by Adam Nevill
Most of the photographs covering that wall of the dreadful parlour were of the band playing live, standing before mic stands, their fiddles and guitars held high. A wall of folk. The band had been huge for a couple of years. He could see that from the crowd sizes at the festivals: Knebworth, The Isle of Man. And before the stages swayed oceans of handlebar moustaches and girls with dead-straight hair. Cheesecloth, denim and prairie dresses: young people who’d adored the thin musicians in their pointy hats standing on stages strewn with black wires.
Dozens more pictures above the fireplace were similarly faded and dust-filmed: lineup changes, female backing singers that were dead spits for Karen Carpenter, Tony standing beside a Jag, all the guys dressed as Morris dancers. Later in their career there was evidence of berets and trilby hats, white waistcoats and matching flared trousers, sunglasses, when it all went a bit Toto.
Steve listened again for sounds within the house. He held his breath. Nothing.
He took in the wall beside the vast wooden dresser. There was a gold disc for Before the King of Bedlam. The glass was cracked and the frame strewn with cobwebs. Another gold disc for Gallow Ballads, a silver for Thin Len and Choker Lottie. A poster for the Run with Hounds tour, supported by The Incredible String Band, 1972. Steve took more pictures.
He daren’t dither but a quick inspection of the dresser confirmed that the shelves were crowded with stones and bones: artefacts. Reasonable to presume their origin was the Brickburgh caves. Flint hand-axes, tooled bones and spearheads; he’d seen the same at the exhibition. Two Venus figures took pride of place on the top shelf, naked, bulbous and beast-headed. Dull clay bodies absorbing the weak light seeping from the hall’s solitary bulb.
He left the parlour. Glancing at the wood-panelled wall that rose with the stairs into the darkness of the first floor, his eyes alighted upon a framed photograph.
A black and white picture featuring a line of men and women in a field, the sun shining on a wide sea behind them. They were naked save for the crude masks. Headdresses crafted to resemble lions or dogs or something like that. Steve wasn’t sure.
A second picture outside the kitchen gave further evidence of outdoor shenanigans from mad crusties back in the day. He squinted to better see these women with flowers in their hair, their bared bodies painted dark. All were laughing and tiptoeing around a big dog-thing made from straw, erected in a field. One of the girls held a champagne bottle that looked heavy at the end of her slim wrist.
The ceremonies on his land. The rumours in Divilmouth pubs not so far-fetched after all. Fuck you, Kat. Excuses for getting pissed and screwing groupies by the look of it. Posho rock stars living it up through a decade of strikes, IRA bombs and factory closures.
The pictures were a bit sinister too, the age of the images not solely accounting for the unpleasant impression given by these rural antics. Steve really disliked the headgear. All of the people in the fields had their faces concealed by grotesque masks. Wispy hair drifted beneath the snouty and horned concealments.
And what on earth were they enacting while naked and daubed in scarlet body paint in the colour picture? That was set at a tilt before the kitchen doorway. In that scene a dozen people wearing doggish masks surrounded a ram, its horns garlanded with wild flowers. Big wobbly canine heads atop pale English shoulders, red faces peering through the mouthpieces: ten women, two men.
Tony had liked naked girls around him: that was obvious. Girls painted like savages seemed to be the norm. He still favoured the practice too. There was continuity with the present, albeit with adjustments to the age range if the shrivelled woman in the chair served as evidence.
Fuck’s sake.
A firelit procession somewhere underground came next on the wall of past shames. A cave maybe. Animal faces and naked cocks, exposed nubile breasts, beer bellies and black body hair slathered in red paint: people walking past a rock wall painted in the style of the Grand Chamber of Brickburgh. Where was that taken, and when?
Steve took his own pictures.
At the threshold of the hall, he paused and made sure the coast was clear out back. He heard the wind in the treetops and a distant rhythmic squeak of the wheelchair’s rotating wheels, growing quieter.
He stepped out.
No dogs.
But what was that? A tremor? An earth tremor? A grumble beneath his feet, the house, the earth.
It passed away.
With his head down he made it to the garden path. Peered down the lane.
