Blacklands

by Belinda Bauer

  He flailed wildly with his hands and caught Avery on the bloody wound inflicted by the son of Mason Dingle. Avery yelped and, for a glorious second, let go of his hair. Steven almost fell with the release of his head.

  Then the punch caught him unawares and knocked every bit of air and every bit of fight clean out of him.

  He lay dazed, only aware that his face was in the cold wet heather, then—from a long way off—he felt his body being manhandled onto its back, floppy as a fish.

  Hands tugged at his jeans.

  A wave of blackness made his stomach clench—and he doubled up and vomited violently all over himself and Arnold Avery.

  In the split second of still silence that followed, he noticed a chunk of guilty tomato on Avery’s sleeve, before the man recoiled from him with a shout of disgust, flicking puke off his hands and scrubbing himself with the pale green cardigan.

  “You little shit! You dirty little bastard! I’ll fucking kill you!”

  But Steven was running. Running before he even realized he was on his feet. Running downhill through the wet, slapping heather, stumbling over tufts and roots, missing the track! Where was the track? He turned right anyway and blundered on through the rough terrain. Heard nothing but a faint squealing sound which, he realized, was the noise that terror made in the throat of a boy running for his life.

  Steven threw a wild look over his shoulder; Avery was above him and behind, but was catching up. He’d found the track and the running was easier there. He was faster; Steven couldn’t go any faster. Not here; not in the deep purple heather.

  He angled up again to try to rejoin the track, slowing still further in the process, Avery gaining. If only he could get to the track, he’d make it. He was sure. Fuck it! He turned sharply and bounded up the hill back to the track, then skidded onto it and kept running.

  Avery was only twenty yards behind him when Steven ran into a wall of fog so thick that he flinched. He hesitated momentarily, fought the instinct to slow down, and rushed headlong into the whiteness.

  He could hear Avery behind him, cursing in breathy spurts. He sounded close, but everything did in the fog.

  And then he heard nothing.

  He stopped, panting and wheezing, and turned circles, ears hurting with the strain of listening over the thudding of his own blood. Nothing.

  Steven decided to keep running but then realized that stopping had been a terrible mistake. Before he’d been running the right way simply because he was running away from Avery. But now he’d stopped, he’d lost any sense of direction. He looked down at his feet and the ground around him. Heather barred the way he would have chosen. He shuffled sideways quietly and found only grass and patchy gorse with his feet. With a panicky tingle he realized he’d lost the track. He stood for a long moment, listening to his heart pounding in his ears, trying not to breathe and give himself away.

  Steven sucked in his breath and held it as he heard a rustling sound. He couldn’t tell where it came from or how far off. He turned. A quiet—strangely familiar—squeak and a bump. He spun the other way.

  It was the wrong move.

  His head was jerked back and he lost his footing and fell. Something warm around his neck; a knee in his ribs pumped the breath out of him and Avery was over him, on him, staring down into his face with his teeth bared and his eyes narrowed into glittering slits.

  Something soft but tight was around his neck; Steven realized he was being strangled with the pale green cardigan. He could smell his own vomit on it.

  He couldn’t breathe. His head felt huge and about to pop; his lungs spasmed and screamed for air. He had to breathe.

  He focused on Avery’s eyes, inches from his own. Please, he said in his head, but his lips just moved silently; no air to form the sound of the word. He kicked feebly and tried to push the man off him but only had the strength to lift his fists against Avery’s denim thighs and rest them there, like the two of them were old friends and this was a game they played.

  Please, he tried again, but there was nothing there.

  This was what it felt like to die.

  It seemed to take forever, and it hurt even more than it scared.

  Uncle Billy hurt like this. Uncle Billy looked into these same shiny eyes and hurt like this. Uncle Billy had left no clues, and neither had he, he thought distantly; he understood now about having no idea that this might be the last day of his life; he’d put on his favorite shirt to be murdered in.

