The Reddening

by Adam Nevill

  ‘Sure, I’ve heard the official line too. They always stay on message. But he wasn’t the only one who lost the plot down there. None of those working at the start are there any more.’

  Katrine shrugged. ‘I’m not privy to the staffing arrangements. But I assume that lots of universities are involved and a great many people are queuing up to work there.’

  ‘I wonder how long they’ll stick around. Not long, so I’ve heard. Think about it.’

  ‘People might come and go for all kinds of reasons.’

  ‘True, but I know it’s because of their dreams. And let’s call it the atmosphere that they’ve breathed in. Sounds raving mad, doesn’t it?’

  It did, though within Katrine’s mind the heavy curvature of the clay Venus figure rotated again through a dim background of darkness and blood; a mere memory, a fragment from her own unhealthy thoughts.

  ‘It’s not just the archaeologists and me. I’ve got a mate who works in two old people’s homes round here. Dementia, end of life care, that sort of thing. And he says he’s never seen anything like it. The way they’re all behaving in there, yeah. Elderly people who can’t look after themselves. He’s no liar. But it’s in their heads now too. It’s why I got rid, took it all back. The pieces I had. The statue, the skull-cup, the little pipe, all of it. Chucked it all away, into the sea. I know what you’re thinking but I’m not superstitious, not religious. What I experienced was unnatural. And what I saw from the sky, two weeks after I found that cave, wasn’t right either. But it was all part of the same thing.’

  ‘Same thing?’

  ‘As what’s in my dreams. It’s connected.’

  Half of her didn’t want to hear any more. The other half, the half she had no control over, asked, ‘What did you see from the air?’

  8

  ‘Sorry, what did you say?’ Kat hadn’t caught Steve’s request.

  He reappeared in the mouth of her tiny kitchen, the jazz on the kitchen stereo muffling behind his bulk. ‘Baked, mashed or chips?’

  ‘Oh, anything.’

  He rolled his eyes.

  ‘Er, baked.’

  Steve returned to the stove. A percussion of rattling utensil drawers followed.

  The troubled and wizened figure of Matt Hull had lingered vividly in Kat’s thoughts. Steve’s arrival hadn’t banished the spectre of that frail figure with unkempt hair, standing in the doorway of his small grey home, anxiously peering about the street. In the rear-view mirror she’d watched his front door close, sealing him off from the village once more: where he’d lived all of his life but now resided as if hunted. A grown man made unstable by acute fear.

  Often hard to follow, most of what he’d confided of his ideas, dreams or whatever inspired his jumbled mixture of fantasy, conspiracy and paranoia had been disturbing. Before Kat left she’d advised him to see a doctor but known he wouldn’t.

  His sincerity regarding the threats made against him she didn’t doubt. Genuine terror was hard to fake and that’s what she’d seen in his eyes. He’d refrained from disclosing a single identity too, yet from what she could gather he was claiming he’d been victimised by a group of local people for years. He’d complied with their requests, eschewed paragliding and kept his feet on the ground.

  The idea of him being bullied upset her more than what he’d recounted about the effect of the caves. At least until Matt Hull intimated he’d witnessed a double murder.

  That she still balked at: the rambling about bad dreams, an influence seeping from the caves she could weather, but murder? A fantasy, surely.

  Of what lay between Divilmouth and Brickburgh she knew little. Excluding the excavation of the cave, the area had produced nothing newsworthy during her time in Devon. She couldn’t even recall a minor crime, let alone what Matt Hull wanted her to believe. Her professional assignments involved the higher-profile tourist destinations of South Hams, Dartmoor and parts of North Devon: the affluent, picturesque bits. Which is why she’d come home after the interview surprised that Sheila had never commissioned a feature on Redhill’s astounding regeneration.

  They were never here before they opened the cave. The red people.

  Another new addition to Brickburgh and Redhill and news to her, what Matt Hull had called ‘the red people’. They’d formed the ultimate focus of his chaotic narrative.

