by Adam Nevill
But they’re not all the same, the things in that black place. There’s something much bigger than the red people. It has a dark face . . . And there’s these white things, like big rats . . . They all walk like them little dogs you see in a circus, on their back legs, but they’re bigger than bears. Devils. It’s like I’m dreaming of devils.
It’s the noise of the young ones I can’t stand, the babies, the kids. And when the dogs, these devils, start whining and the babies start screaming, I wake up. I wake up and I’m crying.
On seeing the reproduced cave paintings at the exhibition, the dreams that Matt Hull had narrated to Kat found further synchronicity with her position on mankind’s perpetually harsh, savage and troubled past. To her, history itself was an epitome of darkness and it seemed humanity’s very origins had been made epochal by their ghastliness.
Even simple articles of clothing stored behind glass in museums suggested the grotesque and death to her. From end to end, history was collected horror, preserved for the fascination of a bestial species. Her experience of museums had never been sufficiently different from her experience of funerals. And the most recent fragments exhumed from Brickburgh’s famous caves, curiously sharpened a sense of her own time, while reducing her sense of security within it.
The artefacts were stored behind glass so highly polished that Kat felt she might step inside the larger exhibits. Then and now seemed uncannily closer. Too close.
Clean bathrooms and a chic café awaited downstairs. Traffic rumbled and swished past the museum’s red bricks. Here were ordinary people wearing contemporary clothes. A boisterous school party wandered past her before dispersing to mill elsewhere. And yet, despite the modern screens, a sense of the cave’s raw primitive presence, this brutal time on exhibition, had truly been evoked as a morbid and most vivid spectacle, its atmosphere intensifying within the artificial space.
Kat found herself looking at the ceiling and windows to break a trancelike fatigue as if she’d been forced to look at the evidence of war crimes. The presence of other people and Steve with his camera offered some comfort. She wouldn’t have walked here alone.
Conscious of their solemn, hesitant progress, Steve said, ‘Like a crypt, isn’t it?’ At least their heads, for once, were inhabiting the same space.
By design, the first level of the gallery space resembled the largest cavern discovered in the Brickburgh cave system: the ‘Grand Chamber’. Between the installations, the walls and ceilings were decorated with the same ochre and charcoal colours of the caves. Dark-blooded and womblike was the atmosphere and made doubly oppressive with shadow to replicate the enclosed stone environment.
The slit Matt Hull had reached through to grab a few souvenirs years before had subsequently revealed itself to be the equivalent of a small rear window, opening onto a large subterranean burrow divided into separate chambers. All of the caves had been used intermittently by various subspecies of humans across tens of thousands of years.
And this was a big deal. The cultural significance alone of what had been displayed, the manufactured relics left behind by ancient societies, had shattered much of what was known of early man. Existing knowledge about the first colonisations of Britain was currently under root-and-branch review. Kat had been given the opportunity to write the L&S feature, an assignment coveted by the magazine’s freelancers. Kat told herself she was lucky.
About her head, a herd of horses fled across the walls, their swift passage defined by long, sensual curves, shaped from thick sweeps of charcoal. These were the first things her eyes had been drawn to: reproductions of the cave’s art. Discreet speakers even transmitted a reproduction of animal shrieks and of a galloping rout across the ancient turf of Devon.
Expressions of terror were still frozen upon the horses’ red muzzles because of the great dogs that bounded behind them.
The hunched, black-muzzled creature that led the pack’s hunt was of an unnatural size, the centrepiece. Unto it the ancient artist had drawn the eyes of his audience. Seemingly, the dog-thing had risen upon its hind legs, or had been depicted leaping for the last horse. It was hard to tell.
The eyes above the creature’s wrinkled muzzle were crazed, maliciously eager, idiotically sadistic. The face had been chipped into the rock and impacted with red dye, over and over for millennia, and with so much care by successive generations of occupant. The ‘therianthrope’, as it had been called, had confounded the dig’s archaeologists.
