Blacklands (29 page)

He put a cold hand on Steven’s shoulder.

Lewis could not remember running; he could only remember being on the moor and suddenly being off it.

He had eaten the good half of too many sandwiches to be a fit boy, but adrenaline filled his lungs and squeezed his heart more efficiently than any conditioning that could have gone before or would ever come again.

The stile at the bottom of the track scraped his shins and tore his knee as he barely broke stride to clear it.

He turned left onto the narrow, still-misty street—the only one of any note through Shipcott—and wondered at the way his frantic footfalls smacked sharply and echoed off the canyon of bright, bow-walled cottages.

Lewis had no idea why he was scared, and so he worried about how to impart his fear to anyone who could help him. But he knew he would have to try, because instinctively he knew this was not a job for a secret agent or a sniper, or even a famous footballer.

This was a job for a grown-up.

It was early on a Saturday morning but the mist gave Shipcott a dead, eerie feeling and the street was unusually empty. He rounded the short curve in the road and saw why.

There was a little knot of people outside Steven’s house, spilling off the narrow pavement and into the road.

Grown-up people. Thank god.

Lewis almost cried with relief.

Lettie was in the bathroom when the knock came on the door. At the first rap she frowned, wondering who it could be so early on a Saturday. But then she frowned because it wasn’t really knocking; it was pounding. Pounding of the type Lettie had only ever seen on TV where the drunken husband goes round to confront his errant wife’s new lover. Pounding like police.

It scared her, angered her, and galvanized her all at the same time.

She hurried downstairs and opened the door a crack, her left hand holding her robe closed, not because she was afraid it would swing open but to let the pounder know that she disapproved of his rudeness.

It was Mr. Jacoby. Holding a newspaper.

Lettie experienced a second of complete disorientation during which she wondered whether they now had a newspaper delivered and, if so, why they had ordered the
Daily Mail,
and—even stranger—why Mr. Jacoby was making the deliveries himself instead of leaving it to Ronnie Trewell, who seemed to have spent at least ten of his fourteen years trudging up and down in the rain with a DayGlo sack pulling him so badly off center that, without clearly marked pavements, he would have wandered around in circles all day.

“Mr. Jacoby,” she said neutrally so that she could smile or frown as the ensuing occasion required.

To her surprise, Mr. Jacoby held up the paper in shaking, newsprint-blackened hands, opened his mouth as if to tell her something of great importance—and burst into tears.

Davey was surrounded by legs. It was nothing new; when you’re five, legs are your constant companions. When you’re five your whole experience of gatherings consists of pulled seams, rubbed crotches, bulging thighs, scuffed knees, trailing hems.

But this was extreme. He was on the pavement outside his house trying to stay at his mother’s side as people pressed all around them to see the
Daily Mail
. Legs nudged him, bumped him, propelled him this way and that.

Now and then a hand would reach out to steady him and apologize, but nobody spoke to him or looked at him—everything in this jungle of legs was going on in the canopy over his head. He gripped Lettie’s ratty blue towelling robe and felt her warm thigh under his knuckles.

His mother wasn’t crying but Mr. Jacoby was. Davey had never seen a man cry before—never imagined that such a thing was possible—and found it so disturbing that he tried not to see or hear it but couldn’t stop looking. Big Mr. Jacoby in his green Spar shirt and his wobbly chest and his hairy arms, crying. Davey laughed nervously, hoping it was a joke—but nobody joined in. He gripped more tightly onto his mother.

People were talking grown-up talk very forcefully but very secretly and Davey could only catch fragments. The fragment he heard most often was “It’ll kill her.”

Kill who? thought Davey desperately. What will kill who?

“Can’t keep it secret … has to know sometime … don’t show it … it’ll kill her …”

And through it all, Mr. Jacoby cried his strange, wheezing, blubbery cry, while Lewis’s dad patted his shoulder, looking cross, but not with Mr. Jacoby. To Davey it looked like Mr. Jacoby was a giant toddler that someone had bullied off the swings and Lewis’s dad was taking care of him while trying to spot the culprit to give him a good telling-off.

