The Reddening

by Adam Nevill

  Helene had readily agreed. And once the article about the cave’s ‘ghosts’ was done, Kat would consign the cave and all of its strange sounds and curious tragedies to the past.

  As for Matt Hull’s situation, she’d unobtrusively keep an eye on that front but do nothing rash. Steve, she’d keep on a leash.

  Kat turned in early. But when her alarm sounded the following morning it quickly became apparent that her involvement with Redstone Cross and with all that was piped, whispered and shrieked beneath that hilly earth, was unwilling to remain at the safe remove she wished for.

  * * *

  Kat. They’re back. They paid me another visit. I’m sick of this shit. Just sick of it. So I’m getting out, yeah? It’s gone too far.

  I’m being watched, yeah. All the time now. There’s a car . . . I know it’s them. It’s getting worse.

  The message had been left on her phone in the early hours, and Kat picked it up later that morning. Matt Hull had also sent photographs.

  I swore . . . I swore that next time they tried this shit, I’d be ready. I’d get a picture. And I did. I got one of them looking through the kitchen window.

  I tore out into the garden and I caught one of them running away.

  This is sick. So I’m taking off. Clearing out. I’m going to my brother’s in Somerset for a bit. I won’t be far from my boy. I swear, anything happens to any of us then you know who’s behind this.

  It’s them at Redstone. At the farm. Yeah, I’ve said it. Something’s up with them again. I don’t know if it’s because I spoke to you. I don’t know. I don’t know. How would they know who you are? Unless they saw . . . when you came over. But why now? Nothing for over a year and now I’ve got red handprints on my door again.

  Don’t bother with the police. I’ve called the law. This time I did. And one of them came round and saw what I’ve sent you. He said he’d look into it. I’ve heard nothing since.

  While he was here, he said it was a prank. Prank? What kind of prank, I said to him? Painting yourself red, yeah, and looking in a window. What’s that? That’s sick. It’s threatening behaviour because of what I know.

  Has anything been stolen, any damage to your property? That’s what he asked me. I mean, what’s that? It’s not about that. And there are prints on the window and door. Get the prints, I told him. Get those prints. He never did. No one’s been since. I’ve heard nothing.

  I’m sorry. Sorry for bothering you with this. It’s my problem, not yours. Because of what I’ve seen, you know, from the air. And what I did for them. They know that I know, yeah. They won’t leave it alone, not ever. They were never going to. I’ve been kidding myself. But everyone’s got a limit. I’ve reached mine. I’m sick of it. Sick of this shit. I’m in serious –

  The message reached the end of its permitted duration and cut off.

  Matt Hull had made the call at 2 a.m. He’d been agitated, breathless and frightened but trying to mask his fear with the bravado that follows confrontation.

  Kat was glad her phone had been recharging in the kitchen: it wasn’t a call she’d have wanted to entertain alone, half-asleep, after midnight.

  At 10 a.m. she called him. He didn’t pick up. She left a brief message on his voicemail then transferred his picture attachments to her laptop and enlarged them.

  * * *

  The first picture was of a small window, set deeply inside white walls, above an untidy kitchen sink. But beyond the glass appeared the murky suggestion of a human face. A woman’s face, Kat thought.

  Definitely a head with the skin and features thickly coated in a red daub: a cosmetic lined by the worn skin beneath and smeared about a pair of wide, horridly white eyes. A hand with thin fingers had pressed itself against the window pane, the palm lighter in colour, the nails unpleasantly extending from three fingers.

  The second picture was blurred. Taken as the subject turned from the glass, perhaps after seeing the flash of Matt’s camera inside the kitchen. But he’d raced outside his cottage to confront the intruder, touching the screen as he moved; he’d also uploaded a blurred picture of his own scrawny legs, another of a foot splayed on the wood-effect lino of his kitchen floor. But outside, in the rear garden, against a background of night and amidst evidence of a peeling shed, three large planters on patio stones and the glimmer of a washing line, ran a single human figure.

