by Adam Nevill
* * *
Dogs, massive dogs, were still barking and leaping in the road outside the scruffy house. If he moved they’d see him and come scampering. He’d never outrun hounds that rangy, that eager for chase.
He’d been stuck behind a wall for thirty minutes and counting. His pulse hadn’t stopped thumping in his ears and surely his heartbeat had been audible outside his body. Jerky, panicky compulsions had periodically urged him to burst from where he’d hidden, to try for the dismal pony paddock. But he’d stayed put.
One, two, three, four, five . . . no, six vehicles had since entered the farm and parked beside the farmhouse. Tony Willows had guests: people who weren’t saying much to each other besides a few muffled greetings.
From as close as he thought safe, Steve had quickly inspected the farmhouse before needing to hide fast. Tucked away from the lane and smothered by tree limbs growing over its roof, the building was the kind of place a person might happen across in an American swamp.
White paint peeled from wood panelling, leaving patches of the building entirely green with sap from the encroaching plants. Grass sprouted over the porch like a green wave upon a jetty. Furniture lay discarded, spongy and mottled upon the wild lawn, the grass broken by numerous lumps of discarded machinery: car parts or farm equipment, he hadn’t been able to tell. Stiff, weathered articles of clothing had hung for long enough on that washing line to be unrecognisable. And yet so many people had come here in big expensive cars.
Such a state of disrepair was inexplicable unless the musician had fallen on hard times. And why the enduring seclusion? Willows was largely forgotten now but had the world been such a terrible place for him that this was preferable? A mystery Steve was unlikely to unravel, but while he’d been hidden his drug theory had petered into rags of smoke. This was hardly the palace of a drug lord.
The last time Steve had been poised to beat a rapid retreat out the same way he’d come in, a man with a thin ponytail had bounded from the scruffy house and turned towards the metal gate. So taken aback by the man’s sudden appearance, Steve had almost spoken out loud and recited his apologetic excuses for trespassing. But he’d not been spotted. The man in the oily overalls had not been looking for an intruder and was only intent on opening the gate to let the vehicles in.
Steve had backed further away from the house, his spine scraping through verdure spilling over a wall. Once he’d reached a collapsed section of masonry, he’d slipped over the weed-smothered rubble and crouched in thick grass. A cascade of ivy now concealed him.
Rumbling and purring cars had filled the lane. And from the old house had come the excitable dogs. Out of sight, a slamming of doors and a scuffling of feet and claws on the road surface had ensued. A film of fear-sweat had frozen over Steve’s body and not yet thawed.
When the large Volvo 4x4 had parked level with his position, he’d withdrawn deeper into the foliage, climbing into the broken house’s unkempt garden, encircled by a slate wall, where he’d remained trapped.
The three dogs had kept up their running back and forth on the tarmac and the man with the ponytail had remained by the gate, smoking a cigarette.
Due to the length of the grass, he’d only seen the occupants of the cars from above the waist but they’d seemed ordinary enough: of mixed gender, mostly middle-aged and elderly and smartly dressed as if arriving for a celebration. Slowly and quietly they’d filed through a door above the sagging porch, like people entering a church.
A few minutes later, everything at the farm changed, the activity, the very atmosphere and Steve forgot the cold, the damp and the cramp in his legs.
* * *
His first reaction to the sound was sheer confusion. Because what kind of gathering would make such a noise and to what end? It wasn’t exactly singing but suggested a communal vocal endeavour.
From inside the house came a sustained, high-pitched tone, formed of many voices raised in unison, rising and falling as the participants caught their breath before resuming the odd chant.
Had he not been trespassing and crouching behind a broken wall he might have found the ululation amusing. And though he was unable to decipher a word, one voice soon raised itself inside the building and dominated the others. A man’s voice. An elderly voice. Outside in the lane, the dogs bayed an accompaniment.
