by Adam Nevill
As soon as it appeared, the brief, silvery glare out at sea was swallowed by cloud.
The wind and sky changed everything, constantly: the colours, the temperature, the light and her perspective of how far she’d come and how far she had to walk.
Having recovered from the recent ascent, Helene made her way down to the beach.
* * *
‘Nah, you can’t get through here. University's here most of the time, on the dig. They don’t want no one nicking souvenirs, so can’t let you in, sorry.’
The portly security guard wore a luminous yellow jacket, its vibrancy at odds with his glum, bored face. To escape the cold, he was sitting inside a portable caravan at the entrance of a fenced paddock, above the caves.
‘You gotta go round. Up that track, then down the other side of the fence. Over there. You see it on the other side? That’s where the coast path starts again. Or you follow the road to Brickburgh that we use. Only other way out.’
Helene hadn’t lingered. She’d disliked the way the guard had looked her up and down with a grinning over-familiarity. She’d walked away before the attention had turned suggestive, though not before establishing that the excavation was on the northern side of Whaleham Point, the cave located in the cliffs and not visible from the direction she’d travelled.
Online, she’d seen pictures of archaeologists entering the caves, accessing the site by a ladder and ropes, or up from the sea at low tide. Every local website she’d checked had linked to the dig and she’d been surprised to discover work was continuing into a fifth year. The archaeologists were still making finds in deeper sections of the limestone’s secret hollows. There was another exhibition running in Exeter for a month, before the newer artefacts toured the country. If she had time tomorrow she would go: maybe first thing before she drove home.
But when Helene reached the security fence, what startled her to a standstill was the realisation of how close Lincoln had camped to the Brickburgh dig. During his final fortnight alive and while making his penultimate recordings, her brother had planted his devices around the dig site. Throughout an entire summer six years before, her little brother had been recording on the side of Whaleham Point opposite to where archaeologists were now clawing out the earth to find so many long-hidden bones. Had her brother returned the following winter, after the cliff-fall, he might have discovered the cave. And had he done so, his life would surely have followed a different path.
Unlucky and typical of Lincoln but somehow his proximity to such an important historical discovery made his death appear strangely significant to Helene, as if a new epitaph now competed with his leaping from a bridge.
From the dig, Helene moved three miles inland, retracing her brother’s footsteps to the place where he’d made the final recording and where the first leg of her hike would conclude.
The GPS on her phone bade her follow soil paths worn the colour of drying blood: tracks scarring hillsides increasingly used by farm animals, judging by the copious black droppings scattered around her boots.
At some point in the nineteenth century there had been quarrying here. According to her guidebook, a stone was mined and a pigment extracted from it for the manufacture of dye and paint. And it must have been inside one of those disused quarries that Lincoln had recorded the bestial shrieks.
* * *
The hound leaped, again and again in an effortless propulsion from all four legs, its reddish eyes drawing level with her own.
Elbows out, hands raised to protect her throat, Helene gave pitiful cries that only excited the barking dog, a big rangy creature with a liverish colouring that suggested a Dobermann, though she’d never seen one as big as this. As it menaced and herded her deeper into the hedge, even with all four paws on the ground its head was still higher than her waist. She twisted to conceal her exposed skin from the foamy teeth and the dog immediately appeared on her other side, to leap before her face once again, untiring, insistent.
Through her panic-blurred vision, she noticed a blue figure run from the driveway she’d just walked past. There had been a white van, its bonnet open, parked before a dilapidated house.
‘Kent! Kent!’ It took Helene a moment to realise the man wasn’t shouting the name of an English county, but calling the name of the hound barking into her eyes.
The dog ignored the call, continuing to spring up and down, up and down, higher and higher to match its uncontainable excitement.
With her shoulder blades flattened against a stone wall, Helene’s head completely disappeared inside overhanging wisteria.
