Down River

by Stephen Gallagher

Genres: Occult & Supernatural; Horror; Noir

Synopsis

Johnny Mays has the moral conscience of a selfish child in the frame of a plain-clothes cop. The city is his playground, the rest of us his toys. He likes to find out where we work, and where we live, and what will scare us most. And Johnny never had a toy he didn't break. But Johnny starts a car chase, and he pushes it too far. Soon they're fishing for his body at the foot of a dam, and his partner Nick Frazier has been left behind. They were friends, once, a long time ago. Nick had hoped that he might save Johnny. Johnny's last words still echo in Nick's mind: "I'm going to remember this," he said, a dark fire in his eyes. "I'm coming back for you." Then the killings start. Killings of people Johnny didn't like. And Johnny's car is dredged up, empty.

Release date: March 19, 2019

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 315

Sample

IF YOU really want to know how and where it all started, here’s probably as good a point as any; by a small piece of deserted beach on a stretch of the east coast one afternoon in late September.

It was a wild-looking place, with dunes backed by marshes and topped by reeds against a grey sky with a wide grey sea beyond, and the odd rusted coil of barbed wire a leftover of wartime defences. When the wind came in from across the water it would start to bury the coast road in a blanket of drifting sand, and when this got bad enough they’d have to send out an ex-army caterpillar truck to scrape it all down to the tarmac for a distance of two miles or more. After that the road swung inland for a way, and the sand plough would raise its blade and turn around to head for home; the curving scars of its tracks over successive years could be read on the road surface like dinosaur prints, always turning in the same place and always taking out a chunk of the banking because the beast was tough to handle and the man in the saddle could hardly care less. To a small boy watching from the dunes, it all had the air of a ritual of some deep significance.

But then, when you’re around nine years old, doesn’t everything?

In a car on the cleared road heading south, a travelling sales rep named Harry Waterson was wondering what he could do to catch up on the half-day that he’d fallen behind on his schedule. Harry was thirty-seven years old and a vaguely disappointed man. His suit jacket was on a hanger in the back of the car, his knuckles were on the wheel, and when he looked in the mirror he could see a thin slice of the world receding beyond a horizon of Toffee Button cartons. Toting those same cartons across the pavement at eleven o’clock in the morning while some shopkeeper watched from the doorway, he’d feel the world’s eyes upon him; a man dressed for the office in a Burton’s suit and Rayon tie, bearing penny chews and gum.

But the job came with a car. He got a wage topped up with commission. He had a council-owned house and two children that he loved but rarely saw in their waking hours, and a wife who never said it out loud but who still managed to make plain her feeling that he spent his days in freedom, grabbing all the good things of life’s buffet and bringing none of them home. By the standards of the day, he’d done well.

What he’d actually wanted was to become a fighter pilot, but that had been back at school in the last years of the war. No one in those times could fail to be thrilled by the sight of those heroes passing overhead, on their way to a skirmish or returning from one. Even if they’d managed to spin the conflict out until he was old enough, he’d have run into the twin problems of poor maths and even worse eyesight. Nor was he a fighter by nature. Just about every boy in the school had pictured himself growing up to fly a Spitfire, and none of them would. Most got National Service. Harry had gone to work for his uncle.

He’d never seen a dead body before this day. He’d seen spilled blood after a road accident one time and it had surprised him because it hadn’t been red at all, just dark and wet like a flood of black coffee. And then another time before that, aged eight or nine, his mother had sent him on an errand to a dusty second-hand shop in a back street near to home; nobody had answered the bell and so he’d waited for a while, and when still nobody appeared he’d made his way through the stacks of old, grim furniture and hearse-like baby carriages to see if he could find anybody in the back room. There, in cramped living quarters no lighter and no better-furnished than the junk shop out front, he’d come upon an unattended coffin on trestles. It was deeply polished and the handles were bright silver and there was a wreath of black crêpe and lilies on its lid.

Run? For a couple of minutes there, back through the shop and out down the street, he’d been convinced that he was flying after all. That, and the accident, were the closest he’d ever been to looking death in the eye.

Until today.

