The Reddening

by Adam Nevill

  Soon she found herself struggling to see much further than a few metres in any direction, and feared the sun risked being totally obscured. She looked up, remembering the eclipse of 1999 that she’d seen on holiday: the vast sweep of cold air that had hushed the earth around her in Cornwall. Momentarily epochal, that quickening of night. The eclipse in Falmouth had pierced her with a pang of cosmic terror and she’d been left breathless. Lincoln had been entranced by the spectacle: a minute of darkness during the day.

  But unlike her experience in Falmouth, within Redstone’s sudden and unnatural darkness Helene now heard the sounds of Lincoln’s final recording.

  Inhuman shrieks. And much louder this time: a distant yapping that was almost a voice before it laughed horribly. Never quite human yet garbling a message that made her visualise wild apes. The volume of the horrid chatter obliterated the human cries and the pipes as if all before the exotic shrieks had been muted in shock.

  There were several of these animals down there. And such cries could only be uttered by beasts of considerable size: powerful forms with a tremendous lung capacity. Perhaps a breed of giant cat that they kept on the farm?

  Or maybe she was hearing an ape after all, a great ape, and its cries were suffering from acoustic distortion and amplification in the valley below. Helene hoped so.

  The rapid laughter beyond the wood degenerated into a sustained growling, wrung deep from a throat wet with mucus.

  Helene’s shaky confidence withered. Instinct or imagination again connected the cries to giant savage cats: she effortlessly pictured them rolling across the ground engaged in desperate combat. The alteration from the unpleasant yapping and demoniac giggling to the roar had been so sudden.

  Amidst the signs of bestial outrage human screams rent the air.

  Horses too? Surely those were horses that now shrieked amid the rout of people? The sudden equine cries split the air not far ahead of her, piercing the gaps between the trees.

  A hound yelped itself into an unnerving silence. Then another squealed horribly and fell quiet.

  Helene crouched deeper within the sopping undergrowth, the ferns and dead wood.

  A malefic snarling spiked her ears. An idea of muscular jaws worrying and shaking prey set her teeth on edge and she finally clapped her hands to her ears. Had she been on a safari in Africa or beside a zoo, she’d have been better able to accept the presence of such ferocity. Even then, what kind of animal could it be and what kind of zoo was equipped to contain such savagery? But she was certain that something bestially dangerous was now running amok on the farm.

  The earth beneath her feet grumbled in the grip of an aftershock.

  Distant but rapid bangs against wood followed the monstrous shrieks of rage. The irregular, sickening thuds made her think of bodies flung against walls. A few human screams managed a final, desperate crescendo, one voice so full of terror that Helene stuffed her index fingers inside her ears. She’d never heard anything as awful as that cry.

  In wet air astir with such violence the only noise that offered a shred of reassurance was the distant police siren emerging from the north. She couldn’t judge its distance, but as if cowed by the distant wail of the siren, the desperate struggle on the farm muted.

  The maelstrom of screams could not have lasted for more than seconds, though to her those hateful moments had seemed to elongate time, to trap her in a turmoil that, had it continued for longer, would have sent her mad. And whatever had just occurred seemed far worse for this abrupt, unnatural subduing.

  Obscured by the trees ahead, a man’s voice soon called out in torment to break the temporary silence.

  A second male voice chattered continuously, the words undecipherable yet incongruously calm. Perhaps he was asking questions that no one would answer. The animal cries had ceased. Thank God.

  Beneath the ground the rumbling had also concluded, though her senses had been so paralysed by the awful animal sounds that she’d not noticed when the tremors had stopped.

  A woman now wept as if in desolate answer to the groaning man imprisoned within a tremendous suffering. The second male voice still talked incessantly but drifted away.

  No dogs, no horses and no vehicles could be heard at all. This new absence of all save a few sounds of human distress, and the rain against the leaves of the bent and tangled trees, created an eerie vacuum. It settled amidst the wet wood like the uncanny silence over a well-used battlefield.