Bizarre chimeras. Three of the savage amalgamations of human and animal had been found depicted on the walls. Much patient digging and sifting across four years had led to a revelation of their ghastly forms.
Inside this dark place, within the humid air, so fraught with the sounds of animal distress, Kat was unwilling to look at them for long. To her, the jackal-headed things functioned as a sudden, startling distillation of the natural order’s horror: the eternal repetition of bloodshed occurring the world over.
Those curating the exhibition proposed that the three hound-headed human figures – one was large and jet-black, the other two smaller and sickeningly pale – might have been gods or some curious supernormal forms into which shamans believed they could transform themselves. Only vestiges of Stone Age and Aboriginal belief systems offered any clues as to what these curious figures represented.
Kat cribbed notes: Were these people suggesting they could access a spiritual world? Was this a religion that far pre-dated the Bible?
As she scribbled, her focus was broken by images of Matt Hull’s haggard face and of what he’d so recently recounted to her.
The people’s faces are red. Always. But the red faces are filled with fear. Lined, scarred, dirty, painted faces, terrified. And they’re beating things, rocks with sticks, all of them together. They’re talking or singing something. It’s all high-pitched and weird in this wind. A wind that’s in the darkness with them. The wind comes out of the earth with the dogs, the devils. I can always hear them. The devils. Coming up.
Kat refocused on her notes and on directing Steve’s photographs. She needed the information boards captured for reference. Steve didn’t notice her preoccupation, nor did he seem aware of her distress. He only saw what was before his camera lens.
When they reached the 3D model of an elder’s head, he whispered, ‘Ugly bastard,’ from the side of his mouth. ‘I get a bit of Shrek. What do you think?’
Kat found the crinkled face profoundly unappealing. Several of its brown teeth were missing from the dark gums. Set amidst wild white hair, its bloodshot eyes leered from out of a face powdered the red of paprika. The flesh might have been flecked with dried blood and was far worse than the Neanderthal head upstairs. This one’s features were flatter and broader.
Red people.
Matt’s rambling narrative remained prescient. Kat wondered if the man’s sinister fantasies had only worsened after persecution at the hands of local criminals, who’d suspected he’d witnessed their drug operations from the air. Maybe the intimidation he’d suffered had mixed itself up with these artefacts. He lived near the site. Due to the size and expense of the operation, local volunteers had been involved from the start, to delicately remove thousands of tons of earth from the cave. They’d have seen the cave paintings and buried elders and been told that they were once painted red. Redhill’s small population must have chattered about what had been dug up. Matt would have heard things. Suggestion.
Kat rediscovered the thread of her notes.
The original entrance of the hyenas’ ‘dog chamber’ had been reopened as part of the ongoing excavation of the Grand Chamber. It had led the dig team to the lower Neanderthal level. Impossible to imagine, but the later human species and the Neanderthals before them had shared the caves with hyenas. In each era of human occupation this natural abattoir had been filled with large hyenas. They had been the size of African lions and should have been long extinct.
Inside the ‘dog pit’, as well as the bones of horse, woolly rhino, biso
n and Irish Elk (prey hunted down and dragged through a crack in the earth), and much like the older Neanderthal remains, the chewed bones of later human occupants had been discovered. In abundance.
Tests proved that many of the human remains had been broken and gnawed by hyena teeth in the terrible darkness of the earth. Bodies torn apart before their bones were cracked open for their rich marrow.
Nor was this the last of the macabre connections between the Neanderthals and what was found at the first level, dated at 12,000 BC: at the press conference in Plymouth, and in the first exhibition, it was revealed that the humans had also eaten each other in the same way that their canine superiors had eaten them. In these caves, in all three periods of occupation, it was as if people had been tutored by the greater predator.
And I can hear wind. The people are in that cave, close to a fire. It’s all red and black with shadows spiking across the ceiling . . . their faces are red and creased and their eyes are white . . . and mad, all rolled up . . .
That’s when I hear them. Coming through the dark. The devils. Am I seeing hell? That’s what I ask myself when I wake up. Is this hell in my head?
