The Reddening

by Adam Nevill

  That room’s interior had resembled a workshop and had reeked of oiled steel, dust, damp wood. Amber light had fallen from bulbs collared by old tin funnels. A long rectangular table dominated, its timber surface scarred, vices attached to the sides. Worn drilling and sawing equipment had rusted in a corner. Dirty rendered walls thickly lined with metal shelves had been crowded with variously sized stones, lumps of rock and long bones.

  The surface of a second workbench had been scattered with tools and open boxes, oily rags and dross. But upon that surface Kat had seen a great tusk: bigger, thicker and longer than an elephant’s. Mammoth: she’d seen them at the exhibition in Exeter.

  From the workshop two men had carried her through a connecting door and into an annexe, a smaller space with red walls turned powdery from damp. Inside, an elderly man had sat upon an old office chair: a red room with an old red man inside.

  His withered form was no longer so straight. He’d wilted and re-aged. Sweat streaking his thin, whiskery face had made the rheumy blue eyes weep blood. Beside his foot, his evil-looking headgear had grimaced in silence.

  The old figure had nodded at the two men gripping Kat’s upper arms and they’d released her to the floor, where she’d shivered, gasping, her toxic shock lingering as a permanent electrification of nerve and sense. The liquor from her nausea had made her skin slick.

  The old, ruined man had smiled. His teeth had been bad, missing in places, top and bottom at the front. Those remaining were deformed: whittled yellow pegs. He might have been imbecilic had his eyes not leered with such a frightful confidence and cruel intelligence.

  ‘The red miraculous. You don’t know yourself.’ Like the elderly woman who’d worn an animal mask, his words had purred, a voice enriched by privilege. ‘What comes to us is too great to know.’ He’d said this while nodding his scraggy head as if sharing knowledge that Kat already possessed: a man merely retelling and reaffirming what was known by all present. ‘So be thankful you never saw the pack.’

  When the figure had winced and leaned to the side his eyes had lost focus, the smile dying. He’d slumped and sighed, wafting a bony hand in the air. ‘How it comes and goes . . .’ he’d said quietly to himself and she’d been convinced of his madness. ‘There aren’t songs. Why try?’

  Kat had swallowed the burning sensation in her throat to speak. ‘Willows . . . You’re Tony.’

  One of the old eyes had reopened and filled with a brief awareness of itself, then closed again.

  ‘The recordings, Tony.’ This new voice had originated from behind her shoulder, from the bearded man who had snatched her from out of her home and her life so that he could hold her down in animal shit while they’d done that to Steve.

  ‘Yes, E. Ours. Bring our songs home,’ Tony had muttered.

  The bearded man had pressed his slimy face against Kat’s, the sensation of his wet hair on her eyelids making her cringe. ‘Her brother wiv the recorder we gave up to the red, yeah? You know what I’m saying. We don’t have narks here. He found that out. That one whose just gone froo red jaws would tell you that too, if he could. But he’s gone froo the walls, see. So this girl with the discs, you will bring to us. Your fella give you up easy. But you don’t have to go where he’s gone.’

  Kat hadn’t understood much of what he’d said and hadn’t responded.

  ‘Another life. All gone,’ Tony had muttered and rubbed his sunken chest.

  Against her cheek, she’d felt the wet beard widen into a grin. ‘Guess how old he is, yeah? Nearly eighty. Shouldn’t be here. Heart. His heart was fucked. And her, guess how old? Witchwife’s even older. Cancer should have had her twice. The red bit it out. The red looks after its own, yeah? Some is favoured. You is not, nor him . . .’ The bearded figure at her side had snorted a chuckle and Kat had known he’d been referring to Steve. ‘You don’t know nuffing. We’s the ones who let the dogs in.’ He’d chuckled to himself, his breath a wheeze, and tapped his hoary head before pointing at the floor. ‘You wouldn’t believe what’s down there. But turn that word inside out and dog becomes “God”. Yeah? Yeah? You see, hmm? I fink you might grasp a bit of it.’