“Don’t tell who what?”

They all looked up guiltily at Nan. Davey couldn’t see her through the legs but knew it was her. No one said anything.

“Don’t tell who what?” she said again, a little more suspiciously.

Davey thought someone was clapping. A slow, sharp slapping sound getting closer and closer, and suddenly the sound skidded to a halt as the people around him surged and parted to reveal a red-faced, wild-eyed Lewis.

Lewis could barely speak. He saw his father.

“Dad!”

“Quiet, Lewis. We’re talking.”

“But Dad!”

“Lewis, go home!”

His father looked away from him and the gathering turned its back on the boy and reshaped itself, nudging him to its edge like an amoeba egesting waste.

Mr. Trewell, Skew Ronnie’s dad, was holding the
Sun
and Lewis saw the face on the front of it. It wasn’t right, but somehow he recognized it. Those red, red lips gave it away. Lewis sucked air into his depleted lungs and shouted “FUCK!” as loudly as he could.

The word skittered off the walls and everyone turned and looked at him angrily. He just jabbed the picture.

“That’s him! That’s the man who’s on the moor!”

There was a stunned silence while anger turned to confusion, so he took advantage to explain further.

“With Steven.”

Chapter 39

S
TEVEN FLINCHED WHEN
A
VERY PUT A HAND ON HIS SHOULDER
but he turned it into a shrug and thought he got away with that.

He answered Avery’s question with “Nothing.” Then he turned away so he wouldn’t have to look into Avery’s strangely flickering eyes.

Instead Steven looked longingly back down the moor to where he knew Shipcott was hiding in the mist. Not being able to see even the church spire made him feel very alone.

As he stood with his prickling back to the killer, the jigsaw pieces in Steven’s mind whirled and spun. Bits he recognized: a slice of Uncle Billy’s wide grin; a shakily traced map; a dent made in the moor by the blade of a blunt spade;
on the box it said it was a fillit
. He wrote a good letter. The pieces floated and scattered; he didn’t know where to start with them. So, like all good jigsaw builders, he started by finding a corner.

And that corner—to his utter surprise—was anger.

He’d thought his fear was all-embracing, but the anger was good. It anchored him and trumped fear for a moment and made him feel stronger.

Lewis was gone. Safe. Steven felt a pang that the last words he’d said to his friend had been harsh but shoved the pang aside. He’d done what he had to. This was his mess and so he’d taken care of Lewis.

Now all he had to do was escape the clutches of the psychopath who had baited his own little trap and then—in some crazy, nightmarish way—magicked his way out of prison and come here to kill him.

Harry Potter with a chain saw.

Steven laughed and shuddered at the same time, and felt bile sour his throat.

He swallowed hard and felt weak. He knew that if escape was all he wanted, he’d have taken his chance by now. He’d started this thing; he’d set it in motion. Now it was moving too fast and out of control, but Steven still felt a burning, jealous need to keep hold of it. All the thinking, all the digging, all the planning, all the good letters he wrote. He was so close that the thought of letting go now was at once unconscionable and so alluring that it made him think of tongues and Chantelle Cox. It would be so easy to let go, feel his cramped fingers creak open and release the burden he’d picked up so casually and carried for so long without ever really having a good grip on it.

But the stubborn streak that had kept him soaked, sunburned, and callused on the moor for three long years elbowed its way to the fore, trampling the dizzy panic Steven felt at overriding every instinct he possessed.

Now that it was just him and the killer alone, one thread of thought separated itself and pulsated more urgently than any other: He’d tried so long. He’d come so far. He’d done so much. He was so tired and he wanted to know. He needed to know. He
had
to know.

Which meant that—instead of hitting him with the spade and running for his life—he smiled at Avery.

