The Reddening

by Adam Nevill

  Right here, a broad slate was being wiped clean. Nothing was being left to chance. Every leak, no matter how vague, was being sealed. And when Kat considered the age of the caves and of what had been found inside them, the true length of Brickburgh’s murderous legacy could only be imagined.

  Heartbroken girlfriend of drowned man commits suicide: Kat experienced no difficulty writing the headline of her own obituary. She was next.

  But the motives of the red folk? They didn’t seem so simple.

  Matt Hull and Steve had seen things; Lincoln had recorded weird underground noises on Tony’s land. They’d been caught snooping. Narks, that’s what the bearded oaf, earwigging from her kitchen, had called Steve: ‘a nark’.

  But were people dying because of the drugs or because they’d passed close to something else, something unnatural? Something that had been hidden under that farm for years? Something far worse than a crop of weed?

  The implications of what she’d heard beneath that barn, while drugged by the intolerable skunk fumes, she’d barely considered since, because memories of the bestial sounds were always accompanied by vivid images of Steve’s end: the jumbled, blurred and assorted stages of his butchery, murky yet poignant recollections that continually made her sick.

  And yet everything she’d believed about the earth, the cosmos and the natural laws that governed it might no longer be the whole story.

  With what mental capacity fear had allowed her to reason with, she’d struggled with that idea more than anything else.

  The red man with the ponytail had advised her not to attempt an understanding of what she’d experienced. Enlightenment for her was an impossibility: that had been his message. But it was reasonable to assume that whatever had noisily consumed the son of the two people currently falling apart in her living room might not have been natural in the sense that she’d previously considered anything to be natural. When lying a few feet from that awful crack in the earth, what she’d heard from beneath the ground of an outbuilding did not easily occupy any ‘normal’ classification of animal that she could identify.

  There was always a slim chance that Tony kept wild and savage beasts down there, inside a cave or pen – attack dogs, big cats. And there had been several things down there, a pack of some kind. Drug dealers had macho affectations. Weren’t people always seeing odd things on the moors like big cats?

  But other fragments of evidence did not support this wishful thinking. How had the two elderly and decrepit individuals in that barn assumed the stature, dexterity and strength of people aged a fraction of their years? Why had the wooden walls become stone before her eyes? How had rock walls painted with the prehistoric imagery of extinct animals become animated?

  Might the effects of the burning drug have caused her delusions? Had everyone in that barn been hallucinating too?

  Or did Tony Willows’s farm maintain an unnatural continuity with the past? An era most bloody and cruel, in which survival was determined by the murder of others within a cold, harsh climate.

  Relics from such a time, tens of thousands of years earlier, had littered the cases of the museum in Exeter. The dig was no more than three miles from Redstone Farm.

  Kat was surprised at herself for even entertaining the idea. But how could it not be considered?

  The ritual and ceremonial practices attributed to the Red Queens of Brickburgh and their homicidal shamanic successors might still be a going concern. Cannibals had occupied those caves, on and off, across sixty thousand years. Neanderthal children had been devoured a stone’s throw from Redstone Cross. Human heads had been capped, bones splintered, then gnawed for their marrow by busy human teeth. The shelves of Tony’s outbuildings had been crammed with artefacts.

  While psychotic from LSD overuse, maybe Tony Willows had found something on his land and copied it? It seemed unimaginable, the stuff of fiction. But Kat knew the only things stranger than fiction were the people who inhabited reality.

  ‘But why was he even there? On those cliffs. That’s what I don’t understand!’ Delia shrieked, breaking Kat’s preoccupation. Reg’s muttered pleas for Delia to calm herself were ignored.

  He was there because he was looking for a crazy story about an old folk singer who grew drugs on his farm, who made people disappear if they trespassed on his land. And your son discovered that his crazy, paranoid conspiracy theory was half-true, and that the whole truth was far worse. But he died with all of this knowledge. As I will too, with what I know. Soon.

  Kat excused herself from the living room. She went upstairs to be sick. The old woman in the headscarf followed her. ‘Juz seein’ she’s OK,’ she said to Reg and Delia.

