The Reddening

by Adam Nevill

  The female shrieks in the choir had transformed to wails never heard at Christian funerals. An elderly woman had batted her head with her hands. Kat had glimpsed the face within that small skull, crowned with bemired spikes of hair, being thumped by scarlet hands: a face so wrinkled it might have been made of bark.

  A plump, bald man had stepped forward from the wall and raised his hands into the air, his eyes fixed on something that Kat could not see. Other men had roared, full-throated, straining their lungs. And then the woodwind section had quickly fallen silent and the voices had dropped to a dying wail. Someone had sobbed, briefly, in the darkness on the other side of the pyre, then quietened until only the spit and whoosh of the flames had been audible.

  A new voice had broken the lull: one elderly and female, its words so carefully enunciated that Kat might have been in the presence of an aristocrat. A voice from another world, educated and imperious. A voice at once absurd amidst the filth, fire, blood, the white eyes and the noise that had pierced Kat’s ears and disintegrated her thoughts.

  ‘The past is red. The earth is red. The sky is red.’

  She’d turned to the sound of the voice.

  Against the dark rectangle of the double door of the agricultural building, she’d seen that a diminutive figure had been wheeled inside. Behind the ancient figure in the wheelchair, and about its tatty head and through the haze of stinging smoke, the silhouettes of trees beyond the doorway had become momentarily visible.

  Crippled and sunken but unclothed, the woman had continued to speak in a voice that sweetened to the melodic: a voice that had issued from the black muzzle of an animal’s head. ‘Behind is red. Forward is red. The Queen is risen and she is red.’

  A tongue of fire had flapped in the direction of the speaker, this aboriginal elder in its wheelchair, the sole item in the building to suggest that Kat remained in the twenty-first century.

  The crude red figures of the wretched barn had sniffed and wept at the elderly woman’s arrival. They’d wiped at their white, glistening eyes.

  ‘All we children are red. Amen.’

  ‘Amen’ had been rumbled in unison around the black walls. Above Kat’s lowered head, her captors had muttered the word too. Each of them had then spat on the earthen floor and stamped a naked foot upon the saliva. All around the barn the red people had ground their expulsions into the dirt.

  ‘So close to us now,’ the elderly woman had cried out, her voice breathless with excitement, her frail body atremble with emotion. ‘So close beneath our feet but also our hearts.’

  About the perimeter of the fire’s light people had embraced each other. They’d all come together in the darkness. The faces she’d glimpsed had been alight with an unmistakable love, an intense devotion. And they’d begun a horrid dance. A movement as grotesque as it was absurd. Backwards they’d all gone, in a circle, in and out of the firelight, as if entranced by the new, solemn notes of the pipes, functioning like a marionette’s strings to jerk them about her and poor broken Steve.

  The dreadful eyes of the red people had rolled up white and it must have been the effects of the burning drug that suggested that their arms could snap and move in such contortions behind their backs, or when raised into the air in exultation. Kat had never imagined that the aged could contort themselves so.

  Confusion mingling with terror, her eyes blurring with smoke, her face filmed with grease, she’d panted like a dog. And for several seconds Kat had believed that she’d been rising into the air; terrified that if she didn’t grip the floor, her feet would have ascended to the roof beams. Her trainers might have been filled with helium. Her head, disproportionately, had been as heavy as a bag of wet sand. She’d doubted her neck could support the weight of her skull.

  ‘Kat.’ It was Steve. He’d finally become aware of her. He’d been crying.

  Kat had opened her mouth but her tongue had been too thick and heavy, a large slug. She’d doubted she had a voice left at all.

  A vibration had passed beneath her knees. Through the soil a mighty current of electricity may have thrummed. Deeper still had come the rumble of thunder, or rocks grinding, or the earth moving. A tremor from deep within the soil.

  ‘Give her scent,’ the old creature in the chair had intoned. ‘Let what is so great fill red. Let the walls and the air be red. Let the earth soak red and the sky be red. Let us be blessed in the red. We are red. This, our reddening.’

  ‘Reddening’ was shrieked about the barn.

