The devils footsteps, p.3
The Devil's Footsteps, page 3
But this night, things did change.
He was still in the woods – everything came back to the woods, sooner or later – but he felt older, somehow; the teenager he was now instead of the little boy he’d once been. He looked down and saw his familiar body, still wiry and far from full-grown but not quite a child any more, either.
And it wasn’t Adam at his side. He was conscious of others behind him, though his body wouldn’t turn to look. He felt instinctively that Smokey must be there.
And it wasn’t Adam who stepped up to the rock pathway, but Bryan himself. What am I doing? he wondered. No, stop! But it was as if his body didn’t belong to him.
The others behind him began to chant, and against his will his voice joined with theirs. The echoing sound was eerie, like little children gathered in the playground, and yet at the same time more adult, like a congregation joined in prayer.
One in fire, two in blood, three in storm, four in flood . . . His feet were taking the steps, following the chant. Inside his mind he was trying to fight, but his body continued as implacably as if he were a robot programmed to move to the rhythm.
Five in anger, six in hate, seven fear, evil eight. How had he not stopped on seven? ‘Fear’ was the step for him, surely, for it was all he could feel, thickening the air, tightening in his heart. He tried to slow his heart-rate but his body wouldn’t obey the message his mind was sending it. He was utterly helpless, completely outside of his own control.
Nine in sorrow, ten in pain, eleven death, twelve life again. And then there was no time left to struggle. Thirteen steps to the Dark Man’s door . . .
Won’t be turning back no more.
This time, the scream that jumped to his lips on waking was not his brother’s name, but a wordless sound of sheer terror. This was not a repeat of that past horror, returning again and again to haunt him, but a premonition of a fresh new terror, still to come.
Something had changed. Something had been changed, and he thought it had happened because of what he and Smokey had shared the day before. The Dark Man’s attention had shifted.
He was the target now.
Sweating but still chilled, Bryan rolled out of bed and padded down to the bathroom. It was early yet, but already bright. He had to squeeze his eyes shut against the flood of sunlight when he pushed aside the bedroom curtains.
The tight feeling of dream-paranoia remained in his chest instead of fading. His skin prickled with the sensation of being watched – and he didn’t think it was entirely imaginary. The Dark Man had noticed him yesterday, in a way that he hadn’t since five years ago, perhaps not even then. What did a force so huge and so powerful care for one small boy who had witnessed his brother’s snatching?
But in speaking with Smokey, he’d somehow changed that. They’d broken the code of silence that covered the whole of Redford . . . and the Dark Man had reached out, as if lazily swatting at a buzzing fly. They’d outrun his influence last time, breaking through into a street where there were just too many people passing for him to divert – but what if he tried again?
Lost in such pessimistic thoughts as he mechanically chewed his breakfast, Bryan jumped out of his skin when somebody knocked. It was too early for the Saturday post, and nobody else ever came calling. He wondered if his father had locked himself out – he would go out walking sometimes, disappearing for hours without word of where he was going or why – but no, there he was, slumped in front of the TV. Bryan went to the door.
It was Smokey. Looking unfamiliar with his school uniform swapped for faded denims, he seemed awkward and slightly embarrassed to be there. ‘I’m sorry, it’s early. I just—’
‘It’s OK. I was up,’ Bryan cut him off. He was already dressed, ready to run out of the house as quickly as his morning rituals would let him. ‘Hold on a second. I’ll come out.’
The polite thing to do would be to invite Smokey in, but he didn’t think he could quite cope with that. As he ducked back inside he automatically pushed the door until it was almost shut, as if the dark atmosphere that ruled his home now was something Smokey might be able to see if he looked into the hallway. Bryan returned to the kitchen and picked up his keys.
‘Dad, I’m going out.’ His father nodded vaguely. ‘With my friend Smokey,’ he added, wondering if that might get a reaction. He didn’t hope for anything so outrageous as a conversation; maybe just an ‘It’s nice you’ve made a new friend’ or even just a quick ‘Have fun’. Of course, it didn’t happen. Just another distant nod.
