The Reddening

by Adam Nevill

  ‘This technique is consistent with the processing of animals for food at this time across Europe. From a close scrutiny of the cuts impressed into the skull bones we can even establish the actual angle at which the individual’s heads were held by one hand, while a second hand operated a sharp tool to remove the flesh and soft organs from the exterior.

  ‘Rather gruesome, I’m afraid. It may even be upsetting for your readers and viewers. But we must remember, despite our sensibilities in the civilised world, that our species has resorted to cannibalism throughout its history. Even in recent history in some parts of the world.

  ‘But the evidence from the Brickburgh caves chiefly indicates that there was no difference between the preparation and consumption of animal and human carcasses. Here butchery found an equivalency between man and beast that we’ve not witnessed since the twentieth century in Russia and North Korea.

  ‘We must remember that the brain, bone marrow and the soft body tissues all contained an important nutritional value in cold uncultivated environments. These food resources were extracted from the broken bones by gnawing and chewing actions that we’ve matched to human teeth. So these human remains were not scavenged by other animals.

  ‘So far, we have assembled the mostly complete remains of two hundred and seventy-six people who died and were processed in this way. The eldest appears to be a forty-three-year-old male who was suffering from what must have been very painful gums, infected by a tooth abscess. But neither women or children were spared. The youngest victim was three and appeared to be perfectly healthy at the time of death.’

  A woman towards the middle of the room stood up, apologised to those at her side and left the room through a side door. Even Katrine wanted to shout, Bastards!

  ‘This trench became, in effect, a rubbish tip, or landfill, for the discards or unused materials from the community’s food supply. Interestingly, we also uncovered evidence of a twelve-metre-long hearth, close to the entrance of the cave, but the human remains do not appear to have been cooked.’

  Attention was rapt: Kat would have heard a metatarsal drop inside the room.

  ‘The crafting of many of the human skulls at the Brickburgh site, as a domestic and cultural centre, is also extraordinary. We’ve observed an identical usage of the human skull in Gough’s Cave in Somerset, but not on this scale. As I’ve mentioned, some of these victims were carefully scalped. Score marks on the skull bone are consistent with this procedure. And in twenty instances, a sharp hammerstone was used to chip away the top of the skull.

  ‘The cranial vault of some victims was of particular importance to this community. The upper part of human heads was often scraped and cleaned before being worked into what has been called a Magdalenian “skull-cup”. We know in more recent cultures that such containers were used to carry liquids and as drinking bowls for ritualistic purposes.’

  Upon the screen what looked like an ancient but intact pottery bowl appeared. Mottled on the outside like a dark hen’s egg, with visible impressions of tributaries across the inner surface, where blood vessels had once supplied a living, thinking, feeling brain.

  Kat wouldn’t have guessed it was the top of a human head if she hadn’t been told. And now she’d seen it, and learned of how a human form was reduced to a cup and a pile of chewed bones, she wished she hadn’t. For her feature, the details of the butchery and cannibalism would have to be toned down and reduced to bare hints. She knew her editor, Sheila, wouldn’t print most of what had been shared with the press today. Their readership was predominantly elderly, affluent and conservative.

  Considering the heat and lack of oxygen, Katrine didn’t judge the younger woman, sitting three rows down, who at first seemed to be coughing with her head bowed. But when the barking girl was identified by two self-conscious hotel stewards, standing at the side of the room, they soon plucked her out of the seating and led her from the conference. The woman had been sick, probably into a coffee beaker. One of the stewards held a paper cup at an arm’s length. Katrine held her breath.

  ‘But moving on from the unpleasant evidence of how this early culture sustained itself in a harsh environment, I’d like to share some of the rich evidence suggesting that a sophisticated culture coexisted. One fully immersed in its own religious rites and practices. A community that also skilfully produced some very affecting art, artefacts and funerary rites that demonstrate a great reverence for some of their dead.’

