The Reddening

by Adam Nevill

  The rhythmic thump of something solid against a hollow object replaced the thunder: a sound that encouraged her to picture a wooden vessel being struck. Then she imagined that something harder and denser than wood was being hit, like a hollow rock.

  The recording ended.

  Helene inserted a third disc into her machine: one marked by a star and three exclamation marks after the title: ‘Second Cove at Whaleham Point’.

  Complete silence.

  She checked the clip’s duration on the audio player’s graphic: two minutes remaining. But she was still hearing nothing at twenty seconds and was about to stop the segment when an exhalation made her start. A tiny cough preceded absolute silence that resumed for another twenty seconds.

  An animal?

  At forty-six seconds, the sound of trickling water was unmistakable. The water may have been trickling over the rocks of what she presumed was the cove of the disc’s title. It was unceasing for fifteen seconds before the running liquid was joined by another cough, this one in the distance.

  Only when she heard an infant crying, a noise she was highly attuned to, did Helene sit upright and rewind the recording. She slipped off the headphones to make sure that it wasn’t Valda next door. No, the cry had been on the recording.

  She replayed that part of the track. There it was again, behind the sound of running water. Though surely that was the cry of a bird or an animal near the crevice, or inside it? But, God, that had sounded just like a child. The clip finished.

  Helene exchanged the CD for a fourth disc: ‘Slagcombe Sands & inside cliff crevice/cave @ Whaleham Point’. This one had also been festooned with stars and exclamation marks.

  The recording had been edited and began with an audio commotion: a sequence of sounds expanding her imagination into the image of a pebble rolling around a stone bowl, continuously. That’s what the noise made her think of: a dry pebble, small and smooth, circling the curved interior of a bowl. This continued until a word appeared inside her headphones.

  Or almost a word: crom-creel-hhom. That was how she imagined it being spelled phonetically. The word was followed by the suggestion of a large throat swallowing.

  And again, wind travelled through a hollow pipe. No notes, but a noise similar to Valda enclosing a tube with her lips and blowing through it. Only this was a thin continuous hush of air: one that grew until it filled her headphones, right before the soundfile abruptly ended.

  Helene checked her watch. Getting on now but she no longer felt tired. Instead, she was intrigued, even unnerved.

  She picked up the final compact disc, entitled: ‘Redstone Crossroads. Quarry on Farmland’. The labelling was embellished with the subtitle ‘Money shot’. This was Lincoln’s last recording and he’d made it two weeks before he disappeared. Helene moved her fingertips over the surface of the disc in the place her brother’s hand would have rested as he’d written the title.

  The soundfile began with water trickling at some distance from the microphone, continuing until it was broken at sixteen seconds by a disturbance that might have issued from an animal. A kind of rumbling and lowing. Moments later, when the noise was repeated, she equated the sound to a man groaning. Though surely the reverberation was too deep for a man, the sound originating from a much larger chest capacity. Maybe a cow or bull?

  A fresh groan lengthened before being abruptly choked off by a bark. So something that was not a man, but maybe a farm animal or wild animal, had been drawn to the water and had issued the noises?

  Helene replayed the segment but the noise still suggested that it might possess both human and animal origins. Before she could consider this further, from out of the watery distance the infant’s cry reissued. Only this time the wail was smothered by a pig-like grunt in the foreground, near the microphone.

  A bellow followed, coughed with force from a muscular throat. And again she thought of a bull.

  The juvenile cries drifted nearer the microphone. An animal imitating a child?

  A rattle deep in a phlegm-filled throat.

  A savage feline hiss.

  Whatever Lincoln had recorded had been angry.

  Again, the hiss. Might that be a great cat?

  A rumbling growl, emerging from the pit of a large stomach.

  A fox? A badger? But even when agitated, Helene couldn’t readily imagine those creatures being responsible for these noises. Though how would she know? She was no expert on wildlife.