  The picture had been taken from behind the intruder as she’d retreated, providing a glimpse of a body darkened by paint: the ankles, knees, hips and elbows all defined, if not pronounced. Between the spiky joints the corresponding limbs were narrow, the buttocks pinched and creased above the top of the thighs. A rack of ribs was discernible below prominent scapulae and the arms were cast out for balance.

  The figure seemed aged, or suffering from an eating disorder, perhaps an addiction. But an impression of a certain daintiness to its flit across the small lawn was unpleasantly at odds with the fearsome sight of bemired skin and emaciation.

  What Kat found most unnerving was the wild hair, stretched out into lengths and oiled into a series of haphazard spikes and tufts. Above such narrow shoulders it made the head grotesquely large.

  The visitor to Matt’s home was horrible. Surely the police would investigate such a reprehensible intrusion, one solely intended to frighten a resident. What other reason could account for such behaviour? The woman, if it was a woman, was surely mentally ill.

  At the very least she should call Rick, her contact in police community liaison. And yet she found herself hesitating and sufficiently nervous to feel sick. The ‘red people’ existed.

  At least Matt was leaving Redhill and not before time. He would be in less danger in Somerset with his brother. She refused to accept that his son was in jeopardy at his mum’s in the harbour town. And maybe Matt was right and it wasn’t her problem.

  It did resemble a prank, a horrible one, but a prank all the same. It wasn’t as if Matt was a vulnerable woman stalked at home: he was a grown man being menaced by a horrible clown-thing covered in red paint. He was paranoid and frightened and that was contagious. But who wouldn’t be in that situation?

  Eventually, Kat found herself not wanting to think about it at all, particularly not his allusions to her being observed at his home by the same people who’d appeared in his yard and left red handprints on his door.

  But by the afternoon, staying silent about Matt’s plight had felt irresponsible, it nagged and twisted her. Should she have already reported what he had seen from the air to the police or to Sheila? The two people ambushed beside their tent: had that really happened? Because Matt saw her as insurance, he’d talked about her contacting the police if something happened to him, but not otherwise. She didn’t want to be insurance but why wasn’t he answering his phone? Feeling sick and drained, she soon half-convinced herself that she was now implicated in whatever he was mixed up in. But what was that?

  Kat called Steve at home. He didn’t pick up so she tried his mobile. He didn’t answer straightaway but while she was leaving a message he called her.

  His breathless, excited voice burst through her phone’s speaker. ‘Babe, hiya. Don’t ask where I am, yeah? Just don’t ask.’

  He was outside, she knew that much. Wind buffeted the phone’s microphone, suggesting open sky. Gortex rustled near his mouthpiece.

  ‘You’re outside.’ She didn’t say any more but her body tensed.

  ‘Just passed the dig and on my way to Redstone Cross.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘No. I don’t want you to be . . . don’t want you to go up there.’

  ‘Don’t fuss. It’s cool. I’m not going to do anything.’

  13

  One by one, the black sheep stopped walking when Steve did and stared at him. The posture of their bulbous forms suggested expectation. Their thin legs were set apart and braced for his next move. He imagined they were waiting for him to speak and was reminded of the sudden interaction with strange children:
patient, insistent kids, instinctively following an adult. Their presence made him tense.

  Ninety minutes of breathless weaving had elapsed before he reached this impenetrable tangle of brushwood and blackberry vines, untamed between the boughs of the unappealing wood. Up across the valley floor he’d crossed spongy turf, turning marshy at the very foot of the valley; following a stream that often disappeared underground, its hypnotic trickling on his left side.

  Most of the animals were rams, their expressions impassive, though almost noble in a peculiar way, with long muzzles like the faces in Phoenician bas reliefs, and powerful grey horns curled into crowns.

  He was an interloper here, an intruder, and he imagined that other eyes might be upon him too. Maybe the landscape itself was aware of his passage. The suspicion was hard to suppress and contributed to his unease. A drop in temperature and the dimming light further eroded his resolve to continue.