  Helene’s fatigue equalled what she’d felt lying in the hospital bed. But at least the air beyond the wood was perceptibly lightening and filtering back to the watery grey of only moments before. The fall of rain was now more refreshing than confining.

  She crept on through the undergrowth as noiselessly as possible, certain that she was approaching an aftermath.

  Her hunch was confirmed when she reached the paddock.

  45

  Four weary figures hobbled along the tunnel, their descent enclosed by wet walls. They scurried further, deeper, away to where lights were embedded in the rocks in a widened passage. From darkness they came back to the light. From siege to freedom.

  Bare feet scuffled the rock. The old man’s tortured wheezing competed with the sibilant whispers passing between the mother and her son; he now carried his mother within his sinewy arms, her wheelchair left far behind.

  ‘My boy. We shouldn’t go on. Take me home, Finn. Take me back home.’

  Finn sniffed and swore under his breath. He’d been crying over the loss of his dogs and for the abandonment of the precious crop he’d raised from the rocks like John Barleycorn. ‘Police. They’re at our place. They must have seen it. I doubt it was pretty. The old Creel was wide open. We’re for sanctuary, mother. There’s nowhere else for us now.’

  ‘Sanctuary? I don’t trust him. Adrian’s no true neighbour.’

  ‘He owes us. The arrangements stand. They were made for this day.’

  ‘Am I heavy, son?’

  ‘We’ll be out of here soon. We’ve a car, waiting. We’re safe. I promise.’

  ‘“They moved.” You know, the girl said that to me, son, when I was this far down the first time. Maddy. That was her name. Maddy Gross. Have I ever told you that? Finn?’

  That was the last time Jess had been so frail and frightened down here, but not as frightened as Maddy. Her torch’s light had revealed the face of the girl in the red boots whom she’d lured into the quarry. And by torchlight Jess had seen the child the girl had once been and the child she’d remained. She’d been so young.

  The girl, Maddy, had seen the movement in that chamber too, on the walls.

  It was all so long ago now but Jess remembered being tired and hungover. Her mind had not been as it should have been. She’d been taking things, smoking them, for a long time. They all had at the farm. She’d been open to the suggestions of the darkness. But, without a doubt, she’d seen something similar to the movement of bodies beneath a blanket at the corner of her eye, where the torch’s light had thinned across the painted walls of the cave. A disturbance, a shudder.

  ‘Can we go back?’ the girl had asked, eyeing the torch.

  Yet, despite the unnatural motion inside the chamber and how it had frightened young Maddy, Jess had continued to hate that pretty face beside her. How fresh the wound of betrayal had been. A cut reopened by a memory of the girl’s flushed face when she’d stumbled back to the fire they’d had in one of the fields, after Tony had had his way with her, up at the house.

  So like some foolish, jealous peasant girl in one of Tony’s old songs, Jess’s hatred had flared, the old green burn. She’d already entered the red. She’d just not known it at the time. The red made her see things differently.

  The animals on the wall had moved again. The girl hadn’t lied. Jess’s own eyes hadn’t deceived her either. A ripple creased the striped flanks of the painted herd. Their heads rose and fell. The movement was natural. Their white eyes rolled; they were alive.

  Yet when Jess looked ag
ain at where she’d seen the movement, the figures all became stationary, as if she’d merely seen apparitions of charcoal sliding over the stone.

  The girl had screamed.

  The air had smelled of iced turf.

  Then they were cold, became colder, were shivering.

  From where had those piped notes arisen? From deep in the tunnels beyond the chamber, or from behind the walls? Had their presence coaxed out the fine notes? And how, down there, had so many come to move about them in the darkness? Maybe the girl’s screams had woken the earth and the restless ground was no longer asleep. What was not seen was sensed, parting the black air, their faces buffeted by curious wakes and slipstreams, a slow breath moving their hair. They might have been standing at the edge of an underground platform anticipating the roar and rush of an approaching train.