The thump of feet upon the lane that followed seemed to stop all movement inside Steve's body: footsteps accompanied by the timpani of dog claws on tarmac, closing on his position in the weeds.
The thin, bearded man with the ponytail reappeared, crowded by the excited dogs, all hurrying down the lane as if towards the nearest agricultural building. The man entered the pony paddock. From there he was soon leading the smallest animal into the road. The other three ponies followed, their heads nodding disconsolately before stopping at the verge.
Cantering sideways the pony in the lane shied away from the leaping dogs. The man holding the bridle struggled. What Steve could see of his face was pale, perhaps taut with nervous excitement.
A sound of feet scuffed the wooden boards of the sloping porch and Steve turned to peer at the house. His view was part-obscured by the vines of the boundary wall, though not enough to prevent him from seeing what came out of the back door. A single file, a solemn parade, of naked people. Not a soul wore a stitch of clothing.
These people were much changed in another way too and for some time Steve neither blinked nor inhaled, because each person was coloured red from head to foot.
The red people entered the lane and walked unhurriedly in his direction, their progress accelerating a collision of possible connections that made him grow cold.
Tony Willows’s last album, Hark! Hear the Red Folk Sing. Red Folk.
Iron oxide had coated the human remains found in the Brickburgh cave, on and off, for sixty thousand years.
All too much to be a coincidence with the Grand Chamber no more than three miles east of where he crouched on Willows’s knackered old farm.
A hippy, folksy thing then? Must be. Pagan folk music thing . . . a tradition.
Forget the drug farm, this was a weird backwoods Devon thing: an old man with some influence enacting old practices.
His festivals from the past. A relic of those. Must be. But harmless. Don’t freak out.
Willows had fried his brains with LSD in the Seventies. Maybe there was no coming back for Tony. Sure didn’t look like it.
But the campers Matt Hull had seen from the air?
A sudden imagined scenario of himself surrounded by the grotesque red figures made Steve deeply uneasy.
Along the potholed tarmac the red folk walked barefoot. Sagging bellies, shrivelled genitalia, wasted breasts: most of the people were getting on. Pale bluish tattoos, not completely covered by the dye, were visible on some arms and legs. But only when the last few figures reached his position did he spot the objects they clutched in their scarlet hands.
All but two of the figures held a dark rock. Two bald, overweight men trailed spears with stone heads. Weapons. Not something Steve wanted to see in this context. Those that had hair had teased and lathered it outwards, stiff with the red stain. They all looked a sight, they looked a fright.
A tiny impulse bade him take a picture, but he dared not even twitch. If anyone in that ghastly procession peered to the side of the road they’d see him. Steve pretended he was made of stone.
As they ambled to the pony in the lane, the scratchily bearded face of the man who held the animal became solemn. His dogs leaped joyously about the red people. The naked figures stroked the pony, caressing the shivering beast with their hands while uttering the curious fluting sounds. Red dye was wiped upon its flanks, ribs and thick neck.
Skittish, the pony’s visible eye went big, white and wild. Steve knew how it felt.
And on to the far buildings the strange red procession continued, in single file, led by the man with the paint-smeared pony.
From a distance Steve finally managed to take pictu
res with the flash disabled. There was still enough light to catch something. Using the zoom he enlarged his view of the gathering, watched them enter the open doors of the largest barn. Inside they went, heads bowed and arms rising as if in greeting.
This was no longer about what he could find out about missing people or drugs: the day was now all about Steve’s unrestrained curiosity. His fear on the wane, he shivered with excitement. One half of his mind, driven by instinct, still shrieked and begged him to run away fast. Another part, the one that drove him to surf in high winds and angry breakers, or to dive from cliffs into the sea, bade him tarry a while longer. This place was too damn weird to abandon now.
A reckless impetus drove him through the long grass of the garden, past a sodden sofa, across the moving planks of the porch and right up to the doorway of the old house.
* * *
Little had changed inside for some time. Steve doubted it had been cleaned in a while either.