No way. Steve raised his camera and zoomed in on the spectacle in the middle of the private road. At an angle, he could still see the bearded man from behind. His body was also now stained red from his thin neck to his bony feet. His progress was slow and made with measured pomp, displaying a regal absurdity in the manner in which he pushed the elderly woman in the wheelchair.
Though it was obscured by one of the man’s arms and his back, Steve was still able to determine that the old woman’s head was covered by a bulky and hairy headdress. When she turned her head to one side, almost as if she were trying to look behind her chair and at Steve, through his zoom he glimpsed a horrid black muzzle, detailed with yellowing teeth. A wolf from a pantomime too scary for kids.
“Then I must have a face to greet the red”. That’s what she’d said when Steve had been hiding.
Meet who? The red sickos in the barn? The “children”?
Steve pulled back. Beneath his feet the earth growled again as if a restless giant had just stirred in some cold barrow.
He pushed his head out. The odd couple continued towards their destination: the barn. They seemed unconcerned by the possibility of what appeared to be a freak earthquake.
Like the inside of a furnace seen from a distance, the mouth of the agricultural building now glowed red. And across the darkening, overgrown farm, the couple walked as if to an open mouth, one as fiery as their own bodies.
Fuck’s sake.
Steve knelt down and took a picture, catching the watery grey dusk and fire-flickering gloom. He could blow it up later. And with the doorway so ruddy with light now, he’d chance a couple more shots of the barn. He’d go a bit closer and then split. He’d not be far from the pony paddock and he could slip through there easy. Luck was on his side tonight. So preoccupied were these people with their twisted red shit, it was like he’d been invisible to them.
This decision to linger became irrevocable when his nose detected a familiar scent: cannabis. On the southerly breeze, dope fumes were being blown back toward the house. Hashish. Marijuana. A citrusy, sausage-meat blend of something potent and intensely pungent billowed across the farm. A lot of dope was getting smoked too. If he could smell it from this far away, the fragrance must be literally belching out of that building. It was like those red people were hot-boxing an old barn. Drug farm scenario was back on the table.
Tony, you pervy old fiend.
The man and the elderly woman in the wheelchair disappeared inside the barn. As if to herald their crossing of the threshold, the earth surged again, its vibrations registering through the soles of Steve’s boots.
Bent over like a war photographer in a combat zone, he jogged down the lane and paused beside the pony paddock. Crouched, he got off a couple more shots of the doorway in zoom. No one was visible inside the bloodied light of the barn, but sticklike shadows were being cast up the interior walls as if the occupants were prancing about inside.
Steve switched camera mode to film and crept closer. And that’s when he became aware of another development: the introduction of a new soundtrack to this surreal evening.
At first he’d thought it was the wind but the fragrant air around him was being moved by little besides a faint breeze. No, it wasn’t wind, this was music that he was hearing. Or rather a series of piped notes was now drifting from the direction of the barn.
A new musical direction, Tony?
Steve immediately thought of Helene’s recordings, those her brother had made years before: it
was definitely the same sound. But louder, bigger, a replication of those subterranean sounds that begged the question: had Helene’s brother recorded one of these rituals or whatever this was?
The piping’s volume increased. Soft and woody but insistent and building to strident as if an orchestra was warming up the recorders to hit the right notes. It would all look eerie on film with the tendrils of smoke drifting from the flashing red interior of the barn.
Steve recorded from the side of the lane until he flinched so hard he nearly fell.
Had he ever heard the sound of a terrified horse before? Maybe, in a film or something, but not one so frightened. The pony's screams of distress projected horribly from the reddish doorway and funnelled up the enclosed lane: cries accompanied by a distant stamp of hooves on stone.
Raised human voices broke into fresh high-pitched whines, in turn transforming into savage shrieks, competing with the pony’s. The cacophony was so horrid that Steve hardly noticed the next earth tremor. And he was clueless about what issued the next series of cries. But again, he’d encountered similar on Helene’s recordings.
