Running Shoes (The Shades of Northwood) (3 page)

Katie swung her
legs out of bed and found an old book in a box she had not taped
fully. It was an old copy of Romeo and Juliet that she had used for
her GCSEs and wanted to keep in case she needed it again. There
were a few blank pages near the back of this study edition,
ostensibly for notes but she had written all of hers in the margins
or over the text. She and a group of kids in her English class had
decided to use each other books as a sort of mini yearbook with
little stick figure self portraits and short messages. One page was
dotted with stick people bearing cheesy smiles or fake tears and
speech bubbles that said, ‘Good luck in your future. I won’t forget
you.’ Chances were that most of that crowd already had forgotten
her. No big deal. They weren’t worth wasting tears or sadness
over.

Something
creaked behind her and Katie looked over to see the door of a
wardrobe yawned open. Any minute now a bony, dark hand would
stretch out of it and curl one finger to her, silently calling her
over to it. She would go with it. No hesitating, no moment to
think, just follow the hand. The hand would flatten out in front of
Katie and she would place hers in that large skeleton palm and then
step through the wardrobe door which couldn’t be a wardrobe any
more - wouldn’t she remember putting a creepy corpse hand there?
She stepped onto the wooden bottom of the tall cupboard, vaguely
wondering if she would get splinters in her feet, and felt cold
smooth floor beneath her. Marble. She glanced down and found she
was no longer holding on to the bony fingers; only a strange cold
outline of a hand signalled there had ever been anything there. All
around was dark but light must have been creeping in from somewhere
because, as Katie stared into the darkness, her eyes adjusted and
she could just make out shadows far away and leaning against what
she assumed were the walls to this place. She stepped forward a
bit, using her feet to feel the ground at every step just in case
it fell away or there was something to trip her. Stepping forward
was the only thing to do. It was also crazy as a jack in the box.
Something rustled. The dark shapes. They were moving. Katie thrust
her hand behind her and pawed the air for the door, a way back to
safety, although she knew it had either closed and locked or
disappeared totally the moment she had stepped into this place.
Forward was the only way to go. She knew that. She willed herself
to run in measured, even strides like she had trained to do. But
she was frozen. Fear did that and maybe there was a little of that.
The shadows were so far away they could be anything from a giant
fluffy bunny to a psychotic clown with thoughts of doing her good
or harm. But it wasn’t the idea that something might hurt her that
held her in place – it was knowing they were alive and moving
towards her. A footstep clicked down on the hard floor and echoing
around like a stacked heel with some weight behind it. Echo… echoes
were caused by sound rebounding in an open space like a cave or a
canyon. So the noise had to be bouncing off something –walls, she
guessed, and walls meant a room which meant there must be a door
out of here. That was logical but Katie’s legs seemed not to
comprehend logic. Then the rustling started up again. Nothing moved
when she looked but every black hump and lump seemed a tiny bit
closer when she turned. And that was enough for Katie to will her
feet into unwilling movement. One step. Two steps. That’s all she
managed before the footsteps of one of the shapes started again. It
was just a little two far away to be within touching distance but
Katie certainly was not going to look around to see how much leeway
she had. If she did, she knew, the sight would be so terrifying
that she would be afraid to move or even breathe. She put her hands
to her ears and did her best to step forward calmly but quickly.
These blobs of black would doubtless know if she started running
but she did, her hands falling towards her sides and pumping out
the rhythm of her strides. There was darkness stretching on forever
and no end in sight. And the clicking footsteps were always coming
after her and pretty soon they were joined by more and more sets of
heels – too many to count. No rustling, no voices, just footfalls
that never seemed to run but never seemed to get farther away, no
matter whether she walked or ran. For one heart-stopping instant,
Katie decided that there was no way out of here. Running put no
distance between her and whatever was chasing her – maybe it would
be just as well if she halted and let these unformed things catch
up to her, grab her, swallow her whole. These splashes of black in
the nearly black which had no faces or names. And then, so far away
it may have been a trick of the light, such as it was, or the
mirage of a frenzied and frightened mind, a thin strip of light
opened up. She headed for I knowing that if she slowed then there
would be no escape from this nightmare. A nightmare where the
monsters were unseen, where there was no light to show the true
horrors it contained. Heels clip-clopped after her. The chink of
light was growing a touch larger with every step. But it wasn’t
close enough. The leader of the phantom pack hunting her reached
forward with one deeply dark limb and came within inches – maybe
centimetres – of her shoulder. Katie felt the air whoosh by her.
Too close. Part of her wanted to scream only that would be wasting
breath she sorely needed for running. All that running and the
crack of light seemed to be almost no closer than earlier. Katie
kicked down and pulled on her energy reserves, picking up her pace
and trying to keep in a straight line. The steps sounded as though
they were merely inches away now. The crack of light was a few
inches wide and tall enough to be a door. But the light not only
gave Katie something to run towards, it threw light into this dark
room. Not much, just enough to tempt a person into looking around
too see exactly what was chasing them. The girl willed her feet to
run that little bit further, her protesting legs which felt like
they had run so far and so hard this night – and then threw herself
towards the light with eyes squeezed shut so tightly. She didn’t
want to see the faces of the things that followed her – if they had
faces – or the hand that would reach out for her, grab her and pull
her back until she could no longer be seen amid that dark, moving
mass.

