Close Behind Him Read online

Smudger bent down to peer more closely. When he looked up again there was a bewildered expression on his face. He gazed at Spotty's boots, and then back to the glistening marks. The prints of bare feet...

  “There's some­thing funny going on here,” he said in­ade­quately.

  Spotty, looking back over his shoulder, took another step for­ward. Five feet behind him a new mark of a bare foot appeared from now­here.

  A watery feeling swept over Spotty. He took another experi­mental step. As mys­teriously as before, another foot­mark appeared. He turned widened eyes on Smudger. Smudger looked back at him. Neither said any­thing for a moment. Then Smudger bent down, touched one of the marks with his finger, then shone his flash­light on the finger.

  “Red,” he said. “Like blood...”

  The words broke the trance that had settled on Spotty.

  Panic seized him. He stared around wildly, then began to run. After him followed the foot­prints. Smudger ran too. He noticed that the marks were no longer the prints of a full foot but only its fore­part, as if what­ever made them were also running.

  Spotty was frightened, but not badly enough to forget the turn where they had parked the car beneath some trees. He made for it, and clam­bered in. Smudger, breathing heavily, got in on the other side and dropped the attaché case in the back.

  “Going to get out of this lot quick,” Spotty said, pressing the starter.

  “Take it easy,” advised Smudger. “We got to think.”

  But Spotty was in no thinking mood. He got into gear, jolted out of hiding and turned down the lane.

  A mile or so farther on Smudger turned back from craning out of the window.

  “Not a sign,” he said, relieved. “Reckon we've ditched it —whatever it was.” He thought for some moments, then he said: “Look here, if those marks were behind us all the way from the house, they'll be able to follow them by day­light to where we parked the car.”

  “They'd've found the car marks any­way,” Spotty replied.

  “But what if they're still follow­ing?” Smudger suggested.

  “You just said they weren't.”

  “Maybe they couldn't keep up with us. But suppose they're coming along somewhere behind us, leaving a trail?”

  Spotty had greatly recovered, he was almost his old practical self again. He stopped the car. “All right. We'll see,” he said grimly. “And if they are — what then ?”

  He lit a cigarette with a hand that was almost steady. Then he leaned out of the car, studying the road behind them. The moon­light was strong enough to show up any dark marks.

  “What do you reckon it was?” he said, over his shoulder. “We can't both've been seeing things.”

  “They were real enough.” Smudger looked at the stain still on his finger.

  On a sudden idea, Spotty pulled up his right trouser leg. The marks of the teeth were there, and there was a little blood, too, soaked into his sock, but he couldn't make that account for anything.

  The minutes passed. Still there was no manifes­tation of foot­prints. Smudger got out and walked a few yards back long the road to make sure. After a moment's hesi­tation Spotty followed him.

  “Not a sign,” Smudger said. “I reckon — hey!” He broke off, looking beyond Spotty.

  Spotty turned around. Behind him was a trail of dark, naked foot­prints leading from the car.

  Spotty stared. He walked back to the car; the foot­marks followed. It was a chastened Spotty who sat down in the car.

  “Well?”

  Smudger had nothing to offer. Smudger, in fact, was con­sider­ably confused. Several aspects of the situation were com­peting for his atten­tion. The foot­steps were not follow­ing him, so he found himself less afraid of them than of their possible conse­quences. They were laying a notice­able trail for anyone to follow to Spotty, and the trouble was that the trail would lead to him, too, if he and Spotty kept together.

  The immediate solution that occurred to him was that they split up, and Spotty take care of his own troubles. The best way would be to divide the haul right here and now. If Spotty could succeed in shaking off the foot­prints, good for him. After all, the killing was none of Smudger's affair.

  He was about to make the sugges­tion when another aspect occurred to him. If Spotty were picked up with part of the stuff on him, the case would be clinched. It was also possible that Spotty, in a bad jam with nothing to lose, might spill. A far safer way would be for him to hold the stuff. Then Spotty could come for his share when, and if, he succeeded in losing the tell­tale prints.

