The Dark Inside

by Rupert Wallis

  The door began to bang. Opening then shutting. Winking a white line of light as the wooden man tried shutting them up in the darkness again.

  James drove through the door with his shoulder and fell through into the hallway, palms burning on the carpet. The torch landed on the floor beside him, the bulb a twist of amber in the daylight.

  James heard his heart. And then he was up.

  Pulling back the door, he saw the small wooden man lying in a heap, squashed against the white panelling that ran below the balustrade for the main staircase of the house. One of its legs had twisted out of its hip and splintered all the way down the front of its thigh. Its painted eyes gave no indication of any pain. There was no breath or movement in its chest. James could not stop staring. He did not understand what this thing was. He told himself he shouldn’t try to.

  Cook emerged, panting, at the top of the stairs, blinking in the light. His face was the colour of old newspaper left out in the rain.

  ‘What about the old woman?’ he gasped.

  James shook his head, and then he picked up the wooden man and flung the thing down into the cellar. It landed on the stone floor, beside Billy, and James shut the door and locked it.

  Together the two of them crept down the hallway towards the kitchen. There was no sign of the old woman or Webster.

  They walked quietly towards the back door. But they both stopped immediately when they saw her through the kitchen window. She was sitting outside in the garden with her eyes closed, perched on a mahogany chair with a blue velvet seat taken from the set of six in the dining room. Silver hair scraped back. A black shawl draped around her shoulders. She seemed to be in a trance, hands folded in her lap.

  ‘What should we do?’ whispered James.

  Cook said nothing. He remembered how the old woman had been inside his head. She had crept inside him like a chill and the cold had burned him.

  ‘I’m scared too,’ said James and he gripped the old man’s hand.

  The woman opened her eyes. When she saw them, she rose in one long creaking movement, levering herself up out of the chair. James wheeled round, already imagining himself opening the front door, and dragging Cook with him.

  But then they stopped dead.

  Because she was standing right there in front of them, the leather pouch around her neck pinched between her bony fingers.

  James heard Cook gasp.

  27

  The old woman allowed herself a smile before dropping her head to one side like an inquisitive bird. Her eyes were black and wet. Like two pebbles plucked from a stream.

  ‘We got a job to do, my loves,’ she said and pulled out two chairs from the kitchen table, their feet scraping the linoleum floor. Cook went to sit down, as though he had no choice, but James pulled him gently back. The old woman drummed her fingers on the laminate tablecloth for a moment and then muttered something.

  The daylight in the kitchen dimmed slightly.

  Whisperings nipped at James’s ears.

  But he did not listen as he picked up his knees and charged into her, closing his eyes before he looked too deeply into hers. His nose connected with something hard, driving his breath down into his stomach, where it stuck for a moment before flying up out of his mouth as he tumbled forward.

  The old woman grunted as she fell with him. Her leather pouch went into orbit around her neck, and then jerked back on its cord and slammed down hard beside her head as she landed on the floor with James on top of her. It split at once, and a stream of seeds and pebbles and tiny bones skittered across the linoleum. She gasped as if dealt a mortal blow. And then her face curdled as she wrapped her arms around the boy.

  Her skin smelt of dark lace and roses. Broth on a stove.

  James struggled to right himself, but her fingers hooked his thin sweater like brambles. Her lips peeled back. Spit bubbled between worn grey teeth.

  His nose was hot. Wet. Blood dripped from it on to the woman’s forehead, and ran along the creases and down into her eyes, which she tried blinking clear as she refused to let go of James’s sweater.

  And then, suddenly, a great force gripped him on either side, jolting him free of the old woman.

  James saw muddy boot prints glistening on the kitchen floor as Webster lifted him through the air.

  The man dumped him down and stood over the woman who scrabbled backwards, until she came to a stop against the wall, the boy’s blood glistening on her face.

  He strode towards her and crouched down and wrapped his hands around her throat, making her gasp.

  ‘No,’ said James in a frail voice. ‘Stop! Please!’

