The Sacrifice Box

by Martin Stewart

  13

  The Old Way

  The route was familiar to the point of instinct. Thom Roxburgh moved along it with subconscious ease, staring only into his own mind.

  The path was unmarked but clear: a flat furrow of ancient soil that ran from the big house to the hunting grounds. Every once in a while he found Roman pottery under his feet, made smooth as old soap by earth and time.

  The estate was old, and so the way was old – and so the gamekeeper liked it.

  Roxburgh was grubby and sinew-thin, sweating in a ragged suit and a layer of waxed cotton. Old tattoos spilled like bruises from his collar and cuffs: wave lines on his jugular, crosses on his knuckles and swallows behind his thumbs, their wings following the arch of his palm.

  He strode past the bracken, thwacking its new limbs with his stick. His terriers, Lundy and Biscay, were chasing vermin somewhere in its thick tangle, silent as they focused on the scent. He’d always kept Patterdales, but he’d never known two as brave as these. A week ago Biscay had been cornered by a badger and Lundy had gone right in after her. They’d have torn it to pieces, Roxburgh thought, if he’d not intervened with a quick shovel.

  He looked for the dogs, running his tongue through the spaces of his missing teeth. After a moment he spotted Biscay through a gap in the foliage, something gripped in her jaws. He narrowed his eyes against the needles of sunset that pierced the canopy, but couldn’t see what it was.

  He packed some more tobacco into his lip, sucked out its thick syrup, then spat. Later on he’d pick the bloody mess from their teeth while they listened to the shipping forecast.

  Looking down, he saw the ground under his feet had been churned by deer hooves, and shifted the shotgun to his other arm.

  He hoped not to fire it, but knew it was a fool’s hope: the air had a raw, animal smell that raised his hackles – the way hot blood smelled in frosty air.

  The old gamekeeper carried on – breathing with the forest’s rhythm while his dogs hunted in the darkening shadows – towards the hunting grounds, and the secret thing he’d protected all these years.

  14

  Crow

  Mario let him leave early. The last hour had been quiet and most of the cleaning was done.

  ‘Of course,’ the big man said, holding the shutters in the air for Sep to duck under. ‘All the fridges have stopped working, is very strange – but I can finish here myself. You go. And remember, my Sep: is difficult to have friends; sometimes your pride is needing a spoonful of sugar maybe.’

  Sep stood in silence, so Mario rubbed his head and laughed.

  ‘You’ll come in tomorrow afternoon, to help clean the cold store?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve got that application to finish –’

  ‘Is no problem,’ said Mario, shaking his head. ‘I will manage.’

  ‘No, I’ll come in, I’m sorry,’ said Sep. ‘I can do the form after.’

  Mario beamed.

  ‘Thank you, my Sep. You are good boy. You remember the cold-store locking code?’

  ‘It’s … I do, it’s –’

  ‘– the special day of Mario and Greece.’ Mario laughed. ‘Everything else you remember! Now be quick, there is a storm coming – and be careful of the greasy boy on your way,’ he added, before the shutters rattled down. ‘If he comes for you, hit first. My father always say: “Big men do not have wooden balls.” Kick him there and he will sink like lead balloon, yes?’

  Sep rolled his eyes, but left his headphones in his bag and walked, leaving his board strapped up. The music and the grind of wheels would fill his head with sound, blinding his good ear, and he wanted to be ready if Daniels was waiting for him.

  And now he was outside, his tooth was really hurting.

  He looked at the sky. The clouds were too thick to see stars, never mind the comet. But Sep wondered if it was out there, filling his head with cosmic agony.

  Across the water, the mainland’s street lights glowed like scattered jewels. The idea of the college and its freedoms glittered incorruptibly inside him, and this stupid distraction, this … bullshit, would not get in his way. He turned on to the thin strip of beach, avoiding the main street and Daniels’ usual haunts, each step taking him deeper into his own mind.

  His guts boiled.

