The Reddening

by Adam Nevill

  ‘Can you show me how?’ Jess had asked him with tears in her eyes, stroking the miracle thriving in her womb. And she’d knelt before the youth, which had troubled him. He’d asked her to stand and instead had knelt before her, placing his mouth on her feet.

  The boy with the yellow eyes came home with her afterwards, and they’d taken his old dusty suitcases that had never belonged anywhere but upon the red land that few wanted. And he’d shown her what his mum had done with farm animals in the grove to fill the old Creel and what she’d been shown by the other wives and so on, before his dad had gone for Christ and stopped it all.

  She’d learned how the sacred weapons and the music underground had always led others to the grove of the oldest red columns, the witch-wives. And she saw the patterns of witch-wife bones curled in the dusty nests where they’d lain a long time. She went below with him, many times, masked and unclothed and red and with great reverence so as not to drown in her own blood, and she’d let the maps upon the walls fill her with knowledge.

  In the sacred grove she made the earth grow dark, from time to time, giving succour to the pups, who fed first, to resume the old bond. And in the parts of the earth that were still open enough and close enough to what paced below, the youth with yellow eyes taught her how the five-fold kiss worked and what it could do once the Creel was nourished. The first girl who went into the red was sufficient explanation as to how she’d given birth to the twins, Finn and Nanna, and why so many other mothers were soon blessed too, and how the flocks had doubled in size on the farm and on the land all around the crossroads.

  The counter-clockwise steps around the red column with the sun’s low light setting in the West allowed her to see much farther than the sea. The rite was used when something needed to be built or planted. That movement always stirred the pipers and opened Creel’s door.

  Others came and helped with the farm and with the rites and they settled her as witch-wife with kisses on her feet.

  In the red places, once her cut flowers were bringing in an income, along with the lambing and calving and dairy farming, across all of the farms where the Creel was nourished and her tracks became visible again, Jess’s place as the red column was accepted without question.

  Before Finn was old enough to replace him, though his slaughter of the youth with yellow eyes she'd thought unnecessary, she’d asked the youth for the names of what it was that came and went beneath the earth – if called in the right way and when carefully provisioned with ponies, lambs and sturdy rams, all being the hue of night – and he’d said his mother had called her Creel. Her milky pups had names you never did more than whisper. There were other names, but those in the red grove were mostly referred to as a pack, or a trinity: the Creel.

  They had been given that name, or the name of ‘Old Creel’, many years before, and all anyone knew now was the song about a giant in the West who’d kept his hunting hounds in a basket filled with bones. But his hounds were devils and had escaped and devoured the giant, as well as anything living they’d come across, before returning to their basket.

  Only the cleverest tribe of men who’d hid their delicious scent by taking on the likenesses of the devils in the Creel, through the fashioning of their heads and the staining of their flesh, had survived the devil hounds of the Creel. Those men had learned to fill the capacious bellies in the Creel and to freshen the dread basket with new bones. The hounds had then hunted with the men as they’d hunted for the giant, and the men had fed on the scraps.

  She’d learned the song and others still known in the oldest tongues of the West; some that could still be heard beneath the ground at certain times along with the pipes. Soon, she’d sung them all proudly and loudly in the old tongues that came from the back of the throat. Tony was next to useless so Finn took the role of John Barleycorn not long after he’d been caught offering black lambs in the grove independently of tuition. No school would hold him so she tutored him at home until he introduced the new crop that would sustain every red child for miles.

  And by learning to see in the dark, as witch-wife she too saw that the past was red and that the future was red for certain. That the red abided and that all was truly red in the world and was destined to be red again.

  She’d seen how red the world was at its end, which wasn’t too far away, and she’d learned that even though much could conceal the red in every heart, those that didn’t abide by the red were never saved.

  49

  Static crackle from police radios inside the barn, then a voice said, ‘Christ. Here . . . Jesus, look at that.’