  Delia was crying again. Reg remained polite and said, ‘Of course. Thank you for helping Kat. You’re so very kind.’

  Upstairs in the bathroom, Kat fell to her knees.

  23

  Being in the presence of open sea offers a unique perspective. Even when an onlooker is standing a few feet from where the foamy shallows lap the sand, beholding such an indifferent vastness can consume a mind. A fleeting comprehension conjures the sense of deep personal insignificance and an acute vulnerability before an insurmountable, barely knowable presence.

  A belittling of the sense of self is even more apparent when you are afloat upon the surface of the sea, aware of those leagues of empty, lightless water below your frail body. Being beyond sight of land can electrify a mind with wonder but mostly with a great and suffocating terror. Helene only experienced the latter.

  She spent a fair bit of her free time at home in water, swimming in the safe, chlorinated pool of a local leisure centre. Up and down, up and down, until she’d covered one mile, three afternoons each week before picking up her daughter from school. As an adult she’d swum in the sea too, during holidays in Spain and Portugal, but that was many years before she became a mother.

  During her short trip to Devon Helene never expected to find herself so suddenly and intimately reacquainted with the heaving power of the ocean: the elemental vastness, the swamping pressure upon her mind shaping prospects too frightening to analyse, and promising to be the last thing she’d ever experience.

  Even before they’d removed the hood, she’d smelled the brine and heard the slop and splash of the swell against the hull of the boat she’d been taken aboard. Below deck, she had become instantly aware of the immensity of unlit water surrounding the vessel, and of the depthless canopy of air above the sea’s surging surface.

  The three-man crew took her a long way out. As the motor of the boat chugged, even though she was hooded and without sight, she’d sensed the safety of land reducing to a thin strip of darkness behind her, twinkling with occasional lights, so far off and beyond reach.

  The comprehension of what she was being ferried into had made her shudder bone-deep and she’d whimpered like a child. What was about to swallow her seemed far more frightening than the intentions of those who’d seized and bound her like an animal they’d trapped. But they were only people. Horrible, callous, cruel and psychotic strangers who’d painted themselves red for some bizarre reason known only to themselves. The threat of the sea was deeper, colder, less personal, impervious to entreaties or negotiation. The sea didn’t even let you breathe beneath its monumental surface. The very idea of so much open water had accelerated her agoraphobic panic.

  Earlier, in darkness, three men had boarded the boat with Helene. Two of them had carried her below deck. Prior to casting off, and for some time once their van stopped rattling down a steep hill, their feet had crunched on sand and pebbles. She’d heard their exertions, the gasps and grunts as they’d carried her weight and length through the night. Their feet had eventually sloshed through shallow water and only then was she reminded of how the temperature dropped like a stone once you were mere feet from the sea’s surface.

  Her legs had been tied together at the knee. That felt odd, her knees bound, with the twine wrapped around a towel. Her arms were secured at the elbow with a
second towel slipped between her joints and the binding of rope. But not secured by wrists and ankles? She’d been bound at the guesthouse, on the floor of reception, as if her captors hadn’t wanted the bindings to hurt her if she struggled. But concern for her comfort was the furthest thing from their minds.

  The people with the red faces who’d come running through the house like excited hell clowns and then pulled her to the ground were not on the boat. But images of them had endured in Helene’s mind the whole time she’d lain on the metal floor of the van that took her to the shore. Inside the closeness of the hood, her most vivid memory had been of Carol making that horrible dingo sound. As Helene was seized, from behind the reception desk the elderly woman had barked like an old lunatic mistaking itself for a dog.

  Their job done, Carol had stayed behind at the guesthouse with her blood-faced comrades. The men on the boat weren’t painted. Their eyes weren’t swivelling, wide and messed-up on some kind of drug either. They’d been outside when she was captured and bound. Their van had been parked in a lane shielded by a hedgerow, near the guesthouse. The first wave of attack had involved the red lunatics; the second assault comprised three unpainted men in drab, ordinary clothes. The latter had been more methodical, silent, less aggressive.

