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<h2>20</h2>
<p><em>August 2. 11.30am.</em></p>
<p>"It's like the moon," Tom whispered. The breeze over the high ridge of the moor snatched his awe-struck words and carried them away. The others stood on the long edge of tussock grass looking down at the wide and barren basin of the heathland that seemed to stretch to the horizon. It was pock-marked and pitted with craters that really did give it a blasted lunar aspect. The black water in the depressions, each one ringed by a tumulus of heaved-up earth, made the craters seem like bottomless pits.</p>
<p>"Christ on a bike," Billy said, his voice reduced to a marvelling whisper. He stood up on a thick mound of peat and scanned left and right. "It goes on forever."</p>
<p>It was the eeriest, most spectacular sight any of them had ever seen. The basin of the moor swept down from where they stood on the rim. Fifty yards away, a rusted chain-link fence suspended betwen concrete posts that angled over, listing like wounded sentries, caught the wind and made it moan, adding to the sense of desolation and old destruction.</p>
<p>Far across the moor, maybe a mile off, but probably more, only the roofs of a clutter of shacks and shanties were visible beyond a lower ridge.</p>
<p>It had been further than they had thought, at least five miles up into the hills from the camp. They'd walked since early morning after a breakfast of cornflakes and slices of bread toasted black over the flames. Doug had woken first and had disturbed them all in his scramble to get out of the tent, twanging the guy ropes and almost collapsing the canvas on top of the others.</p>
<p>The fire had still been smouldering and it only took a handful of dry bracken and twigs to get the flames flickering and in no time at all the pinewood was crackling hot. They huddled around the campfire in the cool of the morning, drawing the heat into themselves and watching the magic transformation as the rising sun began to burn a fine valley mist away.</p>
<p>"We heard something last night," Corky said. "Sounded like somebody walking."</p>
<p>"It was like the sound you get if you walk over a racine rat's burrow," Danny confirmed although he hadn't actually heard that. Billy grinned.</p>
<p>"Oh, I'm really scared. Terrified even. You should have woke me up so I could have trembled all night."</p>
<p>"You were scared enough in the dark," Doug derided.</p>
<p>"It's true." Corky insisted. "Probably a cow, though. Just as long as it doesn't barge intp the tent when we're sleeping. We'd be flat as pancakes in the morning."</p>
<p>"Maybe it wasn't a cow," Tom said, still shivering in the cool of the morning. "I told you I saw a man when we were collecting firewood. I think there was somebody watching us."</p>
<p>"Bunch of pussies," Billy said. He went down to the stream with his mug and threw the dregs of his tea out into the stream. He turned and was about to come back up to the campfire when he stopped so suddenly that Doug and Danny noticed immediately. They asked him what was wrong. Billy crouched down and the others came sauntering over to the stream, expecting some silly joke.</p>
<p>"Was this here last night?" Billy asked. He was hunkered on the gravel, inspecting a wide footprint impressed deep into the surface. They could see the clear zigzag of heavy duty cleats. Doug bent down beside him.</p>
<p>"I don't think so. I think we would have noticed."</p>
<p>"Somebody's playing silly baskits," Billy said. He stood up and then stamped his foot down beside the print. His own baseball boot made only a slight indentation, hardly two thirds the size of the original print.</p>
<p>"Can't be us," Corky said. "You've got the biggest feet. And it's nowhere near that size."</p>
<p>"Did you draw this?" Billy asked Danny. "Did you fool around here and make this look like a footprint?"</p>
<p>"Don't be daft. It's the real thing." Danny came down the bank and got down on his knees. "But it looks old to me. Nobody's been up here in a long time, and it hasn't rained in a while. It's probably been there for weeks. Your boot hardly made a mark and this one's pretty deep. It must have been here before we came."</p>
<p>Danny wasn't sure of that, but he preferred to believe it, and the shale was hard-packed and fairly dry. The print could have been there a long time, since the last time it rained, sometime back in July. He didn't want to think of anybody passing through their camp in the middle of the night. He remembered Corky poking his head out of the flap. There had been a sound, a hollow thud.</p>
<p>And then a branch had snapped.</p>
<p>If it had been somebody, they wouldn't have made so much noise, Danny told himself, rationalising it out. It must have been a cow wandering among the trees.</p>
