by Sara Crowe
He put the thong around his neck. Now it was his. But retrieving the pendant was the easy part. The difficult bit was what came next: making it back to Thornditch before the hound boys caught up with him. By now, they’d have spread out through the valleys and mountains. They’d be scouring the slopes for any sign of him. If any of them spotted him, the cry would go up and they’d all come running.
The time for speed was over. From now on, it was stealth that mattered most.
First he needed to get his breath back. He sat down on a flat rock with his back against the cairn. Stretched and flexed his legs until the cramp in his calf loosened. His breathing slowed, heart rate slowed.
At eye level, a buzzard circled in the darkening sky then veered off southwards, towards the shelter of valley and woodland.
A few fat drops of rain hit his face and arms. He looked up, hardly believing it. After nearly three months of drought, rain. He lifted his face to it, tasted it on his tongue. It was real, rain falling hard and fast now. Soon the parched mountain streams would run with water again. There’d be green in the valleys instead of browns and dull golds. The bad times were over. The land would heal. It was going to be all right.
He stood and raised his arms to the sky. Suddenly he felt giddy with excitement, the Stag Chase momentarily forgotten as he laughed and spun in the downpour. The rain washed the sweat and dust from his skin.
Clouds piled in from the north. The wind moaned over the rocks.
Ash stopped his joyful dance. He looked towards the horizon, and the clouds blotted out the sun.
TWENTY-EIGHT
The gloom leeched colour from the land. Greyed the scorched grass, dulled the bracken, tarred the rocks with shadow.
Along the eastern horizon a line of enormous boulders hunched like giant crouching beasts under the angry sky.
Shivering with cold, Ash started back down Black Crag.
Halfway down, he slid on a slick of loose stone, feet skidding out from under him. He fell onto gorse. The long needles stabbed into his hand. He scrambled free, stood and pulled needles one by one from his flesh. Beads of blood welled out. Fear ran through him, as if the scent of his blood might bring predators hungering along his trail.
As if in reply, the soughing wind carried the distant baying of the hound boys to him. He stopped to listen, uneasy, wondering if these were real boys or wraiths. Either way, they’d seen him, must have. His heartbeat quickened. Now the chase was really on.
The wind drove the rain into him. Thunder growled. A few seconds later, lightning ripped through the gathering dark.
He set off again, followed a path around the shoulder of the mountain, out of sight of the hounds. He descended more slowly now, placed his feet carefully. He reached a short drop and eased over the edge, hooked his fingers into crevices, pressed himself against stone already slippery with rain. Felt around for toeholds, descended a little further. Halfway down he lost his grip. He landed awkwardly, banged his ankle against a knuckle of rock. He rubbed it, tested his weight on it. Bruised but nothing broken, nothing sprained.
No path here. Instead there was only a dense scrub of heather and gorse, bracken and stunted thorn trees.
He glanced back up towards the summit. In the storm light, Black Crag looked different. Not transformed exactly but somehow more than itself, its features taken to extremes. Its southern flank rose in rocky jags like the hackles of a hyena to its blunt summit. Then it dropped down to the north in a series of huge steps.
The hound boys bayed again, closer this time, their calls echoed by other boys scattered through the nearby mountains and valleys. They were the hunters and he was the hunted. Suddenly he felt sick with fear.
Breathe. Think.
The rain slanted in, sheets of it, grey and cold.
Without a path to follow, the going was rough. His feet sank into the thick mattress of scratchy heather. Already the skin around his ankles felt raw. He lumbered on, wading through the dense growth, moving from one rocky island to the next.
The rain changed. It became thinner and harder. It stung like grit on his exposed skin. His soaked vest and shorts clung uncomfortably to his body.
At last he came to another path. It was faint, the merest trace. Worn by generations of grazing sheep, leading nowhere in particular. But at least it was a path. Head down under the tilted mask, he ran along it, down into the valley and around Midsummer Tor to where the western end of Stag’s Leap rose like a vast petrified wave from the valley floor.
