Blacklands

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.

Still gripping his shirt, Avery stooped to pick up the spade and Steven’s remote brain informed him dully that that was what had hit him in the back. Uncle Jude’s spade. Felled by his own weapon just as he’d been caught in his own trap.

Because he was just a stupid, stupid boy. Not a sniper, not a cop, not even a grown-up. He’d played at being a grown-up and this was how it was ending. Him dead on the moor in his best red T-shirt with LAMB on the back. And the papers reporting not his triumph but his pathetic, lonely, weak little-boy death. A death that would reduce him to initials on a map and a blurry old photo in a fading newspaper. Not even a good photo, he’d bet. Probably the one from school that Mum had on the mantelpiece, which made him look like a refugee. Not the photo he’d dressed for this morning when he still thought he could be a hero.

Fear, shame, and nausea mingled inside him and he sagged against Avery’s cold jeans.

Avery pulled him away and slapped his face.

“You know who I am?”

Steven nodded dumbly at Avery’s black rubber-soled shoes.

“Good.”