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.
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