The devils footsteps, p.7
The Devil's Footsteps, page 7
‘Come on, Jake,’ he urged, trying not to sound accusing. ‘This morning couldn’t have been the first time you ever saw anything. You grew up in Redford, for God’s sake – every kid who’s lived here has seen something.’ He remembered all the scenes from infant and early junior school: teachers smilingly chalking it up to youthful imagination as they comforted the kids who’d seen ghosts in the storerooms and trolls lurking behind trees. And then sent them right back out to play in front of the waiting claws of the Dark Man.
‘Maybe that’s true,’ Jake said, ‘but I swear, I’ve never seen anything.’ And Bryan would have been forced to leave it at that, except Jake quietly added, ‘It wasn’t anything.’
‘What wasn’t?’ Bryan asked quickly.
‘Nothing!’ Jake insisted; angry, but at himself, not at Bryan. ‘I thought, one time—’ He broke off, shaking his head. ‘But it was just me. I was scaring myself. It wasn’t anything.’
Bryan wanted to push him further, but made himself wait. They walked on in silence, crossing at the corner of Geller Street. A few moments later Jake went on, as if barely aware Bryan was even there.
‘I saw this documentary once. I was quite little – six, seven, I don’t remember. It was about wolves. There were these white wolves, and they were – they were beautiful. Do you know what I mean?’
Bryan just nodded, not wanting to interrupt the hesitant flow.
‘I was totally mesmerized. I had a pet cat once, and I could watch him for hours, but those wolves were . . . something else. You wouldn’t believe anything like that could exist in the world. They were like . . . gods. Animal gods. And they looked like ghosts, the way they moved. Totally silent, as if they weren’t really there at all; as if the rest of the world was something they could just kind of melt through. As if nothing else apart from them was real.’
Jake was quiet for a long moment, and he and Bryan walked together in silence. Then he suddenly started up again. ‘I saw them . . . hunting. In the trees. I can’t remember where it was, or what they caught. I just remember the way they appeared out of nowhere and tore it apart. And that little animal – I don’t think it matters what it was, anything would have been the same. Nothing, nobody could ever get away from those wolves, those wolf-gods, because they were just too perfect.’
Bryan noticed him glance over his shoulder, almost automatically. He wondered if Jake realized he’d done it.
‘I used to have nightmares,’ Jake continued. ‘I’d be in amongst the trees somewhere, and they’d be there. Watching me, stalking me. And I’d see them; I’d catch little glimpses of them gliding between the trees. And then . . . and then they’d vanish. And you knew. You knew that as long as you could see them, you were safe, but once they disappeared . . .’
At first Bryan thought Jake had come to another halt, but instead his voice had dropped to an almost inaudible whisper. ‘And one time I thought I saw them for real. I was in the woods with my dad, and he’d just gone back to pick up something he’d dropped. And I saw . . .’ He shook his head angrily. ‘But it was just a shadow. Or – or it was a dog or something. Somebody’s husky dog. But just for a moment – just for a moment it looked like a white wolf.’
He fell silent then, and Bryan struggled for something to say. Inside, he was sure that the wolf Jake had seen had been real; as real as the hanging figure in the empty house or the Dark Man at the end of the Devil’s Footsteps. But Jake seemed to have backed himself into a corner, refusing to believe in this one thing, refusing to accept that the wolves of his nightmares could really come to life, and Bryan wasn’t sure it was a good idea to shock him out of it.
It had grown dark as they walked. Dark? It’s the middle of summer. He tried to look at his watch, and couldn’t even see the dial. It could have been no later than seven when they left Smokey’s house; night shouldn’t fall for hours yet. And hadn’t they been walking for a long time as they talked? Shouldn’t they have reached Jake’s house by now? Where were they?
In the distance, a wolf howled.
XIII
Jake’s eyes had suddenly gone wide, very white in the dimness. ‘Sounds like a . . . pretty big dog.’ He was walking a little faster. Bryan wasn’t sure that was going to help.
‘Er, Jake?’ he asked softly. ‘Where do we turn now?’
