Read Online Blacklands by Belinda Bauer - Free Book Online Page A

table. Now he held two of them out to Steven, pressing them together.

    “What?”

    “Make it work!”

    “What do you mean?”

    Davey got his grizzly face on. “It won’t stick! Make it stick!” At the same time he tried to force the two jacks together as if willpower alone could meld matter.

    “They don’t go together. That’s not what they’re for.”

    Davey looked at the jacks with mounting discontent.

    “Look, I’ll show you.”

    Steven picked the jacks off the floor and found the small red rubber ball where it had rolled against the wall. He bounced the ball and picked up a jack, then bounced it again and picked up two.

    “See? That’s how it works.”

    The disgust on Davey’s face was plain.

    “You want to try?”

    Davey shook his head, slowly working out that he’d spent a large portion of his birthday money on something he had no interest in.

    “I don’t want them,” he said crossly. “I want my Curly Wurly.”

    “You can have it when we go,” said Steven.

    He knew the moment the words were out of his mouth that they were an invitation to Davey, and Davey seized it and RSVP’d in an instant …

    “I want to go.”

    “In a minute.”

    “I want to go now!”

    “In a minute, Davey.”

    Davey threw himself onto the dusty tiled floor and started to grizzle loudly, flailing his arms and legs about and scattering his jacks across the room.

    “Shut up!” Steven shushed but it was too late.

    Oliver appeared in the doorway, and they were out.

    The rain had stopped and the sun was trying its best but the cars still hissed past and sprayed unwary pedestrians.

    Steven knew he was walking too fast for Davey but he didn’t care; he yanked and tugged at his little brother to keep him going, ignoring the boy’s whines as he half jogged to keep up. It had been a wasted day; they only came to Barnstaple three times a year—Christmas, school clothes shopping in August, and for birthdays. Steven’s was in December, so his birthday trip was combined with the Christmas trip, but this was Davey’s birthday trip—1 March—so it would be months before Mum brought them back in to moan about the size of Steven’s feet and the rips in his school shirts.

    And what did he have to show for it? Nothing. A crude map and an enemy in the form of Oliver who would probably never let him back into the archives, or perhaps even the library. Stupid Davey with his stupid jacks.

    As they hurried, the faces of the throng of shoppers started to emerge at Steven as if he were noticing for the first time that a crowd was made up of individuals.

    Individual whats? Individual farmers? Chemists? Perverts? Killers?

    Steven felt a sudden eerie fascination with the shoppers of Barnstaple. Arnold Avery would have shopped. He would have appeared normal to his neighbors, wouldn’t he? The books Steven had read under his sheets were filled with quotes from friends—even family members—who were baffled when their “normal” neighbor, son, brother, cousin was exposed as a homicidal maniac. The thought of Arnold Avery or someone like him walking free on this street made Steven feel nervous. He looked around him warily and his grip tightened on Davey’s hand.

    A grey-haired man stared about as his wife cooed over something in Monsoon’s window, his eyes hooded and predatory.

    A girl in a dirty skirt played an old guitar badly and sang “A Whiter Shade of Pale” in a dull monotone while her lurcher shivered on a wet blanket, too dispirited to make a break for it.

    A young man walked towards them. Scruffy yellow hair like Kurt Cobain, a brown goatee, bike jacket. Alone. Was alone bad? Steven caught his eye and wished he hadn’t. The young man appeared uninterested, but maybe that was a ruse. Maybe he would walk past Steven and Davey to lull them into unwariness and then turn and slip his fingers around Davey’s right arm, starting a tug-of-war which a screaming, pleading Steven could never hope to win,