<p>"Yea, that's days old," he said, now near enough convinced. "Weeks even. There's nobody around here. Nobody daft enough to come all this way up the hill."</p>
<p>But Tom and Doug seemed less convinced. They were looking round warily, scanning the trees. Nothing moved. Far off in the distance, way down the valley where they knew Blackwood Farm was, a cockerel welcomed the day. Danny flapped his elbows and did a little strut, coaxing a grin from Doug and they all sat down again. They waited by the fire, toasting more bread on the ends of their sticks while they finished their tea, and then they started off on the trek. They followed the Blackwood Stream ever upwards, over narrow falls and through narrower gorges, up onto the high moor where the water cut its way through deep peat deposits and sometimes disappeared altogether under the thick cover of purple heather. Up at this height, the air was colder and a wind blew in from the west so that when they stopped walking, it dried their sweat on their backs and despite the power of the sun in a clear blue sky, it made them shiver.</p>
<p>The stream had become a rivulet, dwindled to a trickle and then they were beyond it, right at the source, into the damp bog draining the high moor where the clumps of sphagnum moss sank under their feet in soft sponges of marsh. Clusters of papery reed-moths flew up with every step and marshy gas bubbles gurgled and burst in stenchy little explosions. It had been slow going here, crossing the boggy land, sometimes sinking up to their knees and sometimes further than that in the stagnant pools where the mud was oozing and liquid. Corky told them he'd read in National Geographic, of a man's body found in a bog, preserved by the peat for thousands of years, still with the hair on his head and the leather tunic on his back.</p>
<p>"That's what the smell is," Billy said. "It would make you puke."</p>
<p>"You think there's bodies here?" Doug asked. Corky nodded.</p>
<p>"Sure. Dozens of them. They used to have battles up here. William Wallace and Rob Roy McGregor. All the clans in their kilts and claymores.</p>
<p>"Isn't that a land mine?" Billy wanted to know. "A claymore?"</p>
<p>"No, it's a sword," Corky explained patiently. "Used to hack each other to pieces. We're probably walking over the skeletons right now. They'll be lying down there all rotted and grunged up like something out of the Twilight Zone." He twisted his face into an approximation of a skeleton and curled his fingers into hooks. It looked not unlike Dougie's imitation of the creature from the Black Lagoon on the day they'd first thought of the expedition to find the Dummy Village.</p>
<p>Tom hauled himself out of a sinking hole and clambered onto a grassy mound that could take his weight. He had taken off his canvas shoes and had them hanging by the laces round his neck. "That's horrible," he said. "What if we stand on one?"</p>
<p>"It'll probably bite your toe off." Corky said matter of factly. Tom stayed up on the tussock, wobbling for balance, arms outstretched.</p>
<p>"Then spit it out again when it finds out its your stinky ol' foot," Doug chipped in, grinning his big-toothed smile, but careful to avoid placing his own feet in the muddy holes. They seemed to go down forever and up at this height, they probably sank for thirty feet.</p>
<p>Tom leapt from the mound to another, nimbly landing and swaying for balance as it shuddered under his feet. He jumped to the next, lost his footing and fell to the third one, landing on his belly. Billy dipped, quick as a cat, snatched a wet handful of moss and mud in his hand, then grabbed Tom's ankle. The small boy felt the cold, clammy grip and let out a howl of fright. He kicked backwards, landing his foot in the pit of Billy's belly. Billy gasped and stumbled backwards, stepped into a dip and his foot went right through the mossy covering into a slick swampy hole. His foot snagged on a buried root and for a moment he imagined bony fingers clawing on to <em>his</em> ankle. Without any hesitation at all, he heaved himself right out again before he fell on his face.</p>
<p>"I'll get you for that," he bawled hoarsely at Tom who had rolled over the mound and reached a thin strip of firmer ground.</p>
<p>"You and whose army?" Tom called back. Billy lumbered after him but for once the small boy had the weight advantage. Billy's feet kept sinking below the surface matting and all around him the floating marsh wobbled and shivered in his wake. The legs of his jeans were black with peaty mud.</p>
<p>"The creature from the black lagoon," Doug jeered. "Except uglier. And fatter."</p>
<p>"Piss off Nicol," Billy rasped. He clambered awkwardly over a mound of moss. "I'll get that little shit." He reached under his tee-shirt and pulled the pistol from his waist band.</p>