  When the growling ceased, silence ensued, bringing her more relief than she was comfortable acknowledging.

  She suspected she might have been caught out by a practical joke played by her dead brother. But as these were the last sounds he’d ever recorded, before leaping to his death from a bridge, his excitable, confused states of mind and drug use found an abrupt, momentary connection in his sister’s thoughts: a sudden synthesis occurring between a sense of her brother and the horrid recordings, as if a fatal inevitability had always shadowed his experimental attitude to life.

  The clip petered to its conclusion but was far from done with her. From the middle distance the microphone picked up more of the animals, because there must have been more than one contributor and these creatures were really distressed. Gut-deep rumbles ascended into sharp, pained bleats, as if expelled from the muzzles of awful, oversized lambs.

  And yet was that not the snarly yipping of a dog or a fox that she was hearing too? Though surely nothing so small could posses such a powerful range of cries.

  The cacophony grew, the intensification matched by her certainty that the cries possessed no possible origin inside human throats. This section of the recording effortlessly created an accompanying mental imagery: of brawny, monstrous shapes skittering and fighting within darkness, perhaps after detecting a man’s scent on the intrusive equipment buried inside their cave.

  Helene reached for the volume control as a series of swinish bleats descended to a resumption of a growling behind closed jaws. Large jaws. And what kind of mouth was she now imagining, with black lips quivering as it emitted that snarl? An idea of yellow-brown teeth and discoloured gums, so horribly moist, snapped at her nerves.

  Helene thought of pit-bull dogs. Idiotic teenage boys on the estate were dragged about the local park behind them. How quickly she’d sweep Valda off her feet at the first sighting of the dogs, while their juvenile escorts would cry, ‘Y’all right, she loves kids.’ So maybe her brother had recorded, at a remote location in Devon, a wild or rabid dog?

  Didn’t people holiday, keep second homes and caravans and make ice cream down there? Had these noises occurred in Equatorial Africa, she’d have found the recordings far easier to accept than their actual origins in Devon. Lincoln’s recordings were absurdly incongruous with what she knew of the place, which also wasn’t much, admittedly.

  Without warning, a high-pitched laugh erupted from the glottal medley.

  Helene flinched.

  It resembled gibberish uttered by a madman, or a shriek from an exotic animal that only sounded as if words existed within the cry. How would she ever know? But as the noises became increasingly apelike, the cries appeared to her ears too cruelly amused for a creature lacking human intelligence.

  Mercifully, the ‘laugh’ dwindled, until only a trickling of water remained inside her headphones. When the clip fizzed to white noise she was sure she’d never play the recording again, nor any of the other discs from Lincoln’s box.

  Helene left her room, walked across the landing and sat in the doorway of Valda’s room to watch her daughter sleep.

  6

  Two weeks later.

  Did you walk here, little brother? And here? There too? Did your scruffy hiking boots stand upon this spot? Did you crouch and take in this view? Did the sea breeze ruffle your red hair?

  Google Maps, a walkers’ guidebook and the scribbles on the CDs had enabled Helene to identify the inlets where her brother recorded the weird soundfiles. At first light, she found the first two sites.

 
; Each unremarkable cove had been near Divilmouth harbour, where she was staying, and each rugged aperture between the sea and forested cliff-sides had contained a plethora of crevices and fissures. Inside a couple of those her brother’s microphones must have picked up the sighs and grumbles and the tinkling of hidden streams inside the earth.

  A good seven-mile hike had then stretched ahead of her to Whaleham Point, the site of his penultimate recording. Inland from there, near a farm at Redstone Cross, he’d captured the nightmarish animal cries recorded in his final SonicGeo clip. Those were the last two sites she planned to visit: curious monuments to the summer before his smile vanished from this life.

  Save the bridge near Bristol, which she never wanted to see, only those places significant to him at the end interested her. There was no time for Dartmoor, a place he’d explored for ten months before Brickburgh. But right here, during his final few weeks alive, her little brother had seemed happy and enthused while living out of his tent and scrabbling round these cliffs.

