The devils footsteps, p.1
The Devil's Footsteps, page 1
Table of Contents
Cover
Also by E. E. Richardson
The Devil's Footsteps
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
Chapter XXV
Chapter XXVI
Chapter XXVII
Chapter XXVIII
Chapter XXIX
Chapter XXX
Epilogue
Also by. E. E. Richardson
The Intruders
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Epub ISBN: 9781407097596
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THE DEVIL’S FOOTSTEPS
A CORGI BOOK 978 0552 55171 7 (from January 2007)
0 552 55171 6
First published in Great Britain by The Bodley Head,
an imprint of Random House Children’s Books
The Bodley Head edition published 2005
Corgi edition published 2006
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Copyright © E. E. Richardson, 2005
The right of E. E. Richardson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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For my parents and David
I
One in fire, two in blood . . .
‘Come on, Bryan!’
Three in storm and four in flood . . .
‘What the hell are you so afraid of?’
Five in anger, six in hate . . .
‘You don’t seriously believe this junk, do you?’
Seven fear and evil eight . . .
‘You think the Dark Man’s gonna come and get me?’
Nine in sorrow, ten in pain . . .
‘It’s just a stupid game.’
Eleven death, twelve life again . . .
‘It’s like a skipping rhyme.’
Thirteen steps to the Dark Man’s door . . .
‘You ever see anybody die from a skipping rhyme, Bryan?’
Won’t be turning back no more.
Adam!
Bryan woke, as he always did, with a scream that didn’t really happen out loud, and the sweat sticking the cotton sheets together. It was the height of summer; the grass outside was dying, and even in the shade the concrete was hot to the touch. But Bryan was still shivering.
The shivers always came in summer.
People thought winter was the bad time, the time when you huddled under your blankets and hid from the evil things outside. But winter was just dull and dark. It had to be bright and sunny for the blackest shadows to come out.
He could always feel the Dark Man when the weather started to warm up. It was his season. The sun in the sky and the birds in the trees, and the Dark Man in the shadows.
He’d tried to tell himself again and again that it was imagination, twisted memories. He’d only been eight when it happened; he was thirteen now. He had been just a kid, and his brain had made him see the Dark Man because that was what they’d been playing. The Devil’s Footsteps were just stones, and the Dark Man hadn’t taken Adam.
But it was Adam’s voice Bryan heard when he told himself that. Adam laughing, taunting, making fun of Bryan, who hadn’t completed the rhyme, who’d run away before he’d reached the thirteenth step. Adam making fun of the Dark Man.
What did it matter if you believed in the legend or not? Adam was still gone.
Everybody laughed if you mentioned the Dark Man. A local myth, the children’s bogeyman. The Dark Man of Redford. What a silly, childish story. Everybody laughed. And everybody hugged their coats about them and said, ‘Hey, isn’t it cold in here? I think it’s going to be a bad winter, this one.’ Bryan could have told them that it wasn’t winter you had to watch out for.
But Bryan just wiped the cold sweat away, and got out of bed. Because being afraid of the Dark Man didn’t get you a day off school. Not even a missing brother did that, five years down the line.
His parents were already downstairs, making breakfast, talking quietly. It looked happy, it all looked normal. Only if you’d been here five years before could you tell that something had changed, something was missing. Something that should have been here had slipped out into the night and disappeared with Adam. His parents might be making conversation, but Bryan didn’t think either of them was really listening to it.
The dining table had four chairs, and no matter where you sat you shared it with the ghost of Adam. Bryan poured himself a bowl of Cheerios and sat on the arm of a chair in the living room to eat them. Adam’s face smiled up at him from the photographs. But that was better than the other photographs, the later ones, the ones with the Adam-shaped hole in them.
The smiles all looked the same. Even his own. Bryan always thought that was creepiest of all – that it all looked the same and you couldn’t see; that there could be this great big huge wrongness in the middle of their family, and you couldn’t actually see it at all.
He was always glad to get outside. Even in the summer, when the Dark Man might be out there waiting for him, it was better to be outside. Being at home was like sitting in a crypt where they’d forgotten to tell the people they were dead.
As he walked, he counted steps. He always did it – he didn’t know how to stop.
One in fire . . . two in blood . . . three in storm . . . four in flood.
Devil’s Footsteps was one of those playground rhymes that everybody knew and nobody remembered making up. It was a game, a test of bravery. Whichever step you stopped on, that told you how you would die.