  Aboard the little boat, when they finally ripped the hood from her head, the crew didn’t look her in the eye. Whatever they’d planned they wanted done quickly. They weren’t drunk and she felt no sexual threat: the only upside she could scratch from the situation. Nor did they want to hear what she had to say. Onboard, the muffling rag remained taut between her jaws.

  Once Helene blinked away the tears scalding her eyes, she was confronted by the confines of the small white cabin. She lay between a padded bench and what resembled a kitchenette counter in a caravan.

  The boat appeared new, its surfaces shiny. No scratches, no signs of wear. A few cupboards, a little table supported by aluminium legs, a padded bench seat, three steps that ascended to a bridge and the broad back of the man who piloted the boat.

  She guessed that between thirty to forty minutes had passed since they’d snatched her from the guesthouse. And despite her panic, there had been enough time for her to form some perspective on what was going down tonight. Kat made a lot more sense now. The state of the woman at the festival, the psychological collapse, was part of this. Kat had asked her to come to Devon specifically for this and even provided her with accommodation. She’d been set up.

  What was wrong with people that they would do something like this? And to a stranger who has already lost her brother? That’s what she’d asked herself self-pityingly and what she’d asked of God, who she dearly hoped was listening.

  Kat’s desire for Lincoln’s discs was connected. But these men and those red horrors were welcome to them. There was no need for any of this. She’d have handed them over at the first sound of a raised voice.

  There had also been ample time for her to suffer desperate thoughts of home, of her daughter and her mum. Recurring thoughts of Valda dominated and formed a heartbreaking loop. Helene had told herself not to cry, not to lose it. She had to keep her head straight to reason with the men who’d bound and gagged her and taken her out to sea in their boat . . . out to sea, oh Jesus. She’d faint if she thought about that part too closely.

  Perhaps they only intended to frighten her. Job done.

  But once the hood was off, she did lose it. Only a thin fibreglass hull now separated Helene and the sea, an alien region that you’d never see the end of this far out. And her terror of that immensity of water and sky returned. It was choking. No lifeguards, no shallow end out where she'd been taken. Not much natural light with the sun sunk below the horizon.

  She cried upon the fibreglass floor of the boat that smelled of oil, bleach and the sea. Oddly, weeping helped, at first. But then crying tipped her into hysteria and she flipped about the wet floor of the boat like a big fish that her abductors had landed. She kicked both feet into the furniture, uselessly.

  The pilot told the younger man, ‘Hold her still. Don’t want her chokin’ on her tongue. Nor gettin’ bumped about.’

  With his long fingers that stank of tobacco, the younger man with the alert eyes and sallow skin pushed her shoulders into the fibreglass deck. ‘I’ll sit on ya if you don’t stop,’ he said.

  They’d gently placed Helene on the floor before setting sail and had been very careful with any physical contact since they’d collected her from the naked aborigines at the guesthouse. A strange consideration.

  The third man in the red baseball cap and sunglasses wouldn’t look at her at all. His face was pale. He stood at the stern, above the motor’s churn, and looked out at nothing: there was nothing to see but black water and a matching sky.

  When the boat slowed, the engine thudding then whining like a food mixer, Helene nearly threw up. The winding-down of the motor implied a terrible finality. Only the rag between her jaws held nausea at bay.

  ‘Gag’s leavin’ marks,’ the younger man said. His fingertips were hurting her shoulders. The youth was so frightened or excited that he probably didn’t know he was bruising her skin. If not leaving marks had been an objective, these men had failed.

  ‘Get it off her then!’ the pilot barked.

  Surely they aren’t really going to hurt me. Her head seemed to clear, momentarily. This cannot be real. They’re just trying to scare you. They won’t . . .

