They ran and ran and the trees became thicker, crowding together to bar their way. Out of the corner of his eye, Jack saw a low sinuous shape slither into curling ferns. A flock of birds racketed up into the air, screaming in alarm and Jack didn't recognise the sound. Big mushrooms clung to rotting trunks, almost luminous in the moonlight, dripping with a liquid that Jack instinctively knew had to be poison. Under their feet, in the leaves and moss, small things scuttled into root crevices.
"Too far," Kerry said, out of breath. "Can't be Cromwath."
"Just run." Jack could hardly get the words out. He was thinking ahead. Kerry was right, they had run too far for this to be the walled woodland, but it could be nowhere else.
So how could it stretch so far? They had run a mile, maybe more, and the Blackwood was never that big. And what would they do when they came to the far wall? It was twenty feet high, maybe more. How could they scale that before the chittering darkness overtook them and swallowed them in its cold?
Kerry tripped over a root and Jack fell over him, rolling on the crackling leaves, down a small incline with Kerry tumbling after him and suddenly he fetched up against stone.
The wall, he thought. We have to get over. He hauled himself to his feet, helped Kerry up and as they turned to face the wall, he saw that he'd been wrong.
It was a stone. A huge standing stone. On its surface intricate carved creatures from somebody's nightmare cavorted and twisted around each other. In the poisonous moonlight, they seemed to crawl with a life of their own.
Jack took an involuntary step back. Not one stone. A ring of stones, massive pillars of carved rock in a huge ring. There were thirteen of them, solid and rooted into the ground. He'd never known they existed. The twelve spaces between them yawned darkly. Right in the centre was a flat slab, like a table top on three thick basalt legs. The darkness under it was so complete it seemed solid. Jack took a step forward into the ring, suddenly aware of the old story about the boy who disappeared here. Kerry was just behind him.
I've seen this before! Jack thought. I've been here.
"Where now?" Kerry's breath was rasping in his throat. Jack pointed ahead. There was nowhere else to go. They had to keep moving. He passed right into the ring, wishing it was another day, a daylight day with no obscene dark thing on their tail so he could have a real look as they had planned. Behind him, the reality of pursuit was like a squeeze on his mind.
"Come on." He crossed half-way making for the far side and then abruptly swerved towards the centre. He hadn't meant to do that at all. His feet just took him there.
"Where are you going?"
Jack couldn't speak. He kept on walking, unable to stop. The dark under the table stone pulled at him with such sudden force he felt like a moth in lamplight, though there was no light there. It tugged at him with a tidal drag he couldn't resist. His heart was thumping in his chest, a great double thump that he felt in his ears and even as he took his next step, unable to prevent himself, he felt that second pulse, and it wasn't coming from under his ribs at all. It was pulsing out from where the Major had hung the heart-shaped stone.
One step. Another step. It drew him on and in towards the blackness under the slab. A third step and he could see shapes swirling in there, black on black, and an odd, far off laughter, like the giggling of mad people. Another step and he was almost there, he tried to speak but his mouth wouldn't open. A final step and the darkness began to swallow him.
Then suddenly he was on his back and Kerry was dragging him across the rough ground.
"What're you doing man?"
"Couldn't stop," Jack gasped, mouth now suddenly working. Kerry turned towards the table slab and the dark underneath.
"It was suckin' you in. I could feel it. We got to get out of here."
Beyond the ring, in the direction they'd run from, the chittering was louder and here the air was beginning to freeze. They were caught.
Kerry pulled him up, kept his grip and hauled past the rock table towards the far side, through the space between two massive stones and there was a twist, a wrenching shiver that rippled through them both as if they'd been turned inside out and them twisted back again.
Jack saw swirling colours all around him. Kerry shouted, somehow far in the distance. For an instant Jack was spinning in a vortex of light and rushing sound.
And then they were running in a grey mist.
Something reached out, something so dark it scratched the eyes in this light. Jack just got a glimpse in the corner of his eye and tried to duck, slipped and went on his back. A long black claw of pure night rippled from the space as he scrabbled away from it, heels frantic on the wet grass.
A picture of Billy Robbins doing exactly the same thing came flashing into his mind and pure terror exploded inside him.
