The Reddening

by Adam Nevill

  The eyes of the man she struck were glassy. She drove her fist into his eye-socket and he went down without a sound. Yanking her other arm with sufficient power to pull the second man down and onto his front, she glimpsed his bewildered face as it struck the soil. Her eyes met the eyes of an old, confused man.

  Kat ran at the fire. She ran into the flames. Within that infernal darkness, instinct alone insisted that the fire might be the only thing at hand to preserve distance, no matter how narrow, between men and what had so recently appeared in their modern domain. And she’d have run through lava in bare feet to escape what burst from the earth behind her.

  The desultory piping and the calls for those beneath the ground were over: swiftly replaced by other noises, like the ripping of the first torso, a sound of moist cloth tearing.

  The rending emerged from behind Kat’s head as she skittered through the fire, her legs kicking up a shower of embers and a flurry of sparks. Multiple stabs and sudden sears penetrated the jogging bottoms she’d lived in for days. Burns pierced the soles of her feet. Hair crisped around her face, crackled inside an ear. A vile smell swamped her sinuses. She was on fire and she screamed and launched herself at the absolute state of darkness beyond the pyre, landing on all fours, not on earth but on stone that rubbed the skin off her knees.

  As she turned about and slapped at the searing agony on her ankles and feet and behind her knees, a shockwave of stinking air blew the fire flat.

  Kat never saw the men who’d raised the grille come apart. Nor did she see what it was that removed their heads, but she did hear two human carcasses thump the walls where they’d been flung. And when the fire briefly righted and tongued a ceiling of rocks the colour of blood, two incomplete bodies dropped to smack the ground.

  The stampede of hooves through the darkness was heralded by a roar of shrieking animals. A herd, their rout a deafening thunder. Nothing of the creatures was visible but the force of this rushing multitude buffeted her face: heavy, powerful shapes plunging through the void. Had she been an inch further out from the fire she was sure her body would have been broken apart by trampling hooves.

  Inside the black space the herd was massacred. And beyond the carnage distant dogs squealed and horses screamed as they too must have fallen beneath the same claws and teeth.

  Devils laughed through it all and aloud, and they growled on the blood they gulped in the way of hounds assuaging desperate thirsts in puddles. Beyond the fire’s tiny borders, in skirts of dim light, the feeble silhouettes of the red folk were tossed back and forth like puppets, limbs flopping. A throat was opened far above Kat’s head and a warm broth washed her face. She tasted salt.

  A damaged figure crawled: an intoxicated piper in possession of enough sense to realise that something had gone amiss. Kat watched this woman’s bony back opened like pastry. The straggly head then vanished under what might have been a great hand or a foot; it pressed her skull as flat as fresh putty. Perhaps the limb that crushed the skull was clawed; a suggestion of a matted leg held the remnants of her head in place so that the body could be ribboned. The sorry carcass was swiftly peeled and emptied before Kat could look away.

  A length of timber burned beside Kat’s grubby toes. She seized it. Its end glowed white and red with heat and ash and burned her hand. She dropped it. Patted the length of wood for the cooler end and reclaimed the short plank. Then turned, arcing the flame through the darkness at an arm’s length.

  The meagre light of her torch was momentarily reflected in eyes as wide as headlights: amber amidst a jaundiced yellow, stricken with capillaries. A silhouette found scant definition, only for a moment: a broad shadow with great haunches that trembled behind a dipped head, the small ears pressed flat before the shape withdrew, or vanished.

  She tottered from the pyre, swinging the burning plank at waist height. Pushing onwards, she moved in an ungainly lurch to where the world dropped into complete darkness. There should have been soil yet stone pressed the burned soles of her punished feet. Impossible. But curiosity had no place in such an abattoir, nor did hesitation: the mauling and scattering of the red folk the only testimony she required.

  Savage grunts, the slopping of heavy, wet carcasses in rank air. Quarry thrashed frenziedly against the ground, then flung against the walls, repeatedly. A rapid scuffling of large feet. Inert forms were tugged and fought over anew, between jaws she was blessed to never see. Kat doubted that anything survived behind her burned heels.