<p>Tom had made it to the solid ground and was fifty yards away while Billy was still floundering. The rest of them laughed at the blundering pursuit, and that only made Billy angrier. He struggled out of the marsh, breathing heavily and stopped to get his wind. Tom was half-way up the slope towards the ridge jumping up and down, taunting. His high voice carried down the hill. Billy raised the airgun and cocked the spring. He took aim.</p>
<p>"Christ Billy, don't..." Doug started to protest. Billy fired but Tom was too far away and the pellet travelled only forty yards before hitting the ground. Tom jumped up and down, jeering, and the others laughed raucously. By the time they reached the top of the ridge, Billy's quick anger had evaporated and his jeans were almost dry, though now caked with the black mud.</p>
<p>They stopped there, and below them the heathery lip of the wide depression, the pocked moonscape stretched out towards the low horizon in a swathe of broken landscape.</p>
<p>"We found it," Corky said. He pointed across the wide basin. "The Dummy Village." The way he said it gave the words capitals. "I never really believed it was there. I thought it was just a story somebody made up."</p>
<p>"I <em>always</em> knew," Billy said.</p>
<p>"You always <em>would</em>," Doug observed drily.</p>
<p>The craters dotted the whole of the plain, some of them solitary and isolated and others so closely packed that their embankments merged and gave them different shapes. The larger ones were deep and dark while those on the slope nearest them seemed shallower, as if the earth itself hadn't been deep enough. These were fringed in dark green reeds and choked with duckweed and algae. They stretched northward as far as the eye could see.</p>
<p>"The plan must have worked," Billy said. "Look at all those bomb holes. Must have dropped thousands of them up here. Millions. Bet the old Jerries were sick as pigs when they heard they'd all missed their targets." He put two fingers across his lip and made a mock nazi salute. "<em>Shweinhund dirty Brittischers</em>" he screeched in a commando comic German accent, making them all laugh.</p>
<p>He held his stick up like a rifle and aimed it at the sky, making hawking sounds at the back of his throat as if he was firing a machine gun. "They should have had anti-aircraft guns up here to blast them when came. That would have been great fun. You couldn't have missed from up here."</p>
<p>"I wouldn't like to have been here when they were dropping all that," Doug said. "You'd have been blown to pieces."</p>
<p>"I didn't think it really existed," Corky said, wonderingly. "Honestly I didn't. Not <em>really</em>. I thought it was just a story." Danny nodded in agreement and wonderment. He hadn't truly believed in the Dummy Village, but he'd <em>wanted</em> to believe. It was part of the schoolyard legends, like old Miss Dorrian who'd died of a stroke in Castlebank Primary school and now walked the empty corridors at night. It was like the tales of Cairn House, the oldest building in town, where a girl had once seen a white and bloodless face floating outside the window twenty feet above the ground, and where Mole Hopkirk had been found with the nails still growing on his dead fingers. The Dummy Village had as much substance as the three little girls who'd been playing skipping ropes and were killed down on Crossburn Street before the war when a cart horse had bolted and the overturned flatbed had crushed them against the wall. People said that when the mist came off the swampy lowland of the Rough Drain on Halloween night, you could hear them chanting their schoolyard rhymes as they skipped on through the night.</p>
<p>The Dummy Village, the decoy target for the wartime bombers had not been truly real, though it <em>should </em>have been. Now it was indeed real. They had trudged up the length of the Blackwood Stream, right up to its marshy source and clambered through the swamp of the bog and in the heat of the sun they'd slogged up the hill to a ridge miles from the town where the air was clear and there was no sound but the mewling of lapwings and the warbling song of lark rising into the blue.</p>
<p>It was here. A dilapidated <em>Shangri-la</em> on the far side of the low ridge in a wild moonscape.</p>
<p>"And we're the first," Danny said. " Nobody's ever been here before. Maybe not since the war."</p>
<p>Far overhead, a buzzard wheeled on broad wings, circling on the clear air. Its plaintive cry came down from the height.</p>
<p>And the boys started walking down the hill, towards the craters and the clutter of buildings.</p>
