The Beast

by Barry Hutchison

  There were a few vehicles parked along the street – a couple of cars, the van of the window-cleaner who lived at number five – but nothing moved in any direction along the road.

  ‘Listen,’ I said.

  A pause, then, ‘Listen to what?’

  ‘To nothing,’ I said.

  Another pause, then, ‘Are you winding me up? What you on about?’

  ‘It’s quiet,’ I whispered. ‘There’s not a sound.’

  She listened, properly this time, without speaking.

  ‘It’s early,’ she said, offering an explanation.

  ‘Not that early. People should be up and about.’ I nodded across the street. ‘They should at least have their lights on.’

  Ameena looked at each house in turn, considering this. Then she scooped up some snow, squashed it into a ball shape, and launched it at the closest bedroom window.

  Her aim was spot on. The snowball hit the glass with a loud thonk, and I had to resist the urge to run away and hide. We stood watching the window, waiting for a light to come on.

  ‘Try another one,’ she said, when it became clear the room was staying dark. ‘Try them all.’

  We worked quickly, making snowballs, chucking them at windows. Most of mine found their target. All of Ameena’s found theirs. We hit over twenty windows. No one appeared at any of them.

  ‘Empty,’ I said, voicing what we’d both already guessed. ‘They’re all empty.’

  ‘Or maybe...’

  I turned to Ameena. ‘Maybe what?’

  ‘Maybe the people inside just can’t come to the window.’

  I looked to the closest house, shrouded in darkness like all the others. A shiver ran the length of my spine, nothing to do with the cold.

  ‘Only one way to find out,’ I said.

  The gate squeaked as I pushed it open and slowly, quietly, we approached the front door.

  t’s open.’

  Ameena drew her breath in sharply through her teeth. ‘That doesn’t bode well.’

  I gave the door a gentle push and it swung inwards, revealing a shadowy hallway. A brass number 9 was screwed on to the front of the door. Number 9 was Mrs Angelo’s house. I couldn’t tell you much about Mrs Angelo, other than that she was in her sixties, and always used to give out the best sweets at Halloween. Not much of a biography, really.

  I tried to call Mrs Angelo’s name, but my throat had tightened so the sound that came out was little more than a whisper. I coughed and tried again. ‘Mrs Angelo? Are you there?’

  Ameena pushed past me and strode into the hallway. ‘Helloooo?’ she shouted at the top of her voice. ‘Anyone home?’

  ‘What happened to stealth?’ I asked.

  She shrugged. ‘Stealth got boring. Shut the door.’

  I hesitated, unsure, but then quietly clicked the door closed. Ameena flicked a switch and the hallway was bathed in light. I realised for the first time that my hands were blue with cold. Jamming them under my armpits, I followed Ameena into the living room.

  A tattered armchair and a saggy old couch sat empty in the room. The TV was off. An old grandfather clock tick-tocked solemnly in the corner.

  ‘Not in there,’ Ameena said, and we both backed out into the hall. I tried the kitchen next. The door was ajar, and swung open at a prod from my foot.

  The room was empty, but the fridge door hung open, casting a pale yellow glow across the rest of the kitchen. A mug of tea stood on the worktop beside the fridge.

  ‘Cold,’ Ameena said, touching the side of the mug. ‘Guess she changed her mind about having a cuppa.’

  ‘Or something changed it for her.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to mention that,’ she said. ‘In case, you know... you wet yourself or something.’

  ‘Funny,’ I sighed. ‘Come on, she might be upstairs.’

  Something crunched softly beneath Ameena’s foot. We both looked down to find a bag of sugar on the floor, its contents spilled across the lino. Our attention was instantly drawn to the shape that was clearly visible in the scattered granules. We studied it for a long, long time.

  ‘What the hell made that?’ Ameena asked, at last.

  ‘Dunno,’ I replied.

  ‘Well, if you are going to wet yourself, now might be the perfect time.’

  I stared down at the shape in the sugar. A shape that could only be described as an enormous, three-toed footprint. ‘You know,’ I whispered, ‘I might just take you up on that.’