“Moving
time!”

“Wha -?”

Katie whipped
her head off her desk where she was slumped over her empty desk and
drooling over her old, ratty Romeo and Juliet. Most of the boxes
had already been taken away, Dad was carting them downstairs and
singing to himself a song with word he had made up and in a tune
no-one had ever written. It was mid-morning on a Monday – no-one
had the right to be that cheerful. Katie looked over at her sister
who was bouncing on the bed.

“I’m gonna miss
you, Dan.”

“Yeah, yeah,
it’s not like you’re never coming back.”

“No, but it is
a long time. I’ll phone and email though.”

Dan rolled her
eyes. “Do you have to?”

Katie laughed
and pushed her out of her room so she could get dressed. Gone was
the twelve year old tomboy who had hugged her and made her a gift
and reminded the world she actually had a vulnerable side and back
was the moody, hard as nails pre-teen. Katie had been like that not
too long ago. She still had moments when her attitude got the
better of her and probably always would. How would she cope at the
academy with no-one to rein her in?

There was a
loose tracksuit draped over her bed which was so old and mucky she
was happy to ruin it in today’s move and finally put it out of its’
misery. Katie picked it up and started to cross the landing to the
bathroom. The hot jets of water bean to rain down and Katie lifted
a leg to hook the hanging shampoo bottle without having to leave
this lovely bubble. She tried to bend her foot to snag it with her
toes and an explosion sent needles of pain shooting up her leg.
What happened? She had no memory of injuring herself. But this had
happened before. She had tripped over on a run with school and
twisted an ankle. It had felt fine at first and she’d even finished
the run. Then, after sitting still for hours in the subsequent
exam, she had barely been able to walk. It was stiff and sore but
the pain had more or less disappeared when she had walked on it for
a while. Katie gave her hair the quickest wash ever, dressed and
went downstairs. Mom was buttering toast and there was a bowl of
cereal on the table. Katie ignored it for the moment and went to
the freezer fashioning a crude ice pack out of ice cubes and a tea
towel.

“Are you okay,
love?”

“You remember
when I twisted my ankle last year? Well, I reckon I just worked it
too hard this weekend. It’ll go off in a while like before.”

Mom finished
scraping the toast and put it down in front of her, taking over the
ice pack duties while she ate. The school nurse had warned them
that this might well happen. The ankle was weaker now. It could
even break. And then there was Dan, who had fallen from a post and
only ended up with a sprain, which was no doubt why Katie always
decided to run through the pain because everything would turn out
fine. But Dan was at home where they could keep an eye on her and
take care of her if anything happened and Katie, the
indestructible, take-on-the-world Katie, would be fending for
herself. If she got really hurt or…

“Mom, I’ll be
fine,” Katie assured her as if she had known exactly what she was
thinking. “Don’t worry about me.”