<p>Before the first of the pot-holes, the chain-link fence, red with rust at the places where the concrete stanchions stood upright caught the wind and moaned muted protest. At other places, the poles had sunk or listed into the peat and the wire was ripped and jagged, some of it flat on the ground with thick grass stalks growing through. On the periphery, tangles of stinging nettles swayed in the breeze. A square metal signpost with its sign obliterated by rust hung from a pillar, pock-marked with bullet holes that Billy claimed was from a soldier's Lee Enfield but which looked just like straight .22 shot to the others. Further along, once they had clambered through the defunct barrier, Tom found another sign, this one angled into the ground. Wind and rain had peeled back the paint on the side which had braved the elements, while a triangle of dirty red corrosion showed where it had been angled under the turf. The red mark eliminated the first letter of the warning.</p>
<p><em>ANGER! </em></p>
<p>the rest of the word warned. For some reason it seemed apt up here in this forgotten monument to the fury. Danny felt that shiver of foreboding again, although they could all fill in the missing letter.</p>
<p>"What do you think the danger is?" Tom asked.</p>
<p>"It's been up here since the war," Billy said. "It was the bombs coming down. It was to let everybody to know that if they stayed here they'd get bombed to pieces. Simple."</p>
<p>"I think it's the craters, telling people to stay away from them," Doug said. "Some of them must be pretty deep. If you fell in there they'd never find you again."</p>
<p>Tom let the ragged sheet of metal drop. It stuck back in the peaty turf again. They went on down, past the first of two shallow craters where dragonflies helicoptered out from the choking reeds. Beyond that, a large single hole, almost perfectly round, was bare of weeds. The water inside was black and there was a shimmering dirty iridescence of oil on the surface close to where the boys passed, giving it a poisonous, somehow evil aspect. They couldn't tell how deep it was.</p>
<p>At the next one, an oval pool caused by the close detonation of two wartime bombs, Doug spotted a boot lying upside down in a patch of reeds, its sole peeled away from the upper like an opening jaw. Billy stretched with his stick to haul it out of the thick growth.</p>
<p>"What if there's a foot in it?" Doug asked, with a snort of laughter. "Like the one in the quarry?"</p>
<p>Billy ignored him and brought the old boot to the edge. He up-ended it and they watched a sludge of water and algae gurgle out. Something black and many-legged wriggled in the flow and made it to the pool before Billy could hit it with his stave.</p>
<p>"If there was a foot in it, you'd have filled your pants," Doug said. Billy didn't bother to deny it. If there had been a foot in it, they'd all have run, yelling in fear, down the hill and back to camp.</p>
<p>Corky and Danny had moved on together, in a hurry to get to the huddle of buildings. They were half-way down the basin, though for some reason, the shanty town seemed no nearer. The others caught up with them and they trudged over the ridges and heaped earth where the old explosions had thrown up peat and boulders. Billy kept up a running commentary about the kind of planes that would have flown overhead and the bombs that would have rained down and the noise and the thunder and the excitement of it all.</p>
<p>They skirted another crater where Doug probed with his ash sapling and got a foetid and oily bubble of marsh gas for his pains. Here, another boot, identical to the first, was jammed against a plank of wood.</p>
<p>"Maybe somebody fell in," Tom suggested.</p>
<p>"Maybe it was somebody got bombed," Corky said. "Like a poacher. Or a shepherd up here all alone at night just minding his own business. Stuck here on his own in bad weather and he sees the Dummy Village and thinks 'there's a good place to shelter'. Maybe he sneaked inside and thought he was safe out of the rain and the snow. Probably a thunderstorm, with lightning all over the place and thunder. He was probably glad of the shelter and he's sitting there trying to stay warm and then <em>WHUMP....</em> before he knows it he's been blown right out of his boots."</p>
<p>"You really think that's what happened?" Billy asked, his face alight. "You reckon it blew him right out of them."</p>
<p>"No," Corky said. "Look at it. The sole's got a big hole in it. Somebody just threw them away."</p>
<p>Billy's excited expression collapsed into disappointment.</p>
<p>"But it was a good story," Corky said, and they all laughed. But as they moved away, Tom looked nervously over his shoulder just in case it <em>hadn't</em> been an old boot.</p>
