Bone Jack (17 page)

Instinctively he picked up his pace.

He followed the streambed until it stopped at a wall of rock. Usually there was a waterfall here, a narrow torrent of clear cold mountain water that plunged into a seething pool. Now there was only a slick, slimy height with a stagnant greenish pool at its foot. Water boatmen skating on its surface. Midges storming above it.

He scrambled up the bank to the side of it, gorse ripping at his skin.

Ahead, Black Crag loomed against the skyline.

He paused in a shady hollow to catch his breath. Somewhere far behind him the hound boys would be fanning out, searching, trying to work out his route and his destination.

He left the streambed. He crossed a desert of sharp black shingle spiked with dead brown weeds. Sweat crawled down his face.

Black Crag, as raw as a mountain on the moon. Slopes of black scree, rock, burnt wiry grass. A faint path slashed its way to the summit in full view of anyone looking up from the valleys and ridges below. Everything else was climb or slither. There was no choice but to take the path.

Speed then, if he couldn’t hide. It was too steep and unstable to run here, but he climbed fast. His breath sawing in and out. Sweat glittering on his skin. A knot of pain tightening in his right calf. He’d stretch it out when he found a hidden spot to grab a few moments of rest.

Up here, the wind was stronger and colder, respite from the heavy summer heat. By the time he was halfway up, the sun was no more than a white blur behind thickening grey cloud.

He passed a gorse bush sculpted by the wind into a sideways teardrop. Yellow flowers bright as flames. The path led between two tall stones leaning drunkenly towards each other. Beyond those, a torrent of scree lay between him and the peak. He started across it. Rock fragments skittered behind him and clacked their way down the mountain. He clambered over rock now, thick weatherworn slabs untidily piled up on each other. Ahead lay a craggy climb to the stacked stones of the cairn.

Below, mountain and valley stretched away into deepening murk. It wasn’t eleven o’clock in the morning yet, but already it was as gloomy as dusk.

Summer coming to an end, today of all days.

He stopped to catch his breath and ease out the knot in his calf. On the mountainside across the valley, three figures picked their way up a steep path. Hound boys. He froze. He was out in the open, against the skyline. He cursed softly. They’d see him straight away if they glanced in his direction. Slowly he lowered himself into a crouch then inched behind the nearest jag of rock. He peered around it. The hound boys were still trudging along the path, tiny figures moving in single file.

He watched them until they vanished around the side of the mountain.

They hadn’t seen him. He was safe, for now. But he had to be more careful, keep a lookout, stay down low where there was less chance of being spotted.

He eyed the climb to the summit. It was raw, shelterless. Nowhere to hide if there were more hound boys moving through the nearby mountains.

He’d just have to risk it.

No path here, just a steep ascent over fissured jags of rock, sharp and gritty against his skin. He hauled himself up it by his fingertips and toes.

He pulled himself over the top, lay panting on a patch of hard dirt in the shade of the cairn.

He stood up, still breathing hard, and hefted away the cairn’s top stone. It was heavier than he expected, a smooth weight that slipped through his fingers and clacked noisily down the slope. He froze. If the hound boys he’d seen earlier were still somewhere nearby, they’d surely have heard it. He looked around, listened. Silence. No sign of any movement. They must have moved on. He was OK.

He fumbled in the hollow where the top stone had been. And there was the pendant, just as Sloper had said it would be. He lifted it out. A leather thong threaded through a polished disc cut from an antler. The stag’s head emblem burned onto both sides.

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 hunter’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.’