  Where had the walls gone, upon which the lurching herd had been etched? The torch’s light had failed to find them. The walls had disappeared or been removed like stage sets. Same above their heads: the space had become big enough to know no boundary.

  That was the first time Jess had seen in the dark and the first time she’d seen what had panicked the herd into flight.

  In the cold darkness, strong, dirty teeth had chattered close to her face.

  The laughter of dogs had broken above her head.

  The herd of animals that could not have been there had jostled and then broken into a rout.

  The feeble glow of her torch had flicked across an upright devil. The first one. The trembling beam unveiling it from out of the dark and for no more than a moment. But there had been an indistinct face. A white muzzle. Most horrible. Wet. Snouted. And dear God, the eyes. Pink like a rat’s. A pale breast matted red. Big and white it was, up on two feet and drenched down the front from what it had been eating. It had made Maddy scream. She’d seen it too.

  The torchlight had shrunk from the form as if of its own volition and the beam had crossed the great eye to reveal a second stained muzzle, atop another long, white, furred thing with a distended belly that also moved about on two legs. And yet its body was fashioned for walking on four. They’d been on the walls of that cave, those albino terrors, but weren’t any longer. It was as if they’d climbed down.

  Insensible, a hysterical child, Maddy had stumbled, fallen. And Tony’s young mistress had cast about for a way out on her hands and knees. Poor Maddy never stood up again.

  And so briefly, yet so clearly, through that pall of darkness had slowly grown a great white sky, spread so wide above the frozen ground they had smelled at their feet. A tundra. So little grew: the earth had iced to stone and had rumbled from the hooves of a stampede.

  They were no longer inside the cave? Or was that new place purely inside Jess’s mind? All that was painted upon the rocks was animate, alive. And that raw eye, painted upon the stone wall, was far too moist.

  The first time.

  The babble. The terrible babble that had approached from a crevice that Jess had seen on the far side of the cavern before everything changed. Out of that wet, black slit had burst the sniggering, the baying, the awful whining. It had echoed through her mind ever after.

  The girl, Maddy, had taken to whimpering.

  The origin of the new shrieks was not visible, but a doggish snout was easily imagined, like those of the two white bitches with fearsome eyes that had tottered past on their hind legs. Yet, in comparison to the sounds that had barked from the crevice, the white things must have been the young. Because another, much larger presence had arrived in the cave.

  An apprehension of its presence alone had further panicked those animals upon the walls. And all around Jess had raged the bellows and the frantic kicking of hooves as the herd ran blind.

  What on the earth could have produced that stench? Her mind had been consumed by the most powerful presence, many carcasses strewn in its wake.

  Heavy unseen forms were slammed against the frozen ground as the cave’s purpose opened, though not wholly. The paintings were mere impressions of where the herds had once been stampeded: into a pit where they were splintered like timber. A vision from the dark.

  Maddy in the red boots finally fell silent. That had been worse than her hysteria.

  Something hunted there, in that cave, always. The paintings on the wall were only understood by the terrified when inside such a darkness. Up and down, north and south, what was far and what was near, made no sense when your mind became a spark dropping into cold space. Jess learned this the hard way. And only at the brink of a mind being extinguished, when so deep, was such vision granted without light.

  Jess had run. She left the girl behind: the mewling girl on her hands and knees, wearing red boots and a jacket that hadn’t belonged to her.

  Jess had fled among the red people. Those who’d appeared around her and who scrambled away after they'd driven the herd into the killing cave. A hungry fury was gibbered in the dark as the red folk ran wild. And down a tunnel she’d stumbled with them, panting, maybe back the way she’d come, her ears filled with the piping and the screams. The coughs of bullocks. Dying cattle.

  The red people had worn masks. They’d grunted through headpieces made of bristles and sticks and hair. Inside the eye sockets their white eyes had bulged. The red-limbed folk had stunk, all fouled by the corrupted flesh from the tatty remains in the pit of bones, the place where they offered succour to the terrible laughing dogs. But Jess had run with the red folk and run red with their rage, their eternal rage. She’d reddened and run past nightmares mapped upon the walls. She’d run with the past, she’d run into the future.

