Blacklands (10 page)

He dug two holes then ate a cheese sandwich and dug one more.

Since what he’d come to think of as the Sheepsjaw Incident, the digging had lost some of its appeal. That intense high and the crashing low had thrown the hopelessness of his mission into sharp relief. Now every jar of his elbows, every ache in his back, every splinter in his palm somehow seemed more wearing.

At the root of his new bad mood was an itchy discontent that made him distant with Lewis and snappy with Davey. Even out here on the moor where sheer hard work usually drove everything from his mind but a kind of dim exhaustion, he was dissatisfied and grouchy—though there was no one to be grouchy with bar himself, his spade, and the endless moor beneath his feet.

He had not heard from Avery. It had been almost two weeks since he sent the letter with the symbols on the back. Was it possible that he had been too careful? So careful that Avery himself had failed to spot the secret message? Had the killer of Uncle Billy merely read the meaningless words on the front of the paper and tossed it into a bin? Or, if Avery had seen it, had he understood it? In Steven’s murderous mind, he had thought he’d given enough to tempt Avery into answering, but maybe Avery couldn’t crack the code. Or maybe he just didn’t want to. Maybe he didn’t want to play mouse to Steven’s teasing cat. As the days dragged by without an answer from Longmoor, Steven could not suppress a sick feeling of failure. He wished he could tell Lewis of his fears, but he knew this was something he had to keep to himself. Nobody else would understand what he’d done. In fact, Steven could see himself getting into some awkward conversations if he revealed anything about the correspondence.

He had already taken pains to make sure he was always there when the post came. Their post came early—around 7
A.M
.—and Steven had started setting his alarm for quarter to so as to ensure he was at the top of the stairs when Frank Tithecott walked up the path. The last thing he needed was his mum or nan picking up a letter addressed to him. Steven had never had anything personal come through the letter box—not even a Christmas card—and he imagined questions would be asked. But the anticipatory moments spent with cold toes at the top of the stairs were more than outweighed by mounting disappointment.

He started on another hole but had only made one stab at the fibrous ground before he flung the spade down, and himself disconsolately after it.

Almost instantly the wet started to seep through his cheap waterproof trousers. The chill earth gripped him below and the wet heather curled over him in a dripping shroud. The sweat he’d worked up dried all too fast and he started to shiver.

A sea mist crept silently over the land in a damp blanket smelling of rotten kelp.

Steven felt himself shrinking under its blind vastness. The image of the galaxy came back to him. He was an atom on a microbe on a speck on a mote on a pinprick in the middle of nowhere. Moments before he’d been upright and strong and emanating heat. Now, just seconds later, he was a corpse-in-waiting adrift in space. Avery was right. It all meant nothing.

Steven’s eyes became superheated and—with no further warning—he started to cry. At first it was just his eyes but his body soon followed and he started to sob and bawl like an abandoned baby stretched out in the heather, his chest heaving and hitching, his stomach muscles tensing with effort, his white-cold hands curled into loose, upturned fists of hopelessness.

For a few minutes he lay there weeping, not understanding what this feeling was or where it had come from; his only coherent emotion was a vague, detached concern about whether he had gone mad.

His crying slowed and stopped and his hot eyes were cooled by the mizzle swirling soundlessly from the nothing-white sky. He blinked and found the effort almost beyond him. Tiredness seeped from his heart and through every part of him like lead, pressing him down onto the moor, and then there was nothing left for his body to do but lie there and await instructions.

Inside his complete physical stillness, Steven’s mind came back to him from a long way off, a bit at a time. At first he felt very sorry for himself; he wished his mother would come and find him and wrap him in a fluffy white towel and carry him home and feed him stew and chocolate pudding. A little after-sob escaped him at the knowledge that this wasn’t going to happen—not just now, but ever again. And another, colder stab in his heart told him that this memory-wish had probably
never
happened. He had no real recollection of fluffy towels, or of stew, or of his mother enveloping him in safe, warm arms when he was wet and cold. He had plenty of memories of her roughly stripping wet socks off his feet, of shouting about the filth in the laundry basket, of drying his hair too roughly with one of their mismatched, thinning towels that were hung up at night but were always still damp in the morning. That made him think of the stained bathroom carpet, which played host to big reddish fungal growths behind the toilet in winter, as if the outside was slowly seeping inside their house, filling it with cold and creeping things. Davey cried when he first saw the fungus, and wet the bed rather than go near it. But now, like all of them, he ignored it. Sometimes they even joked about the mushrooms and the mildew, but more often, when Steven came back from Lewis’s spotless house, the smell of the damp hit him as he opened the front door. He could not smell it on his own clothes but—from the fresh, flowery aqua blue washing powder scents of his classmates—he had an uncomfortable feeling that he carried that stench of poverty around on him like a yellow star.

He never felt clean. Not when he came off the moors covered in mud, not when he climbed out of the tepid baths he shared with Davey, not when he first arose from the bed they shared and pulled on yesterday’s school shirt.