  And yet, his inner life at that time remained as alien to her as the darkness inside the caves he’d explored alone: as much of a mystery as the strange subterranean songs that had called him here.

  She’d come to better understand him at the end and to decipher what he’d been doing with such enthusiasm. But mostly, she’d come to bid him farewell, as she had failed to do six years before.

  Four days at the coast was all she could give him, with two consumed travelling between Devon and Walsall. As every hour had to count she’d lit out early. Knowing that it was probably going to be an emotional day, she’d also braced herself mentally and counted the empty coast path ahead of her as a blessing. She didn’t want anyone to see her talking to herself or crying. It was hard to cry at home because of Valda and she’d not had a single day apart from her daughter in six years.

  Walking from Divilmouth, she’d been struck by how the land changed, the difficulty of moving through it increasing rapidly. Twelve or so miles might have separated the two harbours, though, had someone shown her two sets of photographs of the coastline, one set near Divilmouth and the second set near Brickburgh, and claimed that the two sets had been taken in different countries, she’d have believed them.

  The land corralling Divilmouth’s harbour and its ranks of millionaires’ yachts was made soft and green by great capes of fir trees. The place reminded her of Switzerland, but also the tropics: pines in woods interchanging with lush palms in private gardens. A town built into cliffs and hills festooned with enormous, beautiful houses, arranged in curving rows above the mouth of a broad, glittering estuary: the sands the colour of unbleached sugar, the residents’ yachts moored below their mansions. Boats upright and gleaming like a regiment of royal cavalry, their lances vertical and white. It’s why she’d chosen to stay there.

  Initially enchanted as she’d surveyed the harbour, when she’d had time to dwell on the matching lavish lifestyles of the residents she’d become deferential, before eventually feeling excluded. She’d also wondered, when these yachts had sailed along the coast in the past, if any of them had spotted Lincoln’s little tent in one of the valleys or combes, the thin nylon walls shuddering from an exposure to the winds that now buffeted her.

  Once clear of Divilmouth, Lincoln’s final expedition had taken him, as it now took her, up and down a hilly collar of farmland above a serrated shoreline: a place almost bereft of human habitation for miles beyond a handful of farms and one Land Trust property. Above the sea the continuous range of mountainous mounds might have been the barrows of forgotten gods.

  The surface had been wind-flayed into long, coarse wheat-like grass and brittle red heather, roamed by black sheep and small herds of jet ponies. Thorny hedges and black trees divided the turf into a patchwork eiderdown. Valleys emptied streams onto gunmetal sands. Crude faces, roughly hewn from dark volcanic rock, glowered over the empty gouges of coves that required ropes to reach.

  When she was long clear of the yachts and big white mansions of Divilmouth, even the water below her boots on the coast path had looked unsafe for swimming. When cloud from the moors drifted west, the colour of the sea transformed from the turquoise of Aztec jewellery to slate.

  She’d passed two ancient kilns, each covered in ivy, a cement gun emplacement from the Second World War and an abandoned cider mill. All were in ruins. Old, ravaged and scarred, but a land no longer interfered with.

  Halfway between the harbours as she neared Whaleham Point, the sense of solitude before such a vast sky and sea had been intense enough to trigger flurries of panic.

  How had her brother withstood it? Spending week after week here alone? Or had he shared the remote landscape with a companion? But who? Not Vicky, the young woman he’d been seeing in a long and fractious relationship. A sullen, possessive girl with a round face who’d attended his funeral and been overly conscious of what she’d looked like. Which impelled Helene to ponder how much kindness her brother had been shown by the girls in his life, including her.

  She’d rushed into adulthood and away from home, powered by self-importance and a slow-burning humiliation about her origins. Nothing had worked out: her face had never been a fit in the places she’d tried to fit herself into, opportunities had been scarce, wages low, lovers immature or incompatible. Worn out, she’d eventually dragged herself home and briefly hooked up with an old boyfriend who’d always been kind. Mitch. And become pregnant within two months. He lived in Australia now and they had little contact beyond bank transfers. He’d shown no interest in Valda.

