The Reddening

by Adam Nevill

  Helene peered into the dilapidated wooden barn behind the paddock. Nothing moved inside the dim interior but she could make out the lifeless shapes of at least three dogs. They appeared to have been squashed or pressed into the soil. Kent?

  Dangerous animals had slaughtered the ponies and dogs: the very things she’d heard in the distance cackling and growling and yapping so horridly while engaged in this dreadful butchery. And there had been people at this despicable farm. So where were they? Where were the two police officers who’d accompanied her here?

  A second police vehicle, an estate car, screamed down the lane towards the paddock, its blue light casting an icy swirl over the treeline.

  Helene moved up to the lane, both hands gripping the fence’s top rail to support her bloodless legs. As she handed herself along the top rung, her spine tensed at the prospect of a terrible form rushing out of the barn’s gloom. None came, but only then did she realise that the third and smallest pony was missing its head. That she spotted near the body: a black, shaggy lump, red at the breach where it had been sundered from the neck, the black muzzle grinning at the moment of destruction.

  The police car passed as Helene arrived at the verge of the lane. The presence of more police officers was reassuring, and the part of her mind that still functioned beyond shock compelled her to seek out the two constables who’d brought her here. They could explain her presence to their colleagues. But more than anything she found herself desperate to know that they were safe: they’d been so young. They’d rushed into this dreadful place to apprehend her tormentors. Though, given the state of the ponies and dogs, she did wonder how they could be safe.

  Beyond the ponies’ paddock the police car’s siren pipped and fell silent. Car doors slammed, one following another. Neither officer who climbed from the vehicle spoke until one of them muttered ‘Jesus.’ A name carrying more weight when uttered in such despair.

  Somewhere beyond what was visible to Helene, the groaning of the injured man finally concluded. But the man talking kept up his strange, interrogatory monologue and the solitary woman continued to weep. There were survivors. At least two. The police must have found them.

  In the wake of the patrol car, Helene inched closer to these sounds of human distress. Further inside the farm, if she could stand to look, she’d get a better idea of what had just happened. For Lincoln, for the painfully obscure reasons why three men had tried to drown her at sea, for why the landlady of a guesthouse had painted her naked flesh red and shrieked like a chimpanzee, she had to see, to understand, to know. The need was now maddening.

  From her vantage point in the middle of the private road the roofs of several other buildings emerged from tree cover: uneven rows of grey slate scales topping a row of ramshackle structures. During her first visit she’d seen them in the distance. Men had wandered out of them and idled in the road.

  Maybe there had been a detonation of some kind because the agricultural buildings were damaged. Smoke drifted from out of the largest, a stained, rickety barn.

  Silently, Helene walked past the stationary, empty police car. It was parked outside the gaping doorway of the smoking barn where a red man sat slumped. He either spoke to himself or was speaking earnestly to the mess of innards gathered in his lap. His entire body was red, both from the blood that had escaped his torso and from the same pigment she’d seen on the skin of her abductors at the guesthouse.

  The two police officers who’d just arrived stood motionless on either side of the slumped, disembowelled and, impossibly, still living form.

  Ten metres in front of their car, another body lay in the road. Black trousers, boots, utility belt and a white shirt marked the body as belonging to one of their own: a police officer. The body of the male constable who brought her here, and who’d raced into the farm to investigate the woman’s scream, was now headless.

  The two living police officers weren’t sure what to address first: their decapitated colleague or the muttering figure sitting outside the barn, who’d been opened down the front like a cardboard box but who somehow remained alive, though his mind must have blown like a fuse at the sight of what now glistened between his legs.

  Down the lane, about twenty metres further, Helene spotted the thin scarlet form of an elderly man. He was missing an arm and paced slowly, his destination inexplicable, as was the thin flute-like object he clutched in his remaining hand.

