The Dark Inside

by Rupert Wallis

  There was a squeal of brakes.

  A dull thump.

  The sound of an engine idling.

  Webster edged around the corner. Swanney was lying face down on the pavement, his waist perfectly in line with the kerb, a dark puddle forming quickly around his head, or what was left of it, the back of its sphere missing, like a rotten windfall apple scooped out to its core. The headlights of the car shone straight down the road.

  The engine wobbled and died.

  The driver’s door opened.

  And somebody leant out and retched.

  Webster retreated back around the corner and walked on quickly, the gun hidden beneath his greatcoat. His skin was hot, his lungs full of sparks. And gradually the night air slipped inside his chest and cooled him.

  As he wound a path back to the car, he stopped every now and then. But there was nobody following him. He was sure of it. Because there was nobody reflected in the shop windows or the wing mirrors of cars as he passed them by. Yet he knew Billy had to be somewhere. Billy, who had found him, and locked him in the wagon cage like an animal.

  And then Webster began to worry about the boy.

  When he was close, he stopped in the adjoining street and listened carefully, but all he heard was the silence. He rounded the corner, the shotgun tight against his hip beneath the greatcoat.

  Street lamps dipped their necks like swans.

  He saw houses, in a row, on either side. Set back from the street. With paths dissecting tiny gardens, which lead up to each front door.

  James was not waiting by the car.

  Webster walked on, straight past it, when he saw the slashed tyres slumped against the kerb like snowmelt. James’s duffel bag of clothes was sitting on the front seat, his black suit draped on top. But Webster did not waver. He was light inside. Like a ghost. Or something made of paper. Somewhere in the dark a dog was barking and the sound of it chimed in the marrow of his bones.

  The crunch of his boots on the pavement became hypnotic. For a moment, it took him somewhere else. Back into the past. Into a desert shimmer. He heard shouting. Mortar fire. Gunshots. The barking of dogs. He felt the sun and the dust on his face from a foreign land. He could smell sweat and boot polish and webbing and sun-kissed rock. The gun filled out forgotten parts of his hand as he gripped it tighter and tighter.

  He stopped, his breathing hard in his ears.

  A growl was rolling towards him.

  A large black dog tore out of the dark. Tongue trailing. Claws hissing on the pavement.

  But Webster was not scared. He brought up the shotgun and fired once into the chest of the creature as it leapt for him.

  It yelped. Landed across the tops of his boots. The warm weight of it lodged against his shins.

  A bedroom light came on across the road, followed by others. Curtains twitched. Webster stepped over the dog and kept moving. The end of the street swallowed him up as people came out of their houses and crowded round the dead black dog, stepping back from the blood as it pooled out over the pavement.

  19

  When Billy saw Webster raise the shotgun and shoot the dog dead, he knew that Swanney was not going to appear and help him.

  As Webster kept walking towards the end of the street, Billy dragged James away, slipping down an alley where large steel bins were piled high with black plastic bags. At the far end, he followed the cobbles round to the left and found himself on a narrow path that wound round between high-walled buildings and then opened up into a square ringed with cars. On three sides were tall, smart houses, set back from the road, with large bay windows and black railings like lines of spears. On the one open side was the fringe of a green park lit by street lights.

  Somewhere in the distance a police siren skewered the air. As it faded, a gunshot ripped through the car nearest to Billy and James, blowing out a window. Billy’s blood shuddered in the wind of it. Something sharp caught the side of his face, and he put up a hand and felt a shard of glass lodged in his cheek like a tooth in the wrong place. His stomach turned and he looked back.

  Webster had dropped the shotgun and was running towards them. Billy drew James closer to him, putting the pistol to the boy’s head.

  ‘Stop!’ shouted Billy. But Webster kept on coming. Mouth open. Roaring. Tongue straining at its root. Billy raised the pistol and fired into the sky. But Webster did not falter.

  Billy felt James shaking. He was shaking too. Flinging the boy to the ground, he turned and ran into the park, disappearing into the dark.

