The Darkening Read Online Free PDF

it had been supplanted by a severe slug of hurt between his hipbones and a burning gravel-rash throb on his scalp, but the black worms inside his skull had suddenly been exorcised. He lay motionless staring at the slate sky, enjoying the sensation of feeling - at least for a moment - that pain for once was all on the outside. The sky was as grey as an old headstone, and a small flock of starlings hurried across it.
    Then a young man in a stained corduroy jacket stepped into his vision.
    Nicholas realised he must look like a drunkard, and hoped this might grant him licence to remain lying there a while longer. ‘I’m fine,’ he said.
    The boy looked down at him, unblinking. He had heavy bags under his eyes, and his skin was as pale as herring scales. His hands fidgeted like spring moles in his pockets.
    Shit , Nicholas thought. Maybe I’m not making sense. He reluctantly rose to his feet, wincing in anticipation of the flurry of black claws into his brain. But the headache stayed away.
    ‘I slipped,’ he said.
    The boy pulled his hand from his jacket pocket. It held a screwdriver. Nicholas’s brain just had time to register it was a Phillips head when the boy shoved the chromed shaft hard into Nicholas’s chest. Nicholas jerked reflexively, waiting for the wave of agony that was sure to come. The boy withdrew the screwdriver, then shoved it in a sweeping underhand into Nicholas’s stomach.
    Nicholas braced himself. But no pain came.
    The boy watched him, jaw tight, red eyes glistening with tears. Then he took one step back, another . . .
    Nicholas looked down at his chest and stomach. His T-shirt was unmarked. No punctures. No blood. No pain.
    The boy took a step backwards off the gutter onto the road. A blue Vauxhall was racing towards him, only twenty, fifteen, ten metres away.
    ‘You’re going to—’
    The car sped right into the boy, sending him flying. It kept going, accelerating.
    ‘Jesus, Jesus!’
    Nicholas took one, two, three jerky strides down the stairs and across the footpath. The boy lay prone on the road, a twisted swastika. Christ , he thought. The car didn’t even slow.
    He stared.
    In fact, you didn’t even hear it hit him . . .
    Then the boy was up. He was walking on the weedy footpath towards the flats. As he passed, he rolled his gloomy eyes to Nicholas. Hands in pockets, he climbed the flat’s front stairs to the buzzer panel, pressed it, waited, pulled the screwdriver from his pocket and stabbed an invisible victim twice, then retreated back, back, back and onto the road again before being struck by an invisible car and flying through the air, landing once more in a crippled heap. Then he vanished from the road, was walking on the footpath, and did it all again.
    Nicholas was rooted to the spot, transfixed by the macabre loop. A woman with a blue anodised aluminium walking frame trundled right through the boy as he backed across the footpath. She didn’t see him.
    Nicholas waited till the boy had backed off the stairs, then scurried up, grabbed the boxes and shattered photograph, and ran to his car, shaking hard, not looking back.

    A CAT scan - booked on the pretext of solving the now-vanished headaches - revealed his brain to be perhaps two per cent smaller than average, but otherwise normal.
    But nothing was normal.
    He was seeing the dead.
    After his vision of the boy with the screwdriver, Nicholas drove home to his new and humbly tiny Greenford flat, took three Nytols and slid into a thick and dreamless sleep. The next day, he’d been able to dismiss the boy as a Fata Morgana brought on by the bash to the back of the skull, but the CAT scan results were a mixed blessing.
    ‘Seeing things?’ the radiologist asked. ‘What kind of things?’
    The look on the woman’s face made Nicholas whip out the first lie he could think of, like an under-rehearsed magician pulling out a badly hidden bouquet. ‘Freckles. All over people. Dark, join-the-dot kinds of freckles . . .’
    She’d