The Dark Inside

by Rupert Wallis

  Downstairs, in the kitchen, she nodded approvingly when she saw James sitting in the back seat of the car, watching the house. Billy was waiting in the driver’s seat, drumming the steering wheel with his thumbs. When she saw the farmer’s Lanber shotgun with the walnut stock resting against the wall in the porch, she picked it up. And then she turned to the farmer who was standing with his wife, waiting to be told what to do.

  ‘Do you have any cartridges for this?’

  The farmer disappeared into the boot room beside the kitchen, returning with a box of cartridges that he handed to her.

  ‘Now you make sure and wave us off, then you can go back to doing whatever you was busy on.’

  She walked out into the yard. Climbed into the passenger seat of the Ford, and smiled at the little wooden man sitting in the footwell by her feet and leant down and whispered something. Then she handed the shotgun and cartridges to Billy.

  ‘What do we need these for?’

  ‘We need to go up on to the moor.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Billy. ‘We’ve got the boy.’

  The old woman sat still and looked out at the moorland.

  ‘Because we have to if we want to keep him,’ she said, staring out through the windscreen.

  Billy hesitated, and then he turned the key in the ignition and the engine came to life. As the car began to move, the old woman turned and waved at the farmer and his wife. But James didn’t wave. He just watched them, telling himself to try and keep remembering their smiling faces.

  When the car came out of the yard, it stopped beside the track, leading away from the lane that would take them back to the main road.

  ‘You’re sure?’ Billy asked her.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you know where he is?’

  ‘I will. Take the track on to the moor.’ The old woman looked back at James slumped in the seat with his head still turned, staring back at the farmer and his wife. ‘They’ll be OK,’ she said to him. ‘But they won’t remember you. So you best forget them too. We made a bargain, remember? So you be good now. You wouldn’t want to go back on yer word now, would you?’

  And then she turned round and settled back in her seat, and closed her eyes.

  James sat, looking out of the window, his mind only half working as the pain in his shoulders lurked just below the surface of him. He felt leaden and sore, a lump of a boy, as the car moved. Finally, he managed to lean forward, swallowing sharply as the wounds on his shoulders creaked.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said quietly before sitting back in the seat and breathing away the pain as well as he could. But all the time he kept telling himself he would run away as soon as he had enough strength, escaping again just like he and Webster had done before. Whenever the opportunity arose.

  As the car bumped along the track, he noticed a black dot high above them in the sky. A bird of some sort. Circling slowly. Growing larger in the blue. As it dropped lower and lower, he saw it was a crow, its black fingers spread at the ends of its wings. It swooped past and landed in the scrub ahead of them, and hopped through the heather, stopping on the track in front of the car.

  Billy braked.

  The engine throbbed.

  A wind rocked the car.

  The bird stared up at them as the old woman began muttering under her breath, and it seemed to James the crow was joining in with her, talking too.

  As soon as she stopped, it launched itself into the air, catching the wind and spiralling higher and higher, until James lost sight of it against the sun.

  It was five minutes before the old woman said anything, her shoulders twitching, her head moving slowly back and forth.

  ‘Straight ahead,’ she whispered to Billy.

  35

  Billy looked back once more at the sky-blue Ford parked on the track before the ground swallowed him up. He reckoned he must have walked more than half a mile after following the rabbit run over the scrub before reaching the gully. The backs of his heels were beginning to rub raw. His boots were not meant for this type of walking.

  As he trod carefully down, below the level of the moor, the air began to cool. Instead of gorse and heather to his right, there was just a wall of hard brown rock. Billy patted it with the flat of his hand, as though calming the spirit of a horse, and then continued on down the trail, such as it was, the rock face guiding him.

  Loose stones ran ahead of him, chattering. Some falling over the edge into the tea-coloured river below. Billy peered to his left all the way down. The water was running hard and fast, a yellowish curd riding the surface, clinging to the edges of rocks.

