by Adam Nevill
She hadn’t gone far but couldn’t resist another look up the valley. The numbers of their visitors had swollen in mere seconds; the new arrivals were also now moving down the valley sides.
Shelly estimated that within a few moments a dozen of these figures had appeared, all now possessing a sinister inexorability in their unhurried descent. Equally distributed across the slopes of the valley and in the ravine flowing from the summit, they walked. The beach or their tent appeared to be the destination.
Her thoughts scratched about trying to fathom whether the situation called for hilarity or caution, fight or flight. A spurt of adrenalin made her lighter on her toes. She stumbled, jittery, knees clumping together. Her feet required her full attention and without that resource she skidded on the moist grass, ploughing dung. ‘Greg!’
He hadn’t heard and continued to roll a large stone across the pebbles towards the fire pit.
‘Greg! Greg!’
That he heard. He looked up, his body still bent over. Shelly pointed to the slopes. ‘We got company!’
She returned her eyes to the slopes. The naked people continued to observe their careful side-steps. Easier to see those on the northern slope now and in the low light their bare skin issued a scarlet sheen. Red. The people were painted red. Red people. Naked red people. And what had they done to their hair? That wasn’t right, having it all tufted and clawed out from the sides where it glistened.
Most of them gripped something in their hands: small black objects. One of the men held what might have been a staff or spear. Two others carried the thin pipes she’d heard. They’ve come out of time.
Shelly turned to Greg for confirmation that these people were actually there and that this was actually happening. He’d stood up straighter to see over the wetland’s reeds, shielding his eyes to survey the visitors.
Anxiety increased a pricking of Shelly’s nerves. If she wasn’t careful, fear would soon take hold of her throat and make her voice warble. She couldn’t show that she was frightened. She had a notion that looking afraid would be a bad idea. She’d not run either, she’d walk normally.
Picking her way across the uneven ground and the slippery grassy mounds was slow going, comic even, slapstick slow, and she soon regretted the decision not to run. To circle the marsh and get to Greg on the beach, she’d need to make the track traversing the southern side of the valley. By moving so slowly, she’d now meet the naked red people descending the slope over there. They’d reach the track first.
Shelly stopped and acknowledged why she’d not run: she feared that they would too, towards her.
‘Greg! Hurry!’
Greg was still on the rocky shore, slowly making his way to where the marsh turned into a stream, embedded with smooth boulders. Upon his distant pale oval of a face Shelly read his confusion. Tension had thinned his mouth to a slit. ‘Shell!’ he called.
On came the red people, without pause, fastidious in their exodus from the hillsides. Even though there were wide gaps within their ranks they were incrementally forming a tighter semi-circle as they neared the shore. Shelly was becoming trapped behind the wetland within a shortening necklace of naked people.
Far off, at the head of the valley, two of the group had remained behind. One was sitting down, which was odd, but Shelly lacked the clarity of mind to scrutinise what the distant form sat upon. The second figure was standing and had raised thin arms. All that differed between those that were approaching their tent and the couple who’d remained behind was the heads. At a distance, the heads of the couple at the top of the valley were out of proportion to their bodies: were too large, misshapen.
‘Greg!’
A childish urge ushered her back towards the tent as if the campsite possessed a private domestic boundary that wouldn’t be crossed or invaded by the insistent visitors. She wasn’t thinking straight and knew it.
Like the rams. They just came. At you. Just came, from up there, out of the land. Then they’re here, around you.
The idea was simple and it horrified her, as did the faces of the figures as they drew closer: all red, the eyes and teeth too white. Their expressions alone collapsed her resolve and her hope that it was all a jape. These people were angry. No, they were more than angry: they were enraged. Excited too, because they abruptly made a terrible noise. All of them started to howl and ululate like angry apes, a commotion intimating that the restraint they had used in their orderly descent was about to conclude.
The pair at the valley summit with the malformed heads had incited the chorus by issuing faint, high-pitched shrieks that had warbled into a horrible skirl. When the sound had pierced the valley their confederates had immediately taken up the cry.
