The Dark Inside (5 page)

‘I’ll always be grateful to you. For helping me. I will. But it’s not safe being with me. I’m not like normal people. You heard them. They said it was the work of the
devil. That it can’t be undone.’

‘What can’t? I don’t understand.’

Webster looked away. His fingers drummed the steering wheel. He sucked in his cheeks and let out a long, slow breath.

‘Do you believe in fairy tales?’ he asked. James opened his mouth. Then shut it again. And Webster turned to look at him. ‘Well, I didn’t either. Not until a few weeks
ago. Now I believe in all sorts of things.’

‘Why? What happened?’

‘I was attacked in the night.’ Webster squeezed the top of the steering wheel as he remembered. ‘I was attacked by something as close to me as you are now. But I still
couldn’t tell you exactly what it was for sure. It all happened so fast.’

‘What did it look like?’

‘Like a man but larger, with teeth the length of your fingers. Knives for hands. Eyes the colour of wasps. I tripped. Fell all the way down a bank. When I came round in the morning, I
couldn’t move for the brambles. I was bloody. Sore. Barely alive. The travellers found me walking down the lane in a state. They helped at first. But when I told them what had happened they
locked me up. Told me I was going to make them rich. Because I’d been attacked on the night of a full moon . . .’ Webster’s voice tailed off.

‘By what?’ James saw the glitter of questions in his head. His tongue touched the roof of his mouth. ‘You mean by a—’

But Webster shushed him, as if he had the power to break the world in half with just a single word, leaving James’s heartbeats sounding louder than any statement he had thought of
uttering.

‘I believe them too,’ said Webster, ‘because I’ve seen the travellers do things. Things you’d never imagine were possible.’

‘What sort of things?’

But Webster just shook his head and looked away.

James kept on trying to think of the right thing to ask.

‘You don’t believe me, do you?’ Webster squirmed in his seat and pulled back the collar of his greatcoat to reveal two large scars disappearing down the back of his neck, the
skin still tender and pink around them. ‘You tell me then. What else could have done that?’ And James kept staring because he had no answer. And then he remembered how the gash on
Webster’s face had healed so quickly, wondering how such a thing could have happened to any normal man.

‘They told me it’ll happen at the next full moon,’ said Webster, releasing his collar.

‘What will?’ whispered James.

‘That I’ll change.’ Webster’s breath became shorter. ‘Transform.’ His fingers attached themselves to the steering wheel, and then he peeled them off and drew
his arms tight around him, as though guarding against his body splitting apart there and then. Slumped in the seat, he seemed smaller than James remembered him being before. ‘I’m not a
bad person. But I’m not the person I used to be either. That’s why you can’t come with me.’

James thought he heard a sound again, behind the car, and looked round. But there was nobody there. As he stared through the rear window, into the dark, he saw playing out in the void what would
happen if he stayed in Timpston, and he looked away. His eyes met Webster’s, the two of them staring in silence, until the fear inside James became too much to bear.

‘You told them there’s a cure. I heard you.’

Webster nodded.

‘An old traveller broke me out of the cage I was in. He told me I should pray to God. Ask to be led to one of his saints. St Hubert. Because he said that way I might find a cure, a key I
could use to banish evil.’ He shrugged and blew out a long, slow breath. ‘That’s it. That’s all there is.’

‘Don’t you believe in God?’

Webster sighed. He dropped his head back and looked up.

‘Do you?’

They sat there not speaking for what seemed like an age, with the dark pressing all around them, and the car engine rumbling. And James began wondering if Webster was scared too, but
couldn’t say it out loud because the world of men was not built that way. When he saw the moon reappearing from out of the cloud, he cleared his throat and spoke.

‘How long until the next full moon?’

‘A week, I think.’

‘Then I’ll help you try and find a cure before then.’

Webster sat up purposefully in his seat. His fingers gripped the steering wheel tight. And then he sat perfectly still for a moment.

‘So you believe what the travellers told me too?’

James nodded. ‘Because we can’t not, can we? At least not until the next full moon.’

And Webster looked at him for a moment and then shook his head.

‘No,’ he said, ‘we can’t.’ He sighed and looked down at his knees. ‘Are you sure you want to leave? With me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Because of your stepfather?’

‘Because of everything.’

Webster said nothing else for a while and James gripped the seat, steeling himself for what he was going to say next if the man said
no.

‘What if we don’t?’ asked Webster finally.

‘Don’t what?’

‘Don’t find a cure in time.’

‘Then it’s not meant to be. None of it.’

‘And if we do?’

‘Then it is. And we’ll decide what to do after that.’

Webster sat listening to the car engine.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘A week. A week and we’ll see if anything good comes of it. Because no one knows the future, do they?’

‘No,’ said James. ‘No one knows how the world works at all.’

And Webster nodded and let off the handbrake, and put the car into gear and turned the steering wheel, and Timpston slid slowly out of sight.

The rear lights of the car glowed like the ends of cigarettes and eventually vanished into the dark.

Up on the hill, a figure emerged from the house. It was Swanney. The shotgun was crooked over his arm and the smell of gunpowder was still ripe in the air. He was speaking quickly on a mobile
phone.

James clicked the link to print. Somewhere near the front of the Internet café a printer warmed and whirred, and he followed the
click-clack
sound of the pages
until he was standing over them.