  Webster squeezed harder as he looked round ready to roar at James that this was the only way. But the boy was not looking at him. He was kneeling beside Cook who was convulsing on the floor. The old man’s blue eyes were screwed down deep into his face, his gums white around his clenched teeth.

  The rage inside Webster was still red and balled and hot, and he struggled with it as James laid his hands on Cook, trying to quiet the jerking of the old man’s body.

  ‘Please,’ said James again to Cook. ‘Stop it.’

  Webster’s hands fell away from the old woman’s throat which juddered and crackled as she took in gulps of air.

  ‘Watch her,’ said Webster, handing James a knife from the wooden block beside the sink. ‘Stick her if she moves, or even says a word.’

  And James managed a nod as the knife wobbled in his hand. He looked at the old woman, her chest still heaving.

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’ James asked quietly as he heard Webster kneeling down beside Cook.

  ‘I think he’s having another stroke.’

  ‘We need to call an ambulance.’

  ‘No-ouhhrrhh,’ garbled Cook, shaking his head. ‘Nooo-ooohh.’ His left hand gripped Webster’s wrist. ‘N-gggot dddiiiss kkk-ime,’ he wheezed. Webster nodded.

  ‘I think he wants to be with his wife,’ said Webster gently. ‘It’s his right.’

  James turned back to look at Cook who half nodded, lips parted, his tongue winding circles in the air. His eyes bulged, but he managed to flash them at James who saw something hard and certain in them.

  ‘Cook told me something,’ he said to Webster. ‘Something important. He told me that he was the one who attacked you.’

  Webster shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I would have known.’

  ‘How? How would you have known?’ asked James, his voice rising. ‘You said you didn’t remember anything.’

  Webster licked his lips.

  ‘He’s too old. Weak. How could he have attacked me?’

  ‘He did,’ pleaded James. ‘He told me.’ He looked back at the old woman and saw her watching everything intently with her hooded eyes, and he kept his arm raised with the tip of the knife pointing at her.

  Webster bent in close to Cook.

  ‘Did you?’ he asked quietly. ‘Are you the one?’ But the old man was already looking beyond him. There was the tiniest of rattles in his throat.

  ‘Tell him,’ said James urgently, glancing round. ‘Tell Cook you forgive him.’

  Webster blinked. Shook his head. ‘It’s not that easy,’ he whispered. He looked down at the swirling red pattern on the linoleum floor. There was an anger swelling in him. Bright and hard. Moving in shapes in the wet of his eyes. The words he wanted did not come, burning up inside him before they could be spoken.

  He clasped his trembling hands in front of him.

  But his whole body shook.

  All that could be heard in the room was Cook’s tiny gasping.

  ‘I . . . I deserved it, didn’t I?’ said Webster quietly. ‘I deserved what happened to me.’ He looked up at James who was staring straight at him. ‘Because of that little girl.’

  ‘No.’ James shook his head. ‘That’s not true.’ He could feel the old woman staring. And when he glanced at her again she was watching, entranced, her mouth hanging open. The knife in his hand wavered as he looked back at Webs
ter and felt his own heart cracking. And he shook his head again as if trying to will it to stop breaking apart. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’

  Webster bowed his head and held on to Cook, and James watched the old man’s face grow still. And then there was nothing but complete silence into which he seemed to be falling forever.

  When Webster realized the old man was gone, he crossed Cook’s arms over his chest and shut his eyes. Then he rolled into a ball on the floor and began to sob into the hollow his body had made.

  James heard a sound behind him. The old woman was reaching out and scooping up the seeds and pebbles and tiny bones lying around her, whispering to them as she placed them in the palm of her hand.

  Her knees clicked as she stood up.

  The knife in James’s hand wilted and she brushed it aside. She knelt down beside Webster and laid a hand on him, shushing him. Cooing softly to him. Patting his side as though he was an animal lying in a barn in the hay.

  ‘So much for that vicar of yours,’ she said, ‘and what he told you.’