When Shelly identified what the red people were clutching in their fists, she wanted to sit down in protest at being intimidated. Black stones. Rocks that tapered into points.
‘Get here! Greg! Greg!’
As she looked desperately in her boyfriend’s direction, her vision suffered a marginal judder. From the waist up he was visible over the furry tips of the reeds. He was running from the shore to their camp.
Ahead of him, a few of the red people had stopped as if to greet him on the beach path they’d already reached. Their tatty, greased heads and scarlet faces seemed more monstrous as they grinned and shrieked excitedly at his approach. There were four. He’d never get through them.
‘Oh Jesus,’ Shelly said to herself and to the unhearing universe of air and stone and sea that surrounded her. ‘Jesus Christ.’
She’d waited too long to act and only now was she running at the nearest gap between the two red things closest to her: women with grimacing faces. Both were elderly, their breasts strangely plump and shiny beneath stringy throats.
But where did she go if she made it between them? Up there? Up the sides of the valley? Already the left side of her chest felt as if an ice cube was lodged in a lung: she wouldn’t get far and wasn’t fit enough to do more than crawl that slope.
Without any alteration in pace, the two women nearest to her moved together and narrowed the parting.
Shelly stopped running, turned, looked for another route through the enclosing corral of red figures. She ran for a space at ninety degrees to her previous course.
No sooner had she set this course when a heavily bearded man, his facial hair entirely soaked in what might have been blood, simply stepped closer to his neighbour and annulled that option.
Shelly adjusted her course again and ran for the other side of the valley. As if reading her mind, two of the red people sauntered inwards at her and sealed that route.
The wetland. That was behind her now. She might make it. Into the water. Wade in. Harder for them to get to you in there.
Shelly screamed, a reaction to Greg’s raised voice behind her. He’d just shouted, ‘What? What do you want?’
Above her rapid, noisy breathing, she heard the scuffling of bare feet on the stony track signalling a commotion, about thirty metres distant, where Greg was.
She looked there but no longer saw Greg. She could only make out the oiled torsos and spiky heads of the howling red people, standing where she’d last seen her boyfriend.
Amidst the reeds of the wetland, their stained arms rose and fell, rose and fell at whatever tried to tear itself from between them. Greg.
They hammered at her boyfriend. He’d fallen and the red people had quickly formed a circle to smash their rocks into his body. The sound Shelly heard was akin to the beating of a drum filled with wet sand. Dunk. Thud. Dunk. Thud.
Her will to run died. A whiteout of shock and bewilderment bent her at the waist so she could be sick.
Ducks flew overhead. Dusty wings flapped amidst honking cries of alarm.
Dunk. Thud. Dunk. Thud.
Oh, God. Leave him. Please leave him . . . Don’t you think he’s had enough? She wanted to say this but there was no air inside her body. She sobbed breathlessly.
Dunk. Thud. Dunk. Thud.
Ar
cs of dark liquid were flung into the air from the tips of many red hands, like suds cast from wet tools. The red arms went up and down, up and down. The flapping commotion of the water fowls dimmed and the noise of multiple pairs of bare feet slapping the turf drew nearer to her. She closed her eyes, then opened them.
Standing upright, her arms loose and weak at her sides, her nose running freely, she watched the red people close. Mouths open and howling: here a filling, there a gap, purple tongues, black nostrils. Eyes too big: wild like animals.
A moment of strange calm came upon her then: a warmth spread through her muscles. ‘No.’ Her final word.
The red people took her down to the wet grass and began tugging her into position.
She wanted the first raised rock to knock her out so that she wouldn’t feel the impact of the other five. It didn’t.
4
Two years later.
‘I can assure you, in my field, no prehistorical site in the British Isles has been the cause of so much excitement. The extraordinary finds at the Brickburgh cave far exceed the combined riches discovered at Boxgrove, Creswell, Swanscombe and Gough’s Cave.’
