by Adam Nevill
The figure stepped backwards into total darkness leaving Kat with a reflection of her own slack face and horrified eyes.
She fell from the sofa where she’d been kneeling, scrabbled to her feet, barking her shin on the side table and sending a coffee mug and three remote controls clattering across the floorboards.
Through tear-blurred eyes she could just make out the phone. Picked it up in hands that shook and struggled to grip the sides of the smooth device. Tried to unlock the screen. Password Incorrect.
Get out! Car! Do it outside! Without hesitation, she scraped the catch from the rear of the front entrance, unlocked it by Yale key, twisted the mortise lock and yanked the door open.
Similar in position and posture to an eager cat on her doormat, the effigy of an entirely different beast awaited upon the threshold. Crude head erect and demanding her full attention, the muzzled and spiky-eared statuette cast its fierce gaze upwards.
A mere glance at the thing illumined under the porch light was sufficient to identify the onyx curves about its full breasts, the splay of rounded hips, the glimmer of glazed clay. Unlike the Venus figures she’d seen at the museum exhibition this one retained arms and a head: shaggy, sticklike appendages resembling a dog’s forelegs. A spear spiked from the culmination of one limb.
Standing in socks, without a coat, Kat felt the cold night air pass through her skin to shiver her marrow. But brutal naked red things, with their wretched stone idols, could withstand temperatures and commit acts that she’d only wither before: instinct wasted no time informing her of this. She couldn’t recall the last time she’d felt as vulnerable and unprotected.
Pitch darkness in the village lane. No streetlights this far out. The only light was spot-cast from the five cottages in Kiln Lane: yellow shards peeking between chinks of drapes and the two dim orbs of exterior lamps. After London, the silence and darkness out here had taken some getting used to. Kat no longer thought about it much but was now reminded of the void that surrounded her home at night. She was also forced to consider what ran through it in the manner of wild dogs.
In a heartbeat she acknowledged another disadvantage of rural living: how darkness could cloak a figure standing mere feet from you.
Three forms rose from the ground and made haste for her front door. One wheeled from behind the front hedge. It skittered on bandy legs, its feet sandalled: a woman with tatty hair clawed into short, wet-looking sprouts. Her face was a vision from Bedlam.
A short, stocky man appeared beside the porch post, his teeth flashing white, the grin malevolent. His knees made a sound similar to snapping celery.
The third visitor ran at speed from across the lane, straight at her door. When he came within reach of the porch light, he revealed a wispy beard trailing over shoulders with the lustre of sunburned skin. An object made from bone hung from his neck.
All were daubed red from head to foot. They wouldn’t have looked amiss in the Brickburgh Caves, scrabbling through the damp darkness forty thousand years gone. Each clutched a pointed black stone. Hand-axes.
Kat closed the door and secured the mortise lock again at the same moment as a fist thudded against wood and shook the cottage. Pressing her back into the door she tried to control her jerking arms and hands. Investing what concentration she still had, she pressed a fingertip to the phone’s screen and inputted two of the required four digits, this time in the right sequence.
Whenever she was downstairs and Steve used the tiny bathroom upstairs, the floorboards always cracked and ground together. Sitting below was not unlike being inside the hold of a sailing ship. Above her head, the floor upstairs now groaned in this familiar manner to indicate the presence of the uninvited within her home.
They were inside. They were here the whole time.
Across the tiny upstairs landing someone strode eagerly. Up there, signs of the desire to get downstairs with her became even more pronounced when a red hand gripped the upper newel post and made it creak.
How did they get in? No windows were broken, no doors. No one had a key . . . except Steve.
Panic enabled Kat to flee into the kitchen. Dizziness made the yellow cupboards swing nauseously through her vision. Her lower back pressed against the cooker. She typed the next two digits of the phone’s password.
Password Incorrect.
When a pair of red legs became visible on the staircase, Kat screamed, ‘Get out!’
