The devils footsteps, p.2
The Devil's Footsteps, page 2
‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said.
Bryan didn’t see Smokey for the rest of the school day, but he was waiting by the gate at half past three. ‘Hey. Mind if I walk with you?’ he asked, a little sheepishly.
‘No.’ Bryan shrugged. Maybe company would help a little; a distraction from the constant counting of steps. ‘Where do you live?’
‘Wintergreen Avenue.’
Bryan felt a shiver crawl across his shoulder blades. ‘Down by—’
‘Down by the park, yeah.’
The park that led into the woods. His own house was little more than five minutes away, but Wintergreen was right within shouting distance.
Something in Smokey’s tone, and memories of their hushed conversation that morning, prompted Bryan to speak aloud the childish words that jumped into his mind: ‘That’s . . . a bad place.’
Smokey stopped suddenly and looked at him sharply. ‘You know about those? I mean . . . I thought it was just me.’
They started walking again. Yes, Bryan knew about those. It wasn’t just Adam’s disappearance that had soured the park and the woods for him. There was a feel to the air, a sense you couldn’t quite describe of shivers down your spine, that told you when you were in one of the Dark Man’s places.
‘The park and the woods . . . that empty old house on King’s Hill,’ he supplied.
‘And that scrap of land down by the train station,’ Smokey completed. ‘Yeah. Yeah, I know all those places. I don’t know what it is, but . . .’
‘You can just . . . feel it,’ Bryan finished, and Smokey nodded silently.
They walked on for a few moments in contemplative silence. It was a mid-afternoon, Friday, the early days of July. The streets should have been alive with people sunbathing and tending their gardens, schoolchildren tumbling home in noisy packs. But as they turned off the High Street onto the side road that led towards both their homes, there might not have been another soul in the whole world.
There was a kind of oppressive stillness in the hot air: no wind stirring, no birds rustling in the trees. It felt like they were walking through a photograph, a snapshot of the streets frozen in time while the rest of the world went on without them. The hairs on the back of Bryan’s neck started to stand up.
‘Electricity,’ breathed Smokey suddenly. He was right; it felt like there was electricity in the air, a thunderstorm waiting to break.
The sun seemed to dim momentarily, as if a shadow had passed overhead. Bryan’s head snapped up, but there was nothing in the sky – not even a cloud.
Neither of them said a word, but they were walking faster. The words of the rhyme started up in Bryan’s head, defying his attempts to shove them back down again. One in fire . . . two in blood . . . three in storm . . . four in flood. He half-scuffled a step, trying to break the rhythm, but it didn’t work and it was nearly enough to snap his nerve and start him running.
Five in anger . . . six in hate.
He didn’t want to run. It was like being in some stupid movie, being stalked by the beast. As long as you kept moving nice and slow, you were safe. But when you lost it and started running, it started to chase.
Seven fear . . . evil eight.
In the movies they always started running – like they always opened that door, the one that led to the cellar or the attic or the laboratory or wherever it was the monster was hiding that week. And down in some part of him Bryan knew why. It was crazy, it was stupid, but you had to.
Smokey’s hand suddenly snaked out and tightly gripped his wrist. And that was it. Bryan started to run, dragging the other boy alongside him. They hared down the road like little children running from the scene of some infantile crime, but there was no one on the street to stop and point or laugh. Bryan thought that if they stopped and started hammering on doors to be let in, nobody would answer them. They wouldn’t be there, or they just wouldn’t hear.
People were good at not hearing things in Redford.
They were running alongside a house with a tall hedge, a neatly clipped bit of topiary, except that suddenly it seemed far, far taller than before, black and twisted and filled with threatening thorns. And the road was getting narrower, which was impossible, because it was an ordinary residential street with cars parked on both sides of the road. Only it wasn’t quite a street any more, but a narrow pathway between two huge hedges, like the path of a maze but with no side turnings to escape down.
There were no more cars now, and if the houses were still there they couldn’t see them. But there was something behind that hedge – oh yes – something huge that snuffled and snorted as it ran. And it was as fast as the boys, faster, ready to burst through that hedgerow at any moment and throw itself at them.
