Bone Jack (6 page)

‘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.

But she’d never stopped him.

‘Training is one thing,’ she said. ‘You can decide your own route and set your own pace when you’re training. The Stag Chase is different. It’s a race, a tough race. The pressure will be on. Don’t let it get to you. Don’t do anything dangerous just to win it.’

‘I won’t, Mum.’

‘Promise?’

‘I promise.’

‘OK then.’ She smiled. ‘You look like you could do with some sleep.’

‘Yeah, it’s been a long day.’

‘Bed then.’

In his room, he lay in his bed as if it was a boat in the silent ocean of the night. Tiredness washed through him, and he surrendered to it.

TEN

The days passed, glassy with heat, the nights as thick as tar. Dad shut in his room and Mum restless, spending most of her time in the garden or visiting friends. It seemed to Ash that life was on hold, all of them adrift on a windless sea, choosing not to look at the storm clouds gathering on the horizon. He slept, he ran, he ate, he played computer games, read books, tried to stay focused.

Every day now, he saw other boys out running in the mountains. They ran in pairs and sometimes in packs. Hound boys, training for the race. Some were boys he’d never seen before, from towns and villages further out in the mountains. Others he knew from school, boys he’d been friendly with until he’d beaten them in the trials and become the stag boy. Sometimes they passed him, silent, their eyes cold and hostile. Sometimes they ran alongside him for a while, jostled him, veered off laughing. He hated it but he knew the score. The stag boy was always an outcast in the weeks between winning the trials and running in the Stag Chase itself. So Ash kept his gaze on the path ahead, kept running. It was him against them now until after the race.

Twice he saw a distant figure silhouetted against the sky and he was sure it was Mark. Standing above and apart from it all, watching. He remembered Mark’s words again and shivered.
It’s the stag boy who has to die … I don’t want to kill you.

After a week of being hassled by hound boys, Ash started to run a different route – one that took him far away from where the other boys ran, far from the Cullen farm and Stag’s Leap. He took the little paths, the ancient paths, and ran north then northwest, beyond the wide farming valleys and into the wildlands.

He almost tripped over the dog.

It was lying in a hollow where the path tucked down between high banks of gorse. A big dog, with a rough black and grey coat matted with muck and dried blood.

Someone’s pet, lost or dumped out here in the mountains, in the middle of nowhere.

Ash crouched beside it. It didn’t move, didn’t even seem to be breathing. It looked dead but, in case it wasn’t, he spoke reassuringly to it. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘It’s all right, boy. I won’t hurt you.’

No reaction. The dog lay there looking like a moth-eaten fur coat that had been dragged through the dirt.

It must have owners somewhere, people who cared about it, missed it. They were probably out searching for it this very moment, worried sick. He pushed his fingers into the thick hair around its neck. He felt for a collar but there wasn’t one.

Maybe it was a stray after all, living wild out here, far away from people.

He ran his hands along its body, felt its bones sharp through its heavy coat. Every rib, every vertebra.

A low rumble in its throat. Ash snatched away his hand.

Its eyes half opened: light amber eyes, wolf eyes. A gaze as ancient and wild as the mountains themselves.

Ash drew a sharp breath. ‘Where did you come from then?’ he said softly. ‘How did you end up out here?’

The wolf-dog curled its lip as if it wanted to snarl and snap but didn’t have the strength.

The spell broke. It was just a dog after all, Ash thought, a half-starved feral stray.

Feral or not, he couldn’t leave it to die. He rocked back on his heels and thought about what to do. The dog was too big and heavy to carry back through the mountains. He needed help. He stood up, looked all around, listened. They were a long way from the main trails, but sometimes hikers left the beaten track and ventured out here along the little twisting paths.

Not this morning though.

Something moved on the mountainside. A clot of darkness, racing towards them. He squinted into the sun, trying to see what was casting the shadow, but there was only the empty land and the empty sky. The shadow sped closer, coming straight for him. He ducked as it reached him. Then it stopped. It lay over and all around him. He looked up from within its darkness, his heart thudding. Nothing there but the scrub of gorse and bracken, the distant peaks.

Nothing that could cast a shadow like this.

The wolf-dog growled softly, a warning.

The shadow shook apart, shattering into fragments that morphed into inky, ethereal human figures that fled this way and that.

Then the shadow-figures thinned, dissolved into sunlight until there was nothing there any more.

Ash stood up, heart thumping. He scanned the horizon in every direction.

No shadows. No people around who might have cast them.

Yet he could still sense their presence. Not evil exactly but savage and predatory, lurking out of sight somewhere on the raw rocky land. And him and the wolf-dog out here alone, miles from anywhere, fragile specks of bone and blood and soft flesh.

He felt like a mouse waiting for a hawk to strike.

But nothing struck. The shadow figures were gone.

If they had ever been there at all.

He switched his attention back to the wolf-dog. He took a bottle from his backpack and dribbled water into its mouth. It licked its lips and swallowed. He carried on feeding it water until the bottle was empty. By then, the dog’s gaze had lost some of its hardness.

It still didn’t look exactly friendly though.

And it needed a lot more than water. It needed serious help, a vet. Maybe it was already too far gone even for that.

He knew his mobile wouldn’t work out here. He could never get a signal in the mountains beyond Tolley Carn. It was like a black hole for mobile phones. He only brought the thing out with him because Mum insisted. He tried it anyway, just in case. Sure enough, a blue No Signal message flashed up on the screen.

He could run back to the village, fetch Dad. But he was miles out. It would take too long to get home and back again and he couldn’t rely on Dad for help anyway, not any more.

It was all down to him.

His best bet was to reach a road and flag down a car.

‘I’m going to fetch help,’ he told the dog. ‘I’ll be back soon.’ He rolled his eyes at himself. Explaining to a dog. Idiot.

