The devils footsteps, p.5
The Devil's Footsteps, page 5
And then it was draining away, pouring down the stairs with the thundering of a waterfall. Could one room have contained so much blood? Where had it all come from? Surely an elephant couldn’t bleed that much if you drained it dry.
Something in him, the rational part of him, knew that, but the thick coppery taste of blood was clogging his nose and throat, making it impossible to think, to breathe. He didn’t want to look inside the room, didn’t want to with every bit of dread he had left, but he couldn’t stop himself. Nothing could be alive in there. Nothing could be alive.
But something was. A small, weakly struggling figure hung suspended from a hook, a huge metal barb shoved through the flesh of its neck like a side of meat in a butcher’s shop. Trainered feet hung a few centimetres off the floor, blood still dripping down to pool beneath them.
So much blood. And it seemed to Bryan in that instant that the torrent of blood that had rushed past them had been nothing, meaningless, completely insignificant compared to the slow, steady trickle from the neck of that hanging figure.
And it was strange. For a brief second it was nothing more than a figure, a vaguely human shape that his brain couldn’t even begin to recognize. For a moment he was even unsure what sex it was; what age. And then, as surely as an optical illusion becomes impossible to un-see once you’ve seen it, it was Adam.
Jake was shouting something beside him, only it sounded like ‘Lucy’ and that wasn’t right – couldn’t he see that it was Adam? Bryan tried to step into the room, not knowing what he could possibly do, only knowing that he had to get there, had to be with his brother. Why wasn’t he moving? His body wasn’t working. Something was holding him back.
He became aware that Smokey was shouting at him desperately, holding onto him and Jake as if they were wild dogs straining at the leash. What was he shouting? Were those words? Bryan couldn’t hear anything, couldn’t see anything but Adam.
Adam’s eyes were fixed on his own. Impossible that there should be life in them, impossible that they should be anything but glazed, but they were fixed on him, hypnotic grey and full of pain and accusation.
Why are you letting this happen, Bryan? Why aren’t you helping me?
And he was trying – he was trying to move forward but Smokey wouldn’t let him. Bryan snarled something inarticulate, tried to wrench free but it just wasn’t working.
Smokey’s yells were beginning to crystallize into something a little like words, something Bryan could almost understand. Bryan hated him for holding him back, for shouting these words that were beginning to get in and distract him from the most important thing in the universe.
Thirteenth. He heard the word ‘thirteenth’, felt an automatic chill slide down his spine, cutting through his panic. Adam. But no, wait, that was Adam there, hanging there, dying. Dying because Bryan couldn’t get to him. What did stupid steps matter against that?
Steps? What was that about steps?
Thirteenth step. Bryan, it’s the thirteenth step. Don’t go in there. Don’t go—
‘– in there! Bryan, Jake, can you hear me? Can you hear me?’
And then, like a bubble popping, the hanging figure wasn’t a figure at all. It was a shadow, less than a shadow. He could still see it, but it was as if it were nothing more than a picture painted on a sheet of glass, placed in front of something else. Something altogether darker . . .
‘I hear you, Smokey, I hear you!’ Bryan’s voice sounded hoarse to him, as if he hadn’t used it for about a year. He realized that Smokey was practically crying with frustration and fear, trying to hold back the wildly struggling Jake, who was bigger and stronger than him.
Bryan leaped to his aid, helping to grab hold of Jake’s arm and yank him backwards. Jake was crying too, yelling over and over again, ‘Lucy, I’m coming! Lucy!’
‘Listen! Jake, can you hear me?’ Bryan found he was slapping the older boy round the face, not even conscious he was doing it. ‘It’s not real, Jake, it’s not real!’
Jake finally turned to look at him, eyes dazed with confusion. In that instant, as he looked away, the figure popped out of existence completely.
‘What—?’ Bryan thought he could see some sanity beginning to return to the dark eyes he was staring into, but he didn’t dare wait around for it to happen. Who knew what else this cursed house might throw at them?
‘Help me, Smokey!’ Together, they hustled the older boy back down the stairs. This time, Bryan wasn’t counting steps. He wasn’t even aware of his feet touching them. They rushed Jake out through the front door, suddenly open again. It slammed behind them with a sound as final as the ending of the world.
