The Reddening

by Adam Nevill

  ‘But beneath the ground, my son . . .’ Maddy’s beauty had been of no consequence down there, only her helplessness proved useful. ‘Much more than our own past. Something much greater we’ve seen.’

  ‘And much more we will see, mother. Together. Not right here. This is over. But we’ll survive. Like the red. Always.’

  ‘“How far are you prepared to go?”’ I asked the girl that. What was her name?’

  The sky had been glowering to dusk that day too, forty years gone, but the girl called Maddy Gross had still followed Jess below the ground through the old door in the quarry. She’d worn red boots with Cuban heels and a special coat she’d found in the house. A suede jacket belonging to her, Tony’s woman, Jess: the woman Maddy had betrayed in her own home.

  Jess had picked out that jacket in Copenhagen when she was with Tull. It was purple, patterned with rhinestones. But back then, beneath the ground, Jess had been unsure how to confront the girl. Maddy, her rival, had made deep inroads, had become dear to Tony, so Jess had only wanted to intimidate Maddy in a place that was dark. Yes, in the dark. But that was all: she’d only wanted to frighten her. ‘The matter was taken out of my hands, my son. The red came. It filled the air.’

  ‘Aye, mother. And we can’t keep it waiting now. It’s on our doorstep.’

  On that day, forty years gone, her old bones were not wheeled down a rutted lane in a hideous chair like a babe. Her son hadn’t even been conceived. ‘That sweet girl and I had stepped like nymphs through the meadow to the quarry. Our hair was so long, so black, son.’ By that afternoon, forty years gone, no one at the farm had slept for three days. Coming inside to escape the rain, they’d all crashed on the floors and couches. Nothing unusual about that but the others were asleep when it happened, or wrecked when the girl with red boots was lost below the ground.

  Someone from the record label had brought coke that weekend. His true purpose to inquire about a new album. Terry, a photographer, had come down from Kensington too, with a shoulder bag stuffed with marijuana. Sometimes Jess remembered them, the old crowd. ‘Brian was your father’s manager back then, son. He abandoned his Rolls-Royce in a lane. It was miles from the farm. It was stuck. He came on foot with a bottle of wine in each hand. Over one finger he had a carrier bag, from Harrods. It was full of pills. His car was there for a week until a real farmer towed it here.’

  ‘Yes, mother.’

  ‘Under the ground, I held the torch. Poor Maddy didn’t have one.’ And it was Jess’s light that found the paintings. They were inside the cave. So horrid were the designs, yet fluent and so elegantly wrought upon the stone. Jess had never forgotten them. An ancient work. Hellishly beauteous. ‘A map, a tapestry, a history. I only understood that later.’

  ‘And how beautiful are your readings of it, mother.’

  A work both abstract and figurative. Art that used the contours nature had fashioned into rock over millennia. How one texture augmented another had astonished her. How one thing became another when it was illumined . . . Was that not the nature of this land she’d come to know so intimately, transformation? ‘It watched us, son. It still makes me breathless.’

  A curving hollow of stone, coloured by hand, had formed a great bestial eye, to gaze upon the occupants of the chamber for ever. An eye drawn so artfully in pigments of ochre, powdered bone and charcoal. But for how long had that eye been open? She hadn’t been able to guess. But after they’d stumbled from the chute and into the vault the eye had observed Jess and Maddy, closely.

  The first great chamber, but never destined to be the last that Jess would find.

  A much older version of that young woman now laughed gaily in its wheelchair. ‘That girl . . . Maddy Gross stopped giggling then, I can tell you!’

  ‘I bet she did. We’ve watched the faces of a few cuckoos straighten here, have we not, mother?’

  The change in the register of Maddy’s voice had been so abrupt. The purest darkness was the killer of levity. The sudden freeze had chilled their spirits rigid. Foes and rivals the women were, but how they had clung to each other upon entry, she and Maddy, and before paintings so dreadful that they were instantly sobered from their weariness and intoxication. A hangover that had lasted for days. There’d been such a party at the farm, the origins murky, its conclusion indefinite.

