The Reddening

by Adam Nevill

He’d left soon after, unable to withstand the cast of Kat’s trembling face.

  * * *

  Unable to sleep after the row, Kat dug around online.

  She vowed that whatever she found would not be shared with Steve. His enthusiasm for ‘checking it all out’ needed little encouragement and she wouldn’t risk his appropriation of the story because he was bored and desperate.

  A competing guilty suspicion that her courage had failed, that Steve was morally right and that she should help Matt Hull by going to the police was exacerbated by the results of her online search into missing persons, in or near Brickburgh and Divilmouth.

  On the Torbay Gazette’s website she quickly located two stories relevant to her search as well as old appeals for information. The same information was repeated at two further newspaper websites in Plymouth and another in Exeter.

  The incidents were five years old and must have occurred around the time Matt Hull discovered the cliff fissure. Matt had said the camping incident had occurred at the beginning of spring. While aloft that final time he’d seen wheatears, a red kite and meadow pipits over the coastline. A flock of Brent geese had been flying in the opposite direction on their long journey to Siberia.

  At the same time, a pair of campers who were believed to have been camping near Brickburgh had instead performed a curious double suicide in North Cornwall, not long after being reported missing. Shortly before their demise, a walker had vanished from the coast path near Brickburgh.

  Curiously, articles of the missing couple’s clothing had been found in a remote Cornish cove, folded into two piles and left together besides other personal effects. Though alerts had been posted as far away as Dorset due to the sea’s currents, their bodies were never recovered.

  Their yellow Volkswagen Transporter had also been found near their clothes, their camping equipment packed inside, some twenty miles from where they’d been staying in Divilmouth. There was no motive for the double suicide or why Cornwall had been chosen. The case had mystified their families.

  But they’d last been seen in Divilmouth. They’d even told a guest at the hotel where they were staying that they’d intended to hike and camp near Brickburgh. Cornwall had never been mentioned by either of them. But as their vehicle and effects were found in Cornwall, the search had moved twenty miles down the coast and the official focus, while it lasted, appeared to have remained there.

  Had she not heard Matt Hull’s story that afternoon nothing about the incident would have inspired her curiosity. But two campers going missing at the same time he flew over Brickburgh who’d never been found? She thought that odd.

  By the time Kat was scrolling through page seven of a Google search she found the second missing person case from the same area. Earlier in the year the campers vanished, a walker called Andy Little had also been reported missing near Brickburgh.

  It was believed that he’d been overcome by darkness and fallen from the cliffs, misjudging a walk on difficult terrain. His body had never been found either. No suspicious circumstances were reported and his rucksack had washed up in the next county on Chesil Beach.

  An accident by all accounts. They often happened near the sea and cliffs. But when the Andy Little incident was considered in relation to the missing campers, whose intentions had been to hike to the same place as the walker and around the very time that Matt Hull claimed to have witnessed ‘red people’ attacking a campsite, Kat did wonder.

  Old news, five years distant, and it wasn’t impossible to assume that Matt Hull had read about the campers’ disappearance and concocted a story. But when she recalled the torment in his eyes and his twitching limbs, her instincts insinuated that he might have seen something on that beach, not far from where he lived in Redhill.

  * * *

  The following morning, before she left home to gather material for an L&S feature on a sculptor in Dartington, Kat called a contact stationed with the police at Brickburgh.

  Rick worked in community liaison. He was the press officer for the emergency services covering the area and might ask around for her. She knew him via the news desk of the magazine: in effect, a communal phone in the magazine’s tiny office.

  Kat lied to Rick and claimed she was undertaking consultancy work for a property developer and prospecting a potential cottage renovation near Redhill. She asked him about illegal activity near the village, adding an emphasis on the drug rumours she was picking up. She said she was being lazy on due diligence and would rather talk to the law than wade through the council archives.

  Rick happily told her that three years before she’d arrived in Devon, a large cannabis factory had been found and closed down at a Brickburgh farm, about seven miles from the cave, resulting in four arrests.