  ‘Should we search the rest of the house?’ Ameena asked. She didn’t take her eyes from the print. It was about forty centimetres in length, and the same again at its widest point, up near the three saucer-sized toeprints.

  ‘Probably,’ I said, though I doubt I sounded convinced.

  ‘Thought you’d say that.’ Ameena gave a grim nod, then swept the sugar aside with her foot. ‘Come on, then,’ she said. ‘Let’s get it over with.’

  Mrs Angelo’s house was laid out differently to mine, even though they were on the same block. The stairs in my house led up from the living room, but in Mrs Angelo’s they started in the hall. Two steps, then a sharp left turn and more stairs leading to the upper floor.

  The stairway was narrow, but neither of us felt like pushing ahead. Flicking on the light, we made our way up, shoulder to shoulder, side by side. Each step brought a groan of protest from the floorboard beneath us. If anything was up there, it would already know we were coming.

  ‘Anyone home?’ The sound of Ameena’s voice in the cramped space made me jump.

  ‘Sssssh!’ I hissed.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Um, well, giant footprint,’ I whispered. ‘Remember?’

  ‘Um, well, narrow staircase,’ she said.

  ‘So?’

  She gave a sigh, then spoke slowly, as if explaining to a child. ‘Big thing no fit up small stairs.’

  I thought about this for a moment. The footprint we saw suggested an enormous creature. Rhino-sized, maybe bigger. A rhino couldn’t fit up these stairs in a million years. Not even with someone pushing it really hard from behind.

  ‘Anyway, we don’t even know if it was a footprint,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, it was,’ I nodded. ‘It was definitely a footprint.’

  We were almost at the top of the stairs now and began to creep even more slowly. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because I don’t want it to be a footprint,’ I said. ‘Because the worst possible thing it could be is the scary big footprint of something that wants to kill us. And the worst possible things keep happening to me lately.’ I took a deep breath, stopping my rant before it became too loud. ‘I know it’s a footprint, because with my recent luck, it couldn’t be anything else.’

  She shrugged. ‘Fair point. But it still couldn’t fit up the stairs.’

  We stepped on to an upper landing awash with the smells of old lady. Talcum powder. Lavender. Something that could’ve been cabbage. As I breathed them in, my memories of Mrs Angelo became pin-sharp in my mind. I remembered my last meeting with her, chatting to her for a few seconds on Christmas Eve as I’d delivered her card.

  Mum was always late writing Christmas cards, but even for her, 10 p.m. on Christmas Eve was cutting it fine. I’d planned to drop the card through the letterbox and move on, but Mrs Angelo had clocked me coming up the path and had come to the door to talk to me.

  She was the last person I’d seen before Christmas Day. Before Mumbles. Before any of this had started. Mrs Angelo – and her smell – were normality. They represented the last moments of my old life, a life where the only things I had to worry about were my mum’s cooking and a regular hammering from school bully, Billy Gibb. A life I’d go back to in a heartbeat.

  ‘Ssssh!’

  I blinked, Ameena’s hissing in my ear dragging me back to the present. ‘I didn’t say anything,’ I whispered.

  ‘Ssssh! Shut up. Listen,’ she said, clamping her hand over my mouth. ‘Hear that?’

  It was a complete role reversal from jus
t a few moments ago, outside the house, when I’d been trying to draw Ameena’s attention to the absolute silence of the street. But there was something to hear now. A slow, irregular knock-knock-knock, coming from the other side of the door at the end of the landing.

  ‘Mrs Angelo?’ I said.

  Knock. Knock. Knock.

  I crept closer, Ameena following behind, scanning for trouble. No voice answered from within the room. ‘Mrs Angelo,’ I said again. ‘Is that you?’

  Knock. Knock-knock-knock.

  ‘Maybe it’s Morse Code,’ Ameena suggested.

  ‘Do you know Morse Code?’ I asked hopefully.

  She snorted. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘Right. Didn’t think so.’

  We were met by more knocking when we reached the door. It wasn’t loud, little more than a tapping against the other side of the wood, really. It seemed to come from all over the door – a knock at the bottom, followed by something bumping against the middle, then again up near head-height.

  There was another sound too, that I could only hear now we were closer. It was a shuffling, rubbing sound, as if something was brushing against the other side of the door between knocks.

