‘Can you remember the place where it happened?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Then we’ll have to start there,’ said James. ‘See if that helps.’
Webster looked up at the sky. Cupped his hands round his mouth.
‘Hey!’ he shouted at the blue and the clouds hanging in it. ‘Up there! Is this what we’re supposed to do? Is this all part of the plan? Well, is it?’
The sun beat down.
Birds flickered and hopped.
The trees hissed as a warm breeze blew.
And it was all they heard.
James took Webster’s shaking hands in his and held them until they were steady.
Only then did they walk on down the path.
16
Billy unlocked the steel door of the wagon and glared into the empty corners, just as he had done on the day Webster had vanished. And then he spat into the dirty, brittle straw that covered the wooden floor.
He had checked the boards under his feet and not one of them was loose. All the black iron bars along the front were intact. And the panels on the back wall and at either end were made of hard, solid oak. The ceiling was a flat bed of steel. The only way Webster could have escaped was if someone had let him out.
He turned round when he heard her walking over the grass towards the wagon, the charms and amulets clinking inside the small leather pouch strung around her neck.
‘Airght?’
‘Airght, Ma,’ replied Billy. Her silver hair was scraped back into a bun. Looped over one shoulder was a red leather bag.
She wrapped her black shawl tight around her and walked up the four wooden steps into the wagon, her black shoes clipping and clopping.
‘You should’ve told me sooner about him leaving.’
‘I didn’t want to worry ya.’
‘That right?’ Billy heard his blood swelling in his cheeks as she looked at him with a grey half-moon of a smile. She tugged on a couple of the iron bars. ‘He en’t made of air too, is he?’
‘No, Ma,’ he said, rolling his eyes. ‘Someone let him out.’
‘I seen it happen. There was a man once, me and yer da saw him. Vanished in front of our eyes he did. Old magic that was.’ She stared through the bars at something Billy could not see.
The chug of machinery working in the distance swept past them on the wind, and Billy glanced towards the patch of waste ground where the fair was being dismantled and packed away for the next town.
‘You need anything else, Ma?’
The old woman said nothing as she delved into her red bag and drew out a marionette minus its strings. A wooden man in a dark suit. As tall as her knees until she sat him carefully on the straw. He was wearing small brown brogues with scratched-up soles. And his eyes were nothing more than paint. But he seemed to see Billy all the same.
‘Give me what you have then.’
Billy drew out Webster’s green beanie hat and the old kitchen knife from his pockets.
‘These were his. And his bowl’s over there in the corner,’ he said, pointing. The old woman took the woollen hat, but shook her head at the knife.
‘That won’t work,’ she said and then shuffled towards the bowl. She picked it up and the puddle of cold broth inside broke its skin as she rotated the bowl in her long, bony hands, her nails tapping on the wood.
‘You sure he used this one?’
‘Yes.’
The old woman laid down the bowl in front of the marionette and placed the hat next to it. Then she sat down cross-legged in the straw, opposite the wooden figure, like an overgrown child.
When the muttering started, Billy walked back down the steps and stood beside the wagon on the grass. He did not like seeing the darker side of his mother. Her wild eyes. The lips curled back from the gums. Whenever the darkness filled her up, the woman he knew and loved was gone. Like the living dead, he often thought.
Her muttering rippled back and forth.
Wooden joints creaked.
Wooden shoes tapped the floor.
Billy walked further away and lit a cigarette. Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw the marionette standing beside his mother, holding her hand. He heard her asking questions. Soft and gentle. The way she used to be with him when he was a boy.
‘Billy,’ she shouted suddenly, making him jump and almost lose his cigarette. ‘You said there was a young lad with him?’
‘That’s right, Ma. Little sod.’
His mother laughed. The lump on the crown of Billy’s head seemed to swell again. He remembered nothing about being knocked to the floor. But James’s face haunted him. Lifting up his shirt, he looked at the scar in his side, puckered like an old man’s lips now his ma had healed the wound. He rubbed it thoughtfully with his fingers as he pulled long and hard on his cigarette.
‘You’ll get your chance, Billy,’ she shouted. ‘We’ll find them for you.’ And her voice tailed off as she returned to her mutterings. Billy tried to let the sun warm him, but inside he was cold and vengeful. Thinking about the boy. And Webster. And the person who must have freed him from the wagon to set all of this in motion. That was how life worked, it seemed, unfurling from one episode to another, always moving. Like ripples on the surface of a pond.
‘Don’t forget about who set him free, Ma,’ shouted Billy. ‘I want their guts for garters ’n’ all.’ And he took the kitchen knife from his pocket, spun it up and caught it by the handle, and hurled it into the grass, where it stuck.
When it was over and the old woman had packed away the marionette into her red leather bag, Billy returned to the wagon. His mother looked older. Her lips were dry. Her eyes watery and dull, with the skin below them bumpy and mottled like the back of a toad. It was always the same after she had worked with magic. He wondered what deal she had struck with it and what price she might pay for it when she died. But she had never seemed bothered by such thoughts.
She put out her hand and held his arm as he walked her down the steps. He stood with her in the sunlight, wondering when her time would come and whether it would change him.