  Old Tony on the chair had merely shrugged and opened his old hands as if this business had nothing to do with him; as if he’d merely been a spectator, indifferent to the woman before his gnarled feet. Then he’d grinned like an idiot. ‘Old Creel. Those pups hunger, what?’

  The wet beard had brushed Kat’s ear again. ‘In times coming. Terrible it is, terrible times . . . There’s what, seven billion of us? Who gives a fuck? They don’t. You’s all going. You is, yeah?’

  His breath had been too foul for her to focus on much else. She’d not understood much of the idiotic jabber either and thought it a half-understood version of what the bearded oaf had been told by someone else: knowledge he believed fervently that had enabled him to perform such inhuman acts upon a stranger. She’d truly entered a land of psychotics and met its crazed inhabitants.

  ‘All going. Going, going, going,’ Tony had said. He’d seemed to think his affected sardonic air was funny; he’d been amused with himself. He might have been drunk, drugged or just deranged.

  Kat’s own mind had remained full to capacity with what the smoke had done. What she’d experienced her mind had quickly put from itself in order to survive the ordeal, leaving her unthinking, unresisting and numb. She hadn’t trusted her thoughts since: her short recall was full of blanks.

  ‘Please,’ she’d said to stem the hysteria that had wanted to burst free.

  ‘It’s in the stones.’ Tony had pointed at the floor. ‘There’s sound in the red earth. Music. Visions. Poems.’

  Other bodies had crowded into the room. Another man had crouched beside Kat, taking the place of the foul-breathed oaf who’d abducted her. This man’s hair was thinning and scraped over his skull. A thin rat’s tail soaked in red ochre had fallen down his naked back. In one hand he’d held a joint and the smoke had seared Kat’s eyes. When her discomfort had registered he’d deliberately held the burning weed under her chin.

  ‘What Daddy and my associate are trying to tell you is that you are going to bring those recordings to us. All of her fucking gadgets. This girl that has them, some sister, yes, of that thief we put to the red years ago. She comes to us with what she has, yes? You understand? Dear Steve told us all about her. Helene. And her CDs. That music belongs here and shouldn’t be above the ground, ever. So how this plays out is now up to you, yes?’

  He’d then dropped his well-spoken voice to a whisper. ‘You wouldn’t believe what we can see. Backwards. Forwards. All about. Including right into every nook and cranny of your drab life. We’re completely out of our heads right now. It takes time to readjust but I’m positive you get the gist, yes? So you’ve some messages to pass on to dear Helene.

  'You know, she was even here. We had her here! She came here, like her brother. Nosing. Cuckoos. Neither of them had one iota of sense. They couldn’t begin to imagine what they were fucking with. And if you never want to see us, or this place again, or come anywhere near what we have down below, then you’ve some arrangements to make.’

  Kat had nodded her assent.

  ‘You’ll never forget tonight and don’t try and understand it. Because you won’t, ever. None of this is for you, yeah? I can sense that. You’re bright enough to lay off. So play along and the big dogs won’t bite.

  ‘My associates will take you home now, so you can get the ball rolling with Helene. Once you’ve finished throwing up and all that.’

  At the outer limits of her hearing, possibly from beyond the doorway, a voice had said, ‘He’s here. Five minutes.’

  And then Kat’s head had been re-gloved by the hood and she’d been taken outside. A car engine had rumbled in the distance and she’d been half-dragged towards it.

  Voices and the sound of bare feet had come and gone within her blindness. Someone had wept. She’d heard an animal cough and had whimpered at the sound. When dog claws had scratched
about the road surface near her feet and a wet snout had sniffed her crotch, she’d screamed.

  Overhead lights had bathed the ground as she’d neared the idling car engine. She’d heard the roar of a plane’s engine, too close to the ground.

  Lying on the cold metal floor of the van, barely able to breathe, she’d then been taken home. Impossibly, unbelievably, they’d driven her home. They hadn’t cut her apart and fed her to the devils in the cave, nor chiselled off the top of her skull. They’d just taken her home to its absurd light and modernity and possessions that meant nothing and offered no security.