  The pain in his chest was unbelievable and his own blood squeezed through his eyes and started to blur his killer’s face behind a misty red curtain.

  Please.

  He was unsure of whether he was trying to beg for his life or for his death.

  He thought vaguely that either would be okay.

  And the darkness covered him like a cold black wave.

  Chapter 40

  THERE WAS BREATHING AND FEET, BREATHING AND FEET.

  The moor did its worst.

  Twisted roots tripped and tangled, wet heather slapped and gorse whipped and prickled. Mud gripped and slid.

  The mist was a thick white veil. Or a shroud. It chilled the eyelids, slid up the nose, and pooled in the gaping mouth—its damp fingers stroking the senses with a seaside memory of childhood and a portent of death.

  But through it all there was breathing and feet, breathing and feet.

  With a purpose.

  Chapter 41

  THERE WERE VOICES AND SUDDENLY STEVEN COULD BREATHE. IT wasn’t dramatic; there were no gasps, just a ragged little whining sound as he started living again instead of dying. He stared up into the streaky pink sky, wondering what had happened to Avery. He thought vaguely of getting up and running again but his head felt like lead and there was a great weight across his legs, pressing him into the moor.

  If Avery appeared and tried to kill him again, there was nothing he could do to stop it, he was that weak. He didn’t even care really.

  The cardigan still wound around his neck was warm and comforting now and he felt tired and floaty.

  There were still voices. Close, but not that close. Not right over him. They were men’s urgent voices—the kinds of voices people used in TV cop shows when something worrying had happened. Steven didn’t bother working out what they were saying, but he did wonder why they weren’t saying it over him. Maybe they thought he was dead. He wouldn’t blame them—he’d thought he was dead. Maybe he was dead, although he didn’t think he’d feel the prickly wet gorse under the small of his back if he was. Steven let his mind drift away from the question of his death. It was tiring.

  “Steven.”

  That was more like it.

  Steven flickered his eyes to the right and found his mother bent over him in her old blue bathrobe.

  Mum, he wanted to say, but couldn’t—just felt his lips open briefly as he tried silently. She was holding his right hand, which made Steven feel five years old again. Having his hand held like Davey. He almost smiled at the thought. Then didn’t bother. Tired. Too tired to bother. Maybe he’d sleep a bit.

  But under the voices he became aware of a ticking whirr in his left ear. He made an effort and turned his head minutely and frowned. Right next to his face, an all-terrain wheel spun lazily against the sky, something dripping from it that was not water.

  It was so out of context that he had to know more. Slow with pain and effort, he turned his head farther to the left and found himself looking at a maroon slipper with a stout ankle in it.

  It was his nan, lying in the heather beside him—her trolley between them.

  Lettie stroked his face, but all the voices were over Nan. All the activity was over Nan. Some men from the village were with her, one murmuring softly into her face and pressing his lips to hers like a public lover, another pumping at her chest with his arms straight, a third tucking his jumper around her legs.

  The fourth—Lewis’s dad—just stood, staring sightlessly, his expression blank and his freckles oddly dark against the sickly
white of his face.

  A little way behind them all, almost hidden by the thick fog, was Lewis.

  But his friend’s eyes didn’t meet his. Instead they flickered between Steven’s legs and his father’s face, wide with horror—and a jolt of panic made Steven jerk his head up to make sure his legs were still there.

  They were. But in the two seconds that Steven could keep his head raised, he took a mental snapshot that would stay with him forever, however much he tried to erase it …

  Avery lay on his back across Steven’s legs, his hands curled into loose fists beside his head. And what used to be his face.

  Now it was just a face-shaped clot of blood and hair and splintered bone. Only the eyes gave a clue as to its previous form—dull green half-slits like those of a dead cat.

  Steven’s head lolled back in the heather as he felt his childhood drop away behind him, winking out in the darkness of the past, and he burned with the tears of suddenly being a grown-up. He knew now what was dripping off the all-terrain wheel, and why the freckles on the face of Lewis’s dad looked so dark.

