The Reddening

by Adam Nevill

  ‘For your own preservation we’ll need the inside track on everything. Every angle, every lead, so the red can deal with its foes in its own way. Like it always has done.’

  Kat had heard the detective groan at that; a sound dragging itself from his belly. ‘Jesus,’ he’d added, the word weighted with the opposite of salvation.

  ‘And remember your place, Louie. You’re an associate, a lackey. She’ll be here soon and I don’t want you running your mouth round her.’

  ‘You bloody morons,’ Lewis had wailed, uselessly. Kat had sensed he’d never grasped the full vision of the red.

  ‘Hindsight’s a wonderful thing, Louie. I bet it was for you, after playing blackjack online and pissing away fifty grand.’

  ‘I never agreed . . . not this.’

  ‘You’re in the middle, Louie, and everything’s at risk. But in the scheme of things, nixing a few cuckoos is irrelevant.’

  ‘The red demands.’ An elderly voice had entered the conversation then and the atmosphere outside the car changed, a hushed tension seeping through the darkness. ‘And protects itself. They’ve been at our door for years. We knew this time would come. But what can I tell you? The red thirsts. All our futures are red.’

  ‘Tony, for God’s sake.' Lewis had tempered the volume and tone of his voice, but barely, which had only served to increase Kat’s sense of his desperation, his helplessness. 'Tonight alone I’ve done a hundred times more than was ever agreed. I got your people out of that cottage and I delivered the reporter. I was minutes away from being caught. She could have called anyone. And you put people in her house. Abduction? You can’t. You can’t do that. How was that going to end? You’re out of control . . . This isn’t the fucking Stone Age.’

  ‘It’s a shame you’ve always hung around the fringes, Louie.’ Tony’s lordly tone was mocking. ‘If you’d shown a little more commitment, you’d be more than bent swine with gambling debts. You could’ve seen what we see, lad. You could have shared something remarkable. It would have provided you with more backbone than you’re showing now. I’m disappointed in you, lad. Bitterly.’

  Finn had laughed and sounded like a horse neighing.

  Lewis’s meagre restraint had finally melted. ‘Save your mystical garbage for the nutters. And for the simpletons that you’ve got hanging on to every word of bullshit that drops out of your old lady’s mouth –’

  A foot had then scraped the tarmac and the assembled crowd had jeered. Kat had overheard the sounds of an enraged and screaming woman being restrained.

  ‘You ill-mannered bastard!’ That had come from Finn. Huddled on the backseat, Kat had sensed his anger building through the exchange: he seemed about as stable as his father. ‘You say that here? You greedy, shitty pig! You want to be shown what we have here?’

  ‘Finn! Get him out of my sight.’ Willows’s voice had risen amidst the standoff, the kicking and scuffling of feet, the confusion in the darkness outside the car, the convergence and collision of raised male voices. Kat had recalled an afternoon in a pub in King’s Cross when football fans had exploded into violence near her table.

  If Lewis, a police officer, was working for the family and the operation, or whatever it was, who else might be in league with the red? Sheila had introduced her to Lewis. The sudden sickening idea that her editor was involved had turned Kat’s shock to concussion. Not Sheila, surely. No. Involved with these dirty, dyed devils? Butchers. Cannibals. She’d never live to disprove her paranoid grasping but the last few days had been sufficient preparation for Kat to believe anything.

  Eventually, a sullen Lewis had returned to the car and yanked Kat from the rear seat as if she’d been a dog with fleas that stank and left stains on his upholstery. His mouth had been bleeding.

  Finn Willows had appeared too: a scrawny frame topped by a thin ponytail and a scratchy beard. His ferrety face a mask of loathing as he’d lit her path into the cell of the condemned.

  Others in the lane had tugged open the front passenger door and retrieved Beard. He’d lain slumped forward in the seat, ominously silent, leaking. Headscarf’s remains had been dumped inside the boot by Lewis.

  At her cottage, once the detective had secured Kat in the car, he’d dashed inside to remove as much evidence as possible. He’d come back out carrying Headscarf like a limp child before depositing her in the boot. There had been no time for the collaborator to administer first aid: the false protector had merely hauled the wounded red soldiers from her home so they wouldn’t be found.

