The devils footsteps, p.4
The Devil's Footsteps, page 4
‘What does it say?’ asked Smokey, leaning forward.
‘Not much. The Dark Man . . . blah, blah, blah . . . local legend, akin to several mythological bogeymen. A stealer of children, never seen by adults, believed to haunt the Redford woods and prey on the unwary in the form of their worst nightmares. I think that’s all . . . No, wait, there’s more about the woods. Just a mention of the Devil’s Footsteps legend – there’s a version of the rhyme here.’
‘Don’t say it!’ Bryan and Smokey spoke together.
Bryan leaned in closer as the librarian shot the three of them a questioning look. ‘I think we’re safe here,’ he said, glancing around and seeing that several more people had trickled in since their arrival. ‘But don’t push it, OK?’
Jake was looking at them both with a thoughtful expression on his face. ‘You really do believe this, don’t you?’
‘We know what we saw,’ said Smokey firmly.
‘Well, I don’t,’ Jake pointed out. ‘Tell me.’
So they told him: about Adam, about what Smokey had seen at the railway station, about what had happened the day before.
When they had finished, Jake looked at both of them carefully, as if trying to see if they were lying to him. Then he snapped his binder shut decisively, and said, ‘I want to go down to the woods.’
‘You don’t,’ Bryan disagreed, shaking his head. ‘Trust me, you really don’t.’
‘I have to see something,’ Jake burst out. ‘I’m sorry, but I do. I’m not blind, I know something’s at work here. And I know you believe what you’re saying to me. But if you want me to believe it . . . I have to see it for myself.’
Smokey shrugged, and looked expectantly at Bryan, who sucked in a deep breath, and then sighed. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘OK, maybe you’re right. Maybe we should go looking for this thing, instead of letting it hunt us.’ His voice sounded steady enough to his own ears, but the idea made his flesh creep. ‘Not in the woods, though,’ he added quickly. ‘Anywhere else, but not there.’
‘King’s Hill,’ said Smokey promptly. ‘That empty old house. I’ve never been in it, but’ – he shuddered slightly – ‘I swear, you can feel it just walking past on the street.’
‘Three people have disappeared there in the last few years,’ Jake told them. ‘Three that the papers knew about, anyway,’ he added. ‘Two boys went there in the middle of the night for a dare, and never came back. A toddler was snatched from the street in front of it while his mother was looking the other way.’
‘I bet there were more,’ said Bryan. ‘Kids who went there on their own, without telling anybody where they were going.’
And now they were going to do exactly the same thing. Were they all completely crazy? A part of him was definitely screaming so, but a lot of the rest just numbly thought, Why the hell not? What difference did it make? Better to walk right up to the Dark Man and say, ‘Go ahead and do it,’ instead of just cringing in terror, waiting. He’d never escape, so why keep running?
‘So you think, if we go there, we’ll . . . what? We’ll see something?’ Jake was trying not to be sceptical, but an edge of it was creeping into his voice anyway.
‘I think so,’ Bryan agreed. He glanced at Smokey. ‘Yesterday . . . we weren’t even anywhere special. I think . . . I think maybe the fact we were talking about him, breaking the silence . . . That made him notice us. He could have gone after me a million times since what happened to Adam; obviously, he doesn’t care too much about the fact that I saw it happen. But when there were two of us, comparing notes – that got his attention.’
But also, he thought, when there were two of them it somehow hadn’t been quite so bad. Oh, at the time it had been as stomach-churningly frightening as ever, but afterwards it had helped just to have someone to say ‘Whoa, that was scary’ to. Because that was how you got over it, he decided. Shared it with somebody so that it wasn’t just rattling around the inside of your skull until you couldn’t tell if you’d imagined it or not.
‘But I’ve never seen anything,’ Jake pointed out. ‘And I’ve been investigating the disappearances for months.’