What had happened to him? Steven felt his mind whirl with confusion. How had it happened? Where had he gone? Somewhere, somehow, the little boy who used to be him had disappeared and been replaced by the new him. The new Steven did not watch
Match of the Day
or queue in the Blue Dolphin for fifty pence worth of batter bits. He did not want Steven Gerrard in his
Soccer Stars
sticker book more than life itself. The new Steven was out here every afternoon until nightfall, sweating in dirt, eating moldy sandwiches, prodding feebly at the ground with a rusty spade, and seeking death.

For three years this had been his life. Three years! He felt like a man who’s just heard a sentence passed down. The thought of three wasted years stretching out behind him was as shocking as if they were still to come. What had happened to him? Where had he gone?

Hot on self-pity’s heels came an anger so intense that it struck Steven an almost physical blow. He threw up an arm as if he could ward it off. The anger was blinding. In a single violent motion Steven rolled onto his knees and tore at the heather and grass, ripping up great handfuls, gouging the soil with his fingernails, slapping the sodden turf. He beat and flailed and kicked and pounded as the heather flicked rain at him. A high whining sound in the back of his throat was punctuated by little mewling breaths that kept him alive for this one purpose—to assault the very planet.

When Steven next had a conscious thought he was kneeling with his forehead on the ground, prostrate before nature. There was scrub in his fists and in his mouth, as if he’d tried to chew through the Earth.

He sat up slowly and looked at the feeble inroad his hysteria had made into the moor. A few scattered clumps of uprooted grass; heather torn from its stalks, now dying on the ground, a couple of small, muddy exposed patches fast filling with water. It was nothing. Less than nothing. An Exmoor pony pawing for winter grass, a deer lying down to sleep, a sheep squatting to shit would have left more of a mark than Steven had in all his fury.

He stood up shakily into the white sky. His spade was where he had dropped it aeons ago; his lunch box and map nearby—alien artifacts that had no meaning for him in this end-of-the-world fog.

He turned to go but had no idea where he was. Ten feet in any direction was as far as he could see, and then there was nothing. Something far back in his ordinary boy’s mind stopped him from stumbling blindly into the swirling void. He had been caught on the moor before like this, enveloped by fog and wholly lost. This whiteness sneaked up on you, even on a sunny day out of a blue sky. Two years ago he’d sat beside an empty grave for three hours in total whiteout before summer reemerged and he could find his way home.

The memory pulled Steven back to something like normality and he had the sense to stay where he was.

He was cold, but he’d been colder. He was wet, but he’d been wetter. He wasn’t hungry—yet. He wasn’t injured and, as long as he didn’t walk stupidly into the fog, that should remain the case.

He glanced down at his spade and it seemed familiar to him once more. Not lovely, but at least familiar.

The rain was coming down again and Steven upended his lunch box and put it on his head. The rain that was gently cushioned by the heather turned into a tin-roof rattle on his skull.

Being still would only make him colder. With reluctance, he leaned down and picked up the spade. He found the place where the first sliver of ground had been broken and dug the spade in again. It was a halfhearted effort, but his next strike was better and, by the fourth, Steven was back in a rhythm.

By the time the hole was half dug, Steven knew he would carry on, even when the point was not merely to keep himself warm.

Digging had given his life purpose. It was a small, feeble purpose and was unlikely to end in anything more than a gradual tapering off into nothingness.

But purpose was something, wasn’t it?

A small, mean voice somewhere nagged that it meant nothing. It all meant nothing.

But there was another, stronger voice in Steven. It had no answers, only another question, but it was this question that kept him digging until well after an unseen sun set in the invisible sky.

If it all meant nothing, why did it matter so much?

Chapter 13

“S
TEVEN
! B
REAKFAST
!”

“I’m coming!” Steven’s hands shook as he opened the letter from the serial killer.

Steven turned the page over with trembling hands and held it up to the light. Nothing. The paper was cheap and thin—no impressions could have been scored into it. He turned the toilet light on, but there was no mark on the reverse of the letter.

Steven frowned. What was the point of Avery writing back if he was not going to help him? Avery’s previously neat and even handwriting had been replaced by an uneven script, dashed off carelessly, using inappropriate capital letters.

“STEVEN!!”

“COMING!!”

From his reading he knew that serial killers liked to play games—first with their victims and then with the police. They liked to show off. From what he could tell, that was how most of them were caught. If they were caught.

Maybe Avery just liked getting letters and was tempting him to keep writing.

But then surely he would make more of an effort to lure his correspondent into a reply this time?

Steven couldn’t work out whether thanking him for his “great letter” was sarcastic or not. He’d be the first to admit that his letter had not been top-drawer stuff, but if Avery had found and understood the clue, then maybe he thought that
was
pretty great. Maybe that thing about time and tide meant Steven was right to be asking these questions right now. But if Avery had found the clue, why had he not responded in the same way with a map? Or—

Steven jumped as the toilet door banged open. His mother was red in the face from running upstairs.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Mum! I’m on the toilet!”

Lettie looked down at him. “With your trousers up? I’ve been yelling at you for ten minutes!”

She noticed the letter in his left hand.

“What’s that?”

Steven reddened and folded it. “Nothing.” He looked at his mother and saw an expression of flinty patience come over her face. She wasn’t going to let it go.