Devil’s Day by Andrew Michael Hurley

Author:Andrew Michael Hurley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
Published: 2017-09-19T16:00:00+00:00

While I watched him, I was aware of movement on the other side of the river. The undergrowth cracked and a young stag emerged like a broken-off piece of the woodland and came down to the bank to drink.

He lifted his head, the river water a sopping beard, and when he saw me I expected him to sprint off and wake Lennie up. But when I looked again, I couldn’t be sure that it was a stag at all. The way it moved its head, or pawed at the mud, it wasn’t quite what it was pretending to be. That was how I could spot the Owd Feller, the Gaffer told me.

‘Look for an animal trying to be an animal, Johnny lad, and it’s probably him. He can’t always get it right. That’s why he likes to hide himself in a flock, so no one notices.’

The Devil stared at me and I looked away with the same feeling I had when Lennie spotted me from the far side of the playground and picked his way through the other children, assembling some sophisticated insult or devising some means of hurting me without the teacher seeing. But the Devil didn’t seem as if he wanted to do me any harm. He seemed more like one of the lonely boys who started at the school now and then and, shunned by everyone else in the yard, always gravitated towards me as a kindred spirit and stuck like a burr.

As the Devil watched me, the same question ran through my mind as incessantly as the river. Did I like stories? Did I like stories?

I answered yes.

And did I want to know another? Did I want to see one played out before my eyes? Not in a book, but here in the Wood.

I did, I said.

I could see a boy die down here, if I wanted to; the boy who was sleeping now in the butterbur. It couldn’t be prevented. Nothing could. All time had already run its course. All we ever saw were stories. But I should keep that to myself, along with the trick the sticklebacks had shown me.

The stag finally turned his head away and went up the bank between the willow trees, picking his way through the bracken, leaving the Devil with me, his voice closer to my ear now, speaking into it from the inside.

Come and see the boy who’s going to die here, John. Come and look at him.

In my bare feet, I moved along the banks and I stood over Lennie, my toes inches from his outstretched fingers. I watched his fat belly rising and falling under his striped T-shirt where the stolen packet of Players strained against the breast pocket. I watched his eyes moving under the lids as he dreamed, his mouth open and slack.

I’d spent seven years at school with him, but until then I hadn’t ever really looked at him so closely or for so long. I hadn’t ever noticed the spray of freckles across his nose or the subtle cleft in his chin, like a finger-dent in a lump of dough.

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