  ‘Your father wasn’t easy to live with, son . . . I’d been below before. To get away from your father. I’d gone inside. A crevice. But never so deep.’ Much further down that time, much further with the cuckoo, Maddy, who’d been wearing red boots and Jess’s precious coat: the pretty oaf that her man had pawed. Maddy. ‘She was not blameless!’

  Finn sneered. ‘None of them are, mother.’

  Maybe Tony was rich. The girl had surely had that on her mind. Inquiring but dull, a tiny mind. Though how could anyone have known there was no money left? The farm had been worthless. ‘I’d only wanted to frighten her . . .’

  Maybe back then, when she and Tony took it on, the dilapidation of the farm had been charming. For a while: those sombre ruins and the antiquity of the tools the real owners had abandoned. Tools that spoke of an austere, methodical use of the land lasting for generations.

  The former tenants, a local family, had worked that earth and survived and watched the quarries open and close, their own fortunes rising and falling hard, their ranks withering to those two thin men who had sold the ruins to Tony.

  The farmers: an elderly man and his son. The mother of the family had been in the ground five years. The son had no wife. Everything ended for that family in those two exhausted, heartbroken men of few words. And they let a hippy, wearing white cowboy boots, buy their home at a good price. That’s what happened when you gave up the Creel for the cross.

  But how the ghosts of those farmers had continued to make idiotic the bearded figures who’d been drawn to Tony from London, all of them in their unsuitable footwear, stumbling about the muddy pastures and churned yards.

  ‘This. It was your father’s idea.’ Tony’s dream to live on a farm. Escaping the system, the suits, managers, accountants, taxmen, the serpents, usurpers, backstabbers, users, the false prophets, the manipulative, the hangers-on . . . away from them all, and Jess too. But she’d never let Tony go. He’d once promised her children, away from the transience, the fatigue and sleeplessness of a minstrel’s existence upon the road.

  She’d wanted to free Tony from himself most of all, those tendencies for bedlam that flourished inside his delicate, boyish head. ‘I wanted a home and children . . . we were going to adopt.’

  ‘The red provided,’ Finn said. ‘It always has done.’

  To be a young family on an old farm so far from the distractions that were destroying her man: that had been their dream. Together they were going to be children again, she and Tony, at the dawn of time, before history, before ‘the man’.

  After his stay in the hospital in Surrey, she’d kept Tony secluded and fostered his desire to sow and reap, to take food from the ground, to grow smoke, distil cider, to rise with the sun and sleep at sundown.

  ‘I’d started to believe it was possible. Your father had seen others do it, buy farms in Essex. He’d envied them. But he couldn’t change. He was incapable.’ Just like their son, Finn, who’d sowed the new crop and made them so wealthy. But all Finn’s father had longed for was a lazy kingship. From afar on tour and in London he’d wished for a smaller fiefdom, surrounded by admiring subjects. One simpler, easier to govern, his plot in Devon a Garden of Eden: no tourists and only a few local farms clinging to the red earth.

  But what strange music would he find in a part of the world so left behind and stuck between the wars? The Sixties had passed by Brickburgh and Redhill. They promised perfect isolation, but for Tony it was only ever going to be morbid and depressing. The silence in the valleys, the power of the sea beyond the cliffs, had soon swallowed them and made their days boom with loneliness.

  How he’d drunk again and picked up his old crutches that
he rolled into cigarette papers: as trapped inside his own labyrinth as he’d been before. He’d never asked for desolation, never obscurity. He couldn’t coexist with the highs or function without them and so the darkness had reclaimed him. His light dimming month by slow month, he’d performed pastiches of who he’d been. ‘Moving here was the worst thing for your father.’ His instruments had gathered dust. Ghosts of his enemies had consumed him. He took to remonstrating with them in loud whispers. He was sick and yellow. Only the prospect of a party and a girl half his age roused him. Until that day.