  It was obviously the only safe and reason­able course. The trouble was that Spotty, when it was suggested to him, did not see it that way.

  They drove a few more miles, each occupied with his own thoughts. In a quiet lane they stopped once more. Again Spotty got out of the car and walked a few yards away from it. The moon was lower, but it still gave enough light to show the foot­prints follow­ing him. He came back looking more worried than fright­ened. Smudger decided to cut a possible loss and go back to his former plan.

  “Look here,” he suggested, “what say we share out the takings now, and you drop me off a bit up the road?”

  Spotty looked doubtful, but Smudger pressed: “If you can shake that trail off, well and good. If you can't — well, there's no sense in us both getting pinched, is there? Any­way, it is you as croaked him. And one has a better chance of getting away than two.”

  Spotty was still not keen, but he had no alter­native to offer.

  Smudger pulled the attaché case out of the back and opened it between them. Spotty began to separate the bundles of notes into two piles. It had been a good haul. As Smudger watched, he felt a great sadness that half of it was going to benefit nobody when Spotty was picked up. Sheer waste, it seemed to him.

  Spotty, with his head bent over his work, did not notice Smudger draw the piece of lead pipe out of his pocket.

  Smudger brought it down on the back of his head with such force and neat­ness that it is doubt­ful whether Spotty ever knew anything about it.

  Smudger stopped the car at the next bridge and pushed Spotty's body over the low wall. He watched as the ripples widened out across the canal below. Then he drove on.

  It was three days later that Smudger got home. He arrived in the kitchen soaked to the skin, and clutch­ing his attaché case. He was looking worn, white and ready to drop. He dragged a chair away from the table and slumped into it.

  “Bill!” his wife whispered. “What is it? Are they after you?”

  “No, Liz — at least, it ain't the cops. But some­thing is.”

  He pointed to a mark close inside the door. At first she thought it was his own wet footprint.

  “Get a wet cloth, Liz, and clean up the front step and the passage before anyone sees it,” he said.

  She hesitated, puzzled.

  “For God's sake, do it quick, Liz,” he urged her.

  Still half bewildered, she went through the dark passage and opened the door. The rain was pelting down, seeming to bounce up from the road as it hit. The gutters were running like torrents. Every­thing streamed with wetness save the door­step protected by the small jutting porch. And on the step was the blood-red print of a naked foot...

  In a kind of trance she went down on her knees and swabbed it clean with the wet cloth. Closing the door, she switched on the lights and saw the prints leading towards the kitchen. When she had cleaned them up, she went back to her hus­band.

  “You been hit, Bill?”

  He looked at her, elbows on the table, his head supported between his hands.

  “No,” he said. “It ain't me what's making them marks, Liz — it's what's followin” me.'

  “Following you? You mean they been following you all the way from the job?” she said incredu­lously. “How did you get back?”

  Smudger explained. His imme­diate anxiety, after pitching Spotty into the canal, had been to rid himself of the car. It had been a pinch for the
job, and the number description would have been circulated. He had parked it in a quiet spot and gotten out to walk, maybe pick up a lift. When he had gone a few yards he had looked back and seen the line of prints behind him. They had frightened him a good deal more than he now admitted. Until that moment he had assumed that since they had been following Spotty they would have followed him into the canal. Now, it seemed, they had trans­ferred their attentions to him­self. He tried a few more steps: they followed. With a great effort he got a grip on himself, and refrained from running. He perceived that unless he wanted to leave a clear trail he must go back to the car. He did.

  Farther on he tried again, and with a sinking, hope­less feeling observed the same result. Back in the car, he lit a cigarette and considered plans with as much calm­ness as he could collect.

  The thing to do was to find some­thing that would not show tracks — or would not hold them. A flash of inspi­ration came to him, and he headed the car towards the river.