Between the banisters, slender calves and naked feet stepped carefully down from the darkness. A woman. One who paused under the hallway light for an interminable moment and revealed how a pair of pretty blue eyes in a thin face could be deranged by suppressed fury. The loathing projected by those eyes paralysed Kat.
The intruder turned her head and issued a short, high-pitched sound, one that warbled and tailed into a yip: a cry more animal than human. She then turned and with one slim arm opened the front door to let the others inside.
17
Helene ended the call and sat in silence. The Game of Thrones episode finished without her noticing. On-screen, a group of women in another show were shouting at each other. She turned the TV off and refilled her wine glass.
The contact had been unexpected, as was the information she’d received. According to the call register, Kat, the journalist whom she’d met in Devon, had also called twice earlier when Helene had been reading The Little Grey Men to Valda.
Her daughter was still awake and was animating soft toys on her duvet; through the ceiling of the living room Helene heard the muted voices Valda attributed to each character.
If Kat had called three times then what she had to say was important. But what exactly had Kat just relayed to her during the third call that Helene had managed to pick up?
The entire communication remained vague because of the enigma of its contents. But Kat had alluded to the fact that she had come into some information about Helene’s brother Lincoln. News pertinent to the time that he’d spent in South Devon during his final summer alive.
Prior to this revelation, Kat had issued a caveat: that she’d been reluctant to call Helene because she didn’t want to upset her. Kat had also judged an email to be too ‘cold’: that’s what she’d said. ‘It’s best that we talk about this.’
Information; Kat had received information about Lincoln. ‘Trust me,’ Kat had said. ‘You really need to come down and see this for yourself.’ The journalist claimed that she’d met people whom Helene ‘should definitely speak to about Lincoln. People he met while he was here.’
So if she’d correctly understood Kat, then the journalist had somehow located people who’d been with her brother near the end of his life. Only she’d omitted to explain how she found these people, or who they were, or anything about the information they possessed about Lincoln. She’d only mentioned that they were ‘local people your brother stayed with’.
This was more than Helene had hoped for when she’d travelled to Divilmouth alone. But it now appeared that her chance encounter with the journalist and photographer in the museum café would lead to something far more meaningful. From these locals she might learn how Lincoln had seemed at the end: she might even solve the mystery of what had troubled her little brother enough for him to take his own life. Helene still had no idea where he’d camped or slept during his last two weeks in Devon.
She was only just coming up for air from an exhaustion of delayed grief that had accompanied her home from the trip to Devon, but if Kat had found people who had known her brother, then another trip was worth the risk of getting upset again.
Only work and the relentless intensity of motherhood, after returning home from Divilmouth, had prevented her from taking to her bed and not getting up for a while. The trip had upset her in ways she couldn’t fully define. But she’d been left with a lingering, almost psychic sense that her brother had somehow been engulfed, psychologically, by that unforgiving and hostile landscape, a place crowded with unpleasant echoes from prehistory. At times, when she’d be
en down there, she’d even felt as if his spirit had been passing through her body.
Kat had also confided that she’d ‘sensed how unhappy’ Helene had been when they met. Helene was flooded with a clear sense of Kat’s experience and maturity and her kind-heartedness. No one had done anything like this for her in her life. Kat had clearly taken a keen interest in her brother’s tragedy and had wanted to help a grieving woman find some resolution.
Oddly, Kat had seemed emotional on the phone. There had been a tremor in her voice, a frailty Helene had not heard when they’d met. This tone had prompted her to ask if the news about Lincoln was bad. Kat had said, ‘Not at all.’
Helene stared at the phone number of the guesthouse that Kat had told her about: a place where she could stay free of charge. ‘My friends own a guesthouse, the Red Barn. They’re happy to offer you a place to stay while you’re here.’ That was just as well as Helene would struggle to find the money to pay for another trip south. She would call the number of the B&B in the morning. Maybe she could even make another trip this coming weekend as Kat had suggested she should. Kat would be covering a local festival on the Saturday in Redhill and had suggested they meet there.