  Steven watched the bloody sky pass bumpily overhead as the paramedics carried him off the moor.

  He wanted to know how his nan was but speaking was beyond him. All he knew was that somehow she’d come up the track with his rescuers and that something had happened to her there because of it.

  Because of him.

  The thought brought red tears to his eyes and everything went kaleidoscopic.

  He’d thought that him dying was as bad as this day could get, but he’d been wrong. Something had happened to his nan.

  Because of him. Because of his plan. Because of his trap. Because of his good letters. On the box it said it was a fillit. Because he’d been a boy. Not a man, who would have done everything differently; everything better.

  They were loaded into the same ambulance. His mother’s hand squeezed his and she said she’d see him in a mo, and she was gone.

  Inside, Steven could only see that his nan had an oxygen mask on, but so did he, so it meant nothing. Gave him no real clues.

  Nan, he said with his lips, but sound was still unable to squeeze through his swollen throat.

  Nan.

  It was hard to see through the blood in his eyes so he didn’t bother trying. He closed them and slipped away once more, still feeling sick because of the tomato sandwiches Avery had fed him.

  Chapter 42

  STEVEN LAY IN UNCLE BILLY’S BED AND WATCHED HIS GRANDmother knit.

  They had moved him in here so he could rest without Davey bothering him—and so Davey could sleep without Steven’s thrashing, weeping nightmares waking him up and making him grouchy all day.

  The curtains were open, making everything strangely bright—even now when rain spat onto the window, blustered there by unseasonal little winds.

  The bedroom looked wholly different from the bed. With his feet swelling the end of Uncle Billy’s blue duvet, it suddenly looked like a normal boy’s bedroom—as if a spell had been broken. Steven felt oddly at peace here, strangely completed.

  The Lego space station had been pushed under the bed to allow the regular passage of feet bringing books, tepid soup, and Lucozade.

  The photo of Billy had been pushed to the back of the bedside table, which now held an array of Steven-related items: half a dozen pill bottles, a glass with a bendy straw, a box of Milk Tray that Davey was assiduously working his way through, and a slew of get-well cards.

  There was another Steven-related thing in the room now that only he knew about. At night—after his mother and his nan and Davey had all looked in on their way to bed—Steven would roll carefully onto his side and use the point of a compass to carve his name deeply into the wall behind the bed. He knew it was a bad thing to do on one level—and Lettie would be angry when she found it. But on another level he never wanted to venture out of this house—or any house—again without leaving some clue that he had once existed and that he understood the transitory nature of life.

  Everybody should make his mark.

  Steven let his mind drift to his most recent missive—contained in a card showing a flowerpot, a spade, and gardening gloves.

  He had badly wanted to write “Love from” but finally didn’t. He didn’t want to scare Uncle Jude. He didn’t want to scare himself.

  Now that Lettie had posted the card for him and it was too late, he wished he had.

  But it would have to do. It would have to be good enough.

  He sighed and looked away from the sky.

  Nan knitted slowly in the chair at the end of the bed. Her fingers were gnarled and knotty and she stopped often to flex them. Steven blinked but said nothing.

  She’d insisted. She was putting new feet on his best socks. Before she’d even left hospital she’d demanded Lettie bring the socks in, and painstakingly unpicked the old, ragged feet until by the time she came home—with new angina pills—the socks were just ankle-tubes with a lacy fringe of little loops around the bottoms.

  “What color do you want?” she’d asked.

  Steven had leaned back into Billy’s pillow with thought, and seen the Manchester City scarf over his head.

  “Sky blue,” he’d answered.

  Steven was living on the settee by the time Nan pressed the socks. She wouldn’t let him help with the ironing board, setting it up in the bay of the window where she used to stand, and placing a crinkled brown paper bag over the socks, to keep the wool from getting shiny.