  James looked away and found himself staring at Cook, lying peacefully on the floor, still as a statue on a tomb. His heart clenched tighter and tighter in his chest as he started to panic about something deep down inside him. When he blinked, he tried not to see his mother lying there. But it was hard not to think of her with Cook so still and pale.

  ‘Where’s he gone?’ he asked quietly. ‘Where’s my mum? Are they together?’

  The old woman turned and looked at him. The lines in her face were decades long, and deep and crusted red where his blood had dried on her. When she opened her fist, James saw the dried seeds and tiny bones and pebbles heaped in her palm.

  ‘There’s only nature,’ she said. ‘The world and our journey through it. We are what we are, part of everything we see around us. Just like these charms, which my mother gave to me and her mother gave to her and I’ll give to my granddaughter when my son gets round to giving me one.’ She flickered a smile, but then shook her head and clicked her tongue on her teeth. ‘The world is full of suffering, my love. And when you leave it that suffering ends because there’s nothing.’ She nodded at Cook. ‘Look how peaceful he is.’

  James tried to move. But his bones were heavy, and the tendons and ligaments that kept him strapped together threatened to crack and fall apart.

  ‘I’m so tired,’ he said to her. ‘Is it because of you?’ But the old woman said nothing else. So James just sat there, watching her stroking the ball that was Webster and whispering into his ear.

  Eventually, she raised her voice for James to hear too.

  ‘All this running away won’t do anyone any good. And I’ll tell you why, my loves. Because there is no way of lifting the curse from this poor man,’ she said, stroking Webster’s hair. ‘There’s no way of undoing what’s been done. I know the history of these things and how they work. And I would know about a cure if there was anything to know.’

  James struggled to think. Thoughts came to him in a blur and he spun them into words. And then he crept slowly towards the woman and sat beside her.

  ‘Cook didn’t attack him,’ he whispered so Webster would not hear. ‘We made it up.’

  ‘Well then,’ she whispered back, as though playing a game with him. But James shook his head.

  ‘Because of the newspaper,’ he said. She watched him as he struggled to piece his thoughts together. ‘Because,’ and he lowered his voice again so he could barely be heard, ‘because he wasn’t attacked by any sort of creature at all.’

  The old woman smiled.

  ‘Then who attacked him?’ she asked. ‘Who cut up his shoulders and made him bleed?’ James tried to remember what he should say, but his thoughts kept slipping. And the old woman nodded. ‘I know the truth of it,’ she said. ‘I surely do.’

  A distant shouting cannoned in the bowels of the house and she asked James to go and open the cellar door for Billy. And the boy did what he was told because it seemed the easiest thing to do. She was right. Running was too tiring now. And thinking everything through was beyond him.

  When Billy stumbled up the cellar stairs, he blinked in the daylight and rubbed the swelling along his jaw.

  ‘What’s happened?’ he growled.

  ‘Cook’s dead,’ replied James.

  When Billy saw the haze in the boy’s eyes and knew his ma was all right, he grunted and pushed his way past.

  They left Cook lying peacefully in the kitchen, on the linoleum floor, with the sunlight drifting all around him. As the four of them walked across the lawn towards the door in the cedar fence that opened on to the lane, not one of them looked back at the house.

  Before leaving, the old woman had made another pot of tea and asked James to drink a mug’s worth, and Webster two, saying it would calm them. She poured the rest into a Thermos flask she found in one of the cupboards and stowed it in her red leather bag together with the broken marionette. And then she made sure she had picked up every last seed and pebble and bone before tying her leather pouch shut with a piece of string.

  As James stood in the lane, he breathed in the sunlight and listened to the sounds of birds and the whirring of insects. Noticing a flower beside his shoe, he crouched down by the verge and looked it full in the face, recalling dimly that Cook had told him to look for something there.

  When he glanced up to ask the woman if she might know what it was, she put her finger to her lips. So James stood up and waited until a green Vauxhall car came down the lane, driven by Billy, and stopped beside them. Webster climbed into the back seat and sat in silence. And James settled beside him.