The wind picked up, hammered him with hard howling gusts. Rain swept across the land in chains. It bounced off the rock, off sun-baked mud, off patches of grass, exploded into a fine mist. Raindrops glittered in his eyelashes.
He heard faraway voices again. In the near distance, figures moved through the blur of rain. He crouched in the bracken, watching them through a lattice of fronds. Three of them, hound boys, walking in single file. Flesh and blood boys, solid and steady.
They came out onto the open ground and stopped. Ash froze, held his breath. Any moment now they’d look his way, see him crouching there, bedraggled and pathetic.
The wind carried their voices.
‘Are you sure you saw him? Sure he came this way?’
‘He must have. There’s nowhere else he could go without us seeing him. He must be up on the Leap somewhere.’
‘Can’t see a damn thing in this rain. We should have run faster. We should have got to him before the storm started.’
‘He can’t have gone far. Running into that wind’s like running into a bloody wall.’
‘He’s probably hiding around here somewhere, crawled into a hole or hiding behind a rock or something.’
Ash froze. If they started searching, it wouldn’t take long for them to find him.
‘Split up,’ said one of them. ‘Scout around.’
Ash hunkered down further, a tight ball in a thicket of bracken. He heard one of them blunder towards him, singing under his breath. Hush, little stag boy, don’t you cry … The hound boy stopped and stood so close that Ash imagined he could feel the heat from his body, hear the raindrops hitting his skin.
Ash closed his eyes. If I can’t see him then he can’t see me.
All at once, the hound boy turned and crashed away.
Ash opened his eyes, peered through the bracken again.
They were standing together about ten metres away. He could hear the urgency in their voices but he couldn’t make out their words. Then one of them gestured down the mountainside. A few seconds later they headed off, loping along like wolves following the scent trail of their prey.
Ash huddled in the hard rain, shivering, blinking water from his eyelashes.
When he was sure they must be too far away to look back and see him, he stood up.
The hound boys were lost to the rain haze but they were still out there somewhere, most likely seeking out others to help them search.
He’d have to move fast.
He’d climbed the northern slope of the Leap with Dad at least a dozen times. It was a slog but straightforward enough, no need for ropes. Even in the sheeting rain, he climbed steadily.
At the top, he stopped. In the storm gloom, he was no longer afraid that the hound boys would see him. He could run the length of the ridge, descend along the path that dropped down past the Cullen farm to the valley, loop around and return to Thornditch from the east.
He set off at a steady trot, stones clacking underfoot, mud spattering up his legs.
He ran half a mile along the ridge.
Then, through the welter of the storm, a figure came towards him.
TWENTY-NINE
A hazy shadow at first, featureless. Then, as the figure came closer, Ash made out more detail. The ragged outline of a hound mask. A muscular body streaked with pale clay.
Somehow he’d already known it would be Mark. The unhurried stride towards him, the lowered head, the arms swinging a little, loose and dangerous. A warrior’s walk, not a hunt
er’s.
No point in running now.
Mark stopped a few feet away, facing him. Watched him from behind his mask.
‘You’re bleeding,’ said Mark. ‘I can smell it. That’s how I found you. I followed the scent of your blood and it led me straight to you.’
‘Don’t talk crap,’ said Ash. ‘You’re a boy, not a real hound.’
Mark laughed. ‘It would be good though, wouldn’t it? Tracking you down by the scent of your blood.’
‘So how did you find me?’
‘I knew you’d come to the Leap.’
‘You can’t have known. Even I didn’t know.’
‘And yet here you are.’
‘What now?’ said Ash.
But he already knew the answer. He was caught. His Stag Chase was over. All that training, everything he’d gone through, it was all for nothing in the end. He wouldn’t cross the finishing line in triumph, wouldn’t get to wear the antler headdress. Even if Mum got Dad to leave the house and brought him to the finish, there’d be no victory to celebrate. All that was over now. He might as well have given up before the race started, like he’d wanted to.
He didn’t even care any more. It was over. He’d failed. That was that.
