The Reddening

by Adam Nevill

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  The Reddening

  Adam L. G. Nevill

  Ritual Limited

  Devon, England

  MMXIX

  The Reddening

  by Adam L. G. Nevill

  Published by

  Ritual Limited

  Devon, England

  MMXIX

  rituallimitedshop@gmail.com

  www.adamlgnevill.com

  The Reddening © Adam L. G. Nevill

  This Edition © Ritual Limited

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the address above.

  Cover artwork by Samuel Araya

  eBook formatting and conversion by Polgarus Studio

  ISBN 978-1-9160941-2-3 [Mobi]

  The Reddening / Adam L. G. Nevill. —1st ed.

  For Will Tenant, David Bruckner, Joe Barton, Richard Holmes, Keith Thompson, all at Imaginarium, and the cast, crew and post-production team of The Ritual. You took the last old god of the woods by the horns.

  Table of Contents

  ORIGINS 1

  2

  3

  4

  EXCAVATIONS 5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  RELICS 41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  Story Notes: About This Horror

  Acknowledgements

  More Horror Fiction from Adam L. G. Nevill at Ritual Limited.

  Author Biography

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  ‘They were the first fossil teeth I had ever seen, and as I laid my hands on them, relics of extinct races and witnesses of an order of things which passed away with them, I shrank back involuntarily . . . I am not ashamed to own that in the presence of these remains I felt more of awe than joy.’

  Father John MacEnery (on his discovery of prehistoric artefacts in Kent’s Cavern,

  South Devon, 1825).

  ORIGINS

  1

  In the coming darkness, stepping off the stony cliff path and into thin air did not seem unfeasible. Andy too easily composed the only headline he’d ever make, post-mortem. Body recovered in harbour . . .

  A mere glance down and he sensed the potential for a terrible skittering of his feet. The earth rolling marbles beneath his boots before the sickening plummet tingled his sphincter. Over he’d go, snatching, thumping, scraping onto spumes of foam in the din of water that smashed the slate teeth of the shoreline two hundred feet below.

  Or would he drop silently, without fuss? He pictured an egg breaking on the side of a ceramic bowl and winced.

  Even though little had been marked or signposted across the last five miles to offer an escape from the coast path, remaining on it was too dangerous. The further he’d ventured the more remote and hostile the cast of the land, so unlike the lush, near-tropical sections around Torbay, or the long, open reaches of South Hams.

  Heather now bearded the slate and shale at the top of the cliffs, producing a vast rust and grey stonescape that suggested Scotland or the South Island of New Zealand, not what he expected to find in South Devon.

  Since the first coves of the morning, north of Divilmouth, he’d walked the edge of an unceasing undulation of mostly bare, hilly farmland. Distant copses had occasionally sprouted on higher ground, the silhouettes of the trees seemingly silent and still with anticipation, like warriors watching on horseback in old Westerns.

  Earlier, closer to Divilmouth harbour, it had been the vista of an enormous aquamarine sea that had lulled him into complacency. Nothing could go wrong beside water so achingly beautiful. But beauty doesn’t last. That stretch of the coast was a long way behind him now and he’d not seen another walker since. Only a paraglider had offered any human contact. That was at midday and he’d been packing up when Andy stopped for lunch, three hours gone. The man had called the hills ‘the cardiacs’.

  Those hills.

  Rendered clumsy with fatigue by late afternoon, what remained of his body’s depleted stamina tinkled inside a near-empty tank. Andy couldn’t even recall how many rocky hillsides or rough stone steps he’d struggled up. Maybe four, but they’d all looked similar and in his memory had fused into one tortuous travail. Descending the slopes had pressed his toenails into their cuticles: he’d not trimmed his nails before wearing new hiking boots and was close to limping.

  There had been no mention of so many hills in his guidebook, a publication aimed at those with more local knowledge than he possessed. Although it had let him down on each walk so far, he’d wanted to get his money’s worth so had persevered with Spectacular Walks on the South West Coast Path: South Devon. But what if he’d been elderly? The numerous steep rises would burst hearts.

  Forty minutes for lunch at midday was also a stupid decision. As were the hours he’d spent exploring the first three coves at ten. His one litre of water was long gone. This is how people get into trouble. The tone of his head-voice was now his dad’s.

  Time.

  The atmospherics served as a premonition of how dark it would soon be. To get out of the situation safely he’d need every minute of the one hour of remaining sunlight. Then another hour of half-light to find the car.

  Andy looked up, imploringly, at the light situation. Cloud had tarnished the sky metallic, giving the sea an appearance of liquid steel. In one circular portion of the iron cumulus, light splintered to produce the sulfur and mercury of a Turner seascape. Far out at sea, one great shaft of concentrated sunlight struck the water, producing a white-gold disc too blinding to look into.