<p>They got over the next small ridge and into the wide depression. There was another perimeter fence here, most of it rusted to pieces and there were sections where rolls of barbed wire, the kind Billy insisted had been used to snag prisoners of war, had been laid in long tangled cylinders. They followed it for fifty yards to find an opening, testing the rolls for breaks. In one of the tangles, a dead fox, its fur and most of the flesh rotted away, had been snared by the coils. Its frozen snarl of clenched teeth was still ferocious. Further on they came across the whitened skull of a ram which had suffered the same fate. The rest of the carcass was long gone, picked cleaned scattered by scavengers. The skull was pure bone and it bore a massive ridged pair of curled horns. Billy hooked it out of the wire and tried to set it up on his stick like a trophy. When they found a way through the fence he led them like a standard bearer with the skull held aloft as they finally strode in to the Dummy Village.</p>
<p>A flock of rooks watched them, huddled together like black vultures on a roof down the centre way. The five boys walked warily between the first of the buildings and the birds sat silent, all their heads turned to watch the approach. There was more than a dozen of them, squat and shiny black and somehow dangerous. Doug raised his stick and made <em>ack-ack</em> noises and the birds flew off in a clatter of wings and a protest of cawing. They swooped low, close to the tangled moor-grass and then rose over the nearby roof, gaining height until they reached a thick wire that bellied in a curve between two canted poles. They alighted on the wire in a flutter and settled down to observe the intrusion like wary guards in black uniforms.</p>
<p>"That's really creepy," Doug muttered, keeping his voice low. They had wandered through the gap between two buildings and could see down the centre way. For some reason the dereliction and isolation of the place hushed them to near silence. "Just like <em>The Birds</em>."</p>
<p>"You're too young to get in to see that," Billy argued.</p>
<p>"Me and Danny sneaked in at the intermission, didn't we Dan?</p>
<p>Danny nodded agreement. He was looking at the line of crows, black in colour, but now even blacker, silhouetted against the sky. He couldn't see their eyes and that made them seem as if they were blind, but he could sense their gaze. They huddled like judges deliberating on a sentence and he recalled the heron's fall and its broken, graceless ending.</p>
<p>"Scared the bejeesus out of me, I don't mind tellin' you," Doug said. "They were all sitting just like that, waiting to come down and peck people's eyes out." Danny agreed with that. The film had been disturbing, nature inverted and distorted and out of control. That night, as he lay in the dark he had wished he hadn't sneaked in to the old Regal picture house.</p>
<p>Corky found a rusted bolt in a pile of broken slabs. He lobbed it at the crows and they took off again, winging to the far end of the compound, settled on a roof and sat to wait once more.</p>
<p>The place was eerie. For a moment, when the crows had settled there was a pause of silence where nothing seemed to move and the wind dropped to a sudden stillness. They were in a ghost town. It was the only way to describe it. They stood there, five small gunslingers at the end of the derelict main street where the couch grass and rough reeds poked their way up from a gravel-bed road. The line of wooden shacks, grey with age and sagging under the weight of neglect angled in a straight line, dwindling in dismal perspective for several hundred yards. The corrugated iron roofs, intact on only a handful of them, were red with rust and peppered with holes where blasted stones had punched through. Others leaned into deep depressions where the ground had subsided, still others were tumbled and crumpled as if a giant hand had smashed them flat.</p>
<p>The place was eerie, a dead and decaying village, broken and picked clean like the ram's skull. It was creepy and shadowed. But it was magnificent in its desolation. They stood there abreast, Danny leaning on his stick, Doug in his string vest, his slingshot loose in his hand, Billy hip-shot in his mud-caked jeans, Corky with a thumb hooked on his belt, a casual arm around Tom's thin shoulders.</p>
<p>"Magic," Billy said, and for once he was right.</p>
<p>Just at that moment, the wind picked up and moaned through the wire. A metal tin clanked against a post like a tuneless bell and a piece of twisted galvanised sheet creaked in protest. The Dummy Village came alive again. Two swallows came darting in on flickering wings and swooped under a mouldering lintel. The faint twitter of squalling fledglings came from inside. A stream of gold wasps flew busily between two spars to a massive globe of papery nest suspended under a sagging grey eave.</p>