  The wizened figure in the wheel chair had risen swiftly from its seated position, thin arms raised high. And as if young again, the woman had walked, in a wretched parody of provocation, across the dung and soil. Each heel placed perfectly before each set of toes, her withered hips swaying: a demented pastiche of a catwalk model with that shaggy, bestial head grinning through the firelight.

  And at the figure’s approach, Kat had suddenly cramped with a fear that the attention of whatever peered through the black muzzle would turn upon her.

  The congregation had issued fresh cries of awe before the miracle, if that was what it had been: the lame walking, the decrepit renewed. Others had ventured forward from the far side of the fire and out of the darkness. Naked, oiled forms. Devil faces creosoted in dye. In their midst had been a thin, bent figure, leaning upon a stick. A furred wolfish head had dwarfed its frail body, seeming to weigh the torso down at a tilt.

  With reverence, a younger woman and a portly man had each held an elbow to lead the tottering figure closer to the fire. They encircled Steve.

  What happened next did not remain entirely clear in Kat’s memory. One of few mercies she was granted that night. And she’d later wondered how much she’d seen or only imagined. She now even wondered if she’d been dreaming in that barn with her eyes wide open.

  Through the skeins of smoke, the barn’s timbers had transformed into walls of stone, but without her noticing the transition. Rock walls had appeared on either side of her and above her head. A cave chalked, painted red. Upon the rough rock surfaces the sensual silhouettes of beasts had been shaped from charcoal: herds of animals, glimpsed betwixt rags of smoke. The creatures had been moving too. Their thin legs had flickered back and forth as the beasts had surged. Horses, oxen, reindeer. And yet, impossibly, the animals had remained in place upon the walls, running forever but never progressing.

  It was around the time of her hallucinations when she’d realised that Steve had been tethered to an iron ring, cemented into the rough floor: a short chain lying idle beneath his legs, the links connecting his ankle to a circular mooring. He’d been placed upon a patch of firmer ground, a lighter patch of floor, level with the soil. A portion partly cleared of dung and straw to reveal cement and a metal grille. Steve hadn’t been lying on the earth.

  When the elderly male figure in the mask had begun uttering a series of deep, croaking noises at the back of its throat, Kat had been reminded of a Siberian throat singer she’d once seen in London at a music festival. But this man’s performance would never make Time Out: this was something the general public were not supposed to see.

  Two men had immediately stepped forward from behind the masked elder and seized Steve under his arms.

  Kat’s lover hadn’t resisted. It seemed he’d become accustomed, or broken, to this method of transport.

  The fire’s light had offered a better view of the shaggy muzzle of the beast man’s mask. Flame-red illumination had flickered over black gums and the aged enamel protruding from a permanently open mouth, the mask’s jaws and teeth resembling those of a great animal, a preserved panther or lion. The surrounding features might also have been a replication of a canine head: pug-snouted, whiskered, flat-skulled and broad in the forehead. And from within the darkness of the tatty jaws the elderly man had gutturalised and grunted what might have been human words rendered in a savage tongue.

  It had been a command.

  Hair gripped in a greasy, red fist, Steve’s head had promptly been pushed into the
noisome floor of the barn. And his arms had been arranged at the side of his body, his legs following: his body shaped into a star, face-down.

  Instinctively, Kat had surged toward him but was held fast by the hair and throat. She’d instantly suffered thoughts of broken bones in glass cubicles at Exeter Museum: shattered fragments, rusticated the colour of bleached seashells.

  The old man’s dog head had grunted out fresh commands in the bestial language and Kat had recalled where she’d heard similar before: the voice on the recordings that Helene’s brother had made at Redstone Cross, the brother who’d vanished.

  She’d sobbed then, sobbed at her own helplessness. And at that point in the wretched proceedings, Kat might have pleaded too, on Steve’s behalf, but hadn’t known if she’d been shouting or merely whispering, or only thinking of a protest. Confusion, terror and a sickening dread had swamped her consciousness.