  His first sighting of these strange characters was the most bizarre story that Kat had yet heard in her career as a journalist. A story that had stuttered from the mouth of the same man who’d also admitted to being consumed with psychotic thoughts directed towards anyone he perceived as a threat. Not something he’d ever experienced before, or so he’d claimed. ‘I see red too. I do. For hours some days. I’ve broken two teeth from grinding.’ At that point Kat had nearly grabbed her coat and run from his home.

  Rage was a natural response to victimisation. It was also a symptom of depression, though she’d been truly baffled by his story about ‘red people’ attacking a campsite. She hadn’t asked if she could record the interview but had surreptitiously set her phone to record when his story took an especially sinister turn.

  The second bedroom of the cottage she used as an office and just before dinner she replayed the recording in there.

  ‘This swarm of them red people came down the hill at Slagcombe. Taking their time. They just walked towards each other and surrounded this couple at the bottom. And that valley became a pit with two animals trapped inside it.

  ‘I stayed in the air, because I didn’t like the look of how things were going on the ground.

  ‘One of the campers was by the tent, the woman. The other was on the beach, her fella, I think. She was running this way and that but gave up and went back to the tent. I don’t know why. I was shouting, get in the water, get in the water, but she’d never have heard me. And this whole time, her fella was running up from the shore to get back to her. But it was too late. They were surrounded.

  ‘The red ones came into the valley naked but painted like they were from another place. Like they were from the past. I remember looking for cameras and thinking, Is this a film? But there was none of that, no cameras or the lights they use. This was real. It was happening. And these two people, the campers, didn’t know what to do . . . The ring of red people just got tighter.

  ‘In the end, the woman gave up. Was resigned, like. I’ll never forget it. I heard her voice before that. Faint. She was shouting something. I don’t know what.

  ‘But the bloke was done first. He stopped running and they got round him. He went into the reeds. I saw his arms in the air as they got close, crowding him. That’s when I realised they had something in their hands. Small black things, these objects. Like rocks.

  ‘And it kicked off. He tried to break through them and they were hanging on to him, like a pack of animals. But when they got hold of that woman I’d seen enough. I flew north. Back to where me gear was, near Whaleham where I launched. My phone was there and I was going to call the law. But those red bastards were already waiting, you see, waiting for me. Three of them had got there first and were staring into the sky, right at me. Just all standing beside my gear. A woman, two men. They’d have done me too, like the campers.

  ‘So I carried on, further up the coast, and I came down hard on Saviour Bay. Nearly came a cropper too and took a dip in the water because I was so rattled by what I’d seen. But I got untangled and put everything away and hiked back home.

  ‘And that’s when I had the first visit. You see, they were waiting for me to get here. They already knew who I was. But these others, inside here, weren’t red. They . . .’

  He’d broken off then so as not to reveal the identities of who had been waiting for him at his home.

  ‘They were sitting in my chairs. They’d broken in. And I was told, in no uncertain terms, that I was not to fly again and that the air belonged to them from now on. They knew all about my boy too and I lost it when they said his name. But what they did to me . . . what they showed m
e left me with no choice. I hadn’t a chance against them. There was no fighting back and there was no leaving here. They made that clear. They told me I couldn’t go. They wanted me where they could keep an eye on me. And so I could do a few favours for them.’

  Kat remembered Matt Hull pausing again at that point to rub his face. He’d wiped tears from his eye sockets. ‘The red ones came that night too. To make sure I knew how much shit I was in because of what I’d seen in that valley with the campers. The first one I saw was in the garden. She was just standing there staring at the windows. I went out with the torch to see who’d set the neighbour’s dog off and there she was. Naked, all red and shining like her skin was peeled off. All her hair was pulled out too, from her head. And twisted round this horrible old face.

  ‘I went back inside double-quick. But there were more of them and all looking through the front windows, showing me their red faces . . . their teeth. The white eyes. Never been able to put that out of my mind. They weren’t right, their eyes.