  The speaker couldn’t get the skull-cup off the screen fast enough. A few journalists were already whispering into phones as if they’d received a scoop, and Kat guessed the evidence of cannibalism would be exactly that for the tabloids. She could even supply their headline: Cannibal Holocaust: The Prequel.

  Two arms were raised near the front, which encouraged the rising of a dozen more. Two hands clicked fingers.

  ‘We’ll have a Q&A at the end of the presentation,’ the speaker said with a smile. ‘I’d first like to share evidence of these exquisite burials. Twelve in total, recovered in the section of the site excavated so far.’

  The new slide featured an intact human skeleton lying in a dusty recess on the floor of the cave. The bones had been carefully exhumed and brushed clean by the archaeologists.

  ‘Deeper inside the cave and interred within what we’ve been calling the “false floor”, we’ve uncovered the remains of twelve humans, all female and all aged between thirty-seven and forty-eight.

  ‘Their remains are in an excellent state of preservation. We can see that each individual was carefully placed in a nest and surrounded with a range of remarkable grave goods. Some of this material’s manufacture dates from at least twenty thousand years earlier. So artefacts were being reused. The occupants of the graves have become known, on-site, as The Red Queens of Brickburgh.’

  As soon as the speaker uttered the regal title every journalist in the room bowed to make a note.

  ‘We’ve arrived at this term because each corpse must have been painted with iron oxide, a red pigment extracted from local stone. It would have been processed into a dye by these people. Ample vestiges of this haematite have been recovered from each nest. These interments were ritualised.

  ‘We’ve also recovered a variety of animal skulls from each grave. Objects that must have offered a special significance to these individuals, perhaps even a spiritual status.

  ‘The first queen uncovered still held the preserved skull of a hyena, Crocuta crocuta, and a relic at least twenty thousand years older than she was. An animal that was once the size of a modern African lion. This might have been rediscovered within the cave, or even brought here by the group as they transported their culture into the area.

  ‘The other queens were also buried with skulls, though of wolves in nine cases, an animal indigenous at the time. Interestingly, one of the queens was interred with the much older skull of a giant cave lion, Panthera spelaea, once endemic to this area. Another held the skull of the scimitar cat, Homotherini. That species went extinct around the time the cave was abandoned at the onset of the Younger Dryas.

  ‘This burial practice and culture are similar to what has been found at various German sites. And as with those continental burials, at Brickburgh we also uncovered a large number of manmade grave goods. Carven images and simple but beautiful musical instruments.

  ‘And make no mistake, this is figurative art. Each of the flutes was carved from swan wing bones, the longest being forty centimetres in length, the smallest six centimetres. Each instrument has been inscribed with precise and quite sensual images of water birds.’

  A fresh slide on-screen revealed a pair of hands, clad in rubber gloves, gently holding a smooth length of what looked like a pipe of hollowed wood.

  ‘There was once music in this cave. Perhaps music was incorporated into ceremonies, ritual practices. Maybe it was simply a source of pleasure and bonding in hard times. We can only speculate.

  ‘Of the carven artefacts, we know that most were crafted and worked
out of mammoth bone. And most of the carven images appear to be representative of the human female, though the heads of these figures are animal. Hyenas, giant cats, dogs or wolves, we think. But there has been some decay and most of the recovered pieces appear incomplete. They may once have been attached to wooden staves, since decomposed.’

  The carvings on-screen were upright, straight-backed. All missed hands and feet, their abdomens tapered to spikes, but the tiny, blockish spurs of animal ears were unmistakable. Well-proportioned, even elegant figures, but transmitting a distinctly bestial character to Kat. She found the shape and posture of the artefacts subtly aggressive, the worn but barking faces grotesque, even mad with a horrible delight.

  ‘The last item of great interest that I will share today is this exquisite larger figurine of a woman’s body. This item, however, was constructed out of baked clay and mirrors similar Venus figurines that have been recovered from all over Europe from earlier Cro-Magnon sites. Again, we date this figure’s manufacture at around 30,000 BC, some fifteen thousand years before a revival of its significance by this community.’