  The sky was barely grey yet. He fancied that he managed to get the car down to the tow­path with­out being seen. At any rate, no one had hailed him as he cut through the long grass to the water's edge. From there be had made his way down­stream, plodding along through a few inches of water until he found a rowboat. It was a venerable and decrepit affair, but it served his purpose.

  From then on his journey had been unexciting, but also un­com­fortable. During the day he had become extremely hungry, but he did not dare to leave the boat until after dark, and then he moved only in the darkest streets where the marks might not be seen. Both that day and the next two he had spent hoping for rain. This morning, in a drenching down­pour that looked like it might continue for hours, he had sunk the boat and made his way home, trusting that the trail would be washed away. As far as he knew, it had been.

  Liz was less impressed than she ought to have been.

  “I reckon it must be something on your boots,” she said practically. “Why didn't you buy some new ones?”

  He looked at her with a dull resent­ment. “It ain't nothing on my boots,” he said. “Didn't I tell you it was follow­ing me? You seen the marks. How could they come off my boots? Use your head.”

  “But it don't make sense. Not the way you say it. What's following you?”

  “How do I know?” he said bitterly. “All I know is that it makes them marks — and they're getting closer, too.”

  “How do you mean closer?”

  “Just what I say. The first day they was about five feet behind me. Now they're between three and four.”

  It was not the kind of thing that Liz could take in too easily.

  “It don't make sense,” she repeated.

  It made no more sense during the days that followed, but she ceased to doubt. Smudger stayed in the house; what­ever was follow­ing stayed with him. The marks of it were every­where: on the stairs, upstairs, down­stairs. Half Liz's time was spent in cleaning them up lest som­eone should come in and see them. They got on her nerves. But not as badly as they got on Smudger's...

  Even Liz could not deny that the feet were stepping a little more closely behind him — a little more closely each day.

  “And what happens when they catch up?” Smudger demanded fear­fully. “Tell me that. What can I do? What the hell can I do?”

  But Liz had no suggestions. Nor was there anyone else they dared ask about it.

  Smudger began to dream nights. He'd whimper and she'd wake him up asking what was the matter. The first time he could not remember, but the dream was repeated, growing a little clearer with each recurrence. A black shape appeared to hang over him as he lay. It was vaguely man­like in form, but it hovered in the air as if suspended. Gradually it sank lower and lower until it rested upon him — but weight­lessly, like a pattern of fog. It seemed to flow up towards his head, and he was in panic lest it should cover his face and smother him, but at his throat it stopped. There was a prick­ling at the side of his neck. He felt strangely weak, as though tired­ness suddenly invaded him. At the same time the shadow appeared to grow denser. He could feel, too, that there began to be some weight in it as it lay upon him. Then, merci­fully, Liz would wake him.

  So real was the sensation that he inspected his neck carefully in the mirror when he shaved. But there was no mark there.

  Gradually the glistening red prints closed in behind him. A foot behind his heels, six inches, three inches...

  Then came a morning when he woke tired and listless. He had to force himself to get up, and when he looked in the mirror, there was a mark on his throat. He called Liz, in a panic. But it was only a very small mark, and she made nothing of it.

  But the next morning his lassi­tude was greater. It needed all his will-power to drag himself up. The pallor of his face shocked Liz — and himself, too, when he saw it in the shaving mirror. The red mark on his neck stood out more vividly ... The next day he did not get up.

  Two days later Liz became fright­ened enough to call in the doctor. It was a con­fession of desperation. Neither of them cared for the doctor, who knew or guessed uncom­fort­ably much about the occu­pations of his patients. One called a doctor for remedies, not for homilies on one's way of life

  He came, he hummed, he ha'ed. He prescribed a tonic, and had a talk with Liz.

  “He's seriously anaemic,” he said. “But there's more to it than that. Something on his mind.” He looked at her. “Have you any idea what it is?”

  Liz's denial was uncon­vinc­ing. He did not even pretend to believe it.

  “I'm no magician,” he said. “If you don't help me, I can't help him. Some kinds of worry can go on pressing and nagging like an abscess.”

