The Reddening

by Adam Nevill

  Steve had always paid a lot of attention to Kat’s legs but this woman’s were longer, more slender, stronger, with a second skin of skinny-fit denim emphasising powerful calf and thigh muscles. She was athletic and probably worked out to remain so rangy yet feminine. In time she might go stringy.

  Helene also seemed moody, though it only contributed to her air of being effortlessly sexy. Single, with a lovely daughter – and Steve was becoming increasingly interested in having kids. Kat’s penchant for paranoia enabled her to imagine Steve with the woman and her ready-made family. His boyish antics would delight the six-year-old.

  When she felt sick Kat stopped the punishing fantasy. A dark presence, a cold pall more than a cloud, pushed again at the edges of her memory: Graham and his horrible rejection.

  They’d had twelve years together in London. Eight years gone but the coals of that relationship were prone to being raked over if she didn’t remain disciplined.

  Her separation from the only man she’d ever wholly loved had been excruciating. Graham had left her to start a family with someone else: a family already under construction, in another flat in West London, while she and Graham were still together. His deception had been monumental.

  Jane had been a mutual friend. Graham had made her pregnant during the five-month affair that Kat had missed while consumed by the unravelling of her career and her war with the intern, Clarabelle.

  Jane’s pregnancy had finally turned Graham’s sullen dissatisfaction into a conclusive rejection of what he’d had with Kat. He’d been so relieved once he’d finished with her. She could still hear the sentence that tore her apart: ‘I can’t do this any more.’

  She’d sat still, bloated yet weightless with trauma in their flat in Westbourne Grove. A linen curtain had wafted across her face like a shroud. In that moment, the world had been lifted from Atlas’s shoulders and dropped onto her face.

  Graham had already made Kat infertile. Chlamydia. She’d not known he’d passed it on when they’d first met. By the time she found out and they were treated it was too late for her. But not for Graham.

  In the café, Kat had to close her eyes for a few seconds before she lost control of her jaw. She then scraped herself back into the present.

  She shouldn’t dislike Helene. Jesus Christ, she lost her brother. A suicide too. Kat thought of a long drop from a bridge into cold water and shuddered. She knew unhappiness, she knew desperation, but she’d known nothing like that. And Helene was here for closure. On that matter, Kat was tempted to inform her that closure never happened, not really. In time, the past was partially covered and your memory moved on to fill itself with other things. But the damage to your hardware remained permanent.

  ‘You hear this, Kat?’ Steve asked. ‘Her brother ended . . . this happened near Bristol, not here. But the last anyone knew he was here.’ Steve emphasised his point by pressing an index finger upon the table. ‘Mmm? The couple in Cornwall? The walker?’

  Helene was frowning. ‘Sorry, I don’t follow.’

  Steve turned to her. ‘Oh, just something we’re looking into –’

  ‘Hardly,’ Kat said quickly to curb Steve’s conspiracy theorising: it was getting out of hand again. He’d started first thing that morning when she’d allowed the discussion about Matt Hull to resume. She’d also broken her vow to herself and shared with Steve what she’d found online – though it would only have been a matter of time until he discovered it himself and went mad at her for keeping her findings to herself.

  She’d also told Steve that she would consider looking into the information further before sharing it with her contact on the force, because she needed more information. Under the table she tapped Steve’s thigh with her knuckles.

  Steve turned to Kat. ‘We’d love to listen to the recordings, though. Wouldn’t we?’

  ‘They’re her recordings. And important to Helene.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be a problem,’ Helene said, looking from Kat to Steve with her alert blue eyes: long eyelashes, jet-black and velvety. So pretty. ‘Lincoln wanted to share them. He’d been really excited about having his own album of noise but it never happened.’ She dabbed at the wet weight of another tear that had formed in the corner of an eye.

  Kat’s heart cracked. She clenched inside with self-loathing for perceiving this grieving woman as a rival.

