The Dark Inside by Rupert Wallis

burst in his throat as he opened his mouth. He gagged on them and, as he caught his breath, all he could manage was to look up at her.
    She was muttering to herself, one hand clutching her leather pouch, the fingers rippling back and forth. He tried to hear what she was saying, but his ears were full of the drone of insects and
the ticking of the sun on the patio table and chairs.
    Cook had stopped laughing. His left hand was clamped to his head as he rocked gently back and forth in his chair.
    James leant forward across the table and stared into the old woman’s eyes. When she smiled, James knew that all the good around him had been sucked clean away. He heard someone laughing
and followed the sound until he saw the painted face of a small wooden man, peering up out of the red leather bag, its hands gripping the top.
    James tried to cry out.
    But he could not make a sound.
    She took James and Cook by the hand, and led them into the house and sat them on the sofa in the living room. Then she bound their wrists with lengths of washing line which she
had unhooked from the two wooden posts in the garden. When she was satisfied that all was in order, she drew out a mobile phone and tapped out a text message with one bony finger. And then she
knelt down in front of James.
    ‘What are you doing here, my darling?’
    James struggled to speak. It was difficult to focus on her. He wanted to tell the old woman the exact truth, but all he could manage was spit and hot air. She muttered something under her breath
and then laid a hand on his knee. A weight released inside him. The fog in his head cleared. He was able to speak.
    ‘We’re looking for whoever attacked Webster,’ he said.
    ‘And why’s you doing that, my love?’
    ‘So Webster can forgive whoever’s done him wrong and cure himself of evil. Forgiving is the only way to do it. That’s what the vicar in the church said.’ The old woman
smiled.
    ‘Hmmm,’ she purred. ‘I’m not sure it’ll make any difference, my darling.’
    When she took her hand away from his knee, James felt his throat closing, as if someone was pulling a thread tight around it.
    After she had clicked the door shut behind her, he tried screaming out loud for someone to hear. But it was impossible to make a sound.
    When his mother appeared on the floor in front of him, bloody and broken like a corpse, he tried to speak to her and ask for help. But all James could manage were tiny grunts like the noise of
some shuffling thing at night in the leaf litter of a forest.
    She crawled up on to the seat beside him and held the boy until he closed his eyes and lost himself in her arms. She began whispering that he should never have left home, constantly so, until
James tried to wish her away, saying that she wasn’t real. But she told him she was and that he did not really want her to leave at all. And, in the end, he just nodded and said nothing else
as she kept berating him in her soft, gentle voice until the dark of her embrace swallowed him up.

24
    ‘Jesus, Ma, whatchoo done to them?’
    ‘Don’t you fret at yer mother,’ she said, slapping Billy on the meat of his arm. ‘They’re fine as we want them for now.’
    Billy crouched down in front of the sleeping Cook. The lines on his face were so deep it seemed he might break apart at any moment.
    ‘He’s old. Look at him.’
    ‘Stop fussing.’
    Billy reached forward and touched Cook on the wrists as though venerating him.
    ‘I won’t ever get like this,’ he said, lifting the old man’s hands and inspecting them before laying them carefully back down on his knees.
    His mother clapped three times and muttered something, and touched Cook on the elbow. His eyes flickered open. He licked his lips. Blinked. Shuddered.
    ‘Tell him what’s going to happen,’ she said to Billy as she shuffled out.
    It took a few moments for Cook to come round fully and for his cheeks to fill with colour. When he understood what was happening to