“Oh honey, it’s
my job to worry about my baby girl. Going off to college. Growing
up. And then one day you might not even need silly old Mom and
Dad.”

“If that ever
happens you have my permission to slap me. You’re my parents and
I’ll always need you for something, probably just for someone to
chat to about my day or whatever.”

“I’m just not
sure about this. You’re only16 still and you’ve been through so
much this last year.”

Katie took the
pack from her mothers hand and emptied the melting ice into her
empty bowl. A trick the athletics team from school had used was to
make sure the tea towel, or rag of t-shirt which had been always
available then, was properly cold and then just tie it around the
ankle, knee, wrist, whatever was hurting.

“Ready?” said
Dad. He had loaded all but a few of her belongings ino the van he
had managed to borrow from his brother-in-law for the day. He
leaned down and planted the tiniest kiss on Katie’s head.

She glanced up
at him and, all at once, a ridiculous amount of tears blurred her
vision. Some of them she managed to force back but some – too many
– found their way out and carved a hundred paths down her cheeks.
Either the tears were silent or no-one noticed because her parents
only seemed to see the smile. “Good to go.”

CHAPTER
THREE

It took almost
fours to get to the tiny town of Northwood. It seemed longer. Dad
had gotten Katie and Dan to help cram the last of the boxes into
the van, said his goodbyes and started the van up to get a
headstart. All the girls would pile into the car and follow him
later, meeting up with him at a service station nearly two hours
down the road for lunch, when the worst of the traffic was over.
Just under half of the drive was motorway and the directions they
had said the rest of the journey would be A- and B-roads.

“I’ll have a
double cheeseburger, fries and lemonade.” Katie gave her order to
her mother and carted her little sister off to find a table that
was relatively clean. “Dad phoned when you were asleep. He’s about
twenty minutes behind us. Some moron of an Uncle Billy decided to
leave us with less petrol in the van than I can spit. Isn’t family
oh so wonderful?”

“Is this
conversation meant to convince me or you?”

“Huh? Of
what?”

“That your
family’s no great loss.”

“I’m not. It’s
just that Uncle Billy really is a prize dick. It’s really only fair
that the world is warned.”

“Not that I’m
arguing but some of your relatives are kind and compassionate and
basically great people.”

“Honestly, I
don’t know why I ever thought you were delusional.”

A minutes or
two later, their mother came over with a plastic tray of food,
being careful to dodge the wrappers and chips that dotted the
floor. “Goodness, they really need to employ a cleaner here.”

“Mom,”

The older woman
sat down and put a finger to her lips before doling lunches out.
She was famous for bemoaning the lack of cleanliness in restaurants
and cafes. A neat freak by nature, not even eating off a surgically
sterilised plate would be completely faultless. Too cold or
chemical. The girls dug into their burger meals. Katie would
normally have something with a little salad and fruit but today she
was ravenous and craving something so covered in grease her
arteries were blocking as she ate.

“Why does food
just taste better and better the worse it is for you?”

“It’s the law,”
Dan said around a mouthful of fries. That girl had the biggest
mouth of anyone in the history of always. “So, I always say, why
the hell do they even make food that no-one enjoys eating? Fruit
and stuff is sweet a lot of the time so I kinda get that but brown
bread or carrot cake… it’s a waste of perfectly good cake.”

“Cherish this
moment Mom. It’s the most words she’ll say until she grows out of
her teens.”

“You’re one to
talk. All this smiling and saying you’re okay and crap. Everyone
knows you’re just pretending.” Dan stuffed the last few bites in
her mouth and gave a wide, beefy grin.

“Gross!”

“Now
girls.”

“Dadda!” In the
excitement, Dan succeeded in spitting out a shower of crumbs and
worms of meat. A commendable achievement really but not one she
should consider putting on her CV in a few years. Katie realised
she might already be thinking of it, and it likely made her more
qualified than the dead-eyed man who had served.