Now Kurt slathered Loctite over the nuts and washers and
slipped dangerously down the ladder, toe-tips flying over the rungs.
Alan laughed as he touched down, thinking that Kurt's heart was aburst
with the feeling of having finished, at last, at last. But then he
caught sight of Kurt's face, ashen, wide-eyed.
"I saw something," he said, talking out of the sides of his mouth. His
hands were shaking.
"What?"
"Footprints," he said. "There's a lot of leaves that have rotted down to
mud up there, and there were a pair of little footprints in the
mud. Like a toddler's footprints, maybe. Except there were two toes
missing from one foot. They were stamped down all around this spot where
I could see there had been a lot of pigeon nests, but there were no
pigeons there, only a couple of beaks and legs -- so dried up that I
couldn't figure out what they were at first.
"But I recognized the footprints. The missing toes, they left prints
behind like unbent paperclips."
Alan moved, as in a dream, to the ladder and began to climb it.
"Be careful, it's all rotten up there," Kurt called. Alan nodded.
"Sure, thank you," he said, hearing himself say it as though from very
far away.
The rooftop was littered with broken glass and scummy puddles of
meltwater and little pebbles and a slurry of decomposing leaves, and
there, yes, there were the footprints, just as advertised.
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