Through the screen of verdure, a man came into sharper focus, dressed in a dirty overall, unzipped at the front, with a ragged red jumper hanging loose beneath. A bearded face loomed. There was something odd going on with his eyes, but she didn’t see much more because the dog snapped its jaws through the vines, an inch from her nose. She dropped into a crouch, hands over her skull.
Yelping, the dog was pulled away, the owner’s grimy boots sloshing through scarlet puddles where the tarmac was worn to mud. A chain was clipped to the dog's collar.
Up on its hind legs, straining, the hound still matched its owner’s full height and like a horseman he applied all of his strength to hold the lead while the dog tottered like a kangaroo, both choking and barking.
Helene shrieked when two more dogs of the same breed turned from the driveway and ran at a low, fast trajectory at her legs. They stopped just short of her body and appeared to smile at her distress. Their tails, mercifully, were wagging.
A thin woman followed them, her body also covered in an overall, shiny with oil stains to the knee. At first glance she was a waif with unkempt blonde hair but she grew older as she drew closer, until her skin was riven with deep clefts about her eyes and nose and heavily freckled. Too much sun. Even with the elfin bones of her worn face keeping her handsome, she must have been in her fifties.
‘Kent!’ the man shouted again, then, ‘Private road!’ at Helene.
Two of the sinewy dogs retreated to the woman. Like a current they swilled around her booted feet. She came to stand beside Helene, her position obscuring the road ahead.
The bearded man moved beside the woman, crowding into her, his dog restrained on a shortened chain. The positioning of the people, so uncomfortably close to her, was as discomforting as the presence of the enormous dogs.
Now she could see him clearly, the man might have been blind in one eye. One of his eyeballs was bisected by an oyster-coloured scar, the surrounding sclera grey. A pale-blue iris existed as a residue of his former sight and the eye peered down as if in shame. Around and under his beard his skin was red, his facial hair speckled with flakes of dead skin. A wispy ponytail collected his hair at the back, thinned to several bootlaces on top of his scalp, scraped across the narrow red skull. It looked like psoriasis, his rage further inflaming the skin condition.
‘Private road! Private road! Private road!’ he roared at Helene. Tiny balls of salivary foam speckled her eyes and made her blink. He was worse than his dog. ‘How the fuck did you get in?’
The woman softened her expression of fearful concern to pity. When she touched the man’s arm he quietened and stepped back.
‘What do you want?’ she asked softly, in what might have been sympathy but her eyes remained cold. Their accents were also immediately incongruous: even with voices raised they suggested the upper middle class. In stark contrast to their tatty, dirty appearance and the wretched state of the farm buildings that Helene had assumed were deserted, these people were posh.
‘Can’t you read?’ The man pointed the way she’d just walked, a distance of no more than fifty metres.
The thin woman caught his eye. ‘The gate must have been left open. She wouldn’t have seen the sign.’
‘Richey! Fucking retard!’ the man spat at the woman at his side. ‘How many times has he been told to close that bloody gate?’
Helene hadn’t noticed a gate, let alone a sign. So overgrown was th
e hedgerow she’d not looked at the sides of the lane. Relieved to see a road after passing up through woods to reach the crossroads, she’d merely walked south to where she guessed the quarry would be. She’d assumed she was on a public road.
The bearded man turned down the volume but his anger maintained itself as an ugly sneer. ‘Who the bloody hell are you? What are you doing here?’
Helene straightened and stepped out of the overhanging wisteria. ‘Walking. I was just walking.’ She took the guidebook from the pocket of her coat. ‘I didn’t know. . . I thought the road might go to the quarry.’
Her interrogators looked at each other, then at her book. The woman snatched it from her hand without asking. She looked at the page Helene had marked with a post-it, then showed the man, who stared at Helene as if he’d just caught her stealing.
‘I just wanted to see the old quarry.’
‘Well, you can’t! This land is private!’
It may have been thin and forced but at least the woman managed to smile. As if weary of his ranting, she touched the man’s elbow again.