IX
The sunlight outside was as bright as ever as they collapsed breathlessly in the front garden. Smokey was brushing compulsively at the legs of his jeans for several moments before he realized he was scrubbing at nothing. ‘What the hell . . . ?’ He stared at his own fingers in complete bafflement.
‘No bloodstains,’ Bryan realized, scrambling to his feet. He looked down at himself. ‘No blood.’ And yet he could still remember the horrifyingly warm red tide around his legs as the door burst open . . . He stared at the others, heart still pounding. ‘Was any of that even real?’
‘Some of it was.’ Jake thrust his upturned palm in front of them, the skin blistered with burns from where he’d grasped the red-hot door handle.
‘Oh, ow,’ sympathized Smokey, wincing in dismay.
There was the faintest of clicks from behind them, sounding as loud as a gunshot to Bryan’s jangled nerves. They all whirled round, to see the front door of the house slowly creeping open.
‘It slammed,’ said Jake, an edge of panic creeping into his voice. ‘I saw it – it slammed and locked!’
‘Let’s get the hell out of here,’ Bryan said fervently. The acid taste of fear was back.
Smokey led the scramble for escape, but stopped a few steps short of the pavement, looking dismayed. ‘Oh, no. Guys, can we . . . ?’ He trailed off, recognizing that staying in the garden was hardly an option. ‘Aw, hell.’ He resignedly slumped a few more steps forward. ‘OK, today is really not my day.’
Running up the garden path after him, Bryan saw what had stopped him in his tracks: Nina, coming up the road in cycling shorts and an alarmingly pink top. There was no point hoping she hadn’t noticed them.
‘Hey! Brat,’ Smokey yelled down the road, taking the initiative. ‘What d’you think you’re doing? You’re not supposed to be out on your own.’
‘I’m just going to meet Becca.’ Nina shrugged defensively. ‘Mum said I could.’
‘Yeah, and did you tell her where?’ Smokey demanded, overprotective in the face of forcible reminders of just how dangerous Redford really was. ‘You’re supposed to be together if you’re going more than a couple of streets.’
‘God, she’s only down at the shop!’ Nina said, rolling her eyes incredulously. ‘What are you, my grandma? Anyway, what are you doing here?’
She eyed the three of them shrewdly, registering which garden they were standing in front of. ‘Did you just come out of Old Pete’s house? Oh, you are so dead,’ she said, starting to smirk. ‘Mum’s gonna kill you if she knows you’ve been in there looking for ghosts.’
‘Nobody was looking for ghosts,’ Smokey snapped back, managing to muster more of a disbelieving sneer at the suggestion than Bryan would have been able to. ‘And who’s this Pete guy supposed to be?’
She gave him a scathing look. ‘It’s his house. He haunts it. Everyone knows that.’
‘Yeah, well, everyone’s an idiot. And don’t you get any ideas about going in there ghost hunting,’ he warned her. ‘Or I’ll tell Mum you’ve been running round town on your own, and you’ll be grounded, like, for ever.’
‘You went in there.’ Nina folded her arms, clearly unimpressed.
‘We had to get a tennis ball from the garden,’ Jake covered.
She gave him the same sceptical once-over she’d given Bryan, clearly not reserving much respect for anybody who chose to hang out with her older brother. ‘Where is it, then?’ she demanded.
‘We lost it in the bushes,’ Smokey said crossly. ‘Now could you just—?’
‘What did you do to your hand?’ Nina interrupted, looking at Jake.
He paused guiltily in the act of rubbing his reddened skin. ‘Burned it. This morning,’ he explained quickly.
‘Hey, quit being so nosy,’ Smokey glowered, manhandling his sister away from the others. ‘Now, would you go bug Becca instead of me? We’ve got better things to do than babysit you all day.’
‘I’ll tell Mum I saw you breaking into Old Pete’s house!’ she threatened.
‘You won’t, because you didn’t, but I definitely saw you out here when you shouldn’t be. And I’m the one with witnesses.’ He indicated Bryan and Jake.
Nina pulled a face. ‘Whatever,’ she sighed, outmanoeuvred but unwilling to actually concede the argument. ‘But I’ll still tell Mum unless you give me money to buy an ice cream,’ she added quickly.