Bryan frowned. ‘Well, maybe if you’re with us . . . Hell, I don’t know.’ Something struck him as wrong in that, though. Some instinct that he couldn’t quite explain was whispering to him that if Jake had never seen the Dark Man, then he shouldn’t be noticing what he was, taking notes and making connections. If he couldn’t see the Dark Man, then he should be like the others, looking the other way, somehow failing to notice the blindingly obvious.
Maybe Smokey was sensing the same thing, because he said, ‘Are you sure you never saw anything? Anything at all?’
‘Well . . .’ For a second, something in Jake’s eyes made Bryan think he was about to share some story with them. And then he shook his head and just said, ‘No, nothing.’ He swept the binder off the desk into a black backpack, and zipped it shut with a decisive snap of the wrist. ‘Let’s go to King’s Hill.’
VII
King’s Hill was a steep incline, difficult to climb but a rollercoaster ride to bike or skateboard down. Adam had always made fun of his little brother for being so nervous when they went coasting down it together, laughing at his fear of the slope. Bryan had never told him that it wasn’t so much the reckless speed of the descent that bothered him as that empty house on the left-hand side, dark windows peering out like soulless eyes. He had always been convinced that one day they would be racing down, brakes useless, and something would come lunging out of that darkened house in front of him, leaving him no time to swerve out of the way.
Today he had no bike to recklessly coast down on. The one he had ridden when he was eight stood gathering dust in the shed, propped up beside Adam’s oversized racer. Adam’s bike had been so much too big for him that Bryan could probably still ride it now, but the thought of taking it out himself made him feel physically sick.
He supposed that bike would stand there for ever. His own might go, but his mother would never throw away anything that had been Adam’s. His brother’s belongings had all been boxed up, but somehow the boxes had never made it out of his room. Bryan never went in there. There was something horribly temporary about all those boxes, as if Adam had just that instant moved out and might be coming back any day now to collect his luggage.
The hike up the hill was as bad as he remembered. Jake, two years older and much taller, had the long legs to outpace him just walking, and the more athletic Smokey had no problem jogging to keep up with him. Bryan had done his share of running over the past five years, but that was a kind of terrified sprint, hotfooting it away from the things that lurked in the shadows. A sustained jog was not something he was good at, and the powerful July sun beating down did little to help.
By the time they got to the crest of the hill and the empty house came into view, Bryan’s breath was wheezing in his chest more than a little. He should have been grateful it was downhill from here, but instead it felt like he was being deliberately drawn towards the house, faster and faster, as if a spider was tugging him towards the centre of its web.
The houses on King’s Hill were similar to those on his own street, falling somewhere in between the squalid estates and the ‘nice’ part of Redford where the rich people lived. The houses were relatively old, from the thirties or forties, but mostly in good repair. They were all different, a pleasing change from the newer part of town, where the only variety in the rows and rows of terraced homes was what colour people painted the front door.
Even in that mess of individuality, number 29 stuck out.
It had lain empty as long as Bryan had been alive; sometimes he thought maybe it had been that way ever since it was built all those decades ago. A forlorn for sale sign stood in the corner of the front yard. It didn’t even have a phone number for the estate agent on it, as if whoever had planted it there had done so more to mark the house as empty than out of any genuine belief that somebody might want to live in it.
The house was a strange contradiction of disrepair and order. The gardens, front and back, were like jungles, but there were no discarded beer cans or heaps of other people’s rubbish. The windows were unboarded, but none of them had been smashed. The brickwork was crumbling, but it had never been graffitied. Redford was a quiet town – at least on the surface – but even so such good behaviour on the part of its youth was hard to believe.
It was an oddity – but, like lots of other oddities in this town, one that went completely unnoticed and unremarked.
Strange or not, there was nothing in the outward appearance of the house to account for the feeling like millions of tiny spiders crawling across his skin that set in as soon as Bryan saw it. ‘Feel that?’ he said quietly.
Smokey nodded, tugging his denim jacket closer about him.
‘It’s just a house,’ said Jake. But Bryan thought he sounded a little uncertain.
They approached the front garden, Bryan’s creepy feeling growing steadily stronger. ‘What, do we just walk right in?’ asked Jake in a low voice.
