The Reddening

by Adam Nevill

  The WPC leaned in closer to him, her voice too low to hear. But whatever she’d said brought a reaction from the second, thinner man in the hood. He moved his head towards the car as the WPC’s voice rose. ‘I’m not going to ask you again to move away from the gate.’

  As the portly, red-faced figure grinned at this rebuke, Helene remembered where she’d seen him before: he’d been bellowing into a microphone at the Redhill village fête.

  She also saw the face of the second man more clearly as he peered at the police car. Trying to see who was inside. Cheeks hollowed out as if sucked in, a broken nose, acne scars: Richey, the rat from the boat. And no matter how indistinct, the very sight of him conjured the ghosts of his bony hands around her ankle as he’d raised her leg to tip her into the sea. She’d scratched his face: he’d be marked.

  Helene sat up straight. The wind about the car seemed to pause. As she cleared her throat to call out to the police officers, a distant female scream tore the taut atmosphere apart: a far-off but urgent cry.

  The police officers cocked their heads at the distant trees. ‘Right!’ the WPC shouted, then dipped her head to the radio at her shoulder.

  From somewhere near the origins of the scream a group of dogs barked a noisy chorus and Helene wished that she was lying in the hospital bed again.

  The two men at the gate broke away and began running in an ungainly fashion down the private road. Their rubber boots flapped noisily. Richey made yards on his portly, intoxicated comrade.

  Helene scrabbled at the car door, her muscles and arms unthawed and slow.

  The male police constable climbed the rungs of the gate first. The metal barrier wobbled, shaking in protest, but once on the other side, he held it steady as his partner ascended the rungs. They were going in.

  Helene’s heartbeat thumped up her windpipe and beat inside her ears. She clambered from the car and shouted, ‘Him! From the boat! Skinny bastard wearing the hood!’

  The police woman looked at Helene and nodded. ‘Stay in the car!’ she called, before angling her mouth to her radio. Her colleague was already gaining on the portly oaf.

  43

  The pyre crackled and snapped. It was only half the size of what had been ignited for Steve. Regardless, like her lover Kat knew she would die here: inside a ruined, reeking barn, tied to a grate encrusted with his blood. She would depart this life from a miserable patch of dirt enshrouded by the stench of animals.

  Shivering upon the dirty cement of her cell for hours after refusing the Willows’ drug, Kat had listened to the preparations for this event in the barn. They finally came for her around noon.

  All morning the dogs had raced in the lane outside her cell. Motorbikes had growled past before roaring away to the valleys where they’d grunted like excitable animals set loose. A commotion had agitated Redstone Farm.

  She’d sensed that something was being collected and removed in great haste. Hydraulics had wheezed as if freight transport had squeezed itself down the rat-run. There had been much clanking of metal and screeching of roller doors. What sounded like a van had repeatedly bumped up and down the tarmac on incessant journeys.

  When Willows had arrived with the skull-cup to offer his anaesthetic, he’d cryptically alluded to ‘exile’: her death the last ‘nourishment’ of the red earth. At least for a while. From this she could only assume that her demise would serve as a last hurrah before the red rats deserted their bunker.

  She assumed the red folk were engaged in a tactical retreat. Perhaps Willows and his band of red murderers had been found out. They’d been on a spree for sure, confirmed by the argument Lewis had chaired that she’d overheard. Maybe they’d killed beyond their ability to conceal their scarlet tracks through these hills and inside their neighbours’ homes. The detective had been furious at their profligacy with the blood of strangers. And when Tony and his daughter had performed for her, and recited their mystical, apocalyptic script, she’d known enough anxiety in her own life to smell it on others.

  Inside the barn, the hooting and the shrieking of the man-apes was less intense than it had been for Steve. The piping came less shrilly from the two red musicians holding lengths of antique bone. Each was elderly: a bony man and a woman not far shy of eighty. They formed a shabby ensemble. Their notes and overtones were tunelessly piped into a space that seemed too airy and bright for what was intended.