  ‘Hello?’ I said, trying the handle. It turned and I eased the door open a crack, but a weight pressed against it from within the room, stopping it opening more than those few millimetres.

  ‘Mrs Angelo? Are you OK?’

  Knock. Swish. Knock. Knock. Swish.

  I looked to Ameena. ‘What do we do?’

  ‘Out the road,’ she said, stepping back. ‘I’ll boot it open.’

  I moved to block her. ‘You can’t do that! It could be Mrs Angelo in there.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Ameena nodded. ‘She might be hurt.’

  ‘Well getting a door in the face isn’t going to do her much good, is it?’

  Ameena thought about this. I could see she knew I was right. She’d never admit it, of course. ‘Well, what do we do then?’ she scowled. ‘Just walk away?’

  Knock. Knock. Knock. Was it my imagination, or was the tapping getting louder?

  ‘The window,’ I said. ‘We’ll look in the window.’

  ‘Hold it steady,’ I hissed, my legs shaking as I inched up another rung of the metal ladder. It had taken a few minutes of fumbling, but we’d managed to get it unstrapped from the roof of the window-cleaner’s van and around the back of Mrs Angelo’s house.

  There were no lights on at the rear of the house either and it had taken a bit more time to figure out which was the window of the room with the knocking.

  ‘I am holding it steady, it’s not moving.’

  ‘It’s wobbling like crazy!’ I insisted.

  ‘No, Kyle, that’s just you,’ Ameena sighed. ‘You sure you don’t want me to go?’

  I shook my head and took another step higher. I was only ten or eleven rungs up, but the falling snow meant I could no longer see the ground. ‘No,’ I said aloud, realising Ameena probably couldn’t see me either. ‘She doesn’t know you. If she sees you at the window she might get a fright.’

  ‘Whereas she won’t if she sees your ugly mug suddenly popping up?’

  ‘At least she knows who I am,’ I said, ignoring the jibe. ‘Now shut up and hold it steady.’

  She muttered something below her breath. I decided to ignore that too. Heaving myself up another two icy-cold rungs, I at last reached the window. The curtains were open, which was possibly the first piece of good luck I’d had in weeks.

  It was dark in the bedroom, with only the early-morning daylight to pierce the gloom. I looked over to the door, and to the old woman in the ankle-length nightie who stood in front of it, her back to me.

  ‘See anything?’ Ameena’s voice was muffled by the snow.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, even if I wasn’t quite sure exactly what I was seeing. ‘She’s in there all right.’

  ‘Is she OK?’

  I shakily took one hand from the ladder, then the other, leaving myself balancing. Cupping my hands against the glass, I looked more closely at Mrs Angelo.

  She was walking – well, more sort of shuffling slowly – on the spot, apparently unaware of the door blocking her path. Her feet bumped against it, then her knees, then her forehead. That explained the knocking sounds, at least.

  ‘Is she OK?’ Ameena asked again, louder this time.

  ‘I... I think so. I think she’s sleepwalking.’

  I knew you weren’t supposed to wake someone up when they were sleepwalking, but the window was shut tight, and I couldn’t think of any other way to get to her. Keeping one hand cupped against the glass, I used the other to rap three times on the window.

  Over by the door, Mrs Angelo stopped shuffling. Her body went rigid, no doubt startled by the sudden sound. She showed no sign of turning around, though, so I knocked again. ‘Mrs Angelo,’ I called. ‘It’s me, Kyle, from down the street.’

  That did it. Her whole body turned at the same time, her bare feet shuffling her around on the carpet until she was facing me. Her long, greying hair, which was usually tied in a bun, hung limply on either side of her face. Her mouth drooped open, revealing her shrunken, toothless gums.

  But it was when I saw her eyes that I realised she definitely was not OK. Each eye was completely black – no iris, no pupil, no white bit – just two slivers of absolute darkness in the middle of her face.

  ‘Something’s wrong,’ I started to shout, but Mrs Angelo’s sudden lunge forward made the words catch in my throat. She moved much faster than I expected, crossing the room in a heartbeat.