The dark-haired boy came to a confused halt, as if he’d been walking on auto-pilot until now. He looked around with increasing bewilderment. ‘I, er, well . . . what street are we on again?’
‘I don’t know,’ Bryan admitted, beginning to panic a little. How could they be lost? It was impossible.
‘We must have – er, we must have taken a wrong turning somewhere. If we go back—’
‘A wrong turn?’ demanded Bryan. ‘Jake, we’ve lived here all our lives. It’s not like this is a metropolis.’
‘Come on, Bryan, calm down.’ Oddly, it seemed as if Bryan beginning to lose it was helping Jake to regain his cool. ‘We’re both spooked, and it all looks different in the dark . . .’
‘Dark? Jake, it’s July.’
‘Then it must be – it must be a little bit later than we thought.’ He turned, ready to go back the way they’d come. ‘If we just—’ He stopped dead.
Standing silently regarding them at the end of the alley was a white wolf. Wolf? It was as big as a tiger, and twice as still. It regarded them through pale eyes, devoid of expression. Somehow that was even worse than a glare of anger or hatred.
Its snow-coloured coat seemed impossibly bright in the darkness, and Bryan’s eyes threatened to water as he stared at it, not daring to move. He blinked, and in that fraction of an instant it was gone.
‘Where did it go?’ he demanded, shocked by the speed of it.
‘I didn’t see it move . . .’ said Jake. He sounded distant, not quite with it. His eyes were fixed on the spot where the wolf had just been standing.
Bryan looked around frantically, suddenly remembering the older boy’s words from a few moments earlier: You knew that as long as you could see them, you were safe, but once they disappeared . . .
There was another wolf at the other end of the alley.
It looked just as blank-eyed and ghostly as the first. Bryan froze, forcing his eyes to stay open the way he did when he was waiting for his photo to be taken. The wolf didn’t move like a real animal at all; it didn’t yawn or sniff or twitch its ears. He couldn’t even see it breathe.
There was a sound from behind him, and he whipped round. Nothing. He looked back, and the second wolf was gone. He edged closer to Jake, who hadn’t moved the whole time. ‘There must be two of them,’ he whispered.
‘There’ll be a whole pack,’ said Jake dully.
‘We’re gonna have to pick an end and run for it,’ Bryan decided. There were no sideshoots from this cramped, unfamiliar alley, and if the wolves moved in on them together . . .
‘What for?’ asked Jake in the same disconnected tone. ‘We can’t outrun them.’
‘Well, we better do something!’ snapped Bryan, tide of panic once again rising. He couldn’t watch both ends of the alley at once, and he was convinced that every time he looked away the wolves were returning to regard them with that same sad gaze. ‘Come on!’
He decided the end they’d been heading for was closest, and grabbed Jake by the arm to make him follow. The other boy stumbled after him willingly enough, but there was an odd blankness to his expression that Bryan really didn’t like. He looked like a rabbit caught in headlights, mentally and physically frozen.
They burst out of the end of the alley, Bryan’s hands automatically tightening into fists – as if he could possibly hope to beat off such huge creatures with his bare hands.
No wolves.
‘Where did they go?’ He looked around, saw nothing. It would have been better if he’d been able to see them.
They seemed to be at a nexus of narrow alleys – which was crazy, of course, because there was no place like that in Redford – nobody would build anything like this in any town. Narrow paths stretched off in at least eight directions, and the walls were high, far too high. He couldn’t tell which alley they’d come along.
Was that a flicker of white at the end of one tunnel?
Tunnel? Weren’t they alleyways a minute ago? The world was melting and reshaping itself, nightmare merging into reality as the Dark Man wrapped his grip around them . . . Not just the wolves, but everything that came with them – visions harking back to primeval days of crouching in caves at the mercy of prowling beasts.
Suddenly, so vividly that for a second Bryan feared it was really happening, he had a mental image of eight wolves appearing, blocking the mouths of every possible exit and all converging on the centre . . .
‘We’ve got to move!’ He practically set his shoulder against Jake to shove the older boy into a randomly chosen tunnel. ‘Go! Go!’
