The Devil's Footsteps. John Burke
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softened the flint and brown stone of the church tower, and there was a hint of red-tiled roofs above the wall. Other times, under a pile of clouds sagging down fit to drown the world, it might have been no more than a gnarled lump of bog oak wrested out of the sodden earth, with a spike here, an elbow there, and on that far comer something like an ogre’s nose and chin.
Joshua tried to straighten up to take a good look at the prospect this morning. It was getting harder and more painful all the time.
Just beyond the crossing gate stood a young woman in a brown smock with long sleeves, and a kilted skirt. She wore no bonnet but sported deep auburn hair drawn tightly back from her forehead into a gleaming knot above her neck. Her eyes were wide and green. Joshua had observed her a couple of times before, and avoided her, and in particular avoided the glance of those eyes: too much like a cat’s for his liking. Today, though, he was going to have a bit of a bother getting past her. She had planted herself and that contraption of hers right in his path.
The contraption was a large mahogany box camera on a sturdy tripod, with one staring brass-rimmed eye which Joshua found as disturbing as the girl’s. He had stood in front of some such thing only once before, in a shop in Ely where he had posed behind his daughter in her wedding group picture, and they had had to keep still so long he had thought his toes would go numb.
What this young woman thought she was up to, lodging with the widow at the crossing and then tramping off all over the place and taking picture after picture, he couldn’t imagine. At least they expected you to pay for wedding photographs. No one was likely to pay her for pictures of dykes and churches and tumbledown cottages. One thing, for sure: she wasn’t going to squeeze a penny out of him for having his picture taken, if that was her notion.
He edged to one side of the road, above the steeply shelving bank of the dyke. Still she had her eye on him: just like the eye of that gadget of hers, as if they were all set on drawing the soul out of him. Then her attention was distracted. Someone was coming the other way. Joshua recognized the widow’s eight-year-old Tommy, trudging back from the fields of stubble. Must have been at it since early morning. Like the other village children, he was off school until gleaning was finished. He had a sack over his shoulder, both his hands were scratched and raw, and he kept his gaze fixed on the road immediately before his feet. As he turned to the wicket gate beside the cottage, the girl called out:
‘Tommy.’
The lad came to a stop but hardly raised his head.
‘Can you spare me a minute?’
‘Well, miss, I dunno. I’m supposed to be—’
‘Just one minute. Stand where you are just for a minute, that’s all.’ As he began to shuffle sideways, she raised her voice. ‘I need a foreground figure to give scale to my composition. It really won’t take a minute, Tommy.’
He posed reluctantly, a tiny figure distorted into a hunchback by the sack over his shoulder. In the background was the rim of the embankment, and to one side the squat little cottage; still farther on, the hummock of the village sprouted its church tower.
Joshua had no intention of waiting about just in case this young madam picked on him after she had finished with Tommy. There was something not right about her. He felt it in his bones, along with all the other troubles and twinges. Things were building up this autumn that there was no accounting for. What she’d got to do with it he didn’t know and he wasn’t going to stay to find out. One thing at a time was more than enough. He kept to the edge of the dyke and quickened his pace past her. She was too busy stooping and squinting and sizing up her picture to pay any heed as he reached the gates and crossed the line.
The road made a long loop over the causeway, turning towards Hexney only by the long gash of Peddar’s Lode. A faint green scum was forming on the water, and on the far bank of the cut the old punt was pretty well rotted away where it had been left since old Egglington’s grandson drowned, that last time.
Last time...? Time for what?
Blades of sedge rasped together, dropping over the murky water. Peddar’s Lode looked just as bad under sun as under rain clouds. It was a place you didn’t want to get too close to, but couldn’t very well steer clear of, the road winding the way it did. Used to be queer stories about it in his grandad’s day, and long before that: a place where old heathens, they reckoned, had had a custom of throwing children in to ‘feed the fen’.
He reached the drove road, a cleft along the shallow hillside, making its way round the village and across the levels beyond to the rising ground on the Norfolk borders. Half reluctant to learn the worst, he stopped where he had stood last night.
The moonlight had not deceived him. Here were the marks in broad daylight.
He did not dare to bend too close.
From out of the boggy area which swallowed up a section of the ancient track ran a line of deep footprints, trodden into the dry surface of the abandoned droveway: not old prints solidified in dry mud, but fresh and dusty. Footprints; or hoofprints; or what? He could not identify them. Roughly triangular, eight or nine inches long, they were set in a nearly direct line one in front of another. Surely not made by any four-legged beast. A man, then, for some reason playing a drunken tightrope game, a wobbly heel-to-toe? But the line was straight and determined and not at all wobbly. And the prints weren’t human. To the old fenman’s eye they looked like nothing so much as the imprint of a distorted, magnified eel’s tail.
Then he realized something—something even more outlandish.
The footsteps had advanced during the night.
There wasn’t a doubt about it. He was positive the marks had stopped level with that twisted hawthorn last night. Now they had trodden their way another couple of yards.
Joshua hurried into the village and into The Griffin.
Constable Rylot was firmly planted by the doorway to the snug, along with two older men and a youngster who dropped in from time to time to collect advertisements and local announcements for the Wisbech Advertiser, and who was known to supplement his income by contributing the occasional news paragraph to the paper. They greeted Joshua with nods and a routine mutter of ‘Josh’.., ‘Mornin’, Josh’..., ‘Well then, well, Josh.’
The barmaid, Leah Morritt called Joshua ‘Mr. Serpell’. The landlord, whose wife was safely in the scullery, heating up the copper, took the opportunity of squeezing his bottom past Leah’s on his way to get Joshua’s old tankard from its hook.
‘Hear as they’ve got a plague of adders under Sowder’s Hythe.’
‘Been bitten yet, Josh?’
‘Wouldn’t reckon much on the adder’s chance of surviving.’
Joshua drank half a pint without stopping to reply, then began to recount what he had seen last night and this morning. Leah sniggered, and then at a glance from the landlord wilted into sullen silence. ‘Great big marks,’ Joshua emphasized, ‘comin’ on, gettin’ closer since last night.’
Fortrey, the landlord, leaned on the counter and mopped up a beer spillage and asked the constable very loudly whether there was any news about that poacher who had hidden out here a month ago without anyone getting a sniff of him. Joshua faltered as the men moved away and leaned towards each other over the far end of the bar.
The young Wisbech man said: ‘This is interesting. You’re really telling us that—’
‘I swear to you they’re on their way,’ said Joshua. ‘Them footsteps, they’re comin’ up the track, comin’ up this way.’
Leah was beckoned to fill Joshua’s glass. Thus encouraged, Joshua talked across the other conversation. ‘If they go on beside the hill and out over the level, maybe that’s all right. None of our concern. But if they turn off, like I got the feeling they will do, like turnin’ up Tinker’s Lane, then they’ll be in amongst us.’
Leah winked at the young man. Fortrey stubbed his right foot against the inner planks of the counter and