Shivers

Not all mysteries make their way to the Internet, to be dissected on message-boards and podcasts. You might have caught mentions of what happened to the members of the Shivers wild swimming group but their connection stayed secret, never becoming pieces of a greater puzzle.

The death of Richard Allen turned up in his local newspaper. The autopsy found fluid in the pleural cavities along with other signs of drowning. Yet he died in bed beside his wife, with no signs of foul play or water, a rare case of spontaneous drowning.

Cindy Smith's passing was reported a little more widely. The cause of death was less remarkable, drowning in a hotel bath. That bath, however, was in the Chinese city of Nantong. The mystery was that no record existed of Smith entering China - indeed, she didn't have a passport. The strangest rumours never made it to the anglophone internet, but if you know your way round Weibo, you might catch suggestions that the entire floor of the hotel where she died was locked down for two days by the authorities.

Allen and Smith were two members of Shivers, a six-person Whatsapp group devoted to extreme wild swimming. The phones all remained locked after the deaths, so nobody learned what linked these six people, all of whom died in 2023. They'd met on Brighton seafront through swimming on red flag days when sea swimming was forbidden.

Steve Kent was known by the handle 'UrbexMerman'. He was one of the first people to navigate the Brighton Storm Drains. His body was found in an old swimming pool. He had fallen from a great height, as if he had leapt from the diving boards that had been removed some years before. His death was noted on the urbex sites with a certain amount of dark humour.

Lewis Hook was found lying in a puddle on the Cheviot Hills, naked. He'd checked into the Alnwick Premier Inn that morning. It's not unknown for people to undress in the last stages of hypothermia, but no trace of kit was found anywhere near the body.

The six of them had been out swimming in Brighton on the same September night in 2022. There had been a celebration, a couple of drinks, but not enough to put them at risk. They had been looking back at the seafront lights from the waves when someone noticed that the West Pier ruins were in a better state than they looked from land. Tony said that they should explore.

There was no obvious mystery about what happened to Tony - King Tony, they called him - since drowning was not an unimaginable fate for a sea-swimmer. Nobody knew that he had paid a fisherman a substantial amount of money to be dropped off for a time beyond the horizon. The fisherman couldn't find him when he returned, and never told a soul about his involvement.

It was Tony who went ashore to tell Sandra to join them. She'd decided against swimming at the last minute, and offered to watch the clothes. Tony had insisted that she come out, even if someone stole everything. She'd not quite believed Tony's explanation, but could tell that he was excited about something. She spent an hour with the others, exploring a building that had burned down in 2003.

Sandra Ellis was the last to die. Her body was found in the wreckage of a small yacht that had shattered on the rocks near Beachy Head. The yacht was painted with the name Eugenius, but no trace was ever found of who owned the boat or where it came from.

Six death, six mysteries, but nobody ever found the true secret, that they all died within a year of exploring a ghost building.

Background

This piece has an odd structure and, by some definitions, isn’t a proper story. For me, it’s the story of the mystery rather than of any particular person.

In the writing group discussion, it was suggested that linking the characters through Brighton’s West Pier didn’t fit with the tone of the rest of the piece. I’m made some other changes, but kept that for now. I’d be interesting in knowing what anyone else thinks.

For me, the structure is most inspired by a section of Grant Morrison’s Zenith comic, which I read in 2000AD when I was ten or eleven. Members of a 60s superhero team called Cloud Nine are dispatched in a single page, including Spook, who “fell through a mirror”. I’ve always loved how comics can tell powerful stories so quickly - although I realise that for most people my story will evoke the Final Destination films.

Recommendations

I’ve just finished re-reading Ben Graham’s novella Electric Tibet, which is the first part of his American Underground novel. It tells the story of 1967’s Human Be-in, the event that kicked off the first summer of love. Graham retells the history as an act of sorcery, with appearances from Kennth Anger, Allen Ginsberg, Jerry Rubin and more. There’s a huge amount of work gone into the research, but Ben uses it very lightly. There’s a lovely beat-poetry vibe to the language in places.

There are both physical and e-book versions available from Bleeding Cheek Press. I’d previously read a pre-publication electronic copy and bought the physical book for a re-read. The cover has a lovely white-label feel and is labelled “Underground edition for true heads only”.