  Rick also admitted that ‘everyone’ knew the crop was still being grown surreptitiously in pockets, here and there, but little was sold locally. Unless anyone was hurt or tougher criminal elements were drawn to the area, they had little chance of finding the operations.

  ‘That area is massive,’ he’d said. ‘Better the devil you know, between us, when there’s no violence and us being so short-handed from the cuts.’

  Matt Hull had alluded to organised criminal behaviour, though not specified a line of business. But he’d said the perpetrators were ‘ruthless’. Didn’t drugs inspire ruthless behaviour throughout their supply chains?

  Besides a plethora of minor drug busts in Torbay, Plymouth and Exeter – local operations selling narcotics received through the harbours and rumbled through occasional police operations – the only other headline-grabbing drug-related incident that Kat uncovered online occurred in the early Eighties. This story appeared at the end of her search, some twenty pages deep. A story that interested Kat for a reason unconnected to Matt Hull.

  Oddly, the story was not carried by any local press sites, probably because it predated the internet. Instead it was posted on Wikipedia, as well as several other websites concerned with folk and folk rock music.

  ‘Brickburgh’, ‘Redhill’ and ‘drugs’ had been the keywords that had dredged the information from the depths of the online cosmos.

  Although she’d lived in South Devon for seven years she’d not known that a folk rock singer, Tony Willows, owned a farm at Redstone Cross, near the Brickburgh dig. His band, Witchfinder Apprentice, had been a cult band in the Seventies. She’d heard of them and remained vaguely aware of one eerie song, ‘Old Black Mag’, that her ex, Graham, had often played in their flat in Westbourne Grove. She’d never taken much interest in Graham’s music collection but recalled him regarding Witchfinder Apprentice as the Black Sabbath of British folk rock.

  A quick check of their Wikipedia page confirmed they’d charted at number two with a song, ‘All Around My Throne’, at Christmas in 1974. Another tune that Graham had often played at weekends.

  At the edge of Tony Willows’s farm in 1979, the dead body of a young woman had been discovered the day after the solstice, her system full of cocaine, LSD and alcohol. Apparently, the girl had been a guest at one of the raucous, seasonal private parties that Willows had thrown for his old entourage. The woman had also suffered head trauma from a fall. Willows briefly went to prison for manslaughter and possession. After his release he was never seen in public again.

  The excess of the singer’s lifestyle was also documented at length on the band’s Wikipedia page. Kat skim-read it, learning that he’d suffered a massive breakdown in 1977, either brought on, or worsened, by long-term LSD and tranquilliser use. He’d left the band and released one eclectic solo album of folk music on his own label. The record had surfaced in 1986 but he never appeared on a stage after 1977.

  Elsewhere online, his biography petered out with his current status as a breeder of rare ponies and Black Welsh Mountain sheep at Redstone Cross Farm.

  When Kat searched for the farm, Google maps placed it three miles above the Brickburgh caves.

  She quelled her own instinct for conspiracy and random but easily made conn
ections. Famous entertainers hiding in South Hams and Cornwall were not uncommon. She knew of at least three from the same period as Willows’s heyday in British rock music.

  As so often happened with an online search, she found herself being dragged into an annexe unrelated to what she’d first attempted to research. But what surprised her most about the Willows information was that no one at the magazine had ever mentioned him, which was odd considering Life and Style’s obsession with local success, affluence and celebrity. Kat made a note to ask Sheila about Tony Willows the next time she called the L&S office.

  By the evening, her interest had drifted away from missing campers and Matt Hull; her priority became a persistent desire to mend the recent fracture with Steve. They needed to produce a feature article together on the new Brickburgh dig exhibition in Exeter and the last thing she wanted was an atmosphere, with him sullen and monosyllabic, as she directed him around the displays, telling him what to photograph.

