by Sara Crowe
Dad curled up tighter, pressed his forehead to his knees, rocked himself back and forth. Useless.
‘Did you hurt her?’ said Ash. ‘Where is she? You’d better not have hurt her.’
Nothing.
Ash raced into the hallway, yelling for Mum.
Then he heard her voice.
She was upstairs on the landing, leaning out over the banister. He took the stairs two at a time.
She was all right. He could see that. There wasn’t a mark on her. But he needed her to tell him so he asked anyway.
‘I’m OK,’ she said. ‘Calm down. I’m fine.’
‘There’s blood,’ he said. Still breathless, trembling. ‘There’s blood on the living-room floor.’
She ushered him into her bedroom and closed the door. ‘Your dad cut his hand, that’s all,’ she said. ‘It’s his blood, not mine.’
‘How? What happened?’
‘I didn’t see, but I think he punched the mirror. His hand was still bleeding heavily when I got there but it’s not that bad really. The cuts aren’t deep. I’ve put a dressing on it and I don’t think it needs stitches.’
‘I thought he’d hurt you.’
‘Oh, Ash. He’d never hurt me. Or you. He’d rather die than hurt either of us.’
Ash nodded but he didn’t believe her. Dad wasn’t himself, wasn’t rational. Right now, he seemed capable of anything.
‘What happened, Mum?’ His hands were still shaking. He tried to steady them but he couldn’t. ‘Why did he flip out like that?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I went out for a couple of hours. When I got back, the living room was a mess and he was sitting in the middle of it with the TV on full blast and an empty whisky bottle next to him. I couldn’t find the remote control to turn off the TV.’
‘I pulled the plug out.’
‘Good. I didn’t think of that. I was panicking, I suppose. Anyway, he was bleeding so I ran and got a dressing and bandaged his hand. Then I came up here to phone the doctor.’
‘Right,’ said Ash. ‘Is he coming?’
‘Yes, of course. He’ll be here as soon as he can.’
Footsteps on the stairs and then the landing, slow and heavy. Ash froze. The door to Dad’s room slammed shut.
Mum sighed. ‘Back in his bolthole again. I’d better go down and clear up the living room before the doctor gets here. Will you give me a hand?’
Ash didn’t want to. He was still trembling. He wanted to retreat into his room, like Dad, and play computer games and loud music until his brain fried.
But that would have to wait.
They crept passed the door to Dad’s room and went downstairs. They fetched the vacuum cleaner, a dustpan and brush, a couple of cloths from the cupboard under the stairs. Then they went into the living room.
Ash’s gaze went straight to the black feather. But the feather was gone. He looked around for it on the floor. Nothing.
Where the hell was it?
He searched again. No sign of it.
No one had been in here except Dad. Dad, who’d been staring at the feather, terror written on his face.
Ash’s thoughts raced. Another black feather in the house was more than just a coincidence. It was a message, a warning with some sort of supernatural force. And Dad had understood that too, felt its power. But how had the second feather got into the house? Someone must have brought it and left it in the room with Dad.
Someone else had been here. Who?
His mind was spinning. Dad must know, must have seen someone, but he couldn’t ask him, not right now.
Who’d been here? Who would do this?
None of it made sense.
‘Come on, Ash,’ said Mum. ‘Snap out of it. I thought you were supposed to be helping.’
‘Yeah,’ said Ash. ‘I am going to help. Sorry.’
He picked up the vase and mopped up the spilled water soaking the carpet. Then he looked up.
There was blood on the window, a smeary handprint where Dad must have pressed against it after he’d punched the mirror. Ash wiped a cloth over it, but the blood wouldn’t come off. He stared at it, puzzled, still too much in a daze about Dad and the black feather to think straight.
Then it hit him.
The bloody print was on the outside of the window.
Someone had stood out there, watching Dad. Someone with blood on his hands.
He looked past the handprint, across the lawn to the line of trees beyond. Something stared sightlessly back at him. A sheep skull, wedged in the fork of a branch.