  Helene blinked her eyes dry and cleared her throat. ‘They are really weird though. I have no idea what’s making the noises. But they’d be a better soundtrack than the one they’ve got here. Everything Lincoln recorded actually came from underground too. Some of it was recorded close to the caves.’

  ‘Fantastic,’ Steve said. He clapped his hands. ‘Then we can eat.’

  12

  ‘Steve, no. Absolutely not. What would you achieve?’

  ‘But it’s what you should be doing. You said you would look into this more. Well, this is one way of doing that. Just hear me out. This is a story. Your story, I get that, if it’s anybody’s, but I can help.’

  Steve smoothed his hands over the great paper blanket created by the Ordnance Survey map that he'd brought to her cottage and spread across her living room floor. The corners were weighted with used Witchfinder Apprentice CDs he'd mail-ordered.

  ‘Kat,’ he added with an exasperated finality. ‘Just join the bloody dots. That paraglider wasn’t lying. Matt. He was clearly warned off from flying here. People got hurt because one of these farms is growing dope, and big time.’

  ‘Matt could be suffering from paranoid delusions, Steve. He had a bad breakup with his wife. He was also a local hero for finding that cave, but the cameras moved off him years ago. He’s been left high and dry. I’m not so sure he handled his fleeting moment of fame all that well, never mind the fact that it’s now over.’

  ‘The copper you know in Brickburgh also said there’s past history. A drug farm bust went down –’

  ‘Long time ago. Nothing since. Ancient history.’

  Steve pointed at the iPod speakers. ‘Then there’s this guy’s parties that got out of hand.’ A download of Tony Willows solo album, Hark! Hear the Red Folk Sing played quietly.

  ‘In the Seventies! Old, old news, mate.’

  What drifted through the air of her living room was morbidly haunting; even the jaunty passages darkened by bleak lyrics. The voice she remembered distinctly from when Graham had played his Witchfinder albums. It was thinner on the solo album but still high, melodic, almost feminine for a man and quavering with more anguish than she remembered. The pipes accompanying the acoustic guitars were unusual too. Other than that, it was folk music plain and simple, conjuring a sense of the past or mediaeval balladry.

  ‘But a woman even died. At his farm.’

  ‘People die of overdoses all the time, Steve. In the towns, in the cities round here now. It’s not uncommon, despite appearances in the tourist brochures and our rag. You’re trying to rake over a minuscule, out of date scandal.’

  ‘Those might not have been parties on Willows’s land. They were more like . . . like festivals. Rites. Unofficial. All very secretive. Need to know. Private. Invite only. Crashers were dealt with. That’s what I’ve been told. It’s weird, but someone – this old guy, Mac, in the pub – said that Willows wasn’t even present. He was in prison when this stuff really took off. They were held at certain times each year, for a long time. That’s what Mac said. Some were an annual thing connected to the moon or something.’

  ‘Or something? Mac said? Mac? Jesus, Steve! A party once got out of hand and Willows got in trouble. He’s not interested in any kind of public life. He’s retired and reclusive. He burned out in the Seventies. Went a bit Syd Barrett from what I’ve read. It’s safe to assume he’d had enough of drugs and all that they bring a long time ago.

  ‘And I asked Sheila about him yesterday. She said they tried, over and over again, to get him involved with the Divilmouth folk festival and the big one in Sidmouth. He always regretfully declined. He gave up touring in the
Seventies and he’s just an old hippy that breeds sheep now. No one’s seen him in public for years. A few old crusties kept his music alive until the new folk bands revived his back catalogue. That’s the only reason anyone even mentions him now.’

  Steve rolled his eyes. ‘Helene’s brother? He was up there. Redstone Cross. Where he made those recordings was in the heart of the quarries that supplied the old paint factories. Redstone. Some of those quarries are on Willows’s land. Her brother was recording those noises we heard a fortnight before he died, at Redstone Cross. In a frickin’ quarry, Kat. Come on. And the couple who said they were going to camp out there? Why did they top themselves? Did they really? There’s that walker they never found. People get lost, they climb over the wrong fences, but who knows what he might have seen out that way? Matt was threatened, victimised, just for paragliding.’