This was it. They’d chosen, and if one of the wolves appeared in front of them . . . The walls and ceiling seemed to be closing in, and Bryan didn’t think he had room to turn round even if he wanted to. Which was nuts, because Jake was ahead of him and still moving, and he was taller, broader about the shoulders. If he could still stumble onwards, Bryan had more than enough space. Except that he didn’t.
He couldn’t see anything past Jake, could only literally push him onwards, teeth gritted in anticipation. Anticipation of the moment when Jake stopped dead despite his pushing – or worse, when the wolf arrived from his end of the tunnel instead, and suddenly snapped at his heels . . .
So why didn’t they? Where were they? Why were they waiting? Bryan felt an insane urge to yell out to them to just go ahead and bite him, get it over with.
Of course, he knew the real reason why they hadn’t come for him and Jake yet. The monsters never just attack. First you have to have the stalking, and then the chase . . .
Even as he thought that, an inrush of cool air struck his face as they stumbled out into the open. They had emerged from the mouth of a cave into a vast expanse of trees—
Oh God, the woods, please not the woods—
But wait, these weren’t Redford woods. They weren’t any trees that had existed these past few centuries, or maybe ever. They were fairytale trees – the kind of forest where lost children wandered helpless for days, where dark things could lurk for centuries undisturbed by humans.
‘Where the hell are we?’ he heard Jake mutter, but he couldn’t have given an answer if he’d had breath to do it. It was insane, impossible that they should be here, and yet on some level it struck a chord so deep that it hardly even seemed unnatural. This wasn’t a place, it was a nightmare – literally, the elements of every half-remembered fairy tale and fantasy story made solid. He almost expected to see Red Riding Hood come skipping through the trees . . . except, in this story, there would be no heroic woodcutters or happy endings.
In this story, the big bad wolves would close in, and tear you limb from limb.
There came another plaintive howl; in the distance, but closer than that other one had been, back in the alley. What had been the alley. Bryan glanced back towards the cave, but that had gone too, folded away like a stage prop that was no longer needed. When the Dark Man was in control, time and space were bent around to follow the rules of a nightmare . . . and the nightmare said that when the wolves came, you would be lost in the middle of the forest, with nowhere to run.
Another wolf voice joined the first, and another. Bryan lost count as the lone howl swelled into a chorus, a sound that was at once terrifying and heartbreakingly mournful. The howls seemed to come from all around them, a veritable army of wolves somewhere in the distance.
They were surrounded.
XIV
The wolf chorus suddenly came to an end, not in the gradual way it had started but as abruptly as if a switch had been flipped. The sound hung in the silence for a long moment, and Bryan wasn’t sure if it was a real echo, or just the memory of the howls reverberating inside his head.
Chilled to the bone by a sound that sent him right back to prehistory, Bryan instinctively reached out to snag Jake’s arm – the only human contact in this desperately lonely place.
He could feel the older boy trembling, and Jake flinched away at the touch. Bryan realized that however horrific this was for him, it must be so much worse for Jake – an enactment of the nightmare that had haunted him most of his life. Bryan had to press right up close to even make a decent guess at his expression.
‘Jake, are you all right?’ he said; softly, although part of him believed that however far away they were, the wolves would still hear everything. Their breathing, their heartbeats – probably even Jake’s teeth chattering.
Jake certainly seemed to be shivering, with a violence that was quite frightening. ‘I’m so c-cold,’ he managed to force out.
Cold? Wasn’t that supposed to be a symptom of being in shock? But what the hell was ‘shock’, anyway? What were you supposed to do? Bryan didn’t even have a coat or a sweater to offer him – he himself wore just a thin summer shirt, while Jake was still in his sports jacket.
Suddenly Bryan’s memory shot him a flash of Jake digging in the pockets of that jacket. Trapped in the dimness of the house on King’s Hill, rooting around for—
‘Jake! Have you still got your lighter?’
‘Huh?’ Jake frowned, animation partially returning to his worryingly slack face, and then he started to fumble in his pockets. It seemed to take him for ever to drag the cigarette lighter free, and his hands were shaking so badly he almost dropped it. Bryan snatched it from him quickly, scared that if it hit the ground they’d never find it.
