Bone Jack (7 page)

‘So he’s your dog?’

The man shook his head. ‘Ain’t a dog. That’s a wolf.’

Ash’s eyes widened. ‘A wolf? Did he escape from a zoo or something?’

‘He’s a wild wolf.’

‘He can’t be. There aren’t any wild wolves in Britain. Not any more. Not for hundreds of years.’

‘I know that. That’s why he has to come back with me.’

The man hunkered down next to the wolf-dog. It didn’t move.

Dead, thought Ash. Dead, dead. They were too late.

The man whispered something, singsong words too softly spoken for Ash to catch. The wolf-dog’s ears twitched and its eyes flickered open again. The man smiled. He slid his hands along its body then under it and hefted the beast up into his arms.

Ash could have run then. Unnaturally fast though the man was, Ash would surely be able to outrun him now he had the wolf-dog in his arms.

But he didn’t run. He wasn’t afraid any more. The man was more interested in the wolf-dog than in him.

‘Will he be OK?’ said Ash.

‘Mebbe.’

‘He looks in a bad way. We should get him to a vet.’

‘No vets up here. Just me.’ said the man. His eyes narrowed, slits of blue. ‘He shouldn’t be here. Something brought him through, brought him from long ago. You know owt about that?’

Ash shook his head. ‘I just found him here.’

‘You know owt about that lad that’s been killing rooks?’

The three dead rooks hanging from a tree at Mark’s camp.

Again, Ash shook his head. ‘I haven’t seen anyone killing rooks.’

Not quite a lie.

‘Aye, well,’ said the man. ‘Best go home now, lad.’

Now Ash remembered where he’d seen him before. The face in the dark, turning away. ‘You were in the woods the other night,’ he said. ‘I saw you.’

The man grunted, said nothing.

‘Bone Jack,’ said Ash. ‘That’s what Mark called you.’

Something flickered in the man’s eyes. Then it was gone again.

‘You ain’t my business today,’ the man said. ‘Go home.’

He turned his back on Ash and headed back down the path, walking with the same easy stride as before despite the weight of the wolf-dog in his arms.

Ash watched him go until he was out of sight.

Then the spell that had held him broke. He ran all the way home.

When he got there, Dad was screaming.

TWELVE

The screams came from the living room. Shattered glass glittered on the dark green carpet. Broken mirror on the wall above it. A fallen vase spilling flowers and water. The sofa upturned.

The room stank of whisky.

Ash stood rooted to the spot.

The TV was running the news, the volume turned up loud. Flyblown children stranded on a tiny island of mud in a swirling tide of brown floodwater. The shadow of a helicopter passing over them. A bomb in a marketplace, dozens dead or injured. A dazed woman walking through the carnage. Apples spilled everywhere.

So strange. All those apples among rubble and twisted metal and blood and bodies.

A yelping scream from somewhere in the room, like the cry of a seagull. And another yelp, and another.

Blood on the carpet, on the coffee table, dark and glossy.

Ash’s stomach clenched.

Dad, sitting on the floor next to the sofa, knees drawn up to his chest, one side of his face pressed against the wall. Staring into space, his eyes wide and crazy with terror.

Ash followed the direction of Dad’s gaze.

He was staring at a black feather on the floor. A feather like the one Ash had found in his bedroom. Exactly like it.

And no sign of Mum.

Blood on the carpet, and Mum nowhere in sight.

Ash’s head was full of noise: the TV, Dad, the ocean roar of his own blood rushing through his veins. The feather on the floor, shadow pulsing out of it.

How did it get there?

It couldn’t be the same feather he’d dropped in the river. So where had it come from? Why was it in the room with Dad?

Ash forced himself to look away. ‘Where’s Mum? Dad! What have you done?’ he said. He couldn’t catch his breath. The words juddered out, drowning in the racket from the TV.

Yelp.

‘Dad!’

Yelp.

The TV spewing noise. Ash hunted for the remote control. Nowhere to be found. He wrenched the TV’s plug out of the socket instead. The screen popped and went black.

Dad stopped yelping.

‘Dad!’

Slowly Dad turned to look at him. Red-rimmed eyes. He looked exhausted, like he hadn’t slept for weeks.

Ash was shaking, his whole body trembling. ‘Dad, where’s Mum?’

