Mike Shevdon - Sixty-One Nails

The water came up to my waist now, chilling the whole lower part of my body. The hammer swung slightly as the head was buffeted by the current. Water soaked into the bottom of my shirt. I took another step down, and another, holding tightly to the rungs to keep from being swept from the wall. At chest height in the water, I lowered myself again, wondering how deep it was and how much further down I could descend. The water swirled against me, dark and oily. It smelled of rain-stormed streets and flushed gutters. Pieces of litter were swept by along with darker, less identifiable flotsam. I was just a head above water. It was now or never.

I looked up one last time, hoping to catch Blackbird's eye. Instead Solandre's face leaned over, watching me. I did the only thing I could think of with both hands clinging to the rungs. I stuck my tongue out at her.

The expression of outrage on her face as she turned away to tell Raffmir was worth the moment of bravado. He would see the joke and it meant she would miss the moment when I slipped below the surface. I was glad of that.

I filled my lungs with air and descended two rungs, making sure I was well below the surface where they could not see what I was doing. The freezing water swirled and tugged around me and I began shivering almost immediately. Fine bubbles steamed from my mouth as my body immediately started to shake with cold.

Being careful to avoid accidental contact with the head of the hammer, I released one hand from the rung. The current swung me sideways as I let go and the water pressed me at an awkward angle. My wrist scraped against the roughness of the bricks. I found my pocket and fumbled with rapidly numbing fingers for the nail. Weed slipped across my face. At least I hoped it was weed.

My fingers wormed their way inside the sodden pocket and my hand found the metal of the nail. I wrapped my hand around it, feeling the answering echo of the void within it, sensing it fall into blackness in my hand.

Already running short of oxygen, I focused on the nail and formed a link with the core of darkness within me. The universe parted for me and the many overlapping and intertwining worlds were there, but there was something different, something wrong. There was a weight, an anchor holding me to the world I was in. The iron of the hammer would not come through.

I twisted and pulled in the water, pulling the hammer around in front of me. I wrenched at the void and it answered, distorting space around me. But the hammer stayed. It was solidity where everything else was fluid. It would not move.

I had a choice. I could try to cross without the hammer, or stay with it and drown. My chest ached with the need to draw breath and I hadn't even started to cross. Without the hammer, I knew there would be no point to any of it. With my lungs already bursting from lack of oxygen, I shoved the nail down into the pocket and pulled the hammer around in front of me, letting it drag me down to the bottom. I crawled away from the wall along the bottom, using the hammer to stop me being swept downstream.

The current was stronger away from the wall and swirled about me, tugging at my clothes. I opened my eyes briefly, trying to get some sense of distance. It was pitch black. I could feel the pull on the sling as the hammer swung underneath me bumping along the bottom. The river bottom was littered with junk. Objects embedded in the silt, sharp and blunt, scraped my hands and knees. With my numb fingers I clawed my way along, pulling myself forward. I reasoned that as long as I kept the force of the current to my left I would be heading in the right direction, though how I would find the rungs at the far side, I had no idea.

My lungs burned and I ached to take a breath, but I knew that was death. Spots swam before my eyes and I began to feel light-headed. Bubbles of precious air escaped from my nose and ran up my face, wriggling like worms.

I hauled myself along, scrabbling at embedded fragments of rusted metal and slithery weed with both hands. The hammer caught on some unseen snag and I wrenched it free. How much further could it be? The strength in my arms deserted me and cold panic pooled in my gut. I hated water. Why had I agreed to do this?

The current twisted and pulled, tugging me around. It was a fight not to get swept sideways. I needed to breathe. I kicked upwards with futile twists trying to reach the surface but the hammer stuck resolutely to the bottom. My vision blurred, filling my closed eyes with warm tears.

I tugged myself along. My head swam with lack of oxygen. I couldn't find the way. I was lost. I coughed and the deathly cold water flooded my mouth and nose. I retched at the foul taste of it, the spasm pulling water into my lungs. I kicked listlessly for the far bank, feeling consciousness began to slip from my grasp.

I did the only thing I could think of. I shoved my hand in my pocket, grasped the nail and linked. The world slid apart and I crawled into the edge of the parting, still tethered to the hammer and unable to enter fully, but grateful for the moment of respite. The void held neither air nor water. I drifted in it like the weed in the current, coughing and retching, my mouth filling with sour bile. My vision blurred, unable to focus on the non-space surrounding me. The sounds of voices echoed distantly around me.

"How long do you wish us to wait?" It was Raffmir's voice, drifting past me like the flotsam in the water.

"Not yet," Blackbird said, her voice cold and hollow.

"How long?" he repeated.

"Just wait."

I released the nail and kicked back into the water. The hunger for air returned, my oxygen starved muscles screaming with cramp and fatigue. I pushed myself backwards along the bottom using my heels for traction. I got a few feet before I had to grab for the nail again.

This time the void spun around me. My oxygen-starved brain whirled the fractured worlds in kaleidoscopic dizziness.

I could hear Solandre giggling to herself. That bitch was barking and her brother knew it.

Within me, I could feel fingers of the void spreading into me, the cold echoing that of the water. I had not called it but it had come. My hold on it was slipping.

I had a brief flash of Blackbird, standing on the bank looking into the dark roiling water. Her arms were wrapped tightly around her. She held herself stiff and inert, Raffmir waiting at her shoulder. Then blackness clouded my vision and pulled me away with lazy strength. It whorled and turned, responding to some unseen current, fed by an unknown source. My mind drifted, unable to face the water again. The void swirled within me, echoing the water. It sent an exploring tendril out and upward, coiling around my heart and then, tenderly, pricked it.

Pain exploded in my chest. I wrenched myself back into the world, fleeing in panic from the acid touch. The water gushed into my mouth and I coughed, desperately trying not to breathe in. I wrenched and grasped at anything to draw me from that dark embrace. The black coils stayed with me, sliding inside my arms, feeding from the burning ache in my cramped muscles, tasting the pain.

My hand punched into something solid, sending a jolt up my arm, further numbing my senses. I tried to scramble past but something was blocking my path. In a moment of clarity I realised it was the far bank. I was there. The prospect of air had me skidding my hands across the wall while my chest felt like it would burst apart. My numb fingers skittered across the broken bricks searching for a handhold. A vertical edge found me a metal rung and I hauled myself up while I choked and coughed, inhaling water and slime, my vision swimming with spots and strange lights until finally I erupted out into air.

I slid my forearm through the highest rung I could reach and hung there, retching and spewing, while the current still tried to pull me free and carry me downstream. My head swam and the world spun around me as my chest tried to pull air into my waterlogged lungs. I felt curiously detached. The pain seemed distant and otherworldly. My vision swirled and the void within me writhed and coiled. Somehow I was out of myself. I was up in the vaulting, seeing the wretched bedraggled figure hanging from the rung, the hammer still dangling in the water behind, while the figure spasmed and belched muddy water.