  The noise of the water rose with the spray and he heard nothing else as he walked carefully down.

  When he reached the bottom, he followed the river’s flow, slowing when he saw a pool ahead of him, dark and oily, with currents circling the surface.

  He stopped when he saw the dead sheep in front of him, lying on a flat section of rock overhanging the pool, its head looking down at the water. There was no blood. Just scree pooled nearby. He looked up at the sheer rock face above, all the way to the blue sky at the top, wondering what might have caused the creature to fall. It could have been an accident. Or something might have scared the animal over the edge.

  Billy moved warily as he passed it, its pink tongue hanging from the corner of its mouth.

  Rounding a sharp bend, just past the pool, he stopped again and held his breath.

  Webster was crouched on a bed of flat rock by the water’s edge. Semi-naked, his trousers ripped and torn around his ankles. His wet black hair was scraped back and glistening, and there were ugly grey scars on his shoulders.

  Billy crept slowly, letting the water cover the sound of his footsteps.

  But Webster seemed to hear him anyway and looked up.

  Quickly, Billy raised the gun.

  And fired.

  36

  James listened. The old woman listened. But there was only the echo of the single gunshot rolling over the moor until it was gone, wasted into the wind.

  ‘A clean kill then,’ she said, smiling, as if trying to soften the blow. James wanted to fling open the door and run, but the old woman’s smile forced him to shrink deeper into the seat and close his eyes. In the dark he saw the face of Webster staring back at him. As though the man was trapped inside his head forever. James whispered to him, telling him he was safe now and could never be harmed again by anything or anyone. All the anger and disappointment at what Webster had done was nowhere to be found. Maybe it was spent. Or maybe it was still raging somewhere out of sight. James didn’t know. All he could do in that cold, hard moment as the wind whistled round the car was to sob for the man who had been his friend, his ally against the pain in the world.

  He opened his eyes and wiped the wet in them when he heard Billy’s boots clumping down the track. The old woman leant across and opened the driver’s door, and Billy sat down behind the wheel. In one hand was the Lanber shotgun. In the other was a heart. Slippery and glistening. It had been rinsed somewhere in water.

  ‘This what you wanted?’

  The old woman nodded.

  ‘You should have wrapped it in something soft, like bracken,’ she said before Billy could complain about carrying it back.

  She lifted the heart carefully out of his hand and wrapped it in her black shawl, then bound it up inside a white supermarket bag which had been scrunched in a ball beside the wooden mannequin in the footwell.

  The heart sat on her lap.

  Like shopping, James thought.

  Billy wiped his hands on a chamois leather, which he stuffed back into the doorwell beside him, and then started up the Ford. He drove back along the track and then out on to the lane to join a road.

  When he reached a junction, the car turned left and gradually the road became larger and wider.

  Eventually, they turned on to a slip road which led them down to a motorway.

  No one spoke for the whole journey back to the fair.

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nbsp; 37

  It was almost dark when the car pulled up in the traveller camp. James recognized Billy’s caravan, its bright green writing electric in the headlights, but not the place in which it was standing, with concrete blocks wedged behind the wheels.

  The fair had moved on since he had tried to bargain for his gold. Now it was pitched in the field adjoining the one that Billy had stopped in, outside a different town that shimmered orange in the near distance, pumping thumping music into the night sky that seemed to make the stars sparkle.

  James had no idea where he was after losing track of the road signs as the roads narrowed and the day wound round to dusk. He thought he could smell the sea, but he couldn’t be sure.

  A toilet flushed somewhere.

  A dog barked.

  Billy took James by the arm and led him across the dark field to another smaller clearing, away from the knot of caravans and the fairground. There they found an old wagon cage on wheels, which was wooden, except for the black metal bars down one side. It looked old and brittle in the moonlight. There were washed-out patterns in red and green on the thin panels above and below the bars. The rest of it was a weather-blistered blue.

  Without saying a word, Billy dragged James up a set of white painted steps, opened the steel door and pushed the boy inside.