Bryan’s half-eaten cereal went down the sink, and that didn’t get a comment either. His parents no longer nagged him about chores or eating right or even staying out late. He would have thought that the latter at least would have worried them, struck some chord of fear, but it was as if they had used up so much pain and anxiety after Adam disappeared that they didn’t have any left for him any more.
The kids at school would think he was crazy if they knew he sometimes got jealous just listening to them complain about how strict their parents were, he thought as he let himself out to join Smokey. Anything, anything, would be better than this. He sometimes wanted to scream and shout and say outrageous things to make his father angry enough to yell or even hit him, but he didn’t dare. He didn’t dare: after all, what would happen if he did all that and they still just nodded and grunted like he wasn’t there?
‘Sorry about that,’ he said, pulling the door shut with a flash of relief that he felt guilty for. ‘My parents aren’t – they aren’t ready, this time of the morning.’ They aren’t ready for anything any more.
‘Sorry,’ said Smokey again. ‘I know it’s too early, it’s just . . .’ He shook his head. ‘After what happened yesterday, I couldn’t just, just sit at home and watch TV and play music like everything was still normal. I – I . . . had to get out of the house, you know?’
‘Oh yeah, I know.’ Bryan could have laughed . . . if there had been anything remotely funny about it.
V
There was no chill to the air even this early, but Smokey tugged his jacket closer about him uneasily. ‘I didn’t know where else to go,’ he confessed. ‘Nothing’s open this early, and I didn’t want to stay out on the street, and my friends . . . well, they like to hang out in the woods.’
Bryan nodded. ‘I usually go to the library.’ It was as good a place as any to hide; never too empty on a Saturday, and well removed from the Dark Man’s most threatening haunts.
He and Smokey took a slow walk down to the local shops. The streets were quiet, but not in the awful oppressive way they had been yesterday. This was a safe, normal, early morning quiet – few people on the streets but the occasional car swishing past.
They had to cross the bridge by the train station on their way, and Bryan noticed how Smokey unconsciously speeded up as they were passing the steps that led down to the platform.
‘I wonder why,’ he said thoughtfully, once they were well past it.
‘Why what?’ asked Smokey. They had been walking in a not uncomfortable silence until that point.
‘Why that bit of scrap land by the station? There’s nothing there.’ It was strange. In all these years he’d just accepted the Dark Man and his ways as solid fact, unchangeable, unavoidable, but now that there was someone he could talk to about it, he found that questions had begun bubbling to the surface. ‘I mean, I know about the woods, and that house on King’s Hill . . . Well, there were always stories about that place.’
‘I heard some guy hanged himself,’ Smokey volunteered, and Bryan shrugged.
‘Maybe. But I’m saying . . . it makes sense he’d be powerful there if it’s some kind of haunted house or something. And the woods . . . well, yeah.’ He didn’t want to talk any more about that right now. ‘But why behind the station?’
Smokey frowned, and shook his head helplessly. ‘I don’t know. It’s just . . . How can it be like this?’ he burst out suddenly. ‘Kids disappear – they must disappear all the time. And nobody even notices! Nobody stops and says, “Hey, that’s not right, that can’t be normal.” Nobody says anything!’
‘Sometimes I think they notice,’ said Bryan. ‘They notice, but they just pretend it’s not happening.’
‘I hate this town,’ Smokey said softly.
The library was just opening for the day as they reached it; the only people there were an old man scowling at the rows of large-print books and a teenage boy hunched over stacks of newspapers for what was probably a school project. Bryan and Smokey walked past them both to take a safely secluded table in the far corner.
‘We should look this stuff up,’ Smokey said abruptly.
‘Huh? Look what up?’ Bryan wondered.
‘You know . . . the train station and everything. There must be books about the history of the town somewhere.’
‘I guess.’ Bryan had never even tried looking up the Dark Man’s history; he couldn’t imagine that any of it would have been written down. But maybe there was at least some clue to why that piece of land behind the station might belong to him. ‘I’ll ask the librarian.’
