The Reddening

by Adam Nevill

  Torn from the sink, the top of her buttocks caught a tap spout. Panic rioted inside her skull. Her strength fled, resolve following.

  Had the canister only ejected a spraying agent and not a blinding chemical? You’re supposed to shake it. Did I?

  Beard had merely blinked under the aerosol’s deluge but barely slowed. She must have squirted water from a dud. Use by date: the phrase screamed at Kat accusingly. The hairy killer was not for slowing down.

  He hauled her like a child across the bathroom, onto the landing. Pulled about too forcefully to keep her feet, she went down. On her knees she said, ‘Please.’

  She wasn’t sure what happened next but her attacker’s hands unclenched, releasing her bloodless arms.

  Looking through her hair at the floor, she was braced to receive a blow from above when a roar of animal pain filled the entire cottage, vibrating through timber and brick.

  A glance up.

  Not much of Beard’s head was visible. Inside a halo of wild, greying hair and crispy beard, his thick-fingered hands clutched at his face. He bent double, bellowed again. Tears dropped from his chin and splashed onto his tattooed forearms.

  Delayed effect.

  Kat stood up.

  Without giving notice of her approach, Headscarf appeared on the stairs. She peered between the banisters, the rat-face inquisitive. ‘Wass wrong, E?’ she said. ‘Wass she done?’

  Sprightly for a woman in her sixties, Headscarf skipped onto the landing and grabbed E by an arm. ‘Lemme see,’ she demanded of him like a mother before a son with something stuck in his eye. Maybe they were family.

  ‘Bloody spray!’ Beard roared, and spat gobs down his chin. ‘Fuck! Fuck!’

  Headscarf frowned, trying to comprehend, and Kat took two steps into the melée and laced the woman’s face from close range. This time she wiggled her wrist like she was a graffiti artist with a spray can tagging a concrete bridge.

  The woman stumbled back, lowering her face. ‘Bitch!’ She instinctively thrust out a knobbly hand in defence, arthritic fingers gripping a black hand-axe, before screaming from the agony engulfing her eyes and sinuses.

  Kat dithered. Tried to remember her plan. It had been simple but her mind blanked amidst the screams, the tears, the screwed-up faces, the flying saliva.

  Get past them and run.

  She’d dosed them good but didn’t know how long the spray’s caustic effects lasted. To make sure, she positioned the can under Beard’s covered face as he spat and grunted at the floor, his head almost between his knees, and discharged it again.

  He pulled away violently and knocked Headscarf down. He carried on capering and wheeling until his back hit the wall outside her bedroom.

  Something like hope merged with delight and surged like electrical current. Kat ran the last few feet of the landing. Tucked her body between the roaring oaf and the staircase. One hand on the railing, on legs unaccustomed to moving quickly, she padded down the stairs. The bright ground floor of her home reappeared in her vision. The sight was blessed.

  Hesitation gripped her again outside the kitchen. Her legs were shaking. Her hands too. They had her car keys and her phone. That’s right, she was supposed to retrieve those from her captors once she’d sprayed their faces. In hindsight, that part, the spraying, seemed to have gone too smoothly. Recovery of her car keys or phone, or preferably both, chimed new alarms.

  Should she run from the house in the dark? How far would she get? She wasn’t fit. Her neighbour was elderly and probably wouldn’t open her door in the early hours. Further up the lane were another two cottages. Each owned by elderly widows. Though one of them, Grace, usually had her daughter staying over.

  A quick survey of the kitchen counters and then the living room: the sofa, the coffee table, the bookshelves and counters, revealed neither phone nor car keys.

  Kat returned to the hall and stuffed her feet into a pair of trainers. She looked up. Beard was ranting, his broad West Country accent more pronounced when in pain. The timbre of his voice alone was terrifying and he was fumbling his way down the stairs like a blind man. One eye kept trying to open before clenching shut again like a frantic red snail inside its shell. But if that bloodshot orb managed to remain slightly open and the pepper spray was too old to be effective for long, she’d be in all kinds of trouble again and fast.

  Kat unlatched the door and undid the mortice lock. The door handle had little give. Locked. They’d removed the Yale key from the main lock.

