The Reddening

by Adam Nevill

  ‘Messing with your head. They’ll say anyfing when they’re caught. You seen them go into the red, ain’t ya? Hear it free or four times more and it don’t mean nuffing. They goes in the red and we is gifted. No more to it than that. Stop complicating fings. What’s it matter anyway? You sin what’s coming to all of them, aye? But not us. Who you wanna be, them or us? Old witch-wife opened your eyes, so why is you closing them again?’

  ‘They . . . they got forensics and things. When she washes up . . . They’ll know. They’ll know!’

  ‘Reason why others do the thinking in the red is cus you’re a stupid cunt, Phil. You fink she’s the first? The red’ll keep us, no worries. We’ve coppers, councillors, twats and all sorts on our side. Red goes deep. You ain’t breaking no rules when you is making them. Aye, Richey?’

  Richey nodded along and added his own self-convincing spiel. ‘Deaf by misadventure. Or suicide, like her brother. One or t’other. It’s fixed, Phil. It’s all fixed up.’ But the younger man had wet himself. Near her face, Helene could smell urine soaking into denim.

  ‘But if you wobbles, yeah? Yeah?’ The pig pilot was directing his sole attention to Phil again, who would not turn around from the black sea, as if he couldn’t. He just stood still and stared at where she was going. ‘If I fink you’re a liability, yeah? Then when it gets back to you know who, yeah, and it gets passed up to the witch-wife, yeah? Then when she gets queened up, you’ll be capped. I promise you that. I’ll do it meself. You’ll be in the red before you know it and I’ll piss on your bones too, or whatever the Creel leaves down there. You’re a waste of space, Philly. Always was. I vouched for you but I’ll be just as happy to see you go froo, yeah? Down there, yeah? Froo the walls. Cunt.’

  Phil slumped at the railing.

  ‘So git over here and fucking help out!’ The captain of pigs then turned his attention to the youth, Richey. ‘You grab her legs. We go froo the back and she’s in, yeah? Don’t let her bang the sides, like. Take the rope off her arms as she goes in, yeah? Last minute, like.’

  Easy to believe that you’ll have something to say at the end too, when all hope has gone. That you’ll impart memorable last words. But it’s not true. People become vague. They call for their distant mothers. Things like that. Helene understood this. The last of you was mostly useless. But she did briefly inflame from her toes to the ends of her hair. A bit of her former self that gave boyfriends hell resurfaced.

  ‘No!’ she screamed. The nonchalant way in which the swine captain had imparted instructions for her disposal into the sea had burned out an inner firewall between her fear and rage. Anger scorched, loosening her muscles. She swivelled on her buttocks and kicked both feet, as hard as she could, into the stout trunk of the captain’s nearest leg. Right on the knee.

  The hinge joint clicked back, locked and he roared, slipped sideways. One fat hand scrabbled across the table like a corpulent sea snail, failing to gain purchase. He thumped against the floor and found himself lying alongside Helene, sweating hard with his face so red his heart must surely burst.

  ‘Fuck’s sake, fuck’s sake, fuck’s sake,’ Phil repeated as he walked up and down the tiny deck outside the cabin.

  Richey grinned like the idiot that he most surely was.

  The captain gasped, struggled to his knees but made sure to put his weight on the one that Helene hadn’t kicked. ‘Bitch,’ he said, his mouth filling with saliva. ‘Kill ya!’

  ‘No marks, no marks!’ Phil shouted as he finally ducked inside the cabin.

  ‘I’ll have ya. I’ll have ya!’ the captain shouted, clawing pudgy digits at Helene’s hair.

  Phil and Richey dragged her away, out and onto the deck.

  Cold air drenched her body: mere warning that the ocean itself would be far colder. ‘God, no. My daughter . . . No. My little girl needs her mum. No. Please. Please.’

  Phil began to cry. ‘Nothin personal. It’s nothin personal,’ he chanted.

  Richey took control and was horribly strong for a scrawny youth. His hands passed under her armpits and he hoisted her upwards. Helene kicked her feet about the deck, her trainers squeaking without finding grip.

