Quick note: This is a horror short
There’s a bridge a few minutes from my home that crosses over a small river. Not small enough that it should go without mention but this was the type of river that would be hard to describe if you were ever asked. It was bland in many senses, just two muddy banks and a line of brown water that never turned an errant tide, although something about the river’s surface always seemed to catch my gaze as I walked across the iron path of its bridge. You’d see fish during the day, tiny flecks of a school that draw a circular ripple as they pass, possibly thinking the glint of the sun to be something important, a mystery greater than just reflected sunlight, the possibilty of an escape.
It wasn’t a clean river by any means, the mass collection of bottles and rubbish lining the bank always irked me far more than it should and the gentle fall of its daily ramble never seemed strong enough to dislodge the shopping trolley some bastard had tossed into the water.
I grew to hate the river because of these scars, this ugliness that it was in no way responsible for, and each day as I walked across the polluted waters I’d feel a pang of resentment in my side, almost as if I was angry with this river, this body of water that held no malice or thought. Maybe I was already scared of it in some way.
That night I had noticed a distinct lack of life on my walk home, a soundless chill in night air that was free from the regular underscore of urban existence. This stillness, this absence of normality had made my walk take purpose and caused the air to grow somewhat thin. Sailors speak of these nights in rime and in terror; the sheer expanded void of inescapable nothignness, the darkness stretching outward and laying its weight onto the stitch of horizon.
I pulled my coat closer and paced toward the bridge.
The water was still.
Underneath that lightless pathway the usual tepid surface of the river had lost its form. Outward, a valley of night had been carved into its place and lay silent as if a starless sky carried lonely, untouched by the light of the moon.
The pupil of an eye, a sightless iris, focused deep upon me and I halted for a moment, staring at a bridge that now seemed much longer than it had before. Drawing a tight breath, I began to walk across the wooden pathway.
The river was paused, briefly halted in its movement, its surface a pure sheen of glass that paralleled the world above it. I looked across the river and saw no rubbish, I saw no discarded trash clogging the banks, the river I knew was gone; in its place I could only see a sprawling tree line, absolute in its expanse and following a forigen bank away into distance.
I looked for something I could recognise, something to ground my fears, but the familiar was gone: the trolley that had survived both flood and drought had been dislodged, its absence more profound than any other horror that had assailed me. Looking into the matte reflectiveness of the river I could only see myself, an image thrown back as if captured in a last moment of unnoticed horror.
A single imperfection formed from my reflection on that river’s surface, a marble of pure darkness that rose without movement. I leaned over the rail as this curiosity broke the still water and then, in ripple, shattered the mirror around it. Further I leant, stretching to see what this strange apparition could be.
I fell…
Almost as if I were dragged into the heart of the sky I fell into absence. The bridge was only a short gap above the water but as I fell time seemed to part beyond me. The aches of muscles atrophied around the bone as my flailing grasp grew wrinkled, clutching at free air. A meek cry leapt from my lungs but could do nothing to save me from this descent.
I aged, rapidly and without mercy. Can you imagine what it feels like to grow old, to experience an entire span of life in total focus and without distraction? I grew decrepit, a pale form of malnourished bone that was almost too weak to remain conscious; I felt trapped in the fathomless nothing of years, one by one being torn from my hands. I saw that marble, that perfect black circle, grow larger and larger until it opened up into the horizon, a flat disc of sprawling nothing, hemmed by the invisible seam of totality.
Light would not find me in this place and as my decaying skin began to fall behind me, my vision too became blurred, everything I knew as myself was helplessly lost. Now no longer able to see, the darkness doubled around me as the passing of time elongated with detachment. Bone by bone I was segmented apart. My toes, each rib, my teeth, methodically each of these were stripped away until only my skull remained: all these modicums of garbage being washed away and disposed of, picked clean by the river’s tide.
In a concussion of vividity the rumble of a truck eased past and knotted the hypnotic weave of silence. I left the bridge, fumbling for my front door as I had suddenly reached my home with heavy breath and sweat on my forrid, I must have ran… The morning now was cresting behind me and I assumed I had been struck by a nightmare and walked outside, A nightmare so real that I was to still feel it linger but a figment of imagination all the same.
It’s strange to recount this, as I’m sure it was nothing, but I never have seen a darkness quite like that again nor have I felt so utterly alone. Now as I cross that bridge on my morning walk, I seldom can bring myself to look over its side, I never seem to be able to look out into the crystal clear waters of the river below.
J.McCray
2021
Sunday Short Stories 