  The sounds of her scrabbling at the cottage entrance incited greater efforts from Beard. He thumped his feet down the few remaining stairs. If his cruel hands seized her now he’d just hang on. He’d make sure next time.

  Half-finished job.

  Kat side-stepped into her tiny kitchen. She glanced about: toaster, breadboard covered in crumbs and dirty knives, dirty dishes, microwave, dirty pans . . .

  Panting, shaking his messy head, Beard angled his face down in case gravity offered relief from the sting and clawed at the front door. He pressed his hands against the wood and seemed relieved to find the door closed.

  Clearing his nostrils onto her mat like a bullock, he realised that his quarry was still indoors. The cottage was small. Even blind he’d find the bitch.

  With a clarity that made her grow cold, Kat understood that if he got hold of her now he’d probably kill her where she stood. At the very least he’d knock her senseless. And then . . .

  Do unto others . . .

  She opened two cupboards beside the oven. Food mixer, oven trays, bin bags, tinfoil on a roll, clingfilm, but nothing to weaponise.

  Cutlery drawer next. Kat opened it so fast the drawer reached the end of its runners and snapped them. Beard must have heard the tinkle of sharp metal things. He turned from the door and tried to force that ulcer of an eye open. Kat stepped up to the kitchen doorway and re-sprayed his hoary face.

  With a roar he tumbled backwards, escaping most of the fresh dose, but a few droplets must have entered the puffy slit of his parted eyelid. His hips struck the cabinet storing unopened post and racked shoes. A grasping hand tore two coats down.

  The can’s tiny load was nearly spent, the nozzle fizzing alarmingly during the last despatch. And now she’d made him even angrier. Once this conflict concluded one of them would not be getting up again. She swallowed this revelation like bile. But with her advantage the idea also excited her in a perverse, shameful way.

  Kat retreated to the drawer that tilted out of the fitted kitchen unit.

  Headscarf was washing her face upstairs. Kat heard the gush of a tap. The wrinkled rat must have sunk its burning face inside the basin to stop the pain.

  Kat removed kitchen scissors from the cutlery drawer. Dropped them. Snatched the small, sharp paring knife. Pocketed the weapon. Then grabbed the wooden rolling pin she’d only used once in a disastrous attempt to make pastry: a beef Wellington so dry and misshapen that she and Steve had been forced to order takeout. They’d eventually laughed until they cried. ‘Can I watch it go into the bin?’ Steve had asked. ‘Bastard!’ she’d called back at him, helpless with laughter.

  ‘Bitch!’ Beard roared from the kitchen doorway like a bee-stung bear, obliterating the brief echo of her dead lover. He knew she was in the kitchen and was aware of the room’s tiny dimensions, its potential as a domestic killing bottle. He’d been foraging in there for long enough, making endless cups of coffee like a recovering alcoholic, and had smoked so many rollups the room was now fungal from tobacco fumes. He’d made her space his own and he would kill her upon its linoleum floor. Even with him blind, his monstrous hands would still inflict catastrophic damage: they were tree roots wrapped in moleskin capable of crushing a windpipe like a bunch of spring onions. She was cornered.

  From the back pocket of his jeans he pulled a flint hand-axe. His hairy mitt cupped it, point down, as if he intended to hammer something hard.

  Steve.

  Kat remembered the sounds of Steve’s body coming apar
t in the dirt.

  Beard stepped inside the kitchen.

  Kat stepped up to him. And brought the wooden rolling pin down so hard and with such a wild swing she clipped the kitchen light. It shattered. Glass and the metal casing showered the floor. But the arc of the makeshift club, this comedy weapon that seemed to have passed from a Tom and Jerry cartoon and into her hands, connected with Beard’s head. She caught him where the simian forehead sloped.

  He grunted, dropping his head, feet planted.

  Vibrations passed along Kat’s arms. The wooden pin had bounced off his skull with an almighty coconutting sound that made her feel sick, the impact suggesting his head was a hollow wooden vessel.

  A bright streak of blood bisected his face, passing between his swollen eyes and around his flat nose to creep through the untidy moustache. Tributaries of crimson spread through his hairline. Kat’s nausea slid from six to ten.