  Partnered by the wet, grey weather, a desultory, subdued aspect had dogged these proceedings from the start. Her own spirits had waned to the same hues of the watery, washed-out light that made the world outside the barn so drab. She could see some of the sky through the crack left in the barn doors: it was as murky as a dismal seascape that vanished into mist. Rain had speckled the roofs all day.

  Not nearly as many of the ‘red children’ had gathered for her slaughter. She counted only eight including the pipers. Naked one and all, daubed in scarlet dye, but tucked against the walls like shy pensioners at a dance in a community hall. Their voices were smothered by the roar of the vehicles outside in the lane and barely reached the blackened rafters.

  Perhaps the wrong atmosphere produced such muted effects. Maybe daylight was interfering with the environment requisite for murder. Kat imagined the red was best accessed at night: the traditional time of nightmares, criminal deeds, Sabbats and the sundry unwholesome acts of the depraved. That made sense but brought no comfort, because here she was again where the imminent actions of these people promised to match the very worst incidents in her country’s criminal history.

  Braziers had been lit and they issued a familiar, sickening pungency. Keeping her breathing shallow, Kat plugged her nose with her grimy hooded top and spared a thought, which seemed gigantic inside her skull, for how many others had also lain upon this altar before passing to the red.

  ‘Oh, dear God,’ she occasionally muttered and had little else to offer the grubby air of the barn. This sign of her trauma went unacknowledged.

  She’d thought for a while that she should try and knock herself out. She also feared that her refusal to sup the brown fluid had been premature. But drinking from her boyfriend’s wet skull had stalled any thought of swallowing the filthy medicine. She’d kicked the horrid container across the floor of the cell and watched it skitter, spilling its contents across the legs of Tony’s daughter Nanna. But not before father and daughter had each taken a good draught. And if they’d required medicating before exposure to Creel then she’d need a double dose.

  Victims were drugged here, dismembered, partially consumed, the bulk of their parts cast into darkness. That’s why they’d wanted her stoned, to assist her end. This was no mediaeval practice but an abhorrence culled from much earlier times, before civilisation tempered the bestial urges of her species. ‘Dear, dear God. Dear God,’ she repeated, though she didn’t know why: the last time she’d been in church was for a wedding.

  They would remember her demise, cherish it: that’s what Willows had said, and at the memory of those words Kat stared down and through the grate, seeing only empty darkness. An absence. A steady stream of air that reeked of wet stone and animal rot passed over her face.

  The Black Dog. The White Pups. Her recall of the names made her jaw wobble like a child’s. But the drugs and ceremony, the wretched but carefully wrought atmosphere, might be nothing more than a ruse for when wild dogs flowed over each other down there in the black pit. Fighting dogs. Animals conditioned to consume what was thrown down still warm and wet.

  Perversely, the prospect of real animals was less awful than what she’d imagined rising from the earth during her previous visit. And that was all she could hope for now: that she’d been wrong about something else inhabiting the black space beneath the floor of the barn.

  Oh, Steve.

  The sounds the creatures had made that last time, and the movements of the earth, and the transformation of the old wooden walls into painted stone before her eyes: for these strange and hideous things she had no answers. The sense tha
t she’d been returned to another time, where she’d seen beasts and rough-faced people crudely put to the flint inside a cave: how could she explain that?

  Her shaking worsened.

  Kat sipped the toxic air. She’d pretend she’d succumbed to the fumes when they came to remove her bonds . . . to move you into position, face-down . . .

  She’d fight like before when trapped like an animal in her own home. That would be her only chance. There would be a moment and then . . .

  Suppressing the image of a hand-axe, the blue flint glistening in red light, Kat squeezed her eyes shut.

  All here might change again, soon, transform: the building, the very earth she lay upon destined to alter and welcome what pawed hither, across the moist ground. This notion she could not suppress. It persisted. Now, right here, would soon combine with another time. One place would become the other.