‘She’s not here.’ Mumbling, slurring his words.

‘Where is she?’

Dad curled up tighter, pressed his forehead to his knees, rocked himself back and forth. Useless.

‘Did you hurt her?’ said Ash. ‘Where is she? You’d better not have hurt her.’

Nothing.

Ash raced into the hallway, yelling for Mum.

Then he heard her voice.

She was upstairs on the landing, leaning out over the banister. He took the stairs two at a time.

She was all right. He could see that. There wasn’t a mark on her. But he needed her to tell him so he asked anyway.

‘I’m OK,’ she said. ‘Calm down. I’m fine.’

‘There’s blood,’ he said. Still breathless, trembling. ‘There’s blood on the living-room floor.’

She ushered him into her bedroom and closed the door. ‘Your dad cut his hand, that’s all,’ she said. ‘It’s his blood, not mine.’

‘How? What happened?’

‘I didn’t see, but I think he punched the mirror. His hand was still bleeding heavily when I got there but it’s not that bad really. The cuts aren’t deep. I’ve put a dressing on it and I don’t think it needs stitches.’

‘I thought he’d hurt you.’

‘Oh, Ash. He’d never hurt me. Or you. He’d rather die than hurt either of us.’

Ash nodded but he didn’t believe her. Dad wasn’t himself, wasn’t rational. Right now, he seemed capable of anything.

‘What happened, Mum?’ His hands were still shaking. He tried to steady them but he couldn’t. ‘Why did he flip out like that?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I went out for a couple of hours. When I got back, the living room was a mess and he was sitting in the middle of it with the TV on full blast and an empty whisky bottle next to him. I couldn’t find the remote control to turn off the TV.’

‘I pulled the plug out.’

‘Good. I didn’t think of that. I was panicking, I suppose. Anyway, he was bleeding so I ran and got a dressing and bandaged his hand. Then I came up here to phone the doctor.’

‘Right,’ said Ash. ‘Is he coming?’

‘Yes, of course. He’ll be here as soon as he can.’

Footsteps on the stairs and then the landing, slow and heavy. Ash froze. The door to Dad’s room slammed shut.

Mum sighed. ‘Back in his bolthole again. I’d better go down and clear up the living room before the doctor gets here. Will you give me a hand?’

Ash didn’t want to. He was still trembling. He wanted to retreat into his room, like Dad, and play computer games and loud music until his brain fried.

But that would have to wait.

They crept passed the door to Dad’s room and went downstairs. They fetched the vacuum cleaner, a dustpan and brush, a couple of cloths from the cupboard under the stairs. Then they went into the living room.

Ash’s gaze went straight to the black feather. But the feather was gone. He looked around for it on the floor. Nothing.

Where the hell was it?

He searched again. No sign of it.

No one had been in here except Dad. Dad, who’d been staring at the feather, terror written on his face.

Ash’s thoughts raced. Another black feather in the house was more than just a coincidence. It was a message, a warning with some sort of supernatural force. And Dad had understood that too, felt its power. But how had the second feather got into the house? Someone must have brought it and left it in the room with Dad.

Someone else had been here. Who?

His mind was spinning. Dad must know, must have seen someone, but he couldn’t ask him, not right now.

Who’d been here? Who would do this?

None of it made sense.

‘Come on, Ash,’ said Mum. ‘Snap out of it. I thought you were supposed to be helping.’

‘Yeah,’ said Ash. ‘I am going to help. Sorry.’

He picked up the vase and mopped up the spilled water soaking the carpet. Then he looked up.

There was blood on the window, a smeary handprint where Dad must have pressed against it after he’d punched the mirror. Ash wiped a cloth over it, but the blood wouldn’t come off. He stared at it, puzzled, still too much in a daze about Dad and the black feather to think straight.

Then it hit him.

The bloody print was on the outside of the window.

Someone had stood out there, watching Dad. Someone with blood on his hands.

He looked past the handprint, across the lawn to the line of trees beyond. Something stared sightlessly back at him. A sheep skull, wedged in the fork of a branch.

Mark, he thought. The black feather, the bloody handprint, the skull. All this was Mark’s work. Had to be.

