The Reddening

by Adam Nevill

  But at least for a while, the sex with Steve had expelled the foul images of the cave and of Graham that she’d brought home with her. Though to be of any use the following day, Kat had known how badly she'd needed to sleep. She’d closed her eyes and tried to get back to sleep and passed out a second time, in a manner akin to being sucked into the darkness beneath her bed. And her dreams had quickly filled with other curious things.

  A stone axe, shaped like a pendulum, near-purple in the thin light of memory. Knapped to produce sharp edges.

  The toothy spike of a bone awl.

  Thin notes from a flute fashioned from bone. A reedy lightness, beautiful and ethereal and filling a smoke-filled darkness.

  Music that summoned skeletal human faces, the tops of their heads chipped away like egg shells . . .

  The perforated bone of a wolf’s head mounted upon human form . . .

  Her running, then falling, as if one leg was shorter than the other, into a cave, into the void. Dropping into the false floor . . .

  A bulbous Venus. Smooth clay turning as if on a carousel, round and round. Curves and raised contours catching red firelight . . .

  A voice in the darkness, the gibbering of a man . . . or was it a dog?

  A wet thud . . . the sucking of soft tissue . . .

  Kat had sat bolt upright at that point, breathing quickly, bilious with nausea, the echo of the heavy thud resounding. From where did the sound originate? She’d been sure it had arisen from inside the cottage. Not a noise she’d have created herself or could have attributed to anything but murder.

  She’d glanced at Steve and wondered whether to wake him. She’d not wanted to be alone after the second nightmare.

  But once brighter, waking thoughts had banished the resonance of the wet thump, she’d climbed out of bed. After dousing the bedroom lights, she’d gone down the narrow stairs to the ground floor.

  The cottage had once been the home of a quarryman and his large family, a hundred years gone. The past was all around. And wouldn’t local history now make her more aware of itself? Bad memories never died. They only blurred, became smooth and heavy and not so spiky and sharp.

  The small building had been her sanctuary for a few years. Two-up, two-down, with a front door that opened onto a lane that ran to the shops in Ivycombe: a home purchased from the sale of a one-bedroom flat in a depressing area of London, at a time in her life when she’d given up any hope of ever living in an actual house again with two storeys and a garden.

  Her home was brightened by electricity, not kerosene or coal or wood. Magnolia coated the walls of the warm, centrally heated building. A wide-screen television dominated the cosy living area and she’d turned that on to rebury her upsetting dreams. Had the other journalists shared her lurid thoughts?

  Kat had soon looked to the curtains and pondered what really surrounded her home: would the landscape henceforth only remind her of what had once roamed these valleys and of what had been done beneath them? Was her funny turn going to become permanent?

  Butchery.

  Processing.

  How far away were the caves from her front door? Six or seven miles, she’d estimated, and situated in a place she didn’t know well: all that empty space surrounding Brickburgh harbour. She only ever drove through it to get somewhere else.

  Why would she go there? No one did. What was there? Farmland. Redhill, a dying village. Fields carpeting the rank spaces beneath the earth, filled with the chewed evidence of industrialised murder: the grimy fragments hidden for thousands of years but exhibited anew in her sleep.

  She’d pushed back at an early-hour dread that there were no longer any solutions to the worst places and the worst kinds of human behaviour. She’d never ordinarily entertain such thoughts, but the early morning news had been sufficient indication that such desperate times thrived once more, were always striving to reappear and not only beyond the borders of the first world. An exposure to the bloodiest episodes of human prehistory would make anyone dream the way she had done. Surely?

  Kat had turned the television off and in the sudden vacuum of silence had briefly warmed with gratitude that she was having her time then: in a home that wasn’t a damp cave, inhabited with reddened flesh and dirty teeth within crude faces, where the black air must have reeked of carrion, and skeins of smoke been backlit by flickers of firelight.

  Filthy hands, slippery with the fluids of what was stuffed inside bearded mouths.