  I was still pressed against the glass when her face hit the other side with a thonk. I gasped in fright. Instinctively, I leaned backwards away from her, then remembered there was nothing but empty space behind me.

  Clawing at the air, I grabbed for the top of the ladder, even as Mrs Angelo ferociously slammed herself against the glass. My fingertips brushed the ridged metal of the top rung, but couldn’t find a grip. The winds seemed to whip up around me, and I found myself toppling backwards from the ladder, falling silently through the twirling, swirling snow.

  he snow was a cushion of cold. I sank into it, stunned but unhurt by the fall. Flailing, I pulled myself into a sitting position and found Ameena standing over me, staring down.

  ‘Do not even think about blaming that on me,’ she said. She gave the ladder a shake. It didn’t budge. ‘Steady as a rock.’

  I shook my head and pointed up. ‘N-not the ladder,’ I stammered, clambering to my feet.

  ‘What, then?’ Ameena asked, looking up to where the ladder vanished into a haze of white. ‘What happened?’

  ‘It’s Mrs Angelo,’ I said. ‘It’s Mrs Angelo, she’s... Something’s...’ I raised my hands to shoulder height and shrugged. ‘Go look for yourself,’ I said.

  Ameena didn’t hang around. Fixing her eyes on where the window would be, she stepped on to the ladder and began to climb. I watched her, fluttering my eyelids against the snow, until she was lost to the blizzard. There was silence then, before a steady creaking told me she was climbing back down.

  With a soft plop she jumped the last few rungs and landed in a knee-deep snowdrift. She ran a hand through her long, dark hair, clearing away clumps of white that had begun to freeze there.

  ‘I take it she’s not normally like that?’

  ‘What, foaming at the mouth and battering her face against the window?’ I said. ‘No. That’s new.’

  There was a loud, hollow-sounding thonk from the bedroom window. ‘I’m not sure letting her out is such a good idea,’ Ameena said.

  I shook my head. ‘What is g-going on?’

  ‘You’re freezing, that’s what.’ I saw Ameena take me by the arm, but my skin was too numb to feel her touch. ‘Let’s get home and get changed.’

  ‘But N-Nan...’ I stammered. I realised that every time I opened my mouth, my lungs ached.

  ‘We’ll find her when you’re warm,’ Ameena said. She guided me ahead of her, still hold
ing on to my arm. We both took a final look up in the direction of the window, before making our way back around the front of the house.

  It was there that we saw her.

  ‘Hey,’ Ameena whispered, ‘isn’t that...?’

  ‘The policewoman? I... I think so.’

  She was standing along the road. We would never have seen her had she not been beneath the streetlight. Her neck was craned back so her face pointed to the sky. Her back was to us, but her arms hung limply by her sides so we could see the wash of blood over her hands.

  ‘What’s she up to?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t ask me. I thought she was dead,’ Ameena muttered. She took a step closer and raised her voice. ‘Hey! I thought you were dead.’

  The policewoman whipped around at the sound. Lit from behind, it was impossible to see her face, so we walked towards her, stooping low to shield our eyes from the snow.

  We were halfway there when she moved. Her arms raised and her legs began to pump furiously, powering her through the snow in our direction. She opened her mouth and a sound – part scream, part roar, part... something else – emerged, shattering the near-silence.

  ‘What’s she—?’ I began to ask, but she was on me before I could finish. She launched herself from three metres away, clearing the gap in one big bound. Her knees hit my chest, right below my chin. Fingers clawed at my face and pulled at my hair. I didn’t feel myself falling until the snow came up to meet me.

  ‘Get her off ! Get her off !’ I howled, my hands flailing as I fought to fend off the frenzied attack.

  GRAAAAAAH! The sound started as a growl at the back of her throat and quickly became a scream of animal rage. Her eyes, black as midnight, glared down at me as she thrashed and twisted and clawed.

  CHOMP! Her teeth snapped shut just centimetres from my face. CHOMP! Again they clamped closed, close enough that I could feel the warmth of her breath. I dug my forearm in against her throat, trying to hold her back, but she was strong. Stronger than a dead woman had any right to be.

  ‘What are you waiting for? Get her off !’ I cried again.