In fact it almost happened too soon, because he was thinking about other things and was late hitting the brakes when he saw the kid with the bicycle. The boy was standing right out in the middle of the road and looking straight at him, the bike turned sideways like a shield. As the brakes locked-on Harry felt with a deep and blossoming horror that he was going to slide all the way and the kid was going to die. The boy was frowning at him, knowing nothing of the physics of the situation, simply expecting the adult to stop. There were things that a more expert driver might do, but Harry’s only reflex was to stand harder on the brakes, and then harder still as if willpower alone would draw him back from the edge of disaster.

The rear end of the car started to go. The stock on the back seat shifted. Harry could already hear the sound, first the crash into the bike and then a thud like a fist into a side of meat.

But maybe willpower was enough. The car slid to a halt about a yard short of the boy, and the boy rolled his bicycle forward and parked it against the radiator grille. Harry was wondering whether a couple of strong men with crowbars might have a fighting chance of getting his fingers unclenched from around the steering wheel, and whether he himself might ever have the strength to walk unaided again, when the boy beckoned to him and then turned around and set out for the dunes.

Harry took his hands from the wheel. He was actually trembling. He took a deep breath, and felt better.

The boy obviously expected him to follow, and hadn’t even looked back yet. Harry couldn’t drive on because there was a sodding bicycle leaning on the front of his car now, for God’s sake. He opened the door and started to get out, thinking that at the very least he could throw the thing out of the way and leave it at the side of the road. But then the saddle and the handlebars abruptly dropped out of view, and there was a crash as the bike slid down and hit the tarmac.

The boy was almost at the crest of the first line of dunes when the sound reached him. He looked back at Harry, and then beckoned again. And then he went on.

Harry didn’t know what to do. He was in the middle of nowhere with all of his stock in the back of the car. Beside all the usual stuff he had two gross of chocolate Santas and snowmen that he was supposed try talking his regulars into taking early this year, as well as promotional packs and window stickers for a couple of lines that hadn’t been moving too well throughout the summer.

And then he thought, To hell with it, and with a terrific sense of release he slammed the door and set out toward the dunes to follow the boy.

There was a wide path of sorts, railway sleepers buried under the sand. Most of them were submerged but every now and again one would be tilted slightly so that its edges showed through and made an abrupt step. To either side of him was gorse so dense that a stick thrust in would have stayed in place when released. Harry came up onto that first, low line of dunes, and paused to look for the boy; he’d left the wider track and was now following the edge of the brush along the higher ridge ahead.

This path was softer and well-trodden, and harder work. Harry had to stop after a minute to get his breath. He’d left his jacket in the car and was in his shirtsleeves, and the sea-wind cut right through the cotton. About two miles out stood the nearest of the big freight ships, one of an endless procession that waited for pilotage around the head and into the bay, faded by light and distance until it and the others beyond seemed to exist in some other zone of reality. Closer-in, the incoming tide was beginning to cover the stained light and dark bands of the shoreline.

The boy had stopped, too, and was watching him.

Harry raised a hand to signal that he was following, and the boy turned.

They came down between two shallow ridges that were actually buried runs of picket fencing, with just the picket-points showing like the tips of animal bones. Litter and scraps of old newspaper had been caught here as if in the teeth of a rake, and they fluttered in the wind. The boy had slowed, giving Harry a chance to catch up. Harry was beginning to feel uneasy about how this would look, and wondering whether he wasn’t making a big mistake. Even now he was uncomfortable about buying dolls for the girls if they weren’t along with him; a man of his age, and alone, could so easily be taken for a child molester shopping for bait. The further behind they left the road, the less sure of himself he felt. There was nothing out here but sand and rabbit shit and grasses that stung like whips as he pushed through them.

The boy had stopped again, on another rise in the path. They’d almost reached the edge of the incoming sea by now, and this time he was waiting for Harry to reach him.

“What’s the matter?” Harry said as he laboured his way up the final slope, and his voice sounded thin and stripped of authority in the wide open air. “Is somebody hurt?”

“I don’t know,” the boy said, and he turned to look down over the crest of the dune as Harry came up level.