  And there it was. Black, slopping, stretching for ever. The sea. The unfeeling, unseeing sea that would suck her down into non-existence, into the depths where she’d never see her baby again. ‘No! Stop! Oh, God. Please!’

  A lazy pummelling of small waves shifted the boat about queasily. Indigo patches the colour of her daughter’s blackcurrant juice were spotted near the boat’s lights. The reek of brine engulfed her. The cold bit her nose. Her body lost its strength and flopped limp. Feeling sick, weak and dizzy, she thought she’d pass out.

  ‘Not yet,’ she said, feebly, finally, her voice distant amidst the shock she was slipping into.

  ‘Get her in! Get her fuckin’ in!’ the oaf captain shouted, his pig face a lather of spit and sweat at the mouth of the cabin.

  Valda, running through a sunlit garden. Her face one big smile. A melting ice lolly in a small hand.

  Valda: a baby on her zoo mat, little feet kicking at the mirror and bells, tiny hands whizzing with excitement.

  Lincoln, smiling, his hair tousled.

  Mum, Dad.

  The binding was cut from her elbows.

  One of them, Richey or Phil, was panting as if he’d run a marathon. She didn’t want to see their faces.

  There was no going back.

  A hand grabbed her ankle and began to pull that leg from the slippery deck. A second hand scraped down her calf, trying to seize her second ankle. They meant to tip her in, over the back of the boat, headfirst.

  Helene seized the railing and kicked her free leg backwards, blindly. Catching Phil’s groin. He collapsed against a moulded bench. She raked a hand behind, found Richey’s face. A cold, rubbery ear, wet lips, a stubbly cheek. He pulled away, out of reach, his dirty fingers releasing her hoodie.

  But what happens now? They going to take you back to shore? All a big mistake? Soz, love.

  No. The pig captain was on deck, with a limp and a complexion like roast beef. Clutched in his hateful swine hands was a long wooden pole that ended in an iron spike. Boathook.

  Helene didn’t consider what she did next. She acted before her conscious mind processed the impulse. Riding a surge of unreason, she passed into a weightless euphoria and she stepped up and onto the stern of the boat.

  She turned her head and called the fat man ‘Bastard!’ through bared teeth. And without any further assistance from the crew, she plunged into the black sea.

  24

  When Sheila finally called, Kat’s captors crowded her, their fingers whitening around the razor flints they held at her jawline. She still did not know their names. They were close to being as unfamiliar to her now as when painted red and pushing inside her home. Grief and horror and fear kept her compliant because they’d dehumanised her. All she could do was confer the same treatment on them, so in her mind and until this was over she would call them Beard and Headscarf.

  Both of her jailers possessed a high boredom threshold: she’d worked that much out. They either watched her or watched terrible television, each activity undertaken without comment, and though it was never difficult to assume that they disliked her, they rarely conversed with each other and never smiled.

  Kat suspected that old Tony Willows, or whoever called the shots at his unwholesome farm, had told Beard and Headscarf to dislike her. For the kind of people who could ecstatically dismember a living man and feed him to dogs, such a command seemed sufficient justification to hate someone.

  Not once since they’d taken over her life and home had she seen a flicker of empathy in their hard eyes. They didn’t see her. Not plainly. They didn’t perceive her distress, and their absence of sympathy horrified her. She’d never met the likes of them before but she’d always known that they were out there.

  As the uncomfortable cohabitation progressed through a third night, Kat’s thoughts sank deep enough to be
come still, emotionless and blank. They’d periodically resurface in shallower cerebral water, then sink again. And so she’d slept, wept and slept some more.

  They’d established a routine, the three of them. Kat washed in front of the strangers, slept in front of them, picked at food while they stared and even used the toilet in front of the woman. Beard let her close the door as if afraid of being disgusted. The woman put clothes out for her each morning. The man mostly watched television.

  And when Sheila called, the bearded oaf had delivered Kat’s phone and issued his usual crude warning. During the call even Sheila was uncomfortable and desirous of an end to a conversation she’d never wanted to be part of. Kat remained uncommunicative. Her mind blanking. What could she say anyway?