The warm paper smelt of bleach.

He paid for ten sheets of A4 and folded them over to fit more easily into his hand. Two pounds for the printing and a pound for an hour on the Internet didn’t seem too much at all for
finding out what they wanted to know.

And it was easier than asking God.

During the night, James had secretly tried praying to find out more about St Hubert. And Webster had admitted to doing the same. But neither of them knew if their questions had even been heard.
And then James had thought of using the Internet.

He sat on a bench outside the café and made notes in the margins of the pages, periodically looking up to see if Webster had returned to the car parked across the road. By the time he
looked up to see the man standing waving at him, James had read everything through. He narrowed his eyes until Webster was just a man trying to attract his attention.

A man who could be anyone he wanted.

‘There’s a few cures mentioned,’ said James as he sat beside Webster in the car, looking through the pages. ‘Wolfsbane. Exorcism. There’s even one
about addressing somebody three times by their Christian name.’ Looking up, he smiled. But Webster didn’t seem to notice as he sipped from the old plastic bottle of water he’d
taken from his greatcoat pocket.

‘What about the one we’re after? St Hubert.’

‘That’s here too.’ James ran his finger across a block of text. ‘St Hubert is the patron saint of hunters. His key was supposed to be a cure for rabies. It was a metal
bar or nail with a decorative head. Priests would heat up the key and place it on the wound to cauterize and sterilize it.’

‘My wounds have all healed up. You’ve seen the scars.’

James looked up from his pages again.

‘An old traveller woman worked on them,’ explained Webster. ‘Open and red the first day, closed the next. She used an ointment which I was supposed to keep rubbing on.’
He stood the bottle of water in the well between them and dug out a small glass pot from a trouser pocket and twisted off the black plastic top. Spots of granular yellow paste were dried out around
the rim. James smelt hints of beeswax and sugar and olive oil. ‘It worked for my face too,’ said Webster, running a finger down the scar on his cheek. ‘I caught it on a fence in
the dark after I escaped from them.’

James studied the scar on the man’s face as though still unable to believe it. And then he smoothed down the fold in the pages, making them crackle.

‘It says here the key was used for other reasons too. To cure all sorts of evil,’ he said, sifting through the pages until he found what he was looking for. ‘The nearest church
dedicated to St Hubert is in Dorset. I printed out directions. It’s a couple of hours according to Google.’

‘A church? I haven’t been to one of those in a while.’

‘Neither have I. Not since I went with Mum. We used to go most Sundays. She said it made a difference.’

‘Did it?’

When James didn’t answer, Webster screwed the cap back on the bottle of water, and put it in his greatcoat pocket along with the ointment, and gripped the steering wheel. ‘Your seat
belt,’ he said as he turned the key in the ignition and pushed up the indicator to turn out on to the road. James reached round for the belt and dragged it down and clicked the metal head
into the plastic socket below his hip. He ran a hand up and down the line of grey webbing across his chest.

‘Do you think he’ll be glad to see us?’

‘Who?’

‘You know.’ James jabbed a finger at the ceiling of the car. ‘It’s a church after all.’

Webster thought about that for a while as they trundled up the road and then he turned and looked at the boy.

‘As long as you haven’t done anything to piss him off,’ he said and smiled. But James did not smile back. He bunched up his shoulders then dropped them down as he sighed so it
seemed to Webster that he was melting into nothing.

‘He pissed me off first,’ James said.

Webster nodded. He listened to the car wheels grumbling in the springs of his seat.

‘Yeah. I guess he did.’

They kept to the minor roads. Sometimes the hedges running beside them opened up and they could see great expanses of fields blocked out in different colours and shapes, rising
and falling according to the land. Pylons ran empty tramlines in the blue. Telegraph poles broke the horizon at intervals like staples punched by some giant hand to prevent the earth and the sky
from breaking apart. James touched the scar beneath his hairline, which was all that was left of the accident, and it was like pressing a button that fired up thoughts in his head. He tried not to
think what his mother would say about him sitting in another car, in another time, having left Timpston far behind.

Webster was still nervous about the travellers. Occasionally, he would pull the car into a lay-by and turn off the engine and wait, scrutinizing any vehicle that passed them. James had given up
asking him how the men would know where they were.

Eventually, they stopped for petrol. A small garage on the edge of a village with three white pumps the size of refrigerators in the forecourt and potholes in the asphalt, full of black
rainwater.

Inside, the grey linoleum floor was scuffed with years of footsteps. Paperbacks with sun-bleached spines were racked in a wire tower that squeaked when it turned. The man behind the counter
watched James and Webster as they picked out cans of Coke and a loaf of bread and a packet of rolled pink slices of ham.

Webster paid, peeling off a note from a wad he kept in his trouser pocket. James had no idea where the money was from. And it never seemed the right time to ask.

The man behind the counter wore half-moon glasses on a chain. He tapped the keys hunt-and-peck style on the old plastic till and each number appeared in digital green on the narrow screen. His
face was lean and lined, the colour of an estuary at low tide. Black strands of hair were combed crossways over the white dome of his head.

‘Nice tat,’ said Webster suddenly, nodding at the inside of the man’s wrist. James tipped forward and saw the beginning of a word in black gothic script. The man pulled up his
shirtsleeve to the elbow for him to see.