He found himself looking down into a shallow creek. Here a freshwater stream, cut so deep into the dunes that it wasn’t even visible until you stood right over it, ran out into the sea. Its sides had been shored-up with bales of rocks and stones, and some of those bales had been levered open by driftwood so that a spreading fan of pebbles marked the place on the beach where river and ocean met.

Harry sensed the nature of the location. It was a child’s magical spot. Such things existed back then, when children roamed free to claim lonely marshes and derelict buildings as their own. Something in him responded to it, like hearing a forgotten language after so many years. It had isolation and diversity and that essential hint of mystery, like the aura that hangs around shut-down machinery.

Out in the turbulence, a man was weakly trying to scramble out of the surf and onto the shore.

He was face-down in the rising tide. He was wearing a thick blue serge jacket, a fisherman’s jacket, and the weight of it sodden was holding him down. As the spent waves lifted him he’d make an ineffectual grab to stop himself being pulled back in the undertow, but there was no strength in him at all. He was lifted and dragged back, lifted and dragged back, and his hands clawed at the sand and the sand simply ran through his fingers. He was an anonymous hulk, swollen by the sea, and the mammoth effort that must have brought him to the shore had drained him of the energy to complete his salvation.

Harry didn’t even hesitate at the water’s edge. He splashed straight in, oblivious to the soaking and the sudden and penetrating cold, and as he came close the fisherman raised a hand from the water as if in supplication to a saint.

Harry took the man’s hand. Gripped it.

And the hand broke up in his own.

The flesh seemed to dissolve at his touch. The hand slid out as if from a glove, bone-white and slender, leaving Harry with a grasp on … what?

He stopped, knee-deep in the freezing water. He looked in his own hand and saw the mass of shrimps that had been stripped from their human feast, curling and writhing and breaking up and flaking away. The man in the surf was being drawn out again, sucked by the undertow, and his half-consumed hand dropped back into the water. Harry was screaming. He felt as if he’d grabbed a fistful of live maggots. He was shaking them away as he staggered back, and as he stumbled out he saw the drowned man’s body making another bid for the beach, a puppet moving with the action of the sea. It briefly lifted its face as if to grab a breath, and presented a black slit-eyed mask that Harry would never forget even though he would try his best over the years to come.

The boy on the dune had been watching it all. Harry made an effort to get a grip on himself. The boy was pale-faced and serious, and Harry was suddenly intensely aware of how he must look. If every encounter was a snapshot of you in someone else’s eyes, then this had to be one where Harry wanted to be at his best. Inside, he felt about the same age as the boy. But now he’d have to step up and play the adult.

The boy said, “Is he dead?”

“I’m afraid he is,” Harry said. “I’ll have to tell somebody.”

“Aren’t you going to pull him out?”

Harry looked back, even though a part of him didn’t want to. The dead man must have been washed in alongshore to this place of cross-currents, and here he was being held and played around with like unwanted food. Until the tide turned, he’d probably stay here.

Harry said, “I’ve been about as close as I care to get. Come on. What’s your name?”

“Nicky,” the boy said.

They trooped back over the dunes. Harry asked the boy how he’d come to find the body, and then didn’t pay much attention to the story he got in reply; he was breathing harder and harder, and knew that he was only kidding himself if he thought that he wouldn’t have to stop and throw up any moment now. He was also wiping his hand repeatedly on the side of his pants, although he hadn’t even noticed that.

Suddenly he stepped off the path, and dumped his breakfast into the gorse.

The boy waited patiently, without expression or comment.

Someday, Nicky, Harry thought as he stepped back onto the path; he was feeling cold and wrecked and miserable and his wet clothes were making him shiver, and he knew that he was cutting something rather less than a dash here. Someday, when you’re older, I hope you’ll understand. And they started on again, coming down where the sand thinned out over the buried railway sleepers. The boy reached up and took his hand as they covered the last quarter-mile back to the car.

Nothing had changed. Harry could see the great length of his skid drawn clearly on the road. The boy picked up his bicycle and set it upright, and Harry got his jacket and put it on. It had taken some creases when the stock had fallen over against it.

The boy said, “I’m coming with you.”

“There’s no room for you and the bike. Sorry.”

The boy’s sudden eruption of feeling startled him. “He’s mine!” the boy protested, and his expression was one of outrage rather than any common form of anger. “I found him! I didn’t stop you just to let you take him away from me!”