He got moving just as the long wavering arm of pure black reached for him, snatched just as he thrust himself backwards. It touched him, just a scrape on his chest near his shoulder and as soon as he felt the contact, a dreadful river of cold splashed into him, burning his skin like fire.
He screeched, rolling backwards, and the contact was lost, leaving only a pain sizzling through skin and bone.
"Run," he screamed. They ran from the darkness, through the grey drizzle of mist and kept on until they ran out of breath and stood, leaning together for support, panting like horses, shivering with fright and the adrenaline rush that fright gives you, and kept holding on until they were able to breath properly again.
Kerry looked at him. "Got you, didn't it?"
Jack nodded. The pain on his shoulder was like nothing he'd ever experienced before and it pulsed in rivulets of glassy hurt all the way across his chest..
"Let's get out of this fog and have a look at you." He got an arm round Jack's shoulders and helped him along, through thick tussock grass, moving laboriously uphill in the gathering light as the mist swirled thick as smoke around their feet. They had run from hellish night into a misty morning. Neither of them said anything, not yet, but despite the pain and the fear, Jack kept thinking of the boy who had disappeared in Cromwath Blackwood and come back stone blind and stone mad.
They walked on until they came to a mound of brittle bare branches, like tangled dead saplings on the moor, fuzzed by the mist. They skirted past them. Jack stumbled on one, fell headlong and fetched up on his face.
He pushed himself up on shaking arms, gagging at the sudden stench. The mist swirled, cleared and he found himself right up against the gaping, mouldering skull of a man. A big yellow maggot twisted out of the eye socket.
He hauled in a breath, too shocked to make a sound. Behind him Kerry was yelling.
"Get off me. Let Go!"
He turned away from the nightmare face to see Kerry hopping on one foot, trying to haul the other back. Bony fingers of a skeletal hand were hooked around his ankle.
They hadn't stumbled through bare branches. They had walked into a battlefield. All around them, all over the misty hillside, lay the bones and broken bodies of dead men.
Kerry was squawking in fright, hauling away, and suddenly the thin white arm pulled out of the socket with a wet sucking sound. Kerry stumbled and the arm and hand trailed along with him. Jack snatched at it, gorge rising, fingers clutched on bare bone and mildewed skin and the clawed hand tore away from Kerry's ankle.
"You're okay. It just snagged you."
"Jeez Jack. Thought it had me. Thought it grabbed me." He sunk to his knees gasping, gagging against the awesome stench.
Jack winced against the pain in his shoulder, trying to slow his breathing. He eased himself to his feet, bracing himself against a broken lance that was stuck into the peaty ground, stuck through the white and peeling ribs of something that might have been a man but wasn't quite. It was squat and heavy, with a skull that narrowed above a sharp brow. Big spade-like teeth snarled in a mouth open in a hellish scream. A massive spiked club was gripped in a gnarled hand.
"What is that?"
Kerry looked down.
"And what the heck is that?" Beside them, on its side, an animal sprawled muzzle down into the turf, its bristling hide spiked with arrows, snout curled into a perpetual snarl. Two wicked tusks curved like yellow knives on either side of it's maw.
"I don't know what it is."
"Jack. There's something wrong here." Kerry wasn't normally given to understatement. His voice was still shaky.
"Where the hell are we?"
Hell could describe this place. All around them lay the broken bones and shattered bodies of men and things that weren't quite men and horses and beasts that looked like giant warty boars with spiked collars round their bristled necks. Whatever had happened on this moor had been awesome. It had been desperate.
"I don't know that either." Jack confessed.
"It was night when those things came, and now it's morning. How did that happen?" Kerry asked the question, but Jack's head was fizzing with them and he had no answers.
The picture of Thomas Lynn kept pushing into his mind. Was he dreaming? Was this a nightmare? Or worse?
When that dark had reached for him and clawed at him, the pain had been so monstrous that Jack thought he would die of it.
Now the possibility struck him that he might well have died, and what he was seeing now was just the last sparkings of a dying brain. He just didn't know.
The mist cleared some more, showing the extent of the battlefield. It went on up and over the hill. Rusty armour was beginning to merge with russet bracken. Above them, dark threatening clouds raced by and the wind moaned ghostly. A movement caught Jack's eye, just as a harsh sound cut the air. Both boys turned to see a huge crow perched on the breastbone of a half-rotted skeleton.
