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away and was gone, vanished into the night.
    ‘There’s someone here,’ said Ash. He pointed towards where the man had stood. ‘Over there, in the trees. A man.’
    Mark glanced across. ‘No one there now.’
    ‘He was there. I saw him.’
    ‘What did he look like?’
    Ash shrugged. ‘Big. Wearing dark clothes, I think.’
    ‘Was he wearing a hat?’
    ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’
    ‘Bone Jack,’ muttered Mark. Scowling, angry again.
    ‘Who?’
    ‘The wild man, the soul-taker.’
    ‘The what?’
    ‘It’s Bone Jack who guards the boundary between the living and the dead out here. He keeps each in its place and he takes lives as he sees fit. My dad. The road-kill stag. It makes no difference to him. It could be you next time. It could be me.’ He grinned. ‘Or maybe I’ll beat him. Maybe I’ll kill all his rooks and take all his power and bring back my dad from the dead.’
    Ash stared at him. Perhaps Mark really was crazy and believed all this stuff he was coming out with. Sheep skulls, the old ways, human sacrifice, killing rooks, this creepy Bone Jack character. Bringing back his dad from the dead.
    But another, darker thought played through his mind – that Mark wasn’t mad at all. Ash had seen weird, impossible things with his own eyes – the unearthly stag boy fleeing the hounds, the shadows that had chased him along the path, the black feather oozing evil. Maybe it was the world that had gone mad, not Mark.
    He shivered.
    Mark laughed and jabbed at the fire with a stick. ‘Don’t look so worried. You probably saw a poacher, that’s all. We’re not the only ones out and about in the woods at night.’
    Ash forced a smile. ‘Yeah, well, this place is freaky. All those sheep skulls in the trees. Did you do that?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘There must be at least a dozen of them,’ said Ash. ‘Where did you get them from?’
    ‘They were our sheep,’ said Mark. ‘Some of the ones that were slaughtered in the foot-and-mouth outbreak.’
    ‘They burned the carcasses and buried them. I was there. I saw it. You dug them up again and stuck their skulls in trees? What for?’
    Mark shrugged, looked away.
    Ash changed the subject. ‘There was something weird going on up near Stag’s Leap the other day,’ he said. ‘Hounds chasing a stag boy.’
    ‘The Stag Chase isn’t for another couple of weeks yet.’
    ‘Twelve days. I know. That’s what’s so weird. I saw the whole thing. They ran right past me. Then they vanished into thin air.’
    ‘Yeah?’ Suddenly Mark seemed guarded, unreadable.
    ‘Yeah. Callie was out there too, but she said she didn’t see them. She said you’d know something about it.’
    Mark smiled. ‘You saw the ghosts.’
    ‘Right,’ said Ash. ‘Ghosts.’
    ‘You don’t believe in them. I get that. I didn’t used to believe in them either. But there are plenty of ghosts out in the mountains. You’ll see. This land’s all blood and bone. All the lost and the dead out there.’
    ‘Ghosts and blood and human sacrifice. It’s crazy. You should just listen to yourself.’
    Mark looked sideways at him. ‘It’s like I told you. The land’s dying. Shadows in a wasteland, that’s what we are, Ash Tyler. So the old ways are back and things have to be put right.’
    ‘You’re not making any sense,’ said Ash. ‘All this dark stuff. It’s all just old legends and ghost stories. You’re not supposed to believe stories like that.’
    ‘Bone Jack.’ Mark hunched up, rocked himself. ‘Bone Jack took my dad’s life.’
    ‘Your dad took his own life.’
    Mark didn’t answer. He rocked and rocked. Then he stopped, straightened. ‘Those boys you saw,’ he said, ‘the stag boy and the hounds – they were ghosts.’
    The pounding of their feet on the parched ground. The stag boy’s stumbling run, the exhaustion on his face. ‘They weren’t ghosts,’ Ash said, uneasy. ‘They looked unreal, but that was just the heat haze. It makes everything look like a mirage. They