  ‘Steve. Down a notch, please. We don’t know anything about Helene’s brother. Not really, besides him being into drugs. His sister said as much. He had a weird lifestyle, blah, blah. There could be any number of contributing factors to his suicide, which, by the way, was near Bristol. Bristol, Steve. Not Brickburgh. The campers had some kind of suicide pact in Cornwall. They were nowhere near here when they topped themselves. The links are tenuous. We have no idea what was going on in their minds either.’

  I mean, you’ve very little idea of what goes on inside mine.

  Steve looked at his map in silence. He seemed so young then, a thwarted boy who desperately wanted an adventure. When he spoke again his voice had lost its power. ‘What about Google Earth, yeah? What is that?’

  He’d shown her the Google Earth satellite photographs of the Redstone Cross area and Tony Willows’s farm: a few buildings with dark roofs, strewn down a lane surrounded by unbroken woodland on all sides. Beyond the trees were miles of pasture, copses of woodland, a series of steep valleys cut by streams that drained water from the hills: great clefts separating his land from two neighbouring farms. All remote.

  Further along the private lane where Helene said she'd unwittingly trespassed was another, bigger structure with a newer roof.

  What did surprise Kat was how much land Willows owned. She guessed he must have sold a lot of records and invested his money wisely, or maybe got a good deal on the land in an economic downturn. The Seventies were a time of heavy recession. Perhaps the sheep farming had done well, though that was not something she often heard about the local farming industry. But what did she and Steve know about farming? Nothing.

  West of the buildings was a great flat expanse of ground, bordered by a thick perimeter of trees. It was this area that Steve had become excited about. The grass between the woods was marked by what appeared to be a paler strip of land, resembling a giant cricket pitch. ‘Airstrip,’ Steve had ventured confidently, tapping it with a finger. ‘Why would a retired folk singer and breeder of odd-looking sheep need an airstrip? Think about it.’

  Only when Steve mentioned an airstrip did Kat see the similarity. But it might just as easily have been the patterning of crops. How would they know?

  ‘Steve, there’s a Land Trust country house right in the middle of all that farmland, Redacre House. Part of a national organisation and about three miles from that farm. No one would erect a drug operation anywhere near one of those places. You’ve got the Saga crowd trekking in and out all summer to see the award-winning gardens. And don’t say “hidden in plain sight” or anything like that, because if you start down that road then you might as well introduce UFOs into your theory. Maybe aliens use the airstrip and harvest DNA from his sheep?’

  Steve took another long swig from his beer bottle. ‘All I am saying is there’s no harm in just nosing around a bit, on foot. See what gives. Land Trust put some walkers’ paths through here. It’s not all private land. You can go on some of it. Public right to roam. The coastal path is open too. They’ve widened another old green track for the dig traffic. It’s an accessible area. We’d not be trespassing, just taking a look around.’

  ‘Big area, Steve. Over twelve miles wide. You might have the leisure to stroll around it but I haven’t. I need to earn a living from paying assignments in line with editorial direction.’

  ‘Not the bit I’m looking at between the cave and Redstone Cross. That’s no more than three miles as the crow flies.’

  ‘And what happened to Helene when she wandered up there? Someone set their dogs on her. She said herself that her brother must have been trespassing. The quarry, or whatever is left of it, is on private land. And there are kilns and quarries all over that area. If they weren’t preserved they’ll be overgrown. All you can see are big gouges in the earth and a few bricks. I know, I covered the Industrial Revolution Season in South Devon that was run from Torbay. You could walk straight past an old quarry and not know it. These aren’t filled with water. They’re just overgrown earthworks. You’ll never find where Helene’s brother stuck his microphone in the ground.’

  ‘How do you explain those noises on the discs then? Shit, they were freaky.’