  Before she lay down, Kat sent him a text: We need to talk about Exeter. Tomorrow. K x

  9

  The great expanse of time elapsing between the exhibition and the distant inhabitation of the caves was not as apparent as Helene thought it should be. The condition of the recently recovered artefacts was remarkable. What she saw was also unpleasant.

  The Home of a Lost People: 60,000 Years BC. The relics on display had been recovered from the deepest level of the Brickburgh caves so far, the most important Neanderthal site ever found in Britain. An extinct people occupying the Brickburgh caves, periodically, across another fifteen thousand years.

  Helene paused to glance at maps, illustrations, read some information boards. She’d liked to have watched the films but there was always one child or another drawn to the glowing screens and pushing buttons.

  The bout coupé hand-axe had been the first artefact identifying the remains in the cave as Neanderthal. U-shaped in silhouette, the tool had a convex blade, a surface curved like a sphere, its bluish-black flint glinting under electric light.

  A sign explained its purpose: ‘Butchery: decapitation, dismemberment, defleshing carcasses.’ A stone knapped and flaked to hack and carve flesh. Merely by looking at the blades Helene could effortlessly imagine the damage the tools could inflict. And beneath the forbidding and starkly beautiful landscape that had swallowed and rejected her while she’d looked for vestiges of her brother’s final path, these very tools had once been slippery with a great volume of blood.

  The foaming mouths of the dogs at Redstone Cross, her being so tired on the windswept hills, the bestial noises her brother had recorded, must also have conspired to form the unpleasant collusions inside her sleeping mind the night before. She’d first woken at four with a start, suffering the terror of finding herself inside an unfamiliar room, separated from her daughter.

  Unable to recall specific details of her dream – most of it obscured by a dark-red smear suggesting a frenzy of activity – she’d woken unrested that morning, suffering something akin to a hangover. But the exhibition both revived and worsened the lingering sense of having witnessed something terrible in her sleep.

  Detailed copies of the cave paintings were reproduced on large photographic boards, installed in connecting stairwells. Helene suspected it was these images she’d dreamed of, though in sleep the figures on the red walls had been moving. A constant, hypnotic sound of wind, piped through the claustrophobic confines of a wet tunnel, had formed a soundtrack.

  A 3D graphic beside the axes caught her eye. The illustration depicted a group of thickset figures, hoary of face and made bulky by their animal-skin coverings. In the long grass where a vast creature had fallen, exhausted from many wounds, the men stripped the elephantine beast of its flesh, exposing the sturdy scaffolding of its bones. A thicket of black spear shafts and the animal’s tusks thrust through misty air. Vultures circled and alighted to feast. A wounded hunter lay on his side, clutching ribs and a limp arm, his face grey. Hard times.

  A thousand tons of sediment had been mined and sifted from atop the exhibited remains. A great layer of earth installed by natural soil movements, floodwater and glacial activity, separating this group of early humans from those that came after them, fifteen thousand years later at around 45,000 BC. The latter remains were found in another section of the cave system and were displayed on level 1. She’d get to them next.

  But while the Neanderthals resided in the Brickburgh Caves, it appeared that other things had occurred in those black recesses of the earth: terrible things, happening for reasons unclear to the experts.

  Hunger in the extreme weather had probably played its part: the perpetual drops in temperature, the stalling of the Gulf Stream, the frozen tundras pushed forward by the Northern ice sheets. And with some help from the illustrations, Helene had no difficulty imagining hunters returning home, gaunt and empty-handed, the vulnerable drawing deeper inside the cave and about the fire as the hungry dogs of an eternal winter howled outside and inside a cold labyrinth of moist burrows.

  The final chapter in the Neanderthal display, the one that had drawn so many excited schoolchildren to itself, shaded Helene’s thoughts even darker than they’d been at first light. These were artefacts to make any mother want to hold her child tight.

  Fragments of a human skull obliterated by a large stone littered the faux rock floor of the display case. The scattering of shards resembled stone chippings but the pieces had once formed a child’s head. A boy’s skull reduced to a vase dropped upon a hard floor.

