Blacklands Read Online Free PDF

touch anything, but Lewis’s Lego had run out before they’d finished the terrorist headquarters and he was desperate for bricks.

    “I know where we can get some,” said Steven.

    Lewis was skeptical. He was the solver of problems in this partnership and he thought it unlikely that Steven would be able to conjure Lego from nowhere when he didn’t even own a set himself. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to see what he had in mind.

    Steven steered Lewis quietly past the living room where the TV was blaring cartoons for Davey and where Steven’s nan stared out of the window, and led him up the stairs.

    They went past the small, messy room with the big, messy bed that Steven shared with Davey, and Steven cracked open the door at the end of the hallway.

    Lewis knew this was Uncle Billy’s room and he knew Uncle Billy had died young. Furthermore, he knew that no one was allowed in Uncle Billy’s room. That was all either of them knew right then, although things were about to change.

    With more furtive glances downstairs, they entered Uncle Billy’s room, made subaqua by the blue curtains drawn across the window.

    Lewis squeaked when he saw the space station.

    “We can’t take it all,” warned Steven. “Nan comes in here all the time. She’d notice.”

    “Still, we can take bits off the back and sides,” and Lewis started to do just that.

    “Not so much!”

    Lewis’s pockets were bulging with half the docking station.

    “He’s not going to play with them, is he? He’s dead!”

    “Sssh.”

    “What?”

    Steven never got a chance to answer. There was a creak on the floorboards right outside the door and they looked at each other in alarm. Too late to hide …

    Then the door opened and Nan was looking down at them.

    Lewis still felt uncomfortable when he remembered that afternoon. He tried not to think of it but sometimes it popped into his head unbidden. When it did, it knocked all the stuffing out of him—and there was plenty to knock.

    Nan had not shouted and she hadn’t hit them. Lewis couldn’t remember quite why it was so frightening; he only remembered rebuilding the docking station with hands that shook so hard he could barely hold the bricks, while Steven stood and sobbed loudly beside him, his socks wet with piss.

    Lewis squirmed as he recalled that sudden dizzy fall from anti-terror sniper agents to little boys bawling and peeing like babies as the old woman loomed over them.

    He had not seen Steven for two days afterwards but when he did, Steven had a story to tell which was the best story he’d ever heard in his whole life and which—to a very great extent—made up for the humiliation and fear they’d suffered in Billy’s bedroom.

    Steven’s uncle Billy—the very boy whose hands had constructed the space station—had been murdered!

    Lewis had felt the hairs stand up on his arms when Steven said it. Even better, he’d been murdered by a serial killer and—best of all—his body was most likely still buried somewhere on Exmoor! On the very moor which he, Lewis, could see from his bedroom window!

    At the time Steven was still cowed by the tellings-off and the tears in his household, and the sadness which came with the sudden shocking understanding of his own family’s suffering. But safely ensconced three doors down, Lewis was merely drunk with the gruesome thrill of it all.

    It was—naturally—Lewis’s idea to find Billy’s body, and he and Steven spent the summer of their tenth year tramping across the moor looking for lumps under the heather or signs of disturbed ground. Snipers and Lego lost their charms in the face of the real possibility of the corpse of a long-dead child. They called the new game Bodyhunt.

    But when the evenings grew short and the rain grew cold, Lewis inexplicably tired of Bodyhunt and rediscovered his passion for small colored bricks and beans and chips.

    Surprisingly, Steven did not. Even more surprisingly, that winter he acquired a rusty