Devil's Day

by Andrew Michael Hurley

  I used to jump in here, I tell him. When I was your age. I used to come here in the summer. I used to pretend that I was an otter.

  But even that doesn’t crack a smile. Even the thought that his father was once a boy and liked to play imaginary games.

  What would you be? I say.

  I don’t know, he says.

  You could be a frog, I say. Then you could jump in too.

  No, he says. I can’t.

  I won’t let you drown, I say. I’m not going back to the farm without you, am I?

  Please, he says.

  You won’t get hurt, I say. There are no rocks for you to land on. Listen, I say. I’ll throw in this stone and you’ll hear it splash. Listen.

  I let it drop and Adam hears it, I know he does, but he still says he doesn’t.

  I’ll get into the water, I say. I’ll wait for you to jump in and I’ll catch you. How’s that?

  Can we go home? he says. I want to go home now.

  All this is your home, I say.

  I mean the house, he says. I want to go back to the house.

  Didn’t you hear the rock splash? I say. You can’t hurt yourself. I won’t let you. I survived, didn’t I?

  After a moment, he nods.

  Put your arms up, then, I say, and I pull his T-shirt over his head. His mop of hair gets caught in the neck on the way and then flops down over his ears. He’s a slight boy, Adam, all ribs and budding muscle.

  I get down on my knees to unlace his trainers. His skin is frilled from the elastic of his mismatched socks. His toenails need cutting. The scar from where he slipped off the stepping stones years before smiles under his ankle bone.

  He holds on to me as I stand up and finds my fingers with his little hand, yet to grow.

  I’m going to go down and get into the water now, I say. You stay here. It won’t take me long.

  I let go of him and pick my way through the shallow pools.

  No, I say, don’t turn around, don’t move. Just stand there until I get into the water.

  How will I know if you’re all right? he says.

  Keep talking to me, I say. Then you’ll know that I’m still here.

  He crosses his arms and rubs the cold from his skin.

  You knew Lennie Sturzaker, didn’t you? he says.

  They still talk about Lennie down in the village. He’s the warning that parents give their children about playing near Arncliffe’s.

  Is that what you’re worried about? I say.

  I don’t understand what happened to him, says Adam.

  He drowned, I say. You know that.

  But how? he says.

  Down in the Greenhollow, Lennie Sturzaker is real, not just a mother’s parable. He’d died here in the valley, here in the river gushing past and spilling endlessly over the edge of the Falls.

  ∾

  A few days after I’d watched Sam and Jeff and the others dunking Lennie in the river, the Gaffer sent me to cycle down to the abattoir with the money that he owed Clive Ward from their last card game. Money that Dadda said had been earmarked for the deposit on my grammar school uniform. But the Gaffer had told him not to worry about it. He knew someone who worked at Mosconi’s and he’d let us have it on the tick until he won the money back on Saturday.

  When I got to the abattoir, the lairage was full of pigs all knuckled together and waiting for the doors to open. Clive Ward was one of the two men in boiler suits standing by the fence on a fag break. I passed him the pound notes through the railings and he stuffed them into the pocket of his overalls.

  ‘Here,’ he said, blowing smoke from the side of his mouth and pressing some loose change into my hand. ‘Tell the Gaffer I’ll see him on Saturday. Make sure he doesn’t gamble away that bike of yours.’

  He winked at me and flicked the butt-end into a puddle and went with the other man to herd the pigs inside.

  By the age of eleven, I’d become expert at cycling through the village at speed, using the slight downward gradient along New Row to take me over the hump of the bridge. On the other side, I’d make pistons out of my knees and feel the twitch in my stomach as I took the sharp bend by Beckfoot’s and Wigton’s. It had been some time before I’d found the courage to keep my fingers off the brakes and lean into the corner, but if I steadied my nerves then I could freewheel all the way past school, past the Croppers’ Arms and the church and only have to start working the pedals again when I reached Archangel Back. Then it was a case of keeping the momentum going, arse off the saddle, and into Sullom Wood.

  At first, I thought I must have run into a stone in the road, or caught the front tyre in a rut. There were no puddles in which I could have skidded; the lane was dust-dry.