  Beneath the incomplete skull a collapsed human skeleton was splayed. Like splinters of ancient pottery each component of the skeletal structure was set in a ruddy coloured stone: a rectangular plinth cut from a section of the cave floor and removed in its entirety. The final resting place of a young Neanderthal male, malnourished at the time of death.

  Stanzas of unintended horror poetry on white display cards indicated that seven children and three young adults had been found upon a slope inside the Neanderthal cave, their pitiful forms concealed by debris. Now installed inside a cabinet, three tiny infant skulls grimaced their little faces at the light of the future, where their unspeakable story was interpreted. Large eye sockets and small jaws offered determined expressions. Initially, archaeologists assumed the group of youngsters had been crushed by a cave-in. A forensic examination of the bones revealed a different fate: each of the individuals had been manually disarticulated. Many of their bones were then smashed apart and gnawed by other Neanderthal teeth, perhaps by their fellows, even family members.

  Their demise had been established through the indicative Neanderthal dental condition, ‘taurodontism’, that produced stronger teeth, more exposed from the gums. On receipt of that information, Helene had shut her eyes to dispel an image of yellow teeth clamped on a small bone . . . apelike mouths sucking.

  Origins. How it began.

  Helene moved away, before her imagination coated the little skulls with other features and expressions. She stopped by photographs of rock piles. Only they weren’t stones but pictures of hyena droppings. Petrified mounds rich in both animal and human bone deposits. A hyena den had existed close to the Neanderthals, a pit inside an adjoining branch of the cave system. A section filled by the earth’s movements but a chamber once accessed through a crevice on the surface.

  The card accompanying the photographs postulated that prey was ‘dragged through the fissure and devoured below’. Teeth marks on the pelvis and skull of a mammoth suggested a new species of hyena had existed, as large as those previously thought extinct.

  Neanderthal teeth and bones discarded as indigestible were also discovered inside the petrified droppings of the jackals occupying the pit. Following herds of mammoth, Neanderthal hunters, wolves and hyenas had loped from the plains of northwestern Europe, crossing Doggerland.

  Some distance from the bone larders of the children, devoured by their own, another six Neanderthal bodies had been found. These were buried in a different manner,
side by side.

  At the time of their death, these people had been old. Their skulls were intact and each revealed the characteristic Neanderthal bulge at the rear, the ‘occipital bun’. Palaeoanthropologist artists had fashioned a resemblance of one of the inhabitants on a mounted bust.

  Level with Helene’s eyes, the face leered directly out of prehistory, its wrinkled flesh the colour of tea and as riven by deep lines as an eighty-year-old woman of Helene’s time, one who had spent a life working outdoors without sun-cream.

  Tufty white hair sprouted from the elongated head. The murky brown eyes displayed a clear, hard, human intelligence. A bulbous nose flared into black nostril pits and Helene recalled the weathered vagrant she’d once seen in London’s Soho, who’d worn a Union Jack flag like an emperor’s cape.

  Unlike the children’s remains, the mature individuals had been interned with reverence and care: ‘Elders’ prized after they’d died in their fourth decade. Perhaps they’d been laid to rest when food had not been so scarce. No animals had worried their remains and they’d stayed undisturbed in the very places in which they’d first been laid out in the caves, some time between 55,000 and 50,000 BC.

  Conditions in the sealed limestone cave had preserved their bones: even signs of arthritis and tooth decay had been revealed in analysis. That they’d been cared for in their dotage, even loved, offered some much-needed evidence of humanity within such an abattoir..

  Inside the shallow trenches of their graves, a ruddy stain, an iron oxide dye, had also been detected by chemists. Across generations of Neanderthal occupation, the remains of the ‘special dead’ had been painted before interment. And each rust-stained figure had ventured into eternity with a cruel black hand-axe within reach of its skeletal hand.

  10

  It’s the faces I keep seeing. Red faces. Every time I fall asleep. They come in and out of a dark place. There’s smoke. Red light on the walls. The wind too, always the wind.