  They had been: disembodied, ghostly sounds, varying from faint and enigmatic to outlandish and horrid as they’d filled Helene’s tiny car. Kat couldn’t think why Helene or her brother would fake the sounds. Nor had she shared the discs with anyone else in six years.

  ‘I can’t explain them, Steve. But there is an explanation. Some kind of wildlife. Little creatures can make huge sounds, especially in enclosed spaces. The earth moves, you know. It never stays still. The wind can produce all kinds of noises, even like voices underground. So can water.’

  ‘You’re reaching.’

  ‘Not as much as you. You were just talking about some mammoth drug operation with an airstrip and now you’re basing your story on weird underground noises. Narcotics and the paranormal. Not my bag, mate.’

  Steve took another draught of beer and returned his attention to the map. ‘It could be . . . I dunno. It’s weird.’

  ‘Can I turn this off now?’ Kat pointed at the iPod.

  ‘Nah. I like it.’

  * * *

  Steve didn’t stay over. Kat had assumed he would. He’d sloped off in another sulk, taking his map and music with him.

  She didn’t like discouraging him but her boyfriend hatched ideas for new projects on a monthly basis. When in that mood she found him exhausting. He was a stick-at-nought, a flitter, possessing a restless soul, one somehow both idle and sporadically bursting with energy.

  But something sinister had happened to the paraglider Matt Hull. Kat believed that much, though whoever Matt had tangled with was never going to be anyone she planned on doorstepping. People growing cannabis were none of her business. Though thoughts of the campers, the hiker, the curious sounds and the recurring idea of red people in the area confounded her. As did the coincidence she’d happened upon the day before, when she'd spoken to members of the archaeological team who’d taken part in recent digs inside the caves: information she’d decided not to share with Steve.

  For her feature about the new exhibition she’d requested an interview with the dig’s site staff. She’d only been seeking a couple of quotes about the second phase of the dig but had received far more. At the end of the interview, she’d dropped a few hints about the weirder aspects of the caves, suggested by Matt Hull’s sinister tales and Helene’s recordings, and been astonished by her interviewees’ response.

  Helene couldn’t have known that similar noises, effectively the sounds of life that Helene’s brother had accidentally recorded, were reported by staff working on the dig’s second phase: disturbances transmitted through solid rock from the direction of a sediment-packed enclave of the cave system.

  From a senior geophysicist, Roger Price, Kat had learned that a number of on-site staff also claimed to have heard sounds of distress underground: those of animals and even children trapped on the other side of walls. The reports had encouraged the archaeological team to explore further south.

  What the geophysicist had told
her had never gone public. According to him, a world-famous sedimentologist, a palaeontologist, a palynologist who’d been examining the soils, two geophysicists who’d mapped below the surface to detect new artefacts, and a cultural archaeologist who’d been identifying and interpreting the manmade tools they’d found in the Grand Chamber, had each encountered the ghostly sounds at some point in their work. Roger knew them all well. They were scientists and academics and not prone to spreading stories about unexplained phenomena.

  And if Helene’s recordings could be trusted, the caves of Brickburgh had been issuing strange sounds long before Matt Hull discovered the original fissure.

  Eventually, surely, there would be a theory citing natural causes for the disturbances. There always was. But there was a story here that could be printed. She wasn’t going to allude to drug farms or red people or anything Steve was pawing at her to chase up. But a piece on the eerie sounds from ancient graves might just bring in another billable assignment.

  Over the phone, she’d discussed Roger’s story with Sheila and her editor had been intrigued by the idea of ‘ghosts’ within the caves. Sheila had suggested Kat research a supplementary story to the main feature: a nod to Tutankhamen’s curse in the Valley of the Kings.

  By a pure-chance meeting, Helene had put her within reach of a soundtrack; they could play the soundfiles on the magazine’s website with a link to the story and credit her brother. Helene might like that.

  Kat had sent Helene a message: Was lovely to have met you. Next time you are down this way do get in touch. She also reminded Helene to let her have copies of her brother’s recordings from an FTP site.