Black Water Down

Black Water Down

... an excerpt from my novel, working title

Find the River

Diana Morrison

The sunlight scorched his eyeballs as its ghostly brilliance infiltrated and filled his vision with the subtlety of a blunt needle.

Syl tried to close his lids against it but couldn’t; some external force was keeping them open.

The water that bore him along was thick, warm, sticky and slow moving. If he were not so weary of struggle, he might have clawed his way out but as the radiation sickened sun melted into turbulent bubbles of heavy, acid-laden clouds, he believed that it was over, that his life had finally ended and that he had departed without a whimper or friend to see him on his way. He felt at peace but for a painful stretching of the heart as he thought of what might have been with Áine.

He became aware of his surroundings; such a grey lonely place, hills worn to their skeletons and apparently devoid of all things human. The murky polluted waterway was conveying him slowly through a drab and dreary, unknown ghost town of grey buildings, yellowing grass and dismal skies. The smoke of former heavy industry still hung, like a fixture overhead almost close enough to touch. Tall spindly chimneys continued to belch out sulphuric waste spitting acidic rain at the visibly crumbling buildings. A rancid stench of death and decay filled the air.

Filth and squalor seeped from the festering, abandoned town land into the slouching, stagnant water, surrounding him in a slimy slurry, binding him tightly to the surface in a mucoid bond broken only occasionally by corroded supermarket trolleys, dead fish and dead men’s boots.

Reptilian skeletons of rusting barbed wire lurked menacingly on the sidelines. They darted out at him periodically, snagging his unclad and vulnerable body at strategic points, stinging and prickling with irritating familiarity. The cruel fangs of one such monster lunged and hooked tenaciously into his groin, tearing savagely at his skin and flesh. He knew real pain and realised that he still had life somewhere within him as he felt it chewing its way through his femoral artery, aided and abetted, in a show of massive betrayal, by his own body that appeared to be willingly sucking it in.

The tall buildings loomed large overhead. Their blackened windows like empty eye sockets blindly watching him wallowing past. A great fountain of slush fired out from a concealed pipe in the bank and blasted his face in a sudden icy and nauseatingly filthy torrent. Taking their cue from the master, other pipes lining Hades’ Conduit sprang into action, exploding their vile contents all over him.

An insubstantial bridge with imperfect arches spanned the channel ahead of him. A figure dressed in seductive black reclined against the flimsy parapet watching him with dull amusement. The long tendrils of her luscious red hair hung over the edge and skimmed the surface of the effluent, smouldering in the phantom light and just beyond Syl’s grasp. She watched his slow progress with sneering yet sorrowful superiority and blew him sarcastic little kisses that hit him like gravel as he passed beneath her.

She waved a child’s little wave as the water picked up speed and swept him around a bend. She and the town were lost to him as the jaws of a black hole loomed before him and vaporised him.