  Liz continued to deny. For a moment she had been tempted to tell about the footmarks, but caution warned her that once she began she would likely be trapped into saying more than was healthy.

  “Think it over,” the doctor advised. “And let me know tomorrow how he is.”

  The next morning there was no doubt that Smudger was doing very badly. The tonic had done him no good at all. He lay in bed with his eyes, when they were open, looking unnaturally large in a drawn white face. He was so weak that she had to feed him with a spoon. He was fright­ened, too, that he was going to die. So was Liz. The alarm in her voice when she tele­phoned the doctor was unmis­takably genuine.

  “All right, I'll be round within an hour,” he told her. “Have you found out what's on his mind yet?” he added.

  “N-no,” Liz told him.

  When he came he told her to stay down­stairs while he went up to see the patient. It seemed to her that an intolerably long time passed before she heard his feet on the stairs and she went out to meet him in the hall. She looked up into his face with mute anxiety. His expression was serious, and puzzled, so that she was afraid to hear him speak.

  But at last she asked: “Is — is he going to die, Doctor?”

  “He's very weak — very weak indeed,” the doctor said. After a pause, he added: “Why didn't you tell me about those foot­prints he thought were following him?”

  She looked up at him in alarm.

  “It's all right. He's told me all about it now. I knew there was some­thing on his mind. It's not very sur­prising, either.”

  Liz stared at him. “Not—?”

  “In the circumstances, no,” the doctor said. “A mind oppressed by a sense of sin can play a lot of nasty tricks. Now­adays they talk of guilt com­plexes and inhi­bi­tions. Names change: when I was a boy the same thing was known as a bad con­science...

  “These things,” he went on, “are usually sus­cept­ible of fairly clear expla­nation once one knows the facts — the trouble, as a rule, is that one is not given the facts; or gets only part of them. In this case it's all obvious enough to any­one of experience. Your husband was engaged in — well, to put it bluntly — burgling the house of a man whose interests were mystic and occult. Naturally, he would be under con­sider­able mental strain at the time and there­fore li
kely to be unusually influenced by what he saw there.

  There was then a — shall we call it an unfor­tunate inci­dent? That, on top of his current strain, gave him a shock which – er – unbalanced his judge­ment. Under the double pressure he was unable to disting­uish between imagi­nation and reality. The sur­roun­dings suggested things he had read about, and perhaps super­ficially forgotten, were really happen­ing.

  “Possibly, for instance, there still lurked at the back of his mind those lines from The Ancient Mariner:

  'Because he knows, a frightful fiend

  'Doth close behind him tread.”

  “You see, his fears, his guilty con­science would easily manu­fac­ture for him the idea that he was being dogged by the foot­steps of that unfortu­nate man from the house — and, too, he seems to have developed a primi­tive vampiric type of fear.

  “Now, once we are able to help him dispel this obsession, he...”

  He paused, abruptly aware of the look on his hearer's face.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “But, Doctor,” Liz said, “those foot­marks...”

  She broke off suddenly at a sound that was half a groan and half a scream from above.

  The doctor was out of the door and up the stairs before she could move. When she did follow him it was slowly and dully, with a heavy certainty in her heart.

  She stood in the doorway, watching him at the bed­side. In a moment he turned grave-eyed, and with a slight shake of his head. He put Ms hand on her shoulder and then went quietly past her out of the room.

  For some seconds Liz stood without moving. Then her eyes dropped from the bed to the floor. She trembled.

  Laughter, a high-pitched, fright­ening laughter shook her as she looked at the red, naked foot­prints which led away from the bed­side, across the floor and down the stairs, after the doctor.

  BOOK INFORMATION

  THE BEST OF JOHN WYNDHAM

  SPHERE BOOKS LIMITED

  30/32 Gray's Inn Road, London WCIX 8JL

  First published in Great Britain by Sphere Books Ltd 1973

  Copyright © The Executors of the Estate of the late John Wyndham 1973