  The others were so casual, sitting in his chip shop and blaming him for – what? Some ridiculous paranoia? Well, he would find Arkle tomorrow, tell him to back off – they could chase their own wild geese.

  He marched over the little worm towers that sat like knots of spaghetti among the ribs of the old tide. Slow clouds of salt hissed from the rocks and the bay sang with the tinkle of swinging masts, the sand shining silver as the earth lurched away from the sun.

  As the island turned beneath his feet he thought of his mother sleeping in her chair, grey-skinned and off her food. Memories of the last time she’d looked that way – the treatments in the mainland hospital and the waxy tack of her skin – struck his mind like hailstones on tin and he shook his head, turning the pad on his headphones.

  He thought of the sacrifice box – and the guilt he’d put inside it. After years of forgetting he’d been surprised by how bright and clear the memories had felt when Lamb mentioned it – how immediate the emotions had been.

  ‘No,’ he said aloud. ‘She can’t be getting sick again. Not again.’

  His tooth throbbed suddenly, the pain running through the tubes of his head and into his deaf ear, while a smell of dampness and soil stirred his memory like footprints in dust. He sniffed.

  The rock beside his foot leaped up.

  Sep fell into a stream, his jeans soaking as he splashed backwards. The crab, a sharp-limbed boulder in jagged skin, unfurled slowly, mouthparts whirring as it balanced on the awls of its enormous legs, pincers held in warning.

  Sep froze.

  The crabs did not do this. It was too hot for them. In winter they filled the beach like rats, but in summer they stayed below the water. Even at night.

  The creature poised on the tide’s edge, white surf bubbling through its needle feet.

  They hurt someone every year. Badly. Island kids were warned about them as soon as they could walk – Don’t let them grab you, because they won’t let go – but tourists always got too close, hunting for photographs, or trying to impress their friends. The year before Sep was born, the crabs had killed a little boy who fell off the pier.

  As the animal finally eased into the water, step by agonizing step, Sep ran – heart flapping in his chest, headphones loose around his neck – all the way up the hill and along the silent streets until he reached his house and clattered through the front door, muscles seized up in terror.

  He breathed out, clicked the buttons on his Walkman and let the soft scent of his house gather around him, making the world normal, making everything secure.

  The TV was hissing on standby, and his mum was asleep on the sofa – still in her uniform, a plate of untouched chicken beside her on the floor. Sep tucked a pillow under her head and cleared away the dinner things. He filled a glass with water and sat it next to the chair, covered her with a blanket, then grabbed the remote and tried changing channel.

  Every station was the same: snowy static filling the darkness with ghostly light. He pulled the plug out at the wall.

  In his bedroom, he picked his way across the messy floor and swung the telescope to the window. But the clouds were as thick as wool, and he found nothing.

  He lay awake long after his mum’s snoring had subsided, watching the shadows grow in the blue of his bedroom. The house was silent but for the familiar click and ping of pipes as the building settled. A gap in the curtains spilled milky light across his feet. He shifted his legs. Flipped the pillow. Turned on to his other side.

  Arkle’s toothy face, all deep-lined concern, kept flashing in his mind. He wondered if the others had remembered that was their favourite table at Mario’s – if they’d sat there tonight by instinct or choice. He thought of what it ha
d felt like to be with them again – sitting in the chip shop just as they’d done that summer, eating Mario Specials while bike sweat cooled on their skin.

  They were genuinely worried. He knew that. And it was strange, his mum asking about Arkle and Lamb for the first time in years – the same day they showed up in the shop.

  He shook his head, thought of his application and the college – of his longed-for escape from Hill Ford. But an image came, unbidden, of the hospital gown gathered round the lumps of his mum’s knees as she was wheeled into theatre. He closed his eyes against it, but it burned there anyway.

  Sep lay for an unknown age, clicking his Walkman on and off as his waking thoughts muddled on sleep’s gummy edge – when a moment settled on the house that lasted much longer than a moment. The world slowed, the blood swelled in his good ear, and when he opened his eyes the shadows had deepened. A car passed, the blades of its headlights slicing through the room.