The shadows cast by the monstrous hedges were so deep and dark it was midnight down between them. Bryan could see the faintest glimpse of light up ahead, an end to this tight, dark passageway. But the hedges were growing closer together – no trick of perspective but actually moving closer together, closing in on them.
Bryan tripped on something, would have gone down, but Smokey was still running, pulling him forward. Bryan could see the light before them growing, getting nearer, but that was just a cruel trick, wasn’t it? A flash of hope to be snatched away at the last moment.
The thing from the hedges was coming for them. It was no longer on the other side, chasing and snuffling for a way to get in, but right behind them, on their heels. The thorns were wrenching and tearing at them now, trying to hold them back for just those few moments, the matter of seconds that would allow the passageway to close in on them completely.
But now the sunlight was directly ahead of them, spilling through the twisted branches like the first rays of light returning after an eclipse. Bryan wrenched himself free from thorns that suddenly felt like fingers, and forced himself through the tight gap, Smokey right beside him . . .
They burst through onto a busy street, traffic swerving out of the way in an explosion of horns and swearing. They somehow threaded their way through without being killed and reached the sanctuary of the opposite pavement, breathless.
III
Bryan’s heart was jolting in his chest as if it had somehow come loose. He turned and looked back at the road they had just come out of. It was an ordinary street: two cars wide with pavement to spare, hedges neatly cropped and not two metres tall at their highest. Traffic zoomed along regularly, and now he could see other kids from their school making their way home in noisy packs. It seemed crazy to think that it could ever have been silent and still.
‘It wasn’t real,’ panted Smokey, sitting on the gravelly pavement beside him.
Bryan looked down at his arms, left bare by his short-sleeved white shirt and lightly tanned. There were scratches all the way up, souvenirs of a fight with uncompromising thorn bushes. ‘It was, and it wasn’t,’ he answered.
They cleaned themselves up at Smokey’s house. After the initial adrenaline burst had worn off, Smokey had been surprised to find that he too was covered in slashes and bruises, and both of them had hands thick with the kind of grime you got from climbing trees. Bryan supposed you could try to twist it all into some theory about hallucinations and the ordinary hedges they had passed in their headlong flight, but he wasn’t stupid enough to believe it himself. When the Dark Man was abroad, he could make things happen. Just because the street had returned to normal afterwards didn’t mean it hadn’t been changed momentarily.
Smokey’s house was empty, which eased Bryan’s discomfort at being there a little. But while Smokey poured them drinks in the kitchen Bryan tried not to look at the family pictures clustered on the middle shelf. Brother and sister together in every one; no accusing gaps here. A family still whole and healthy.
They sat in the lounge sipping blackcurrant juice, almost sweet enough to make him gag, but helping to ward off the shivers that had threatened to take him over. It was a time of day when, at home, he might have switched on the cartoons up in his room to keep him company, but the two of them sat and drank in silence, not really looking at anything or each other.
‘Do you want to tell me about Adam?’ said Smokey finally.
Bryan wasn’t sure he did, but suddenly the words started tumbling out without waiting for him to hear about it. ‘It happened five years ago. It was in all the newspapers – but you weren’t here then, were you?’
‘I heard about it,’ said Smokey, sipping his drink. ‘My mum warned me about the woods – she told me a little boy had disappeared there once. I didn’t know it was your brother until somebody at school told me. They said how you’d always told everybody it was the Dark Man; they were kind of joking about it but not joking, you know?’
Bryan knew. Nervous giggles, like whistling past the graveyard, because of course you’re not really scared. ‘I don’t think he was the only one. I think it’s been happening for years. For ever, maybe. Do you know about the Devil’s Footsteps?’
Smokey frowned, dark brow wrinkling. ‘That’s that children’s game, isn’t it? My little sister was always coming home singing it when she started at school here. How does it go? One in—’
‘Don’t say it!’ Bryan stopped him with a warning grab of his arm, more desperate than he intended to be.