<p>"I never thought it would be so big," Doug said. "It's like a Dummy flaming <em>city.</em>" They started walking down the overgrown street until they reached an intact building with a gaping doorway. They went inside. The place smelled of oil and rust and of age. The floorboards creaked threateningly under their weight and the whole building seemed to shudder as the five of them crept inside. An old cobwebbed box lay in a corner and immediately Billy bent down to try the lid.</p>
<p>"It's an ammo box. Just like in the war," he said. The lid hauled up surprisingly easily. Inside, among a tatter of shredded wood, a vole squeaked and darted out through a gaping hole in the bottom. Billy tried to catch it but it disappeared under the sagging floorboards. Tom and Danny went outside and crossed the road to go into another shack. From the front, it looked almost intact, but once inside they could see that the whole of the back had fallen away into a pile of grey, rotting wood. Even the floorboards had disintegrated. Beyond the walls another row of buildings stood gaunt and crumpled. There was a space where a bomb had blasted a hole in the ground and the neighbouring shacks were smothered under the debris of turf and rocks.</p>
<p>The others joined them.</p>
<p>"Must have been really great," Billy said. He pulled the airgun out and aimed it at the sky the way he had done with his stick. "They must have come in low, over the top of the hills. You could have picked them off one by one. My old man was a gunner during the war." He cocked the gun, fired it and they watched the pellet climb into the air, hardly faster than a thrown rock. He re-loaded.</p>
<p>"Your old man must have been John flippin' Wayne," Doug snorted. "He was in everything except the town's brass band."</p>
<p>"What't that supposed to mean?" Billy demanded, rounding on Doug. "And what did your Dad do? Eh? Tell me that <em>Bugs</em>!"</p>
<p>"Jeez, would you grow up?" Doug said. "All we ever get is your old man and how he won the flippin' war." He turned away.</p>
<p>"Just what does that mean? " Billy bawled at Doug's back. "Come on! Buck-toothed <em>baskit</em>."</p>
<p>Doug spun round. He jabbed his hand up to his temple and tapped hard. "Think about it."</p>
<p>"Come on Doug. Leave it." Corky tried to defuse them.</p>
<p>"Leave what?" Billy wanted to know. Danny looked at Tom who looked back, trying to keep his face non committal. "What's Bugs bloody Bunny talking about?"</p>
<p>"Nothing," Doug said. He turned away again, feigning disinterest though the others could see the stiffness in his bony shoulders.</p>
<p>"No. It's not <em>nothing</em>. You're having a go at me, taking the mick." Billy's face was reddening. Corky tried again.</p>
<p>"Give it a break you guys," he said, cajoling. "We never came up here to fight. Come on." He looked from one to the other. "How about it?"</p>
<p>Doug shrugged. "Well tell him not to call me Bugs."</p>
<p>"Don't call him Bugs," Corky said to Billy, putting a laugh into his voice. Danny caught it and giggled.</p>
<p>"Or <em>Lugs</em>," Dougie insisted.</p>
<p>"Or Lugs then," Billy said. The tension drained away.</p>
<p>"Or Bugsylugs."</p>
<p>"That as well," Billy conceded. He grinned and the tension evaporated. Billy stuck his hand out and Doug shook it, both of them looking sheepish, simple as that, and it was over. Tom and Danny ambled away. They went down the street. Tom went through one of the decrepit shacks and out to the far side where the peat was ridges and grooved in gaping black slashes where the land had subsided. Danny found another swallow's nest, just a little cup of hard mud set against a beam. He got up onto an old oil drum to peer in and saw the gaping yellow beaks of the baby birds as they demanded food. Corky was in the hut opposite. He came out with an old beer-bottle. He set it up on a piece of angled iron and searched about for stones to pitch at it. Doug leaned in through the window of the next shack down, his skinny backside poking out. Corky couldn't resist it. He drew back the elastic and let fly. The small pebble spanged off Doug's buttock. He jerked, let out a yell, and toppled inside with a crash of splintering wood.</p>
<p>They heard him yell some more, while Corky and Billy rolled about, unable to control their laughter, and when he came out he was grey with dust.</p>
<p>"Who did that?" he demanded truculently. "Put me through the flamin' floor."</p>
<p>Corky tried to stand up, failed and sank to his knees in uncontrollable laughter.</p>
<p>"Was that you, Harrison?" Doug wanted to know.</p>
<p>Billy shook his head. "Honest, I never did a thing. Swear to...." his eyes opened wide. Danny and Tom were coming round the side of the building with something big and heavy weighed in their hands. "<em>Jeeesus kee-flamin'-rist</em> where did you get that?"</p>