  A burly male figure, its beard a tangled mess of red scrub, had then knelt beside Steve’s ear. He’d held a dark lump of stone against Steve’s face. The rock had flickered with the pyre’s reflections before the point of the tool was repositioned above the nape of Steve’s neck.

  Kat had later queried whether she’d passed out at that point because she remembered being shaken while someone had hissed, ‘See!’ into her ear. But she’d kept her eyes closed as a human scream had broken into a cough. The cough had then evolved into a moist, glottal rasp, suggesting that a terrible finality had been achieved.

  When she’d been slapped alert, what she saw had since existed in haphazard form, in flashes.

  Sinewy forearms glistening by firelight. Hands slippery and gloved in bright scarlet. A hand sawing. Another hand tugging at hair and raising a head too far from its shoulders.

  The congregation had committed their voices to fresh ululations: exultant, deafening, born from their rejoicing. And in the red barn the fire had leaped higher as four men worked like butchers.

  Slick, wet sounds from the carving. Sharp black stones in wet fists, up and down. Hack hack hack. Crack of bone, the stretching and splitting of sinew. The black air seething yet squeezing her with its undersea pressures. Smoke billowing about wet straw.

  The stone ceiling had seemed to lower to crush Kat’s mind. Then the roof had vaulted up and away and she’d wondered if the ceiling of rock had completely gone and the only remaining things were the fire, the stars she saw and the nothingness between them. A void that she could have fallen into at any time.

  Her stomach had turned itself inside out. She’d gulped for air but swallowed more of the burning blue smoke. Around her skull thoughts and nonsense had swirled as if it had been stirred from above with a ladle. Her head had been pulled about to watch the slap of a heavy, whitish limb upon the ground before her eyes.

  Followed by another.

  On the ground there had been a dirty torso with no arms. The neck an oval, white at the centre, a thick snake cut in half.

  Forceful sawing between the legs into the V of the groin’s meat.

  Kat had coughed saliva onto her thighs.

  At the edge of her vision had lain an upturned hand, lifeless, the curling fingers dirty.

  She’d screamed and screamed.

  The red people had shrieked too, they’d brayed like beasts of the field. Their vocal cords had found impossible ranges. Their reedy ululations had made them eunuchs, castrated animals. Each oily face she’d glimpsed had broadened, become more bulbous, scarred and pugnacious. Brute faces, oaf mouths, leather-breasted and bloodied forms shrieking amidst the smoke.

  On the walls the animals had continued to lurch, wide-eyed, forever stampeding the ground that had trembled beneath Kat’s shivering body.

  Wet parts had been raised from the mess on the floor. Heavy meats had been passed out to so many reaching red hands.

  Slippery fingers had pulled her forehead upwards so that she could better see a tongue being sawn from out of a human head: one already missing its lower jaw.

  ‘Cuckoos, gabbers and narks all get theirs,’ a voice had said.

  Dirty knees had bumped her arms. Naked feet had slapped the soil about her fingers. A woman had panted with sexual desire.

  She’d looked away, to the side, to the door, as if to draw the colder air into her polluted lungs. But, alas, in such places where hell is made on earth one can never look away from the business of depravity. That had been his jawbone that she had. That old thing that had risen so youthfully from the wheelchair was unmasked now. And a jawbone had been cracked open and was grasped within its long fingers. Her wrinkled mouth had suckled.

  They didn’t cook him. They’d consumed his parts raw.

  The horror that was behind us in this land is the horror that is now and ahead of us. That has already begun . . . That is come again.

  Kat had known it at once, had accepted it. The awareness had dawned with the clarity of a single, finely wrought note, piercing her paddings of disbelief, shock and the nausea of intoxication.

  A voice then. From the bearded man who’d held her face upwards, her handler: ‘The old ones feed in the old way.’ She thought that’s what he’d said. And then, ‘Watchum your bastard git capped.’

  That she hadn’t watched. She’d have put her own eyes out with her fingernails when the butcher began his careful chiselling upon the beloved crown of Steve’s head. And at that moment she understood that she’d never loved him as much as she had done right then.