  The tingle of old, forgotten fears lit his veins, and he sat up sharply. He felt the skin of his younger self crawl inside him, alert to the darkness with a child’s precision, and he searched the corners of his house with his mind like a tongue probing teeth. There was a sound, invisible on the edge of silence, like the drumbeat of his own heart.

  He was not alone.

  Something was on the other side of the window, watching him with cold patience, the way a lizard watches a fly.

  A shadow moved on the curtains.

  ‘There’s no way it’s the box,’ he said aloud, pulse closing his throat, then sat up and threw the curtains wide.

  Three pairs of dark, gleaming eyes stared back at him.

  Sep looked at the crows. Their terrible beaks were touching the glass and their wings bristled, light playing through the blacks and blues and purples of their moonlit feathers – and as he met their stare a wave of cold gripped his body. He grit his teeth, snapped up the latch and opened the window, hard, sending the birds flapping silently into the night.

  15

  Bones

  Roxburgh had known something was wrong as soon as he entered the paddock. It wasn’t the absence of deer. It was the absence of everything.

  After decades in the forest the little chirps and cracks of the world’s shifting skin were as familiar as his own voice. But today all had been silent: unturned soil and still trees, cold air empty of birdsong. So he’d sat unmoving as night came, watching the sun leach from the sky – waiting.

  Now his eyes flashed in the darkness. There was something in the clearing. The feeling was bright on his skin, as though he’d been caught in a flashlight’s beam. He dragged some thick, tobacco-flecked spit from the gaps in his teeth, and tasted his own fear.

  When he was young he’d fought a war he hadn’t understood. As a scout, he’d crawled through the insects and the spiders of the Malayan jungle while the canopy dripped on his helmet and the Liberation Army slithered like cats in his cracked binoculars. One day he’d hunkered down to watch, cool and invisible in the green shade. Then a bullet had split the heel of his boot and he’d scrambled into a shell-hole before he’d drawn breath, a body moving independently of thought.

  The sniper had toyed with him for the rest of the day, cracking the bark above his head or bursting the stream at his feet, and he had lain like an ant under a magnifying glass, guts baking in the sun, lips splitting as he burned. He’d waited until the sun set massive and orange through the trees, then crawled away on his belly, hiding from the moonlight in mud pits that spun with venomous snakes.

  At his barracks the CO had given him new boots, a fresh canteen of water and sent him straight back – along the same path, into the same ditch. And as he’d marched there Roxburgh had understood what fear meant – not the jolt of a sudden noise, but real, primal fear – the chewing of reason between instinct’s yellow teeth.

  Even forty years on, there were nights when he lunged from bed having walked that path in his dreams, moments in his waking life where he felt those young bones quake in his old skin.

  Now that primal terror was upon him once again. Something was watching him with the sniper’s measured threat, the same patience – and the same deadly intent. And Roxburgh recognized something he’d not felt in decades, something from before even the jungle – something from his childhood. He’d almost forgotten what it felt like – the charge there’d been in the air that summer.

  The old gamekeeper whistled for his dogs, but the silence took his brisk, efficient note and made it desperate and small, like a cry from a well.

  Lundy and Biscay came reluctantly from the brush, close to his heels. They were whimpering deep in their bellies, and Roxburgh saw a gash in Lundy’s side – pink and thin, like wet, pursed lips. He crouched and parted the fur. The little dog flinched.

  ‘What’s you done to yourself, girl?’ he said quietly.

  He reached into his pocket and withdrew a string of soft red meat, pressed it gently into the dog’s mouth. She mashed it quickly, then licked the dirt from his hand, covering his wrist in glistening spit as he examined the wound. It wasn’t from a tooth or a claw – it was deeper, longer. It could only have been made by Lundy dragging herself against something, like a wire snagged in her skin.