  The door slammed shut.

  A lock turned.

  And James rushed back to the door.

  But there was no handle on the inside.

  And the steel felt solid and strong when he pressed his hands against it.

  He ran across the wooden floor to the bars and looked out between them. Billy was walking away to the left, back towards the caravans standing out of sight, and he soon disappeared into the dark. James could still hear the fairground, even though he couldn’t see it, and pushed his face as far as he could into the gap between two cold bars and yelled.

  Laughter in the distance.

  A faint hubbub.

  The odd delighted scream keening.

  James shouted until he was hoarse.

  But no one came.

  Boots clumped up the steps. A key clicked round in the lock.

  The steel door opened and Billy trudged into the dim-lit wagon with a bucket which he set down in a corner on the bare wooden floor. He drew out a metal bowl full of something hot and steaming from the bucket, and then reached back in, retrieving a wooden cup which he placed on the floor. Billy took a wooden spoon out of his back trouser pocket and held out the bowl.

  ‘Ma says to eat this broth. It’ll help you feel better.’

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  ‘She’ll be along in a minute. You can tell her yerself if you want.’ Billy put the bowl on the floor beside the cup and slid the spoon into the steaming mixture. ‘The cup’s for water. Just tip it up and drink. It won’t run out. The bucket’s for yer business.’

  He closed the door behind him.

  The key turned in the lock again.

  Footsteps padded away.

  James picked up the bowl of broth and sniffed it. Hedgerows and mud. He swirled the spoon and pearl barley bobbed in the liquid. He was hungry enough to try it. It tasted slick and sweet and wholesome, and he ate as much as he was able.

  When he had finished, he picked up the wooden cup. It was empty, but when James tipped it up, as Billy had told him to do, water ran up over the lip and on to the floor. When he looked again, the cup was empty. He tipped it up a few more times and, each time, water appeared at the lip. Yet, every time afterwards, the cup was empty. The boy stared at the wooden bottom and shook his head because he did not understand it.

  He wished he had not eaten the broth.

  When the door opened again, it was the old woman who stepped through into the wagon. Billy stood behind her, waiting on the white steps, his outline clear in the bright moonlight.

  She glanced into the almost-empty bowl.

  ‘Good boy,’ she said, nodding.

  After inspecting the wounds on James’s shoulders, she left the dressings off, folding them up and putting them in her skirt pocket.

  ‘There’s stories that the moon can heal creatures like you,’ she said, looking up at the sky through the bars. ‘You should bathe tonight in the waning moonlight. Draw as much strength from it as you can.’

  ‘Creatures like me?’ whispered James.

  And the old woman shone back a smile and nodded, and picked up the metal bowl and the spoon, and left.

  Before he closed the door, Billy threw in a thin stripy mattress that flopped on to the floor like a dead fish. Two red blankets landed on top of it.

  James sat alone on the dirty mattress and looked up at the moon. His shoulders and his neck were sore, and he turned to let the moonlight fall on them. But it seemed to make no difference. Eventually, he lay on his side, staring at the wooden wall opposite, trying not to think about anything except for who he was.

  When he rolled over, he felt something uncomfortable in the front pocket of his jeans. It was the small black torch he had taken from the farmer’s kitchen. He pressed in the rubber button, and the light roared into the dark and lifted his heart. He started remembering everything he could about the farmer and his wife, and all the good in their faces, flashing the light around the walls of the wagon to try and chase away the dark. But the night wouldn’t leave, only shrinking back and then creeping forward again as soon as he moved the beam.

  The wagon was smaller than his bedroom in Timpston. For the first time since leaving home he wished himself back in his bed, safe under the covers. But then his stepfather’s face loomed up inside him and made him shudder, and he stared into the shaky pool of light on the wall until his hand had stopped trembling.

