by Sara Crowe
SIX
At lunchtime Mum made lasagne and loaded a tray for Dad.
‘He hasn’t eaten anything since he got back,’ she said. ‘Not so much as a bite.’
‘I’ll take it up to him if you want,’ said Ash.
She hesitated.
‘It’ll be OK, Mum. Come on, I’ll do it.’
He knocked before he went into Dad’s room. There was no answer but he went in anyway. It was night-dark in there, the heavy curtains pulled so tight that not even a thread of light showed. The air smelled of sweat and unwashed clothes.
‘Dad, I can’t see anything. I’m going to put the light on, OK?’
A grunt from across the room.
Ash flicked the switch.
Dad was on the hard single bed, adrift among all the random bits of furniture and junk stored here because they didn’t fit anywhere else. He was lying on his side, facing the door, the sheet pulled up to his ears. His rucksack was on the floor nearby, clothes spilling out of it.
Ash put down the tray on a small table and dragged it across to the bed.
‘Mum made lunch for you. Lasagne.’
Dad’s eyes opened a crack. ‘Thanks. Just leave it there.’
‘You getting up?’
‘In a while.’
‘You’ll feel better if you get up.’ Ash hovered by the bed. He trawled his mind for something more to say. ‘You could come out running with me tomorrow, Dad. If you want.’
‘Not tomorrow. Maybe next week.’
Next week. Or never. Then he remembered. He hadn’t told Dad yet that he’d entered the Stag Chase, that he’d won the trials and so he’d be the stag boy in this year’s race. It was supposed to be a surprise, his great gift to Dad on his homecoming.
Some gift.
He should tell him now, get it over with.
But he couldn’t. The timing was all wrong. In the state he was in, Dad would barely even register the news. And it had to be big, it had to be special.
Ash drew a deep slow breath, exhaled again. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Next week then.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Right. Maybe. Do you want me to leave the light on?’
‘No. Turn it off. I want to sleep.’
Ash stood there for a few moments. He felt useless, helpless. An abyss yawning between him and Dad and all he could think of was the lasagne congealing, the salad wilting, the bread roll going dry and hard. He told himself it didn’t matter. It was just food.
But somehow it did matter.
‘Mum made it for you,’ he said. ‘Her special lasagne. It’s what you always want when you get home, better than all that army food. Mum says you haven’t eaten anything since you got back. You need to eat, Dad.’
‘I will eat.’
‘You won’t. You’ll leave it and it’ll get disgusting.’
‘I said I’ll eat it,’ said Dad. Pulling the sheet up over his head, mumbling through the cotton. ‘I’ll eat it when you’ve gone.’
Ash started to leave.
‘I’ll be all right tomorrow,’ said Dad.
‘Yeah,’ said Ash. ‘You said that yesterday.’
He switched off the light, closed the door behind him and went up to his bedroom.
He sat at his desk, staring at the photographs pinned to the corkboard above it. Dad on one of the climbing expeditions he used to go on with his army mates when he was younger. Up on some mountain, blue sky beyond. Dad was weather-burned, squinting into the sun, smiling like he didn’t have a care in the world.
More than anything, he wanted the Dad in the photograph back – strong and capable, always up for adventure.
But that Dad was gone. Maybe for ever.
His gaze travelled over the other pictures on the corkboard. A print of a leaping wolf he’d cut from a magazine; an eerie photograph of a fox on a misty moonlit night; a shot of Stag’s Leap, raw and mysterious under a stormy sky. An old picture of Mark, taken at the farm a couple of years ago. They’d been downhilling that day, shredding their bikes along the dirt track on Tolley Carn. Mark was mud-spattered and grinning, eyes full of light and laughter.
It seemed a lifetime ago.
Ash looked away. He booted up the laptop and opened the web browser.
He typed ‘shell shock’ into the search engine.
Hundreds of hits came up: medical sites, psychology sites, sites about the First and Second World Wars, Vietnam, the Falklands, Afghanistan, Iraq. Help groups for veterans. Videos.
