The Beast

‘Anyway, we don’t even know if it was a footprint,’ she said.

‘Oh, it was,’ I nodded. ‘It was definitely a footprint.’

We were almost at the top of the stairs now and began to creep even more slowly. ‘How do you know?’

‘Because I don’t want it to be a footprint,’ I said. ‘Because the worst possible thing it could be is the scary big footprint of something that wants to kill us. And the worst possible things keep happening to me lately.’ I took a deep breath, stopping my rant before it became too loud. ‘I know it’s a footprint, because with my recent luck, it couldn’t be anything else.’

She shrugged. ‘Fair point. But it still couldn’t fit up the stairs.’

We stepped on to an upper landing awash with the smells of old lady. Talcum powder. Lavender. Something that could’ve been cabbage. As I breathed them in, my memories of Mrs Angelo became pin-sharp in my mind. I remembered my last meeting with her, chatting to her for a few seconds on Christmas Eve as I’d delivered her card.

Mum was always late writing Christmas cards, but even for her, 10 p.m. on Christmas Eve was cutting it fine. I’d planned to drop the card through the letterbox and move on, but Mrs Angelo had clocked me coming up the path and had come to the door to talk to me.

She was the last person I’d seen before Christmas Day. Before Mumbles. Before any of this had started. Mrs Angelo – and her smell – were normality. They represented the last moments of my old life, a life where the only things I had to worry about were my mum’s cooking and a regular hammering from school bully, Billy Gibb. A life I’d go back to in a heartbeat.