  After turning off the torch to save the batteries, and hiding it under the mattress, he lay down and fell asleep to the distant sounds of the fair. He conjured himself into a long, slow dream wherein the world had ended and he was the only person left wandering through an ashen waste with no one left to speak to. All he could do was keep walking, hoping to find some way out of the desolate wasteland where the silence was so loud it hurt his ears and the blood in his bones.

  38

  James awoke as soon as the door opened. The daylight and the quiet shocked him as he stared at the green field in front of the wagon, steaming gently in the early morning sun. A blackbird took fright at something, trilling as it strobed past the black metal bars, its shadow ticking through the golden bands of sunlight lying evenly spaced on the wooden floor. He righted himself on the mattress and huddled the blankets closer as the old woman walked towards him.

  Billy waited on the steps like before as she inspected the boy’s wounds, sighing her disappointment when she saw they had not healed.

  ‘Some of these stories are so old,’ she said, ‘that no one really knows any more what’s true and what en’t.’ She tapped her chin. Tugged at the hairs sprouting from one of her ears. ‘A child like you is a very rare thing,’ she said, smiling. ‘Valuable too.’ And she looked over at Billy who smiled back. ‘At least we’ll have new stories to tell now,’ she continued, ‘and I’ll make sure they won’t get lost like before.’ She waved her hand at Billy and he threw her an old black sweater which she caught in one bony hand. It was the one James had been wearing on the moor. But the holes in the back had been stitched up and the whole thing had been washed clean.

  She applied new dressings to his wounds, and then rolled the sweater carefully down over James’s head and torso, trying not to hurt him.

  When she stood up, James hooked his hand around her arm to stop her leaving.

  ‘Am I really different now?’ he asked. ‘Am I really cursed?’ The old woman nodded. ‘But I don’t feel different. Nothing’s changed inside.’

  ‘It will. The next full moon will make it happen.’

  ‘I never saw Webster on the moor.’

  The old woman smiled. ‘He saw you though, didn’t he?’ she said.

  ‘I mean I never saw what he was.
If he was really what you said.’

  ‘Would he have done this to you if he wasn’t?’

  When she turned to go, he tugged on her arm again, pulling her back.

  ‘Webster was a soldier. He’s seen terrible things which upset him. Changed him. I think he might have believed he was cursed because that’s what you told him.’

  ‘And why would he have believed that, my love?’

  James felt himself shaking. ‘Because . . .’ He licked his lips and took a breath. ‘Because he might have been confused about a lot of things.’

  But the old woman just smiled.

  ‘Is that what you really think?’ She pointed at his shoulders. ‘Would he really have done that to you if he was only a man?’

  James blinked back at her, remembering how Webster had promised never to hurt him. And then he looked down at the wooden floor. But there were no answers there.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I can’t say I know anything for sure.’

  The old woman laughed. A dry, brittle sound.

  And then she walked away.

  Out of the wagon.

  Down the steps.

  And across the dewy, steaming grass.

  Billy locked the door. And then he unhitched a pair of wooden shutters on the outside of the wagon at either end of the bars and began pulling across the one on the left.

  ‘Ma says the daylight’s not for someone like you no more. You best forget about it. Like the world out there’s gonna forget about you too. Yoo’se a whole different person now.’

  ‘The world won’t forget about me. My picture’s in the paper.’

  Billy shrugged.

  ‘You en’t the only news. Things move on. And what we got planned means the world en’t never gonna see you. Not like this anyway.’

  ‘What are you going to do with me?’

  ‘Work you. For a while. And then who knows after that? Depends on you.’ Billy thought about something as he brought round the left-hand shutter to the middle of the bars. Then he smiled and stood looking at James. ‘See, what you got is a gift. One you can give to someone on a full moon. Now people’ll pay once to see a freak and be scared. But the next time around they’ll be expecting something more. Double the thrill for double the money. And that’s where you come in, passing on yer gift to as many people as we need. There’s no accounting for punters’ tastes. For what they want to see. And then there’s freaks fighting too. Which is where the real money is. Because everyone likes a flutter, don’t they?’