by Sara Crowe
‘Of course she told me. She’s my sister. She’s loyal, that one. Not like you. Do you think it’s right, that my dad died and yours came home? You’re useless and a coward but your dad is fine. And I didn’t do anything wrong but mine died. Is that fair?’
‘It’s not my fault that your dad killed himself.’
‘I didn’t say it was your fault. I asked you if you think it’s fair.’
‘No,’ said Ash softly. ‘I don’t think it’s fair.’
‘See, I’ve got to make it right again. Whatever it takes, however hard it is.’
‘Is this why you got Callie to bring me out here? So you could beat me up and blame me for everything?’
Mark’s eyes glittered in the firelight. ‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s not why.’ Then his mood seemed to change again. He helped Ash to his feet, draped his arm across Ash’s shoulders. ‘Do you want some water?’
Uneasy, Ash nodded. Mark seemed capable of anything, laughing one minute, punching him the next. Now this.
‘Here.’ Mark handed him a bottle. Ash rinsed blood from his mouth, spat, rinsed again.
‘Are you hungry?’
‘A bit.’
‘Good.’ Mark picked up a charred length of stick, crouched by the fire. He raked the stick through the embers and rolled out a heavy lump wrapped in blackened tinfoil. ‘Venison. Road kill.’
‘Road kill?’
‘Yeah. Don’t worry, it’s fresh, not some maggoty old carcass. A stag hit by a car this morning along the valley road. Its blood was still wet and warm when I found it.’
They squatted on their heels, tearing with their teeth at the meat, washing it down with bottled water, sucking their greasy fingers. Ash’s jaw ached where Mark had punched him, but at least the strong smoky flavour of the venison took away the taste of blood. For a while, everything seemed almost normal again, the way things were when they were still kids, camping out on summer nights.
When they’d finished eating, Mark tossed the gnawed bones among the trees. ‘For the foxes,’ he said. ‘Out here, if you take something then you have to give something back.’
Ash stared into the flames, into the glowing red heart of the fire. ‘Have you been living out here by yourself all summer?’ he said.
‘Most of the time, yeah.’
‘Living on road kill,’ said Ash. ‘And rooks.’
‘I don’t eat the rooks.’ Mark laughed. ‘And it’s not just road kill. I hunt and fish too. There’s rabbit and wood pigeon and berries and trout and mushrooms. My dad taught me how to live off the land. There’s all sorts of stuff to eat, if you know where to look.’
‘Like when we used to go camping when we were kids.’
‘Yeah,’ said Mark. ‘A bit like that, except we used to take soggy cheese-and-tomato sandwiches with us and a flask of hot chocolate. We were just kids messing around then. Things are different now.’
‘I’m sorry about your dad,’ said Ash. ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t around much afterwards. I should have—’
‘Yeah, you should have. But you didn’t. When the going got tough, you ran for the hills. You literally ran for the hills. Ran and kept running.’
‘I tried to talk to you.’
‘Not hard enough.’
‘I know. I’m sorry.’ That word again. He was sick of saying it but it kept coming out. ‘I wish things were still the way they used to be.’
Mark gave a short laugh, sharp as a fox yelp. ‘Things are what they are,’ he said. ‘And they’re nothing like the way they used to be.’
‘I’ll make it right somehow.’
‘My dad’s dead. We’ve lost the farm. How will you make that right?’
‘That’s not what I meant. Of course I can’t make that right.’
‘No, you can’t. Only one thing can make that right.’
‘What then?’
‘The death of the stag boy.’
Ash stared at him. ‘What do you mean?’
‘The stag boy has to die. It’s the only way to put things right. Life for life.’
Ash shifted a little, uneasy. He thought about the spectral stag boy he’d seen running in the mountains, the hound boys hungering along his trail. That terrible scream.
‘The land’s sick,’ said Mark. ‘The sickness killed all the sheep. Killed my dad. Now there’s drought, crops all withered in the fields in the valleys, and the old ways are coming back. The land needs blood. The stag boy’s blood. That’s the way it used to be, a sacrifice to the land in a time of want. Well, it’s a time of want again, isn’t it? The land is dying and there are ghosts rising from its bones, ghosts that kill.’