He half expected to get some outraged or shocked reaction; amazement that he was breaking the Redford code of silence. But she just pointed out the right shelf, as if it had been any other innocent request. ‘Are you boys working on a school project?’ she asked him.
‘Something like that,’ Bryan agreed.
‘It’s nice you’ve got a friend with you for a change,’ she added with a smile. And it struck him then that this woman, who didn’t even know his name though she saw him every week, was probably more concerned about him than either of his parents. Neither of them ever noticed that he spent all his time alone.
The books she pointed out were in the corner where the older boy had been seated. He’d disappeared somewhere – perhaps into the basement to get more newspapers. As Bryan passed his desk, he glanced at the ring binder left open on the tabletop.
It was open at a list of names, each with a month and year beside it, and another number. It took him a moment to realize that they might be ages, because the highest value he saw there was sixteen.
He shrugged and was moving away, when one of the names suddenly penetrated. He scanned the list again and found it: Jeanne Wilder. The date was April that year, and the age given was fifteen. He suddenly recalled a missing poster fixed to the doors of the shopping mall in town – posters that were all too common in Redford – and . . . hadn’t the name beneath the slightly fuzzy enlarged snapshot been Wilder?
Suddenly feeling chilled, Bryan carefully turned back the pages of names. Last year. Three years ago. Five years ago . . .
And there it was. Adam Holden. Ten. And beside the letter A of his name was an asterisk in blue ink. There were several such marks, in different colours of ink, but the vast majority of names carried only blanks or pencilled question marks. Bryan wanted to see the key, to understand what the marks might mean, but of course these were somebody’s private notes and there wasn’t any such thing.
He turned back pages with increasing speed: 1990 . . . 1980 . . . 1970 . . . 1960. The lists started to grow sparser, and petered out entirely towards the early quarter of the century; was that when it started, or just when they didn’t have records of missing kids? Redford must have been a whole lot smaller back then.
All those decades of disappearances. Yet nobody ever seemed to notice . . .
He frowned down at the ring binder. Apparently, somebody had noticed.
Bryan turned back another page, and found himself at the front; a neatly penned sticker at the top inside corner proclaimed the binder to belong to ‘Jake Steinbeck, 10DCa’, the way all his own school books and binders were labelled. But somehow he didn’t think that this was any project the teachers at Redford High had ever set.
A plastic wallet inside the cover was stuffed with dog-eared photocopies; the one on top was a road map of the town. Both the woods and King’s Hill were marked with asterisks – the woods, of course, in blue to match the star by Adam’s name. A wavy green line had been drawn around an area encompassing the station, as if the person drawing it had not been entirely sure where the third mark ought to fall.
Somebody cleared his throat, and Bryan jumped as if he’d been caught sneaking a look at something dirty. The owner of the folder scowled down at him darkly. He was taller than Bryan by half a head – judging by the form number written on the binder, he was probably fifteen – with spiky black hair and a faded sports jacket. Bryan fought a sudden urge to say, ‘Mr Steinbeck, I presume?’
‘See anything interesting?’ the boy challenged. There was a kind of ‘go on, I dare you’ note in his voice, and Bryan suddenly thought that maybe he was thinking what he himself had, when he was talking to the librarian. Wondering if somebody was going to take issue with him for peeking into Redford’s darker corners.
And that moment of recognition prompted him to take a chance. ‘Plenty,’ he replied, and tapped the photocopied map. ‘It’s there, by the way.’
‘What?’ Sullen aggression melted into confusion.
‘The third site. It’s that little overgrown patch behind the station. I guess it’s harder to pinpoint because if kids disappeared there people would just think they’d left town. But I’ll bet some have died there.’
Bryan looked up to see Jake wearing the same expression of shocked surprise that he himself must have shown when Smokey first mentioned the Dark Man.
VI
Bryan realized that Smokey had come over to join them. Jake twisted round to look at him a moment and then turned back to Bryan, face contorted in almost comical confusion. ‘Who are you people?’ he asked.
