossed at the top stair and he overbalanced.

  The world turned.

  The aged landlord executed a half-somersault before his right shoulder connected with the threadbare stairway. He heard the clavicle snap. The pain was excruciating. He rolled to the foot of the stairs and screamed in agony at the crunching sensation in his collar bone and shoulder. He rolled onto his back and saw the silhouette standing on the stairs, a shadow against the dirty yellow light cast through a moth-eaten light shade at the top of the stairwell. St. John tried to move but the pain had spread throughout his entire torso. As he took a hitched gulp of air, his ribs seemed to cut into his lungs. Something was broken there too. He was helpless. The man moved down the stairs towards him. As it drew closer, St. John saw that there was something unnatural about the figure; it had the cautious gait of a primate and the dome of its head was preternaturally smooth and hairless. In the dim light its skin was the colour of old paper. A repugnant odour emanated from it; even ten stairs away, he could smell it; the sewer hung about the figure with such intensity it was almost visible like smog. The creature stood on the stair above St. John and the landlord looked up at its nakedness. It bent towards him and opened its toothless pink mouth wide. A faint hissing sound came from the pit of its stomach, a sound that increased in volume by the second. This is it, St. John thought and squeezed his eyes closed. This is what it is to be taken to hell.

  The hissing stopped. There was nothing to be heard other than his own wheezing rasps as he pulled what he was sure were his last breaths into his lungs.

  Nothing happened. St. John braced himself but nothing happened.

  It had gone; it was a scare. Enough was enough. He would pack up his suitcase and leave tomorrow taking just enough money to see him alright for a few years. Fuck the rest. Then town was welcome to it. He knew when he had been warned.

  He opened his eyes and looked into the dead eyes of the creature, its face close enough to kiss. Its mouth gaped impossibly wide.

  "Make sure, Tommy, make sure," the voice whispered.

  David St. John screamed.

  *

  4

  It's my mom. S
he killed my step-dad. She's one of them now. Shes here in the house and she wants me next. Im scared. What shall I do.

  Claire pressed send.

  The woman that had been her mother- had told her to finish her cereal that morning and not to go out of the house because of what was going on at the moment- smashed her ornaments and crockery against the walls downstairs. Claire cringed at each crash and drew her knees up to her chin hugging her calves and rocking. Tears coursed freely through old tearstains on her cheeks. She had no idea what to do. The two people in the world (three, if she counted her former tutor at school) that she could turn to when she didn't know how to proceed in any given situation were gone. Ian was lying with his brains dripping out of his skull in the next room while her mother ransacked the belongings that she had lovingly gathered and cherished for as long as Claire could remember. Her bed was pushed up again her dressing table and tight against the door as it had been before she had dared to go out of the room. She had retreated to her room at the sound of her mother's return and took refuge on the floor space in between her bed and the wall below the window. Now she realised that she was trapped; she was cornered by her own fear. She should have run for all she was worth while she’d had the chance. But where to? Her communication with Jack and what she observed from her window of those that had left their homes and taken to the streets- many inappropriately dressed for the elements, to wander the streets, the majority with the look of the lost- told her that there was nowhere to go. This was happening everywhere. And then there were the gunshots and the screams. Now she only had Jack and, for all she knew, something had happened to him too. His father was one of them now and she hadn't heard anything from Jack since he had left the refuge of his attic, poor Kevin left in the dark waiting for his big brother to return. Earlier in the evening- before her mother and step-father had returned to the house- there had been others to talk to via the Internet but the Internet had gone down along with the landline telephone system. Then there were the text messages but- one by one- they had stopped texting. Knowing what she now knew to be happening in the town, the silence of Vicky, Steph, Jayne and Sonny had larger implications. What if they were all dead? What if they had been possessed?

  A peal of wild laughter from outside made her start.

  She risked a look down on to the street and saw, among the drifting people of Measton, a goblin like creature that came to a grinding halt in the middle of

  Cornhill Road. There was a man on its back. It turned its bald head in her direction causing her heart to leap in her chest. She ducked back under the ledge whimpering. It had sensed her. A hissing, grunting noise came from the street below but she didn't dare another look. She heard her garden gate open followed by the sound of trodden gravel that meant that a number of people approached the front door.

  A slam came from below as one of her new visitors kicked in the front door. She pressed her face into the pillow that she had lain on since she had been a baby and listened to them whispering on the stairs.

  They began to make their way up towards her.

  *

  5

  It did not pause as it headed into the freezing floodwaters. Weaver cried out in shock at the sub-zero impact on his skin. The cold immediately bit into his flesh and worked its way right down to the bone. As the creature dived into the water, it tossed Weaver ahead of it and then pushed him across the flood plain that had previously been Meadow Vale Caravan Park and towards the opposite bank. Weaver was swept through the water at a remarkable speed. The strength of the thing was incredible. He knew that it was Davies but the metamorphosis that had occurred in the man to become this thing- for want of a better word- was beyond understanding.

