Release by John-J Anderson [Short Story]
Release
By John-J Anderson
The river grew black, glowing with the faint spectral petals of ghostly pale hands reaching up from the depths, unable to break the surface, trapped in a sodden muddy prison of breathless torment. Cries echoed out through the desolate landscape surrounding me as I dug my bare feet into the crumbling soaked winter banks.
“Release me from this nightmare!”
Adding malice to misplaced anguish, the whippings winds that howled through my ears and drew up spiky grey hairs upon my limbs. Shrouding the night sky that had grown tired with a black cloaking mass of cloud, the darkness held a canopy of withered tangled tree limbs. They danced against the stars as though orchestrating the events unfolding just below their reach. Nature succumbs to the forces of dark splendour that danced on her soils that evening. With sudden disarray, the river ceased its tempest storm of crashing waves and became deathly still. Frozen as a solid block of obsidian, as though the arrival of an expected guest broke the focus of hatred towards me as I longed for saving from the centre of the gale. The fog that could not penetrate the rivers tension parted with slow ease, shapes of illusive greys made their way through the dense cloud as the rivers remained undisturbed and eerily pleasant. I fell to my knees in devastation, crumbling the last strands of strength that clung on like desperate features of armour. Winds swirled and raced forward once more in panic frenzy, the nights creatures scattered into the undergrowth and down burrowed holes of infinite mazes that littered the brush.
“What would become of me if this were my fate? If I accept this darkness, what then?” I called out with little breath retained; no answer returned from the fog alone besides the playful tease of rippling calmer waters somehow untouched from the weather battering all else exposed to the bitterness.
“Please, I beg you release me from this torture, release me from the binds of the river!” desperation was brazen and unhidden in my voice as it cracked and squeaked out a living into the frost-bitten sodden night.
As though the shapeless mass of writhing colours answered the call, the fog was once again split. The ripples on the water turned into the indistinguishable trail of a tide being forced by the driving force of a vessel.
“Hear me once more spectre. I will not fight you on this night. Show me the mercy I desire,” I screamed out once more into the void with a beg of despair.
Finally, emerging from the thick cloud of dense mist came the unmistakable lance of a wooden ship, black wood construction with an aged degradation perforating the ship’s body as a cancerous slimy moss coat. Atop the bow of this emerging wooden ship was the now visible decoration of the macabre. My heart shrieked and recoiled as I made out the vision of this trophy clear, a demonic skull tied with crass rope. Dripping blood had stained the eye sockets and the tips of the teeth, what few remained, seemed browned by time. It seemed otherworldly in my eyes as I struggled to conceive what I witnessed on that terrible evening at the river’s miserable shore.
Emerging now in its full glory stood the wooden haunting carriage of the river. Mist swirled in confusion besides the boat’s underbelly that bobbed above and below the river’s frozen surface, almost teasing the bodiless limbs that grasped at the surface world with hellish hunger. Raising my eyes to the centre of this paranormal image and all its nightmarish proportions, the strands of reality began to disintegrate. At the oar of this ten-foot ancient boat, oozing with a nefarious presence unfelt before in this life, stood the lumbering giant-like figure unmoving and dressed in black garbs as though all the colours of plain life had faded in its presence. I could feel my mind writhing in disgust at the very image of this heart-breaking luminary sculpture that stood without breath. No doubt remained in my mind that this was destined to become the end of my life, sunken upon into the mud and damp at the arms of the river. One last challenge must be posed if this was to be my end.
“Show yourself spectre!” I declared into the darkness that forced itself before me. No reply came from the hooded figure still clutching at the black splintering wooden oar in its hands.
“Who are you boatmen? I do not wish to play games on this horrid night!” I shouted across the break of the river. No reply came.
“Show yourself,” the words became lost in the roars of a sudden stabbing gust wind, interrupted, as the alien air blew over the scene, the spectres hood fell back onto his shoulders six feet above the grounds of the ship.
I found myself speechless as I observed the horrors beneath the hood. My eyes fell towards the earth and against my will I wept into my hands warm, tears that froze in the night’s atmosphere loose in my palms. Stood before me, atop his ship of damned wooden cruelty, was a living form of skeletal and vessel. Skin entirely removed of humanity, it was a sunken white sheet of remaining cover that dressed over the bones of a monster from the depths of the dark ages. Identifying this creature now felt of the utmost redundancy. For this nightmarish fiend that rode a wooden hearse along the black river, Lethe, was the visage of death itself. The stare of this looming finality never left my eyes, imprisoning my body in a paralysed fear of a lifeless nothingness that crushed any love into the pit of my stomach, it raised its hand and upturned its palm, beckoning that I might inch closer to the river’s edge and meet my fate. Crawling on all fours to the edge of the dark waters, my shadow underneath seemed to pull away, desperate to abandon me completely, a loneliness I had never felt, stood in place of all happiness and joy that I once knew. Memories became unobtainable in the presence of this empty beast. The very light that guides all moral and sentimental notions of individuality seemed to be shrinking inside me. I was a husk in its presence and in its presence was a great yawning nothing.