Smokey nodded quickly in acknowledgement, and licked spilled blackcurrant from the back of his hand as it threatened to drip onto the carpet.
‘Sorry. I mean . . . you can say it. It’s probably safe. All the Redford children sing it; everybody plays. They have done since right back when my parents were kids here, and before that. But then there’s the legend – do you know that?’
Smokey shook his head.
‘It’s like saying “Bloody Mary” in the mirror thirteen times,’ Bryan continued. ‘The legend goes that there’s a real Devil’s Footsteps, a pathway in the woods with thirteen steps, and if you walk along it and say the rhyme, the Dark Man will come.’
Smokey had stopped drinking. ‘And you found it,’ he said.
Bryan was surprised by the deep sense of relief he got from telling the story he had repeated so many times as a child, and for the first time having it simply accepted as truth.
‘We found it. I was eight – I . . .’ He found it difficult to continue, pretended he was pausing to take a sip. ‘I was scared, and I chickened out. But Adam was two years older, and he was never scared of anything. Well, not when he was with me. Because I was his little brother, and he had to show me that he wasn’t scared. He had to prove that there was no such thing as the Dark Man. So he said the rhyme, and . . .’ He couldn’t even try to disguise how much this was paining him now.
‘And the Dark Man came,’ said Smokey soberly. ‘Did you see – I mean, of course you saw him – but did you really see?’
Bryan knew what he meant. He opened his mouth, but there was no way to articulate what he had seen, nothing any more useful in his vocabulary now than in the one that had been at his command five years ago. He had seen, and he had not seen. To the endless frustration of the police, there was no clear-stamped set of features he could put a photo-fit to.
He was a man, and he was . . . other things. Constantly shifting, and yet all of his images the same.
He was the man in the bus station with the creepy eyes who had frightened Bryan once. He was the clown at Adam’s seventh birthday who hadn’t been funny at all, but terrifying with his false smile painted on. He was the serial killer in the late movie Bryan had snuck out of bed to watch, and the grinning tiger in the picture from his mother’s old book of folktales.
Bryan had glimpsed the Dark Man for a matter of seconds – less. But in that brief instant he had seen all those images and a million more. All the things that had ever frightened him, no matter how tightly locked away in his mind and forgotten.
‘I saw . . . He was . . . It felt like I saw everything.’
‘The shadow of everything you ever saw,’ agreed Smokey darkly. ‘All the goodness squeezed out, like water from a sponge.’
And Bryan knew, if he had ever doubted it, that Smokey really had seen the Dark Man himself.
There was a long silence.
‘What happened?’ Smokey finally asked him softly.
Bryan could only shake his head. ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted, racked with guilt. ‘I didn’t see. The Dark Man came, and . . . and I just ran.’
He could have said that he’d been expecting Adam to follow him, but that wasn’t true. As soon as the Dark Man had risen up to claim his brother, he’d known that it was too late. And in those last few moments, Adam had known it too. Bryan hadn’t even seen his face, but the imagined expression was burned into his mind anyway.
Adam had been so confident, so mocking and sceptical on the surface. But deep down, some part of him must have believed, some small voice of fear that he’d pushed aside in his hurry to show off in front of his brother. For a fraction of an instant, at least, he’d believed in the power of what he was doing.
And the Dark Man had answered the summons.
The sudden creak of the front door bled into the silence, making them both jump. Smokey pushed a shaky hand through his cropped hair, and laughed at himself. ‘Oh, that’ll be Mrs Cunningham with Nina,’ he realized, standing up.
Bryan shot out of his seat. ‘Um, I should—’
‘Nah, don’t worry.’ Smokey brushed his concerns aside without understanding them. ‘Just ignore her. I do.’
‘Stephen?’ the voice of a harassed-sounding woman called out from the front hall.
‘Hi, Mrs C!’ he called back.
‘Oh, good, you’re here. Sorry to have to rush off, darling, Becca’s got her piano lesson in an hour.’