But Valda? How she’d pined for her mother the last time Helene had left home: the only time they’d ever been apart. That had only been for three days. Her mother had cared for Valda while she’d been away but there had been tears and many questions: Is Mummy coming back? Is that Mummy? (every time the front doorbell chimed). I’m starving for Mummy.
Taking Valda with her was out of the question. It wouldn’t be practical: she didn’t want Valda to see her upset and the drive was too long. Forget it. The journey would also have to be undertaken twice in two days.
Valda wouldn’t understand why her mum wanted to go away again: she’d never known her uncle. All the same, Helene needed to go back.
Before she called her mother to ask for childcare cover at the weekend, she dug Lincoln’s box of recordings out of the garage. Kat had asked her to bring the discs, almost insisting that she didn’t forget them and that they were ‘important’. The journalist had also stressed that the recordings would ‘make sense now’. An odd thing to say but if the recordings helped her understand anything about Lincoln at the end of his short life, then Helene would take them.
18
The large creature spotted Helene. The very moment she appeared its shaggy black face turned towards her, the muzzle rising as if to inhale her scent. Having selected her from the herd it hobbled at her, moving like an arthritic animal. When the fraying edge of the crowd, at the mouth of the village festival, parted to let the creature lumber through, Helene raised a hand to ward off the attentions of the ungainly, grotesque form. The lumpy body was coated in dirty black wool to its four feet.
Even as it closed on her, the features of the thing’s head remained indistinct. Until, up closer, a pair of wooden jaws clacked like clogs below big, white eyes: rolling, rattling, lunatic orbs that bulged from ragged sockets in the creature’s mangy head.
The disagreeable mouth momentarily engulfed her head as if the thing intended to decapitate her. An odour of mildewed fabric and old gym equipment in a primary school filled her sinuses. Inside the open mouth, between rows of yellow teeth carven from painted wood, sat an oafish male face, sheened with sweat. The man’s breath reeked of cider and tobacco and he was grinning with the delinquent pleasure that pranking a stranger gave him. Helene had difficulty returning his enthusiasm. He was trying to make a fool of her in public.
The creature reared back, releasing her head. After an ungainly manoeuvre on the tarmac of the road that resembled a big hound turning in too small a space, the thing shuffled around her in a circle. But her nose remained filled with the odours of dust and vintage sweat, a miasma that now trailed from the wretched hide and its fetid innards.
She wasn’t sure what it was supposed to be: a thing that suggested a bull or cow, horse or dog. She only wished that it would go away.
The shabby four-legged figure might even suggest a grotesque vestige from another, much older era: a mythical beast from the Middle Ages, or even possessing origins in Middle Earth. Grinning people in the street seemed intent on filming it and taking selfies beside its mad, hairy face.
‘Don’t worry luv, won’t bite!’ a man shouted from a crowd that both filled the pub’s beer garden and spilled out to encircle a low stone wall. A woman issued a hag-laugh, her throat coarsened by cigarettes.
The shambling animal effigy would have made Valda wail. Even though two men were clearly inside the costume, Helene didn’t like being near it herself: a threadbare pantomime horse with the face of a devil. Instead of hooves, the creature’s feet were two pairs of dirty trainers that clumsily pranced about.
Bedraggled and sinister and parting the crowd, the thing finally stomped away, down the lane. Dodging about like a Chinese dragon, undulating and excitable, it eventually sagged amidst the revellers’ heads and vanished.
If this beast-puppet was a local tradition, why revive it? She couldn’t imagine children appreciating its presence at all.
The raucous voices from the pub were soon obliterated by a local jazz band’s brassy rendition of a Glenn Miller song. Bombarded on every side with noise, colour, motion, raised voices, Helene’s entrance to the fête continued to disorient her.
A few hundred people had gathered at Redhill and milled in the main road that forked up and down a hill. The pub, the streetlights, the stage, the church and the community centre were all edged with red, white and blue bunting.