Smokey glared, but dug in his pocket and dropped a few silver coins into her expectant palm. ‘That’s all I’ve got, and you’re paying me back next pocket-money day,’ he warned.
‘In your dreams.’ Having succeeded in twisting some money out of him, she skipped off quite happily.
Smokey shook his head as she left. ‘Sorry about that,’ he sighed. ‘Nosy little brat.’ He slid his hands into his pockets and looked at the others. ‘Where to now?’
‘Somewhere other than here,’ said Bryan, with feeling. The sensation that the house was watching them was back with a vengeance.
They ended up going to Jake’s house. He led them up to the attic, a surprisingly comfortable if low-ceilinged room with a skylight that let in a little sun. There were a few cushions and a stereo, though most of the space was taken up by haphazard piles of books. A Polaroid photo pinned to a beam showed a younger Jake and a grinning girl with ginger-blonde hair: Lucy, Bryan guessed.
‘Sorry, I know it’s a mess up here,’ Jake apologized, nudging papers aside with a foot to make space. ‘I’m not used to anyone else coming up. Me and Lucy used to sit up here and smoke. Well, she did,’ he corrected himself vaguely. ‘I didn’t, back then.’
Bryan wondered if he’d taken it up as some strange way of extending Lucy’s presence there a little longer. Not the healthiest way to cling to someone’s memory . . . But then, who was he to talk?
It was strange, though. This was obviously a private hideaway that had been shared by Jake and Lucy, but there was none of the choking, oppressive feel that he associated with Adam’s old room and the places where he could feel his brother’s presence. He had a sense that they should feel like this: safe and full of memories, not somewhere you felt as if the air was being sucked out of you and you were slowly strangling.
He wondered if Lucy Swift’s house felt like his own. Did her parents shuffle round like zombies and talk without really talking? Were there parts of the house they never entered, rooms full of boxes that would never be taken away? Did Lucy have a little brother who felt like he was drowning in the silence where she used to be?
He pushed that line of thought away forcefully. It wasn’t fair to act like everything was down to his parents; it wasn’t their fault that the house felt like a live-in tomb. It wasn’t their fault that when Adam had disappeared, they’d somehow forgotten that he existed too.
He shook himself out of it, and forced his mind back to King’s Hill. ‘That house. It’s like a Venus flytrap,’ he said aloud. ‘It lured us in, and it slammed the trap shut – but we got away.’
‘And then it opened up the trap again, waiting for the next happy little insect to come along,’ said Smokey darkly.
‘Or for the same ones to be stupid enough to come back,’ Bryan said, thinking of that door creeping open. And hadn’t there been, underneath that pinprick of returning fear, something else? Some tiny little desire, however well buried, to go back in? To walk back into the trap and see if you could still get away the second time around.
A pained look was beginning to creep over Jake’s face. ‘It was her,’ he said quietly. ‘It was Lucy. I saw her!’ He stared each of the others directly in the eyes, as if daring them to disagree.
‘I know you saw her,’ Smokey said gently, ‘but it wasn’t her. It wasn’t her.’
‘But she – she was—’
‘It was some kind of— Hell, I don’t know, some illusion or something. It was him, the Dark Man, making you see what he wanted you to see.’
‘I saw Adam,’ said Bryan softly. And it was only as he said it that it occurred to him that he had seen the Adam of five years ago, a ten-year-old boy. If Adam was . . . If there was some crazy parallel universe where he could be alive now, he would be fifteen, nearly fully grown, not a kid younger than Bryan himself.
That helped him to figure out how to prove it to the unconvinced Jake. ‘What did she look like, Jake?’
Jake’s forehead crinkled in a frown. ‘What . . . ? She just . . . She looked like Lucy. Like she always did.’
‘Like she always did,’ Bryan echoed pointedly. ‘Think about it, Jake. When did she disappear? A year ago? Did she look any older, Jake? Was her hair any longer? Did she look any fatter, any thinner? Any taller?’
‘I . . . I . . . No,’ Jake said slowly. ‘She looked . . . just the same. Just the same as when she disappeared.’
Bryan laid his hands on Jake’s shoulders. ‘It wasn’t real, Jake. What we saw . . . none of it was real.’
In reply, Jake stretched out his hands palm upwards. ‘This is real,’ he said, nodding at his blistered right hand.