‘That’s OK!’ Smokey lowered his voice to explain for Bryan’s benefit. ‘She collects Nina from school ’cause Mum’s at work and I can’t get down there in time.’ The local junior school was in the opposite direction to the seniors, and uncomfortably close to the woods. Bryan was glad he never had to walk over that way any more.
The front door slammed, and a short, slightly chubby girl with long dark plaits and a Woodside Primary sweatshirt came barrelling into the room. ‘Hey—’ She came to an abrupt halt as Bryan’s presence registered. ‘Hello.’ She eyed him suspiciously, as if anybody found in the company of her brother ought to be watched very carefully in case they were dangerous.
Smokey tilted his head towards him. ‘This is Bryan. Bryan? This is the brat. Unfortunately.’
‘Uh . . . hi,’ he said awkwardly. His experience of hanging out with nine-year-old girls had pretty much ended when he was nine, and he hadn’t exactly been at his most sociable then. He rarely talked much with kids his own age, let alone younger ones.
Largely ignoring him, Nina glowered at her brother and immediately went on the attack. ‘What did you do with my CDs, Stephen?’ she demanded.
‘What would I want with your CDs?’ he said, looking exasperated.
‘I was looking for them all morning!’ she complained indignantly. ‘I wanted to take my CD player to school!’
‘Well, you didn’t look very hard, then, did you?’
‘I wouldn’t have to look at all if you hadn’t moved them!’
‘Again, what would I want with your CDs?’ He twisted to shoot a long-suffering look at Bryan. ‘She thinks I listen to boy bands.’ He rolled his eyes.
Not at all at ease in the midst of sibling bickering, Bryan only mustered an awkward smile.
Obviously deciding that current company didn’t require best behaviour, Nina leaned over the arm of the settee to punch her brother on the shoulder. ‘You’re always messing with my stuff!’
‘You’re always leaving your stuff all over the house!’ Smokey retorted.
‘Oh, so you did move them,’ she said triumphantly.
‘I didn’t touch your stupid CDs! Dad probably cleared them away before he went to work. You always leave them out of the cases so the undersides get all scratched—’
Nina glowered at him, unimpressed. ‘I know it was you,’ she said darkly.
Smokey let loose a long and heavy sigh, and looked across at Bryan. ‘Like talking to a brick wall,’ he observed, and pushed himself upright. ‘Come on, Bryan – unless you want to listen to another four hours of this.’
His sister pouted at this abrupt dismissal, but stomped off up to what was presumably her room. Bryan heard the echo of a loudly slammed door, something that hadn’t been heard in his own house for years. In the Holden family home, everybody shuffled around like the living dead.
Smokey sighed again as they headed out into the front hall. ‘Sorry about that, she’s – you know.’ He twirled one finger close to his forehead in the gesture for ‘completely nuts’.
‘Yeah,’ Bryan said uncomfortably, more an empty sound than agreement. ‘Listen, I should probably, you know, get back.’ He let the suggestion that his parents would be missing him hang unspoken, because that way it wasn’t really a lie, was it?
‘Yeah, OK. See you – whenever, I guess.’
Parting was made awkward by the strange circumstances that had jammed them together.
Bryan took a few steps backwards. ‘OK. See you, then.’ He hovered self-consciously in the doorway for a moment, and then turned and started jogging towards home.
IV
That evening the house seemed colder and emptier than ever. Bryan’s mother said nothing about his coming home an hour later than usual – perhaps she hadn’t even noticed. He finished all his homework despite the fact that it was Friday, and went to bed early. He usually did. The faster he could get to sleep, the sooner the morning would come, and then he could escape.
When he finally fell asleep, his dreams were different.
In the winter months it wasn’t uncommon for him to go weeks at a stretch without knowingly dreaming, and to remember only scattered, nonsense fragments when he did. In the summer, though, it was always exactly the same. Not even a dream, but a memory: Adam’s cheerful taunts and teasing as he went to his doom. The only thing that ever changed was the face the Dark Man happened to be wearing that particular night.
