The Devil's Footsteps. John Burke
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BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY JOHN BURKE
The Devil’s Footsteps: A Dr. Caspian Novel of Horror
The Golden Horns: A Mystery Novel
Murder, Mystery, and Magic: Macabre Stories
The Nightmare Whisperers: A Novel of Horror
The Old Man of the Stars: Two Classic Science Fiction Tales
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 1976, 2012 by John Burke
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
PART ONE: THE SPOOR
When the mighty seven on time’s wheel shall spin
The games of the charnel house must begin
Full nigh to that great millennium of doom
When those who went down shall return from the
tomb.
—Nostradamus
The good things are ended; the saints must suffer.
The two-blooded evil one comes, and begins to
prevail.
—The Prophecy of Orval
CHAPTER ONE
In mid-morning the village paused for breath. The parish constable had sauntered his usual unobtrusive path round to the side door of The Griffin and gone inside for his pint of ale. The milk cart clattered down the slope through the old stone arch, horse’s hoofs slipping on the cobbles, empty churns clanking together. Autumn sunshine coaxed rosy undertones from the damp plaster of cottages along the west side of the square. A dog barked once and then was silent. There came one of those timeless hushes in which nobody moved in the lanes or square, when conversation in the tap-room languished until someone predictably said, ‘Must be an angel flying over,’ and even the wind off the sombre unsheltered miles of fenland was stilled.
No angel flew over. But a figure emerged on to the slope below Hexney. It was the figure of a girl, naked, her flesh a hazy whiteness against the grey of the priory ruins. She stepped out across the grass, quickening her pace towards a crumbling buttress. In its shadow waited a darker shadow.
A hundred yards up the hillside Will Jephson watched, unable to look away and unable to move.
Now she was running, but it was an eternity before she reached the crooked finger of the buttress. Will tried to call her name. No sound would come. The scene before him was real, he could swear to it, yet his ankles were trapped in some clinging swamp of nightmare. She ran, her arms spread wide in greeting; but not to him.
She was his wife, who had never showed herself to him like this. His wife, who tormented him with her shyness and prim little voice; who insisted on darkness in their bedroom, reproved him when he tried to coax her into taking off her nightgown in the full glow of the oil lamp, said she loved him but they were married now and folk didn’t go on talking about it like that. How could Sarah have become this creature, flaunting herself for the world to see? The world—or just himself and that waiting shadow.
The shadow stepped out to meet her.
It was a dark, stocky man, his skin olive against her paleness, with a swathe of hair running black down his spine from the black helmet of his head. Will Jephson saw only the back of him: thickset shoulders with almost no neck, jutting elbows, swaggering buttocks. He sprang like a goat. Sarah cried out as she was weighted down upon the ground. Her slim legs waved, twisted, and clutched. Will heard the howl of her pain in his mind: a pain of ecstasy such as she had never allowed him to know.
His own limbs refused to obey him. His fists clenched but could not strike. Harsh in his throat, his voice could not burst from his lips. Fire burned in his loins as he watched, motionless and speechless, the contortions on the grass, the rise and fall of dark flesh and pale flesh, the pounding and twisting of it. And heard, on and on, the silent shriek of the voice he knew to be his wife’s.
A wisp of cloud drifted across the sun. Shadows trembled. Stones seemed to shift a fraction of an inch and were bathed in a cooler light. Sarah was now only a wraith, and the pulsing dark that had covered her was blotted out by a more intense blackness.
Will’s feet escaped. He stumbled down the slope. At last he was able to shout her name over and over again. But when he reached the spot on which the foulness had been played out, only grass and shattered stone sighed under a sudden flurry of awakening wind off the levels.
It must have been a dream. Must, after all, have been a trick of the light.
He didn’t believe that.
Sick inside, he turned and hurried home so that he could be there to confront Sarah when she got back.
As he pushed open the door into the stone-flagged kitchen he could hear her singing quietly to herself. She was bending over a pot on the kitchen range, but straightened up to greet him with her usual shy, sidelong smile. She wore her everyday blue and white cotton dress with the cuffs pinned well back, and a dark blue apron. Her face was flushed—from the fire?
He leaned, baffled, against the doorjamb. ‘How did you get back so soon?’
‘Back?’
‘From Priory Hill.’
‘But I’ve not been anywhere near Priory Hill. Haven’t set foot outside the house all morning.’
Will looked round the kitchen. It was so normal. And Sarah sounded so truly puzzled. This was all much more real than the wicked vision which had possessed him out there on the grass. Still the scene was vivid in his mind and wouldn’t be got rid of.
‘Will,’ she ventured, ‘Whatever’s wrong with you, then?’
He went past her into the front parlour. She came after him but stopped, unertain, in the doorway. Will pressed his brow to the windowpane. There was nobody in sight until Gregory Morritt stumped across the end of the lane. The thickset shoulders jarred Will’s memory—the broad back, squat head, lank black hair, dark skin. Gregory’s wife had left him, and he had never been one for friends: a solitary drinker, not the kind to joke along with other men. But with that cottage all to himself down along the sluice, there was no telling what he might get up to, no telling about women with more time on their hands than was good for them when their own menfolk were out in the fields or the waterways.
Will swung round. ‘What were you up to with Gregory Morritt this morning?’
‘Will, What’s come over you? I told you, I’ve not gone a step outside this—’
‘Him and you. What’s he to you?’
Tears blurred her grey eyes. She put a trembling hand to her lips and shook her head.
The bell in the church tower began to strike. It chimed eleven o’clock in the morning of Saturday, the twelfth of September 1885.
* * * *
Three women sat in the spacious porch of St. Etheldreda’s preparing for Harvest Festival. In one corner was a stook of barley. Boxes and sacks of peas, beans and fruit had been spread out along the wide stone bench for sorting and assembly within the church.
Mrs. Rylot picked over a box of apples.
‘Trust old Sidney to send in all his bruised ones.’
Mrs. Morritt, with a cluster of crocks and tin vases beside her, snipped ends of chrysanthemum stems with a small knife. After a while she stooped to sharpen it on the step of the porch. When she raised her eyes again, her son Gregory was crossing the square. He caught her gaze, wavered, and looked away.
Mrs. Rylot glanced covertly at Mrs. Lavater. Mrs. Lavater’s fingers continued to plait the strands of a corn dolly. They wondered if Mrs. Morritt was going to confide in them.
Mrs.