  Beard clumsily swiped his arm through the air, the hand-axe at its end. Whisking the air, the weapon passed no more than a few inches from her eyes. It would have opened her face like a sandwich.

  Dizzy, panting like a dog on a hot day, Kat's thoughts fell about inside her mind like drunks. She really wanted this to stop. You made him bleed. Sprayed him three times. Why won’t he fucking stop? Why won’t they all fucking die?

  This is your house! They killed Steve . . .

  Upstairs, Headscarf was sniffing and jabbering. To herself? No, because the old woman had climbed the stairs with a phone in her hand. But would she be able to see the screen and activate a call with her eyes clenched shut? Or maybe she’d already initiated a phone call to one of her colleagues before she’d run up the stairs?

  Beard shuffled about trying to regroup his wits inside the earthquake Kat had just dropped onto his skull. He readied himself for another swing that would swipe deeper inside the tiny room. One of his big arms pulled back, a fleshy catapult, determined to tear her soft body apart with a primitive implement, the tool that had reduced her lover to wet pieces on a grubby floor that stank of animal shit. And that’s all they were now: savages swinging sharp stones and clubs at each other inside a soiled cave.

  Kat stopped thinking, stopped informing herself, stopped hoping, stopped despairing. ‘You dirty bastard,’ she screamed and went at Beard.

  The second, third and fourth blows were easier to deliver against his big head. Kat pulled down more of the light and some ceiling paint and plaster with her back swings but she caught the top of his head, the side of it above an ear and then the back of his skull.

  Beard blindly thrust out an arm in defence and she battered that too, twice, until it was withdrawn. She only stopped swinging when she was too tired to raise her arms and when her horror at herself overcame what had felt like elation as she’d destroyed the intruder.

  Beard’s head was wet, darker, dripping. He was less vocal. Truly one of the red folk now, repainted by her and brought down by one of their own notorious techniques. It all seemed to fit.

  Beard slumped against the washing machine. His mouth moved. Nothing much came out of it, nothing intelligible. As he’d turned from her blows she’d seen the oblong outline of a smartphone in the rear pocket of his jeans. He was now sitting on the device.

  ‘E! E! You get her?’ Headscarf shouted from the top of the stairs, in between sniffs and expulsions from her nostrils.

  Not done yet.

  Kat stepped over Beard’s legs. One of his feet scraped purposelessly against the lino, his head leaking horribly. But Kat continued up the stairs to deal with the old woman who would still be half-blind. No one gets left behind. And then she’d need her phone and she’d need the police here fast.

  As Kat jogged the last few stairs, Headscarf fumbled her way into the bedroom, slapping her hands about the walls, directing orders at someone she couldn’t even see. ‘Get away, bitch! Get away! I got the cancer. I’m ill. Don’t hurt me!’ She clutched a phone in one hand. The screen was glowing. She’d called someone.

  Kat clenched her teeth and raised the wooden club in her hand. We’re all monsters here. We’re all red now.

  33

  . . . the lights

  As she closed the distance between the first and second buoy, the lack of sensation in Helene’s arms and legs made her think of waterlogged timber.

  Using one arm to slowly claw forward, she tried to swim on her side, but a scissor kick proved too much for her numb legs and they drifted like dead weight. A tourniquet of bruise now encircled her neck and her lower back. Halfway across, she went under, twice.

  Slipping under shocked her enough to force her arms to reach and grasp the second buoy. When her head nudged the hollow plastic sphere she managed to cling to it with half-paralysed hands.

  Valda . . . Valda . . . Valda . . .

  My light . . .

  She reached the third buoy, twenty metres from the second, on her back. Unable to kick her depleted legs, she merely wafted her arms at her side, drifting more than sculling. Repeatedly stopping and looking over her shoulder to keep its blob of a silhouette visible, she eventually bumped the plastic ball. Then hugged it.

  Valda and . . . light . . .

  A strident but thinning chorus of drunken thoughts urged an attempt to reach the next buoy. Each one would take her closer to the rocks. They seemed to continue in a line for ever.

  Lights . . . Valda . . .