‘Why not?’ Smokey shrugged. ‘It’s not as if anyone will see us do it.’ It was true; the street had become as eerily quiet as the one they’d gone down the previous afternoon. Hadn’t there been a bunch of kids playing in their gardens a few moments ago? Now there was nobody.
‘How do we get in? Is there a window open round the back or something?’
‘Try the front door,’ Bryan suggested. He had never been crazy enough to even contemplate going inside before . . . and yet he was somehow confident that the door would let them in. What good was a trap you couldn’t get into?
He wished he hadn’t thought of the word ‘trap’. It brought to mind not some man-made device for catching unwanted pests, but a great, bloated plant like a Venus flytrap. A living thing, waiting patiently for its prey to come to it . . .
Jake stepped right up to the front door and pushed it, saying, ‘Don’t be stupid, it’ll be—’
The door swung open.
Bryan was suddenly very, very uncertain about this whole idea, but Jake had already stepped inside and he and Smokey just ended up following. He couldn’t tell if Jake honestly didn’t sense anything amiss, or if he was putting up a mask to hide his own fears. That made him think of Adam.
And this is the same thing. We’re doing exactly the same thing. Here he was again, trailing after someone who didn’t really believe – or at any rate, would rather walk straight into the arms of the Dark Man than admit he might believe.
And with that realization Bryan would have stopped them and demanded they leave, if the door hadn’t chosen that moment to swing shut without being pushed. Smokey jumped, but Jake just frowned and peered at the door. ‘It’s on a latch,’ he said slowly. ‘It can’t have been properly shut, or it would have been locked.’
But Bryan’s memory reported without hesitation that it had been shut, shut tight against the door frame, and Jake wouldn’t have had to push so hard if it had been standing ajar. And suddenly his need to get out was overwhelmed by his fear of trying the door. What if he tugged on the handle, and it wouldn’t let him out?
Breathe, Bryan, he commanded himself. If Jake can’t sense the Dark Man, then you’re safe with him. After all, even the woods had been no danger to him when they were scattered with searchers. The Dark Man never haunted Bryan in front of anyone who wasn’t sensitive to him.
But as Jake pushed past him in the entrance hall, brushing a strand of his dark hair away from his forehead, Bryan noticed a sheen of sweat on his face that hadn’t come from the exertion of walking up the hill. He looked two skin tones paler than he had in the library, and Bryan couldn’t help thinking that maybe he wasn’t nearly as unaffected as he claimed.
‘Let’s just . . . let’s just go through all the rooms and get out of here, all right?’ Jake said quickly, and Bryan was in no mood to call him on his sudden nervousness.
There was a door to their left and Jake pushed through it into an empty room that looked far too big. It’s just the furniture, Bryan. It just looks big because there’s no furniture. There was peeling wallpaper on the walls, a pattern that was maybe flowers, maybe something else. But he couldn’t tell, because it was too dark.
Windows. Where the hell are the windows? Bryan remembered the windows, knew their blank stare intimately. The room to the left of the front door had a huge picture window that should have flooded it with the morning sun. But this room had no windows – nothing but blank walls and that ancient wallpaper.
There was a click of a switch as Smokey tried it, but no flare of light. Bryan looked up to see if there was even a bulb, and the ceiling seemed to be about six metres above them.
Don’t be stupid! You’ve seen the outside of the house – you know it’s not that big.
Not that big on the outside, his mind corrected him.
Jake fumbled in his pocket and yanked something out. It was a cigarette lighter, and it sparked into flame as he thumbed it. Bryan was too grateful for the sudden light to dwell on surprise that he carried it. Readjusting his mental image of Jake was the least of his worries right now.
The flame seemed tiny in the enormous room – and it was enormous now; twice the size it had been when they entered, he was sure. As if the walls themselves were shying away from the light.
In the suddenly dancing shadows, a splash of something dripped from above. Damp, he thought, a leak in the roof, automatically stepping away. Jake kneeled down, bringing his lighter close to the floor to get a better look. No, don’t do that. I don’t want to see, Bryan almost said, but the words didn’t come out.
