The Dark Inside

by Rupert Wallis

  ‘To make things better, you mean?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Maybe you can’t.’

  James thought about that. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t think I can. I reckon I’d have more chance of making it up there.’ And he pointed through the window at the moon.

  Later that night, Cook awoke with a start. He was not surprised. He barely slept well now, not since the clot in his brain had stuck and rewired him into a different, more decrepit version of himself. He lay staring up at the ceiling. Usually, he felt lonely in the middle of the night when the whole world was asleep. But now, for the first time in a long while, he was not alone.

  A noise sent his thoughts skittering away into the dark. He heard it again. The sound of somebody crying out.

  Cook levered himself out of bed, and padded to his bedroom door and opened it, following the sound until he came to Webster’s door. His hand hovered above the handle as he wondered whether to look in or not.

  When he heard another door clicking open, he looked up and saw the boy peering out from the dark of his bedroom.

  ‘It’s the war,’ said James quietly as he tiptoed on to the landing. ‘It’s all locked up in there.’ He tapped the side of his head.

  Webster cried out again. Words burbled into one another.

  ‘Will he settle?’ asked Cook and James nodded. ‘War does terrible things to people. Turns them into somebody different.’

  ‘Like a stroke can?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Cook. ‘In a way. The same as grief can too.’ And when he looked down at the floor James knew not to ask anything more.

  Gradually, the cries ceased. James and Cook stood like sentinels guarding the door until the silence began to hum.

  ‘He’ll be OK now,’ said James. So Cook nodded and returned to his bedroom after whispering goodnight.

  Back in bed, James lay thinking about what Cook had said. About how Webster might have been turned into somebody else because of the war and how different he might have been before then, before they had ever met. And James wondered if he could ever help change him back.

  Eventually, he clicked on the bedside light and took out the notes from the back pocket of his jeans, which were hanging over the back of a chair, and read a section over and over. Throughout history there had been some people who had truly believed in the ability of men or women to shape-shift into terrible creatures on the night of a full moon, but there were far more who had proclaimed it to have been a delusion of those diagnosed as mad or sad or troubled.

  No one knew the truth for sure.

  After James had finished reading, he slipped the notes back into the pocket of his jeans and turned out the light. The dark held him gently in the palm of its hand. Yet he could not sleep. His mind kept turning over what he knew to be real about the world and what was not. And the more he mulled it over, the less sure he became of anything at all. In the end he tried telling himself that whatever he thought did not matter in the slightest.

  But, deep down, he knew it did.

  22

  When Cook picked up the newspaper, from beneath the letter box at the base of the front door, he saw James’s picture on the front page. Webster was standing back down the hallway, watching him, the morning sunshine beaming off his black hair. The old man laid the paper flat on the dresser by the door and scanned it. When he sensed someone watching him, he looked up.

  ‘The boy’s here of his own free will,’ said Webster. ‘He’s got no one else.’

  Cook tapped the newspaper.

  ‘Says he’s got a stepfather worried sick.’

  ‘He beats him.’

  ‘So you’re his saviour?’

  ‘And he’s mine. Same as we’re yours.’

  Cook smiled at that.

  James appeared at the top of the stairs and powered down them. He stopped when he saw the newspaper lying on the dresser. Both men were staring at him.

  ‘Someone’ll notice you eventually,’ said Cook. ‘And then there’ll be trouble.’

  ‘No one has yet,’ James said.

  ‘They will around here. It’s that sort of place.’

  ‘Do you want us to leave?’ asked James.

  ‘That’s up to you.’

  Webster and James looked at each other and something passed between them.

  ‘We’ll stay,’ said Webster. ‘For another day. We’ll need to leave then anyway, even if we don’t find who we’re looking for.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Cook.

  ‘Because then it’ll be out of our hands.’

  When Cook looked at James to ask why, the boy just turned away, saying nothing.

  They decided James should stay with Cook while Webster went back to the park to look around again for clues. As they drank tea, Cook described how he had been divorced early on in his life, but then found his real love second time around.

  ‘Luck, I used to call it,’ he said. ‘Fate, she used to say. I don’t mind telling you, if there’s a plan for each of us, I reckon I got a better one than most. I’m not sure what I did to deserve it. Maybe that was luck.’ And he chuckled.

  James told Cook stories about school.

  They avoided the real questions weighing inside them. And they knew it. But that was how it was.

  After a few moments of silence staring into the brown dregs in the bottom of the teacups, Cook slapped his thigh and asked if James would like to see his garden, and the boy nodded. Both of them were glad for the chance to have something else to talk about.

  The garden shone. It moved and lived around them as they walked down the green, striped lawn. Cook used his walking stick to point out the various trees and shrubs his wife had planted, at the shapes she had sculpted using flower beds and borders. And James began to imagine what sort of person she might have been.

  They followed the sound of running water and stood by a shallow stream flowing down the left-hand side of the garden. Green weed like streamers. Flat stones silvered with bubbles. Cook leant on his stick and grinned at the tiny fish hovering, gulping water over their gills.

  James could tell he was proud of the garden and even prouder of his wife.

