Blacklands

“You go,” he said quickly, before he could lose his nerve. “I’ll stay.”

Lewis gave a confused laugh and glanced at Avery, who was looking at Steven with an odd expression on his face.

Steven was white, with two burning patches high on his cheeks, his eyes fixed on his sandwich. Lewis noticed he was trembling. He also noticed that the sandwich Steven was eating had tomato in it. As he watched, Steven took another bite and sloppily sucked a bit of errant tomato into his mouth.

Something was very wrong with his friend.

“C’mon, Steve!” He laughed again but it sounded so odd to his own ears that he cut it short, leaving a strained silence in its wake.

He’d been engrossed in his own sandwich but now he saw that Avery was squeezing the green cardigan between his hands, twisting and crushing it, his knuckles white with tension. His vague sense of unease became an ache in his belly.

“C’mon, you divvy. I got to be back soon.” It wasn’t true, of course, but Lewis suddenly felt the overwhelming need to be at home.

Steven hurled what was left of his sandwich at Lewis, hitting him in the chest.

“Just fucking go, will you! Just fucking go!”

Lewis’s eyes were round with surprise. He took a step backwards.

Steven got up, shaking, and closed the gap between them.

“I know what you did to the garden.”

Lewis flushed deep red. “W-what?”

“You heard me. I know what you did. Now fuck off!”

Steven shoved Lewis in the chest with the shaft of the spade, making him stumble backwards down the mound. Steven came after him and shoved again. Lewis fell onto his backside in the heather, and panic burst on Steven’s face. He grabbed Lewis by the shoulder, trying to lift him and push him away at the same time. Lewis stumbled once, twice; Steven screamed over him: “I hate you! I fucking hate you! Just piss off home! Just go!”

Bits of sandwich and spittle fell onto Lewis from Steven’s furious mouth. He scrambled to his feet and Steven came at him again. This time Lewis skipped out of the way down the track.

“Are you nuts?” he yelled at Steven. “Are you pigging crazy?” Again he glanced at the man—as if for support.

“He’s nuts!” Lewis yelled, but the man was not looking at him. He was looking at Steven; his red, red lips had drawn back to reveal his sharp white teeth in a grimace of concentration. More than Steven’s sudden attack, that sight made Lewis’s insides lurch dizzily and suddenly he had to get away. Had to. Couldn’t stay another second. Primeval fear gripped him and he cried out as if struck—then turned and ran.

Steven watched him go, feeling the thread of his life unravelling and trailing down the track behind his friend as if caught on his heel, leaving him with nothing but a black, hollow chest and bits of bloody tomato free-floating in his rolling gut.

He felt Avery swishing slowly down the hill behind him, wet heather stroking his ankles, a knife, a rope, a gun at the ready.

A shudder passed through him and he spun round on a sob.

Avery hadn’t moved.

For a long moment they regarded each other. Steven pushed tears of panic out of his eyes with the heel of his hand, feeling how strange was the disconnection that allowed him to think that Avery would attribute them to his row with Lewis. It was almost as if his mind had unravelled a bit too far and was now able to consider his own actions from a little way off. The coldness of that scared him but he clung to it nonetheless—it was almost like having someone else in his head, someone else to make decisions—and it was the only thing keeping him from curling into a ball of pissing terror in the heather to await the inevitable.

“You okay?”

Steven nodded, biting his lip. There was more silence.

Avery stood up and brushed the seat of his pants carefully, then made his way down the mound.

Steven saw that the man’s jeans were soaked to the knees and it made him aware that his own were the same, cold and stiff against his shins.

His nerve endings twitched, jumped, screamed to turn and run.

But he just stood there and waited for the killer to come to him.

Why?

The voice observing him demanded an answer. Steven didn’t have one, just a buzzing jumble of words and images like the pieces of a jigsaw when the box was first opened. He knew that those random pieces made a picture—a country garden, sailing ships, puppies in a basket—but the pieces in his head were fragments and some were turned facedown and it would take more than a demanding voice to assemble them into something coherent. Something useful.

Avery stood so close to him now that Steven had to look up into his face.

“What was that all about?”

His voice was kind and his expression was sympathetic. His features were making all the right moves, but his eyes were elsewhere, thinking other things.

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.