  ‘I’ve never been so freaked out. I shut myself in the bloody bathroom upstairs. But they left something. The backdoor had handprints on it, red handprints. A sign. All of this was a warning, like I was marked. That night was a demonstration of their reach. They could show up anytime unless I did exactly what they wanted.

  ‘Couple of days later, my ex-wife mentioned that someone had painted a red hand on her back door. My lad and his mates swore they weren’t responsible and she believed them. I did too because I knew who’d done it.

  ‘I’ve been on the ground and mostly in here ever since, losing my mind. Work’s gone to shit. I’m unreliable. I know I am. They took my gear with them. All of it. Clipping my wings, that’s what they said they were doing. But they’d bring me gear back when they wanted favours doing. They left this too. It was just sat on my doorstep the next morning.’

  Matt had shown her the effigy he’d found on his doorstep: a marker set in place by the strangers who’d apparently peered through his windows and stood in his garden, naked and painted red. She’d seen a similar design before: a crude figure of a woman, about the size of a Barbie doll, carven from bone, with the head of a snouty dog. Its small skull was made unnervingly alert and eager, the pair of small ears pricked upright. A thing with origins in the Brickburgh caverns.

  * * *

  ‘You might be content, and for the rest of your life, covering the fun runs, the new musicals down the coast, the Michelin stars, the guide dogs, ponies, the new llama at the zoo, or whatever the fuck it is that we’re always doing here, but I can’t take another year of it, Kat.’

  The argument with Steve began after dinner within minutes of her playing her recording of Matt Hull to him, and he’d been quick to make his accusations too, leaving Kat desperately wishing that she’d never shared the information with her boyfriend.

  But keeping it to herself would have made her unbearably tense and anxious. She’d only wanted to lighten her load, to get a second opinion from someone who cared about her, who’d tell her that Matt was unstable, exaggerating, that everything would be all right and that she’d not need to break his confidence any further by going to the police, or getting involved in any inquiries into a local drug gang. Her compulsion to confess to Steve now made her feel pathetic.

  As much as she tried not to dwell on the issue, Steve was much younger than her and less experienced in just about any way that she could imagine, save windsurfing and partying. But since they’d met, she’d been the catalyst for Steve to grow more ambitious professionally than she would ever be again. And within seconds of sharing Matt’s story they’d been competing, again. A situation that always made her feel ill.

  During a playback of the interview, Steve had been enraptured. Only after she’d admitted she intended to do nothing about Matt Hull’s claims, had his response been harsh, the scold burning hours later.

  Admittedly, Steve had been tipsy, having moved from beer to wine from the afternoon to the evening and although he rarely spoke to her in that tone, his dissatisfaction with what he was doing with his life had clearly been festering more toxically than she’d hitherto intuited.

  She’d secured all of Steve’s freelance work at Life and Style, as well as work for several digital marketing companies. But of late, he’d increasingly had the gall to make her feel like an impediment holding him back professionally.

  Kat had long taken therapeutic measures to prohibit her own history’s intrusion into the present. But they didn’t always work. The past was a greater part of the present than the present itself seemed to be. And that evening her head had filled with the pretty face of a girl called Clarabelle.

  At a magazine Kat had worked for in London, she’d employed Clarabelle as an intern: a young woman from a privileged background who’d wasted no time in undermining Kat in editorial meetings. And she’d been surreptitiously encouraged to do so by Kat’s rivals. Kat had lost the job eighteen months later when another round of cuts had kicked in: it was, in fact, her final staff position in magazine editorial. The redundancy had occurred at the same time as Kat’s twelve-year relationship with her fiancé, Graham, fell apart.

  The fallout from Graham she was still dealing with and Steve had unpicked the stitches. That evening in her cottage he’d exuded Clarabelle’s sense of entitlement to the best professional work and an assumption of all that came with it.