  Despite the long, sensual curves, Katrine would not have described the black object as ‘exquisite’. A torso missing its head and feet occupied the screen. Suspended against a white background its dark breasts were outsized, pendulous, perhaps suggesting a heaviness with milk. The hips and buttocks were given prominence from the rear and rendered lifelike.

  ‘A tribute, perhaps, to fertility and the continuance of human life.’

  Or its flux and the prolonging of brutality.

  Kat disliked the turn in her thoughts, inevitable whenever she was exposed to the gruesome details of human history.

  Inside the hot room her skin cooled. She closed her eyes and her mind immediately became busy with what had just leered from the screen.

  The speaker called for questions.

  Can I go now?

  * * *

  When that red earth of Brickburgh yawned and revealed its horrors to the archaeologists, Kat was living north of Divilmouth, on the periphery of the affected area. Tucked away in Moorbridge, in her two-bedroom cottage on Kiln Lane, she’d observed the transformative power that spread from the lightless mausoleum to the nearest harbours.

  The discovery of the first cave made headlines, locally and nationally, for a while, and perpetually in academic and scientific journals that fewer eyes read. But two years after a paraglider spotted a crack in a cliff-face in South Devon, the initial excitement was eclipsed into insignificance by a greater fascination about what had been found inside the cave.

  The piles of ghastly, rusticated artefacts extracted from within that cold, pitch-black tomb possessed a unique reach and enduring resonance internationally. Such discoveries generated stories and theories and revisions of what was known about early man. And these speculations, both academic and Fortean, did not quickly fade nor slow. The caves became the biggest deal in living memory for the harbour towns of Brickburgh and Divilmouth.

  In Brickburgh, an ailing, deprived fishing port that had lost out to Brixham’s rise further north, she’d watched the reawakening of a town all but abandoned after the last quarry had closed in the Fifties.

  Further south in the affluent enclave of gleaming yachts and white-walled dream houses that comprised Divilmouth, the air of the caves settled over the town like an enchanted whisper of even more gold than it already possessed.

  After the first exhibition that toured the British Isles and Europe, in Divilmouth and Brickburgh it appeared as if every hotel, inn, guesthouse, B&B, ice-cream parlour, gift shop and fish and chip restaurant swelled with a horde of new faces, while each ferry, car park and narrow rural road rumbled anew with vehicles from elsewhere.

  As if the caves had called out with some silent, summoning dog whistle, tourists from all over the world appeared again to startle the amiable, taciturn and undemonstrative outer reaches of South Devon. We’re on the map. Change is coming. That seemed to be the message, the belief, the impetus. And for a time down there, anything had seemed possible. Even out in Brickburgh’s purposeless, ailing satellite, Redhill – that tired grey village, hanging on amidst the last working farms – the renewal that none had ever thought possible began.

  Kat saw the holiday accommodation near the harbours refurbished, the empty shop units find new tenants, the widening of roads, the council’s dispensing of development grants, the resurrection of ancient and dimly remembered festivals and the arrival of a celebrity chef to open a fish restaurant. Even the odd cruise ship was occasionally seen on the horizon, slowly passing what had come to be known as ‘The Cannibal Coast’.

  But the most noticeable changes all occurred some distance from the actual caves. Across the twelve square miles of hilly land surrounding the caves and where the sea’s mists smothered the coastal combes, things remained resolutely agricultural, as they had done long before the old quarries first opened and long after they’d closed.

  There were a few hiker trails out Redhill way and they proved too difficult for guided tours to take hold. The farmers, as if forming some ancient guardianship of the land, had tended to renew and heighten their border fences and pretty much carry on as they had done for some time. A ring of wagons around the caves.

  But what Kat recalled most about this time of discovery and potential was the night that followed the press conference in Plymouth.