  ‘God!’ As if her cry acted like the bleat of a tethered goat, her distress finally received its acknowledgement from deep below. A thunderous rumble, as if great stones had just ground together, created a tremor across the very surface of the world. A subterranean groan followed by a bustling, or a burrowing through the red earth.

  44

  The woman in the distance issued another scream. It ripped apart the drizzly air. A chilling resonance lingering about the police car Helene stood beside.

  Somewhere deeper inside the farm, farther down that potholed lane, a mind had snapped, its terror insufferable: a distress signal confirming that the police presence was no longer a matter of merely making inquiries.

  Wailing came next, as if from a sparse crowd of agitated lunatics. Coordinated cries rose in unison to form a shrieking chorus, one that repeated in waves. A woodwind instrument piped in and out when the wailers paused for breath. No discernible tune, just random, blurted, reedy notes. Male voices barked. Their contributions too distant for words to be distinguishable but the tone implied anger, or even exultation, structured into a crude rhythm.

  Smoke billowed beyond where the lane turned: a dirty trail of charcoal vapour disappearing into the low grey cloud. But the deep rumble that thrummed the soles of Helene’s feet was the most frightening sign of how the world around her appeared to be altering.

  Perhaps it was only her vision and not the light dimming, but night appeared to be falling prematurely. She peered up at vestiges of watery sunlight leaking through the thin cloud: a veil of ashy vapour oppressed and gradually swallowed by an advancing shelf of black sky, ushered from the sea by a strong, new wind. Rain pattered on her coat and her face. She shivered.

  An earthquake, or its aftershocks, or an earth tremor, registered again in her ankles and knees. She imagined that great gears of rock were churning within the earth. The thud of her pulse drew the blood from her legs. She rested her weight against the patrol car and cowered behind the rear door.

  A motorbike’s roar broke from the distant chaos of human cries: a bike approaching the gate. The engine’s grunt set her teeth on edge, her instincts anticipated violence. Helene’s need to get inside the car and lock the doors competed with an urge to run.

  Behind her, two thin lanes cut the fields and led away from the farm: tarmac crowded by hedgerows that offered no cover. And how far would she get on a B-road with a motorbike in pursuit?

  The path that had first brought her here from the Brickburgh Caves was closer. That track ran into the valley below, the wood beneath the farm topping slopes of pasture. She could hide in the trees until the police were reinforced.

  Helene fled along what her guidebook had called an ‘ancient green track’ connecting the caves to the crossroads.

  Alongside the righthand side of the track, trees and vines marked the wood, underpinning the sly grin of the private road like a tangled beard. At the first possibility of ingress, where the blackberry vines and nettles rose no further than her knees, she stepped off the track. Arms up to protect her face from the whipping branches, she yanked her knees high and clumsily stepped through the spiky undergrowth, cutting inwards, parallel to the lane. Moisture soaked her calves, nettles stung her ankles.

  The roar of the motorbike drew level with her off-road position. At the gate the bike’s engine coughed to idling.

  Helene couldn’t see through the wet tangle of tree branches but heard the rider dismount.

  Stepping a few feet further inside the wood she came upon a boundary fence: three strands of wire strung in line with the gate. And almost sobbed with frustration. If the motorcyclist followed the track and spotted her at the edge of the wood he’d reach her before she could clamber over the wire. Nor was this terrain she could move across in haste. Unmanaged, the thorny vines and deadwood created a perpetual tangle as far as she could see. She’d tear her legs to ribbons.

  Where were the police?

  Up on the lane, the gate jingled and a chain slapped the tarmac. Hinges groaned as the metal barrier swung wide. The motorcycle was remounted, the engine revved. The vehicle roared away.

  Helene exhaled, sagging with relief, then attempted to climb the fence in case anyone else came down the lane.

  It was not easy to get over; the wires dug into the palms of her hands. Supporting her weight, the length of wire shook, wobbled and seemed determined to pitch her over into the waiting nettles. By clinging to the nearest wooden post she eventually managed to get over, falling more than climbing.