  Steve came from money and like the intern it was as if he found it preposterous that someone from the lower social orders, like Kat, should hold a position senior to them. There must have been some mistake. You’re not one of us.

  That’s how Kat read both situations and her personal experience wouldn’t allow an alternative interpretation.

  She and Steve had been together, on and off with non-committed periods, for over three years. But what was the relationship built on? That was the question she asked herself again. What you can do for him. That’s what this is about.

  Within moments of Steve's outburst, their age differences and the disapproval Kat harboured about his co-dependency upon his parents also reared scaly heads. His criticism of her an inevitable tripwire.

  She’d always found Steve’s terror of his mother hard to respect, though she managed to suppress judgement. He was thirty-two but Mum and Dad were still bankrolling him. They owned the flat he lived in rent-free. They wanted grandchildren too. A desire for multiple heirs, the enhanced social standing: it still concerned the affluent as much as it had ever done. And she was unable to give Steve children. So how was this going to work?

  Her internal cacophony had included her certainty that Steve’s mother disapproved of her being ten years his senior. His parents were present in all of their arguments, at least in spirit: an unfailingly polite couple who’d never really warmed to Kat, who were potentially of the unspoken but implied opinion that she wasn’t good enough for their son. And once the disapproving spectres of Delia and Reg appeared in her mind, her repressed anger unsuppressed itself. The argument with Steve had escalated fast.

  When Steve had said, ‘I’ll go to Sheila myself,’ Kat had genuinely loathed him for several minutes that had made her skin go cold.

  ‘She doesn’t want to know, Steve! I nearly had to revive her with smelling salts when she saw a picture of a gnawed bone that was twelve thousand years old!’

  ‘The Gazette in Torbay. Plenty will be interested in this.’

  ‘It’s privileged information from my source, not yours. I only told you because it upset me and because I needed to share it with someone. I wanted your support. Support from someone who keeps telling me that he’s in love with me. Makes me wonder what the fuck this is all about. Am I useful to you, is that it? A stepping stone?’

  ‘That’s low!’

  ‘This is not material for you! You’re not even a journalist!’

  When Steve had hit thirty he’d become tired of ‘bumming around’ and ‘doing his own thing’, as he’d initially pitched it to her. Nigh on a decade of wind
surfing, raving and the creation of a Dad-funded app that never worked had given him a premature midlife crisis. Meeting Kat had incrementally worsened his frustration.

  Despite her world-weary air – and her consistent efforts to detox her former lifestyle from her system with diets, yoga, meditation and anything that helped her cope with the post-traumatic stress disorder that she’d been diagnosed with seven years before – by the time she was Steve’s age she’d already been working in the capital’s top-flight media for nine years. Her CV bothered Steve. His resentment had acidified.

  ‘It’s just not right to keep this quiet,’ he’d insisted that evening. Preposterous too, his lecturing her like that. It had been worse than his pretence that he gave a damn about Matt Hull.

  She’d exploded. ‘You’re going to lecture me about press ethics? From your considerable experience as a press photographer? Not even one year’s freelance work under your belt. Work that I bloody secured for you! You do realise that Sheila has far better people available?’

  ‘My pictures are good!’

  ‘For a fish restaurant in Plymouth, so don’t get ahead of yourself. I am not an investigative reporter. I never wanted to be.’

  ‘So you’re just going to let them get away with it? With what they did to that poor bloke?’

  ‘He’s unstable. Probably delusional. If I had a name or a shred of evidence besides some crazy stories about red people attacking a campsite that he saw from a thousand feet up, I’d contact the police. But all I have is a garbled story of the Brickburgh curse from a man who needs psychiatric help.’

  At that, Steve had smirked triumphantly and she’d really wanted to slap his face. ‘Oh, he’s not alone,’ he’d carped. ‘There are others. I’ve heard all kinds of things about that area. It’s notorious. You wouldn’t know that. You’re not from here.’

  At that attempt to exclude her, he’d quickly looked sheepish, embarrassed and out of his depth.