  The handlebars jerked to the right, jack-knifing the wheel, and the lane suddenly rose to meet me. I hit it hard—knee, elbow and shoulder—and the bike went end over end, clattering into the undergrowth on the other side of the lane. It lay there with the back wheel ticking as I picked myself up. My elbow had been torn open and the skin hung off in a flap, dribbling blood down my arm. A fist-sized lump of rock had left a long scratch mark on the concrete, where it had rolled after pranging the spokes.

  The bracken rustled and Lennie Sturzaker emerged sweat-stained and red-faced from the humid afternoon.

  ‘Come off your bike, did you?’ he said.

  The bridge of his nose was black from where Sam had hit him a few days before and there were little cuts all over his neck.

  I said nothing and went to retrieve the bike from the ditch. Both wheels were buckled and twisted. It would have to hobble home like me.

  ‘Where have you been?’ he said.

  ‘Nowhere,’ I said.

  ‘Where are you going now?’ he said.

  ‘Home,’ I said over my shoulder.

  ‘Not to the Wood?’ he said and I felt his fingers jabbing me in the back. ‘It were you, weren’t it? It were you hiding in the trees?’

  I tried to push past him, but he stopped me short.

  ‘I didn’t say you could go home, did I?’ he said, his palm in my chest this time.

  I started to say something—God knows what—but I hadn’t got more than a few words out before he put his fist into my stomach, knocking loose every breath of air in my lungs. The bike fell to the floor again and I bent over trying to inhale. I felt him grab hold of my hair and drag me off the lane and down into the ditch. Through the brambles and nettles at the edge of the Wood, he let go and shoved me hard in the back, sending me stumbling on a few paces.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Show me where you were hiding.’

  Even with a shredded elbow and labouring lungs, I’d have easily outrun him, but the Devil told me that this was the time, these were the last moments of Lennie Sturzaker’s life and I had to watch. Every footstep he took through the Wood was one closer to his end. He’d retrace none of them.

  ‘Is there summat wrong with you, Pentecock?’ Lennie said. I was his plaything now, as he flicked me in the side of the face and put his knee into mine. ‘Do you like spying? Have you built a den, or summat? It’s mine now, if you have.’

  I could show him the willow tree where I’d concealed myself, I could show him the bank where I was going to burrow out my holt; it didn’t matter, he wouldn’t possess them for long now anyway. I hoped it would happen quickly. The pain from my torn elbow was knocking me sick and there was no escape from the clamminess of the afternoon. Even in the Wood it was sticky with heat and the tree trunks swarmed with ants. Lennie was breathing heavily as he shoved and prodded me and when he pulled me close to him at the top of the Greenhollow I caught a whiff of his sweat, a rancid smell, as sharp as geraniums.

  ‘Don’t think about swimming off, Pansycock,’ he said. ‘Or I’ll be waiting for you at the farm.’

  He nudged me down the slope to the edge of the river and when I came to the bottom, I felt his hand on the scruff of my shirt again.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Show me where you were hiding then.’


  When I didn’t move, he turned me around and pulled hard on my ear.

  ‘Doesn’t this work, or summat?’ he said. ‘Have you gone deaf? What are you looking at me like that for?’

  I didn’t know what to say to him. It didn’t really matter now.

  ‘Stop fuckin’ staring at me,’ he said. ‘You’re not right in the head, Pentecost. Have you got problems or summat?’

  I’d heard about folk dropping down dead on the spot from a sudden glitch in their heart or from some portion of the brain tearing open and shedding blood. Perhaps that was how Lennie would go.

  ‘If there’s summat wrong with you,’ he said. ‘If you’ve got the Devil in your head, you need to have him taken out.’

  He nodded past me.

  ‘Get in the water,’ he said.

  ‘Like this?’ I said, looking at my clothes.

  From his back pocket, he took out a penknife and opened the blade.

  ‘Go on,’ he said, pointing with the tip of it.

  I went to the bank and down on to the shingle, the back of my head blown with spit. Then with a hard kick in the thigh I was ankle-deep, losing my balance on the weedy rocks underfoot.