“Fuck him.” He shrugged. “You got any more sandwiches?”

Steven watched the mist creep up the heather towards them. It was only forty or fifty feet below them now, moving so sluggishly it was almost imperceptible. By ten, it would be summer.

Avery had put down a second plastic bag for him to sit on—so close that their hips and shoulders were touching and he could feel the warmth of the man through his jeans and bloody shirt. It made him itch to move away, but he didn’t.

Now Steven stared at the last bit of Avery’s sandwich and knew that if he didn’t speak soon, his chance would be gone.

“You live around here?”

“No. Do you?”

“Yeah. Down in Shipcott. Over there.” He waved a vague hand at the sluggish mist.

Avery made a grunt of noninterest, then looked round at Steven. “I heard there’s bodies up here.”

A jolt of pure electricity pulsed through Steven. His heart flared with it and he felt the tingles and crackles all over his skin.

Avery smiled with his mouth. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” said Steven. “Bodies. Creepy.”

He concentrated on a piece of tomato dropping out of the back of the crust and took his time stuffing it into his mouth, licking his fingers and chewing without tasting the watery mess. He waited for his heart to stop pummelling his chest, but it didn’t slow.

This was what he wanted. What he’d been waiting for. And he hadn’t even had to ask. Bodies. He was excited and terrified in equal measure.

“Yeah,” said Avery. “I heard some nut killed some people—kids—and buried them out here.”

“Oh yeah. I heard that.” He wished his heart would stop pounding—he was scared Avery would hear it.

“He strangled them.”

Steven nodded, trying to stay calm.

Avery lowered his voice. “Raped them too. Even the boys.”

Steven tried to clear his throat. Tomato stuck in it. “Did they find them all?”

“No.”

Steven felt faint. Not “I don’t think so”; not “I’m not sure.”

Just “No.”

“There’s a few still out here, I reckon,” said Avery.

A few.

Paul Barrett, Mariel Oxenburg. William Peters.

“Yeah?” he said. “Like where?”

Just like that, Steven asked the question. He felt giddy with anticipation.

Avery looked off towards Dunkery Beacon. “Why do you care?”

Time slowed into a strange sucking vortex for Steven as the reasons why he cared nearly overwhelmed him. A spinning wheel of fortune and the suffocating press of frozen mud around a small boy’s lonely bones.

“I don’t care,” he said, and his voice cracked in his tense throat. “I’m just interested in … I mean … if you were going to bury a body out here, where would it be?”

He’d hoped for casual but his question sounded horribly loud and desperate to his ears as it hung over them in the still morning air. He felt sick that he’d asked it. Sick and clammy.

Avery turned to look at him carefully and Steven met his eyes, hoping the man couldn’t see through them into the dark pit of fluttering fear that lay behind.

The silence stretched out around them until Steven could swear he felt it creak under the strain.

Then Avery merely shrugged. “Around. About. Who knows?” He smiled a little smile at Steven and dug about in the bag. “You want something to drink?”

Steven wanted to kill him.

He jerked to his feet. He picked up his spade to go, but Avery gripped the shaft hard and looked up at him, his face suddenly cold and dangerous.

“I’m going to need that,” said Avery quietly.

And when he looked into the man’s milky green eyes, Steven knew he’d lost the battle to keep the book of his mind closed—and Avery’s ruby lips split into a crooked white grin as he read the boy like a billboard.

Steven cried out as if he’d touched something dark and slimy.

He let go of the spade, making it rebound hard into Avery’s bloody arm.

Then he turned and ran.

As he hit the track, he heard Avery come after him—close, too close, he should’ve made his move before, when he’d have had a head start!—then he felt a sharp pain in his back and fell to the ground, winded.

He felt Avery grip the back of his best T-shirt and lift him like a bad puppy; his feet scrabbled for purchase as he almost staggered upright, then collapsed sideways to his knees against the man’s legs.