  But definition along the cliff edge was growing vague. Greens, blues and reds were being extracted from the earth. He pictured himself reduced to a tiny figure in a dark aerial photograph, the surface murky with dust.

  Wind with cold pins began to sheet off the sea, shivering his flesh. Perspiration beneath his fleece transformed into a second skin of frost, covering his back, groin and forehead. For all the protection it offered, his thin woollen hat might have been a Christmas crown made from tissue paper.

  The latest edition to the new script was rain. The white horizon was blackening. If you get wet in a cold wind . . . Shit going wrong just builds. He coul
d no longer use the GPS on his phone either: he’d run the battery down by taking pictures to show his wife.

  Anticipation of a temperature plummet at nightfall tightened the tourniquet of concern further, squeezing his thoughts into choices measurable on a three-fingered hand.

  Should he go back to where he had a vague memory of a path heading inland, in the direction of a Land Trust property? He guessed that route promised to be a death march uphill into the interior. Then he’d have to locate the house. Would it be open off-season? Those places usually closed at five anyway. Or was it six?

  Or should he just press on for his original goal, the nature reserve at Brickburgh? He’d intended to cut inland from there on the sole track his map noted: a route that would eventually circle back and deliver him to the small Access Countryside car park where he’d left his Volvo at nine that morning.

  Though it was the best option for locating the car, the Brickburgh route would surely involve over an hour on the hilly coastal path in dimming light and intensifying cold. So Andy ruled it out almost as soon as he mooted the notion. A glance at the beach below pulled his eyes to the steep shale hills that buttressed the shore. The map helpfully indicated that two more beaches would follow that one too. There wasn’t sufficient light remaining to make agonisingly slow progress up three more cardiacs.

  For the first time in years, he felt tearful.

  A third option involved a yomp directly inland from Slagcombe Sands, around the wetland and up the valley. But a glance in that direction invited the question: what awaited at the summit? A bloody fence? It’d take him an hour to get up there too, the final hour of daylight. There was no street lighting out here. No prospect of electric light save from a few remote farms dotted about the hills. He’d seen a couple of dejected buildings earlier, perched atop the valleys. But distant yellow windows wouldn’t illumine where he placed his feet on uneven ground. He’d already lost his balance and fallen twice in daylight.

  There were options, or diminishing choices made in desperation. None were satisfactory.

  He was not an experienced walker. At Christmas, as a means of keeping fit, he’d made his rambling debut. This was walk six in two months but the first on the wilder stretch of the coast path.

  Self-loathing added to a fearful mix of incomplete thoughts. The day had no room for another bad decision: no about-turns, retracings or hunkering down in the wind to beseech the map that he could barely see without reading glasses. The last few times he’d returned the book to his pocket, he’d already forgotten what he’d just looked at: cold-wind dementia.

  Option one: the Land Trust property.

  Head down, his mouth a rictus, he meandered up a slope parallel to the direction he’d just walked. The period building would be on a road, somewhere inland, behind this section of the path. It must be. There might be a phone. He’d have to reach it cross-country, across fields.

  So turn around, twat, and walk until the darkness swallows you . . .

  * * *

  A dining room. Two figures sitting upright at a table. Painted red from their hairlines to the soles of their bare feet, their torsos and limbs oiled to a dull sheen. Not speaking, their eyes closed. Perhaps deep in the concentration of prayer and giving thanks for what they were about to receive: those bruised slabs of meat, wet and heavy upon their white plates. A fare not shocking Andy as much as the couple’s appearance. To come so far and be confronted by this? He feared that fate had marked this day out for horror.

  Prior to this revelation, he’d walked inland from the coastal path for a couple of hours, moving west on a muddy groove rutted by hooves in black soil caked with dung. The odour of animal waste had become a permanent stain on his sinuses. He’d persevered and followed the crease for ninety minutes until the lit windows of a building had become visible atop a ridge.

  As he trudged to the isolated house, the last vestiges of sunlight had dissolved into a sky of iron. The iron had subsequently faded to coal, his eyes filling with pitch. He’d stumbled through night-sodden fields and talked out loud to suppress panic. Blind to the world’s forms from his waist to his feet, he’d crashed through hedges and fallen down the sides of stone walls, snagged himself on fences he’d only seen when bent over them. Pawing his way over a gate, he’d scraped a thigh. That whole leg was now wet and his waterproof trousers were stuck to stinging flesh. Both knees were bruised.

  Sometimes his feet had crunched stone chippings, sometimes grass. Sometimes he’d slid in mud; often he’d skated through dung. His hands were chilled to claws black with dirt. Blood from his nails had adhered the wool of his socks to his toes. Rain had made his jacket twice as heavy. But he’d continued, staggering about a lumpy land without light, aiming his lurching at a far-off row of yellow squares: window-shapes that had been distant for hours, embedded within buildings indistinguishable from the void their lights pin-pricked. A lighthouse for a careless rambler. A farm enclosed by barbed wire.

