Silent Footsteps

By Elliot Lord

Bill is a freelance photographer and his car breaks down on a long stretch of road between two towns. He spots some abandoned buildings in the distance and to kill the boredom of waiting for someone to drive past, he goes over to take a look. What he uncovers there might keep him from leaving for quite some time. His girlfriend can't understand why she hasn't heard from him for days and she contacts the police to report him as missing.

Silent Footsteps is a story of mystery, suspense and surrealism. A fast-moving novella that will make you question what is happening in Bill's dilemma.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elliot Lord
• Release date: Aug 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393734109

Book preview

1.

Bill scratched his head as he looked at his car engine. There was steam pouring out of it and despite his limited knowledge of cars, he knew this wasn't good. The head gasket had split and the heat from the engine had got to the water. He stood back and waited for it to stop steaming.

Bill was stuck on a long road in a region between where he lived and where he'd just done a job as a photographer; a road rarely used and he hadn't seen another car for a long time. He thought about seeing if he had enough water to put into the car, but he wasn't feeling hopeful. He'd got a small bottle of water with him, some of which he'd drunk and when he went to check it, he had no more than 150ml in it. It was a warm day and he didn't know how long he'd be waiting there for someone to drive past and help him and he may need to drink the water in the meantime.

He picked up his phone off the passenger seat and saw that he had no signal. For God's sake, he said. Why do things have to turn out like this? He looked down the road from where he'd come and couldn't see the town in the distance. He looked the other way and similarly, there was no sign of life there. Out of a lack of options, he got into his car and gingerly tried turning the keys. Nothing resulted from his action. He'd never tried to fix anything in his car before and felt that there was nothing he could do. He screwed his face up as he looked out of the window and wondered what he was going to do. It was just before midday on a Monday morning. His plan was to drive home and have some lunch before checking his emails to see if any more work had come in.

He got back out of the car to listen for the sound of an approaching vehicle, but it was eerily quiet out there. All around him was a vast expanse of desert and no sign of humanity. He hadn't driven out this way much before, but he thought about his outward journey that morning and couldn't remember seeing a petrol station, shop or farmland that wasn't on the outskirts of either towns.

He was thirsty so he took a small sip of his water; just enough to ease the dryness in his throat. As he was looking around for some sign of life, he thought he could make out something in the distance, across the road from where he'd pulled up. It looked like there were some buildings a couple of hundred metres out, but with the dust that was blowing around, he couldn't be certain. Maybe it was some former mining settlement from years gone by.

Bill was a freelance photographer and took on a variety of jobs, which meant he often had to drive long distances. That morning he'd been out to take some family photos in the next town of Kestleton. He'd been over there once before about ten or twelve years ago

He stood in the road and weighed up his options. Whichever way he looked down the road, he could see nothing where he could walk to. He had no idea how far he was from home, but it must be another two hours to drive. How long have I been driving? He thought. It had been about an hour and he'd been driving as fast as he could on this poor quality road, around 80 kilometres per hour. He knew his only option was to wait for someone else to drive past. Hopefully, they would be able to tow him or at least phone for help when they go to where there was a phone signal again, maybe even give him a lift as there was no way his car was going to move of its own accord now. He looked down the road, but there was no sign of any traffic. He could see for a kilometre in the direction he had come from and about half that in the direction he was going because of a slight hill that lay ahead. He wondered if it would be worth walking to the point where he could see no further in case there was somewhere he could see beyond that that may have some sign of civilisation, but he chose not to yet in case he missed a passing driver.

He leaned against his car, constantly switching his gaze between left and right, but there was no sign of anything. He listened carefully to see if he could make out the sound of an engine, but all he could hear was the wind blowing. He thought about how long he should stay there waiting before going to see if there was anything beyond the horizon. As long as he stayed on the road, if someone drove past, he would be able to see them. He looked again at the dilapidated buildings that were in front of him, but he was sure that there was no-one there. He took his camera in case anyone came past and stole it while he was away and he grabbed his bottle of water.

Bill had one last look down the road behind him, but still there was nothing coming, so he set off. There really was no sign that anyone had been in this area on foot seemingly for years. He reached the point that he hadn't been able to see past in about five minutes and as the landscape revealed itself to him, he wasn't at all surprised to find that it continued in the same vein. The road curved out to the left and faded into the desert before it reached the new horizon and he found no sign of hope.