  James was a heap in the road. His head had gone off like another gunshot on striking the tarmac. Glass tumbled from his hair as Webster picked him up in his arms and carried him away from the square. He did not stop, keeping to the small paths and alleyways. Eventually, he found a towpath and followed the canal until he came to a bridge. He laid the boy down underneath the arch and then took off his greatcoat and wrapped him in it.

  James’s face was cut in places. Blood had dried in sticky patches. Webster ripped a corner from his shirt and used the water from the old plastic bottle in his greatcoat pocket to wipe the boy’s face clean. After emptying the bottle, he stopped and stared at it, and squashed the sides together, and yelled and hurled it away down the path. Then he took out the small glass jar of ointment from another pocket and ran his little finger round the inside until he had enough paste to smear across the cuts on James’s face.

  After he had finished, Webster listened for some time to the distant buzz of a helicopter, and watched the spotlight strobe back and forth over the rooftops of the town.

  Eventually, he lost interest and stared at the moon. He cursed at it under his breath until the anger in him had died down, leaving him cold and hollow inside.

  After walking back down the path, he picked up the empty bottle and observed it for some time, turning it through his fingers, before screwing the top back on.

  James stirred when Webster knelt beside him and put the bottle back in one of the pockets of the greatcoat. ‘Where are we?’ he said.

  ‘No place for a boy like you, that’s for sure,’ said Webster, staring at the black canal water. It could have been a river of blood for all he knew without some sort of light to shine on it and see for sure.

  20

  The bus tucked back its doors like a pair of wings.

  Webster stepped down on to the pavement and blinked in the sunlight. James appeared by his side. Just the two of them. A man in a dirty blue greatcoat and a boy in a black waterproof filched from the back of a chair. They stood facing the warped reflection of themselves in the dark glass window of an office.

  ‘So,’ said Webster, ‘here we are.’

  The bus shuddered and growled as it left. Cars zipped by.

  ‘If we go to the exact spot,’ said James, ‘you might remember something.’

  Webster caught sight of a plane in the deep blue between two tall buildings. He watched it until it was gone and there was nothing left but a white trail fattening. He closed his eyes.

  ‘I wish we were somewhere else,’ he said.

  They walked until the office blocks on either side of them faded away into a vast park and then they started over a large expanse of grass, which was hard and browned from the sun. Bodies were marooned on towels and rugs. Lifeless-looking. As if their souls had abandoned them. In the mighty distance someone was steering a kite on the breeze.

  They kept going for some time without saying anything, Webster plotting the way with James beside him. Eventually, they stopped in the shade of a line of lime trees by the top of a sheer bank that fell away sharply into a long, steep slope. Old magazines, caught in a matting of weeds about halfway down, flapped like dying winged things. A Coke can had burrowed in deep. Great thickets of brambles and hawthorn were fused together at the bottom.

  ‘It was here,’ said Webster. ‘I fell down this part of the bank.’ He pointed and opened his hand as though introducing James to an old friend. They stood in silence, listening to the magazines
catching the breeze. Looking into the brambles below.

  ‘Anything?’ asked James eventually. Webster stared for a while longer and then shook his head.

  James studied the drop beneath them one last time and then looked along the edge of the bank in both directions.

  Nothing but trees.

  And grass.

  And the path trailing off into the distance.

  ‘Doesn’t seem like much of a place to meet evil,’ he said.

  Webster looked around them. And then he bent down and whispered in James’s ear.

  ‘The stuff gets everywhere,’ he said and then stiffened and straightened, folding his arms, as a crow landed on the grass and bounced towards them. Not a sound as it stopped and stared up at them, head cocked, one black eye shining a half-moon in the sun. Webster raised his arms to shoo it away, but the crow seemed glued to the grass. So he ran at it, shouting and hissing, and James watched it flap its wings and wheel into the sky. It was nothing more than a black dot by the time Webster had started walking away, leaving James to wonder why the man had done such a thing.