‘Ghost stories. No one believes that stuff, not really.’
‘I believe it,’ said Mark. ‘More than that. I know it’s true. That’s why I asked Callie to bring you here, so I could tell you to pull out of the Stag Chase.’
‘You want me to pull out of the race because of some stupid story about ghosts and the old ways?’ said Ash.
Mark bared his teeth, a smile or a snarl. ‘It’s just a race. It’s not that big a deal.’
‘It’s a big deal to me. No way I’m going to pull out.’
‘Then you’ll die,’ said Mark.
‘I’m not going to die. No one’s going to die.’
Ash gazed into the fire. A charred branch, bowed like the scorched rib of a giant beast, collapsed into the flames. Firefly sparks and flakes of snowy ash eddied skywards. Ash breathed in a lungful of smoke and started to cough. Then he froze, stifling his coughs with his hands.
Someone was watching them.
EIGHT
Ash only caught a glimpse of him. A face among the shadows, a dark bulk. Then the man turned away and was gone, vanished into the night.
‘There’s someone here,’ said Ash. He pointed towards where the man had stood. ‘Over there, in the trees. A man.’
Mark glanced across. ‘No one there now.’
‘He was there. I saw him.’
‘What did he look like?’
Ash shrugged. ‘Big. Wearing dark clothes, I think.’
‘Was he wearing a hat?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe.’
‘Bone Jack,’ muttered Mark. Scowling, angry again.
‘Who?’
‘The wild man, the soul-taker.’
‘The what?’
‘It’s Bone Jack who guards the boundary between the living and the dead out here. He keeps each in its place and he takes lives as he sees fit. My dad. The road-kill stag. It makes no difference to him. It could be you next time. It could be me.’ He grinned. ‘Or maybe I’ll beat him. Maybe I’ll kill all his rooks and take all his power and bring back my dad from the dead.’
Ash stared at him. Perhaps Mark really was crazy and believed all this stuff he was coming out with. Sheep skulls, the old ways, human sacrifice, killing rooks, this creepy Bone Jack character. Bringing back his dad from the dead.
But another, darker thought played through his mind – that Mark wasn’t mad at all. Ash had seen weird, impossible things with his own eyes – the unearthly stag boy fleeing the hounds, the shadows that had chased him along the path, the black feather oozing evil. Maybe it was the world that had gone mad, not Mark.
He shivered.
Mark laughed and jabbed at the fire with a stick. ‘Don’t look so worried. You probably saw a poacher, that’s all. We’re not the only ones out and about in the woods at night.’
Ash forced a smile. ‘Yeah, well, this place is freaky. All those sheep skulls in the trees. Did you do that?’
‘Yeah.’
‘There must be at least a dozen of them,’ said Ash. ‘Where did you get them from?’
‘They were our sheep,’ said Mark. ‘Some of the ones that were slaughtered in the foot-and-mouth outbreak.’
‘They burned the carcasses and buried them. I was there. I saw it. You dug them up again and stuck their skulls in trees? What for?’
Mark shrugged, looked away.
Ash changed the subj
ect. ‘There was something weird going on up near Stag’s Leap the other day,’ he said. ‘Hounds chasing a stag boy.’
‘The Stag Chase isn’t for another couple of weeks yet.’
‘Twelve days. I know. That’s what’s so weird. I saw the whole thing. They ran right past me. Then they vanished into thin air.’
‘Yeah?’ Suddenly Mark seemed guarded, unreadable.
‘Yeah. Callie was out there too, but she said she didn’t see them. She said you’d know something about it.’
Mark smiled. ‘You saw the ghosts.’
‘Right,’ said Ash. ‘Ghosts.’
‘You don’t believe in them. I get that. I didn’t used to believe in them either. But there are plenty of ghosts out in the mountains. You’ll see. This land’s all blood and bone. All the lost and the dead out there.’
‘Ghosts and blood and human sacrifice. It’s crazy. You should just listen to yourself.’
Mark looked sideways at him. ‘It’s like I told you. The land’s dying. Shadows in a wasteland, that’s what we are, Ash Tyler. So the old ways are back and things have to be put right.’