  Helene kept her distance from the gaping, smoking doorway. Sickened by what lay strewn and ruined about the dirt floor at the mouth of the building and on the road, she remained on the lane in the drizzle, feeling delicate and useless inside the oversized coat from the hospital’s lost property box. Though the next time one of the constables came out of the barn, she’d try and attract his attention. More police would be here soon too. Ambulances. Please. Please come quickly.

  She struggled to put one thought in front of another to complete short bursts of comprehension. But disbelief and confusion mingled with the relief that it was over. She’d survived, again. Soon she would be reunited with her family. That’s all that mattered now.

  Until a woman staggered out from between two of the decrepit farm buildings. A person with bedraggled hair swaying in clumps about her face. A woman stumbling on bare, grubby feet, but not painted red or naked. She wore a hooded top and jogging bottoms: her clothing smeared with grime and inappropriate to the weather.

  In her hand she dragged a long piece of timber that smoked at one end. She seemed intent on reaching the scrawny red arm that lay upon the lane’s surface: an arm severed from a body.

  The woman bent at the waist, emitting a gasp, and pulled something from out of the hand at the end of the crudely amputated arm. The object looked like a stone and the woman examined it until something in a tree beside the lane distracted her.

  Scraping a dark lug of hair from her forehead, the dishevelled woman peered into the overhanging branches, then studied the drainage ditch at the side of the road. As if sensing scrutiny she turned her head and looked at Helene.

  Even from a distance, recognition dawned in the mind of each woman.

  The scruffy figure was Kat, the journalist.

  They stared at each other some more. Inside the smear of a face, smudged with dried blood and soil, Helene watched the awareness of who she was dawn in the other figure’s too white, too wide eyes.

  Kat shuffled about to face her. ‘Helene?’ she asked in a dry voice close to a croak.

  Helene didn’t reply. This woman had given her to the red people. She’d lured her to this dreadful place where there had been an attempt on her life. She’d implicated her family in this unnatural business, her little girl, her old mum. The police in the barn needed to know that Kat was here and that she was part of this: part of the outlandish story that she’d narrated in a hospital bed to unbelieving police officers and detectives. Helene looked to the barn and parted her lips to call out.

  ‘How did you . . .’ Kat never finished the question but said enough to distract Helene. ‘What are you doing here? I thought they’d . . . I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry, Helene.’ Kat wiped her eyes. Her body was shaking. The hand about the wood was white, the clenched knuckles defined. ‘I had no choice.’

  Helene pointed at her, moving towards her. ‘You. I’m here because of you.’ Her throat briefly closed with emotion, her jaw trembling, her eyes smarting with tears. ‘Because of you . . . You did this!’ She cast her arm in the direction of the barn. ‘The police are in there. So you stay the fuck away from me. Don’t you bloody move, bitch.’

  Tears glistened on Kat’s cheeks, diluting the filth around her eyes. The frustration of what she wanted to say creased her face as if she was about to cry. ‘Steve,’ Kat blurted, her voice shaking. ‘They killed Steve. In there.’ Kat pointed to the ba
rn with her wood. ‘They cut him open in there.’ She nodded her head rapidly to add emphasis to the memory. ‘They tried to do it to me. In there.’ She looked at her dirty burned feet. ‘I had no choice. They came to my home. They made me call you. Because of the recordings. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Tell it to the police.’

  If Kat heard that she paid it no heed. ‘They killed your brother. And Steve. So many. I was next. The . . . things that did this . . . the murderers at this farm brought it here. They called it.’ Kat looked up at the tree. ‘It was just here. Out here. Oh God.’

  Helene followed Kat’s gaze and saw that a dark, irregularly shaped object was caught in the tree. At first she assumed they were empty clothes, snagged on twigs. But when she moved to better see what was strewn through the branches, she made out a murky human form, criss-crossed by sticks.

  At a glance the figure might have passed for a scarecrow with poorly constructed limbs, made from poles broken at odd angles inside its sleeves and trouser legs. Moving closer, she recognised it as the body of a man. He either had an arm missing or it was twisted behind his back.

