Free Dark Harbour: The Tale of the Soul Searcher by Joseph Kiel Page A

Danny.
    He peered out of the far corner of his eye to see what he could of her. She seemed to be looking at her hand… at one of her fingers. And was she smiling?
    Eventually she received her drink and the link was broken. Watching her walk away, Danny felt gutted, like he’d suddenly woken up with a crushing hangover. That was it. That’s all that Danny was going to be in the story of her life. Not a star-crossed lover of hers but some random nobody in a pub.
    He knocked back the rest of his useless whisky in one. Michael and Larry were returning. Danny breathed in deeply.
    He saw Stella standing above the table of friends. She was holding her hand out in front of them and they were all looking at it with gasps of delight. Of course, they were all looking at a ring on her finger.
    An engagement ring.
     
    Seven frames of pool were about all that Eddie could stand. Larry wasn’t so bad, but Danny was just plain boring while Michael had his nauseating I have to be nice to everyone else I’ll be going to hell attitude that was incredibly tiresome.
    Eddie didn’t believe in God, didn’t really believe in anything. He didn’t even believe in having a dream, or think that he would ever discover the key to what he wanted to do with his life. It was a waste of time trying to find it anyway. He hadn’t come to Dark Harbour because he wanted to. It was just that he had nowhere else to go. If anything he’d been dumped here by his worthless mother. She’d wanted to get him out of the way. Eddie knew it.
    He stood outside Danny’s chip shop eating from a tray of chips, intermittently illuminated by the purple light of the neon fish that hung on the shop sign. Before leaving the pub, he’d noticed there were still two fifties on the side of the pool table, so Eddie swiped them and came here for his first meal of the day.
    The smell of hot vegetable oil and the saline air swarming in from the sea reminded Eddie of his childhood holidays. They used to come to this town for a week each summer. It was the only token of fun his father ever afforded him, before he left his stupid mother. The town was local and it was cheap.
    Eddie had never liked the place. It was usually showered by rain or shadowed by thick clouds. Litter floated along the pavements and the weathered buildings looked like they were all falling apart. And they were grimy, reminding him of the gormless kids at the caravan park who always had dried chocolate smeared over their faces and cherryaid stained lips.
    Then there were all the unpleasant rumours he’d picked up. Stories about kids drowning in the sea, devil worshippers sacrificing people in the woods. It wasn’t a place he’d planned to return to but now it seemed that the sadistic hand of fate had dragged him back to these godforsaken shores.
    At least the geeks he was living with now were better than the stoners at his previous place. Now they really were a bunch of pretentious arseholes. They’d smoke all night and talk to each other about incomprehensible existentialist crap as if they were being so profound. They didn’t take proper drugs, didn’t have the guts for a pill or the dragon. It got to the point where Eddie couldn’t get on with them anymore, so he’d stuffed his things into his bag and slept in a church porch for a week.
    Then he got talking to some lad at the college football trials. Larry was trying out as a striker, the glory-seeker that he was, while Eddie, being tall and lanky, went for goalkeeper. Neither of them made the team, only making occasional reserve for the B team. In other words, it just underlined how they were complete losers. Larry would just make a joke about it though; it seemed he had the same warped sense of humour as Eddie.
    As for the other two pricks in his flat, they were just friends of Larry. He’d heard their wonderful story about a dozen times, how Larry was out getting shitfaced one night because his whore of a girlfriend back home told him she