  After half an hour, they came upon a small kiosk selling cold drinks and ice cream. A fountain hissed in the middle of an ornamental pond and people were perched around the stone rim, cooling off in the damp air.

  Webster bought James an ice cream and a cup of tea in a styrofoam cup for himself, and they lay on the hard, baked ground, staring up at the sky, wondering what to do next.

  ‘You don’t remember anything at all?’ James asked finally.

  ‘No.’ Webster let out a long, slow breath. ‘Not from that night anyway.’ James noticed that Webster’s hands were trembling. His tea broke in tiny brown waves inside the cup, which was sitting on top of his chest, rising and falling as he breathed.

  ‘You mean you keep remembering when you were a soldier?’

  Webster stared at his hands until they were steady and then he took a sip of his tea.

  ‘Yeah.’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘Sometimes things pop up out of the dark when I don’t expect it. Or if I think too much.’

  James nodded because he understood exactly what Webster meant.

  ‘Do you want to talk about that instead?’ he asked. Webster said nothing. ‘We don’t have to if you don’t want to.’

  ‘I can’t say it really helps,’ said Webster.

  ‘We could pretend we’re asleep.’

  Webster just smiled.

  ‘Not now.’

  ‘OK.’

  And James stripped down to his tatty white T-shirt and balled up his waterproof and sweater behind his head, and lay down and closed his eyes.

  When they walked on, they discovered an old man sitting on a bench, scattering nuggets of bread into a cloud of pigeons. James kept staring as they walked towards him because the old man was only using his left hand to dig into the bag of bread and tear each white slice apart, while his right arm lay still on his lap. It made feeding the birds a laborious task. But he stuck to it.

  ‘Lovely afternoon,’ said the man with a slight slur to his voice, and James noticed that the right-hand side of his face was drooping more than it should.

  Webster just nodded and walked on, but James went over and sat down. There was something about the old man he recognized in himself, sitting there, all alone, as the world passed him by.

  ‘Sore feet,’ he said, pointing at his black school shoes as the pigeons moved in an oily shoal around them. The old man chuckled.

  ‘Come far then?’ he asked, slapping his left hand on his thigh to clean it, frightening the pigeons and making them skip.

  ‘A way.’

  ‘What’s your father doing?’

  James smiled as he watched Webster inspecting every tree and peering into every bin. And then he realized the man was still waiting for an answer.

  ‘We’re looking for clues.’

  ‘Oh?’ The old man picked up his walking stick, which was leaning against the arm of the bench, and flicked away the nuggets of bread nearest to him with the rubber tip, aiming for the pigeons.

  ‘Somebody attacked him and we’re trying to find out who.’

  ‘Attacked your father? Here, in this park?’

  ‘One night a few weeks ago.’

  The old man tutted and shook his head as the pigeons pecked and cooed and bobbed.

  ‘Do you sit here a lot?’ James asked.

  ‘Yes. My wife and I used to come here every day. We’d talk for hours. Now it’s just me of course.’ The man cleared his throat before he went on. ‘I can’t say I’ve seen anything that’ll help you.’

  ‘That’s OK.’

  They sat in silence, watching people as they passed.

  No one spoke to them.

  Very few people even looked at them.

  ‘I feel like the Invisible Man,’ said James eventually and the old man nodded wistfully.

  When Webster returned, he sat beside James on the flat, wooden arm of the bench.

  ‘Anything?’ James asked.

  ‘Not a button,’ said Webster, shaking his head.

  ‘I’m guessing it was a man who attacked you?’ asked the old man.

  ‘Of a sort, I suppose.’ And Webster glanced at James, wondering what he’d said.

  ‘It’ll come back around to them one day.’

  Webster licked his lips. Wiped his brow with the back of his hand. ‘Is that how life works?’ he asked. ‘Somebody gets their comeuppance if they deserve it?’

  ‘I don’t know for sure, but I’d like to think so,’ the old man replied.