  Only when this slowly walking figure collapsed sideways did the police officers move. They'd seen him too but been unable to react. One officer hurried back to the patrol car and ducked inside to operate the radio. The second officer moved to the boot. He rummaged inside then raised a shelf from under the vehicle. With a lid propped open Helene saw the dull shapes of firearms fixed by Velcro straps.

  Such was their preoccupation and her mute, motionless shock, they never noticed her standing on the other side of the lane.

  Inside the barn the embers of a fire glowed upon the earth. What appeared to be another scattering of bodies lay about the soil floor. The parts that Helene could see of the corpses were unclothed, the bare flesh darkened. Incongruously, a wheelchair lay on its side at the mouth of the barn.

  Armed with a small submachine gun one of the police officers returned to the carnage. The second officer retrieved a pistol from the boot, produced a torch and joined his colleague. Silent and immobile in disbelief, they stood in the fetid, smoking mouth of the dilapidated building for a moment and then entered.

  Helene sat down on the tarmac. She wouldn’t shout in case the police officers shot her.

  Weariness engulfed her body. She listened to the sounds of the policemen inside the barn. One of them came back outside. Hands on thighs, his face as pale as cream cheese, he bent over and was sick into the mud. Smoke trailed after him and Helene’s sinuses identified the intense pungency of burning cannabis.

  Three dead ponies, three dead dogs. Dying or dead people who’d suffered catastrophic injuries. She recalled the distant sound of what might have been a rumbling explosion, transforming into a sustained grinding of stone below the ground, like an earthquake.

  If an explosion had occurred under the earth’s surface then how did the male police officer end up in the lane, missing his head, and why had those dogs been flattened into the soil? There was no sign of the WPC.

  Helene’s imagination wanted to envisage, and believe, that there had been an explosion, one that had laid waste to the occupants before a shockwave tore through the lane and paddock to inflict such horrific injuries upon people and animals.

  Though why were the ramshackle buildings still standing? And how would an explosion account for the bestial baying and the cries of blood-lust she’d heard?

  Confused and sickened by it all, Helene felt a sudden need to be at home, holding her little girl tightly. It was so sharp that the desire made her dizzy.

  The slumped man against the wall of the barn moved. His tattered head fell over his rouged chest as if he were taking a closer look at the foul spillings coiled upon his thighs.

  47

  A few minutes earlier.

  Fumes tinged blue billowed from the braziers, fogging the air, clouding blackened rafters.

  Woozy, cold with nausea, Kat scrutinised the darkness below the grille. Her fearful survey only broken by the slow procession of the two shamans, or whatever the animal-headed psychopaths believed themselves to be and their red acolytes assumed they were.

  As before, the couple’s thin bodies were weighed down by shaggy, oversized headpieces. Their stringy forms were naked, painted red. Tony Willows weaved about, greeting his followers, withered and spindly, his arm held by his daughter, Nanna, who was unmasked. They’d emerged from somewhere in the back, beyond the pyre, but Kat couldn’t see a door in the smoke. The second elder was rolled into the barn in a wheelchair, through the front. Jessica Usher.

  Jessica’s wheelchair was pushed by her weasel-faced son, Finn. He was unmasked. The wheels of the chair carved soil and
dung.

  Raising a shrill handful of notes inside the stinking wooden cavern, the pipers heralded the entrance of their degenerate leaders.

  Kat craved a free arm and a weapon. She wanted to have a go at them: the resulting violence would be as much about escape as taking pleasure in retribution. Something of that nature moved too easily about her mind now, like a hound, sniffing and probing on a lower storey of her consciousness. It shied from the scrutiny of reason, but she detested these signs that she was similar to these people, even if her motives differed. At least loathing offered relief from terror and the sickening cramps of anxiety that had been squeezing her stomach for hours.

  Six red folk, who’d backed against the walls, stepped forward and raised reddened arms. Ululating to the roof, they seemed like tatty-head imbeciles, beggars from a distant age who’d drunkenly failed to incite the primitive ecstasy that once brought them such pleasure. Even if their efforts were reinvigorated by the arrival of the two elderly figures, who were unable to enter this place of ancient slaughter unassisted, their cries stopped short of achieving the intensity conjured at Steve’s sacrifice.