  As she squatted in the nettles and brambles on the other side, perspiration prickled icily across her scalp.

  The motorcyclist had been in a hurry: his bike now subsided from full throttle to a whine in the damp distance. He must be making a run for it. With the arrival of the police, that made sense.

  Helene looked deeper inside the wood ahead of her, to where the bracken eventually thinned about a haphazard arrangement of trees.

  She strode between the thick, thorny stems to better conceal herself. She’d crouch and hide here. More police would be arriving in support. She’d seen the WPC use her radio before giving chase to Richey and the purple-faced clown.

  But that scream: ripped from a throat while others, inexplicably, were playing musical instruments and singing? What in hell was happening here?

  Muffled by the trees and thick undergrowth, the piping and the wailing continued in the distance and Helene couldn’t quell a suspicion that she’d arrived as an event ensued at the dreadful farm. Even the wood maintained a peculiar, unnerving stillness as if it had paused in its wild business to observe her ungainly entrance.

  From the very start the area encompassing Brickburgh and Redstone had struck her as peculiar: enchanting, weird, sinister, hostile. In this environment she couldn’t have expected to be more than a city girl out of her depth. But her deepest instincts conveyed to her that this place was just not right in a more fundamental way. Its strangeness was about more than psychotics painted red and murderers on a boat.

  She waited, biting her lip, her eyes those of a hunted animal. About her the canopy dripped water. Mulchy and damp and dank: an atmosphere failing to offer reassurance to those desiring concealment. It was hard to imagine this ground ever being dry. From the fields of the valley drifted the aroma of animal dung and, with the new ceiling of storm cloud, dusk had surely arrived at midday. Beneath the treetops the light thinned further. She needed a torch and fought a childish panic that the land was cursed in ways she’d never understand.

  Legs buried to the knee in nettles and dead wood, she passed deeper, from one lichen-slippery tree to another, to better hide herself, then ducked at the approaching roar of a second motorbike on the private road.

  This bike didn’t stop and only slowed to pass through the open gate before turning west like its predecessor. She saw nothing of the bike or rider save flashes of yellow between the boughs and verdure. But they weren’t looking for her.

  More vehicles followed the bikes. One, two, three cars passed through the gate, including a four-wheel-drive. A white Luton van shuddered out soon after. The police had
routed something. There’d been too many people down there for the law to control or subdue: a significant number of people must now be fleeing arrest.

  When the noise of the straining engines dimmed, other sounds filled the empty grey atmosphere above the farm. A muffled male voice ranted in a sequence of gruff sounds: a sentence of sorts that was rhythmic like a chant. A woman wailed as if engaged in a Middle Eastern lament. Dogs maintained a perpetual barrage of angry barking.

  Two police officers were down there so why weren’t they stopping this?

  They’d be outnumbered.

  Helene imagined the neat, trim, young constables being overwhelmed. Though by what?

  Still weak from her ordeal in the sea and only declared fit enough to sit in a heated car while continually hydrating her body, she could do little to assist them. Her role had been to identify a place while fingering anyone she’d suspected of involvement in her abduction and attempted murder. She’d done that. Even if her core temperature had stabilised that morning there was no fight in her.

  She listened to the rain on the leaves and the harsh sound of her own breathing against the hood of the coat. What to do?

  A compulsion to know why she’d been thrown into the sea and why her little brother had been murdered competed with caution.

  She needn’t risk exposure by getting too close to the shouting and the smoke. If she watched what was happening while concealed by the wood she might at least act as a witness. The police officers had tried to help her. They’d also run to help the woman who’d screamed: they’d risked their own safety without a second thought. She had to do something. Helene moved on through the trees.

  Another thirty metres through the tangle and she saw the top of the grimy, sprawling farmhouse, near where she’d been stopped by the scruffy poshos and their dogs.

  Creeping closer to the lane she established there was no one out in front of the building and no dogs. The commotion was occurring much deeper along the private road, somewhere out of sight, perhaps at the epicentre of whatever continued to rumble beneath her feet.