  In her imagination, the elegant modern room around the sofa briefly recast itself as stained and streaked with charcoal. She’d winced at that, wanting to punch her own face to knock it out of her head. She’d just seen it all too, hadn’t she, when asleep? How did those things get inside you and display themselves with such vigour?

  Kat had willed herself to think of something else. Wrapping herself tightly within her gown, she’d curled up on the sofa and flicked through the local paper.

  Close to 3 a.m. she’d thought of her need to redraft her feature first thing. It was to be followed by five hours’ work in the press office of the arts centre, at the Land Trust offices in Totnes, where she worked part-time. And the longer she’d stayed awake the more she’d also yearned for the sweet-sour taste of cold white wine.

  That was a reckless compulsion: momentary. Easier than ever to ignore, to wait out and let go. Kat hadn’t attended a meeting or called a sponsor in three years. She’d not felt the need.

  She’d padded into the tiny kitchen and sipped from a glass of water. Washed some crockery, checked the door locks, made sure the oven rings were turned off. Only then had she returned to bed.

  Sleep had returned as her wariness of it subsided. But sleep had again brought pictures and frantic motions of spiky shadows on red walls of rock. That third time, there had been screams too and children had wept.

  She’d awoken a third time and stayed awake until sunrise, stricken with a crazy notion, the kind of idea that appears in the early hours, that when so many old bones are disinterred from the earth, things were never going to be the same again in that place.

  EXCAVATIONS

  5

  Two years later.

  Recordings made by her dead brother were one click away. Lincoln had been gone six years.

  In Helene’s bedroom, the laptop screen cast the sole illumination. Next door, her daughter had finally succumbed to sleep. Each evening the pressure to make meaningful use of mum-time quickly transformed into anxiety, undermining the very possibility of relaxing. How determined little Valda was to occupy those last two hours of her day. She’d never been a child that could be alone for long.

  At last, in the warm, dark silence about her bed, the residual static of irritation generated by the nightly struggle to settle Valda prickled less. Pebbles of tension eroded to sand in her neck, back and shoulders. A second glass of wine unclenched her mind. Only the ghost of a grimace remained as a trace behind her face, a fading mask. No longer committed to domestic and maternal tasks, Helene yawned. Most evenings her eyelids dropped and locked up shop before ten.

  Partly from anger at Lincoln for taking his own life, Helene had never played the discs spread out on the duvet. She’d been the only person available to empty her brother’s disorderly flat in Worcester, six years before. She’d found the recordings inside a plastic box with ‘SonicGeo’ written on the lid.

  With the exception of smoking skunk and experimenting with legal highs inside his grubby one-bedroom nest above a bookie’s in Worcester, Lincoln’s sole and final obsession, as far as she knew, had been the recording of ambient subterranean sounds.

  Through the concluding year of his life, the search for these curious noises had returned the excitement of childhood to her brother, until he’d jumped from the Severn Bridge. He’d only been thirty.

  When the police located his car near the bridge they’d assumed the obvious. His camping gear had been stuffed inside the boot. There had been no note, which was odd, and Lincoln’s body was never found. But bod
ies weren’t always recovered when people jumped from that bridge, the police had told her and her mum.

  In the garage of her little town house in Walsall, provided by a housing association, Helene had kept her brother’s effects: boxes of books, comics, the strange music and weird horror films, his worn camping equipment, the recording devices found in his car and a box of compact discs no doubt crackling with weird sounds. All of it had been shrouded in polythene for six years.

  At the time of his death, Helene had been too worried and preoccupied with a difficult pregnancy to go through his things, and her rage at her younger brother for ending his life had sustained itself until the last five minutes of his funeral. Only then, in the front row of pews, had a powerful sense of him come upon her. An inexplicable but comforting sensation, perhaps it even belied the madness of her grief.

  She’d given birth for the first time four days after the funeral. There had been no capacity for mourning since and his possessions had remained a symbol of waste: a testament to his downward spiral, maybe even contributing factors to wherever his head had been at the end.