Mum was picking up pieces of the broken mirror. ‘I need another cloth,’ said Ash. ‘Back in a minute.’ He stumbled past her with the wet cloth still in his hand. Out into the hallway, out through the front door into sunlight. He stood outside the living-room window, wiped away the blood on the glass while Mum still crouched indoors, with her back to him. Then he yanked the skull from the tree and shoved it deep under the hedge.

He closed his eyes, raised his face to the sun. Let sunlight sear through his eyelids, blinding white blankness.

After a few seconds, he opened his eyes. Blinked away the sun glare.

Mark had been here, freaking out Dad, playing mind games.

Why? A warning, perhaps. A threat. Mark had told him not to run in the Stag Chase and Ash had refused to pull out. Now this.

‘Go to hell, Mark Cullen,’ said Ash, under his breath. ‘Leave my family alone and go to hell.’

THIRTEEN

The doctor came, spent five minutes with Dad, five with Mum, left a small brown bottle of pills on the kitchen table. ‘Call me if things don’t improve,’ he said. Cheery voice, a smile and wave, then his car grinding down the gravel drive and away.

Ash stayed in his room all afternoon, all evening. Mum knocked but he didn’t respond and she didn’t come in. ‘I’ve left some supper for you on the landing,’ she said.

He waited until he heard her go downstairs before he opened the door. A plate piled with sandwiches. He wanted to leave them there, some sort of protest against … what? Dad. Mum. Everything. But hunger got the better of him.

While he was eating, he tried to remember exactly what Mark had said to him in the woods that night. About the Stag Chase, Bone Jack, the old ways.

He went online and searched for ‘Bone Jack’. There were only a handful of hits. The first link led to a page on a medical-school website, dedicated to an anatomical skeleton the students had nicknamed Bone Jack.

A second link took him to a page on an online encyclopedia of folklore and legends.

Bone Jack: an ancient and obscure folkloric figure, particular to the mountainous region around Coldbrook in northern England. Some folklorists place Bone Jack in a loose category of mythic figures associated with nature, wildness and renewal – a category that also includes the Green Man, Lailoken, Myrddin Wyllt, Taliesin and many others. The few early writings that refer to the Bone Jack figure further associate him with the cycle of life and death and with guardianship of the boundary between this world and the Otherworld, attributing him with the ability to shapeshift between human and bird forms – a characteristic that further relates to the pre-Christian Celtic belief that the souls of the dead assume bird form to make their journey to Annwn, the Celtic Otherworld.

Ash sighed. As ever on the internet, every answer only seemed to lead to more questions. Only the name Taliesin was familiar, something or other they’d done in school, though of course he hadn’t paid enough attention and now he couldn’t remember what it was. Nothing for it but to follow the links and read.

He read about Taliesin, a sixth-century Welsh bard whose name meant ‘shining brow’ and whose story was part history and part myth – servant to a sorceress called Ceridwen, a shapeshifter, a poet nowadays best remembered for his most famous poem,
The Battle of the Trees
. Ash clicked on another link and read about Lailoken, also from the sixth century, a mad prophet, a wild man who lived deep in the Caledonian Forest and had an affinity with wild creatures. And Myrddin Wyllt, another crazy wild man of the forest, a character some people thought was the original Merlin.

Last, he looked up the Green Man, and he was the strangest and most ancient figure of them all, leaves and shoots growing from his flesh, a spirit of springtime, rebirth and growth.

Bone Jack had things in common with all of them. He was a wild man who lived in a wild place and seemed to prefer the company of birds and beasts to that of humans. A shapeshifter, a shaman moving across different realities. The Green Man’s dark alter ego in nature’s great cycle of life and death and renewal.

It seemed impossible that the wild man he’d met in the mountains could really be Bone Jack, a mythic figure, some sort of dark fairy tale from a distant past. Ash remembered the unnatural speed the man had seemed to move at, but there could be a rational explanation for that, couldn’t there? There could have been two men out there, brothers, almost identical in their tramp clothing. One behind him on the path and one ahead, lying in wait. And maybe Ash had fled from one brother only to run straight into the second.

But much as Ash wanted to believe in his rational explanation, it somehow seemed less likely than the possibility that the man really was Bone Jack – wild, ancient, a myth come to life – and that there really were ghosts in the mountains, spectral hound boys racing across the land. And then there was Mark, caught up in it all, spinning out of control, threatening Ash, chasing some insane scheme to bring back his father from the Otherworld.