‘I’ve got a while yet,’ she said absently, without bothering to look at him. ‘And I en’t scared of the beyond neither. For there’s nothing there.’
‘It don’t matter what we do then, does it?’
‘The way I see it, it matters all the more,’ she said and stared at her son. ‘You seen ’em yet? Smelt ’em?’
‘What?’
His mother pointed a bony finger at the grass beneath the wagon steps and Billy scanned the fringe of uncut green. When he saw the white tips of them, he went over and knelt down, and picked one up and rolled it in his fingers.
‘Turkish,’ he said.
‘Turkish,’ repeated the woman. Billy sniffed the cigarette butt again.
‘Smithy grows his own baccy, don’t he?’
‘Smithy does. He grows his Black Sea Basma. Couldn’t grow his own brain bigger than a walnut though.’ And the old woman laughed.
Billy smelt the hand-rolled butt again, just to be sure. And then he stared at the ground and imagined how it must have happened. Smithy standing there, making friends with Webster when nobody was watching. Smithy with glue for brains, but fingers like feathers that tickled locks for fun. A gift. Of sorts. A makeweight for everything else that was wrong in his head.
‘You don’t need magic to see it, do you?’ she asked.
Billy shook his head.
‘No, Ma,’ he said, ‘you’re right, I don’t.’ He rubbed his face over with a rough, worn hand. His mother was still staring at him when he looked up. ‘I’ll go see Smithy. Sort him out.’
‘You will,’ she said, nodding.
Back in her caravan, she sat by the window and sipped a cup of spicy black tea. The road atlas that belonged to Billy was not to her liking because it was too old. So she sent him to borrow one that showed the most recent changes to the roads.
When he laid it in front of her on the table, she flicked through it, stop
ping at each page she needed. She ran a red pen along the route she knew Webster and the boy would be taking, circling the towns they would pass through, and giving a time for their arrival at each one.
‘And you’re sure.’
‘Sure as sure can be.’
Billy held out his palms to his mother.
‘Will things work out all right?’
‘Ah,’ she said, taking his hands by the wrists, ‘cross my palm with silver and I’ll tell you.’ She spluttered a laugh. Billy laughed too and pulled away his hands. And then he looked at her again, his eyes so steady she saw herself bending forward in the black of them to hear what he had to say.
‘I’ll build this fair up again, as good as me da ran it. Better. Bring the punters back and start making real money for everyone again. That’s what’ll happen.’
‘It will if you believe it, my love,’ she said and stroked his hair.
‘Aye. And Webster’ll be the start of it. People’ll come from miles to see him and what he is.’
‘Yes, they will.’
‘Even Da. He’ll be so shocked, what’s left of him’ll crawl out of that grave we laid him in two years ago to see for himself. And then I’ll tell him he was wrong to say I couldn’t run the fair as good as him. He’ll eat his words. The same way that cancer ate through his bones and left him limp as an empty grain sack.’
Outside, the machinery had stopped. The fair had been dismantled and packed away, ready for the next town. The silence was perfect. And within it Billy imagined a future of his very own making that was perfect too.
17
James read the newspaper headline in the bottom corner of the page with great interest.
Missing Boy
His picture was below it. In colour. The gold on the lapels of his school blazer gleaming. The photograph had been taken before the world had changed forever. James remembered his mother wetting her thumb and wiping away a smudge from his cheek before the camera clicked and the photographer said, ‘Perfect!’ The smile had dropped clean off his face after that, defaulting back to a frown. On the bus journey home she had told him to grow up because everyone had to do things they didn’t like doing occasionally. That was life. And James had sat on the plastic seat, fuming, not saying anything at all. Wishing the world to hell.
The man holding the newspaper folded it round to the next page, making it crackle, and James looked away.
He paid for the cups of tea and carried them over to Webster who was sitting in the window, watching the street. James’s hands shook as he walked and tea spilt over into the white saucers. But no one noticed him as he walked through snippets of conversation and the scraping of cutlery on plates.
‘I’m in the paper,’ he said quietly as he sat down.
‘Fame at last,’ said Webster and smiled.
They said nothing else as they sipped their tea. No one bothered them. But James looked away every time he caught someone’s eye.
‘Got any way of explaining it?’ asked Webster.
‘What?’
Webster raised his hands.
‘It. The world.’
‘No.’
Webster pursed his lips.
‘Well, let me know if you do.’
Other customers ate. Drank. Talked. Came and went. Eventually, Webster started muttering under his breath, drumming his hands on the table. The odd person began to look up, making James nervous.
‘There isn’t just one world,’ he said quietly. ‘There’s billions.’
Webster stopped his muttering and edged forward in his seat.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Everyone’s standing on their own world, spinning round each other, trying not to collide.’
James could not think of anything more to add. Webster just nodded and said nothing. He went back to staring calmly into space and nobody bothered to look at him any more.
When James noticed a newspaper lying on an empty table, he walked over to it and picked it up, and sat back down. His life was summed up in two small paragraphs which did not take long to read. He knew everything already. That he lived in Timpston, which was hidden deep in a green fold of Devon. That his mother had died in a car crash. That he lived with his stepfather.