From a cursory inspection of the stalls lining each side of the lane, she learned that the mascot character was called ‘Creel’. It was well known locally; there was plenty of merchandise featuring the creature’s image, but none of it indicated what kind of an animal Creel was. Where it was depicted as a cartoon, it resembled a dog with a cat’s face, a permanently leering hound-thing equipped with mad eyes and a looping tongue. ‘Yip yip!’ it said on banners, decals and printed shirts. ‘I buy my meat local!’
When printed, it regularly sported clothes in the colours of the Devon flag or the Union Jack. The animal was even depicted on some shirts wearing a top hat and monocle. A set of coffee mugs showed an image of Creel wiping its clawed feet, and worse, on the European flag.
A new irritation replaced Helene’s last when a barking, amplified voice impacted against her ears, hurting them inside.
Before the Tudor-styled pub, The Red Sky, and the fête’s thumping heart, a man stood on a temporary stage and roared into a microphone. The spanking, metallic sounds issuing from his flabby mouth were broadcast through speakers fixed to aluminium posts. The wheezy static of the speaker’s inhalations rasped between his words.
The MC was a purple-faced drinker with a ponderous belly who continually wiped sweat from his bilious jowls. But most of the aggressively jolly, burly figure’s rant was impossible to discern. Helene only caught snatches:
‘Tradition and fam’ly! . . . ’sall about, innit . . . been goin’ four hundred years, if you can believe that! . . . She’s on her way up from Dillmuth right now! . . . Forty-stone boar! . . . All proceeds go to chariteeeee! Ssssso dig deep when the time comes, ladies and gentlemen . . . fink of a few people we’d like to roast ’ere instead, aye!'
A line of bewildered elderly ex-servicemen wearing berets stood before the stage. Their seemingly oversized or nearly empty blazers were festooned with ribbons and medals. They lined up before the ranting face like a Praetorian guard that had not been dismissed in decades. Each man held a plastic charity box.
A squeal of feedback pierced the air and a baby howled. Helene walked on. She’d imagined her Saturday afternoon might have been spent outside a quiet village pub in the company of Kat and the people her brother had known.
She walked the length of the narrow lane and back again, checking the stalls: home-baked cakes, sweets, an ice-cream van, barbecue, handmade toys, cider in clay jugs, a Land Trust Countryside
Membership table, dated souvenirs. Her browse lasted five minutes.
All about her, the people were loudly and assertively happy, though Helene sensed a taut wire of defiance in the gathering too. An angry, tipsy energy bustled in places, particularly near the pub. She didn’t know where the ire was directed but suspected she’d walked into a community forcing a confirmation of its identity: an idea of itself based on what it knew of the past, or had even lived through but only selectively remembered.
Maybe she was detecting aspects of that familiar, depressing working-class nationalism: like at home, where a community orbited hard times and found itself baited and antagonised by low wages, unemployment, benefit cuts and a drinking culture.
From window sills and wooden poles a dozen Cross of St George flags drooped in the warm air. Limp banners that gave the gathering a strange, perhaps unintended political flavour. In Brickburgh Harbour people seemed keen on flags too.
In the street beyond the pub, pushchairs and elderly people crowded, and after the briefest attention from the drinkers and Creel, the presence of the young and old reassured her, as did the fragrance of candy floss and burgers on grills. Though the sight of so many children created a pang in her stomach and her throat involuntarily thickened. From one of the Nans who’d set out a stall in the pub carpark, Helene bought a bag of fruit jellies for Valda.
She checked her phone. No reply from Kat. She’d texted, ‘I’m here’ from outside the festival entrance.
Getting away from the street and the ominous return of Creel, Helene stepped into a shadowed passage between the community centre and Methodist chapel. She entered a small park.
Set up on the grass, other attractions sheltered from the hot sun under plastic canopies. The close, moist, beery atmosphere of the main street immediately surrendered to a bigger sky, the heat in the park less oppressive. Breathing became easier and the clamminess between her shoulder blades vanished. The infernal jabber of the man with the microphone dulled to a distant tinny garble, his chesty roars and rasps contained by the old stone houses. The last thing he’d barked, with provocative eagerness, as if proud of his skill to shock, was something about ‘roasting a big pig!’