For Harry, it was as if he’d unexpectedly touched something live. He watched the boy for a moment.

And then he said, “There’s a Shell garage with a cafeteria. About a mile inland on the right-hand side. Do you know it?”

The boy nodded.

“Well, that’s where I’m going. You can follow on your bike and meet me there.”

AFTER HE’D made the call, Harry went out onto the forecourt to wait. He could never understand how places like this stayed in business, and he saw plenty of them; this one had the pumps out front and a repair shop with an oil-stained pit around the back, while the main building had been painted white and turned into a country-kitchen kind of a place. There were curtains at the windows, chequered plastic cloths on the tables, new oilcloth on the floor, and only one paying customer behind a newspaper at a corner table. From out in the open, Harry could look in any direction and not see one other building. And the land was flat and mostly drained, so that one look covered quite a lot of distance.

The boy came freewheeling in a couple of minutes later, half-out of the saddle and running the bike down to a halt over the last few yards. He’d made pretty decent time. Harry had been forced to stop once, racked with uncontrollable sobs as the drowned man had come surging up in his imagination once again, his face blackened like inner-tube rubber and blown up tight with something gassy and green; but after what had seemed like an hour (and was actually less than a minute) he’d been able to take out a handkerchief to dry his eyes and blow his nose. He felt strangely purged, and able to go on; it was as if he’d sucked on a wound and spat out poison.

And—could he be mistaken in this? But he didn’t feel anything like as bad as he might have expected.

The boy was flushed from pedalling hard, his eyes bright and his hair in unruly spikes. “Who’s coming?” he said.

“I called the police,” Harry told him, and he resisted the urge to put out a hand and flatten down the boy’s hair as he’d have done with one of his own. “The local man’s coming out. We’ll have to show him where to look.”

“Will there be a police car?”

“I should think there will.”

The boy was fumbling in his saddlebag. “I can show him this,” he said, and after a moment he brought out an Airfix car from among the lead soldiers and the golf balls and the bubblegum cards. It was a Ford, a similar model to Harry’s own, but it had been painted in the livery of a police vehicle.

“Who made that?” Harry said. “You?”

“My dad,” the boy said, and he held it up to the light to check on the interior. “It’s got all the seats in, and everything.”

Something was definitely happening here. As that first flush of awfulness receded, Harry was beginning to feel … well, it was something like the feeling he’d get when things were going his way. There was pity for the poor soul whose bloated corpse was struggling around out there and fattening up the seafood, but also a strange sense of vigour that had crept into his day.

His schedule counted for nothing, now. He couldn’t help thinking of the more interesting times that lay ahead, the stories to be told afterwards, the awe and, yes, the envy of others … and as his eyes met the boy’s over the model car, he realised that the two of them were thinking more or less the same thing.

“Don’t forget to tell them,” the boy warned. “It was me who found him.”

“I won’t forget,” Harry said.

And then he walked over to his own car, which he’d left alongside a sales row of half a dozen museum-pieces with rust around their sills and price tickets in their windscreens. Each screen was a near-perfect mirror of clouds and sky.

When he came back a minute later he said, “Here you go, Nicky,” and he tossed the boy a couple of bags of Toffee Buttons.

“Thanks,” Nicky said as he caught them.

And then the two of them sat together on the garage’s low roadside wall to wait for the police car, and all the excitement that would follow with it, to arrive.

THEY’D TOSSED a coin to see whose car they’d use today. This was how they came to be riding in Nick Frazier’s old Granada.

“What do you think of that one, then?” Johnny Mays said, and Nick had to turn and look across the top of the car to see what he meant. Nick was fuelling the Granada, and Johnny had stepped out to loiter against its side on the filling station forecourt. His tie was loosened and his arms were folded. Johnny wore good clothes, but he always looked as if he’d slept in them; he had the air of a lounge lizard perpetually in transit between lounges, rumpled and faintly surprised to find that the world carried on turning through the daylight hours.

Nick followed his look over to the next aisle along, where a woman was unhooking the four-star pump for a waiting Porsche. Nick wondered for a moment which Johnny was talking about, the woman or the car. Knowing Johnny, it could have been either.