The long howl suggested the wolf. A comparison Steve dropped when the ululating cry descended into a semi-human whine. And then a pair of big cats might have been fighting inside the barn, until the wet growls erupted into apelike screams that twisted again into a sadistic mockery of a human voice. The hideous medley chattered out of the old building and left Steve rigid with a terror he’d not encountered since childhood.
Red light flickered and beat the barn's interior walls. The pony’s piteous bellows shot up an octave then abruptly ceased.
Shocked, fearful human sighs rose in group effort.
Wet sounds followed, amidst those of cracking timber, or joints, as something large was torn apart inside that wretched shack.
The rapid jabbering of the aggressor continued, partially impeded by gargles as a wide throat filled with liquid. This final noise muted, then sank as if the animal had returned beneath the ground.
There followed a hushed sound of awe from those gathered inside the building.
The tremors beneath the ground ceased.
On weak legs, Steve turned to leave at precisely the same moment that three dogs bounded from out of the barn. They came at him fast and low, snarling like hounds pouring from the mouth of hell.
* * *
Steve had made it as far as the treeline behind the pony paddock when the first dog leaped upon his back.
His face clouded with meat-breath canker and enraged snarls. His mind offered a mental image of a lioness gripping the haunches of a gazelle, and down to his knees he crashed, wet leaves and greasy red soil embracing his tumble. The dog he flung clear.
A second dog seized his forearm with jaws capable of snapping bone like tomato cane. Teeth tore through his coat, his skin stretched taut around the canines before giving way like pastry beneath fork prongs.
Trees, dark sky, nettles and blackberry vines, all of it whirled through his eyes and the inky, dusky air dispersed his hyperventilating breath. Much louder still were the barks and snarls and growls of the dogs, even louder than the foaming of blood between his ears. Here was an urgent desire to destroy him, the only purpose of these hot moments in a realm of soil and yellow teeth.
He clouted a dog’s muzzle with his camera. Foamy jaws released his arm. Black gums flashed. A purple tongue curled like a mollusc. In the undergrowth the dog shook its head and tried to sneeze.
Black blood dripped from the cuff of that sleeve. Steve saw the drip-dripping of his own life and sucked in a huge breath. He thought he might cry real tears. He was bitten through. He’d never been bitten by a dog before.
He staggered onwards, going down twice, yet rising to his feet and falling into tree trunks. Careening through scrub he ripped his trousers into sideways mouths. Cold air embraced his balls.
A dog seized his leg, behind the knee. He felt the teeth go right inside his body, slicing fat and piercing muscle. That whole leg bruised to the thigh in a heartbeat. The hound tried to dig its hind legs into the soil to put the brakes on his rout. He dragged it across the ground when its jaws refused to release his leg. Ruffled snout and beady eyes, ears back, it partnered him down the slope between the trees, all four paws skidding.
Another of the hounds took up the wretched colours of his tattered, bleeding forearm. The arm-bone was the lowered shaft of a regimental lance in a massacre. While gripping the exposed pole of his forearm the dog bunched its considerable neck muscles to try and twist him down and onto his face.
Throat. It wants . . .
He had no speech, no cries save whimpers. Odd words failed to become sentences in his mind. All was darkness and teeth in black mouths that shook meat on the bone. A smell of wet leaves. Mulch and cold air about the thin body of a weary, frightened boy in trouble.
But onwards he dropped, using the slope of the earth and gravity to propel him through the gloaming wood towards the lighter air above the fields below.
I . . . the pony . . .
He fell from the treeline and into the dung-bumpy grass. He landed on all fours. Turf sodden with moisture registered through the skin on his knees. His attempts to remove himself from the terrible wet sounds of the hounds’ long mouths that gripped his flesh were faltering. His head filled with a light bright and white. He bellowed, pushed on.
This fresh surge of strength raised two dogs completely from the earth. They hung on with their teeth like big leeches. Three were fastened to him now. He could feel another set of teeth grinding against an ankle bone. The backs of his legs were wet. The arse of his trousers was entirely ripped away.
He hurt and kept on hurting but adrenalin pushed him another ten steps out from the treeline where he screamed for help. All three dogs held fast. The pack was wearing him down.