Flashes of lightning interrupted the booming bellows of thunderous tremors as I climbed to my feet. Wind continued to whirlwind through my pores and the overwhelming weight of the night’s darkness sat heavy as iron upon my shoulders. My body ached and my bones wriggled to flee their resting place. Motioning me on with his still lifeless upturned hand, the figure of immense sorrow creaked in the stiff breeze, as though it was bonded to the ancient ship itself, rising and falling with the floating wooden boards. One weighted foot after another fell in front of me as I stumbled, devoid of control, towards the river’s edge. Mud splashed up with excitement against my legs and the air gave no alleviation to my goose pimples that refused to rest.
Reaching the river’s bank, I took one unaided and unsteady large step down into the shallows, icy waters in the dankness chaotically broke under my weight. Bodiless forearms now waited patiently in the deeper reaches of the torrent to anticipate my next movement, eyes felt everywhere and the continuing sense of being controlled beyond rational reason took hold of my mind. I stood with both feet in the river facing my haunt, the waters sloshing around my knees in turmoil. Movement of the ghostly trapped souls beneath the surface flickered silver and white, like escaping fish down into the depths.
“Carry me not from this world” I sought the words with force, but they arrived with desperate begging tones, as that of a child being punished for a naughty deed.
The splatters of raindrops began to fall, the skies no longer content to hold their load at bay. Water surrounded me at all sides. The spectre of the river seemed almost to creak in disapproval as it absorbed the scent of life inside the rain from the air. No good would find its place in the presence of the figure. Defying every fibre of my being, every instinct in the primal recesses of my mind, I clambered clumsily onto the ship’s port side. In my hands, the wood of this ominous boat felt hot to the touch. Splinters dug into my wrists as my soaked body crashed onto the ship with ungraceful embarrassment.
Pulling myself to my knees, now at the ivory feet of this visage of contempt for my world, the winds stopped on a penny. All sound had been swallowed. All that remained was the creaking, I couldn’t decipher if this was born from the ship or the creature itself. Holding out a hand draped in tissue thin skin, black veins could be noted, no blood ran a course through this servant of nothingness. The lifeless hand slowly crept under my chin as the figure crouched over to meet my fallen gaze, it lifted my head to ensure we met face to face. It started with lifeless voids back at me. Features of a human face past still presented themselves through this disfigured mirror image of a man. Eyes no longer located but in their place, black pits of scarred tissue that sank beyond knowledge with two tiny black rocks spinning inside its hollow sockets. Lips so tightly pressed; I was unsure if they could prize apart at all. No hair adorned the head; life did not grow on this creature of the old forgotten world.
Impulsively, without control at the vision of my haunting capture, a scream of agony left my mouth. Unmoving to the noise or my reactions in its presence, the creature merely held my chin in place and stared a great emptiness into my eyes, pierced the safe spaces in my mind and infested hatred wherever it reached. Unable to end the painful throat aching scream that left my body, I began once more to weep salty tears down my face that fell onto the withered, stiff hand that cradled it. Without warning, the creature opened those locked lips and let out a scream of its own.
With tremendous force, the noise ruptured both of my eardrums in an instant. Pain and ringing tolls echoed through my mind. The creature continued this scream as I closed my eyes tightly, still unmoving from my knees in the clutches of this monster. In a turn of added torture, it had now become wrenchingly apparent that my eyes would no longer open. They had been sealed shut in the face of this screaming banshee, I was locked in my mind with the ringing pain and screaming song. I faded internally to the blackness, only to be awoken at the river’s bank in the bright break of day.
The river was calm, the canvass solid once again beneath my feet. The horrendous ballet upon my bones carried itself through. I sat up with muddy palms and soiled clothes, dripping with earth and clay from the rivers break. Could my phantom have left me here in the cruellest tease, wondering if I had passed over into the dreaded void he inhabits. Perhaps my time had not yet come, and this dispatcher of souls was mistaken in his identity that night upon the now bountiful river. I craved for it to give back to me the assurance, that the beating in my chest is that of my heart and not a mere echo of a drum beat lost in the void.
Could the dew upon my face be the moisture of a new day promising me safety and a lover’s soft protection or was this wetness the damp rot that sets in on all those doomed to fall into the murky underworld’s labyrinth of loss? Buzzing thoughts of swarming dread circled my mind as I pieced together the semblance of reality and fiction.
Was the boatman real and would he return?
Although my nightmare appeared over, I sat and shed tears onto the riverbank as I knew I would not be released from memory, I will always carry the spectre from the river Lethe.