  Two uninvited guests had stayed with her and they’d not let her out of their sight since. Naked and sobbing, her hands flat against the tiles, she’d even showered before the eyes of the murdering strangers. But no amount of hot water and continual scrubbing had rid her body of the terrible stench that had dispersed from the cleft in their red earth. And nothing on the planet would ever scrub her mind clean of what they’d done to Steve.

  22

  His mum and dad. His bloody mum and dad.

  Steve’s mother, Delia, was coming apart on her sofa. Kat doubted she’d ever seen a body shake as much. Reg clutched his wife’s hands as if to prevent her twitching free of the furniture.

  Delia was barely recognisable. Naturally thin maybe but she’d recently developed a crippling stoop. Legs and hips at the point of collapse, she’d been led inside the cottage by her husband. Only one eye seemed to be functioning behind her glasses. While crisis pummelled her mind and set fire to her nervous system, all of Delia’s focal power was concentrated into that one interrogative orb.

  Kat’s call to them, three days before, had fertilised the first seed of concern in Delia about her son. The seed had germinated into chronic anxiety and subsequently flowered into a panic that required sedation.

  Over the last few days, Delia’s periodic calls to establish if Kat had ‘heard anything yet’ had been her only contact with Steve’s parents. Her petty estrangement from Reg and Delia had maintained a distance but it had finally been erased by parental terror: a fear now slipping towards grief. Mourning was the unavoidable conclusion to their plight, though Kat was unable to get them started on what she was suffering.

  Reg had never entirely disapproved of their son’s choice of girlfriend. Kat had shared the occasional bout of camaraderie with Steve’s dad and they both read le Carré. At the handful of stilted dinners she’d endured with them, he’d found Kat’s company easy enough when Delia wasn’t micromanaging him and everyone else in the room. But little bread had been broken between them.

  Now, Kat wondered if she’d ever experienced such desperate social discomfort. She was trapped by it, clueless about what to offer the couple by way of support. Hideously, what made things easier was her inability to share anything other than what the red folk had told her to say.

  In a single, mad surge of excitement that nearly became action, she did consider telling his parents the truth. Just letting it all spill from her mouth. But she remembered the keen edge of the bearded man’s flint against her soft throat and she assumed that if she confessed, the red folk would have no choice but to butcher all three of them.

  When Steve’s parents arrived, her two guardians had retreated to the kitchen. As she’d been instructed, Kat had meekly told Reg and Delia that the strange man and woman in her home were neighbours offering support. Steve’s parents had accepted the lie without comment. They weren’t interested in her arrangements, they just wanted their son back.

  The red folk now stood near the kitchen door and listened to every word that was being exchanged in the living room. Neither Reg nor Delia seemed aware of them. Scrubbed of the red dye, her jailers were merely ordinary, scruffy people.

  Reg spoke in taut specifics. ‘It was a farmer out by Whaleham. He saw a person in the water. This was the same evening that Steve took his walk.’

  The mention of ‘water’ quickly sent Delia into a fresh paroxysm of shudders.

  ‘They think,’ Reg continued, ‘that he might have fallen. And with the tide going out and an offshore wind . . . The farmer reported it to the coastguard. They sent a boat from Divilmouth but couldn’t find him. This all happened before we knew he was missing. Apparently it’s happened before, with walkers. Out there.’

  ‘But what was he doing there, at that time?’ Delia shrieked, as if fatigued by her husband’s soft voice and his considered words, so weary with resignation. For Delia, this was no time for polite reasoning; it was high time answers were thumped out of people. ‘He must have told you! He was always here!’ Her one sentient eye bored into Kat; she sensed it searching the interior of her skull, seeking insincerity.

  Sheila’s contact on the force, Lewis, had called Kat that morning to take a more official statement about Steve. That time, the levity had been absent from the detective's voice. Kat had assumed that the humouring smirk had also been stowed, chastened by the reality of an actual missing person, something he’d almost laughed off in Sheila’s office.

  During the call, Detective Lewis never mentioned Steve’s Redstone Farm theories, nor anything of that nature that she’d recounted to him when they’d met at L&S. Nor did he refer to anything she’d said about Matt Hull. Kat wondered how thoroughly those details were being investigated, if at all.