  And why was she even here? She was a single mum who lived in Walsall, who worked part-time in an office. She’d never done anything to deserve this. She’d come to Devon for the weekend to see people who knew about her brother, who’d died years ago under his own volition. So why was she out at sea, lying on the floor of a boat, bound and gagged? Because of some old recordings that had been in her garage for half a decade? If the CDs accounted for her current plight, they already had them. One of the red things at the guesthouse, a woman with the hair oiled-out from her skull like a scarecrow, had hooted and scampered up the stairs to retrieve Lincoln’s discs and the laptop from Helene’s room. So them having those discs didn’t make sense of her plight. Nothing did.

  ‘Why?’ she asked once the gag came off. ‘What have I done?’ Her tearful voice was both too young and too old for her.

  The man in the red cap clutched at the steel railing that ran around the stern. Helene guessed he was struggling with the situation too: this plan, or intention, that had been devised to terrify her, or to achieve something far worse.

  She remembered some of what she’d planned to say to them when she’d been lying on the floor of the van. ‘People know . . . they know I was at that hotel . . . I’ve used credit cards down here.’ She hadn’t, but how did these men know? ‘There are emails and phone calls between me and Kat. I told people where I was going!’

  ‘You’ll not have to worry about that bint,’ the pilot said, as he came down the steps from the bridge heavily. His trainers expelled air as his weight thumped down, whuff, whuff, whuff. He was the only one present who seemed comfortable with the situation. A bald, stocky man with a face that looked like ham moulded into porcine features. He wheezed like an asthmatic but the suggestion of strength in his solid pink arms was intimidating. She suspected he was trying to generate confidence to bolster the resolve of the other two men. ‘She wunt be found.’

  Helene flinched when the younger man shrieked like an animal: the same sound the red people had made at the guesthouse. Naked, barefoot, howling.

  ‘Not ’ere!’ the older man said. ‘That don’t concern the sea. Only the red earth. She ain’t for that.’

  ‘Please,’ Helene said.

  The men still wouldn’t look at her, not in the eye.

  She swallowed. ‘I have a little girl. She’s only six. She needs me . . .’ Her voice broke.

  The man in the red cap in the stern dipped his head and spat over the side of the boat. His younger comrade grinned. There were tiny spittle balls around his whiskery mouth. His pulse thumped i
nside his throat. The eyes in his thin face were those of a confused dog.

  ‘Don’t got ya sea legs, Phil!’ the bald pilot shouted at the man in the red cap. Then he whispered ‘Soft cunt’ to Helene, grinning as if they were friends sharing an observation about a mutual acquaintance.

  Helene didn’t think the pig captain was sane. There was something wrong with his reaction to the situation, to her being so upset and distressed and frightened on the floor of his boat. He had no empathy or pity. He regarded her plight with an air of amused indifference as if he couldn’t take her circumstances seriously. Job needed doing, that sort of vibe. He wanted the onboard atmosphere to be light and seemed disappointed by the lack of camaraderie.

  ‘S’not right!’ Phil in the red cap blurted. ‘Not this!’

  ‘Fuck off!’ the ham-pilot shouted at his comrade. His piggy eyes reddened and he might have been on the verge of dispensing violence about the small craft. An unstable man, perhaps even more unhinged than the grinning, twitching youth. ‘The red not bin good to you, aye, Phil? You was fuck-all when it crept round your door. Think we don’t all sin you scratching about? A pisshead? Your dad woulda lost his farm, everyfing. You was no help to fucking no one. You tellin’ me this ain’t worth what you has? Fuck off. You do your bit same as all. Ain’t that right, Richey? Don’t see him puking when he’s driving that Range Rover, aye. That bit he’s happy with.’

  The thin head of the younger man bobbed in agreement. His eyes were permanently startled now, unable to rest upon any single thing.

  ‘You fuckin’ enjoy it!’ the man in the red cap roared.

  ‘You watch your mouf. None a that. None a that. Or I’ll put you over too.’

  Oh God, they’re going to throw you over the side. Arms and legs tied. At that moment, Helene sensed the excoriating froth of the sea in her throat. Saw herself coughing as a wave covered her face.

  ‘Won’t fool nobody, you stupid pig-headed fucker!’ Phil in the red cap yelled. ‘She just told ya. People knows she’s down here.’