Bryan pushed back his sleeves to display the cuts he’d acquired during his headlong flight past the hedges the day before. ‘So are these! I never said he couldn’t hurt you. He can hurt you plenty! But he can also make you see things that aren’t there – see anything he wants you to.’
‘D’you think this is . . . what happened?’ asked Smokey slowly. ‘Did all those other kids see stuff like this, when he came to get them?’
‘I’m sure of it,’ Bryan said darkly. ‘He . . . pulls stuff out of your head. What you’re most afraid of; what you’re expecting to see . . . He uses your nightmares against you.’
Jake leaned forward pensively, resting his chin on a loosely cupped fist. ‘If that’s true, then he must feed on the beliefs somehow, like some kind of a parasite. The legends, the chant . . . they must play directly into his hands. It’s almost like a formula, telling you exactly what to believe. Keeping people afraid.’
‘Yeah, well, he’s doing a pretty good job of it right now,’ said Smokey, a little shakily. ‘That thing scared the hell out of me.’ He wrapped his arms around his knees, the beanbag rustling as he shifted his weight.
Smokey, Bryan had noticed, wore his anxiety quite openly; he didn’t avoid putting words to the things that had been unspoken constants of his own world for what seemed like for ever. Maybe that was why he’d been the one to finally break the silence, and just walk up to somebody and say, ‘This is what I saw – do you believe me?’ Bryan had spent so many months explaining to deaf ears what had really happened to Adam, it would never have occurred to him to try again.
‘What did you see, Smokey?’ it suddenly occurred to him to wonder.
Smokey shook his head slowly. ‘I – I don’t even know. For a moment I thought it was . . . I thought I saw—’ He stopped, looking distressed. ‘But then you both started yelling that it was Adam, that it was Lucy, and it was like it – it all collapsed in on itself.’
‘You broke out of the illusion,’ Jake realized. ‘Because . . . maybe it didn’t know quite what to show you. We both went in there knowing – expecting . . . The fear must have been right there, ready to come out the instant we stepped into that room. But the Dark Man had to think more about you; he had to dig deeper trying to find something that fitted, and it took too long. He couldn’t quite fool all of us with the same trick at the same time.’
‘So?’ Bryan shrugged, a little too aggressively. His instincts hadn’t quite caught up with the calmer surroundings, and he was still more than a touch on edge.
‘So . . . we have power too,’ Jake continued. ‘It matters what we believe. The shapes he takes come from us, not from somewhere else. And if he uses our fears and our nightmares to shape reality, then in a way, we control him.’
‘Not much of a way,’ Bryan said with a grimace.
‘I don’t know about that,’ Jake said softly, twisting round to meet Bryan’s eyes. ‘Because it seems to me that if believing he can hurt us makes it possible . . . then believing we could hurt him makes that possible. If our belief gives him power, it can take it from him, too.’
X
There was a long moment of silence, and then Bryan sighed tiredly. ‘Oh, come on. That’s crazy. You can’t just . . . This isn’t clap your hands and “I believe in fairies”. It’s not like I can – I can pick up this pencil and say, “This pencil has the power to kill the Dark Man,” and it’ll come true. It doesn’t work like that.’
‘I think it does,’ Smokey corrected him slowly. ‘Just not with pencils. You’ve got no reason to believe in pencils. But if everything the Dark Man does or shows comes from what he takes from people’s minds, then it has to have some kind of influence over him. Maybe if there was something you did have a reason to believe in – if there was some way we could find out more about him . . .’
‘How?’ Bryan demanded, frustrated. ‘Nobody ever talks about this stuff, even as a joke, even as if it was just a legend. I should know.’
Smokey rolled sideways on the beanbag to look across at Jake. ‘What about in books? You must have read, like, the whole of Redford reference library by now.’ By the look of it, he had most of it still stashed here in his attic.
Jake shrugged awkwardly, as if embarrassed to be caught out in his research. ‘I’ve got history books, but . . . it’s not as if I knew what I was looking for. I mean, before today I didn’t even—’ He laughed slightly nervously. ‘Well, I never saw anything like that before.’ He flexed his burned palm and looked down at it, as if it was the only thing still anchoring him to such unbelievable memories. ‘It’s still pretty hard to believe it even happened, you know?’