  Acceptance that Steve had gone into the sea was growing out there beyond her confinement. It didn’t look good. That was clear from Sheila, even if she balked at using drastic terminology. Her boss also mentioned work and told Kat that she should ‘take as much time as she wanted in a difficult time’. Upon hearing that, Kat sensed that Sheila had not only written off Steve but her as well. She could afford to, and Kat might only be problematic henceforth in Sheila’s rarefied world. Tragedy did not become the brand values of Devon Life and Style. Kat was never going back to work.

  There’d be an obituary for her in the magazine, nothing depressing. Kat sniggered at that thought, which confused her captors. They’d never seen her laugh before and exchanged glances.

  She was losing it.

  Kat just didn’t feel like herself any more. In what time she’d left she didn’t expect to.

  She’d often pondered how trauma incubated deep below the surface of the conscious mind to create transformation. Bits of the cerebral flotsam rising from wreckage repressed in the sea trenches of the head, buoyant fragments bobbing into more self-aware waters. Random floating signals were examined as shards from some greater puzzle. The debris offered an indication of how the mind was changing below.

  Perhaps the mind altered to a more anxious state, or a less optimistic one, as it slid into a depressed period weighted by disappointment. It might find scant relief in wisdom or acceptance. But sometimes it became irretrievably broken. And maybe only then did it prepare itself to act in desperate ways.

  In captivity, under house arrest, Kat also found time to think and to identify a connection between her ex’s controlling moods and her current situation.

  Damage inflicted by Graham was permanent but had been manageable over time. When they’d been together, his passive aggression had surfaced whenever decisions were made about their evenings out, or whom they would see as a couple, or what they bought together, or when deciding what to do on a Sunday in London before the pressure of work refocused their minds by late afternoon. Graham had always sulked or brooded Kat into submission. She’d detested that side of her ex, a manipulative man and, she knew, in hindsight, despite his undemonstrative manner, a selfish bastard.

  Yes, he’d been conflicted for years and torn himself apart over the final act of betrayal but he’d still left her alone and forced her to reconstruct a life without him. That had taken a long time. He’d broken every promise he’d ever made. Annihilated her trust in others. Ruined her fertility and scorched her mental health.

  But maybe Graham had done her one favour: he’d left Kat strongly averse to anyone who tried to impose their will upon her. Anyone who nibbled at the periphery of her life and attempted to appropriate her space, her freedom, her emotions, she quickly detested. She suspected she’d developed a phobia about commitment and a myriad other feelings of repulsion for the wilful, the ambitious and the self-interested. Once bitten in half, forever shy.

  She’d only wanted to cruise down here by the coast. Yet here she was again, this time with her hatred of being controlled maximised, magnified and multiplied. A couple of thugs this time: deranged, degenerate bullies who’d taken part in the slaughter and butchery of her lover.

  Beard and Headscarf controlled her completely. Everything she’d worked for was effectively theirs now. They’d just taken it from her and could end her life too: the very workings of her mind and heart could be gone any time they wished. That was their plan, assuredly, because her current circumstances represented only a temporary delay before they destroyed her tactically and purposefully. They had their reasons for postponing the inevitable. She had no say in the timing or the method.

  By day three Kat was comforting herself with visions of Tony Willows’s farm on fire. She fantasised about her guardians having their own red heads smashed in too. Cracked right open.

  She also comforted herself with the idea of seeing them all sucked into the black crevice, that void under the dirty floor, a place she could not think about for more than fleeting moments. The stench of what had stalked below was still trapped inside her sinuses.

  Over the years, she’d also fantasised about Graham dying. Many times. Usually first thing in the morning. Less so now, but in these fantasies he’d never been destroyed by her own hand. She’d favoured imaginary surrogates to claim her revenge: buses, accidents, muggings. Kat had sickened herself while entertaining these pipe-dreams, and her new fantasies about her jailers also troubled her. They stemmed from the damage her tormentors had already inflicted upon her mind. Permanent harm again, no doubt.

  So what kind of person was she now? And what could such a person do unto others if given the chance?