‘You’re not making any sense,’ said Ash. ‘All this dark stuff. It’s all just old legends and ghost stories. You’re not supposed to believe stories like that.’
‘Bone Jack.’ Mark hunched up, rocked himself. ‘Bone Jack took my dad’s life.’
‘Your dad took his own life.’
Mark didn’t answer. He rocked and rocked. Then he stopped, straightened. ‘Those boys you saw,’ he said, ‘the stag boy and the hounds – they were ghosts.’
The pounding of their feet on the parched ground. The stag boy’s stumbling run, the exhaustion on his face. ‘They weren’t ghosts,’ Ash said, uneasy. ‘They looked unreal, but that was just the heat haze. It makes everything look like a mirage. They were flesh and blood, like us.’
‘Flesh-and-blood people don’t vanish into thin air.’
‘What about the boys who were here earlier? The ones who were dancing around the fire? Were they real boys or ghosts?’
‘You weren’t a hound boy last year, were you?’
‘No. I wasn’t old enough. You have to be fifteen.’
‘If you’d been a hound, you’d know. There’s all sorts of rituals and stuff if you’re a hound.’
‘Yeah, I’ve heard about that, the hounds hassling the stag boy, playing pranks, that sort of thing.’
Mark poked the fire with the stick again. The flames guttered and leaped.
‘In the old days,’ he said, ‘it was serious. The hounds distanced themselves from the stag boy, because if they caught him in the Stag Chase, they had to kill him. It meant he was weak, see. Too weak to outrun them. And if he was weak then that meant the land was weak and blight would follow. The crops would fail. The animals would ail and die. There’d be sickness, hunger. Then people would die. So if the hounds caught the stag boy, they killed him. A blood offering to the land, to make it strong again. A sacrifice. That’s bad, isn’t it? That’s savage. But sometimes you have to do bad things to make things right. Sometimes you don’t have a choice.’
The strange stag boy running, desperate, frightened. Running for his life. That final awful scream.
A blood offering.
‘A sacrifice to what? Bone Jack?’
Mark shrugged. ‘To the land. It’s a bargain with the gods of the land, I suppose. People have been sacrificing animals and humans to gods for thousands of years, all over the world.’
‘Yeah, well, so what? Everyone knows those sorts of things used to happen a long time ago. Torture and witch burnings and human sacrifice and other stuff.’
‘Yeah,’ said Mark. ‘This is the twenty-first century. We’re civilised now. We don’t sacrifice people these days. When the land is sick, the government sends men in biohazard suits to kill and quarantine everything. The Stag Chase is just a glorified cross-country race, with costumes and stupid masks and hotdog vans and charity fundraising and TV crews and tourists. But sometimes, when things get really bad, it gets like ancient times again. It’s all blood and darkness again. That’s why you mustn’t be the stag boy.’
‘You really think the hounds are going to kill me?’
‘Not the hounds. Me.’
‘You? You’re full of it, Mark.’
‘Life for life,’ said Mark. ‘The stag boy’s life in exchange for my dad’s. I’m going to bring my dad back, make things right. It’s the stag boy who has to die, not you personally. I don’t want to kill you. That’s why you have to pull out of the race. Let some other boy be the stag.’
‘This is mad,’ said Ash. He watched Mark in the fire’s glow. ‘Really mad. You’re not going to kill me. You’re not going to kill anyone. Come down off the mountain with me. We’ll talk to my mum. Maybe you can stay with us for a while, get yourself sorted.’
‘I am sorted. I’m where I need to be. It’s not like when we were kids, Ash. I’m not going to come home with you and have some supper and then tomorrow we go off downhilling on our bikes somewhere. Those days are gone.’
‘Callie’s worried sick about you. Don’t you even care?’
‘Callie’s just a kid.’
‘She not a kid. She’s fourteen and you’re all she’s got left.’
‘She’s OK. She can look after herself. Besides, he was her dad too. I’m doing all this for her as much as for me. We need our dad back. Both of us.’
Suddenly Ash felt very tired. ‘It’s late,’ he said. ‘I’m going to head off home.’
‘Running away again, Ash Tyler?’