  ‘Further,’ said Lennie and, squatting down, his belly bulging, he picked up a handful of pebbles. ‘Get under.’

  He was as accurate now as he had been when he’d knocked me off the bike and stone after stone found the hands that were covering my face and, when he realised I wasn’t going to take them away, my ribs, my back, my balls. Then he sloshed into the water up to his knees and had me in a headlock as he’d done that day after school. I don’t think he realised, but he called me Sam as he hit me. He called me every name he could think of. He found the eyebrow that he’d opened weeks before and resurrected the pain in a white flash. He thumped at the wound on my elbow. He brought out the penknife again and I managed to fend off the blade once or twice before it sliced through the webbing between my thumb and finger and then went deep in down the side of one of my nails. The Devil had lied to me. Of course he had. Lennie was going to kill me. I was the boy who was going to die down here in the Greenhollow, not him. Squeezing tighter, Lennie leaned back and stood me upright in a position where he could draw the knife across my stomach. His nose snuffled close to my ear and I could smell beef crisps and fag smoke on his breath as he tried to twist his hand out of my grip. Death wouldn’t be quick at all. Not like it was for the lambs we took to the abattoir after Gathering—a warm pulse of electricity to the brain and then a knife through the windpipe as quick and clean as a paper cut. The way Lennie was hacking at me with the blade, I’d be left to leak to death from a dozen trickling wounds.

  The loose pebbles underfoot made both of us stumble backwards, and searching around for something solid to stand on as we moved further out into the river, one of my feet found a lump of rock and I toppled backwards on to Lennie. His legs buckled under my weight and I felt his hold on me disappear.

  His voice became muffled as we went under the surface and were pulled away in the water. His fat hands swept through the murk in front of me, cadaverous-looking already, then one of his trainers kicked aimlessly, the shoelace trailing, then coiling. But after that, I lost sight of him in the silty green and swam across the ply of the current to the bank, where I pulled myself out, my clothes plastered to my skin.

  A few moments later I saw him surface much further along than I’d expected. Where the river bent, he managed to catch hold of the dangling willow branches and he made one or two efforts to try and pull himself out. But I’d seen him on the gym rope at school and he couldn’t ever heave his bulk any more than six inches off the mat.

  He wasn’t all that far from the bank and as I went along the edge of the river I watched him trying to grab the roots that ribbed out of the soil. But the water jostled and turned him so that he was always reaching backwards.

  He caught sight of me and started to shout when he slipped under, one hand patting the water. I sat in the roots and watched his face emerge again, his lips puffing like a woman in childbirth, his free arm thrashing about in my direction in the hope that I would take it. But that wasn’t how the story ended. I couldn’t save him. I couldn’t change what was meant to happen in the world.

  He let out a single cry, his eyes wide with the realisation that he’d come to the end of his life, that death was going to happen to him now, and then the river plucked him from the branches and took him away. An elbow, a hand, a foot broke the dark surface and then disappeared again.

  I felt the Devil move inside me, preparing to leap, the way a cat crouches to scale a fence. He sprang into the trees where the jackdaws were waiting, slipping into one of them and flapping away. Then the rain began, striking the dry acres of the wood, making the leaves nod, falling through the clearings, thickening the river.

  ∾

  Tired and warm, I fell asleep in the bath and woke to find it tepid and Laurel calling for Grace. When I dressed and went down to the kitchen, Laurel was on her tip toes looking out of the window at the snow coming down in the yard.

  ‘Is she upstairs?’ she said.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Why?’

  ‘She’s gone,’ said Laurel. ‘Katherine’s looking for her.’

  ‘I thought she was sleeping in the front room?’ I said.

  ‘So did I,’ Laurel replied. ‘But when I went in with some tea for her, she wasn’t there.’

  ‘You go and fetch the others,’ I said. ‘I’ll see if I can find her.’

  She wasn’t in the workshed or the haybarn. Nor was she in the shed with the ewes and lambs. When I looked in on the ram’s pen, Kat caught me by the door and held my arm.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I said and she nodded to where Grace was leaning on the bars of the gate and watching the tup grunting and pacing. The Ram’s Crown lay in pieces on the concrete.