  Helene set off for the fifth buoy while still able to move her shoulders. The ball joints were grinding dry sockets. Curiously warm from the chest down, she had more of a memory of her legs and feet than any real sensation in them now. Her body was too heavy.

  The next buoy never materialised. She lost it in the darkness.

  Too tired to lift her head much, she drifted on her back, arms stroking at the water. Undulating with the swell, the shivering returned and was far worse than when she’d first entered the sea. Water filled her ears and iced her feeble thoughts, her breathing sped-up but she might have been holding her breath. Gazing at the stars, the sea took her.

  She thought the great black tide was returning her out there. And almost didn’t care.

  Valda . . .

  34

  All was silent upstairs once she’d finished with Headscarf. She’d truly finished her too.

  Shaky but aglow with a strange satisfaction, Kat threw the rolling pin onto the bed, then returned to the ground floor. The warm, full feeling in her tummy was like the quenching of an enduring thirst. But what had been so parched?

  Beard was crawling in the hallway, his head down, between his shoulders. He couldn’t see where he was going and Kat had no fear of him getting to his feet again. The vibrations of solid wood cracking against his skull remained in her hands and forearms like trapped static, a sense memory.

  Remaining cautious, she withdrew the paring knife from the pocket of her joggers and held it to the rear of his neck. Fishing inside the back pocket of his jeans with three fingers, she retrieved her phone and the front door key attached to the octopus keyring that Steve had won in an arcade. The screen of her iPhone was splintered.

  In the kitchen, she stepped around shards of glass from the obliterated light fitting, turned on the bulb inside the extractor hood. She activated the handset.

  Waiting for the software to load, she stepped over Beard and unlocked the front door, but she couldn’t open her route to freedom wide enough to pass through, obstructed as it was by the directionless shifting of his body.

  If she’d thought her anger depleted and sluiced away by her liberal use of the rolling pin and pepper spray, she was mistaken: there was ample heat left and it flared alight, hot and red and quickly, at this new obstacle. She swung the door from side to side rapidly, slamming the edge against Beard’s ribs until he fell onto his side and cleared the exit.

  On the front path, Kat hauled the cold night air to the bottom of her lungs. When was the last time she’d breathed so deeply?

  She bent double and retched onto the paving.
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  Gathering her breath and wiping the hair from her face, she straightened. Her leg muscles had jellied. She’d wrenched tendons too and muscles in her stomach while battering her foe. But her mind was perplexed more than shocked at the idea of what she’d just done to two human heads. Why the heads?

  Fifteen years of pain might have just discovered an outlet at the side of her bed and inside her tiny kitchen. Processing that might take a lifetime. Join the queue.

  Without a tremor of pity, she wondered whether she’d killed Headscarf. You must be in shock, she told herself.

  Back inside the hall, Kat unhooked the one coat remaining on the rack. Slipped her arms inside the jacket. Then left the house, shutting the door and its red-faced horrors inside.

  She walked uphill, following the lane connecting her home to what serviced as a village centre, in reality a crossroads of two lanes. There wasn’t even a shop up there any more. From there she would walk to Ivycombe, where there would be more light and more people.

  Without much enthusiasm, she mused that she should call an ambulance for the red folk inside her home. But before she moved far, her body crashed, the trembling in her limbs unstoppable. Her thoughts diffused into irrelevance. Parts of the last few hot minutes slipped out of sequence in her memory and into vivid flashes of sound and image that she struggled to anchor in narrative.

  Other thoughts were intent on digression, on scattering along pointless paths. She thought about selling her house, and her mind filled with a list of what she would need to do to relocate. Concerns about her deadlines at the magazine mixed themselves up with plans for her next meal. It had been cup-a-soup and plain biscuits for four days – when she could stomach them. Then she was crying hard and saying her mum’s name.

  The icons and text on the phone screen were as fractured as the glass. Thumbing through the call list, she found the number for the detective, Lewis: he’d called her. Steve was the detective’s case. Her own case was now connected to Steve’s. Lewis knew what she’d discovered about Redstone. He should be the first to know what had happened to her. She tapped the call icon. Her phone sought the connection.