  The torch was long gone, knocked from her hand, but it wasn’t needed when a moon’s silver light gave the land below new form and showed faces not seen by day. She ran from there and back to here, crossing a border, a boundary beneath the ground.

  Eventually, a late sun, coin-sized at the mouth of a tunnel, had led her to the surface and returned her to where the ivy cascaded over the scraped walls of the quarry; where buddleia splashed the greenery purple with heavy flowers nodding. And there she had lain until the sun had sunk and the world above the ground was as dark as it was below.

  She’d returned to the farm and Tony had wanted to know where the girl was. Her man’s first thought had been of Maddy, his peasant mistress: the girl whom Jess had left under the ground with the great frighted herds that had been run by the red folk unto their gods in the pit of bones. Jess had understood this instinctively. The red folk had formed a circle beyond the herd to guide it inwards, before fleeing, lest they too became quarry.

  She’d fled with the red people from a place where all had shown the silver moon their devil faces.

  The girl, Maddy, was back with the upright white bitches. She would still have been amongst their busy, wet muzzles and below the sharp pink teats of their pregnant bellies: those pale hounds that had walked upright like men whose words had opened Jess’s eyes so wide that she’d seen in the dark and so far back in time. And their jabber had opened the ground wider to summon another too. She’d not seen that one, but had heard it; though poor Maddy may have laid her pretty eyes upon what had come out of the crevice.

  At the farm, Jess had told them all of this.

  There was an argument about the drugs, about the gear being bad. The manager and photographer had gone into the ground with torches, where she’d been, and they’d returned with no blood in their cheeks. The manager had been sick all down his bottle-green gabardine trousers.

  ‘I told you. I told you,’ she’d cried at them. ‘Isn’t it incredible?’ But all they’d found was a dead girl, Maddy, who’d crawled a long way in terror until her young heart had stopped beating. God knows what had crawled alongside her because the look on her face had made the photographer sit down, unable to speak for the rest of the evening.

  Dead and stiff, Maddy Gross had been cold in a way none could account for, her final thoughts clearly crippled by what she’d seen: that had been frozen onto her face like a
mask. Her eyes had been filled with it. All the guests, save Ade, left the farm. Ade had loved Jess.

  Tony had then gone below with Ade, whom he thought he could trust and who’d played in the band longer than anyone, and they’d brought the dead girl above ground in a wheelbarrow that Ade had fetched from the old barn. And like a couple of schoolboys suspected of stealing, they’d dumped the evidence at the edge of the farm and then stayed up all night muttering and drinking to get their stories straight for when the time came.

  Later that summer, Jess found the masks.

  46

  Trees sheltering Helene’s hesitant progress through the wood ended at a wooden fence, the railings encompassing muddy ground before a black barn with no doors.

  Inside the paddock’s rectangle of churned red soil three farm animals lay on their sides. All were motionless save a weary flick of a single black tail.

  An equine head then reared, the eye of the animal wild with agony. The creature’s ears were flat, its mane matted with soil. Ponies.

  Three black ponies. Two full-size, one smaller, maybe a foal. Two of them were dead while the third had little life remaining. From what she could see from behind the fence, Helene doubted that any animal would survive the injuries inflicted upon the tortured statements of their bodies.

  From the still moving pony, purple and ruddy coils, rubbery and moist, spilled from a once rotund belly and steamed in the mud beside what looked like a fleshy bag the colour of an aubergine. Part of the second adult pony’s throat was missing. A red sash of soft tissue gaped where the underside of its neck should have been.

  Her legs threatened to give way. Helene slumped against the top rail of the fence. Whatever had done this might be nearby. She thought of the police car outside the gates and suddenly craved being locked inside it. Though was a windscreen sufficient defence against what had slaughtered these animals so rapidly? Their terrible wounds suggested a killer wielding a power as swift as it was tremendous: and what size of mouth could remove so much of a pony’s throat?