  As she walked up a slope to a distant bench perched near the cliff edge, her thoughts ambled to the question of her brother’s untroubled veneer and its incompatibility with the manner in which he’d ended himself. According to their mother, the easygoing persona Lincoln had adopted in his teens, the mask, had lasted until his death. Chilled: that’s how people had described Lincoln. He’d even been optimistic about his future, despite all the evidence that he’d nothing to be optimistic about. This confounded Helene. Her brother had been a hippy trapped in the wrong chapter of history, but to take your own life . . .

  At the top of the hill she could barely breathe from the exertion of her ascent but her brother seemed to fill her, briefly yet frantically, as if his very spirit struggled for her attention: a sense of him that was too fleeting for her to relish before it passed as quickly as an arresting dream that she couldn’t claw back upon waking.

  Tired and becoming tearful, she sat on the wooden bench above Slagcombe Sands. Across the beach, the mossy claw of Whaleham Point reared; gulls circled the limestone spur like pieces of litter caught in an eddy of wind.

  Somewhere over there Lincoln had recorded the curious piping and the crying infant sounds. Inland, up in those stark hills that Helene turned her gaze upon, he’d then recorded the awful screaming of the fighting animals in an old quarry.

  The merest echo in her memory of those terrible cries made her wish she were not alone. She suddenly wanted to see a walker; even one in the distance would do.

  And where was this famous dig, the cave filled with bones that had been discovered the year after Lincoln passed? This coastline didn’t look celebrated. Nothing was marked. But she was not surprised that the cave had been discovered relatively recently. There was nothing to draw a crowd here and it was dangerous for walkers.

  The sight of a distant cove, directly beneath her toes, made her dizzy. Uncomfortably exposed to the vastness of the air and sea, she almost felt compelled to be drawn forward and over the edge. Gravity itself seemed different here, altered: combining with the gusts of wind it seemed to move up and down in bands that made her too light on her feet.

  Lincoln used to say he suffered vertigo merely from peering up at tall buildings from the ground. Not once had he mentioned bridges to her or their mother. His choice of exit from his life made no sense; the sheer improbability of it had always made her feel distant from his death. Going out like that just wasn’t Lincoln. But w
hat do we really know of anyone?

  Helene left the bench, her legs stiff. Even in such an open, uncluttered space her thoughts confined her. Despite her fitness from years of swimming, she had less energy here. A late winter cold was trapped by the rock and bit more keenly when up so high.

  She looked down to Slagcombe Sands, a gritty shoreline fringed with ferns and a wetland filled with reeds that reminded her of sun-bleached wheat. Where the baby cried. ‘Slagcombe Sands. Inside cliffs @ Whaleham Point’. So maybe he’d installed his microphones in the distant dark hollows and slits that she could see at the foot of gnarled Whaleham Spur. With the wind slapping his head and the sea’s tumult crashing inside his ears, he must have implanted a listening device inside one of those caves at low tide. His older sister’s respect for her brother increased tenfold.

  And at that moment, out of the very land and water, came a piercing light. Not a warm, golden light, nor the soft seaside light of Torbay that she’d driven through to reach the guesthouse in Divilmouth. Nor was it similar to the bitter white light of the north she’d known as a student in Lancashire. The light here was white-silver and pewter, like it marked a passage into another world or time. At its most concentrated and brightest, where spikes of sunlight pierced the cloud canopy, the light struck the battleship grey of the sea like a welding torch, becoming too strong to look into with unprotected eyes.

  So there was magic here and beauty. Amidst her discomforts she managed to acknowledge this. This place was not idyllic, but here was a raw and wild beauty, one that inspired awe. Lincoln had used that very word. Here, right here, he’d found something special.