  As he’d arrived, the big hand on the luminous face of his watch had clicked past seven, the hour his wife would start to worry.

  He’d then passed between outbuildings, his feet sliding through putrescence, the stench of fresher faeces drifting from underfoot to seep brain-deep, swinish with nitrates, shortening his breath.

  He’d even heard a deep cough in the nearest night-smudged building, followed by two more cries, as if the beasts within had acknowledged his trespass through their sleep. Unlit barns? He’d only sensed solid structures rather than identified what they were, but the glowing windows of the farmhouse had gradually enlarged. And then he’d been standing outside a long room: a combination kitchen and dining room.

  By that time, any shame he felt about banging on a stranger’s door at so late an hour had evaporated. Human intervention in his plight had become necessary.

  And then he’d seen them through the window. The people. The red people. Naked red people. A woman and a man, their true age obscured by the dark pigment encrusting their faces. Had they wiped each other red with blood-caked hands before sitting down to eat?

  They didn’t make sense, and while lost in the dark Andy couldn’t imagine anything he’d rather not have seen through the windows of a stranger’s house.

  Dizzy with shock, he turned to sneak away. His intention was to move silently round the building to the enigmatic front, where he’d creep away on whatever metalled surface he could place his bemired boots upon. But when the toe of his boot struck an object that refused to move, his hopes for a silent escape came off the table.

  Solid, immobile and unseen, the shape responded with a dull thunk, transmitting a tremor to his knee. His body continued while the foot remained rooted. Falling forwards, he thrust out a hand, striking the very window that had so recently promised salvation.

  Second leg swinging wide, he just kept to his feet and righted his spine. As the hot-cold sensation preceding the fall wilted, he peered back at the scene he’d surely disturbed.

  He had.

  The two figures remained seated but their horribly white eyes had widened to stare right at him. Big eyes that contained as much surprise as his own.

  When the bulky male figure rose from its chair and pointed at his face, Andy stumbled and fell about in the darkness of the yard.

  Within moments the sound of a door latch chimed through the cold. And under the roar of his breath, the trespasser whimpered.

  2

  Later that year.

  Bones seeped from the cliff’s freshest wound. A few lay scattered about Matt’s feet. Like fallen columns from an ancient temple, two great plinths of rock had separated from the cliff-face and cracked apart on impact with the sand. He imagined the wet thud they’d once made in the tiny cove.

  Moving his gaze from the fissure above his tousled red head to the grey shore, he tracked the path of fallen debris: broken limestone resembling a frozen river, the furthest extent of the rock-fall hurling rubble across the pebbles and into the sea. The cliff must have collapsed wi
thin the last week, so how long had those bones been embedded in the rocks? Were the darker pieces all bone fragments? Animal or human? Maybe even fossils?

  He decided to collect as many of the more interesting bits as possible before the tide took them away: the same tide that had eroded a notch in the cliff’s foot and written collapse into its future. The new spring tide would rise higher with a full moon, suck at the landslip and reclaim the relics.

  Thirty years of coastal erosion in one month of continual storms were responsible for this avalanche, the sea’s perpetual rage unrecognisable in this part of South Devon. So recently had these blue skies blackened with fury and the aquamarine waters darkened to grey before spitting great briny gouts, day and night and for weeks, right into any face turned seaward.

  Much had been smashed apart in South Devon. Comprising no fewer than thirteen hurricanes, the sea’s maelstrom had surged over walls, bent iron railings and train tracks, battered harbours and fishing boats into fragments, torn down holiday lets from Plymouth to Dawlish and even shrugged off the cliff’s heavy coats. What had been relied upon to be benign, sheltering and gentle had reverted to assault.

  Over now, the weather-front spent, the sea assumed a sheepish, remorseful character. But the towns remained shaken and their people subdued, bruised at a deep psychological level. No one trusted the sea. They wouldn’t for a while. For those who lived beside the coves and the long red beaches of the towns further north, it would take time and forgetfulness to rehabilitate the old bond.

  On hands and knees, Matt climbed into the stones and into the bones. He’d seen the fissure two hundred metres up while paragliding in air cold enough to bite through his face mask and purple his skin.

  Conditions for gliding had been good and he’d reverse-launched from a beauty spot intended for coast-path walkers. In seconds, a high easterly headwind charging off the sea had raised him from standing on his feet to sitting in thin air. As soon as his wing had flapped, risen over his head and inflated, he’d been aloft, his stomach momentarily loosening like it was too big and on the outside of his body, before tightening to a closed fist inside a physique rendered frail. Up through the atmosphere he’d risen, alone and dwarfed by an immensity of sky.