  Her current prison cell adjoined the main barn, that place of murder constructed from vertical planks of wood, stained dark. Earlier, even when only partially visible from the road, the building’s silhouette had declared its malign purpose, withering her spirits and chilling her flesh more than the night air. A black place on land from which all decency had long been erased.

  Before the building’s jagged silhouette she’d gazed as if hypnotised by a place of worship, where the god was still present. An improperly secured cap, that’s what the building was. A fragile canopy above a pit so deep she could imagine an abyss carrying on for ever, through the earth and back through the ages.

  Beneath that wretched barn perhaps even matter as she knew it, and all that her experience had taught her to understand of the world’s rules, ceased. A brush with the very idea had paralysed her limbs. They’d needed to push her inside the cell.

  * * *

  A hand struck wood, palm down. The door of her cell opened and the bent figure of Tony Willows was led inside by a woman Kat put at around fifty years old. She had once been pretty, even beautiful, but the freckled skin of her face was grooved and etched by so many creases that her expression had re-formed into a misery mask. A Pre-Raphaelite princess whose noble features had slipped and sagged around eyes that still suggested kindness: a quality Kat forbade herself to hope could exist in such a place as this.

  In better light, Tony Willows’s skin now appeared treacle-brown, the flesh at his throat and sunken chest wattled, liver-spotted. Despite the timbre of his voice he looked like a man at the end of his life.

  Kat found her own voice. ‘This doesn’t have to happen. I’ve no interest in what you’re doing. I’m not that kind of journalist. Not a reporter.’

  Tony raised a palsied hand to silence her, the fingers quivering like a plucked string. The other lumpy hand gripped a walking stick. His eyes were half-closed, his demeanour sombre like a judge silencing the accused who babbles for his grace and mercy.

  The woman smiled. ‘It’s not an end, but a beginning.’

  Tony’s old eyes opened. They were filmed with tears. He clutched the woman’s hand and cleared his throat. ‘Nanna's right. People would flock here if they knew of the miracle. They’d give anything to be a part of what is here. What abides. You’ve no idea of the bounty, nor the vision we are blessed with. You can’t understand. You’re a vandal. Vandals destroy what they don’t understand. It’s what they do.’

  ‘No.’ Kat shook her head, emphatically. The woman was Nanna then? Willows's daughter, Finn's twin. She'd been mentioned in the first online article Kat had read.

  Tony only sighed in exasperation as if she was a child displaying naivety on an important matter. ‘This earth has been remade, lass. So many times. But through the endless freezes and great flooding thaws, a wonder far older than our species lingered. We can’t expect you to understand, but you need to gather yourself. Make peace with your past. And then forget it all because it really is irrelevant. That should be a comfort. You’re a spark. They go out, dear. Infinitesimal. Nothing. We’re dealing with something our tiny minds aren’t made for. I won’t tell you any more because only one of us can truly see what’s under here, where the red yawns. And may it always yawn so that some of us outlast the desolation that is due.’

  Tony sighed, his chest a dry bag, deflating. He pitied her. ‘But you’re nourishment for a moment, lass. Nor are we much more. Meat and a few thoughts, a little heart from time to time.
Again, again, again. It always comes back around. We’re ready, are you?’

  To Kat, it was a garbled scripture he must have canted before. ‘Please . . .’ she said, and yet she struggled to plead for her life. Horror choked her. Pushed its hot fingers down her throat. The profound weight of inevitability stalled her thoughts. A childlike misery persisted.

  Nanna knelt before her and unpacked a fabric bag. She laid two items upon the floor. A small bottle of brown glass, the contents murky, and an object wrapped in a white cloth. Whatever was contained inside had stained the cloth the colour of iodine. ‘You’re strong,’ she said to Kat, smiling sweetly. ‘Your will has been demonstrated. It has made you even more delicious. Your strength, your hot spirit, will be wonderful nourishment. It’s an honour, my love.’

  ‘This doesn’t have to happen . . . please.’

  ‘Our red mother watched you. She caught scent of your lover too, the thief, who crept inside with us.’ Nanna winked, her smile now verging on the salacious and chilling Kat with the suggestion of a deep instability that surged behind a seemingly affable veneer. ‘But it’s time to forgo the struggle. And we all thank you. We’ll never forget you. We love you, Kat.’