He clicked on a video link. Grainy black-and-white film from a century ago, soldiers who’d fought in the trenches and survived to come home. Men who shook and twitched, wide-eyed with terror, as if the war was still raging around them and shrapnel might rip through flesh and bone at any moment.
A soldier hiding his face, trying to get away from the camera, trotting jerkily in frightened circles.
Like a beaten dog.
Ash couldn’t watch any more. He slammed the laptop shut, sat staring at the wall, seeing nothing.
Slowly he came back to himself. His eyes focused on a small picture of the Stag Chase twenty years ago, the year Dad had been the stag boy. There he was, outside the Huntsman Inn in Thornditch, wearing the ancient antler headdress that the stag boy paraded in if he won his race. He looked uncomfortable, stiffly posed, his expression solemn instead of triumphant.
Dad must have been about seventeen back then. Two years older than Ash was now. He was powerfully built even at that age. Not a distance runner’s physique like Ash’s. Ash didn’t look much like him at all. He had Mum’s fair hair and her slender, bony frame. He wasn’t strong like Dad, wasn’t a fighter. But his eyes were like Dad’s, so people said. Blue and intense.
He took the photograph down from the corkboard and looked at it more closely. There were hound boys in the background, prowling predatory youths still acting out their roles even after the race was over.
They seemed more hound than boy.
One of them stood apart from the others. He wore his mask pushed back over the top of his head. Tom Cullen, Mark and Callie’s dad. He was smiling, his face not yet set into the stern lines that Ash remembered.
Ash pinned the photograph back onto the corkboard.
Too much thinking.
He needed to do something, anything except sit there with his mind spinning. He stood, scooped up his dirty running gear to dump it in the laundry basket.
Something fell to the floor.
It was a feather, about six inches long. Black, with a metallic purple sheen that shimmered in the light like oil on water. He remembered the bird that had flown into him on the mountain path. The dry brittle touch of its hollow bones, its inky feathers. One of those feathers must have snagged on his clothing.
And now it was here, in his bedroom, a fragment of darkness he’d accidentally brought back with him. He stared at it so long that it started to lose its shape, blurring at the edges, leaking shadow that joined up with other shadows, spreading like a dense black mist across the floor.
He had to get rid of it. But that meant he’d have to go closer to it, touch it, hold it. The thought made his skin crawl. He took a step towards it, felt a dark pull, a sickening depth opening before him. Another step, and another. He stopped and bent down. Turned his face away from it, half closed his eyes. Held his breath. His fingertips brushed over the carpet, over the feather. He forced himself to pick it up.
His head swam. He lurched and swayed, slammed his hand down on the floor to balance himself. He closed his eyes tight until the giddiness subsided.
The room was itself again. The feather just a feather.
And yet it wasn’t just a feather. It meant something. It had some dark power. He’d felt it. He didn’t understand it, not yet, but it had been real.
There was no way he wanted the thing in his bedroom or even in the house. He could drop it out of the window. He imagined it lying down there among the flowers and weeds, seeping evil. Still too close.
It had to be
miles away.
He put it in his backpack.
He’d get rid of it tomorrow, somewhere far from the house.
SEVEN
The next night, Callie was waiting for him at the Monks Bridge, just as she’d promised. The red dress gone, replaced with combat trousers and a fleece that looked three sizes too big for her. There was no sign of Mark. A ghostly half-moon sat low above the trees. Bats flitted through the smoky blue dusk, quick blinks of shadow. Below the bridge the little river slid along, as sleek and brown as an otter.
‘Well, I’m here,’ said Ash. ‘Where’s Mark?’
‘Somewhere,’ she said. Watched him with eyes as silver as the moonlight. ‘I’ll take you to him. Come on.’
‘Wait,’ he said. ‘There’s something I have to do first.’
He took the feather out of his backpack. In the half-light, it looked like nothing, just an ordinary black feather, its power over him nothing but a memory now.
He leaned over the side of the bridge and dropped it. It was gone in an instant, borne away by the fast water below.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘We can go now.’
‘What was that?’ said Callie.
‘Just a feather.’