He climbed up onto the higher ground above the path. A couple of hundred metres away, a rocky outcrop as tall as a house jutted from the mountainside. He scrambled up it and stood at its summit. From here he could see for miles. But there was no one in sight, no roads, no buildings, nothing. As if civilisation no longer existed.

Ahead of him, the mountainside dipped down into a wide, deep valley with a straggly thicket of thorn trees running most of its length.

A tiny movement about the trees, a breath of bluish smoke unwinding.

Campers, most likely.

They’d do.

He returned to the path and ran down it until a hunch of mountain hid the thorn trees and the path zagged in the wrong direction. He left it behind and loped across rough terrain, through bracken and gorse, over rocks and humps of gnarly root. Then he was out of the rough, running easily across a greasy stretch of short wiry grass. He splashed across a shallow, sluggish stream that had once been a small river and barged his way through the spiky wall of thorn trees onto open ground.

Ahead stood an ancient shepherds’ bothy, a small rectangular building with thick stone walls, a turf roof, two deep-set windows hazed with grime. Smoke drifted from a little crooked chimney.

There was a doorway, but in place of a door hung a curtain of strings of bird skulls and small bones. The breeze clattered them against each other like Halloween wind chimes.

Behind the bone-strings, the interior of the bothy was a deep quiet darkness.

A flurry of movement in the trees behind him, harsh cries, beating air.

He turned. Rooks, scores of them. They dropped down onto branches, stretched their necks at him. They rattled their night-black feathers, gun-metal beaks wide open, screaming at him with their rough voices.

The dread he’d felt on the mountain when the shadow dropped over him rushed back. He shot a quick glance at the bothy and glimpsed a face through the window, blurry and dim as a fish moving through murky water. Then it was gone again.

Ash raced back through the trees the way he had come.

And a man stepped out in front of him.

ELEVEN

Ash hurled himself between the trees. Thorns ripped at his clothes, hair, skin. He crashed through twigs and bright green leaves and raced towards the open ground beyond. Then his foot hooked on a loop of bramble and threw him forward. He twisted as he fell and crashed sideways into a tree.

Heavy hands seized his shoulders and wrenched him round. He glimpsed a raggedy coat, a floppy wide-brimmed hat, grey stubble, mad blue eyes. The man looked vaguely familiar, in the way that a stranger who’d asked you for directions a week ago might look familiar. But there was no time to think about that now. Ash bucked his body. He threw out a wild kick and felt his foot connect with bone. His fist sank into the thickness of the man’s coat.

The man didn’t let go. Instead his fingers dug deeper into Ash’s shoulders.

‘What are you doing here, boy?’ he said. His breath smelled like dead leaves. ‘What are you after, eh?’

‘Nothing.’ Ash’s voice came out in a pathetic whisper.

‘Liar.’

‘I came to get help, that’s all. I found a dog.’

‘What dog? I don’t see a dog. Where is it?’

‘Not here. It’s further up the mountain. It’s sick, just lying on the ground like it can’t get up.’

The man’s grip loosened a little bit. ‘What sort of dog? What’s it look like?’

‘I don’t know what sort. A big dog, black and grey and covered in muck. It’s got eyes like a wolf’s and it’s really thin. I could feel all its bones. I thought it was dead at first but it wasn’t. I think it’s dying though.’

‘Eyes like a wolf’s, eh?’ The man’s hands slid away from Ash’s shoulders. Instantly, Ash launched himself along the path.

Something shot past him, a bolt of untidy black like a bird flying parallel to the ground.

The man was in front of him again.

Ash froze, his breath coming in quick panicky gasps. It was impossible. There was no way the man could have got in front of him so quickly.

No way.

Ash tried to speak but the words wouldn’t come out.

‘Don’t try running off again,’ said the man. There was no menace in his voice. There didn’t need to be. ‘Take me to this dog with eyes like a wolf’s. Quick, now.’

Ash sucked in air.

There was no choice except to do what the man told him. In silence, Ash led him across the stream to the rough ground beyond. He was shaking so badly his legs barely obeyed him. Get a grip, he told himself. Breathe. Focus. Talk to him. Get him to like you a bit so maybe he won’t kill you.

He forced out the words. ‘Is that where you live, in that old bothy?’

‘Aye.’

‘I’ve run out here a few times but I’ve never seen it before.’

The man grunted. ‘There are lots of things folks don’t see.’

He walked with a long, unhurried stride, the way Ash had seen shepherds walk. Maybe that was all the man really was, a shepherd, still living out in the mountains even though the sheep were long gone.

‘My name’s Ash,’ he said. He felt ridiculous, struggling to make small talk with his captor. ‘I’m from Thornditch. I just came out for a run and then I found the dog and came looking for help. I didn’t mean to disturb you or to trespass or anything.’

‘I know who you are,’ said the man.

Fear flooded through Ash again. He fell silent.

They reached the path and slogged uphill. The morning sun was hot on Ash’s back. Tiny brown birds flitted and chattered in the gorse. A shiny dung beetle blundered across the path.

It all seemed so ordinary.

Except that he was walking with a freak who was wearing a thick coat and a hat on a hot day and who moved with supernatural speed. The man could be a serial killer for all Ash knew, and they were miles from anywhere, miles from help. He could be murdered and buried out here and his body would never be found. No one would ever know.

Sweat crawled down his spine.

The dog was exactly as he’d left it only now its eyes were closed again. Ash stared down at it. ‘It looks dead,’ he said. ‘We’re too late. It’s dead.’

The man grunted. ‘Dead or not, back he’ll go.’

‘Back where?’

‘Back to the valley, with me.’

‘Where your bothy is?’

‘Aye. Back there, back where he belongs.’