  ‘Love. Yes. We adore you, girl.’ Willows’s faded eyes misted with sentiment. He wafted a withered forearm as a mad king on a blasted heath would do to dispense wisdom to his last subject, or fool. ‘You give so that others can abide. We must pass on, lass. To sanctuary. Conceal ourselves in this hostile wilderness. Once more, again and again, the red children take flight. But the black dog and her white pups must be fatted. A dry summer and a hard winter are coming, my girl, and you’ll be the last for a while. The last to go down. We’ve made them . . . excitable. They need to rest in the dark now. For all our sakes let’s hope they do, eh?’

  He leaned forward, his eyes peeled with what she read as panic. ‘We brought them up too far. Too far. You cuckoos are to blame.’

  Kat moistened her throat. She didn’t know what could be said in response to such lunacy, nor whether anything was worth saying. What words struggled through her shock seemed futile before they left her lips, even then as a whisper. ‘Please. I swear on my life. This is sacred to you, I can see that. You’ve done something special. I see. I see that. I get it. I’ve seen it too. What’s here. I have. I really have. But I have a life. In return for that, I’ll say nothing . . . do nothing . . . help you even. I can be useful to you.’

  Tony shook his grizzled white head. He was beginning to remind her of an old Native American chief, or a homeless man leathered by the elements who chatted druggy nonsense to those passing by his cardboard throne. Eyes twinkling, the smile benevolent, as if to a child he said, ‘You’ve no calling. No. You’re a bitch not a witch. But she is one and she decides. Our witch-wife. She found it. Buried, so far inside . . . years ago. Understand, if you’re capable, that what was welcomed back has saved us, all of us here. And she who is greater than us decides who abides and who is swallowed whole. We follow a message. There’s a receiver. Here. You didn’t know? No words, no words. Pictures, in the mind. Never been wrong. And you’ve threatened the old grove. You’re from there . . . that blasted place. Coming unbidden. All traipsing about. We saw you. We saw you. The red has seen you off many times. Left your bones in darkness for thousands of years.

  ‘We watch the door, lass. We merely bargain, and you’re blessed, the bounty. You’re a full belly on a cold night, girl. Be strong now. That’s all, lass. Be strong and be grateful for what you offer to what abides.’

  Tony's daughter unwrapped the cloth from the object on the floor. ‘Drink with us now. Close your eyes. And see. It’s rising. Today. For us. The pack whines.’

  ‘Blind dogs scamper through the red earth even as we sit here, sharing. Old Creel! Old Creel!’ Tony shrieked with what appeared to be a private but powerful ecstasy. ‘And thy thirsty pups!’

  Kat flinched as the bowl was laid before her knees. She’d seen similar in the museum in Exeter and in the slide-show so many years before in Plymouth, manmade artefacts removed from Brickburgh’s caves. Each time they’d made her feel sick.

  What lay on the filthy ground before her was the top of a human skull. This one pale and still moist inside. A more recent addition to the Brickburgh collection. A cup. A cup of special significance like the items buried alongside the red queens, preserved in graves for thousands of years. A receptacle: that’s what it was, designed for purposes for which there was no written or spoken record.

  Cap the bastard.

  Kat whimpered and backed away from the horrid thing. Shuffling on her buttocks she reached the nearest wall but could get no further. In the corner her vision whited out. She spat out the bitter taste that gathered in her mouth.

  Tony grinned. Changed his tone, his demeanour. The wise old man dropped the beatific act and stepped forward a few thousand years to adopt a fresher discourse. ‘Good. Even better on an empty stomach. More potent. Doesn’t get diluted. I’d know too because I’ve taken everything. So let me put it another way: you’ll not want to venture one step beyond that door straight, woman. This shit’ll take the edge off. No one can take Old Creel straight. You’ve gotta be messed-up, lass. So get your load on, girl, because this promises to be the most intense experience of your life. I’d even be tempted to consider this communion wine as a form of anaesthetic before surgery, if you follow, because you’re literally going to come apart next door.

  ‘You’ve squeezed us through the ringer, girl, so you must go, as all our foes are sundered. Who else can we give? And the dogs are out. Can’t say fairer than that.’