Five in anger . . . six in hate . . . seven fear . . . evil eight.
But somewhere out in the woods, so the legend went, were the real Devil’s Footsteps. A trail of stones that led nowhere. And if you walked the real Devil’s Footsteps and you said the rhyme, then on the thirteenth step the Dark Man would come to claim you.
And he and Adam had found them. He had been eight years old, and he’d believed it. His nerve had broken on the eleventh step, and he’d jumped off the stones and fled back to the beginning. He was too afraid of the Dark Man. Adam had been ten, and he hadn’t believed, because ten-year-olds had no time for stupid games like Devil’s Footsteps. But he’d had to prove to Bryan just how childish he was being. He’d had to get all the way to the thirteenth step.
Afterwards, of course, there had been news bulletins and posters pinned to trees, and quiet, patient policemen who tried to get him to describe this ‘Dark Man’; to tell them about the person who’d taken his brother. There had been search parties which methodically quartered the woods, going over every inch, missing nothing.
None of them had ever found thirteen stones that made a pathway. And none of them had ever found Adam.
But life went on. He hadn’t believed it could, that long ago summer, but it had just kept rolling on. September had come round, and school had started again, and there he was, back at school without Adam. And now here he was, Year Nine, while Adam was still frozen back in time five years ago, ten years old for ever.
But in a way, that had helped. Redf
Bryan arrived early, as he always did, and went to wait alone in the library for the bell. It wasn’t that he was particularly lonely or isolated at school; people talked to him, and he talked to them, but he never sought out company. When he was younger, there had always been Adam to be close with, and after his brother had gone he’d just never really tried to fill the gap. He wouldn’t have wanted to bring friends back to visit his poisoned home; nor would he want to visit them, look around at their family and sense that thing that was missing from his own.
He didn’t know how many of the other kids knew about his family tragedy; five years was a long time, and only a handful of those from his old junior school had followed him to this one. But they seemed to be on some level aware of it, willing to leave him alone when he wanted to be. The teachers were the same, never trying to pull him into the core of the group or make him talk about it. Maybe it was something about the town of Redford; people here never seemed to want to push at things like that, as if they were afraid of uncovering something that was better left buried.
So it was unusual, if not totally unheard of, when Smokey came into the library right on his heels and sat across from him.
Stephen Bacon, a handsome, chocolate-skinned boy with a slender build, had given in to the inevitable nickname long before Bryan had met him, rescuing what individuality he could by insisting on spelling it with an ‘e’. He was a good-natured, talkative boy, neither a brain nor a troublemaker, and certainly not the kind of social outcast who would need to seek out someone like Bryan Holden for company.
‘Bryan, can I talk to you a minute?’ There was an oddly hesitant note to his voice.
Bryan blinked, and pushed aside his book. ‘Sure, Smokey, what’s up?’ He and Smokey shared a few classes, but they rarely exchanged more than a ‘hi’.
‘I, um . . .’ Smokey rubbed his forehead awkwardly. ‘I figured I could talk to you about this because, well, I didn’t know who else I could tell.’
Despite himself, Bryan was intrigued. ‘Tell what?’ he asked, leaning forward in puzzlement. The quietness of the empty morning library added an air of conspiracy to their hushed voices.
‘It’s . . .’ Smokey pushed his chair back from the table, as if trying to shove away his difficulty in finding the right words. ‘Hell, for a long time I thought I was just going crazy.’ He was still rubbing his brow, as if the thoughts were making his head hurt. ‘But then, last night . . . I saw something, last night. Down by the train station. I know I saw it.’
He broke off, and studied his own fingers for what felt like a long time. Then he suddenly looked up and met Bryan’s eyes.
‘I saw him, Bryan. I saw the Dark Man.’
II
For the first frozen moment, Bryan was trying to work out if this was some kind of sick joke, some way to embarrass and humiliate him for the story he’d told the police so long ago and refused to ever retract. But what was the sense in that, so long after?
Smokey apparently took his silence for disbelief, or perhaps now that he’d pushed himself into starting to talk, he couldn’t stop. He went on, stumbling slightly, eyes fixed on the desktop as if he didn’t want to look up and see what Bryan might be thinking.