And the devils always come for that woman who’s crouching in front of her kids. They’ve come for those dirty kids in the corner who are grabbing at their mother. She keeps looking for a way out . . . That woman and kids have been given to the devils by the red people.
They’re like shadows. The devils. Their shadows dim the firelight. It shrinks. But I can still see them. These things with the long bodies that get up on two legs. Everywhere, there’s the sounds of devils in the smoke. The rocks are wet, red and wet.
They laugh like men but growl like dogs. Deep. Horrible. Whining and whistling and laughing in the wind . . .
They . . . them kids . . . shaking them in its mouth . . .
This is hell. This is hell I keep seeing.
When Matt had told Kat of his nightmares she’d been able to picture them vividly. She’d had them too. The half-remembered dreams, the ruddy black smears of places filled with frantic movements and screams. She and Matt Hull had shared the same dreams.
Children. The cries of children. Matt Hull had only ever been describing what she’d also experienced; his narrative had only given clarity to what she’d been suppressing in her own disturbed sleep since the press conference in Plymouth.
Kat looked for somewhere to sit down. She needed water.
Steve was quick to express his own fatigue with a nearby sixth-form lecturer, who was holding forth to his blazered students. ‘That teacher could use a hand-axe in the mouth.’
‘Ssh. Let’s get a drink.’
11
‘You all right?’ A voice beside her.
Helene dabbed her nose and blotted tears with the napkin that had come with her coffee. Tired legs, a poor night’s sleep, missing her daughter, none of it was helping. Mostly, she’d just been unsettled by the exhibition and in a way that she’d never anticipated.
When she’d reached the final section, her thoughts had returned to the bearded face and scarred eye of the hostile man at the farm the day before. Him shouting at her, the thin woman watching her retreat, the dog leaping, its wet teeth, the mad brown eyes streaked red: images impressed into her memory by fear. The only confrontations she was accustomed to were with a recalcitrant six-year-old.
Lincoln and his desperate, inexplicable end. The reason she’d come here: to better understand and to say farewell. He’d killed himself mere weeks after recording those horrid sounds from a quarry neighbouring the subject of this very exhibition. A crying child. A relentless trickling of water. An agitated animal in a lightless space. Her instincts and imagination made connections she couldn’t rationalise. The displays had also opened a path into the previous night’s dream, equally ineffable. She couldn’t remember when she’d felt as mixed-up.
Sipping at her water bottle to create a barrier, she returned her attention to the concerned face of the young man sat at the next table who’d spoken to her. A camera hung from his neck on a red and black strap. A plastic badge on a lanyard read PRESS PASS.
A dark-haired woman with a plump, handsome face sat across the table from the photographer and eyed Helene with what looked like disapproval twinned with wariness. Perhaps she was only preoccupied with the book and papers spread on the table top before her; a woman engaged in a professional task, no time for distractions, her stiff courtesy a first defence. Helene had seen the couple inside the Grand Chamber and again on the stairs between the floors of the exhibition.
The man’s face was slim and attractive, his beard producing the effect of noble and hipster. He was much younger than the woman, so she doubted they were together romantically. And yet the woman’s cool demeanour might yet be born of a perceived threat, an intrusion into her space and onto her ground. Helene loathed that kind of tension between herself and other women; she’d made a few jealous in her time.
‘Get to you, did it?’ the man said, his smile kind. ‘It’s why we came down here. Those children’s skulls were the final straw.’ He winced. ‘Awful.’
Some men could effortlessly offer companionable support, without seeming intrusive. Helene found him attractive too but made sure not to show it. She nodded her agreement. ‘I’m a mum,’ she added to placate the woman, in case they were an item.
‘Must make it worse,' the man said. 'Even though it happened tens of thousands of years ago, it must still get to you.’
‘You’re not wrong.’ But to change a subject she didn’t want to dwell on, Helene asked the couple what they were doing at the exhibition.