A shallow pool of dark-red liquid glistened in the light of the flame. Blood. As the three of them stared at it, another droplet landed in the pool with a barely audible splash.
VIII
‘Rust,’ said Jake, talking too fast. ‘There must be some kind of leaking pipe, with the rust turning it that colour . . .’
Smokey just mutely shook his head.
Bryan could see how Jake’s hands were trembling in the way the fragile little flame danced as he stood and raised it to the ceiling. And how had he ever thought that the ceiling was high, that the room was big? It was as close and cramped around them as a coffin made for three, the ceiling almost brushing the spikes of Jake’s hair.
The ceiling was yellowed, cracked and bulging. And in the centre, just above them, it was rapidly darkening with a spreading redness, blood leeching through from the floor above. Someone made a noise like a frightened animal. It took Bryan a moment to realize it had been him.
‘There’s someone up there,’ said Jake, a determined look stealing over his face. ‘Someone hurt. It could be one of the missing kids!’ He darted for the door before the others could grab him.
‘No, wait!’ Bryan snatched for the back of his jacket, only suddenly the room was room-sized again and Jake was out of reach.
‘Lucy!’ they heard Jake call as he dashed out into the entrance hall and towards the stairs.
And – were those stairs there a minute ago?
Not really aware of what he was doing, only knowing that he couldn’t let Jake go up there, Bryan ran after him. He thought Smokey was on his heels, but he didn’t look back to find out.
Jake was scrambling up the steps, and Bryan went up them two at a time after him. And even now, in the grip of extreme panic, the words came to him: Two in blood . . . four in flood . . . six in hate. He knew without even looking that there would be thirteen steps.
He caught Jake on the twelfth, grabbing him by the legs and forcibly yanking him backwards. The older boy flailed, smashing his hand against the banister, and Bryan would have lost his grip on him if Smokey hadn’t been there to help seize him.
‘What are you doing?’ Jake demanded desperately, still struggling to get free of their grip. ‘Can’t you hear?’
And suddenly, as if his words had summoned it up, Bryan could. A forlorn, failing voice, half calling for help and half just crying out in pain. ‘Lucy, it’s me, it’s Jake!’ Jake yelled, but to Bryan it didn’t sound like the voice of a teenage girl, not at all. It sounded more like that of a boy – a boy about ten years old.
‘Let me go!’ Jake demanded, and Bryan felt so gut-punched by suddenly hearing that plaintive voice that he did let go.
‘The step!’ he blurted out before Jake could move on. ‘Not the thirteenth step!’
Jake spun round to face him, eyes dark with anger, as if he was about to yell something, but then he bit it back and used the banister to push himself up onto the upstairs landing without treading on the final step. Bryan leaped over it after him, not wanting to go up there and yet somehow needing to.
The first door on their left was bulging outwards from its frame, as if some huge creature was trying to force its way through the wood. Heedless, Jake grabbed the handle and tried to make it turn. It wouldn’t.
‘Hot!’ he yelped suddenly, yanking his hands back. Bryan saw the dark metal doorknob already beginning to glow a dull red, like the rings on a hob warming up.
The sounds of pain and distress from within were growing ever more frantic. Bryan tried to touch the door himself, but he couldn’t even get his fingers near it – just forcing his hand through the hot air was like trying to plunge it into boiling water.
‘Here!’ Smokey pushed past them, wrapping the thick material of his shirt around his palm to shield it. He made a little moan of pain through gritted teeth as the heat sank through, but he didn’t let go.
With a click like a gunshot, the door suddenly released, sending Smokey flying backwards as it opened. And suddenly, as if floodgates had been opened, water was rushing out around them.
Only it wasn’t water. It took Bryan a moment to process the fact that it could be blood, because there was an impossible amount of it. It came rushing out around their legs like a high wave surging up the beach, horribly warm and with enough strength to nearly knock him down. He thought that if he fell to his hands and knees in that he might actually die.