‘This is my friend Smokey, and I’m Bryan. Bryan Holden.’ He saw the other boy’s brow wrinkle in semi-recognition. ‘Adam Holden’s brother.’
‘Oh.’ The confusion quickly cleared, and Jake emptied out the folder of photocopies to rifle through it. He flattened out a newspaper article on the desk, and the other two leaned in to look at it.
The article Bryan didn’t recall, but the photograph was a punch to the gut. It was that school picture, the last one they’d had taken together. He and Adam seated together on the bench in front of the cameraman’s backdrop, Adam more smirking than smiling – the picture failed to show that he was half twisting Bryan’s arm behind him to try and make him wince.
Bryan looked away for a moment, caught out by the sting of tears that could still hit him from time to time. Then he walled the emotion back up inside where he usually kept it, and made himself read the article.
It had most of the facts right . . . so far as it went. It said Adam and his brother had been playing together in the woods when the older boy had been snatched. According to the article, Bryan had described his brother’s assailant as ‘a dark man’; possibly, the newspaper speculated, a black man, or a dark-haired man in dark clothes. There was no mention of the Devil’s Footsteps.
The words ‘Redford woods’, ‘missing’ and ‘dark man’ had been highlighted. ‘It’s rather a familiar story,’ said the older boy soberly. ‘I’m Jake, by the way,’ he added as an afterthought. ‘Jake Steinbeck.’
‘I know,’ said Bryan absently, still reading.
‘You do?’ he asked sharply.
‘It’s written on the inside of your binder.’
‘Oh.’ Jake looked taken aback for a brief moment. ‘Er . . . OK.’
‘Why are you collecting this stuff?’ Smokey asked him. Bryan lowered the newspaper article and raised an enquiring eyebrow in support.
Jake sat down on the corner of the desk. ‘I had a friend . . . her name was Lucy Swift. Not many people knew her as well as I did. She used to get into trouble – smoking and drinking and that sort of thing – but she was never the kind of girl people thought she was. She was really smart, too.’ He paused for a long moment, then looked at Bryan sharply. ‘Everybody said she must have run away from home. But they’re wrong. I knew her. She would never do that. She disappeared a year ago, and nobody ever knew any more about it.’
‘Seems like that happens kind of a lot around here,’ Smokey noted darkly.
Jake looked up at him earnestly. ‘That’s not the half of it.’ He tapped his folder of data. ‘I’ve been looking, and I’ve been listening, and . . .’ He paused. ‘Kids disappear here. I mean, lots of them. One every couple of months – if it’s that long. And I know there are plenty of things that can happen to kids, but these ones vanish. Totally vanish. There are decades’ and decades’ worth of kids who have gone missing, and not one of them was ever found.’
‘That’s because he took them,’ Bryan said, voice cool with controlled anger.
‘The Dark Man?’ asked Jake.
Bryan nodded.
‘Have you ever . . . ?’ Smokey began to ask tentatively. ‘Have you ever, um, you know, seen anything?’
Jake frowned. ‘Seen . . . ?’
‘The Dark Man,’ Bryan elaborated. ‘Did you ever see the Dark Man anywhere? Or anything else . . . strange. In the woods, or down by the station, or . . . anywhere.’
Jake was shaking his head. ‘No. No – I’ve never seen anything like that. But I’ve heard . . . a lot of things that seem pretty crazy. And the more I read’ – he looked down at his notes – ‘the more I think I’m starting to believe it.’
‘Believe it,’ said Bryan shortly. ‘This is real.’
Jake hesitated, then got up and went to the bookshelf beside him. He pulled out a volume on local history and began to flip the pages. ‘I’ve read a lot of history books, but most of them don’t have much about the legends. I think this was the best one, and even then . . . Ah, yes, here we go.’ His attitude reminded Bryan of some of his more book-happy teachers; he suspected that reading and researching was something Jake had done long before Lucy disappeared.