Mark, he thought. The black feather, the bloody handprint, the skull. All this was Mark’s work. Had to be.
Mum was picking up pieces of the broken mirror. ‘I need another cloth,’ said Ash. ‘Back in a minute.’ He stumbled past her with the wet cloth still in his hand. Out into the hallway, out through the front door into sunlight. He stood outside the living-room window, wiped away the blood on the glass while Mum still crouched indoors, with her back to him. Then he yanked the skull from the tree and shoved it deep under the hedge.
He closed his eyes, raised his face to the sun. Let sunlight sear through his eyelids, blinding white blankness.
After a few seconds, he opened his eyes. Blinked away the sun glare.
Mark had been here, freaking out Dad, playing mind games.
Why? A warning, perhaps. A threat. Mark had told him not to run in the Stag Chase and Ash had refused to pull out. Now this.
‘Go to hell, Mark Cullen,’ said Ash, under his breath. ‘Leave my family alone and go to hell.’
THIRTEEN
The doctor came, spent five minutes with Dad, five with Mum, left a small brown bottle of pills on the kitchen table. ‘Call me if things don’t improve,’ he said. Cheery voice, a smile and wave, then his car grinding down the gravel drive and away.
Ash stayed in his room all afternoon, all evening. Mum knocked but he didn’t respond and she didn’t come in. ‘I’ve left some supper for you on the landing,’ she said.
He waited until he heard her go downstairs before he opened the door. A plate piled with sandwiches. He wanted to leave them there, some sort of protest against … what? Dad. Mum. Everything. But hunger got the better of him.
While he was eating, he tried to remember exactly what Mark had said to him in the woods that night. About the Stag Chase, Bone Jack, the old ways.
He went online and searched for ‘Bone Jack’. There were only a handful of hits. The first link led to a page on a medical-school website, dedicated to an anatomical skeleton the students had nicknamed Bone Jack.
A second link took him to a page on an online encyclopedia of folklore and legends.
Bone Jack: an ancient and obscure folkloric figure, particular to the mountainous region around Coldbrook in northern England. Some folklorists place Bone Jack in a loose category of mythic figures associated with nature, wildness and renewal – a category that also includes the Green Man, Lailoken, Myrddin Wyllt, Taliesin and many others. The few early writings that refer to the Bone Jack figure further associate him with the cycle of life and death and with guardianship of the boundary between this world and the Otherworld, attributing him with the ability to shapeshift between human and bird forms – a characteristic that further relates to the pre-Christian Celtic belief that the souls of the dead assume bird form to make their journey to Annwn, the Celtic Otherworld.
Ash sighed. As ever on the internet, every answer only seemed to lead to more questions. Only the name Taliesin was familiar, something or other they’d done in school, though of course he hadn’t paid enough attention and now he couldn’t remember what it was. Nothing for it but to follow the links and read.
He read about Taliesin, a sixth-century Welsh bard whose name meant ‘shining brow’ and whose story was part history and part myth – servant to a sorceress called Ceridwen, a shapeshifter, a poet nowadays best remembered for his most famous poem, The Battle of the Trees. Ash clicked on another link and read about Lailoken, also from
the sixth century, a mad prophet, a wild man who lived deep in the Caledonian Forest and had an affinity with wild creatures. And Myrddin Wyllt, another crazy wild man of the forest, a character some people thought was the original Merlin.
Last, he looked up the Green Man, and he was the strangest and most ancient figure of them all, leaves and shoots growing from his flesh, a spirit of springtime, rebirth and growth.
Bone Jack had things in common with all of them. He was a wild man who lived in a wild place and seemed to prefer the company of birds and beasts to that of humans. A shapeshifter, a shaman moving across different realities. The Green Man’s dark alter ego in nature’s great cycle of life and death and renewal.
It seemed impossible that the wild man he’d met in the mountains could really be Bone Jack, a mythic figure, some sort of dark fairy tale from a distant past. Ash remembered the unnatural speed the man had seemed to move at, but there could be a rational explanation for that, couldn’t there? There could have been two men out there, brothers, almost identical in their tramp clothing. One behind him on the path and one ahead, lying in wait. And maybe Ash had fled from one brother only to run straight into the second.
