The Dark Inside Read Online Free PDF Page B

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    ‘You can’t come with me.’ Webster’s blue eyes were burning. His face was stone.
    ‘I can’t stay here,’ whispered James. ‘Not now. They’ll find me. Just like they found you.’ He thought he heard something and looked round, back into the dark
behind them, thinking that someone was there. But all he saw was the house on the hill, up above them, as if floating in the dark.
    ‘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.