“Too classy for you,” Nick said, which would cover it both ways.

“You reckon?”

“I reckon.”

Johnny considered further. Nick’s guess was that the woman was somewhere in her mid-thirties and fighting it too hard, a bleached-blonde with a deep suntan, white trouser suit and white shoes and a little too much gold around her hands. She’d turned to face away from them, perhaps deliberately, but as far as Johnny was concerned this had only improved the view.

He said, “Good lines, but that isn’t class. That’s just town money.”

“Whatever,” Nick said. “You still wouldn’t get your nose past the door.”

Johnny thought it over a little while longer.

And then he said, “Watch me.”

Oh, shit, Nick thought, and cut off the pump. He didn’t want to stay around for this. Johnny was, quote, a mad bastard and Nick could imagine him ambling over to an unexploded bomb and giving it a kick, just to see what would happen. He always seemed to get away with it somehow, but it didn’t always pay to be standing too close when Johnny Mays was on a roll. As Johnny was sticking his hands into his pockets and sauntering over to the next aisle, Nick was making for the forecourt office to settle the bill and pick up a receipt. If anything was going to happen he’d see it from a distance, and in relative safety.

What he actually saw, watching through the teller’s window on the far side of the counter, was nothing much. The woman’s hair was whipped across her face by the wind when she looked up to speak to Johnny. She brushed it away with her free hand. She didn’t smile. He gestured out toward the skyline of tower blocks and dark clouds crowding low; he either had to be saying something about the threat of thundery weather, or else he was asking how she came to be passing through this blighted side of town.

Whatever he was saying, it didn’t seem to be working.

Johnny was sitting in the car when Nick got back to it, seat reclined a few degrees and his head tilted back on the rest.

Nick said, “How’d you get on?”

“She’s a sad case,” Johnny said. “Frigid as a Polar Bear’s crap, no hope for her at all.”

“What did she say to you?”

“Just drive. Pull out onto the street and wait.”

“For what?”

“I’ll tell you as we go.”

So Nick started the Granada, and did as Johnny ordered.

Technically, they were equal partners. But Johnny knew the ground whereas Nick had only been working it for a couple of months, and so tended to make the running. As they emerged from under the shadow of the filling station’s metal awning, the small radio that Johnny had left propped on the dash did a sudden fade-in and came to life. Johnny always boosted a radio from the station sergeant, even for a plainclothes detail when it wasn’t considered necessary. Nick had begun to see him as a spider, in need of some sense of the web to feel secure.

“What now?” Nick said as they pulled in by what had once been a row of shops. Now it was just unpromising-looking wasteland with an Enterprise Zone billboard. The board was set back from the road, where stuff thrown from cars couldn’t reach it so easily.

“Now we wait,” Johnny said.

The Porsche came out about a minute later.

Johnny said, “Warp factor six, Mister Sulu,” and Nick said, “You want me to follow her?” And Johnny turned to him, and gave him an infinitely pained look.

“Yes,” he said, “I want you to follow her. Preferably today. Get right up close, so she’ll see us in the mirror.”

It was a four-lane highway cutting straight through the badlands out of the heart of town, and it wasn’t hard for Nick to find a space in the traffic flow and slide in behind the Porsche. There wasn’t much of any rear window in the sports job, but Nick could see the woman as she glanced at her mirror and then glanced again, quickly, when she realised that the car behind her was something more than just another late-afternoon commuter making an early run for home. Now she was obviously beginning to wonder what they might have in mind.

Nick was curious to know, as well.

The road dropped into a concrete underpass, yellow lights zipping over their heads like tracer bullets, and as the Porsche started to pick up speed Nick matched it and stayed on her tail. This wasn’t a part of town where anyone would care to be stopped and in trouble; extensively bulldozed and worked-over in the ’sixties building boom, it now had the atmosphere of a long-abandoned destination for airships that had never arrived. After about a quarter-mile they came up into a daylight that somehow seemed darker than the tunnel that they’d just left; it was grim enough to have triggered the photo-cells in some of the high overhead floods so that they burned like new stars against an iron-grey sky.