  Weaver's teeth chattered painfully as he was guided across the river; he focused on reaching the other side- that was all. If he thought about anything else, he was afraid his mind would snap. He could see the shape of the Abbey ruins on the hillside, briefly illuminated by the temporary moonlight before thick rain clouds smothered it once more. He strained to keep his head above water and tried to ignore the creature's iron fingers gripping and pinching him into the flesh at the backs of his knees. Once, he had looked over his shoulder at the humanoid figure that guided him though the water and it had hissed at him before putting its face fully into the churning waters. They reached the tree tops that marked the river's edge. This is where the river bank would normally be he realised and felt the hopelessness of the fact that they had been in the mind-numbingly cold waters for longer than he thought possible without freezing to death and they had yet to reach what under normal circumstances would have marked the river's edge. He tried to wiggle his toes and realised that he could no longer feel them and his hands were too numb to move. Bizarrely, his body felt warmer though. Strange. That meant something, he knew it did but he was finding it increasingly difficult to concentrate as he struggled to think. He tried to focus on something important and couldn't think of a single thing that felt important enough to drag his mind from the monstrosity that had hold of him or the fact that he was obviously about to die. His teeth had stopped chattering and only his chin quivered spasmodically in the water. He dipped into the water to rest his neck and swallowed river water. He gagged. Weaver was sure that, if he had been warmer, he would have vomited. He felt as though his digestive system was frozen solid along with his other internal organs.

  Try to think, try to think, try to think, try to-

  Mary's face moments after he had kissed her came into his mind then. The way she had smiled and shrugged as though to say: So it's weird, who cares? His eyelids felt heavy despite the chill and Mary's face faded into nothingness. He focused on the far bank again but could see nothing but water; the water's swell was too great.

  Try to think, try to-

  Nirvana mark IV appeared before his eyes in the darkness of the river. He blinked but it was still there. The canvas had a deep blue-black wash that he had painstakingly covered time and again to give the sense of infinite depth. In the vision, that had been achieved. The dark canvas was spotted with intricate star systems to emphasis the enormity of existence. There were three subjects across the centre of the canvas, trapezium in composition but with indefinite sides to give the sense of radiating light; the central light was the largest and within that light there were swirls and patterns that, upon examination, became faces- too many to count and- the more one looked- ever-increasing. To the left and right of the central trapezoid light form, smaller versions of the same.

  Weaver headed for the central light, sure that it would be warm there. This was the River Styx and the creature was the Ferry Man. In the light Weaver saw the faces of those that had gone before him and then he saw nothing for a while.

  He awoke upon the creature's shoulder. They had reached the other side of the river and- Weaver shook his head, the icy water spraying in all directions- he must have blacked out. He shivered convulsively and then felt himself rising into the air as the creature shoved him off its shoulder. He saw the ground racing up to meet him a split second before he landed face first in the quagmire that the field had become. He placed his palms in the mud at either side of his head and pushed himself to his knees. He looked to his left and right. Where was this place? Somewhere in the meadowlands? Trees and bushes surrounded them in abundance. He looked up at the silhouette that stood over him and realised that, for the time being, his fear had gone.

  He looked up into the inscrutable face. "Is that it then, Davies?" The creature cocked its head at the name. "Is that it?" Weaver struggled to his feet. He felt anger pulsing through his veins and that was a good feeling; it meant that he was alive. "Why not kill me in the house? Why bring me over here to do it? Eh?" The creature stood absolutely still and regarded him; in the darkness, Weaver could not see its face. He screamed up at it: "WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU ANYWAY?" From the ground behind him he heard a hissing sound like the painfully slow venting of steam and swung around. He looked down to the source of the sound. The velvet blac
kness there stood out against the darkness of the night; Weaver strained his eyes to look into the abyss. A drawn out phrase whispered out of the darkness and touched him at the core of his being with an icy finger. Weaver's fear returned and he backed away from the fissure. He backed into the rock hard abdomen of the creature. The voice that spoke to him came from the black hole.

  We are you.

  Weaver shook his head violently. "No-" he stammered and felt the creature's rough hands on his shoulder blades. He knew what was coming but was helpless. The creature pushed him towards the edge of the hole. He dug his heels into the mud but it was to no avail; the being that had taken him was too strong. Weaver tumbled into the void.

  6

  Mary pointed the rifle at the advancing figure and John-o braced himself. The old man stopped. He hissed at them like a territorial cat as they edged by.

  "They're not stupid, then," John-o observed.