  To her mind it seemed – and this was a mind that went to great lengths to protect itself from the madding crowds it had once known in London – her own past had been strangely exposed by the excavation and her imagination infected by what had been exhumed from those caves.

  * * *

  A cold stone bed lined with bones.

  A collapsed human skeleton scattered about the crumbling skull of a hyena. Thin arms hugging the mottled and fearsome head.

  Red queen.

  Crocuta crocuta.

  Not fully asleep, nor properly awake, but between the two states, Kat’s thoughts had drifted through an edit of the day’s events. They always did. Like having a television show on fast forward, she’d paused her recall to trigger imaginary interactions: how things could have gone, should have gone, would have gone if . . . And through that dark, ruddy ether of her mind’s deep space, these other things, the images, had reappeared and defined themselves.

  Snout raised and seemingly wet, the head alert, a jackal-headed figure of bone had rotated behind her eyes. The erect, footless image had even summoned the distant cacophony of a canine skirmish from the caverns of her mind.

  This had segued into another scene of an indistinct herd of immense beasts, in which a powerful animal had been pulled by the throat to its lumpy knees and then onto its dusty side with a thump that had shaken the frozen earth beneath where . . . she lay?

  The felled beast was then hastily opened by a scrum of busy black heads.

  Snarling becoming laughter . . .

  A dirty hand, holding a black stone, carving flesh from a human face as if it were preparing fish.

  That final imagining had snapped her fully awake. She’d assumed that she’d been asleep and only dreaming, though the nightmare had seemed too vivid for that. There had been a sinking into a smothering darkness just before her nightmare: the sensation of physically dropping away from the room, her bed. Then had come the sensation of a missed step and a sinking into an inner abyss where that bestial head, carved into stone, had grinned and turned. But the defleshing . . .

  She’d sat up. Defleshing, nutritional cannibalism: such terms had not been part of her awareness when she’d stepped inside that day’s press conference. Her vocabulary had acquired a new vernacular of brutality and bloodshed.

  A few moments staring at the newly decorated bedroom ceiling, to clear her mind of such a noisome infestation, had been required.

  No doubt, a discolouration of her imagination had occurred that day in Plymouth: a taint, reanimating memories of what she’d seen in the PowerPoint presentation, had
transformed into these dreamy scenes of her own making. But her curiosity had stopped short of asking how the visions had distinguished themselves by becoming clearer than dreams should be.

  On awaking from the first bad dream, she’d noted the bedroom lights were still on. She and Steve had both been too tired to turn them off after a more intense sexual collision than they usually enjoyed.

  Steve’s slender back had been turned to her. In post-coital slumber his breathing had been muffled yet deep.

  Her boyfriend had been eager to get her into bed after he’d found her dressed in a suit and heels that afternoon. She’d smiled at that. An outfit she’d rarely worn since leaving London years before: a part of her wardrobe she rarely excavated. But the suit and its accessories had stimulated his libido as if she’d become another woman, a new lover.

  And maybe it had been her clothes that had also awoken her reminiscences of the brightly lit-up parts of her former but abandoned life in the capital? A chapter she’d only dared skim-read since moving to South Devon, before swiftly closing that particular book.

  She’d quit a career at its peak. But that wasn’t even half the story and regret was deceptive because what caused regret was never the whole story. But at the press conference, her old uniform had swiftly become a high-maintenance encumbrance with bad memories stitched into the seams. There’d been a reopening of personal tombs that she’d locked away inside the false floor of her own mind: the falls and disgraces. Thoughts of her ex, Graham, were the most insidious recollections of all. As a result, she’d remained irritable for the duration of her journey home, even grinding her teeth as she always did when she thought of him.

  What Kat usually remembered from her past in London was a lingering sinus condition with headaches akin to bullet wounds, the ethanol withdrawals, forgetting to eat, not sleeping then sleeping for twenty hours, her mind and mouth firing as fast as a computer processor, then crashing and stuttering lethargically like a shitty broadband connection for far longer. And being so weary. So tired, bone deep, soul deep.