The woman was starting to get worried, now. She was looking for a way out.

Radio reception had ghosted away again as they’d gone below ground, but now as it returned Johnny picked up the radio and called in. There was about a ten-second lag before the dispatcher responded.

“Need some car plate details,” he said. “Name, address and anything outstanding.” And then, holding the radio in plain sight and leaning forward to get a look at the Porsche’s plate, he read off the registration. Nick couldn’t tell for sure whether the woman was getting all of this, but he could sense some of the pressure that she was probably feeling.

“You’re too much,” he said.

Johnny grinned, happily. “I am, aren’t I?” he said, and as he waited for the details to come through he fumbled around in his jacket and brought out the Little Black Book.

It was as Johnny was adding the woman’s address to whatever current list he was keeping in the book’s pages that Nick saw the Porsche suddenly swing over into an exit lane at the last possible moment, no signal or anything. Nick could have stayed with her, but a quick check told him that Johnny’s eyes were off the road. He let the woman go, and Johnny didn’t look up until it was too late for him to object.

He’d achieved what he wanted by now, anyway. Nick’s Granada stayed on the level and the Porsche ran parallel for a way, before starting to rise and move out on an elevated ramp. The turnoff wouldn’t take her home, but it would put some distance between her and this unwelcome attention from a random male. Did she know Johnny was police? Most likely he’d mentioned it. He usually did.

Johnny finished his notebook entry with a flourish, closed it, and then clicked the little ballpoint pen that came with it.

Nick said, “What’s the idea?”

“Just for the record,” Johnny said, and as he stowed the book he smiled pleasantly across the increasing gap between the two vehicles. Nick saw the blonde giving him a brief, cold stare. She might have been a beauty contest winner, once. The ruthless kind. She still had her looks, but now the peroxide and heavy makeup suggested panic at their waning currency.

Then the ramp took her up and beyond their eyeline.

Nick said, “You push it sometimes, Johnny.”

And Johnny said, “You don’t walk away from Johnny Mays until Johnny says it’s okay.”

Nick didn’t bother trying to argue. He knew a lost cause when he saw one. Johnny had worked hard on his ‘mad bastard’ status in the Division, raising it almost to the level of mythology, and Nick had come along too late in the day to think about putting any kind of a dent into it. And while there was no approval for the abuse of licence data, most of the officers that he knew had done it at some time or another. Back when he’d been in uniform, one of the oil companies had run a promotional campaign with car numbers displayed on petrol station forecourts. There was a cash payout for any driver who spotted his own number; some of the boys had done pretty well out of tracking down owners and doing a deal for half of the prize money in return for telling them where to claim, until somebody put in a complaint. Everything had tightened up for a while after that, but there was no way of sealing the system completely.

Johnny was looking at his watch.

“She’d have made us late, anyway,” he said.

THEY PARKED the Granada on an asphalt lot at the foot of a tower block. The lot was neglected although many of the cars on it were pretty new; there were rental garages somewhere around, but most people seemed to prefer to keep their vehicles out in the open. Garages were no more than a convenient shelter for the gangs of small children who could get in and strip a car down to nothing with awesome professionalism, bringing along their own tools for the job. This wasn’t the roughest part of town, but it won hands-down as one of the bleakest. The fourteen-storey towers, seven of them arranged in a prehistoric formation that dominated the skyline without adding to it, had all of the charm and some of the function of vertical prison stacks. The square mile surrounding them was an architect’s sketch of access roads and empty plazas, and pointless grass embankments crossed by unofficial footpaths that had been made with the dogged obstinacy of water refusing to flow uphill. Ground-floor windows were covered by plywood boarding, the boarding was covered by graffiti. Where there were trees, they were young and mostly dead.

“I imagine Beverly Hills looking a lot like this,” Johnny Mays said.

Nick gave a quick check to make sure that their summons documents were in order before they got out of the car. As Nick was locking up after them, Johnny stood by the Granada and stretched and took a deep breath of the air. Whatever might be in his mind, Johnny Mays gave the impression of a man who felt himself to be pretty much on top of it.

He glanced back at the car as they walked away. “You couldn’t find anything older?”

“Couldn’t find anything cheaper. . .