He took the stag’s head pendant from around his neck and held it out to Mark. ‘Take it. I’m done. I’m going home.’
‘I don’t want it.’
‘I’m not looking for favours. You caught me, fair and square. You’ve won and I’ve lost. Take it.’
‘You still don’t get it, do you?’ said Mark. He wrenched off his mask, hurled it into the wind. ‘I don’t care about the stupid pendant. I don’t care who wins the race. That’s not what it’s about.’
Ash tied the leather thong of the pendant around his neck again. He’d hand it in when he came down from the mountain, give it to Sloper, then go home, sleep. But first he had to deal with Mark.
‘So what is it about then?’
‘You. Me. My dad.’ He gazed away, into the gloom. ‘My dad, he never should have died. It wasn’t his time. It was a mistake. And I have to put things right.’
‘By killing me? That’s really what you’ve come here to do?’
Mark smiled, turned his back on Ash, opened his arms. ‘Don’t you see them?’ he said. ‘The wraiths? They’re all around you. You must have seen them. I know you’ve seen them. The hound boys from the old days, from the dark times.’
Ash peered into the driving rain. Movement in its depths, blurry shadows advancing. A dozen or more of them, their movements erratic and unnatural. They leaped and twisted, flitted this way and that with a speed and lightness that no flesh-and-blood boy possessed.
The hairs on the back of his neck prickled. ‘What do they want?’
‘They want the stag boy. You. They want blood and death.’
‘Why though? Why me? What for?’
Mark smiled at him, cold and strange. ‘It’s nothing personal. They’re hounds and you’re the stag boy. They hunt and kill. It’s just what they do. It’s all they know.’
‘So what are they? The ghosts of medieval psychopaths or something?’
Mark shook his head. ‘Like I told you before, in the old days if the hounds caught the stag boy, they’d kill him. A blood offering to the land. Centuries of blood and death and terror, the old ways written into the land, like memories. People tried to forget them, but they won’t be forgotten.’
‘How do you know all this?’
‘Because a few folk refused to forget. They passed it on, father to son, mother to daughter, down the generations. My grandpa told it to my dad and my dad told it to me. That’s how I know. The past doesn’t go away, Ash Tyler, no matter how much people want it to. It’s still all around us. It has an afterlife of its own.’
Ash shivered, still watching the dim shapes of the wraith hound boys moving through the rain.
Mark came closer. Head down, skip, skip, from foot to foot. ‘Out here, if you take something then you have to give something back,’ he said. ‘It’s the way of things. Once upon a time, people knew that. That’s what the stag boy is supposed to be, a sacrifice to the land in times of hardship. Well, it’s a time of hardship now, isn’t it? The sheep all slaughtered, the land diseased, my dad dead and other hill farmers going bankrupt, getting kicked off their land. Sometimes we have to go back to the old ways to put things right. Blood for blood, life for life.’ He stopped skipping, lifted his head. Eyes bright and fierce behind the mask. ‘The stag boy’s life in exchange for my dad’s.’
The wraiths came closer through the murk. Baying, yelping, howling.
Ash started to back away. ‘Your dad’s dead,’ he said. ‘Nothing’s going to bring him back.’
‘Look around you,’ said Mark. ‘All those hound boys are dead. But they’ve come back.’
‘No,’ said Ash. ‘They haven’t come back, not really. They’re wraiths, ghosts. They’re not alive like me and you. Is that what you want? Your dad like one of those howling crazy things out there?’
‘Earth and stone needs blood and bone, Ash Tyler. It always has and it always will. It takes life so that it can give life. Life for life. I didn’t want it to be you. I told you to pull out of the race. I tried to save you.’
‘Then what? You’d sacrifice some other kid instead of me? You’ve lost it, Mark. You’re crazy. Stark staring mad. What the hell happened to you?’
Mark took a step towards him. ‘This is what happened. I came out here into the mountains. I thought about my dad. I couldn’t stop thinking about him. I walked and walked. I didn’t eat for days. I didn’t sleep. I walked and I searched and in the end the ghosts came to me from their dead place, hound boys from the ancient days. They were weak then, whispering voices and a breath of mist. But they got stronger every day. They whispered things to me. They told me to kill the birds.’