The man answered, ‘She’s words, I’m pictures.’ He then introduced himself as Steve and said other things about an assignment for a magazine. The name of the publication didn’t register. Helene asked if they were local and they said they were.
‘Mind if we join you?’ Steve asked and Helene raised no objection. But the woman, who had been introduced as Kat, cast a black look at Steve that only reached the back of his head.
Once they’d shifted to her table, Helene shared a few tentative details about Valda. She felt obliged to account for her tears, how the exhibition had made her needy.
The journalist, Kat, finally softened when Helene offered a few photographs of Valda she kept in her phone: a jam-smeared face, a small figure dressed as a fairy with wings, a face split with crazed laughter during some antic that Helene couldn’t recall.
Steve said he loved kids, and Kat appeared to stiffen for a second at this admission.
When Helene tactfully moved the conversation away from herself and asked about their work, she found herself immediately impressed with Kat and wanted the woman’s resistance to disappear. She wanted to be liked by her. Not once did the journalist brag about her career; she only mentioned her work in vague terms. It was Steve who recited Kat’s CV to Helene. Three of the magazines Kat had worked on in London Helene still read. She must have read Kat’s work in the past. The journalist offered a thin smile when Helene stated as much and quickly quelled Helene’s admiration by suggesting that her career had been ‘of no consequence’.
The couple’s attitude only shifted from polite friendliness when Steve asked what brought Helene to Devon.
‘He was here? And then he went missing?’ Steve asked Helene, after she’d nutshelled Lincoln’s story. He and Kat had exchanged glances. Perhaps the mention of a suicide accounted for their reaction.
‘Two weeks before he passed.’
‘Sorry, I don’t mean to pry,’ Steve said.
‘Then why are you?’ Kat asked him.
Steve looked chastened but was clearly irritated by Kat’s terse remark.
‘It’s all right,’ Helene said. ‘It happened a long time ago. But it’s weird, I think I’m only coming to terms with it now. It’s another reason why I was upset.’
‘Grief affects people in different ways,’ Steve offered and Kat looked at him again as if to question the experience behind such an
observation.
As if he were present, a startling sense of Lincoln warmed through Helene. It had happened the day before. ‘My brother was quite a character. It was typical of him to spend a whole summer here, camping and recording underground noises for an obscure website.’
At further prompting from Steve, she described the recordings and confessed how uncanny she found their connection to the sound effects piped into the exhibition. She’d never see Kat and Steve again so it didn’t matter if they thought her a weirdo.
‘The soundtrack here was probably recorded in a zoo, or taken from a music library with a safari section,’ Steve offered. But he appeared unable to contain his excitement when Helene mentioned where Lincoln had camped, though she wasn’t sure why.
She also feared she was out of touch with what was interesting to people like Steve and Kat. This made her wonder how switched on her brother had been and how clueless she was about what was ‘cool’: she’d always believed the opposite to be true.
Kat only frowned as Helene narrated her story and she sensed discontent in the journalist, even a store of unhappiness. She thought Kat was glamorous but careless with her appearance, offering an impression of not really caring about what she’d thrown on. Helene found that odd when someone could afford such nice clothes.
On discovering that the journalist and Steve were in a relationship she had to suppress her surprise, as well as a tinge of disappointment.
* * *
Gradually, Kat overcame her irritation with Steve’s wooing of the single mum in the museum café. He was definitely flirting and that made her dwell on how often he flirted, or worse, with other women. A familiar preoccupation.
For far too long she’d liked the fact that she wasn’t in love with Steve. The mutual lack of expectation suited her. But recently it had dawned upon her that she’d fallen for him.
Steve was out all the time and Kat only saw him twice a week, at most, which suited her more than him. She never kept tabs. Maybe he’d made the most of that arrangement. And there had been an assurance, an easy confidence with no inhibition, when he’d identified a damsel in distress in the café and attended to her. An approach much practised? He’d picked out a hot one too. Helene was leaner than her, taller. Her short haircut suggested Paris more than Walsall and boyishly framed the strong bones of her even features.