  Kat was finally thinking about herself, about what she might do – because unless she managed to extract herself from her current situation, she’d die like Steve. And this posed the questions: how could she escape? How was that done? The self-extraction: how was it possible?

  Only on day four did Kat happen upon an idea she thought was feasible.

  25

  The cold was sharp. It cut subcutaneously. It withered.

  The dive took Helene deeper than she’d anticipated, to where the cold seemed capable of peeling skin and hair from her head.

  Underwater, the roar that came from breaking through the surface was deafening. A layer of ice seemed to form about her entire body, an encasement of aching cold that burned and thumped the breath out of her chest. Her insides shrivelled.

  When the momentum of her plunge slowed, a terrible silence rushed in from the freezing darkness surrounding her.

  You never jump into cold water.

  She’d not had much choice.

  Cold-water shock. Down here, the involuntary gasp was the killer. The drowner. Sea water chilled in layers. The surface layer was closer to the sun by day but that was only a few feet deep. Further down, the temperature plunged. A metre down the temperature might be zero degrees. At night, in early summer, even the uppermost layer racked a warm body with shudders. And she’d just arrowed a couple of metres into the black region that is home to panic, gasping and the strength passing from your blood and into the water. Half a pint of seawater inside your lungs and you’re done. Dead in three minutes. Helene had punched into the black freeze with her eyes wide open.

  She knew how it worked: you were supposed to gradually accustom yourself to cold water, one inch at a time, breathing quickly. She’d swum for years and never thought her local pool warm enough, but in this ebon sea, kicking an iceberg would not have been unexpected.

  Too deep.

  Too deep.

  Too deep.

  The alarm in her mind chattered. Panic flicked a switch in her animal brain. Her mouth opened to inhale. The rapid beat of her heart sent out a distress sonar.

  Anyone less experienced would have sucked her lungs full of the caustic brine and filled her tanks with the watery choker, the ice-cold killer. And as her dive bottomed, something, some nihilistic impulse, some internal nurse with a euthanising syringe stuck into an ampoule, even offered an alternative to her shrieking desire to survive. In an inappropriately calm but natural tone, the impulse had communicated the thought: why not let go? Get it over with.

  She refused. Valda’s
small inquisitive face appeared in her thoughts, how it looked first thing in the morning. And she thought of her child’s soft body strewn across her lap on the sofa once Valda had pried her mum out from under the duvet and made her go downstairs to watch cartoons. Helene even heard a small voice asking, ‘Is the time six past twenty-five yet?’

  Turning her fingers up and kicking hard, Helene had seconds to surface. Any longer and her mouth would widen and that would be that.

  She clawed at the bubbles of her wake. They blossomed silvery in an eternal black. Employing her entire will, she overrode panic just enough to keep her lungs empty and broke from the cold, her face surfacing in lightless air that felt thirty degrees warmer than the sea.

  Separate from her mind’s stewardship, her body shuddered, her chest panted and heaved at the air. Her skull was a warehouse fire, a combustion of animal and childlike terror. She gulped the air her lungs were bruising for, then floated onto her back.

  Her skinny jeans and hooded top were soggy and heavy and seemed far more cumbersome than they had any right to be. But she could float, yes, for a little while. And while she floated she told herself that she needed to calm down. Don’t think about anything, just calm down.

  At the edge of her awareness, the boat’s motor grunted in the water and she heard a voice call out, ‘Drown, you bitch!’ The pig captain.

  As if in disbelief at what they’d just done, the thin silhouettes of Richey and Phil watched from the stern in silence.

  26

  Kat's red roommates would split her skull or slice her throat if she made a dash for the front door. And that’s what they’d expect: her fleeing and screaming for the front. They were primed for it.

  You go all or nothing for the door or a window and they’ll make sure you never attempt it again.

  They’d tie her down. She’d go from standard imprisonment to solitary confinement in bonds. So the front entrance was out.

  For a few hours on the evening of day four, Kat clung to the thin hope that the disappearance of Matt Hull, Steve and Helene would draw the attention of even the most understaffed, underfunded and half-assed local police force.