But much as Ash wanted to believe in his rational explanation, it somehow seemed less likely than the possibility that the man really was Bone Jack – wild, ancient, a myth come to life – and that there really were ghosts in the mountains, spectral hound boys racing across the land. And then there was Mark, caught up in it all, spinning out of control, threatening Ash, chasing some insane scheme to bring back his father from the Otherworld.
The Otherworld, Annwn. If Bone Jack really was the guardian of the boundary between life and death then that meant Mark would have to somehow get past Bone Jack to reach his father. He remembered what Mark had said that night in the woods, about killing Bone Jack’s rooks and taking his power.
And if Mark was attacking Bone Jack then maybe he would come after Mark, after all of them. Maybe it was Bone Jack who sent out the spectral hound boys to hunt, to kill.
He shook his head, laughed at himself. The whole thing was like something from a book or a movie, not something from real life.
He shut down the laptop and went to the window to close the curtains. Taped to the window pane was a scrap of paper with something scrawled on it. Frowning, he pulled it off.
‘We need to talk,’ it said. ‘My camp, tomorrow. Or I’ll find you.’
Mark. He must have sneaked up here to Ash’s room when he’d come to play mind games with Dad.
‘Get lost, Mark,’ said Ash, under his breath. He crumpled the paper into a tiny ball and tossed it into the wastepaper basket.
He switched off the light and lay on his back in the dark. He listened. The night was full of little sounds, the tap of twigs against the window, leaves stirring in the breeze, the distant fluting of an owl. Every sound made Ash’s heart race. Now he thought he heard footsteps on the gravel, coming up the drive. Someone prowling outside. The feather that had been in the living room, still somewhere in the house, oozing evil. Summoning dark forces like a curse.
Anything might be out there, coming for him through the clammy night.
Another tiny sound, inside the house this time. Then another, and another. He lay still, breathing quietly, concentrating. The sounds consolidated into actions: a door opening and closing softly, the pad of bare feet along the landing, down the stairs.
Dad, wandering around the house in the dark.
There was a long silence. Then the click of the front door shutting.
Ash rolled out of bed and went to the window. The waxing moon hung above Tolley Carn like a bent silver coin.
A shadow slipped through the darkness that edged the drive. Then it moved out into the wash of moonlight at the gate.
Dad.
Ash watched him go out through the gate, turn right along the lane, vanish into the night. Nothing up the lane except mountains and a few farms.
No one Dad would visit at this time of night.
Panic raced through Ash. Dad out in the mountains, disturbed and alone. Anything could happen to him.
He switched on the bedside lamp, pulled on his clothes. Briefly he thought about waking Mum. Then he dismissed the idea; she was worried enough already, no point making things worse. So he crept through the house, out of the front door, loped down the drive. No sign of Dad on the lane, but Ash knew which way he’d gone.
He started to run.
The hot dark prickled against his skin. He ran under a skyful of stars. The moon above the jagged skyline. Silence. Nothing moving in the hedges or fields, no breeze rustling the leaves, not even the distant drone of a car. Only the thump of his feet, his heartbeat, the rhythm of his breath.
He slowed around the bend. Dad couldn’t be far ahead. Ash didn’t want to come charging out of the night, scare him.
The lane stretched away, silvery grey in the moonlight.
No sign of Dad.
Tall hedges on either side, dry-stone wall further along the lane. No turnings. Nowhere to go except straight ahead.
But Dad wasn’t there.
Then Ash remembered that there was a little stile somewhere here, hidden away in the thick cover of dusty leaves. Dad must have gone that way. There was nowhere else.
He found the crease in the hedge where the stile was, pushed through dense foliage, felt a lash of tingling heat across the back of his hand where it brushed against a nettle.
Beyond the stile, a faint footpath slanted across a scrubby field and on the far side strode a shadowy figure, quick and purposeful.