Katrine arrived at the press conference late. For a few seconds the room was a blur of lights, unsmiling faces, tight rows of chairs upholstered in red to match the hotel’s furnishings. Even the carpet was obscured by the equipment bags, studio lights, cables and camera equipment littering the floor. There was barely enough room for national press; local was squeezed at the rear, the closeness of the air and its temperature already reaching stifling in the conference room.
Damp all over and stressed, angry at herself, she sat at the back. Journalist misses press conference for the biggest local news story of her lifetime.
Unable to park anywhere near the hotel, she’d hobbled in heels through town to get to where the press had assembled to brief the world. She’d seen Euronews and CNN Europe’s logos on the vans parked outside the hotel. Her press pack was on the floor. She picked it up and started her recorder. The speaker continued.
‘We know that the cavern was used thirteen thousand years ago, and for around one thousand years. The semi-permanence of the occupation being the most crucial element.
‘As with other European sites, our cave was used by Late Upper Palaeolithic people. Creswellian hunter-gatherers. They’d been returning to various parts of Britain from France, Belgium and the Netherlands, during warmer spells in Europe’s climate. A relatively brief thawing before another cold period, the Younger Dryas, that ensued in 12,800 BC, when most of Britain would have been covered by an ice-sheet, the South West a bitterly cold tundra.
‘To get here these people would have crossed a great land bridge known as Doggerland, now submerged beneath the North Sea.’
For a journalist, Katrine was terrible with names, dates and figures, though she never forgot a face. The speaker was a leading palaeontologist from the Natural History Museum in London. She’d seen him interviewed on national news during the first two years of the excavation in Brickburgh. Her local monthly, Devon Life and Style, would dedicate a pull-out supplement to the revelations he offered today: the most significant press conference yet from the dig’s management.
‘But this is the only British site that signifies a formal occupation, including burials across centuries.’ The speaker paused as if to allow the weight of that fact to sink upon his audience.
A few people were taking notes. Glazed expressions or contrived looks of anticipation accounted for the greater number of faces in her line of sight.
The speaker looked past the journalists from the London networks and towards the back as if to appeal for some local enthusiasm. None was forthcoming. A camera flashed.
He had his work cut out. Considering the current state of the world and its weekly upheavals, Kat questioned for how long this story would run beyond specialist pages and presses.
‘We also know what the Brickburgh community hunted and ate.’
Kat suppressed a yawn. Her eyes watered, blurred, then cleared.
On-screen: a picture of a grassland, bordered by marshes and small trees. A wide, flat landscape inhabited by wild horses, red deer, antelopes, some kind of giant ox, what looked like grouse, a solitary badger. A pack of wolves watched the game expectantly from one side of the illustration. Opposite the wolf pack, standing beside a marsh, a group of bearded men were poised, their muscular bodies part-covered in animal skins. Rough leathery faces crowned by tangled hair watched the centrepiece of the picture: a woolly mammoth. Spears were readied.
Were mammoths down here? Kat wondered and felt her interest increase, though not by much. It dropped a notch again when the professor presented the next photograph, which featured a tray filled with flint tools, carved spear blades and points. Notched spikes bore the caption: ‘Shinbones of arctic hares’.
‘We’ve removed five hundred tons of debris so far, and over two thousand items of worked bone and flint. The flint came from Wiltshire . . .’
Katrine’s feet ached and throbbed. She wished she’d worn jeans and trainers. Several women had done so, including the loathsome Vicky from Devon Tribune, one row in front. Much like her own publication, the Tribune was 95 per cent advertorial masquerading as news. But other than Kat, only the female journalists from the big networks were attired in suits and heels and lavishly made up. Those higher-profile journalists would interview the visiting experts for the networks, one-on-one: women who exuded a cultivated indifference to everyone sitting behind them. Their heads even appeared to be enhanced by a celestial halo created by camera lights. A set-up that produced the near-unbearable contained heat.