She shot him a sideways look. ‘A feather?’
‘It’s not important,’ he said. ‘A bird flew into me. One of its feathers must have stuck to me.’
‘I saw you get it out of your backpack. You brought it all the way out here just so you could drop it in the river?’
He shrugged as if it was no big deal. ‘Yeah. Are you taking me to see Mark or what?’
‘This way,’ she said, and set off.
They were half a mile out of the village on a lane that bucked and twisted along the mountainside, linking farmhouses. ‘We’ll have to go cross-country part of the way,’ said Callie.
‘Where to?’
‘It doesn’t have a name.’
‘It must have. Everywhere has a name.’
‘If it does, I don’t know it. It’s just a wood.’ She pointed away into the darkening twilight. ‘Over there.’
‘How far is it?’
‘Not far.’
They trudged along in silence. Again he felt her disapproval of him, the cold force of her rage.
‘It must have been hard for you when your dad died,’ he said. Immediately he cringed inside at his own words. Lately almost everything that came out of his mouth sounded idiotic.
‘Look,’ she said, ‘I don’t want to talk about that stuff. I’m taking you to Mark, that’s all, because he wants to talk to you. And you used to be his best friend so maybe you can help him, but probably you can’t. Anyway, he wants to see you and that’s the only reason I’m here with you.’
‘Fine,’ he muttered, annoyed with her again.
They left the lane, climbed over a stile in thickening gloom. As Ash’s eyes adapted to the darkness, he could make out a faint path around the edge of the field. An untidy hedge to his left. Long grass spiked with thistles to his right.
Beyond the field, woodland stretched like a dark wound around the foot of the mountain.
They paused just before the tree line. A twig snapped close by. A low bough jerked and shook its leaves. Ash stared into the gloom, his heart jumping. ‘What was that?’
‘Just the wild.’
He looked at Callie. She seemed like a wild creature herself, as silent and secret as a fox slipping through the night.
He smelled wood smoke and now, as the path took them on through the trees, he saw firelight flicker deep in the clotted shadows.
Callie stopped. ‘That’s Mark’s campfire over there,’ she said. ‘He’ll be around there somewhere.’
‘Aren’t you coming with me?’
She shook her head. ‘He wants to talk to you, not me. Go on.’
He watched her go, her slight figure becoming a shadow that melted away into the night until at last it swallowed her and he was alone.
Except for Mark.
He went deeper into the woods, then stopped in his tracks, his breath catching in his throat. A gaunt white face stared down at him, long and bony, its eyes hollow with night.
Beyond it, other faces gleamed in the dark, a dozen or more of them.
He started to back away. Then he realised what they were. Skulls, sheep skulls. Some wedged in the forks of branches, others stuck up on sticks driven into the ground or turning slowly at the ends of strings tied around boughs. Three dead rooks, feet bound together, swinging from a branch. Feathers blacker than the fire-cut dark, black as the feather he’d found in his bedroom.
And behind the rooks and the skulls, monstrous shadows shifted among the trees, a dozen or more of them. Figures in masks, distorted and weird, throwing out long limbs, leaping, plunging, twisting.
Freaky shadow people dancing like crazed shamans around the fire.
Mark had company.
Ash dropped into a crouch behind a tree and watched them dance. They were quick and agile, soaring up, spinning, tangling, tearing apart, re-forming and sinking to the ground only to leap up again.
His heart thumped so loudly he was sure they’d hear it.
Fear ran through him. The dancing boys seemed more than human and somehow less at the same time. Half boy and half beast, as airy as wraiths, as dark as the night.
And Mark was in there with them.
They’re just shadows thrown by hound boys in fancy dress, Ash told himself. That’s all. Maybe this was just a game, the usual ritual in the run-up to the Chase, when the hound boys tormented the stag boy and tried to unnerve him to give the race a dangerous edge.
Or maybe it was something else.
But he was here now. Callie had brought him and Mark was expecting him. He couldn’t get out of it. He’d look like a coward and an idiot if he ran away or crouched behind a tree all night.