Just inside the door was a large kitchen area connected to a dim dining room crowded with furniture, unclean kitchenware, piles of boxes and building materials. A room reeking of animals and stale grease. Dog biscuits spilled from steel bowls laid on newspaper, pellets that stuck to the shit on his shoes.
Beyond the dining room, the hallway was cluttered with buckets, tools, garden implements, more newspapers. A single lightbulb was lit behind the front door, the top third of the door crowned by a fantail of stained glass.
Piles of coats and clothes sloped across the table in the dining area.
All of those people had come inside this shitty kitchen and taken their clothes off, before painting themselves red.
Steve took pictures.
The dye they’d used for their bodies was stored in four plastic buckets, the kind that DIY stores sold, filled with wood stain.
Confronted by the haphazard domestic arrangements and the electrifying comprehension of being inside someone’s house without permission, Steve returned to his senses. He’d seen enough and he turned to head out. Maybe a quick recce of the barn down the lane and then home-time while the light was still good. He had a torch if needed.
But Steve failed to take a single step in the direction of the back door.
There had been many times in his life when regret nearly disabled him; when a terrible disbelief in his own impetuous actions cleared his mind of all thoughts save a realisation that there had always been other choices, other ways of doing things. He just rarely chose the more considered alternatives. These days he experienced the epiphany less, because he was getting older and took fewer risks, but he felt it again now and powerfully too: that mixture of defeat, near haplessness and self-loathing, tinged with nausea.
When he heard the dogs’ claws and the scuffle of boots on the path before the porch, this deep sense of regret peppered his forehead with sweat. Only way out for him now was further inside.
Before he could think it through, Steve ran across the kitchen, wheeling around the impediments upon the floor. Inside the adjoining hallway, he ducked through the nearest doorway at his left. And entered a parlour.
Within the moment he had to establish what he’d fled into, he thought the light fitting too ornate for the chaotic space: a bulky shade of red-stained glass, unlit, hanging over a room cramped with heavy furniture.
Dark antique chairs and a settee piled high with clothes and papers choked the floor. Save the big curtained bay window, the entire wall-space was festooned with framed photographs that reflected the thin light escaping the hall.
A dresser was filled with broken stones. A vast fireplace gaped and seemed to exude, like some horrid mouth, a reek of dog, engine oil and a vinegary, sebaceous human odour. But only at the conclusion of his hurried appraisal did Steve catch sight of the wizened form sunk inside the easy chair before the windows. A hunched thing, a wheelchair collapsed against the armrest. So dark had the dye made her shrunken flesh that he’d not seen the occupant when he came in. Now he gaped.
A patterned tray of mostly uneaten food lay beside the figure’s lumpy red feet. Asleep, or worse, its eyes were closed. It was a woman. Breasts shrivelled like large raisins gave the gender away. The head was mostly hairless.
Behind the wall, the kitchen filled with dog claws on lino, canine whines, barks and the muted thump of booted feet.
Steve performed a quick one-eighty and dropped behind the open door. Then pulled it towards himself until the door’s edge met the armrest of the long sofa. A rustle and a thump sounded as his tailbone struck the skirting board, but there he squatted, squeezing his jaws closed.
All of his concentration and will were required to calm his breathing, the air whistling through his nostrils forming tiny screams. He dearly wished that he was a smaller man so the top of his head would not be visible.
Directly outside the room, a man shouted ‘Stay!’ To Steve it sounded as if the dogs were jumping up the walls of the hall.
Steve’s last act was to slide a musty towel from the back of the sofa to cover his head, which he pressed into the sofa’s bristly rear panel. His body behind the door, his towelled head jammed behind the sofa looking down at a scruffy carpet rimed with grey dust, he didn’t know how visible he’d be to whoever entered the parlour.
The very presence of the man in the room ignited the inside of Steve’s skull into a storm of white terror. He even wondered, stupidly, if he should stand up and apologise for being inside the house.