"Look at the size of that thing," Kerry said. "It's a vulture for sure."
The crow cawed again. From a tussock uphill, another one replied. It hopped into view, big as a spaniel, black as tar with a beak like a scimitar. The first one flapped ungainly over the bones towards them.
"This isn't looking too clever," Kerry ventured. The crow cocked its head. One eye was missing, leaving a gaping crater. Even then, Jack knew that it was looking at him from that liquid cavity, looking right through him.
Kerry stepped back. The bird pecked at his knee. The second one flew across, heavy in the air. It stabbed at Jack as he dodged back. Another one appeared between the ribs of a big beast. Then another. The first one cawed again, rough as grindstone, and suddenly the sky was full of immense black birds. They came fluttering in towards them, so close they could feel the whoosh of wings and smell the carrion breath. A sharp beak caught Kerry behind his ear and drew blood.
"You have to be kidding," he yelled, whirling away. He snatched up a sword stuck in a ragged throat, turned fast and hacked at the nearest bird. Feathers flew out in a puff. He swung again and it squawked and fell to the ground, one wing flailing uselessly.
Jack stumbled to the big beast spiked with arrows, snatched one and despite the pain in his shoulder, drew and let fly into the swarm flocking around Kerry's head. A huge bird made a surprising thump when it hit the ground, shot right through. He nocked another, fired again, surprised to hit a second crow. Kerry spun in a circle, slashing at the air. Feathers and what might have been blood followed the swing of the sword.
"We got to get out of here," Jack bawled. "We have to go back."
"I'm with you there." Kerry sounded breathless. The crows fluttered around, dodging the swinging blade. Jack grabbed Kerry's sleeve and pulled him away, back the way they had come, running for the ring of stones, down the hill into the clearing mist. The crows followed in a fluttering cloud, pecking and cawing. They breasted the slope and Jack almost froze.
The ring of stones was gone.
All he could see were two big pillars standing side by side on the open moor.
"Where the heck are they…?
"Trick of the light," Jack gasped, somehow sure it wasn't any trick of the light. He pulled Kerry along, limping, but still running hell for leather, knowing they had to get back between the stones, back to where they had come from, out of this hellish place even if they had to face whatever shades were waiting in the dark. "Come on, Kerry."
They made it ten yards ahead of the flock, dashed through, expecting that sickening wrench they had felt when they ran from the flowing dark.
Nothing happened. Nothing at all. They ran between the stones, tripping over dank heather, and the flock of crows flew right after them. Another reached Kerry and he almost split it in half with a manly swipe, still running down the slope towards the shelter of a thick forest edge that loomed out of the mist. A razor beak caught Jack on the back of his head, sharp enough to make his eyes water. A bird landed on Kerry's shoulder and went for his eyes. He snatched at the beak, threw it off him and in ten more steps they were crashing into the undergrowth at the edge of the trees. Behind them wings beat at the thick foliage, but they ran on, deeper in to the gloom, as the noise of pursuit faded behind them.
They stopped in a glade where great trees branched high above them, trunks yards wide and gnarled. Kerry leaned against a root, catching his breath. Jack slid to the thick carpet of moss.
"We better wake up now," Kerry finally said. "This is the weirdest dream I ever had in my life, that's for sure."
Jack felt a sudden giggle bubble up inside him, more like hysteria than laughter. The pain in his shoulder was draining him, spreading out and down his ribs a grinding chill. He felt his vision waver in and out.
"We can't be dreaming. Not both of us."
"How do you mean?"
"I'm dreaming, or you're dreaming, but not both of us at once."
"Oh, don't say that, Jackie boy."
"Why not?"
Kerry looked him straight in the eye.
"If this isn't a dream, and we're not dead, that means it's real, and I don't care for that one little bit. And I don't have a clue where on earth we are or how we're going to get home."
Jack met his eyes and held them with some difficulty as darkness began to cloud his vision, unable to get the image of Thomas Lynn out of his head. Into Cromwath Blackwood and found on Drumbuie Hill ten years later. Not a day older, but blind and mad and dying.
Maybe it hadn't been a myth after all.
Way out in the forest, something howled, long and shivery and hungry.
"Wherever we are, I don't think it's earth at all."