But there was a lot about his life that wasn’t there at all. After reading it through a couple of times, he tore out his picture. Folded it up. And put it in his pocket along with his notes.
He scanned the rest of the page. And then he held it up for Webster.
‘See?’ he said. ‘Billions.’
Webster looked at the page, and then at the boy, and nodded.
It was dusk by the time they left the café to look for a motel. When Webster caught sight of the moon rising at the far end of the street, he stopped. It was big and bright. A row of two-up two-downs hummed on either side of them.
‘Here,’ said James, ‘I found this.’ And he took out a square of newspaper which he unfolded and gave to Webster. ‘We’ve got less time than we thought.’
Webster stared at the details on the piece of paper, and saw the listing of the times of sunrise and sunset, and the date of the next full moon. He kept staring as though expecting the date to change. But it didn’t.
‘Three days isn’t long, is it?’ he said eventually.
‘It’s long enough,’ said James.
Webster looked up at the moon again. He breathed as slowly as he was able.
‘What makes a man, do you think?’
‘I don’t know,’ said James. Webster rubbed his brow. Planted his hands on the crown of his head.
‘Things would be a whole lot simpler if we did.’
When they started walking again, Webster noticed a figure standing in a deep, dark doorway on the opposite side of the street, smoking a cigarette. The shadows were too strong to see the face clearly. Smoke was gathered like wool around it. He thought nothing of it at first because he was too busy thinking about the future. But, when he looked back after a few paces, the person was gone.
His blood sharpened. He looked out of the corners of his eyes to see more clearly in the moonlight.
‘We’re going to split up at the end of the street,’ he said quietly. When James stopped to ask him why, he laid an arm around the boy’s shoulders and pushed him on. ‘Keep walking,’ he whispered. James did as he was told, eyes flicking from side to side. He was unsure exactly who, or even what, he was looking for. And then he realized. Something dark licked up into the back of his throat and he swallowed it down.
‘It’s them, isn’t it? How did they find us?’
‘I don’t know, but it’s me they want,’ said Webster as they neared the end of the street. ‘Go. I’ll meet you back at the car. Wait out of sight until I get there.’ James nodded without looking up as they parted on the corner.
Eventually, he glanced back.
Webster was gone.
James kept going, planning a route back to the car in his head. When he reached the end of the street, he waited for a bus to pass. The engine noise caught between the gaps in his bones and made him shudder.
‘Hello, boy,’ said a voice. A warm hand gripped the back of James’s neck before he could turn around. Hot breath cooled in the whorl of his ear. ‘I told ya. I never forget a face.’ The hand left James’s neck. Something sharp pushed up into his spine. ‘I’ll pull the trigger if you so much as make a squeak.’
When he heard a growl beside him, James looked down. A big black dog was staring up at him, teeth bared, straining on a metal chain.
18
Webster walked quickly through the moonlight without looking back. Eventually, rounding a third corner, he stopped and lay flat against the wall of a house. Street lamps dropped down cones of orange light that shimmered as he breathed.
Moments later, a man appeared. Walking fast.
Webster caught him square in the face with a fist and heard the nose crack. His knuckles were still ringing as the man dropped to the ground and a shotgun clattered to the p
avement from beneath his long waxed coat.
Webster picked up the gun. Listened for a moment.
Nothing except for the man cursing into his hands. Something black was trickling between his fingers as he rolled from side to side. Webster brought down the butt of the shotgun on the back of his head. Then, in the silence that followed, he listened again.
The sound of a television burbling.
A cat mewling outside a door.
The beating of his heart.
He opened the neck of the shotgun. Two red cartridges with their copper-coloured ends. He clicked the gun shut and listened again, then rolled the man over with his boot.
It wasn’t Billy.
It was Swanney.
His eyes fluttered open and he looked up at Webster from either side of his broken nose, and swore and spat and kicked out. Webster’s finger tightened on the trigger. A great screw seemed to turn in his jaw, hardening it. There were clean, gleaming thoughts about what he should do next. They seemed without question, or consequence, as the trigger grew big against his finger.
But then his arm began to shake.
The harsh metal smell of the gun came up at him in waves. Suddenly, the trigger was so hot he had to let go. His brow was burning. Wet. He tried to wipe it clean.
‘I knew you was touched,’ growled Swanney. Webster was shaking. Blinking faster as his eyes began to sting with sweat. Swanney’s legs and arms seemed to be lengthening. Unwinding. Reaching out for him. ‘I knew it!’
Webster took a step back. He guessed that Swanney was standing up, but he was blinking too quickly to see. And then he felt hands grabbing the opposite end of the shotgun.
Webster ripped the gun free. Tottered backwards. And the shock of it cleared his head.
Swanney was standing there in front of him, his bloody smile falling away as Webster levelled the gun at his chest.
A window opened along the street. Somebody shouted and cut the silence in half and, when Webster half looked, it set Swanney loose. He turned and ran, disappearing round the corner.
The Dark Inside Page 6