  Across the street, Steven could see the hoodies huddled, hands in pockets, shoulders hunched, and hoods shading their faces from the bright sunlight that had found its way back to Exmoor. They shuffled quietly and stared at the house but didn’t approach. Steven thought they probably wouldn’t ever again.

  Things had changed.

  Lewis had told him how they’d all come up the hill. The men running, Lettie keeping up with them in racing panic in her bathrobe and half-tied trainers—and his nan rolling and panting behind, the shopping trolley bouncing over the heather, keeping her upright when she should have fallen a dozen times, gripping Lewis’s sturdy biceps until he bruised.

  Lewis’s dad had been the first to reach Steven and Arnold Avery, but Lewis’s account of what happened next was uncharacteristically sketchy. He would only say the men had dragged Avery off Steven, and then his eyes would slide away and he’d get all unsure about quite what happened next, although Steven had already heard snatched whispers of Lewis’s dad being questioned and released by the police without being charged, and of Lewis’s dad never having to buy another drink in the Red Lion.

  Then Lewis’s memory would reassert itself about how Nan had seen Steven lying there with a pale green cardigan wrenched tight around his neck, and blood running from his eyes like something out of Jeepers Creepers, and how she’d first sat down and then fallen over in the purple flowers, and how the men—once they’d known Steven would be okay—had all rushed to help her. And it was in this context that Lewis allowed his father to be the hero of the hour, belying Steven’s waking vision of Lewis’s dad standing by in a blood-spattered daze while others helped.

  Steven didn’t care. Lewis deserved the good half of that sandwich.

  As his nan’s flaccid arms jiggled over the socks, Steven wondered where the all-terrain wheels were now. It would be nice to have them back. The police had carried them off the moor in bags—along with the smashed and bloodied trolley, his spade, the pale green cardigan, and Arnold Avery.

  Unconsciously, Steven touched his throat, which was still swollen and achy and allowed him to eat ice cream and jelly by the ton. Helped by Lewis, of course.

  Feeling his throat under his fingers made him shiver, even though the gas fire was on in what was proving to be a warm summer. Touching himself like that made him feel like the killer. The tender skin under his fingers, the strange dips and gristle of his own windpipe, the throb of his vein. The odd, floppy vulnerability of it all. Enough squeeze, enough press, eno
ugh cold intent, and it could all collapse and crush so easily.

  Steven had thought a lot like the killer in the past two weeks. He’d thought a lot about Blacklands and a lot about Uncle Billy.

  And a lot about that patch of white heather.

  Avery had been sitting there, waiting for them in the white heather.

  He’d forced Steven up the mound and made him kneel in the white heather.

  Get down!

  Steven shivered again.

  “Cold?” Nan looked at him sharply.

  Steven snuggled farther under the duvet she’d carried down from Uncle Billy’s bed for him, and shook his head.

  Nan stood the iron on its end on the metal grille and lifted the brown paper bag.

  “There,” she said.

  Steven sat up and took the socks from her. They were still his old socks but they were as good as new. Better than new.

  She watched as he pulled them on and wiggled his Manchester City sky-blue toes.

  He looked up at her and suddenly had to bite his lip hard to keep it from getting away from him.

  She saw the tears in his still-pink eyes and put a hand on his head, absolving him of the need to speak his thanks.

  “Nan?”

  “Mm?”

  “I think …”

  He grunted and started again, his voice still cracked and whispery.

  “I think I know where Uncle Billy is.”

  Her hand on his head twitched minutely, and Steven flinched under it in sudden fearful memory, but he didn’t pull away. He forced himself carefully back to calmness and let her hand stay there, not hurting him, warm and cozy on his head.

  He could feel her thinking, as if through the very flesh that connected them.

  Nan didn’t say anything for the longest time and, when she did, she smoothed his hair gently as she spoke.

  “You get better,” she said. “That’s the important thing.”