  Nothing left in her stomach but still it had attempted to empty her body of contaminated air and the brutal sounds of stone on meat and bone and of the sight of those ape-mouths sucking on what grimy fingers had pulled from the feast. And when Kat had dared to hope that her own end would arrive, so that she could be spared what they were making her see, a devil had opened its throat beneath the ground.

  Echoing from out of a chamber beneath the barn, or this cave, or whatever this wretched space had become in a fog of smoke, transforming the walls from wood to stone, had come a cackle and yip that Kat had been certain was a human laugh.

  A shriek had followed, one distorted by schizophrenia and amplified to ear-splitting volume.

  The full-throated baying of a hound.

  Followed by the chitter-chatter of an ape.

  Nasal whines from a vast muzzle.

  Yelps and whinnies. Exotic, zoolike, unearthly.

  The ground had shaken from sounds culled from the lowest part of a vocal range, below her knees, but no longer so far down. Her mind was squeezed, crushed and flattened by what had vibrated through her ears.

  The metal grille, in the centre of the cement that Steve had been tethered to, had been raised from the earth and a noxious wave of air had plumed from the aperture. The stench had made Kat panic as if she’d been exposed to poisonous gas.

  Yip yip yip.

  Into the dark hole her lover’s parts had been tossed. And from down there, in eager receipt of the wet tumble, had come a scrabbling of great claws upon the rock.

  Kat had screwed herself into a ball as the red people had fallen over each other in their haste to escape what bayed and leaped and circled from below their bemired feet. Only the elderly male figure in the doggish mask had stood firm. He’d appeared more upright: impossibly taller, erect, the head and shoulders thrown back. And into the air he’d shaken his staff and from his shabby muzzle he’d coughed and growled out more of the rough, unintelligible sounds.

  Kat had seen no great beast with muscular flanks that rippled beneath a reeking hide. But she had seen something, or experienced its presence, though only behind her closed eyes and within her mind as the tremendous expulsion of hot, foul air had belched from the ground and filled the cave. A mighty bleat had resounded inside her skull.

  Inside her mind she’d also seen a geyser of panic erupt in the wild brown eyes of an animal: orbs peeled by panic into the size of apples. These eyes had filled her thoughts as the creature’s flesh had been torn into by spears and sharpened stones. She’d felt the great impa
ct of a woollen side slammed against a snow-dusted earth. Another victim from another time but brought here. Reason had become irrelevant but she’d navigated those images as if dreaming. She’d been in the presence of the red. Known this at once, instinctively. There, in that place, had existed an impossible continuity from another time to this one.

  And she’d seen these things behind her squeezed-shut eyes: the rough-faced, both young and old, male and female, their bodies stringy and dirty as they’d plodded into a fire-strobed darkness on unshod feet. Tatty-headed people herded by red devils. She’d seen their huddled forms dragged to the floor and sawn into. All in this very place, in other times. Razor flint, black and iridescent, parting joints, separating limbs from . . . for ever and ever.

  Down there, under the barn, she’d listened to the consummation of the rite. Slippery bones had been crunched by teeth that must have been longer than thumbs. Devils that once clawed that very ground had pawed the fetid soil again: she sensed the steam-breathing snouts of black things that had once trodden the earth when it was much colder, those that had flowed sinewy from out of crevices and galloped the surrounding plains. And they had been returned for a terrible succour in that same darkness, partially illumined by firelight.

  Had there been words in that pit too? Voices? She’d thought so, but in no language that she’d ever recognise.

  Eventually rough hands had pulled her backwards and away from the fire.

  All who’d been summoned to that awful place had withdrawn from the lightless crevice in the floor, a fissure in stone, beneath the grate that had been Steve’s final bed. Inside the barn, all had retreated save the elderly man who’d stood too tall and the smeared ancient woman who had risen from her wheelchair to prance and parade like a young girl before a bedroom mirror.

  21

  Outside, four dogs had kept pace with Kat and her captors. Hounds that had come and gone, milling, circling, walking point, pausing to raise their noses into the cold night as she was pulled to a second broken building. Rusting bars had gridded its solitary window.