Authors: Sara Crowe
Bone Jack
Contents
Acknowledgements and Author’s Note
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Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781448187096
First published in 2014 by
Andersen Press Limited
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road
London SW1V 2SA
www.andersenpress.co.uk
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
The right of Sara Crowe to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Copyright © Sara Crowe, 2014
Cover illustration © Kate Grove and Phil Huntington, 2014
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available.
ISBN: 978 1 783 44005 4
For my mother and father,
who filled my childhood with stories,
and for Elaine and Joanna who
encouraged me to write my own.
With love.
ONE
Stag’s Leap. It felt like the edge of the world, nothing beyond it but a fall of rock, depth and fierce winds.
Ash Tyler looked down.
Today the wind was hot, as dry and rough as sandpaper against his skin. It tore back his hair, made his eyes stream. He leaned into it, testing its strength against his own.
There was still a half a metre or so between him and the edge. He inched forward again. The wind slapped his T-shirt around like a sail.
He’d done this before at least a dozen times. Always his best friend Mark’s idea. All the crazy things they’d ever done had been Mark’s idea.
Except this time.
Here he was again. Alone, and nothing between him and a hundred metre fall onto splintered rock.
He stretched out his arms like wings, the way Mark always used to. He forced himself to look down. The salt taste of sweat on his lips. The wind singing in his ears.
The ground hurtled up towards him and spun away again.
He braced himself against the wind. For a few moments he felt weightless, free, as if he could soar out over the land, ride the air like a hawk. Fly up, pin himself to the sky, watch the blue Earth spin beneath him.
He was giddy with fear and joy.
He knew that the wind had only to draw its breath to snatch him away, send him flailing down onto the rocks far below.
He tipped his weight forward until only the balls of his feet tethered him to the ground.
Then the wind dropped.
He wobbled. Not much but enough to make fear drill through him. If he fell he’d die, bones shattering, skin ripping against granite, blood on stone.
He tensed. Every sinew wire-taut, every muscle straining.
He hung there for what seemed an age. Then the wind gusted hard again, pushed him upright. He took a step back and then another, sagged down onto the good solid ground.
That had been the closest one yet.
Never again, he told himself. At fifteen, he was too old for these stupid games.
Still trembling from the rush.
Never again.
He rolled onto his back on the parched mountain grass and closed his eyes. The sun was hot on his face. The wind soughed over the mountainside and birds chattered in the gorse. Crickets whirred somewhere close by.
Beyond these tiny sounds stretched a vaster silence. Once it would have been broken by the rough cries of sheep, but there weren’t any sheep in the mountains any more. First sickness had weakened them. Then came government men in biohazard suits, the whole area under quarantine, gunshots and terrified bleats shattering the quiet air. Now the sheep were all gone, all dead.
Sometimes Ash imagined he could still smell the stink of blood and burning flesh from the slaughter, the choking disinfectants with which they’d drenched whole farmyards.
The wind dropped again. The air was warm and thick. It clung to his skin like sweat. He sat up, yawned, stretched the tension out of his muscles.
He had a three-mile run home. It was time to get going.
He set off at a steady pace down the path. Soon the rhythms of his body took over. He let his thoughts drift apart and fall away until there was only the beat of his feet, the shunt of his lungs and the hard white sky over raw slopes.
The path ran along a crease in the mountain to a wide flattish shoulder halfway down. Brambles, a collapsed dry-stone wall, and beyond that a cluster of farm buildings where Mark had lived with his family until the bank repossessed it last year.
It had been empty ever since. No one wanted a wind-blasted, run-down hill farm in the aftermath of a foot-and-mouth outbreak.
Ash concentrated on the path. Tried not to look at the farm, not to think about it, not to remember. The memories came anyway, dark and airless. Tom Cullen, Mark’s dad, up to his neck in debt, silently watching the carcasses of his slaughtered sheep smoulder in huge pits. His world falling apart.
‘We should have seen it coming,’ Ash’s mum had said afterwards. Eyes full of tears and anger. ‘We should have done something.’
But no one had done anything for Tom Cullen.
