The Dark Inside Read Online Free PDF

chamber pot scattered all around him on the hard stone floor and the shotgun lay by his side.
    Not a sound. Except for the silence.
    ‘Is he dead?’ James whispered.
    Webster wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Spat a gob of blood.
    ‘Maybe.’
    James began to shake. His chest was gone. The ends of his fingers were drifts of smoke and he felt as though he was starting to float. When he closed his eyes, he saw his mother staring back at
him, shouting something, which he could not hear above the ringing in his head.
    At the sound of a car engine he opened his eyes, listening to the vehicle drawing closer as it rounded the road at the top of the hill. When the headlights shone shadows through the windows,
Webster crouched down, dragging the boy with him, to keep him out of the light.
    A black half-moon was appearing either side of the traveller’s green jacket, around his hips, leaking out of him like oil. Carefully, Webster lifted the body to look beneath it. His old
kitchen knife had pierced the inside material of the jacket pocket and lodged in the man’s stomach.
    Outside, the car stopped and the engine idled.
    ‘Come on then, Billy,’ shouted Swanney.
    The traveller on the floor groaned. Shuddered.
    Webster jolted back, keeping below the beam of the headlights. James scrabbled backwards too.
    ‘What’s the problem?’ shouted Swanney more urgently. And then a car door opened and clunked shut, and the engine rattled as it kept on running.
    Footsteps picked their way over the rutty tarmac on the driveway.
    The traveller, Billy, groaned again. One of his hands scrabbled at the flagstone floor as he tried reaching for the shotgun. When he attempted to shout out, all he could muster was hot air. He
turned his head slowly and looked at James.
    ‘I tolllddd yooo,’ he wheezed, his top lip curling round like a dog’s. ‘I neverrr forrrggeettt ahhh faaacce. Nevvverrrr.’
    James gasped.
    He shivered.
    He was not thinking.
    And then he was. As though he had been plugged back into the world.
    ‘Come on,’ he said to Webster. ‘This way.’ And he ran quickly towards the kitchen and the back door.
    They crept around the side of the house. The old brown car was parked in the large circular driveway, empty of its driver, with dim-lit holes for headlights, the engine purring
as it idled.
    ‘Can you drive?’ James asked.
    Webster nodded and hitched his greatcoat around him. The two of them ran to the car and opened the doors.
    A voice rose inside the house. There was a shout.
    James slammed the passenger door shut. Webster’s hands shook as he worked his feet and tried switching gears, but there was a nasty grating sound and then the engine stalled. He twisted
the keys in the ignition, forcing the motor to churn over and over, and James’s stomach seemed to shrink, smaller and smaller.
    And then the car started.
    Webster released the handbrake and worked the pedals and the gears, turning the vehicle around until it was pointing back down the hill. A shout rang out behind them. And then a sound like the
crack of a whip flashed in the dark and the wing mirror on James’s side of the car exploded with a bang. For a terrible moment he thought he had been shot too.
    ‘Get down,’ ordered Webster, who slumped down in his seat, keeping one hand on the steering wheel. There was another gunshot. The back of the car thumped and groaned, and James felt
it through his bones.
    Moths scattered in the weak beams of the headlights as the car hurled them down and round the hill.
    When they reached the bottom, they came to a crossroads. The engine grumbled and the doors shuddered as the two of them sat staring through the windscreen. James gripped the edges of the seat
and pushed himself up until he could see the rooftops of the village just below them silvered by an oval shaped moon. He wondered if this was the last time he would ever see Timpston. It was not
how he had imagined his leaving.
    Every blink was like a