<p>The two boys grunted as they lifted up the long brown, rusted thing, straining to get it to waist height. The four metal flight flanges stuck up like black fins where the end narrowed. A hex nut protruded from the blunt front end.</p>
<p>"It's a bomb," Tom said proudly. "We found it. And there's more of them."</p>
<p>Doug forgot the sting in his backside. Danny and Tom laid the bomb down gently on the turf. There was no mistake. It really <em>was</em> a bomb. It was more than two feet long and heavy enough to indent the ground. The flight blades at the tail were pitted with rust but there was a dark, wet patch close to the nose that still had a skin of paint on it. Some light-coloured letters in stencil form were barely visible.</p>
<p>"Is it a Jerry bomb? Or a Jap?" Billy asked, a-jitter with sudden excitement. War and the tools of war were a constant fascination to him. Proximity to a bomb from the war was just about the biggest thing that had happened to him so far. "Will it still work?"</p>
<p>They all stood around the thing. It was old and rusted at the back but it still looked somehow deadly, like a drowsy adder in the grass that should best be left undisturbed.</p>
<p>"It's probably worth a fortune," Doug said. "Maybe we could sell it."</p>
<p>"There's more of them," Tom said again. "They're stuck into the ground out there." He gestured with his arm. "The peat must have fallen away." Corky nudged the thing with his foot, trying to turn it over. It rolled slowly.</p>
<p>"Imagine that. Must have been a dud," Billy said.</p>
<p>"Might not be," Doug countered. "Remember that one up in the reservoir? Broke all the windows at the top end of Corrieside? That just hadn't gone off. It was still <em>alive</em>. Blew a rock right through McFarlane's barn roof, so it did."</p>
<p>"Maybe this one could go off," Billy said. He kicked the side of the thing and gave a loud yell like an explosion. Everybody jumped as if they'd been stung.</p>
<p>"Hells bells Billy," Corky said. "You scared the life out of me."</p>
<p>"Smell it? He's standing in it," Billy said knuckling Corky on the shoulder. "You're losing your nerve pal." Corky just grinned, not taking offence.</p>
<p>They followed Tom and Danny round the side of the building to where the land sloped away in a profusion of trenches and craters. All of the ground here seemed to be fissured and turned over. A jagged crack a hundred yards long in the peat showed where the summer's lack of rainfall had made it shrink and split, ten feet deep in places and just as wide. It was here that the bombs showed, sticking out from the soft earth of the sides of the small chasm. There were three of them, each maybe forty feet apart, all at the same angle. They had obviously gone into the ground, punching through the soft deposit when the surface had been wet and boggy. Further along, all that remained of another two bombs were their tail-flights. Doug hooked them out of the pit with his stick and tied them to the wood like a trophy. The others hauled the remaining bombs out.</p>
<p>"Can we take them back?" Billy asked. "A couple of them?"</p>
<p>"Sure. It's a long way," Danny said, "but we can strap them to a plank and take shots each at carrying them."</p>
<p>"Let's do it," Billy said. "We can make them work. We could blow half the valley to smithereens."</p>
<p>They spent the whole afternoon exploring the ruins. Tom found another sign with some lettering that was indecipherable but might have said that the land was a target area and that led to another discussion which led to another argument over whether it was a decoy site or merely a bombing range. They all preferred the decoy version and Tom slung the sign away, ending the argument with stunning logic. They searched every shack for more bombs or bullets. Billy was convinced there might be a gun left behind under floorboards, but all he managed to find was a brass buckle from an old Sam Browne web belt and an ancient zippo lighter that was clogged with muck and rust.</p>
<p>The sun was beginning to sink towards the west when they decided to head back to the camp. Danny got some wire and managed to secure three of the bombs to a long piece of wooden planking which he and Corky slung on their shoulders. Billy got his stick with the sheep's skull pinioned on its end and led the way out of the dummy village and up to the ridge. Behind them, the crows watched and waited and when the boys were far enough away, they flew down one by one to whatever dead thing they had been pecking at in the shallow depression dug out by a wartime bomb.</p>
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