  About where she guessed the entrance must have once been, she heard new voices. Distant, urgent cries of ‘Police!’ But these voices seemed to be too far away and at the mouth of a stone tunnel. They were lost in the reeking wind. A human voice was incapable of much besides unwisely announcing itself to what growled about this hell; either that, or it could scream once its presence had been acknowledged. As these new voices briefly did.

  A rumble below the ground passed away; a vast wave chased by the bestial screams that had arisen from the pit. The whinnying, terrified herd retreated with the tremor. Their cries rapidly subsided and withdrew to an impossible distance as if swept from where the barn had been. The noises of the devils going about their butchery were no more, the screams of their quarry ended. The earth beneath her feet was dense and silent once more. The departure of the unnatural atmosphere and whatever had scampered through it had been as swift as its coming.

  Murmurs from the ordinary world, birdsong or traffic, however, remained absent. Kat imagined the earth breathless and mute with shock. Only the moans of the dying and the inexorable pattering of the rain upon the roof tiles disrupted the silence.

  Keeping her feet, she followed where Tony and his invalided wife had run. This had been an endgame that had only spared the perpetrators. Maybe they’d lost control of what they’d directed onto their property. Once it was out, she didn’t believe anything capable of holding that back.

  The kindling she clutched still glowed and what remained of the pyre flickered against walls of wood once more, timber walls instead of stone. She’d been returned to a recognisable place; her smarting feet stumbled on damp soil, the coolness a sudden balm.

  Against a far wall a faintly lit rectangle of thinner air suggested an exit: the aperture through which the Willows family had made their undignified escape, leaving all behind to be mauled in a sudden manifestation of horror.

  Traumatised but still functioning, carried by unsteady legs, Kat passed through the door and entered a cement room, its weak light celestial in comparison to the barn’s unnatural darkness.

  48

  ‘Much further?’

  ‘Not far, mother. We’re out soon. The seventh door is close.’

  ‘You’re tired, my boy. I’ve been such a burden. I can’t breathe in this. Take my face from me.’

  When she finally found the farmer’s son so many years ago, that dear boy with the yellow eyes, he’d told her what the masks were for. In his wild tales, he’d explained how Redstone was a path and he’d helped Jess follow it.

  Mottled, black, bristly, made from dogs but fashioned to resemble other things, the masks had always been old. But how old even the youth couldn’t say.

  The masks had the smell of smoke and damp stone, dust and layers of dried fear. Their scent filled any space they were brought into, grinning. Jess had found them in an outbuilding, inside the drawer of a scuffed bureau: an article of furniture exiled in a stone building you could only enter through the barn nearest the house. Her nose had led her to the headpieces as she’d searched for poison to kill the rats that had scampered the living spaces of the farmhouse.

  Instead of poison, she’d found the masks, the flints and the little figures: knapped stones shaped like big teardrops and figures shaped from clay, laid beside the masks. They’d all been folded inside a piece of antique silk with a lace border.

  The three figurines were additionally wrapped in newspaper. She’d known at once that they were associated with the cavern and the paintings on its walls: s
he’d seen similar walking below the ground.

  After the night when she’d been so deep with the cuckoo girl, Maddy Gross, and for the next seven months, what had followed her from the ground had clung to her mind like a strange spell, infesting her sleep with pictures and scenes that were someone else’s dreams: she’d watched much transpire under vast, white skies far younger than those beyond her bedroom windows. Sometimes she’d stood with others in a darkness flickering red with firelight and the red had flourished in her, surging through her heart like a new blood.

  She was thrilled by a sense that there was a flowing without a destination or an end in the cool silence of the quarry tunnels. Waking from strange dreams she was tempted to dive again into the black spaces beneath her home. Only the death of the girl, and her fear, bade her keep her distance from the old burrows.

  But Jess had removed the treasure from the bureau and carefully placed it inside a bag. She’d taken it to the youth with yellow eyes whose father had sold the farm to Tony. The farm should have been the boy’s inheritance but there had been so many debts.