  She had done this to herself. Even with her prey drive, she’d never have pushed through so much pain to chase something down.

  So she’d been running from something. Running for her life.

  Roxburgh lifted a feather from her lip, held it in the moonlight.

  Black. A crow’s feather.

  He checked the little brass eyes of the shotgun shells, then snapped the gun shut and tucked it into the crook of his arm. He took a step towards the clearing, stopped – then, to his horror, inched back to the path, swallowing away the pebble that blocked his throat.

  ‘These is my lands,’ he called, fighting to control the tightness in his voice. ‘An’ you’s best leavin’ ’em now if you doesn’t want your backside studded wi’ shot.’

  There was no answer. He’d known there wouldn’t be. The sea-salt wind blew hard at his back, but the trees around him were silent and still.

  The dogs drew closer to him.

  And, in that moment, Roxburgh knew with the ancient certainty of the hunted that there was no friend near him, nobody within even the reach of his loudest screams. He was alone in the woods with his little dogs, surrounded by an anger that he felt with his blood but could not see.

  He took a step back, felt bones crunch under his boot and turned, heart thudding, to find a pile of black feathers and the blue-black gleam of a razor beak.

  The dogs growled, licking their lips with nervous whines.

  Roxburgh nudged the feathers apart with the barrel of his gun, exposing the soft tangle of ribs. He bent to lift the thing into the bushes.

  But the mess of feather and bone fluttered at his touch, torn wings flapping as it vanished into the darkness.

  Roxburgh stood bolt upright.

  The bird’s chest had been ripped open – and the little pouches of the lungs had been completely still. The bird was dead.

  And yet it had flown.

  The gamekeeper turned and ran back to his little shack on the edge of the woods, thinking only of getting to Aileen.

  The wind roared behind him, and the trees shook in the clearing.

  Someone had broken the rules again.

  16

  Mack

  Mack moved until the sliver of street light fell on his page: a picture of Darryl Strawberry’s long, looping swing. He had never swung a baseball bat in his life, but read the statistics for the hundredth time, letting details he didn’t understand – at bats, strikeouts, on-base percentages – wash over him in a comforting wave.

  There was shouting downstairs: his dad raging at the broken TV, and the clatter of what sounded like the aerial hitting the wall. He heard his mum’s muttered protest, then the fridge door slamming.

  He reread the profile of the ’85 Cardinals, moving the page like a s
heet in a typewriter, snapping it back to the beginning each time he reached the end of the street light’s glow.

  Glass shattered downstairs, and he heard the raised note of his mum’s dismay.

  He wondered if they’d noticed anything different about him, his mum and dad – how his eyes were brighter, his shoulders straighter.

  He shifted again, this time to relieve the ache in his bladder. If he went to pee then his dad might hear the footsteps and start up on him. But there was nothing for it – he had to go.

  Mack dropped on to the bare boards of his room. He knew the pattern of silence and creaks off by heart – a kind of hopscotch roulette he played in the small hours when he’d guzzled water at training.

  Easing open his bedroom door, he ghosted across the landing and into the bathroom without snapping closed the lock, aiming for the porcelain rather than the water. As he peed he looked up at himself in the mirrored cabinet – tired, red around the eyes from the strain of the last few nights, but happy. Definitely happy.

  Mack washed his hands first, so he could flush on his way back to his room, making sure his door was closed before the sound roused the beast downstairs. He left the almanac open on his chest as he lay in the dark, listening to time’s steady tick through his pillow.

  And then – just before it had lulled him to sleep – someone outside whispered his name.

  17

  Visit

  Sep gripped his pillow as the oily shadows gathered round him. Model aircraft twirled over die-cast figures, posters flapped in the breeze, and everywhere – on the floor and the desk and on top of the wardrobe – paperbacks leaned in soft yellow towers.

  He closed his eyes, wishing for the release of a dreamless night, and for the darkness behind his lids to be empty and safe.

  But the crows followed him into sleep – and he dreamed of them.