‘There’s nothing left,’ she said. ‘A half-demolished kiln. All overgrown. Some big scars on the earth. They’re only visible from the air and they are not open to the public.’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I was just walking. I didn’t know. I’m sorry. It doesn’t look like a private road.’
‘Where did you come from?’ the woman asked, her stare unwavering.
Helene had to think. In her agitated state she thought she’d been asked where she was from. ‘Walsall’ slipped out. Then she corrected herself. ‘The coast path. I’m staying in Divilmouth. I just wanted to see the quarry before I walked back.’
The couple seemed to relax at that, as if realising they’d only confronted a harmless idiot, but the smirk within the man’s scratchy beard boiled Helene’s relief into anger.
‘Was all of this necessary? Do I look like a bloody thief? Jesus Christ! It’s an easy mistake to make. The path from Whaleham Point leads here. My book says there’s a quarry. Redstone Cross.’
It must happen all the time, she wanted to say, and then realised that the violence of their greeting was sufficient indication that it probably did.
The man released his dog.
Helene gasped, flinched.
The hound ran off to find the other two, but its owner clearly enjoyed the sharp and visible ascent of her fear. Trying not to betray her amusement, the woman dipped her face to read Helene’s map.
‘The track for walkers you used from Whaleham is the original lane. An old green track. But this road is private and always has been. That gate should not have been left open.’
The man jerked his thin ferrety head behind him. ‘There’s nothing down there. Nothing.’
Two other men wearing raincoats and Wellington boots appeared outside one of the dilapidated wooden buildings, farther down the lane. They came to a standstill, content to watch at a distance.
The woman touched Helene’s forearm to reclaim her attention. ‘There are two public lanes. One goes north to Brickburgh. They use it for the dig. The other one heads west but there’s nothing that way until Divilmouth. See, here. If you’d carried on down this road you’d have an awful long way back to Divilmouth in the dark. We’ve done you a favour.’
‘A bloody big favour,’ the man said, then seemed to think better about embellishing the admonishment and looked to his dogs instead.
‘I see,’ Helene said. Shock wilting, she now felt chastened and out of her depth: an unwelcome outsider that worried sheep and left gates open. A trespasser. She wasn’t sure she’d ever trespassed before but Lincoln must have done to make his final recording. He’d either walked further down this private road or approached the quarry through the beard of woodland beneath the farm that her path had partly circumscribed. At the meagre crossroads, she could now see how walkers were supposed to walk straight on or turn right and not left as she’d done.
Helene thought of mentioning her brother. But explaining that he’d been here the week before taking his own life was a story she didn’t want to share with hostile strangers whose private road she’d traipsed across.
She peered over their shoulders at the few miserable buildings in the distance: dark wood and grey stones at a slouch. A door sagged, green with mildew. From beneath an awning, the black face of a ram peered back at her.
The woman caught her interest. ‘You better get going. I’d advise heading back the way you came. Or walk to Brickburgh and catch the bus.’
Helene nodded, tersely thanked the woman for her help and hurried away. Retracing her footsteps, she glanced at the house she’d passed on the way in. A building that seemed to have been transplanted from the Deep South of America, intact with peeling porch, shuttered windows and neglected laundry haggard from days and nights left on the wire. A myriad engine parts were strewn across overgrown lawns. When she’d come up she’d thought the house eerie but strangely enchanting.
Going out she noticed part of a gate and the back of a white sign riveted to a metal rung. Both had been pushed deep inside the overgrowth so that a vehicle could drive through.
Her hands were trembling. Helene tucked them inside her pockets, her urge to return to the coast path desperate. She might even run down the valley. The encounter had come close to spoiling the entire day, the wild land she’d walked since dawn acquiring a sudden, unwelcome association with the awful sounds on Lincoln’s recordings.
But her new respect for her brother and his daring deepened: he’d camped out here for weeks, in the wild, where horrible pricks lived, which also made her wonder if he’d crossed paths with the posh nutters and their terrifying dogs. Maybe those very dogs had sniffed out his equipment.