He drew a deep breath to steady his nerves, then stood up and walked out into the clearing.
His arrival seemed to shatter a spell. The shadowy boys spun away into the night. They didn’t go far though, he was sure of that. He couldn’t see them any more but he sensed them still out there, lurking among the trees, beyond the circle of firelight. Watching him.
Now they were gone, he saw Mark. He was standing in front of the fire, facing it. He was dressed in loose, torn trousers and nothing else. His hair was matted and spiked with pale clay, his body caked with it.
Ash had seen that look before, on the stag boy running in the mountains.
‘Mark,’ he said, walking towards the fire. ‘Hey, Mark. It’s me. Ash. Callie brought me. She said you wanted to talk to me.’
Mark turned. His face was a cracked clay mask. There were charcoal smudges around his eyes. Skull-faced, death-faced. His grin flashed bright and fierce in the firelight. ‘Ash,’ he said. ‘You came then. I thought you’d chicken out.’
‘Yeah,’ said Ash. ‘I nearly did.’
Mark nodded. His gaze slid away towards the trees on the other side of the fire.
‘What’s with the zombie look?’ said Ash.
Mark looked at him again. He raised his arms straight out in front of him, slackened his jaw, took a few stiff-legged steps towards Ash. ‘Mwuuuuh! I smell fresh meat. Human meat. Mwuuuuh!’
Ash laughed. ‘You’re still an idiot,’ he said. ‘Where have the others gone? The boys who were dancing around the fire?’
Mark dropped his arms back down to his sides. ‘Dancing boys?’
‘Yeah, those boys who were leaping around the fire a minute ago. All dressed up in hound costumes. Looked like that, anyway. Then they ran off when I got here. Who were they? Why did they run off like that?’
Mark shrugged and cocked his head. ‘You’re the one who saw them. You tell me.’
‘Stop playing mind games with me,’ said Ash. ‘You got Callie to bring me out here so you could talk to me. I know what I saw.’
‘You know what you saw,’ said Mark. ‘Except you don’t know, do you? You’re the stag boy, b
ut you don’t even know what it means, not really. You don’t know anything about the Stag Chase. You don’t know its history. You’re not fit to be the stag boy.’
‘Tell me then,’ said Ash. ‘You seem to know it all.’
Abruptly Mark’s eyes hardened and his mocking smile twisted into a snarl. He took three long, running leaps at Ash, flung out his fist, caught Ash a hammer blow on the jaw. Ash staggered backwards, his legs collapsing under him. His mouth flooded with the thin taste of metal. He gagged and spat blood.
Mark loomed over him. ‘This isn’t a game,’ he said.
‘What isn’t a game?’ said Ash. ‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.’
He was on all fours on the forest floor, the dry mulch of last year’s leaf-fall under him. His mouth felt thick and raw. His voice sounded as if it was rolling over pebbles.
‘You’re the stag boy,’ said Mark. ‘Do you think it’s just about winning a race?’
‘Yeah,’ said Ash. ‘I think it’s just about winning a race. Like it was last year and every year before that.’
‘You’re half right,’ said Mark. Softer now, serious. ‘Mostly it’s just about winning a race. These days, anyway. But sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes it’s about a lot more than that. Sometimes it’s about the old ways. About life and death and the past and the land. It’s about making wrong things right again.’
‘You’re crazy,’ said Ash.
Mark crouched in front of him and cuffed him on the shoulder. ‘Sorry I hit you,’ he said. ‘You had it coming though.’
‘Did I?’
‘Yeah, you did,’ said Mark. Still smiling, but the vicious edge creeping back into his voice. ‘My dad died. Remember that? He was all we had, Callie and me. Then he died and you couldn’t be seen for dust. My best mate. You just abandoned me.’
‘It wasn’t like that.’
‘Don’t lie to me, Ash. It was exactly like that.’
‘I didn’t know what to do.’
‘So you ran away.’
‘Yeah. I suppose so.’
‘And now your dad’s come back. My dad died but yours came back. Do you think that’s fair?’
‘Callie told you about Dad coming home?’