Katrine removed her suit jacket but didn’t feel any cooler and wanted to strip down to her bra. Her tights were laddered up the back of one calf. As she’d run from the car, a tiny burr of leather in the heel of one of her new shoes had rubbed a foot raw and fired white striations up her hose to the left knee. She wanted to pinch herself, hard.
‘From analysing nitrogen isotopes in the wealth of the recovered human remains, we know that the people using this cave maintained a diet that was very high in animal protein. They were towards the top of the meat-eating food chain. Only wolves should have been competing with them for game. The cave lions had been gone for fifteen thousand years.
‘These people mostly ate giant oxen, deer, elk, horse meat and the occasional cave bear. We also speculate that domesticated wolves assisted their hunting. But . . . well, there was another reason why we called this conference before luncheon.’
Luncheon? Just bloody call it lunchtime. Katrine suppressed a flicker of class rage and refocused her attention on the next slide that appeared on-screen: a photograph of a trench filled with hundreds if not thousands of bones, in all shapes and sizes.
The charnel house was lit by powerful lights mounted on metal stands at the head and foot of the long gutter. From the pit, the macabre grimaces of incomplete human skulls drew the eye. Jawless, they peered over the surrounding bones at what may have been the first living human faces to gape about the cave in twelve millennia.
‘A bank of sediment on the south side of the cave that survived the cliff-fall contained over five thousand individual animal and human bones, interred together. So we can be certain that this cave was associated with sustained butchery, operating at recurring intervals across a thousand years.
‘From the wear on the bone awls and flint scrapers recovered from this level of the site, we know what created the myriad cuts and scratches on the examined bones. And what took place here was a great deal of skinning, filleting and dismemberment, as well as the stripping of tougher tendons from carcasses, perhaps to manufacture rope or even thread . . . on all of the remains.’
Katrine’s spine tensed. What’s he saying? Did they . . .
A camera flashed at the front. The rustling in the room ceased.
The speaker raised his voice as if his throat were dry.
‘In this phase of the excavation, the process mim
icked the purpose of a police forensic team at a crime scene. Or that of the United Nations inspecting the evidence of war crimes. You see, the teeth marks on most of the examined bones are unmistakably human.
‘For a settlement with a carnivorous diet, we cannot fathom why cannibalism occurred on this scale when other food sources appeared to be plentiful. Or perhaps there was a scarcity of food at the climax of the Last Glacial Interstadial to account for this behaviour. But, between glaciations, the inhabitants of the Brickburgh caves were engaged in a systematic, industrialised practice of nutritional cannibalism.’
Murmurs gathered momentum the length and breadth of the room: indistinguishable mutters as if the journalists were talking into their lapels, afraid of being heard. Only the blonde heads of the A-listers up front appeared more alert at this whiff of blood in the air.
The whispering continued until the speaker finished drinking from a glass of water and cleared his throat. ‘To make absolutely certain that we were looking at interpersonal trauma within this community, an extensive forensic investigation was carried out by our colleagues at several British universities. This established a more precise idea of how these people died. From an eventual assemblage of single body parts, and from the angle of the cuts in neck vertebrae, we were able to ascertain that nearly all of the victims were decapitated while lying face-down.
‘The removal of the heads probably occurred after death. Other bones matched to the same skulls, particularly the ribs, revealed scars resulting from violent blows, caused by spear points or blunt trauma from hand-axes’ – the speaker paused ‘– occurring prior to the remains being butchered and processed for food.’
Kat guessed it was one thing to know this and another to articulate it in public.
‘But whether we examined the remains of human or horse, elk or ox, the same tools were used in these distasteful preparations. For example, we know that a bone tool resembling a spatula was inserted into the mouth to break the jaws free of the skull, in order to make the softer tissues in the mandibles accessible for consumption. And we can be fairly certain that the facial features, the eyes, lips, ears, noses and even the tongues were defleshed. Cut and scraped away carefully, along with the muscles surrounding the skull on the brow and at the sides and rear of the head.