  ‘The red ways.’ Nanna touched Tony’s arm as if he were being uncouth and embarrassing a guest in their home. ‘We’ll share what you experience. Through your terror, Kat, we all share in wonder. Passing to the red is a great privilege.’

  Tony pushed himself upright. ‘Another era ends. Won’t be the last. But we will remember your cries this day as you nourish sacred ground. So sup, lass. Sup your last. The red awaits. Your passage between the walls is booked.’

  ‘The red abides,’ Tony’s daughter said, smiling. ‘All we red children abide.’

  RELICS

  41

  Lathered in scarlet and masked and frightful, they made their journey down the lane: a mother and her dear son. The son pushed the wheelchair. Every bump and judder of the rubber wheels rolling across each crack, lump and fissure in the tarmac now so familiar to them, mapped by the vibrations within their thin, unclothed bodies.

  ‘This will end where it began,’ the hunched figure in the chair said to Finn, or to itself.

  The odour of the black headpiece that wobbled on his old mother’s head wafted under her son’s nose: it was the musk of old dogs drying beside open fires and the distilled stock of sweat made caustic by age. Over and above the manure from the pony’s paddock, the scent of rain on tarmac and the cold meatiness of upturned earth, the mask’s fragrance proved resilient. Hers had been worn for a long time before she found it; the family had never been sure of its exact age. But the tatty mane of the headpiece had engulfed her pointy shoulders so many times, as it had covered others before her.

  ‘Mother,’ Finn said, sniffing. ‘Quiet now. We’ve made arrangements. This is only a setback.’

  The shaggy skull in the chair twitched. Though muffled, her outburst was strident. ‘“Did you see . . . It’s . . . moving?” That’s what the girl said to me!’

  Her son nodded as if only half-listening to something he’d heard so many times before.

  Without any acknowledgement from him the woman’s voice continued to whine through the ragged muzzle of the shaggy helmet. ‘Who could have known that it would move so much? Or come so close?’

  ‘I know the story, mother.’

  That great black helmet, bison-sized and carrying the face of a devilish ape upon its grimacing front, so ruffled and patchy and bristling, soon dropped forward as if the occupant of the wheelchair had fallen asleep. The toothy mout
h grimaced and its eyeless sockets gazed at the road before the rumbling, rotating wheels.

  Between the tatty jaws, inside the cavernous mouth, an impossibly wrinkled, red face had closed its eyes to remember when she first dropped out of time. The passenger in the chair had truly gone under, not to dream but to sink into a reverie of times long gone, appearing as vividly to her as events occurring the week before.

  Forty years gone, she walked the halls of what was here before her. And had she not done so her life would never have been so long. ‘I’d never have seen this day,’ she muttered. ‘Our last, as shepherds.’

  Her son heard that. ‘Mother. Not true. This is not the end.’

  That girl, so long ago, had been right to think the walls below the ground had moved. A girl in a distant beginning had opened the Creel, but never lived long enough to understand what it was that had overcome her; what it was that she let loose with her terror.

  ‘That was a long time before we knew their nature, son. Finn? Are you with me, my boy?’

  ‘Right behind you, mother. Here.’ The man stretched out an arm and stroked the teeth that protruded from the preserved gums of the headpiece: bumpy and dusty and the colour of tar. ‘The turning. Round your column. It must be done as soon as we get there, mother. We’ve the numbers, just, and the Creel’s right under our feet again.’

  ‘She was pretty. Excitable. A child.’ She’d been nothing more, the first girl, the precursor. Sometimes, Jess even remembered her name, Maddy Gross, who’d played a decorous game too at her man’s ‘soirées’ at the farm. That she remembered bitterly. So eager had been that pretty lamb for the dregs of Tony’s entourage.

  Tony had caught young Maddy’s eye in an inn out Divilmouth way. Men always had a use for a girl like Maddy. ‘Tony. Troubadour.’

  ‘He’s here too, mother. See, ahead of us, with Nanna. We’re all together. We’ll do this together, like always.’

  How he hobbles though. Bent over his stick. An old man who needs a daughter to guide him now. So old but still the twisted, selfish boy that she’d taken for herself in Germany a long, long time ago. ‘They all heard about him here.’ Tony had been the object of such fascination, her man: a fallen star who’d bought the broken-down farm at the crossroads.