‘If you say so. I don’t need any more of this crap. Bad enough with Dad at home.’
‘At least you’ve still got a dad.’
‘Yeah, I know.’
‘Go on then. Don’t let me stop you.’
‘I’ll come back. Soon.’
‘Whatever. I’ll either be here or I won’t.’
‘Do you need anything? Food or blankets or something?’ Ash stood up. His jaw throbbed where Mark had hit him. He felt light-headed, delirious.
As if from a long way off he heard Mark say, ‘Thanks, but I’ve got everything I need.’
Mark stretched out on the ground next to the fire. Closed his eyes.
Ash walked away. In his mind he heard Mark’s voice again, saying, ‘I don’t want to kill you … let some other boy be the stag.’ It would be easy, so easy to let it go, to walk away from the Stag Chase and whatever madness Mark was spinning around it. Let some other boy be the stag. Let everything be that other boy’s problem.
But he couldn’t do that, wouldn’t do that. He wasn’t about to throw away months of training just because a few strange things had happened and Mark was making wild threats.
He walked on, into a darkness that stretched from horizon to horizon. A night dusted with stars, crowded with ghosts.
NINE
The light was on in the hallway when he got home. He crept upstairs. Darkness under the door of the spare room, where Dad was sleeping. A crack of yellowy light under Mum’s door. He knocked softly and went in.
She was sitting up in bed, reading a book. She looked tired and sad, eyes puffy as if she’d been crying. But she smiled and patted the edge of the bed so he sat there.
‘So did you find Mark?’
‘Yeah.’
‘How did it go? Was it OK?’
‘I suppose. I don’t know. It was weird. He said a lot of mad stuff. He’s mucking around out there, eating road kill and shooting rooks and rabbits and living off the land and stuff.’
‘Eating road kill?’ She pulled a face. ‘And rooks? Yuck. So he’s camping out, is he?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Maybe that’s what he needs to do right now. It’ll pass. When autumn comes and it’s raining and cold, he’ll soon go back to his grandpa’s house.’
‘Yeah, I suppose. How’s Dad been?’
‘Sleeping. That’s all he seems to have done since he got home. I took him up some soup e
arlier. He hadn’t touched his lunch.’
‘What’s wrong with him, Mum? Why did he go off drinking for two days instead of coming straight home like he usually does? He looks ill, really ill. And now he’s shutting himself up in that room and acting crazy.’
‘He’s been through a lot. He just needs to get his bearings and settle back into civilian life. It’s hard but he’ll be OK.’
‘Callie thinks he’s got shell shock.’
‘She’s a smart girl. It’s crossed my mind too.’
‘Right. So shouldn’t we do something? Call a doctor or something?’
‘It’s not that simple,’ she said. ‘There’s already an army counsellor waiting to see him, but he won’t go and he won’t have the counsellor come to the house either. He’s not ready yet, I suppose.’
‘When will he be ready?’
‘I don’t know. Anyway, he’s only been back a couple of days. Maybe once he’s adjusted to being home again, he’ll be all right.’
‘What if he isn’t? What if Callie’s right and he’s got shell shock?’
‘We call it post-traumatic stress disorder these days.’
‘Post-traumatic stress then. What if he’s got that?’
‘Then we’ll deal with it.’
‘What if we can’t?’
‘We will.’
‘Yeah, but what if we can’t? What’s the back-up plan? What if we’re not enough?’
‘It might take some time but we’ll get through this,’ she said. ‘He’s still your dad, the same dad who taught you how to ride a bike and pitch a tent and abseil down a mountain. Don’t forget that. He’s just a bit lost right now.’
‘Suppose he stays lost for ever? He might …’ He couldn’t say it. ‘You know, like Mark’s dad.’
‘He won’t,’ she said sharply. So sharply that he knew she’d had the same thought. Then she changed the subject. ‘Not long now until the Stag Chase.’
‘Yeah, twelve more days.’
‘Are you ready for it?’
‘I think so. I hope so, anyway.’
‘You’ll be careful, won’t you?’ she said. Anxiety creeping into her voice. She’d never liked him running in the mountains. Anything could happen to you, all alone out there, she’d say.