  ‘What’s she doing?’ I said. ‘She’s supposed to be resting.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Kat. ‘I found her in here pulling the crown apart.’

  ‘Grace?’ I said and Kat prevented me from going closer to her.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Leave her.’

  ‘It’s freezing in here,’ I said. ‘If she’s not well, then she needs to be back in the house.’

  ‘There’s nothing physically wrong with her,’ said Kat. ‘She’s not got a cold. I told you what she said to me.’

  A flint of light wandered over the wall and then caught Kat in the eye as Grace looked at the piece of glass in her hand, a shank from her broken mirror.

  ‘I thought Liz had cleared it all up?’ said Kat.

  ‘God knows.’

  ‘Where is she?’ said Kat.

  ‘Laurel’s gone to fetch her,’ I said.

  Grace looked at her reflection in the splinter and then stared up at the ceiling with tears in her eyes.

  ‘He’s telling me to kill the ram,’ she said. ‘He’s telling me to stick it.’

  She turned and looked at Kat.

  ‘Oh, Grace, there’s no one there,’ said Kat. ‘It’s not a real voice.’

  ‘He’s telling me to cut its throat,’ said Grace. ‘He’s telling me to cut yours too and Uncle John’s.’

  ‘You’ll hurt your hand again on that glass,’ said Kat. ‘Why don’t you put it on the floor?’

  ‘Now he’s laughing,’ said Grace.

  ‘The doctor’s coming,’ said Kat.

  ‘Not in all this snow,’ said Grace.

  ‘Perhaps your dad might be back soon,’ said Kat. ‘You’ll want to see him, won’t you? Why don’t you come and wait for him in the house?’

  Grace caught herself in the mirror again and shook her head.

  ‘What?’ said Kat.

  ‘He’s saying that if I don’t like him inside me then I’ll have to cut him out,’ said Grace. ‘But I don’t want to.’

  ‘No, no, don’t,’ said Kat, going over to her now. ‘The doctor will get rid of him for you.’

  ‘With the m
agic word?’ said Grace and smiled as she climbed up on to the bottom rung of the gate and leant over to look at the ram again. He stared back at her, his nostrils opening and closing, his white breath mixing with the gentle steaming of the haybales.

  ‘It wouldn’t hurt him too much,’ Grace said. ‘If I get him in the right place, it’ll be quick.’

  ‘Grace, come down,’ said Kat. ‘Come inside with me and John.’

  She smiled again and did as she was told.

  ‘Just here, Auntie Katherine,’ she said, pulling down the scarf Kat was wearing and pressing her fingertips under the angle of her jaw. ‘If I do him there, he’ll bleed like a tap.’

  Kat swallowed and found my hand with hers.

  ‘Stop,’ she said. ‘Please, Grace.’

  Grace put her hand on Kat’s cheek instead and kissed her.

  Outside in the yard, Musket and Fly began barking with a hostility that I’d never heard in them before. Their chains tensed, chinking as a deeper voice yelped back at them. A nose and a set of teeth wedged open the door of the pen and a large dog came in making so much noise that Grace put her hands over her ears.

  It wasn’t Ken Sturzaker’s but one of the strays that were up on the moors. Part of the pack that had killed the sheep and come across Dent at Far Lodge. One of Dent’s own dogs, maybe. One that he’d been intending to use on Jeff. I don’t know. It didn’t look as if it had eaten properly for some time. When it barked at us, its skin moved over rib rather than muscle and its legs were sore with rot from wandering about in the mud. It was the one that was always shunted aside from the kill and only got to lick up blood or chew on bones. The ram backed away braying and muttering.

  The dog recoiled a little when I clapped my hands and shouted, but was determined to get to the ram and put its front paws on the gate, wedging its face between the bars.

  ‘Whose is it?’ said Kat.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘Perhaps you should let it in,’ said Kat, putting her arms around Grace. ‘Then at least it’ll be trapped.’

  ‘I don’t think Dadda would ever forgive me,’ I said.