  The sun’s descent had been swallowed by a sagging ceiling of dark cloud, an underbelly compressing earthbound shadows into swathes of gloom. Along the horizon, where the sun remained visible, the light was intense: white, yet smoky and brushed with sulfur, a nuclear explosion casting out fiery skirts from end to end of the visible horizon.

  And from the darkening cliffs these horned creatures had tottered out to him, their bellies swinging, black muzzled, Satan-horned. Nine pairs of beautiful feminine eyes had immediately fixed upon him.

  They’d been positioned like sentries on the buttresses of rock at Whaleham Point, near the Brickburgh Caves. Black shapes standing on their spindly, ebony limbs above rock faces. The distance between them and him had been hard to judge, but they’d appeared effortlessly poised upon narrow grooves in the cliffs, as wide as a human foot, worn by generations of hooves.

  He’d taken photographs of the sheep before the celestial backdrop, their horned silhouettes in the foreground. Eerie pictures that could have served for a cover of an old Witchfinder Apprentice album: a landscape at dusk, the very tones of the artist’s mind. Perhaps the very atmosphere accounted for why Willows settled here.

  The soles of his boots were now claggy with dung. Every square foot of land seemed beset by leathery plums that squashed and adhered to his feet. The inside of each calf was shit-smeared. Hasty, he’d been hasty. Not entirely prepped for this one-man mission either, if he were honest with himself; he’d left his flat late. That grated.

  Kat hadn’t wanted him to come here, but she’d laugh at him if he bailed now. He’d bailed on a lot of stuff since meeting her. She inspired him but just as quickly identified the flaws in his designs. He hated that and was now ignoring her repeated calls. He planned to BS her about there being no signal on his phone.

  Steve looked down the valley and was struck again by the fact that although he lived not far from this area, and had done for most of his life, he was unfamiliar with this part of the coast. He hailed from the other side of Divilmouth, twelve miles south, and had never walked here. It made him question his desire to escape a place more unfamiliar to him than he’d ever imagined. He didn’t know anyone who’d walked the coast from Divilmouth to Brickburgh. This place was truly overlooked. Had it not been for the cave, no one would ever have come here at all.

  Odd, he’d always thought the countryside odd too. No one about. No one visibly working. British flags on bags of carrots and the odd tractor holding up traffic were the only evidence of activity in the countryside. And here was this epic silence about land so open and exposed and inactive but fenced off, in which these four-legged creatures ambled freely and chewed and shat. What was the point of it?

  Respect to Helene: she’d been fit in more ways than one. Her lungs must have been bellows to get her lean body up the valley slope. She’d walked all the way here from the north banks of Divilmouth. He’d not covered half that ground and was spent. She’d then walked all the way back to her car once she’d been caught trespassing.

  A brief consideration of the young woman’s legs and slender hips consumed him.

  A swimmer’s body.

  Stop it.

  Kat was too clever not to have noticed his amorous fascination with Helene. He’d deliberately sat near her in the café. And though hating himself for the thought, he’d pretty much seen Kat as a hindrance from then on.

  Some women just hung around in his head; Helene was one of them. Before he’d uploaded his exhibition pictures to the FTP site for Kat, he’d also made sure to extract the incriminating images. Photos he’d surreptitiously taken of Helene at the exhibition that were now hidden on his hard drive. There was an absolute gem featuring her bent over, her skinny-fit jeans taut as she read a sign before a case of bones.

  But this was no good. The sheep had to fuck off now. He needed to press through the woods beneath the buildings at Redstone Cross Farm. Willows’s homestead was somewhere on the far side of these trees. The ground was steep inside the woods and he was at a loss as to how to get through. But his current upward trajectory should put him near the middle of the longest buildings as indicated on the satellite map. This next part of the operation called for stealth, not an entrance heralded by a herd of livestock. The situation was not without humour and he couldn’t wait to tell Kat later, though she’d probably blow her stack.

  As if arriving with a solution, a ram clopped nearer. Ashamed of his fear, Steve stiffened. He tried to remember if rams charged and butted with their horns. Or was that goats?