  ‘It’s lovely,’ he said and Cook beamed.

  ‘All I can do is to try and keep it ticking over the way she would have wanted.’

  ‘To remember her by?’

  Cook nodded.

  ‘She used to spend all her time out here. She would say all the clues you ever needed were here.’

  ‘Clues? About what?’

  Cook smiled. He beckoned James over to a flower with red petals and a black cushion of a centre. And then he told him to crouch down and look the flower full in the face.

  ‘Can you see what she meant?’

  James stared. Squinted. Half nodded. ‘Maybe . . .’ And then he shook his head. ‘No. I’m not sure what you mean.’

  ‘You will. When you’re ready. Just like I did.’

  James tried again, focusing on the flower’s black centre, which had the texture of velvet. The hum of insects began to fade. And somehow, as though a spell had been cast over him, he was filled with a sense of hope. The idea of it seemed so fragile he could not describe it to Cook, fearful it might break apart with the weight of words.

  When the moment left him, leaving just a notion like a vapour in his head, James looked up to ask more about it.

  ‘You should go inside,’ said Cook, nodding up at something over the boy’s shoulder. ‘They’re all nosy parkers around here.’

  When James looked round, he saw the face of a middle-aged woman disappearing from a bedroom window in the house next door. Before he could ask about the neighbour, a bird flapped across his eyeline, landing on the branch of a nearby tree. The crow looked down, studying them like a person might, and it seemed to darken a spot in James’s heart although he wasn’t sure why. He raised his arms and hissed, and the bird took off, flying low over the fence and disappearing. Breathing hard, all James could think was that Webster would have done exactly
the same.

  Cook was looking at him.

  ‘They’re bad luck,’ said James before the old man could ask him anything.

  After the boy had gone back inside, Cook pottered in the garden without his walking stick, deadheading flowers as well as he was able, throwing the old brown heads into a basket hanging from a cord slung diagonally across his chest. When he reached the far end of the garden, he stopped and mopped his brow with a white handkerchief that bore the blue stitching of his initials in one corner. Retreating into the shade of a willow, he stood admiring everything around him. He was comforted by the presence of every tree for he knew that, in his old age, he would never have to say goodbye to them as he had done to his wife and so many of their friends.

  It took ten minutes until he was cool again and the hammer of his heart in his head had vanished.

  As he turned to walk back to the house, he heard a sobbing, from beyond the cedar fence at the end of the garden, which backed on to the lane. Cook slid back the bolt on the door and stepped out on to the shimmering black asphalt. Insects buzzed in the heat in flimsy clouds. The verges on either side of the lane were stacked with tall grasses and coloured with wild flowers, as though a rainbow had cracked and fallen to the earth in shards. A woman of roughly his own age was standing at the side of the road, bent over, staring at something in the grass that Cook could not see. As she dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief, the leather pouch dangling from its cord around her neck swung gently from side to side.

  ‘Are you all right, my dear?’ he asked her.

  When she saw him, with his droopy mouth and his basket of deadheads hanging from his chest, she pointed at the verge beside her, saying nothing.

  In between the weave of stems and roots, Cook saw a dead blackbird. Like a drop of tar, its beak two yellow triangles set slightly apart.

  As he stared, he began to lose the sense of the heat of the world around him until all he knew was a profound sadness licking his insides cold. It was as though he had caught his unhappiness from the woman beside him. He shivered as he looked into the bird’s black eye and could not help but think about the corpse of his wife when he had found her in the garden that day.

  ‘I don’t know what came over me,’ said the woman, wiping her face with her sleeve. ‘But it’s just so . . . well, it’s just so sad.’

  Cook nodded.

  ‘It is.’ He tried to say more, but he had no breath. He wiped a cold, thick sweat from his brow. The woman smiled and touched his arm. The dark inside him broke apart and he felt the heat of the sun on his neck again, the beats of it coming up off the road into his face. He smiled back at her.

  ‘Can I offer you a cup of tea?’ he said and blushed.

  She toyed with the little leather pouch around her neck and Cook thought he heard something tinkling inside.

  ‘Only if I can make it for you, dear,’ she replied, picking up her red leather bag, sitting half hidden in the grass, and hitching it over her shoulder. Cook nodded without even thinking. The darkness in him had been replaced by a sense of joy. And then he realized why.

  It would be just like having his wife in the house again.

  23

  ‘I’m Esther,’ she said to James as he stared at her grey gums and rickety teeth. Webster had warned him to be on the lookout for anything odd or strange. But it was Cook who had invited her into his house, assuring the boy it was fine and telling him how sad the woman had been in the lane.

  ‘Where are you from?’ he asked as she bustled about the kitchen, the kettle close to boiling, the brown leather pouch around her neck clinking against her chest. She found the mugs without asking where they were and James wondered if it had been luck or not.

  ‘Oh, down the lane. What about you, dear?’

  ‘I’m visiting my grandfather,’ he said, but the old woman kept staring, waiting for the answer to her question. ‘I’m from a village in the middle of nowhere,’ said James and shrugged. She nodded then pointed at Cook sitting out on the patio, admiring the garden.

  ‘You can tell your grandfather the tea’s nearly ready.’