Ash followed.
Through the mountains, black and soft grey like a charcoal sketch, intense here and smudged there. A burned world. The air thick and warm with a nip to it. Moths grazing his skin.
Silence except for his own footfalls. The shrill scolding of a bird nearby, disturbed by his presence. A thin shriek, some tiny mammal taken by owl or stoat or fox.
Sometimes he saw Dad in the distance. Sometimes he lost sight of him and panicked and hurried and had to stop himself from calling out.
They were up on Stag’s Leap now, rock veined with moonlight, and Dad was standing at the edge, the very edge.
Ash stood rooted to the spot, watching, his heart racing.
But Dad didn’t jump. He pulled something out of his pocket, held it out over the drop, let go of it. A little dart of shadow spiralling down.
The black feather.
It had to be.
Then Dad turned, came back down the slope to the path. Ash waited, then followed again, along a narrow track that hugged the shoulder of the mountain.
Ahead lay the Cullen farm, dark and silent. Dad stopped at the gate, stood there for a while. Then he turned, looked straight towards Ash. Must have known he was there all along. Ash walked along the track towards him.
‘Home now then, lad?’ said Dad. Soft-voiced, gentle.
‘Yeah.’
They walked on for a while.
‘You dropped something over the edge,’ said Ash. ‘I saw you, up on the Leap. What was it?’
Dad didn’t answer.
‘Why did you come out here, Dad?’
Dad drew a long breath, let it out slowly. ‘Tom Cullen,’ he said. ‘He was my best mate when we were boys. Like you and Mark we were. We used to go off hunting, fishing, climbing. Not so much later on though. Him with the farm, me with the army. Marriage, kids, all that. Time passes. And now he’s dead.’
‘It’s not your fault.’
‘Isn’t it? I could have been a better friend to him. I could have kept in touch, spent time with him when I was home on leave. I meant to. I just never got round to it and now it’s too late.’
‘You weren’t to know.’
‘That’s the thing though. I should have known. Him out there on his own after Ella died, two kids to raise and a farm to run. Then there was the foot-and-mouth outbreak, his stock slaughtered. I suppose he’d just used up all his strength by then. No re
serves left. I should have been here. I should have done something.’
‘You were overseas,’ said Ash. ‘You were fighting a war.’
‘People keep dying around me,’ said Dad. ‘And I keep surviving.’
‘Is that what happened in the war?’
‘It’s what war is. People killing each other. People dying. You try not to be one of them. If you’re lucky, you get to come home in one piece.’
‘It was really bad, wasn’t it?’
‘Yeah, it was really bad.’
They walked on in silence for a while.
‘That thing you dropped from the Leap,’ said Ash. ‘I know what it was.’
‘You do?’
‘Yeah, I do. It was the black feather that was on the floor in the living room.’
‘Yeah.’ Sharp and hard. ‘How did you know?’
Ash shrugged. ‘Just a guess. You were staring at it, then it disappeared with you when you left the room. Where did it come from?’
‘A bird, I suppose.’
‘Ha-ha. At least you’re still making rubbish jokes anyway.’
‘All I’m good for these days.’
‘That feather though,’ said Ash. ‘Tell me about that.’
‘It reminded me of something from a long time ago. Stupid, really.’
‘Tell me, Dad.’
Dad shrugged, sighed, shut down.
‘How did it get in the house?’ said Ash. Pushing, not letting Dad retreat into another of his silences. ‘Who brought it in?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Dad. ‘There was someone else there. I saw him but I don’t know who he was. A face like a skull at the window. Hands dripping with blood.’ He stopped, ran his fingers through his hair. ‘I thought it was … someone or something that came back with me from the desert, something vengeful. Haunting me. I see them sometimes, in my dreams. The dead. Then there was that feather and … maybe I’m just …’
Breaking up, falling apart again.
‘Just what?’
‘I don’t know. Hallucinating or something.’
‘You’re not,’ said Ash. ‘It wasn’t anything to do with the war. It’s something else, something to do with the Stag Chase.’