It took him a moment to figure how to spark it off; though he wasn’t shaking like Jake, his own fear numbed his fingers, and he’d never held a cigarette lighter before in any case. Finally he succeeded in producing a tiny flame. He realized he was probably destroying his night-vision, and the lighter couldn’t possibly provide any sort of meaningful warmth – and yet that single small point of heat and light seemed like the centre of the universe.
It seemed to help steady Jake a little. ‘Where are they?’ he asked nervously. His eyes were darting rapidly from place to place, but it was still a definite improvement over the non-responsive zombie. It wasn’t as if his fear was irrational, after all, Bryan thought.
‘I don’t know,’ Bryan admitted, looking around. It was a fairly futile effort, night-blind as he was from staring at the flame of the lighter. But he couldn’t leave any part of the forest unwatched for long without the hairs on his neck standing up as the certainty that a wolf was there, watching, crept over him.
‘Why are we just standing here?’ demanded Jake desperately.
‘Where can we go?’ Bryan asked rhetorically, but somehow the two of them started walking anyway. He didn’t really believe that this forest could be anything less than endless, but even pretending to be doing something was better than just standing waiting for the pack to come and get them. There were wolves all around them, surely closing in.
Bryan felt that they ought to be running, but there was nowhere to run to and, when they couldn’t see the wolves, nothing to run from. But this slow nervous progress was worse than headlong flight in many ways. It felt less like an escape than like the quiet bit in a horror film just before the monster leaps out.
‘I saw one!’ hissed Jake, grabbing him tightly by the shoulder. Bryan followed his gaze, but there was nothing to see. With Jake’s current state of mind, it was impossible to guess if he’d really seen anything or not.
Bryan came to an abrupt stop. ‘We’re doing this wrong!’ he realized.
‘What?’ Jake demanded worriedly. He tugged at Bryan’s arm. ‘Come on, keep moving!’
‘No!’ Something had clicked inside Bryan’s brain, a memory of what they’d been talking over with Smokey earlier. ‘Don’t you get it? We’re going about this all wrong.’
‘Wrong? It’s a nightmare! How can you do it wrong?’ Jake exclaimed, voice rising with his panic.
‘A nightmare – right!’ Bryan clicked his fingers. ‘Fears, Jake! Like you were saying earlier. You can’t get away from the fear by running.’
‘Easy for you to say! It’s not your fear!’
Bryan gulped as a silver shadow flitted between two dark trees, not so far away. They had reached a sort of small clearing, more of a slightly larger gap between adjacent trees than anything else. ‘I think it’s everybody’s fear,’ he corrected. He turned and looked at the nearest tree. It was tall, nine metres at least, not gnarled and expansive like the trees in Redford woods but almost as straight as a telegraph pole.
Perhaps it was supposed to be impossible to climb – that seemed like a part of the nightmare, sure enough – but Bryan knew all about climbing trees. Adam had been a local champion, a school legend.
Adam. A chilling reminder, as if he needed it, that nightmare or not, there was no easy waking up from this. He went over to the tree and took hold of a branch.
‘What are you doing?’ Jake asked.
‘Climbing. Help me,’ he grunted.
‘You can’t hide up there!’ Jake cried, but he automatically stepped forward to help give Bryan a boost.
‘I’m not hiding.’ Bryan carefully handed the lighter across to him. ‘Don’t drop it. It’s our only chance.’
‘What chance?’ Jake demanded. ‘It’s only—’
‘It’s fire, Jake. Fire.’ He started climbing. He didn’t look down now, not from fear of heights but because he could feel the wolves pressing in.
He grasped the nearest branch and yanked, and then lowered himself to the ground, almost falling in his haste. It broke off, the wood splintering easily; he snapped it in half again, tossing one section quickly to Jake.
‘What good is this supposed to do, Bryan?’ Jake asked softly, not looking at him. Bryan followed his gaze to where pale eyes glinted at them in the moonlight.