  Caring for Valda had been the only thing keeping her and her mother upright ever since.

  At the time Lincoln went missing, mishap and misfortune had maintained an insidious habit of taking over her family: a momentum that gathered pace until there’d seemed no bottom to their woes. Only one year after her dad passed from prostate cancer and her mother’s diabetes and arthritis flared to disabling levels, Lincoln had gone and done that. Inflicted more tragedy upon them. She’d never imagined that her anger at him could have served as so sturdy a mast amidst grief’s storm.

  While she’d been swollen, suffering abdominal agony with pre-eclampsia and back pain so severe she could barely stand straight most days, Lincoln had jumped from a bridge. Weeks away from becoming an uncle – an idea that had thrilled him – he’d taken his own life. As Valda’s uncle he’d have adopted a major role too because Helene would have made her younger brother take one. They’d needed him to be around: her and her baby and their old mum.

  Helene had returned to work when Valda was three. That arrangement, even when assisted by her mother, a childminder and fifteen free hours at a nursery, had hardly been easier to manage than being at home alone with a child for the preceding three years. But now Valda was showing a greater tendency towards independent play and developing a better awareness of personal safety, Helene had found herself thinking about Lincoln far more than at any time since he’d died.

  The postponement of recognising that he was truly gone had never helped. The idea that he was still around was always hard to suppress: him being out there, somewhere, awaiting another fixation or obsession with a new group of people, or a preoccupation with a peculiar hobby. Even without his emails or texts for six years, she’d a hunch that he’d still come back when he was ready, like he’d always done.

  Lincoln had yet to return.

  His final recording was dated two weeks before he’d vanished and was made around the last time she’d heard from him. He’d sent an email too, which she’d since copied into a Word document:

  Going back to Devon, Sisco, then I promise to check in with Ma. Have some amazing recordings from South Dartmoor and Brickburgh. Going back for more.

  A website, GaiaCries, are going to post my collection. The best bits. I’m getting an album on there! An album! This stuff is so freaky they thought I’d faked it. It’s better than anything I’ve heard on their site, recorded in all those train tunnels, nuclear bunkers and disused mines.

  Think I’m only happy inside a tent too, Sisco. I have been in a state of ecstasy and awe in Brickburgh all summer. And no, it’s not only down to the weed ;-)

  Have uploaded some stuff for you to play to the baby – seals in a cove [here].

  Promise I’ll call mum.

  Lin xxxxxxx

  Mooching online, Helene had found GaiaCries, a website for investigators of the earth’s ambient soundtracks. A forum for contributors who set up field labs and recorded subterranean noises in a range of uninhabited places: sound files made in disused urban structures, industrial complexes and the few wild places remaining on earth. There were even listings for Chernobyl and Area 51.

  Down in the dark, forgotten places, the unobserved mines and tunnels, empty shafts, extinct volcanoes and caves at low tide, it seemed there was a surprising amount of sound produced by the earth’s shiftings or piped from the rusting monoliths discarded by man’s exploitations. Accidental performances with melody absent, rhythm obscure and unintended, the instruments utterly indifferent to an audience.

  To punish herself, Helene recalled her own uninterest when her brother first enthused about his recordings. At their mum’s house, in the spring of his final year, he’d jabbered breathlessly to her about his endeavours and produced a collection of wires and tiny black boxes from his greasy rucksack. Underwhelmed and frustrated with his inability to get his act together, she’d barely glanced at his equipment.

  Lincoln had always sought her approval for his enthusiasms but she’d never offered even feigned interest. His attempts at making strange electronic music amidst a cloud of cannabis smoke had instinctively evoked a competitive resistance. Her hardwired habit of rejecting the past, her hometown and the very life that she was more or less trapped inside now, had prevented her from seeing her brother up close as a young man. Her final act to her sibling had been to hurt him with indifference.

  She’d always pushed him away. She’d never encouraged him, nor stopped criticising him. And for that she disliked herself far more than she disliked herself for a myriad other reasons.