  After James had left the kitchen, she undid the zip on the small outside pocket of her red leather bag and took out a bouquet of herbs and grasses which she pushed into the white teapot. Then she poured in the hot water from the kettle and secured the lid.

  As she did so, something moved inside the main body of her bag, squirming and making the sides bulge, but she gently shushed whatever was in there and the red leather stopped creaking.

  They all sat on the patio in the sun.

  James and Cook drank a mug of tea each, and they tasted vanilla and mint and sunshine, and both of them approved. They listened to the old woman’s stories about herself as a girl and how different the world had been when she was young. At one point, James found he was not really listening any more. He looked over at Cook and saw him laughing, agreeing with everything being said. And then, quite suddenly, a drop of blood appeared, wobbling at the edge of one of the old man’s nostrils. Before James could say anything, the woman leant forward and wiped it away with a paper napkin without missing a beat of what she was saying. James wondered about what he had seen. Questions inside him immediately gave rise to others.

  He turned to ask the woman who she really was.

  But the words burst in his throat as he opened his mouth. He gagged on them and, as he caught his breath, all he could manage was to look up at her.

  She was muttering to herself, one hand clutching her leather pouch, the fingers rippling back and forth. He tried to hear what she was saying, but his ears were full of the drone of insects and the ticking of the sun on the patio table and chairs.

  Cook had stopped laughing. His left hand was clamped to his head as he rocked gently back and forth in his chair.

  James leant forward across the table and stared into the old woman’s eyes. When she smiled, James knew that all the good around him had been sucked clean away. He heard someone laughing and followed the sound until he saw the painted face of a small wooden man, peering up out of the red leather bag, its hands gripping the top.

  James tried to cry out.

  But he could not make a sound.

  She took James and Cook by the hand, and led them into the house and sat them on the sofa in the living room. Then she bound their wrists with lengths of washing line which she had unhooked from the two wooden posts in the garden. When she was satisfied that all was in order, she drew out a mobile phone and tapped out a text message with one bony finger. And then she knelt down in front of James.

  ‘What are you doing here, my darling?’

  James struggled to speak. It was difficult to focus on her. He wanted to tell the old woman the exact truth, but all he could manage was spit and hot air. She muttered something under her breath and then laid a hand on his knee. A weight released inside him. The fog in his head cleared. He was able to speak.

  ‘We’re looking for whoever attacked Webster,’ he said.

  ‘And why’s you doing that, my love?’

  ‘So Webster can forgive whoever’s done him wrong and cure himself of evil. Forgiving is the only way to do it. That’s what the vicar in the church said.’ The old woman smiled.

  ‘Hmmm,’ she purred. ‘I’m not sure it’ll make any difference, my darling.’

  When she took her hand away from his knee, James felt his throat closing, as if someone was pulling a thread tight around it.

  After she had clicked the door shut behind her, he tried screaming out loud for someone to hear. But it was impossible to make a sound.

  When his mother appeared on the floor in front of him, bloody and broken like a corpse, he tried to speak to her and ask for help. But all James could manage were tiny grunts like the noise of some shuffling thing at night in the leaf litter of a forest.

  She crawled up on to the seat beside him and held the boy until he closed his eyes and lost himself in her arms. She began whispering that he should never have left home, con
stantly so, until James tried to wish her away, saying that she wasn’t real. But she told him she was and that he did not really want her to leave at all. And, in the end, he just nodded and said nothing else as she kept berating him in her soft, gentle voice until the dark of her embrace swallowed him up.

  24

  ‘Jesus, Ma, whatchoo done to them?’

  ‘Don’t you fret at yer mother,’ she said, slapping Billy on the meat of his arm. ‘They’re fine as we want them for now.’

  Billy crouched down in front of the sleeping Cook. The lines on his face were so deep it seemed he might break apart at any moment.

  ‘He’s old. Look at him.’

  ‘Stop fussing.’

  Billy reached forward and touched Cook on the wrists as though venerating him.

  ‘I won’t ever get like this,’ he said, lifting the old man’s hands and inspecting them before laying them carefully back down on his knees.

  His mother clapped three times and muttered something, and touched Cook on the elbow. His eyes flickered open. He licked his lips. Blinked. Shuddered.

  ‘Tell him what’s going to happen,’ she said to Billy as she shuffled out.

  It took a few moments for Cook to come round fully and for his cheeks to fill with colour. When he understood what was happening to himself and the boy, who was still asleep beside him, he began to struggle, the waxy knots of the washing line squeaking as they rubbed. Billy watched him, sitting cross-legged on the floor. He took a penknife from his pocket and pulled out the blade from the brown wooden handle and began cleaning his fingernails, flicking black dirt on to the carpet.

  ‘What do you want?’ asked Cook eventually.

  ‘How long have you got?’ replied Billy and grinned.

  ‘I don’t have any money in the house.’

  ‘I know,’ said Billy, shrugging.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘A man, like you, but beyond that then we’re both struggling, en’t we?’

  ‘Let my grandson go.’

  ‘He en’t yer grandson.’

  Cook watched Billy move on to the other set of nails.