  Before she could look away, Helene saw the thin head, half-concealed behind the leaves, the facial expression contorted with displeasure. It was Richey, from the boat.

  Kat pointed her stick into the ditch. ‘The police have been helping them. You can’t trust the police.’

  Helene looked to where Kat now directed her attention and flinched. ‘Oh, Jesus Christ,’ she muttered, on seeing the body of the female police constable. She recognised the woman’s petite shape and uniform but not much else. Headless, like her partner, her body had landed on its front in the weeds. It was also missing part of a leg, beneath the knee.

  Richey now watched over the woman’s body with his sightless eyes, while dripping from the tree in which he hung.

  ‘No,’ Helene said. ‘No. She was helping me. The police brought me here. To catch the men who tried to drown me.’

  What she’d said seemed absurd. But ever since her arrival in the village of Redhill to meet this woman, and to learn about her brother’s final weeks alive, her life had been implausible. The trend was set to continue. Helene pointed at the tatty remnants of a man in the tree. ‘He was on the boat.’

  Kat wiped at her eyes using a sleeve. ‘They were going to kill all of us. It was the sounds from the cave. Whoever heard those recordings, or came here and saw things, was finished.’

  Hadn’t she suspected as much? That those dim, awful sounds, recorded in a cave by her brother, were connected to this massacre? ‘How . . .’

  Eyes blinking rapidly, her stained face now quivering white with anger, Kat said, ‘Steve came here. And they butchered him. They . . . they’re not getting away with it. They’re not.’ And with that, Kat had reminded herself of some undisclosed purpose. She hobbled up the lane, away from the barn. ‘They came through here.’

  The police officers were still preoccupied inside the outbuildings. Helene could hear them searching one of the adjoining workshops made from bricks and cement blocks. Kat had said they couldn’t be trusted, that the police were a part of this. Helene found that too hard to comprehend. She would not believe it of the two constables who had driven her here and raced towards the smoke and the screams, only to die so horribly while doing their duty, unthinkingly. She stepped after Kat. ‘The police. They’re here to help.’

  ‘They’re not getting away with it. They left us all to die.’

  Helene followed Kat at a safe distance, her mind working hard at what the journalist had confided. ‘Kat. The police brought me here, to help me. Now they’re dead. Both of them.’

  ‘A policeman brought me here too, to die. The red folk were going to give me to it.’

  When Helene drew closer, she could see that Kat’s eyes weren’t right. She looked unhinged, the blood staining Kat’s face only reinforcing Helene’s sense that the woman was in shock.

  ‘Did you hear them too? Mmm?’ Kat muttered. ‘They came from the pit and did this.’ Kat pointed her short plank, the charred end still smoking, in the direction of Richey’s motionless body.

  Helene followed Kat to where the lane curved from view, the tarmac increasingly concealed by outgrowths from the hedgerow. ‘It doesn’t make sense. Kat! Stop! For fuck’s sake, Kat, stop. Where are you going?’

  And before Helene received an answer, both women saw the white house at the same time. Its front now visible through the unruly verdure at the side of the road.

  ‘They went in there,’ Kat said, and staggered on, in the direction of the big house, wincing with every step as the broken tarmac stabbed her swollen feet.

  Helene followed her to the building hidden deep within the decrepit farm. Large and modern, the mansion’s outer walls were resplendent with bright magnolia. Dark panes of glass caught the weak light and returned reflections of what declined about itself: the dereliction and wild, unruly growths. But nothing made sense any more to Helene about this land, or those who danced in red across it, or what had emerged from beneath it. Nor did she know who to trust or what to do any more. But was Kat suggesting that someone, the people responsible for so much bloodshed, had escaped from the barn? If so, then this mad woman with a stick in one hand and a black rock in the other appeared to be pursuing them.

  50

  This tunnel, if Kat was to follow it any further, would take her deep underground, where it lived. From down there the horror had burst. The realisation was sobering. For the first time since she’d escaped from the barn, her determination to pursue the Willows family cooled.