  The link in Lincoln’s final email had led to cloud storage. She’d checked it at the time of the funeral. But there’d been no file of ‘seals in a cove’. Her brother had deleted every file, emptying the account the day before he’d jumped from the Severn Bridge.

  Despite a terrifying recklessness with MDMA, at least Lincoln had seemed energised and happy in his final year. And that was all she and her mum had clung to. Only he couldn’t have been happy. It must have been evidence of a bipolar mania.

  There’d not been much else to salvage from his life. Her brother had been rat-shit poor at the end with only £170 in a bank account and an unpaid credit card debt of £10,000.

  She’d never known anyone work so many terrible jobs and give up so many terrible jobs as Lincoln had done, often quitting a position in less than an hour. He’d once recounted how, one Christmas, he couldn’t pass through the main doors of a warehouse on his first day of temporary work. He’d described the experience in typical fashion: ‘a strange force’ had filled him with a ‘paralysing dread’ and he’d known that a ‘part of his soul would die on the other side of the metal roller doors’. He’d walked home in the rain, made poached eggs on toast and returned to bed to eat them.

  Little brother.

  Helene smiled and wiped the first tears from her eyes. The turn in her thoughts shuffled memories uncollected for decades: his freckled face, a cowlick of hair sticking up on his crown, his cockerel’s comb, a boy, grinning, wearing a patterned jumper knitted by Nan. A brown and orangey haze to that photograph. Not even a proper memory but a picture in Mum’s leatherette photo album.

  But never a boy who’d stayed upset for long: that she remembered without recourse to family photographs. When they were kids she’d regularly been mean to him but he’d always come back to her, his tear-sodden eyes doleful with a hope that his older sister would become receptive to his prancing, restless antics once more. And how she’d made him cry was unbearable now. That little boy. Why must she remember that?

  As if it were a heavy, cold stone, remorse pressed her heart. Her pained love for her brother suddenly transmuted into a yearning for the child in the next room. The need for her own choked her and she vowed to never hurt her daughter’s feelings, never discourage her, never allow herself to transfer her frustration, her resentment, or to get too angry.

 
Helene stopped crying. She pushed at the painful memories until they sank through the floor of her mind. She slipped a disc inside her laptop and braced herself for the sound of his voice. Messily scrawled on the disc was a title: ‘Divilmouth: Crevice above Wheel Cove & Crevice in cliffs @ Ore Cove’.

  Lincoln’s voice never materialised. A mercy, but whatever he’d recorded was faint. She adjusted the volume, slipped on headphones and only then did the sound of the sea, foaming over rocks, rush inside her ears.

  Eyes closed, she listened to the water’s swishing entrance and its withdrawal from an enclosed space. Nothing else existed. The rhythm was soothing.

  Helene changed the disc. She selected: ‘Cliff cave. Whaleham Point’. The disc was labelled with a star and exclamation mark, classifying a priority that was lost on her.

  This recording contained a rumbling reminiscent of thunder. The piece was six minutes long but at two minutes the soundscape altered and she was reminded of air passing through a pipe. Not music, no notes, but a continuous funnelling of air through a narrow aperture: perhaps a recording from a subterranean crevice where he’d stuck a microphone. It made her feel cold.

  When close to ejecting the disc, her head abruptly cocked alert at the sound of a distant voice, or voices.

  Yes, what might have been a small crowd emerged, their speech muffled by distance and by the flow of air in the foreground. She increased the volume but no words or individual voices became discernible: the mumble remained a crowd, passing away.

  Air rising underground might mimic voices.

  Thunder returned to the background. Maybe an earth movement had caused the rumble. Without visuals or an explanation, anything could become something within a stimulated imagination. And yet she received her first intimation of why her brother was so fascinated with ‘SonicGeo’: how natural sounds extracted from an environment acted upon the mind, creating a mysterious sense of unobserved activity inside an uninhabited place. Lincoln would also have been stoned when he’d played these back.