Could a dog have made those sounds?
Before she picked up the green path to Whaleham, Helene looked back. The vicious man and the dogs had gone but the thin woman had remained in the lane to watch her leave.
7
The occupant’s lengthy unlatching of the front door was Kat's first indication of trouble. When the barrier eventually opened, a haggard face appeared in the gap. A pair of faded blue eyes studied the street.
In a prickly seizure of mortification, Kat believed she’d knocked on the wrong door in the row of identical former miners’ cottages. The quartet of doors, in the lane adjacent to the main thoroughfare of Redhill, were all painted brown and studded into uniformly grey stone facades.
She rechecked the number on the door – 4. Right house, so maybe this was one of Matt Hull’s elderly relatives standing on the threshold.
When the door widened and became an invitation to enter, the frail figure spoke softly. ‘Hey, Katrine. Good to see you.’ Only then did she recognise the paraglider.
She’d interviewed him two years earlier at the first Brickburgh cave exhibition, when the cave’s discovery wrote international headlines. Two years prior to the first exhibition, it was Matt Hull who’d directed the light from his phone inside a cliff fissure and revealed a cave filled with prehistoric artefacts. When the broad, sparsely populated spur on the Devonshire coast had drawn the eyes of the world, they’d lingered on this man for a few weeks. He’d become a celebrity overnight.
Two years after their interview, she found herself startled by Matt Hull’s appearance. Maybe a serious illness had subsequently harrowed the diminutive figure on the doorstep to this form: redrawn as worn and sticklike, the facial skin craggy. She remembered him being small, slim and muscular, but the sleeves of his shirt now sagged from a pair of wasted arms. Above his belt his shirt billowed over empty space.
What she recalled was a working-class man with a warm smile. A local character, case-hardened by manual work and misfortune, divorced and shaken by the trauma of his family breaking apart, yet gentle. She’d been impressed by his resilience and the quiet wisdom he’d evinced: a father devoted to his boy, who’d accepted the breakup of his marriage in order to stem his own bitterness, to catch it in
time.
A painter and decorator, too, who crafted exquisite furniture as a sideline from materials foraged in local woodland. Addicted to another hobby, paragliding, in his thirties, he’d originally described himself to her as a man happier in the sky than upon the earth. That kindly impression had lingered and she’d looked forward to his company today.
A very different impression was forming now. The village he called home had altered just as much, albeit in another way entirely.
Redhill was the nearest settlement to the Brickburgh dig and though she’d not been back to the village since their first interview, its regeneration surprised her.
Composed of six streets, five curling about the main road and petering out into tributaries blunted by farmland, Redhill had since laid claim to a grocery store and a pub. Three houses had been converted into hotels. A nearby field was now a large campsite for motor homes, tents and glamping huts. Messy lines of performance vehicles choked the narrow lanes. Several building sites dotting the village’s outskirts revealed the bones of large detached houses undergoing assembly upon the bare red earth. Swimming pools were being dug in expansive gardens. If Matt Hull’s discovery of the caves had led to this level of prosperity in a decaying village, the crumpled figure on the doorstep appeared to be the only thing remaining in Redhill moving in the opposite direction.
Feeling as delicate as if she were visiting someone in hospital, Kat lowered herself carefully into an easy chair in the small front room that opened onto the road. To put them both at ease she accepted Matt’s offer of a hot drink, though when she inspected the contents of the mug that arrived after some delay, there was no milk in the instant coffee. She also detected the presence of several spoonfuls of sugar. She’d asked for tea, milk, no sugar.
Through a connecting doorway she’d watched her host’s slow preparation of the drinks, his rough, shaky hands scattering the unasked-for sugar. Perhaps the soul within the tired shell had been subjected to some whittling from painful preoccupations. As a sufferer from anxiety and depression herself, she allowed herself to presume as much, knowing too well what fatigue and exhaustion looked like and how simple movements became painful exertions.