  Jess had looked for his father first but learned of his passing from a woman in a guesthouse outside Divilmouth. His son had drifted to Plymouth where he’d occupied a single room in a grimy subdivided house. A place for the poor and the broken.

  When she’d found him, the boy wasn’t surprised to see her, and Jess had suspected he was simple or mentally handicapped and should have been in care. He’d sat alone on a fusty bed as if waiting to be collected by a relative or guardian who’d not arrived. What few clothes and possessions he owned had been folded neatly inside a suitcase. Empty jugs of cider had lined the scuffed furniture. Windows closed, curtains drawn, smoke from his pipe had coated everything in the dismal room with the smell of his father: the same pervasive, enduring odour of the sitting room at the farmhouse.

  This sweet, gentle youth with yellow eyes had said nothing other than ‘Come in’ when she’d knocked at his door. In a room at the end of an unlit passage that had reeked of gas, he’d watched her with a steady, bright gaze while she’d asked her questions about the place under the farm. He wasn’t moved to offer answers but his expression became grave.

  Unpacking her bag as carefully as it had been filled, Jess had asked him why he and his father had left the artefacts at the farm: the masks, flints and figurines. She’d laid them upon the threadbare carpet of the dismal room, but still the young man had offered nothing. His silence had only made her frantic to know what the things were used for. Everything was connected: the youth, her, the dead cuckoo girl Maddy, the crude objects, the painted chamber.

  Eventually the thin young man had turned his slow, yellow eyes to the window. A gaze containing no emotion, judgement, respect or contempt: the look in his eyes the same as they had been the day they’d exchanged contracts at the farm, while the slow father had showed Tony his new fiefdom. Because the youth was simple and clearly unfit for the world beyond the farm that he’d left behind in the patient, resigned manner that he’d taken from his father, Jess had decided to leave.

  She’d gathered the foul masks, the blue-black flints and the three carvings of the big-bellied women with the heads of animals. The thrill born of mystification about where she was living, exciting her more and more since the day the girl had died, prompted her to take the objects back home where they’d always been. Each piece was shiny with wear.

  Once the objects had been cleared away, the youth with yellow eyes had finally spoken. ‘The dead lass they found was down the red.’

  ‘She . . .’ Jess hadn’t been sure what to say. The incident had been in the newspapers. Everyone involved had lied, consistently, to the police about where the girl had died and about who’d given her drugs. But reporters had amassed outside the farm. Tony was facing charges of manslaughter and possession. There was going to be a trial. His panic and despair had reached levels she’d never seen before, and now he was back in the hospital and she was alone at the farm.

  She’d tried to sell the land but local buyers had offered far less than they’d paid for it. There had been no serious attempts at farming since they’d been there. They didn’t know how. The buildings were falling apart. With the last of the money, she was paying local men to tend what was left of the flock. But if she’d admitted that the girl had died underground then she might face charges too. No one would ever believe her story about what she’d experienced, nor what had stopped the girl’s heart. They’d think her even madder than many claimed she already was. And Jess wasn’t sure that she hadn’t gone mad from her time at Redstone.

  She was frightened and lonely and expecting twins within two months. She didn’t know where they’d be born and Tony was so heavily sedated that he’d stopped speaking. So she did what all do in uncomfortable positions: she’d offered more questions to those questions asked of her.

  ‘What is the red?’ she’d asked that thin head, haloed by the light passing through the water-stained curtains to sift the dust and curling wisps of pipe smoke. And what the youth said made her sure that if anyone was mad then he was. His father must have been mad too. Anyone who’d been isolated at that farm would lose their way and never rediscover it.

  The young man told her that she’d ‘made the earth grow dark’. He’d then pointed at her swollen tummy and said that she’d ‘wet the dark earth and taken two babs in return’.