  Tawdry, psychotic, hideous and wilful: all of it. Designed to put an end to everything she was and had hoped to be. Was any murder less glorious to its victim?

  From beneath Kat’s soiled knees, the earth rumbled again, distracting her from the rickety performance of the mad folk in their shack. Down below, great mounds of rock were surely shifting. Something had shaken loose. Perhaps a fragment of the very earth was parting to reveal sinuses best left blocked. But whatever resided below was on its way up and closing fast. Through the grate, a long breath developed into a warm breeze befouled by charnel fumes and unseen mouths festering with canker.

  Kat screamed. Then attempted to stand up to relieve her choking terror. But the red folk were only thrilled by her desperate cry. They knew what neared the same surface they walked with unshod feet. Their piped notes skirled anew to pierce their captive’s thoughts more deeply: thoughts immediately scattering like unaccompanied children frightened by growling dogs.

  Outside the temple, voices continued to bark. Men, shouting, breathless in their urgency and with efforts and tasks unseen within the fume-smothered barn. Engines growled as accelerators were depressed to the floor.

  Old man Willows shook off the arm of his daughter that he’d leaned upon. He began to croak in a strangled tongue, from the throat. Maybe the communication was part animal, part human. Whatever the frightful sound communicated, the caterwauling of his folk followed at exultant volume.

  At either side of his mangy black head, old Willows’s arms rose and tensed. Within the open maw of the mask, between canine teeth, his mad white eyes caught the firelight.

  From her wheelchair his mate became animated, unsteady for only a moment before a miraculous renewal of vigour and posture took hold of her decrepit form and brought her upright.

  Coquettish, the emaciated and stained form of the withered matriarch minced from the wheelchair, wailing a falsetto that quivered at its highest point. Such was her excitement that she slapped arthritic hands against her doggish headgear, the knuckles red lumps, the fingers cramped and unmoving. Then she turned round and round on the spot, horribly, like a starving child, blood-mired and participating in a Satanic party game. Her bony feet pranced upon the dirt.

  A skull-cup was carried down the grand chamber, held aloft by Finn, the weasel son. Nodding, he passed and offered communion to each of the eight red fools who still screeched or piped, their grotesque noises old strings designed to draw a most unspeakable company from out of the earth.

  All supped deep from the cup to dull the arrival of what was scampering through the hidden shafts of rock below: more than one beast, rising from the tunnel in haste to reach the grille upon which Kat paced and peered into the darkness between her feet.

  Had the barn door been closed? Had the rags of the feeble sun finally passed behind rain clouds? Maybe the anticipation of what unfolded promised to be unbearable for a celestial body of light and warmth. Darkness turned the barn into a hollow vessel and a void poured between its shanty walls, from above, from below.

  Beyond her head and at ground level the edges of the wooden structure disappeared from sight. Only the fire cast a radiance, and those weak flames offered feeble reassurance in such abject darkness: there was no protection or warmth otherwise in the stinking barn or the human skulls that wailed about her. Perhaps the fire’s proximity to the grate was even a form of protection to those who conducted the ceremony. Maybe this light and heat were intended to keep one thing from another during a hideous interaction: to separate the worshipped from its worshippers. Instinctively, Kat drew as close to the fire as she was able without catching alight.

  White pups. Was it those she could now hear? Grunting through the earth, then yelping and yapping and laughing as they scampered closer, until, directly below her feet, a whinny issued from pitch darkness. Long did it warble before descending the scales to a mocking snigger: a monstrous giggle underwritten by a wet growl.

  Claws raked stone in the chute below. Large forms leaped and scratched at the grate. Kat’s bonds kept her in place so that her terror could be inhaled and her succulence surveyed by what frolicked under her toes.