  ‘What if something bad happens that isn’t their fault?’

  ‘I couldn’t say. Why do you ask?’

  ‘No reason.’ Webster looked down at his lap and said nothing more.

  ‘No one really knows anything, do they?’ said James to fill the silence, and the old man laughed out loud and the pigeons rippled up into a cloud that glimmered with pinks and blues and browns. He drummed the fingers of his left hand over the top of his walking stick then cleared his throat.

  ‘Where are you staying?’ he asked. Webster and James glanced at each other for an answer. ‘Because I have a house, which I rattle around in, if you’d like to stay. Until you’ve found what you’re looking for.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ asked James.

  ‘If it’ll do some good then I’m all for it. I’m not sure there’s enough in the world just now. Or, if there is, I’m not seeing it.’ He held out his left hand, turning it upside down for James to grasp and shake. ‘I’m Cook,’ he said.

  21

  Cook’s house was large and set halfway down a road of detached houses with semi-circle driveways and porches that lit up at night.

  James lay in bed and listened to the night sounds in the walls and the ceiling. The bed sheets smelt musty. An old bloodstain on one of the white pillowcases had turned brown over time and seemed to follow him wherever he laid his head. But he just accepted it because he was tired, and the mattress in the bed was soft and seemed to hold every atom of him perfectly.

  Cook had been very welcoming. Grilling them steaks he had stored in the freezer. Offering them red wine and telling James to try it because life was too short not to. He showed them pictures of his wife as they sat in the living room afterwards, drinking fresh coffee, and asked after their family.

  ‘We’re all there is,’ James had replied. Cook had nodded and then asked what line of work Webster was in, and James had told him he had been in the army, which had worn him out, and Cook asked nothing more about it after that.

  Webster said nothing the whole time.

  Eventually, after speaking and growing easier with each other, the boy plucked up courage to ask about Cook’s useless right arm, and the droop in his face, and the old man told him he had suffered a stroke the year before. It made life difficult, he said, but not impossible, and yet not always worth living. James smiled and said he understood what Cook meant.

  Later, as James slept, he dreamt of his mot
her bustling round Cook’s house, tidying and cleaning until the surfaces in the kitchen shone and the fitted carpets were sucked clean and bright, and the dust on the mantelpiece in the living room was gone.

  When he awoke, it was still night. The moon was almost full and shone through the four panes of glass in the window, printing the ghost of a white kite below it on the bedroom floor. It was difficult to fall back to sleep in a strange house. So James lay there, trying to piece together fragments from his dreaming.

  He sat up when he heard someone walking along the landing.

  When the footsteps stopped, James listened for a while longer and then got out of bed and opened the door. Webster was perched on the window sill near the top of the stairs, wrapped in a white sheet. He was looking up at the moon. James sat quietly beside him and asked if he was all right.

  Webster nodded.

  ‘I thought I heard somebody outside the house, but I didn’t see anyone and then I found myself sitting here.’

  James stared out of the window at the dark garden below, running his fingers over the faint bobble of scars on his face. The ointment had worked as quickly on him as it had on Webster. But he had given up trying to understand how.

  ‘What’ll we do if they find us again?’ he asked Webster.

  The man said nothing, just wrapped the sheet tighter round him and licked his lips. In the silence they heard Cook starting to snore.

  ‘We should tell him,’ said James.

  ‘Or we could just leave.’

  James shook his head. ‘Cook’s lonely. We’re doing some good.’

  ‘And he’s doing some too, isn’t he? So we can’t leave, can we?’

  ‘No. We can’t’

  Webster rubbed his eyes. ‘Let’s sleep on it. Decide in the morning.’

  ‘I’m glad you said that.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I didn’t want all this to be a dream and wake up and find myself back in Timpston.’

  ‘You don’t ever want to go back, do you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Because your stepfather’s there?’

  James nodded. ‘If I had to go back, I wouldn’t know what to do.’