A battered
FOR SALE
sign hung on the gate. Beyond it was the yard, an expanse of cracked concrete edged with tall weeds and nettles. The farmhouse windows were boarded up. Around it stood several outbuildings, a rusted tractor resting on its wheel rims, a few empty oil drums.
The old barn, its doors hanging on their hinges, its roof sagging.
When they were kids, he and Mark had bottle-fed lambs in that barn. Turned the hayloft into a den. Once they’d cornered a marauding fox in there, then, awed by its fierce wildness, stepped back and let it run free into the night.
And in that barn, in the dead of night, Tom Cullen had knotted a rope into a noose, slung it over a beam and—
Ash wouldn’t let himself think about that.
Not that.
He ran on and didn’t look back. Where the path forked, he took the steeper route, a sharp zigzag downhill between high banks of boulder and gorse.
He came around the shoulder of the mountain and the land opened out before him, greens and greys and purples slashed with fox-red bracken. A wild terrain of deep wide valleys, rough moors, crags.
He liked this route, even though it took him past the Cullen farm. When Dad came home – any day now – they’d come running out here together. They’d camp at one of the mountain lakes, go canoeing and fishing and rock climbing. They’d worked it all out in emails and phone calls.
But lately Dad hadn’t been answering his emails or his phone and now he was two days late coming home. Mum was worried. She never said so but Ash knew it and so he worried too. The house phone seemed to ring on and off all day but the callers were never Dad.
‘Where the hell are you?’ he said out loud to the mountains and the sky. ‘Come home, you stupid bastard.’
He ran faster. Only two weeks now until the big race, the annual Stag Chase through the mountains. He’d be the stag boy, the lead runner chased by other boys. And Dad would be back by then. He’d be there. Ash would win. He knew in his heart he would. He was rubbish at most sport but he could run like a stag, run like the wild wind. He’d win and Dad would be waiting at the finish line, brimful with pride.
The whole thing played out like a movie in his mind.
He lengthened his stride, let his body do the thinking, let it make the split-second decisions about footfall and rock and root. Ran through thorn and gorse, over slope, stone, ridged mud, slippery patches of wiry grass. The whisper of the breeze, the scrape and scuttle of loose stones underfoot. A kestrel trembling on the high thermals. The burnt smell of the sun-scorched land.
A bird shot out of the bracken, flew straight at his face. A gaping beak the colour of steel, ragged black wings, claws ripping at his skin. He flung out his hands, felt feather and bone under his fingers. He staggered, lost his footing and crashed down onto a scratchy mattress of heather.
Then the bird was gone. He rolled onto his back and lay there, breathing hard, heart thumping, staring wide-eyed at a darkening sky.
TWO
A few seconds ago the sky had been as pale as the white sun, but now bruised-looking clouds were piling up on each other, a dark avalanche rolling over the land. Still lying on his back, Ash watched it warily. The weather in the mountains could change in the blink of an eye. Last year he’d got caught in a brief, ferocious hailstorm that had come out of nowhere on a clear spring day.
Now it looked as if a rainstorm was going to catch him.
And a tremor in the mountainside, a long low vibration like a roll of thunder except that it couldn’t be because it didn’t stop, just got louder and closer until the bone-dry ground and the air thrummed with it.
Something coming, something powerful and fast. Not just one thing but many, feet pounding the hard earth; animals or people, Ash couldn’t tell which.
Whatever they were, they were coming uphill towards him.
Ash scrambled to his feet, looked around. Nothing. But there was still something coming, the pounding getting louder, closer. He backed away from the path into dense gorse that tore at his bare legs. He couldn’t run through that, couldn’t get any further away from the path.
He looked for somewhere to hide, but now a stone skittered at the bend below. Behind it came a running boy. He was about Ash’s age – fifteen, maybe sixteen – and he was tall and lean like Ash too, wearing rough brown leggings and thin leather boots like some ancient-days character from a movie or a computer game. In the heat haze he seemed spectral and unearthly, a strange shimmering apparition. His hair was sculpted into spikes stiffened with pale mud or clay. More clay caked his face, made a cracked and peeling mask. Above the waist he was naked except for a crude design daubed on his chest, a blood-red stag’s head with branching antlers. He stumbled as he ran, lurched and flailed, staggered onwards again. His eyes were wide with terror. His clay face stretched into a silent scream.