  Prompting the detective for progress on those fronts had been impossible because the bearded oaf who’d invaded her home had been holding a flint knife under her jaw. He’d also put the call on speaker and then confiscated the phone. She had no landline. Her laptop and tablet had been removed. As far as she knew they were no longer at the property.

  Numb with dread now, Kat felt unable to do much but sit patiently and listen to Reg’s account of how he and Delia had busied themselves with the coastguard, the police, the local hospitals and their son’s extended network of friends: the windsurfers and old schoolmates, anyone who might offer some flotsam of optimism about Steve’s whereabouts. As if Kat couldn’t be trusted, she’d been cut out of this investigation through official channels. Had her own circumstances been different, she’d have been offended by the dismissal.

  But they’d never know the truth. Never know why they’d never see their only son again, alive or dead. Kat was the only person in Steve’s sphere who knew he wasn’t coming back, not ever. There was nothing left to return.

  Kat failed to stem the return of the vague, opaque state of mind that Steve’s parents had disrupted. Her attention drifted, musing on the fresh perspectives brought here by her dead lover’s parents, these pale, hapless figures sitting on her sofa.

  The news of a ‘farmer’s’ report to the coastguard about a ‘person in the water’ offered chilling insights into those behind Steve’s ghastly demise. This witness was clearly lying: Steve had never been in the water. So that would mean the farmer was covering for Willows’s sect, this coven, cult or whatever it was that these ‘red children’ had formed near that stretch of coast.

  This also served as endorsement of Matt Hull’s claims that Redstone Farm had a long local reach. When she’d met Helene at the Redhill festival, her guardians had exchanged looks of recognition with others: the subtle slide or narrowing of their eyes that day had not escaped Kat. They’d also fielded numerous calls since occupying her home; people had come to the door with supplies, all part of the network.

  Kat recalled the few farms marked on Steve’s map, dotted between Divilmouth and Brickburgh; Redhill was the sole village. For all she knew, everyone living in that borough was part of Willows’s operation. She and Steve had been clueless about what they were up against until it was too late.

  Only Matt Hull had offered any vestige of the sinister truth. An insider who’d loosened the crust. Her boyfriend had knocked the scab off. Because she was a journalist with a connection to each man they’d unwittingly served her with notice of an impending, vile death.

  She wanted to be sick again.

  Steve’s hunches had been right. And the
re also existed a lead to Lincoln, Helene’s brother. The man at the farm with the wispy beard and rat face had admitted as much. She assumed the weasel was Tony Willows’s son, Finn: he’d been mentioned on Wikipedia.

  They’d murdered Lincoln Brown six years before. Helene’s brother had gone ‘to the red’, not off a bridge in Bristol. As no body had been found, Kat had to assume that Lincoln had been slaughtered like Steve. His suicide and Steve’s slipping from the cliffs in the dark were setups. Matt Hull was missing. The walker, the campers: no bodies in any situations strung across six years and counting.

  The imminent slaughter of Helene, whom she’d lured to the coast with promises of news of her brother’s last week alive, plus herself: the tally was mounting.

  Was Helene even still alive?

  Clothing folded on the shore and cars left at notorious sites used by suicides: easy to arrange. No evidence of foul play. The red people had form; the craft of disappearing someone was much practised.

  This compelled her to wonder how many other souls had been disposed of at the farm, because this was serial murder committed by a group. Ritual murder. And maybe it even began when the young woman died in mysterious circumstances at one of Tony Willows’s debauches in the late Seventies. Perhaps the abattoir had been open long before then. She’d never know.

  Didn’t killers often get away with their crimes for years? Many of them were never caught at all. Kat was aware of the theories, including the one that suggested that most missing people were the victims of serial killers. No witnesses, no bodies and the tracks went cold within twenty-four hours.

  Unknowingly, she might have been living next to a cottage-murder-industry for years. It was preposterous. Here, where people took their holidays in caravans, where snowbirds retired with a sea view. Absurdity and improbability the best camouflage that Tony Willows could have asked for; far better than his masquerade as a recluse.