  The fresh stench from the pit was withering, a slurry of old blood, the choking ammonia of dung: a gust of rot distilled and fermented by age in an airless cavity. She was sure the red earth’s foul breath alone would suffocate her and she desperately wanted to be overcome by the gas so that she would not endure the sight of what had produced it.

  As two pairs of hands grasped her limbs and tugged her to the side of the grate, Kat screamed so hard she matched the idiotic, primitive cries of the two shamans and the cacophony of their shrieking red folk.

  Facing the soil with her toes scraping the ground, her body was pulled forward. One of her hands risked dislocation from the wrist as the rope pulled taut.

  Through locks of drooping hair, she saw firelight battle with shadows in a narrowing circumference of light. Where it flickered, hoary feet and creosoted shins staggered about her. And then she was in position upon the killing floor.

  Inappropriately sleepy, she wondered if her body had issued an anaesthetising drug of its own to dull panic. Then she recalled a particular image that she’d suppressed for days. It snapped her alert: a glimpse of an old mouth, the chin deeply lined, suckling on a wet jawbone to extract nourishment. Steve.

  Kat screamed, but this time she screamed until she thought her lungs would tear like paper bags.

  From her wrists and ankles the bindings were severed. She kicked herself to her knees. Only two of the red folk were restraining her while a second pair made a drunken attempt to raise the grate. Once open, they’d throw her parts down or discard her whole unto whatever yapped and growled so impatiently inside the pit.

  Kat reared and threw her body around in an attempt to free her arms, limbs gripped by the insistent claws of two men who swayed like addicts.

  ‘No!’ she shrieked.

  The two fools raising the grille ignored her and continued to heave the trapdoor free, their arms trembling from the weight of an iron cap designed to keep below separate from above.

  From the near distance, perhaps outside the barn doors, a man shouted, ‘Filth! Pigs is fucking here!’ It was repeated by another two voices, raised, breathless.

  Within moments, a motorbike was kicked into grunting life. Car doors slammed. But those who held her seemed unaware of the commotion outside. The two pipers were seated now too, their eyes turned inwards as if the elderly musicians were succumbing to long overdue comas.

  Beyond the widening aperture in the floor Kat glimpsed the witch-wife. She was being carried like a thin child that had injured itself. In cowardly haste, Jessica Usher’s son Finn was removing his mother from the scene, away from the raid but also, surely, from what was contained within the pit. The couple vanished into darkness at the rear of the build
ing.

  Tony Willows’s former frailty reclaimed his scrawny form and he clawed at his daughter’s arm pathetically. A sudden desperation to flee the barn had gripped him while his distracted and intoxicated underlings still toiled about the hole, to get it open and her inside.

  The last two members of the family vanished into the murky rear of the building where Tony had first emerged so pompously. The family were leaving her in the clutches of their dazed but committed congregation, an aged and motley assemblage that appeared unaware of their priesthood’s retreat and the alarms raised in the lane outside the building. The substance in the skull-cup must have been potent, its effects increasingly evident in the clumsy stumbling around her body. And if the grate moved any further she was no longer destined to be the only victim here. ‘No. They’re leaving. Look! For Christ’s sake, look!’

  Amidst the chaos came the most piercing animal shriek from below, one so full of inhuman excitement that Kat’s theories of fighting dogs and great cats collapsed with no possibility of revival.

  As if finally coming to their senses about what they were almost certainly going to set free, the two men released the grille partway open and stumbled back from the hole they’d opened in the ground. One of them peered about the smoky darkness like a child seeking direction from its elders.

  Inside the pit, the scrabble of what tore at the underside of the metal seal, now only covering one third of the aperture, intensified, as did the chorus of snarls. Those who’d raised the gate must have been out of their minds and yet they seemed too stunned to completely uncover the pit, or re-cover it. Her jailers had become entranced or paralysed by what bayed at a deafening volume inside the black hole.

  Before she could see what they’d seen, with a surge forward Kat found her knees and tugged one arm free. She caught a face with a fist, punching up and through a tarred fringe of dishevelled hair that haloed hollow cheeks.