How he stayed still, he wasn’t sure.
He was unable to see what was happening inside the room, only hearing the man’s feet on the floor and seemingly too near his head. Mercifully, the dogs had done the man’s bidding and waited outside where they whined. They’d have sniffed him out for sure. But as each long second dragged itself through an awful stasis, with his consciousness taut as a snare drum’s skin, Steve anticipated the fall of a hand upon his shoulder, a barked challenge or the sudden yanking away of the towel and a horrible exposure.
Instead, he heard the crack of knee joints. Then the man muttered softly on the far side of the room. Steve presumed he was speaking to the old thing in the armchair. ‘Now. Time, mother. They’re here. The children are waiting. Come now. That’s it. That’s it.’
There followed a snapping metallic sound and the noise of a spring extending, which Steve understood to be the unfolding of the wheelchair.
A startled cry came next and a sound resembling a child’s sob when the woman’s rest was disturbed. Then she took to whimpering as if roused from an awful dream.
The man quieted her with cooing sounds from the roof of his mouth. A strange interaction muffled by the density of the ancient upholstery Steve hid behind, but his shock still mingled with a heightened sense of the absurd.
‘She’s come close,’ an elderly voice announced. ‘The den is full. She’s not alone.’
‘Yes, yes. It’s time.’
‘Up so far. So far again. We must respond.’ The voice was cracking and frail but the woman was well spoken, her tone deeper than Steve expected from a person of such advanced years.
‘Yes, mother.’
‘Their bellies yawn. Are we safe?’
‘Of course. Everything’s okay.’
‘You know what they bay for. What they want. And there’s outside getting inside again.’
‘No. Everything’s fine. Just the red here. I’m going to lift you now. We can’t wait any longer or they’ll be through . . . with us. We don’t want that.’
‘It’s in the air. The outside. You wouldn’t know it.’
‘There. That’s it, sit.’
Steve heard the sound of springs compressing, the air squeezed from a cushion.
The old woman sounded frightened. ‘Around . . . here. They’ve come in. I can tell.’
‘Yes, it’s all open. The air is alive. We’re only waiting for you. We’d never start without you.’
‘But we’re safe? The gate?’
‘Yes, mother. Just friends here. Only the re
d.’
‘No one else?’
‘No one else.’
‘Then I must have a face to greet the red.’
‘I have it right here.’
* * *
The sound of the chair’s wheels and the crowding pack of excited dogs moved away from the odoriferous pall in which Steve crouched. Beyond the interior wall he heard the man and his mother navigate the porch.
Slowly, Steve raised his head and peered around himself, half-expecting a trap, their leaving the house mere pretence.
When he finally straightened his spine a picture frame rattled behind his shoulders. He turned his head, afraid he might knock something from the wall, and peered into a dust-filmed photograph of Witchfinder Apprentice.
Sideburns, long hair, two bearded musicians in a folk rock ensemble of eight, posed like kings around a mediaeval banquet. A table heaped with platters of fowl, fruits and bread, mimicking a classical still-life painting.
Already balding, a young Tony Willows was visible at the head of the table, glaring as if with disapproval at the frolics the record company had imposed upon his band for a gatefold sleeve. The picture was taken from the cover artwork of Below the Green. Steve had bought a second-hand copy from Amazon.
As he came out from behind the sofa, he listened intently for any sign of movement within the house.
Nothing.
He turned and took photographs of the wall. Lots of strange figures were up there wearing suede jackets with wide lapels and bell-bottom trousers. Arms circled shoulders in pictures so brown with age the subjects seemed to have origins in the American Wild West.
The band had also favoured rural settings for press shots and often stood at gates or sat on fences, or posed before rock formations. Some of the latter might have been the Tors on Dartmoor. There were other pictures of the band playing live in monks’ vestments and again in masks with long noses. Hippy Slipknot, Steve thought and nearly smiled.