‘It’s this town – there’s something . . . there’s something wrong here, and nobody ever sees it. Except I think maybe they all know about it really, and they just pretend they don’t. There— Hell, I don’t know.’ He shook his head angrily. ‘Things . . . things are off here. I haven’t always lived in Redford. We moved here two years ago. My old town was never like this.’ He rubbed his forehead again, a nervous gesture. ‘It’s like . . . people are afraid all the time. Maybe not afraid, but . . . edgy, kind of. Like they never know when something nasty might suddenly happen to them. And things do happen here.’ Smokey risked meeting Bryan’s eyes for a brief second. ‘Like what happened to your brother.’
Bryan said nothing. He knew all this, of course – had thought it often enough – but this was the first time he could remember anybody else actually saying it out loud. If you could call hushed whispers in an empty library ‘loud’.
Smokey sighed, letting out air in a rush. ‘It started . . . Well, if I’m honest, it started as soon as I came here. At first I thought it was just . . . a new place, you know. Kind of creepy, getting lost, not really knowing anybody.’ He gave a slight laugh without any humour in it. ‘Couple of times – more than a couple of times – I ran home like the Roadrunner on a speed trip, but if you’d asked me I couldn’t have told you what I was running from.’
Bryan knew that feeling. Except he didn’t run home, he just ran. Maybe once home had felt safe to him, but not any longer.
‘Anyway, I started thinking it was me,’ Smokey continued. ‘Paranoid or something. But last night . . .’ He sighed, and when he finally spoke again, his voice was almost a whisper. ‘I didn’t imagine last night.’
Bryan leaned forward, chest tight with a kind of nervous curiosity, and caught the sleeve of Smokey’s shirt. ‘What did you see?’ he asked softly.
Smokey sank back in his chair. ‘I was walking home with my sister from her swimming lesson – I always have to walk her places, she’s only nine – and I stopped to get a drink from the station shops. Anyway, I came out, and all of a sudden it just seemed like the whole place was deserted, and I couldn’t see Nina anywhere.’ He looked embarrassed. ‘I kind of panicked a bit.’ He let out a huff of breath and shook his head, as if making sure to mock himself before anybody else could. ‘Dumb, I know.’
‘It’s not dumb,’ Bryan said very softly, thinking of Adam.
This time it wasn’t embarrassment that made Smokey quickly pull his gaze away as their eyes met. ‘Anyway.’ He swallowed awkwardly. ‘So I was getting a bit more panicked than I probably should have, and I saw something move round the corner— You know where I mean? That bit of grass round the back where there’s a load of old bricks and stuff.’
‘I know it,’ Bryan agreed quietly. He had little call to go to the station now in any case, but that small expanse of neglected wasteland had that feel. The feel that said this was one of the Dark Man’s places, and you might want to think twice about stopping to linger . . . ‘I don’t go back there,’ he said.
Smokey licked his lips nervously. ‘So, yeah, I saw something move . . . round there. I . . . well, I thought it was Nina. Except at the same time I knew it wasn’t, but I had to go and look anyway, and . . .’ He paused. ‘And I walked round, and it was like I could feel the air getting thicker, and then I turned the corner and there was this – this shadow—’
He rested his forehead against the heel of his palm for a long moment. ‘I can’t . . . Now that I’m telling you this, I guess I actually didn’t see much of anything. But he was there. Not just around, like he always is, but actually there. It was like . . . like having every shiver you’ve ever had, all at once.’
Bryan spoke up, for what seemed like the first time in hours: ‘But he didn’t get you.’
Smokey breathed out. ‘No. No,’ he repeated more firmly. ‘I was— It was like I was hypnotized. I was gonna keep walking forward even though I knew I had to get out of there, and then—’ He shrugged, breaking the mood. ‘And then, you know, this guy comes walking round the corner, all: “Hey, kid, your sister’s looking for you.” And he was just gone.’
‘I don’t think he can do . . . whatever he does . . . to adults,’ Bryan said slowly. ‘He can make them . . . not see things, forget things, but he can’t . . . do things right in front of their eyes.’
‘He gets you alone,’ Smokey said softly. ‘Lures kids off alone, and then . . .’
‘Yeah.’ Bryan closed his eyes briefly and tried not to see Adam, skipping confidently down the trail of stones without a thought for the power he was deliberately invoking. Adam, all alone in the woods with only Bryan to see what happened to him.
And Bryan hadn’t helped. He hadn’t done anything.
The school bell suddenly rang out, startling them both. Smokey laughed at his own nervousness, but Bryan couldn’t relax enough to do that. Suddenly the library felt entirely too empty to be safe.