‘The birds?’
Mark nodded. ‘Bone Jack’s rooks. Kill the birds and take Bone Jack’s power. Now he’s the weak one, too weak to stop the dead getting through. Bone Jack can’t stop the hound boys. He can’t stop me bringing back my dad.’
Ash remembered the wolf. That must have come through too, somehow. That was why Bone Jack had come for it. Back where it belongs, he had said. Back to Annwn, the Otherworld. But the wolf hadn’t been a wraith. It had felt real, solid. He’d run his fingers through its fur, searching for a collar. He’d felt its ribs, felt its hot breath on his skin as he’d dribbled water into its mouth.
Maybe it was different with animals, or it had been dead a shorter time. Or maybe the hound boys weren’t as wraithlike as they looked.
He switched his attention back to Mark. ‘If Bone Jack can’t stop you bringing back your dad, why don’t you just go and get him? Why are you out here? Why do you need to kill me?’
Mark shook his head at him. His eyes were wild, dangerous. ‘It’s how it has to be,’ he said. ‘Life for life.’
‘I don’t care about your crazy stuff any more,’ said Ash. ‘I ran this race for my dad. That’s it. Now you’ve caught me so it’s over. Got it? It’s over. I’m going home.’
He backed away further. Now the ghost hound boys tore from the gloom, spun and lunged and soared. One of them hurtled past him. He felt the boy’s cold airy touch against his skin, breathed in the ancient stink of the grave.
He flinched, shuddered. ‘Call them off, Mark,’ he said. ‘Get them off me!’
Mark shook his head. ‘I can’t. I don’t tell them what to do, and it’s not over just because you want it to be.’
The hounds drew back into the rain, regrouped. Endlessly moving, shifting, advancing again, circling, crowding around Ash. They were in front of him, to his side, behind him. One moment they just seemed like boys in masks, boys like him. The next they were wraiths, rags of mist veiling scorched bone, lipless grins, empty eye sockets.
Ash hurled himself in the only direction left open to him. Scrambled over scree, slipping on wet black stone as shiny as plastic. Acro
ss springy turf that squelched underfoot, on to rain-slick rock.
He glanced back. Mark was standing where he’d left him, hands on hips, watching him. As if he knew it wasn’t worth chasing, knew Ash couldn’t get away.
Ash ran harder, faster.
Again the hound boys advanced through the rain. Still spinning and leaping but moving forward slowly, as if it didn’t really matter that he’d bolted. As if they, like Mark, already knew that he couldn’t get away.
Rain swept over the ridge. The wind screamed. And through it came Mark, and the wind’s scream was his scream, and so too was the beating of Ash’s heart and the pounding of his blood, all one squalling primal shriek.
Mark flew at him. Smashed into him, seized him, beat him down onto rock and pooling rainwater. Ash threw out wild panicky punches. He twisted free, rolled over, scrambled away on all fours. He got to his feet, winded and gasping for breath. But Mark wasn’t done yet. He cannoned into Ash again, a low tackle that sent Ash reeling backwards.
Ash hollered at him through the wind and rain.
Mark came at him a third time. Again the impact shunted Ash backwards. Then he realised. That was what Mark wanted, to push him back and back until he fell off the edge, like the other stag boy must have fallen, flailing down onto the splintered rocks below.
Ash veered away from the edge. He stood gasping in the rain, head down, facing Mark. ‘You can’t do this,’ he said. ‘Your dad wouldn’t want you to do this.’
‘You don’t know what my dad would want.’
‘I do,’ said Ash. ‘I know. Those things, those wraiths, came after my dad when he was the stag boy twenty years ago. They got into his head and because of them he ended up on the Leap and about to jump off. I don’t know how but they made him want to jump. But your dad saw my dad standing there, right at the edge, and he pulled him back. He saved my dad’s life.’