Trained.
Somehow, he still held onto his camera and had it raised above his head like he was wading through water. He brought it down hard on the skull of the dog chewing up his arm. It yelped, closed one eye and staggered sideways.
A human voice bellowed. ‘Cunt! Don’t you touch my dog!’
Steve looked behind himself, turning his heavy body with a skirt of canine flesh swinging from his limbs. When he saw the line of red people most of his remaining strength leaked out of his legs like warm water.
‘Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck,’ he said to the sky.
They fanned out, at least a dozen people. Wild, greased hair and intense red faces slowly moved about him, patiently accompanying his insufficient progress into the valley. Like the sheep that had followed him up the slope earlier, the red folk traipsed in silence. And like indifferent animals, the aboriginal horrors were content to survey his terrible sufferings without making any attempt to alleviate them. From the great white orbs of their eyes, he thought he detected excitement at his plight.
Terrible pain washed hotly through his legs, verging on the agony that drains a body white and limp. One foot squelched and he dared not look down. He was slowing, his adrenalin spent. Steve called out for his mother and his voice broke.
The man with the beard stepped forward, came in close. He held a black rock. His ratty face snarled, baring snaggled teeth, a mouth like one of his dogs. An eye was scarred with a milky slash. A sinewy arm punched the black stone into Steve’s face.
Crunch.
A tremor jarred Steve’s entire head. His sight went out, was all white dots in darkness until half of his vision returned. He saw spit loop from his own mouth. That scent. Was he smelling his own brains?
Dogs tugged and tore. A tooth severed some big nerves in a leg, there were pins and needles like he’d never known before and the corresponding foot turned cold, then numb. His balance slid sideways.
Sky, dogs . . . all the red ones watching . . .
Trapped in a delirium of exhaustion, a frantic swirl of thought and memory filled his skull: his mind was objecting to what was happening right now, but refusing to process what now meant,
or to acknowledge where it was leading. He had odd thoughts that wanted to take him out of himself. He and his cousin wearing matching swimming trunks, running across the sand. They were children, laughing boys. ‘Gary, help us out,’ he whispered.
There, the sea in the distance . . .
His mother, wearing a brown jumper that he’d not seen in thirty years. A polished wooden brooch of an owl was pinned to the wool. She wiped tears from his freckled cheeks with her thumbs.
I’m down. Mum . . .
Then darkness.
14
Handsome and as immaculately presented as ever, Kat’s editor clumsily picked around the cabinets of her chic office to locate an additional salve: a bottle of water. Kat never came into her boss’s office to cry, but in moments found herself dabbing her eyes with a tissue Sheila provided.
Sheila’s glasses blazed in the sunlight lighting up her windows. Only when her eyes were momentarily visible did Kat note her editor’s discomfort and assumed, not without prior evidence, that catering for an employee in distress was an unfamiliar activity.
Sheila preferred the ‘quiet life’. That was the prevailing opinion at the magazine when Kat began freelancing for L&S, seven years earlier. Married to a wealthy man called Adrian, who owned the magazine and kept L&S going as a project for his wife, Sheila wasn’t difficult as far as bosses went. In fact, she was unfailingly courteous and rarely succumbed to anger. Prone to favouritism maybe, but that tendency had only ever benefited Kat. Sheila had always been deeply impressed with her CV.
Mistaken from the very start, Sheila had assumed that Kat was cut from the same silk as her peer group: an older posho It Girl, who’d led a glamorous life in London before semi-retiring in Devon. A journalist who only continued to keep her hand in as a hobby.
Like so many of the affluent, and Kat had met some seriously wealthy people in her line of work, Sheila’s idea of elsewhere was lacking. Innumerable and discreet partitions separated her from the ordinary world and the multitude that struggled out there. Her name even graced the side of her husband’s sixty-foot yacht in Divilmouth. And once Kat had identified Sheila as a conflict-averse socialite and passive control freak, so much about the woman and the periodical made more sense: anyone who threatened Sheila’s bubble was anathema. She either pretended they didn’t exist, or reached into her extensive social network to outsource the difficulty.