  He told her not to enter ‘the grove’ again, unless she’d ‘showed their faces back’. Bending over he’d taken a mask from her bag with his dirty, slender fingers and she’d imagined the dirt under his nails was from the farm and would never wash away: that he was so darkly stained with it, like she’d become, and as marked as the scruffy sheep that ambled about the valleys chomping the grass flat.

  He’d asked if she’d been in a church and she’d nodded. ‘Same thing at the grove,’ he’d said, as if correcting her about something she should have known. ‘Cover your head. Go wiv your eyes down.’ He’d reached out, without a trace of amorous intent and tugged at her dress. ‘You don’t wear nothing in the grove.’ Then he’d asked for her makeup, clicking his fingers to hurry her up, to get past her frowning and puzzlement.

  From the makeup bag he’d selected a red lipstick. Then gently cradled her hand palm-down upon his own and smudged the greasy salve in long streaks across the fine bones of her hand. ‘And all over if you’re going to stand up in the middle of what comes round you.’ Carefully, he’d smudged lines of lipstick into more of her skin like a salve and as he’d rubbed her hand she’d squeezed her thighs together, her face flushing hot.

  ‘You’s right to take lads in the spring if you want more of them,’ he’d said, pointing at her tummy. 'You's taken the shape.'

  All of the blood in her body had eddied into a weir, a tumult, then surged for the boy with the thin head and yellow eyes, passing its force through him and further still. The feeling had made her giddy, yet filled her with wonder at a future she couldn’t understand. Tears had marked her face.

  He’d known, this man, just by looking, that she was carrying twins. Yet she’d been infertile, her womb scarred by an abortion in her teens. But she’d come out of that tunnel on the afternoon that the girl died, pregnant with twins. They weren’t Tony’s. She’d let Ade have his way like he’d always wanted to, in revenge for Tony’s fascination with the girl whom she’d lured below the earth. Maddy Gross. Maddy Cuckoo.

  ‘What shape?’ she’d asked.

  ‘What comes after you give more to the red. More than we ever did you give already. Me mum and dad wouldn’t ever give a girl or a boy. Folks used to. They’d give it what it wants. You’re to use these for any giving.’ He’d tapped a finger on the wrapped flints. ‘And you need to be red for them.’ The man had stroked her hands as if they were precious. ‘All over. Red as the earth, your skin. You need a fire, else it ain’t safe. You’ve to hide your face so you don’t drown in the red like the lassie in the papers done.’

  His mad words had
left her hands trembling in her damp lap.

  ‘The black mother and her white pups. You called them up. They’ll abide cus of what you done. They’ve given you the centre where all gets shaped round you. What’s done is done.’

  And without a hint of mockery or sly humour or deceit in his face, he’d told her, ‘You’s inside the old Creel now. They’ll take things from out of it that you put inside.’ And as he said that he’d looked at her tummy.

  ‘What are they?’ she’d asked him, desperately, but he fell again into the familiar deep silence and was no longer listening but thinking on what could be done for her, as if he were a mechanic and she’d taken a broken car into his garage.

  ‘They pawing the ground now?’ he’d eventually asked, tapping the side of his slender head. ‘Up here?’

  And that had made her think of how often she’d run in her dreams to fright the herds, shepherding the herds alongside the red people with their stinking heads of beasts: some with horns, some with feathers, but all with the black muzzles that their wild eyes peered through. And she’d recalled what walked the darker edges of the pit on its hind legs, their dirty white bibs clotted scarlet. The pups would shock her awake before she ever saw more of them in dream, or of what came roaring up from the ground behind them. And she recalled how she would lie, panting like a dog, and shaking with relief at not having seen more than the end of the larger one’s thin, black legs protruding from the crevice in the pit . . . yet always wanting to go to it, like it was her lover, her sex nearly cramping and opening.

  ‘I think so,’ she told the farmer’s son, who was much more than that. And he’d nodded, sagely, as if what had been discussed between them was a subject of consequence to him.

  ‘Nuffing is written down. It’s all in pictures,’ he’d said solemnly. ‘Don’t work without a witch-wife in the middle who shapes it all about her, you see? Takes time.’