  The creature’s muzzle was stringed with snot. Three of its fellows followed the leader and ambled over too. The lead sheep bleated at Steve before disappearing into the trees. They knew the way through. It was as if they were guiding him now.

  * * *

  Ponies. They were staring at him. Black ponies with stocky legs and small muscular bodies, short heads, broad, bushy tails. Four of them, standing a few feet from the open door of a barn. Save one strip of light in the roof where the tiles were long gone, the interior of the building was pitch. The whole area stank of dung, compost and urine.

  Once out of the woods this was the first building he’d found: a shack tilting in the corner of a muddy paddock. Constructed from vertical planks of wood, the exterior faded, buckling near the earth. The ground was churned red mud and black loaves of dung. Not a blade of grass had survived.

  This was not what he expected to find: he’d thought a rock star’s farm would be smarter.

  Farther along the lane, between the barn and another three scruffy buildings, the verge was overgrown and tangled with thorny vines. Dandelion stalks protruded en masse.

  When he looked in the opposite direction towards Redstone Crossroads, another roof and part of the upper storey of a dirty house were partially visible between unmanaged trees and an unruly hedgerow.

  An ancient stone wall before the building occasionally showed between cascades of ivy and wisteria. A metal gate closed off the road a short distance from the house: the barrier must have been open when Helene visited. And she’d just wandered in.

  While the ponies watched him in silence, Steve knelt down and took pictures. Hugging the side of the road, his ears straining, he then moved towards the trio of grey buildings ahead. The sheep were headed in that direction too; he was following them again, or being led.

  Green vegetation, grey slate, rusticated wood and tarmac, dark-red soil; the colours of the world had been reduced here. And no one cleared the animal dung. Wheels had visibly compressed it into huge discs on the tarmac. Tyre treads offered the only sign of recent human occupation. Take away the farm animals and the place was derelict.

  Steve crossed the lane to the other side, his head down. He found a gap in the long hedgerow to peer at an apple orchard.

  From that side of the road he continued to a clutch of structures with tiled roofs, the largest being the oldest and the second wooden barn he’d seen since emerging from the trees. The walls were suffocated by untamed ivy. Wisterias contorted like pythons to the guttering. No vehicles.

  The two small s
tone buildings next to the wooden barn were single-storey, with greening wooden doors, their padlocks rusted. A single window at the top of each gable was thick with dust and green algae on the outside. The panes of glass dimly reflected branches from the unruly trees. Even if he could reach that high he’d never see anything inside without an interior light.

  A concrete extension jutted from one end of the barn at a right angle, its white stucco milky-green with sap. A window at head height was so dirty it only revealed metal bars, painted white and cemented into the sill. An ancient ceramic sign on the door read: dangerous floor: do not enter. Steve took pictures.

  Where the trees of the orchard thinned on the other side of the road, he found a third barn, also slouching. There were no doors. A black opening gaped at the front and the black sheep had gathered outside the miserable structure. A metal gate, once barring the paddock, lay on its side beside an overgrown drainage ditch. There was nothing else to see unless he broke a padlock. The place was impoverished.

  Beyond where the sheep congregated the air lightened, suggesting an open expanse. That must be his ‘airstrip’. Steve called himself a twat.

  The lane continued further past the peeling, ivy-smothered buildings then turned. Untidy hedges curved with it. According to Google, fields and a continuation of the boundary wood moved eastwards towards a final building: the one with the newer roof he’d seen on Google Earth.

  He wondered if he should check the ‘airstrip’ but if he left the hedgerow and ventured into open space he’d be more visible. But to whom? Helene had met two ‘rough-looking posh people’ with dogs. Maybe the couple lived here with old Tony Willows and that was that. End of story.

  No quarry had been marked on the online maps or the most recent Ordnance Survey map he’d purchased. Steve assumed that whatever Helene’s brother had mic’d up must be somewhere further down and beyond this knackered, potholed road.

  Feeling more confident, he walked back on himself, towards what must be the farmhouse. Using the last of the afternoon light, he’d get a few pictures and take off via the sheep track in the woods. Case closed.