  ‘The red land was not for repose, my dear Finn. It had to be worked.’ Was not for owning either but it allowed stewards, for a time. ‘We’ve had our time.’

  ‘It’s been worked red, mother, our most precious wife.’

  And below the red earth that afternoon, when so far from the weak and watery sun, most fearful was Jess’s recognition that so little had altered down there. All that was below the ground had remained unchanged for more years than she could imagine stacked together. How long had those paintings been on the wall and who were the artists? She asked this, but who was there to answer her? That worn old man and his quiet son with the yellow eyes had said nothing when they sold the farm to Tony. Only due diligence had revealed the existence of the disused quarries and the overgrown, unstable ground that was once used to extract iron oxide for paint. The tunnels she’d found had never been mined. They’d formed naturally and been kept clear. Their old doors had been smothered by ivy or packed with earth. But they were still open.

  And surely those pictures upon the walls were important, valuable? And without the music from where would their future prosperity come? Farming? All this had turned in her mind. But in that chamber, without even knowing it, she was granted her three wishes. ‘The future was decided, my bright boy. Right here.’ As it was, as it has been, as it will be for others. Always. ‘We were claimed by the red earth.’

  Under this bloody soil she’d seen it. The evidence of the former tenants was revealed. Ancient occupants who’d left their own mark upon the earth as her family had done in their time. The etchings suggested ideas she’d never entertained before.

  Others had come later, after the original artists, and settled and felled the trees in the valleys and left them bare and ploughed the earth into furrows. In time, she saw it all. Livestock trampled and clomped the hills shorn and barren. Gouges wounded the land for the extraction of minerals. Battered and scarred: the place, its people. They'd all inflicted damage and became damaged upon the soil that clotted like blood. But once it had all been wild. Like her man and all who came to be with him. And here, beyond the red crossroads, was a place that had always longed to be wild again. She’d known at once.

  Jess remembered keenly how she’d felt before those paintings. She’d felt like a mere grain, occupying a place of mystery and wonder for less than a moment of time.

  ‘He put me underground, your father, with that idiotic girl. It was his doing. What was her name?’ His mistress? Maddy. That was her name and Jess had taken the silly girl deep. ‘I even held her hand as my own daughter holds his hand now. It was so pale, Finn.’

  Final journeys. That had been the last path the girl in red boots had ever walked. And this was the last one for her own family. ‘My children.’

  ‘Don’t cry, mother. Don’t upset yourself. Hush now. Hush. We’re here. Now turn the red, mother. Turn the children about you now, beloved. You are our column.’

  That first summer. There had never been another like it.

  42

  Out at sea the sky darkened and the wind buffeted from the east, skimming the distant water and carrying cold, watery pins in its gusts.

  The patrol car had stopped at the top of the valley where the land re-formed itself into an unpleasant familiarity. Through the windscreen, Helene recognised the holed tarmac and overgrown borders and bitterly recalled her relief at finding the crossroads that first time. Breathless and ragged from the steep ascent up the valley, it was here that she’d come upon Lincoln’s last clue, scribbled on the side of a compact disc.

  The steel gate blocking the lane had been open and concealed by the overhanging trees. Now it was closed. To reinforce the boundary, two idling men leaned against the metal rungs of the gate as if in expectation of unwanted visitors.

  The guardians at the gate wore green Wellington boots and waterproofs in preparation for the rain now pattering on the car’s roof. The hoods of their raincoats were raised and they wore hats beneath. Fleeces were zipped up and pulled over lowered chins, obscuring their faces.

  Beyond the gate unruly grass and weeds tangled with the hedge and trees, forming the impression of a narrowing chute burrowing into the farm. Merely peering down the lane awoke the dogs in Helene’s memory; they leaped and crushed her into the hedgerow. Kent.

  The two police officers alighted from the vehicle and a discussion began at the gate. Helene cracked the rear window but was unable to overhear what was said.

  She was stowed safely inside a police car but that failed to allay the bustle of anxiety that shortened her breath. As soon as they’d arrived she’d wanted to get out of the car and walk away. Here wasn’t safe for her. Lincoln never recorded anything again after placing his microphones here. They’d put him into the red.