  As the car drove through the town, James watched the people in the streets and the traffic on the roads. And he thought again of what Cook had told him to do. But it was still unclear. So he leant forward and tapped the old woman on the shoulder.

  ‘Do you know what Cook meant? About the flower? About what to look for?’

  But all she did was peer round and shake her head as the indicator started ticking and they turned on to the dual carriageway.

  28

  James awoke when the car stopped. He peeled his face off the brown plastic seat and squinted in the daylight. Through the window he could see the white torso of a petrol pump and three nozzles plugged into their ports.

  The grey underside of the canopy over the forecourt was like a patch of winter sky.

  The pump whined as Billy filled the tank. Webster stirred, but did not seem to notice where they were or even recognize James. The boy’s eyes were sleepy too and he was about to lay his head back down when he noticed a car parked on the opposite side of the pump. The driver, a middle-aged man with a moustache, was filling up his estate car. Sitting in the back were two teenagers. A boy and a girl.

  Both of them were staring at James.

  He turned slowly and looked over his shoulder to see if anything might be going on behind him. Nothing. When he turned back round, he saw that the teenage boy had rolled down the car window beside him and was talking to the man with the moustache. The man looked up in the direction of James. He squinted for a moment. Shrugged and shook his head, and looked back at the numbers on his pump.

  The teenagers in the back seat just kept staring. And then the girl had an idea and they bunched their heads together.

  Billy clicked the petrol cap shut. He wiped his hands on the squares of his dogtooth trousers and then headed for the cashier, peeling off notes from a springy wad.

  The man with the moustache left his car to pay too. When he was halfway across the forecourt, one of the doors of the estate car opened. The girl and the boy dropped down on to the black tarmac. They kept low over the few metres between the cars and peered in through the window at James.

  He blinked at them. They spoke to each other in muffled voices, nodding until one of them tried the handle of the door.

  But it was locked.

  When the old woman in the front seat suddenly turned round, they ducked down out of sight.
r />   ‘How are things, my love?’

  James nodded. It was all he could manage. The fog in his head was too thick to think up any words, even though he knew there were lots hidden away inside him. The old woman reached into the red leather bag by her feet in the footwell and drew out the Thermos flask. She unscrewed the white cup on top and then the cap, and filled the cup with hot tea from the flask. Then she leant around and held it out to James.

  ‘It’s the last little bit, my love. Be a good boy and finish it up. We’ve still got a way to go yet.’ Steam unwound and disappeared. A bitter smell curdled the air. She lifted up off her seat to get closer to the boy. ‘It’s OK,’ she said. James reached forward. But, as his fingers wrapped around the cup and he tried to take it, the old woman stiffened and did not let go. She was looking into the wing mirror on the driver’s side of the car, and in it she could see the reflection of the boy and the girl squatting beside the rear tyre, whispering to each other.

  The old woman handed the cup to James, and then let herself quietly out of the car, and walked around to the rear and asked the children to stand up. James watched her talking to the two of them until he felt something warm spreading over his ankle and into his shoe. He looked down. The cup had fallen from his hand into the footwell. He did not remember how it had ended up there. But he knew he had been holding it. When he reached down to pick it up, he discovered it was empty and the tea had soaked into the black fabric making it boggy under his shoes.

  Eventually, the old woman returned to the car and shut out the sounds of the forecourt. James watched the boy and the girl return to their own car without saying a word. They did not look at him again.

  ‘All done, my love?’ The old woman was smiling and holding out her hand. James nodded and gave her back the empty cup.

  When Billy returned, he was holding a newspaper. After starting up the engine, he nosed the car into a parking space on the edge of the forecourt and spoke to the old woman for a long time. When he laid the newspaper down on the plastic island between their seats, James saw his own face staring back at him out of the blocks of black print. He thought he should say something about the picture. But he couldn’t find the words.