Why wasn't there any traffic, he thought. His memories of his journeys that day were that he'd been pretty much by himself all the time. He did remember seeing a lorry and maybe a couple of cars. Being a connecting road between two towns surely meant that lorries would use this quite regularly, but no matter how much he willed one to appear, they weren't playing his game. He gave one last desperate look into the distance before heading back to his car.

The bonnet of his car was still up and he looked at the damage. There was absolutely nothing he could do, so he closed it. As he went round to the driver's door, he stopped himself and looked at it with a querying frown. The door was open. He knew that he had closed it after he'd taken his camera out, he remembered the sound of it, but now it was just slightly open with the door resting against the frame. He quickly looked around him in case the perpetrator was still in sight. His eyes examined every detail in the landscape to try to find some movement, but he couldn't pick out anything. He looked again at the door and the handle in case it gave him any clues. He wouldn't be able to detect any fingerprints and there were no other marks that stood out to him as being new. He opened the door and looked inside. The few things he'd left in there had been scattered around by himself and he paid no attention to where anything was when he went for the walk, but it seemed that nothing had been taken. He opened the glove compartment, which had nothing in there apart from a cloth and a tattered old copy of William Burroughs' Junky. I definitely closed the door, he thought as his eyes wandered around without looking at anything. How could that have opened again? He got into the driver's seat, closed the door and pushed it to see it there was something wrong with the catch. It didn't budge. He opened it, closed it again and repeated this action five times, but it didn't seem like there was anything wrong with it. He looked out of the side window and scanned the desert. Still there was nothing that he hadn't already seen. He wondered if the person may be hiding on the other side of the car, so he got out slowly and walked around. He nervously stretched his head to see around the side, but there was no-one there. He walked all around the car and with nothing else to think of, it occurred to him that the only possible place left to hide would be under the car. This idea made his heart beat faster. He walked backwards a few steps in case whatever it was jumped out at him or grabbed him and he crouched down enough to be able to see the light on the other side. Nothing. He got back up and breathed a sigh of relief. Now that he reassured himself that there was no-one around, his mind returned to the conundrum of how that door had opened. He opened it from the outside and shut it in the manner he thought he had done previously to see if it would come open again, but after trying this five or six times, he gave up as it was not supporting his theory.

By now, Bill had been stuck here for about an hour and not a single vehicle had gone past. He couldn't think of anything to do to pass the time. He pulled out Junky and flipped through it, but he wasn't in the right mental state to focus on reading. Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he noticed something moving over by where the buildings were. He quickly looked over and fixed his eyes on that area, but concluded it must have been a trick of the light or just his desperation that he wanted to find someone, which was making him see things.

He didn't want to stay inside the car as it was too hot, so he got back out, closing the door with deliberation, then watching it in case it sprang open for him. He didn't expect it to and after ten seconds of staring at the door handle, he knew he was wasting his time. He looked all around him and leaned against his car with a sigh.

2.

Bill lived in Hantonville, a medium sized town about 120km from where he was stranded. As there was nowhere else between them, there was no point in walking. He thought that if the normal speed of walking was, say, 8km per hour, then 8 times 10 is only 80, so that meant it would take him about fourteen or fifteen hours and there was no way he was going to do that. He'd be stuck in the desert at night with some shelter, but no light, so he had no choice but to stay right where he was.

In Hantonville, he was a freelance photographer, so he had no boss who was going to raise an alarm at him not going back to the office. He lived on his own, so he didn't even have anyone there to notify the police. He thought about who would be the first person to raise suspicions as to why he was not around and that was his girlfriend, Hannah. They'd been together for a couple of years and in recent weeks they hadn't been getting on too well. Bill felt that their relationship was getting stale; it wasn't like it had been in the beginning, when everything made them feel like they were teenagers, despite them both being in their mid-thirties now, but for Bill it was all getting run of the mill. They would generally meet up two or three times a week and either hang out at each other's houses or go out for drinks. Sometimes, when they were sitting together in a pub, they would run out of conversation pretty quickly and just sit there looking around the room and hoping to find something they could comment on like how someone was acting or Hannah would make a snide comment about how another woman was dressed; something that Bill couldn't care less about. Their conversations often boiled down to small talk; something about their work (Hannah worked at the local newspaper as an editor and would