  She’d allowed herself to be talked into returning. The police didn’t believe her story.

  Only one of the men at the gate spoke with the officers, his slouch transmitting an air of irreverence in the presence of authority. Inappropriate and no doubt tiresome to the police. The male officer’s arms were folded, tightly.

  The WPC did the talking from their side of the barrier, expressing herself with hands that never stopped moving: two white flickers in a grey world, hurriedly working the air. This was a murder investigation or would be soon.

  The second figure’s hood was tight around his head. He looked at the ground. Hands in pockets.

  Helene’s eyes probed that oval head bound in Gortex. She couldn’t make out the face inside but the spiky proportions of the man’s thin body seemed familiar. The prick on the boat who’d knelt on her shoulders? She needed the police officers to make him show his face.

  The male police officer returned to the vehicle and climbed in. He smiled reassuringly. ‘Right pair here,’ he said, then spoke into the radio on his shoulder.

  A crackle of static and a voice electrified the air. Helene marvelled how anyone using two-way radios understood anything transmitted between them. But the police officer made a brief report to the radio operator and mentioned ‘obstruction’.

  ‘Bit early to be off their heads,’ he also confided. Perhaps he wanted the operator and Helene to find the situation and these men amusing. ‘But I’m not smelling drink on their breath. And they’re not for letting us in.’

  Another connection stirred her back brain. Drugs. That’s what the police officer was referring to. It triggered thoughts of Lincoln. Substances had handicapped his development through his teens, his early twenties too. And where there were drugs criminal elements and tendencies abounded.

  The officer finished his call with ‘We’re going to take a look around inside.’

  He turned to Helene as the radio operator’s voice buzzed meaninglessly. ‘We’re going to make this pair of likely lads understand that we’re pursuing some serious allegations.’ The young officer was confident and that worried her.

  ‘I don’t like it,’ she said. ‘The skinny one, I don’t know . . . he looks familiar. I can’t see his face. Make him show it. Then maybe we should go? You can come back without me. I’m feeling very uncomfortable.’

  ‘Sure. In a minute. But we need to do a recce first and we need to speak to the landowner, this old rock star, about what he’s got on his land. See if this quarry is near and if he saw your brother. We’ve got your description of the couple with the dog as well but we can’t take the car any further. They’re claiming they haven’t got the key for the padlock.�
� The officer rolled his eyes. ‘So we’re going to hop over, find old Tony Willows and where this quarry is and come right back. They’re hiding something. See it a mile off. We’ll be quick.’ Before she could raise any further objections, the officer alighted from the car with an athlete’s grace.

  When she’d traced her route on the pad for the police officers, one of the plainclothes detectives had said that an old musician owned the farm by the crossroads. ‘An old hippy. Harmless but nutty.’ Helene and the uniformed officers had never heard of him. Tony Willows was his name. Helene thought that was what the detective had said. Willows, like a tree.

  Now they were going to leave her inside the car and enter the farm: a notion that made her feel terribly exposed, just like she had been in the water the night before.

  Helene shivered inside the coat loaned to her at the hospital. The sea’s chill was far from thawing from her marrow but she wound the window all the way down to try and hear the discussion.

  In the distance a motorbike spluttered, its echo adrift in the valley. As it died away, a faint sound of what might have been a whistle was issued. Several long notes followed.

  No, it wasn’t a whistle but piping. Yes, pipes. She could hear pipes, soon accompanied by a murmur of raised voices as if a choir was warming up or a small crowd jeering. The sounds reminded her a little of Lincoln’s recordings.

  At the gate, between the officers’ heads, she gained better sight of the other men’s faces. They’d raised their chins, alert to the pipes. The overweight man had a boozer’s ruddy complexion. Helene had also seen him before, though where she couldn’t yet grasp. She heard him say, ‘As I told you, no key, like. And you still ain’t give us no reason why you want to come in.’