This short story was recently posted on Medium where it sadly didn’t get a lot of reads. I thought it was a better story than a similar one I posted called Into The Green. That one got boosted and has earned me nearly £30, but I prefer this one. See what you think!
Dirty Little Feet
It was cool and dark in the Holloway – our impatient bare feet slipped effortlessly into the tracks laid down by our ancestors. Their faces were etched into the earth and the clay – their long-dead eyes followed our movements from the walls as we darted along the ancient track.
Our feet thundered upon theirs, our laughter mingled with echoes of their own as we sprang down the tunnel, splashing through cool streams, our toes curling into claggy mud. The walls of the Holloway sheltered us as we ran. This space was our fortress, our underground lair, our tunnel system, our playground. It was our link to the past.
Above us the trees linked hands; their vibrant green canopy a roof above our heads, bursts of late evening sunlight fragmented by trembling leaves. All around us, the stillness of time. We laughed and played as if time did not exist for us and down there, it didn’t. We wouldn’t grow old, we wouldn’t age or decay or die. Much like everything else that lived in the Holloway, we were eternal.
But as dusk fell, we knew we were breaking a rule passed down by our parents and grandparents: don’t linger in the Holloway after sundown or you risk inviting one of the old back home with you.
To us, rules were made to be broken and returning home after sundown offered a delicious risk we could not resist. That evening, my siblings — twins, George and Arthur, Grace, the oldest and I, the youngest — stayed longer than we should.
Still, it was not quite dark by the time the old warnings infiltrated our consciences and prickled the hairs on the back of our necks. We scuttled out, hand in hand, giggling as our muddy feet raced back up the centuries old track, reaching for gnarled roots and boughs to lead us home and leaving the faces of our ancestors on the walls behind us.
We tore across the sheep field — their eyes glittering back at us in the semi-darkness, and we returned home, leaving tell-tale muddy footprints across the kitchen tiles.
Grace washed away the evidence of our childish rebellion and come morning, we all thought our indiscretion had gone unnoticed by Mother.
Not so.
She was raging as she swept her old mop across the tiles where small brown footprints could be seen trailing in from the back door and stopping in the middle of the kitchen. We denied they were ours (ours had been a criss-cross pattern made by four sets of feet…) but it did no good. We were banned from the Holloway and given arduous chores to complete to make it up to her.
Later that day we heard her scream in rage once again; the noise drawing us out of our sulking to witness yet another trail of muddied prints on her floor. Who had defied her? It was my George who pointed out that the prints were far smaller than ours. He made me, the youngest, stand next to them to prove his point. My feet were small but not that small.
Mother’s face paled.
We watched as she sank into the nearest chair and stared dully at nothing. Then;
‘You stupid, stupid children. Why didn’t you listen to us? Why can’t you ever just listen?’
We swapped guilty glances, then released a collective gasp when a childish giggle echoed gleefully around us. We all froze. I reached for Grace and gripped her hand in mine. Tears shone in our mother’s eyes.
We all heard the sudden drumming — at first like a steady heartbeat, then louder, boom, boom, boom, until it faded out into something that was closer to a soft pattering.
Footsteps.
‘You’ll never get rid of it. We’ll have to move!’ Our mother wept again, dropping her head into her hands.
We were silent as we watched her get up and solemnly slosh the mop over the footprints. Still, we didn’t fully realise what we had done, even then. The dirty little footprints came back again and again. As fast as Mother washed them away, they would reappear. Sometimes they came in from the door and just stopped. Sometimes they made circles, as if the culprit was spinning around and around. Sometimes they ran up the walls and across the kitchen surfaces.
Next came the smell.
It started in the kitchen — a musty, earthy, swampy sort of smell. Mother was in despair. She claimed the house would never be clean again. She punished us with more chores and often we would hear her on the phone begging to be rehoused. We would fall into bed exhausted every night.
And that’s when the drumming would begin.
Footsteps at first, light and gleeful, teasing, dancing. Then they would build up. Harder, faster, angrier. Tearing up and down the stairs while we huddled in our beds, our breath frozen in our chests. Our eyes met in the darkness. We had done this. This was all our fault.
The dirty little feet stomped and thumped. Up and down the stairs, across the landing, into our rooms and around our beds while we quivered under the covers, clutching hands. Cold laughter echoed through the house as it kept us awake night after night.
Then one night, I woke up, muddled and sweating from a dream where the thing that followed us from the Holloway was smiling at me from the shadows. It had black holes for eyes and a wide sneering mouth and its skin was as white as bone.
I heard something new.
A frantic pounding. The panicked drumming of tiny angry heels. I ran to my window and there it was — I saw it for the first time. I saw its feet. Small, dirty, they beat as if in a great tantrum against my window pane from the outside. Had it somehow found itself shut out again? There was a great sadness emanating from it, a lonely desperation in its incessant thudding.
‘What do you want?’ I asked it, but the feet continued to kick. I pressed my hands to the glass. I wanted to see it properly. I wanted to see what had followed us home. I wanted to know why. It refused to show its face. Only two dirty little feet were visible and when I finally flung open the window, they were gone too.
In the morning, my mother looked disheveled as she started packing up our things. We had led a simple life there in the little stone cottage and it only took a few hours to pack up our lives and move out. Us children were bereft to be leaving the place we loved.
We trooped down to the Holloway to say our goodbyes but we did not go in. Instead, we held hands at the entrance, our heads lowered in sorrow. We stared at the ancient path, created by the constant tread of endless feet and rolling cartwheels, pushed into the earth deeper and deeper over centuries of old. Our own feet had pressed into it. Our own blood had flowed into the earth and the mud. Our laughter had echoed down the track and up into the giant trees and now we had to say goodbye.
The new home was nice. Small and neat, on the outskirts of the nearest town. Our walk to school was quicker, at least. We were happy there for a year until one morning we awoke to the sound of our mother screaming.
The screams were followed by wails, which soon dissolved into hopeless sobs.
When we ran down to comfort her, we all stopped just outside the kitchen, too afraid to step in.
The kitchen floor was covered in the gleeful dancing footprints of two dirty little feet.
Thank you for reading! I’ve wanted to write a story set in a Holloway since I visited the fascinating Hell Lane in Symondsbury, Dorset, UK. West Dorset is predominantly sandstone so has several Holloways. The name comes from the anglo-saxon word ‘sunken road’ and they are believed to be at least 300 years old with some traced back to the iron age. At one point they would have been trails to drive cattle along, popular highways if you like, to move people, goods and livestock from one place to another. They would have been ground level tracks back then but eventually centuries of human and animal feet and the wheels of carts would have eroded the soft earth and widened it, with help from the water running off the surrounding land. These days many Holloways are 20 or 30 feet deep. They are mysterious and magical places, eerily silent and still and you can’t help feel a real connection to the past as you follow the ancient paths so many centuries of feet have trodden.
The Glorious Outsiders 