  Rough walls of limestone led down, evoking a grim carousel of memory, of living forms flung through the dark, the thud of their falls. A sense of what might yet roam here, the inhuman strength of it, kept her at a standstill.

  The wooden staircase she’d not long ago descended connected a utility room on the ground floor of the big white house to this subterranean level. Whoever had fled down here had left the connecting door ajar: someone in a hurry or with their hands full.

  Kat fingered the black rock in her hand. Outside the barn, she’d scooped it from a dead stranger’s fingers: an implement insufficient to the task of defending herself against those things. And she knew of no weapon that might offer reassurance if she should meet again what the red folk had called Creel, let alone its young.

  Kat wiped a wet hand against her trouser leg to better grip the hand-axe.

  Behind her, at the top of the staircase, Helene stood in silence. She wasn’t coming down: wasn’t going beneath the ground in pursuit of those who’d tried to end their lives and destroyed those they’d loved.

  Helene was a survivor but the girl had suffered enough. That was plain to see. A drawn face, the manic expression and the palsy of her bloodless hands were sufficient evidence of a woman at the end of her tether. The red had tried to exterminate her by drowning. That’s what she’d said.

  But Helene’s limbs were probably aquiver now from the shock of witnessing what Kat had so recently done to a living man, the man with the bad leg whom they’d found inside the big white house.

  They’d come across him in one of the spacious living rooms: an enormous area with a fireplace the size of the bathroom in her cottage. The room had opened onto a brushed granite kitchen; the terrazzo eating bar could have seated eight people.

  The mansion had revealed itself to be a place of atriums, roof beams, viewing walls, vast indoor plants, enormous sofas that slotted elegantly into corners, wooden staircases inlaid with cherry, and private decks offering a view of the distant, angry sea.

  The incongruity of the house’s existence at the farm had startled them both. How did such a palace occupy the same land as the other dilapidated, unkempt and aged structures, all leaning earthward, at Redstone Farm? The sale of sheep had not built the house nor its indoor pool.

  Kat had glanced around as they’d shuffled inside, her raw and seared feet cooling on the marble floors, her professional eye absorbing the la
vish interior as if it were a spread in a lifestyle magazine. Only the wealthiest people owned places like this. Not those with moribund music careers who’d taken to farming sheep.

  She began to think differently about the nature of the land, the properties upon it, where it all began. The buildings at the front were mere facades, old ruins, concealing the guttural calling and the bloodletting, the dog masks, the horrible piping, the red skin and this magnificent house. What else was hidden here?

  Redstone was not a working sheep farm in any meaningful sense. It probably hadn’t been in years. And this gleaming palace was the headquarters of something else, another kind of business: private, exclusive, detached. This luxurious home was the heart that serviced the blood vessels of a criminal network that Matt Hull and Steve had alluded to. Drugs.

  There appeared to be much more evidence of the operation: these hidden tunnels. Perhaps the burrows of the depraved even reached unto the far cliffs and caves. But what had sustained and seemingly just destroyed part of the very tribe that serviced it must also exist below. One thing had crossed over into another: hadn’t Matt Hull said as much?

  The authorities would never understand her story because they hadn’t seen or heard or dreamed of what bayed and jabbered below this farm. Those who’d encountered it first-hand had either lost their heads or were also in league with the red but escaped the slaughter, like the man on the sofa had been.

  ‘Who’s that? Who’s here then, aye? That you, Richey? That you, lad?’ Mere minutes before, the chubby man with the bad leg in the living room had repeated himself, nervously, on hearing the entrance of Kat and Helene into the great white house.

  He’d only stopped asking questions when she and Helene had passed through the grand atrium and discovered him propped up on a long settee, upholstered in white leather. One of his feet had been raised by three cushions.

  No one else had been home. But when the man on the couch had seen Helene, his round face had transformed from a hopeful yearning to something purple-black. ‘Bitch,’ he’d barked, spraying spittle all over the glass table. He’d known Helene. ‘You’s should have stayed drowned, cunt!’ the man had bellowed.