The Reddening

by Adam Nevill

  Wincing and wheezing, he’d struggled to his feet. Unafraid of the two women who’d appeared before him – one covered in dried blood and dirt, the second swamped by an ill-fitting coat and unable to stop shaking – he’d come at them, hobbling and spitting, his short arms wheeling for balance.

  Helene’s pretty blue eyes had opened wide with more than fear: she’d been terrified. She’d turned immediately, intent on fleeing the mansion they’d only been inside for a matter of seconds. She’d whispered, ‘He did it. Tried to kill me . . .’

  And Kat had known that like Beard and Headscarf, this man was one of them; and he was injured. His ruddy forehead was beaded with sweat, his leg stiff: any weight he put upon it caused him great pain.

  Somehow, he’d escaped the morning’s massacre. Maybe on account of his injury he’d remained inside the vast house. Or maybe he’d limped inside to hide while his colleagues fled or died. Kat doubted he was a Willow: they were whippet-thin, ferrety, anxious and posh.

  At the sight of him, Kat had also remembered her own cowardice. How she’d wronged Helene: the woman who’d trembled beside her, the young mother whom she’d sacrificed hoping to save herself.

  So Kat had grasped an opportunity to protect Helene. She’d recognised a chance to avenge the wrongs that this man and his kind had done to a frightened girl who’d already lost her brother: two more innocent victims of the red.

  Her entire body had suffused with a special energy. Molten and red it had been: the red of fury, the red of a wordless rage, warming her muscles to perform acts of unfamiliar strength and agility. A great and unwieldy freedom had taken possession of her limbs. Engulfed by the surge, this awakening of the blood, her conscious mind had slid, sunk away. And with its passing had vanished the possibility of restraint. Her mindlessness had resembled sexual arousal. She’d bathed in a nourishing glow that had beat behind her face and she’d gone to work.

  Kat had raced to meet the challenge of the wounded underling, the agony of her burned feet briefly forgotten, and she’d punched him backwards with her outstretched hands.

  The man with the purple face and chubby, grasping hands, with the silly childish thumbs that bristled with black hair and made her think of a pig’s trotters, never made it past the show-home table. She’d never struck anything so hard before; the balls of her hands caught him on the sternum and instantly deflated him.

  Bending over his half-collapsed form, with the tip of her flint knife pointing down, she’d then hacked and felt the plates of his skull move beneath her fist. She didn’t stop there, but aimed at his temple and his throat and the hands that he’d raised in defence. She’d pierced them all.

  Then she’d gone for the ham of his shoulders and the gammon of his flanks. Even when the swine was down on all fours and bleating, she still hadn’t been able to stop and she’d beaten his back like a drum. Made him boom until his inner softness had sucked at the flint, forcing her to rip the blade free, time after time, which had flecked her face with warmth and patterned the white ceiling with long arcs of bright scarlet: graffiti she’d fleetingly found beauteous.

  She’d only stopped when she’d been too tired to hammer the man any flatter or wetter against the marble tiles and the rug that he’d drenched red.

  Kat had spared a few thoughts for the woman in the headscarf and how she’d ruined her too, in the cottage, down in the tiny space between her bed and the wall of the bedroom. The woman’s toothless mouth had cawed like a baby bird’s but Kat had felt no sympathy. Crushing the foul-mouthed, chubby man had been a fuller experience: then she’d felt something more like joy, her mind half-blinded with a searing scarlet light. If she’d so much as brushed her sex with the beautiful blue shard that she’d used to smash open her foe, she’d have climaxed.

  She’d turned to Helene after she’d finished and for a while Kat had struggled to put a name to the woman’s face. She’d not even known herself.

  Beyond the kitchen in a utility room Kat had then found a door operated by a silver keypad, as if it concealed a safe. Before the door, the false front of a tumble dryer and a cupboard had been left ajar.

  Helene had followed her from the living room, at a distance, like a child who’d not known better.

  Despite their haste to escape, Kat had judged that the Willows family wouldn’t have gone down if it was dangerous. That’s why she’d followed them.

  Still panting hard from her exertions in the living room, and smiling oddly between lank laces of the dripping hair bootlacing her face, she peered up again at the tall woman in the doorway of the cellar. In Helene’s face she saw shock, revulsion and sheer incomprehension. Helene, Kat decided, had not tasted the red as much as she had. Proximity was contagion.

  Without another word to Helene, Kat followed the underground path.

  * * *

  Below the earth the temperature plummeted, a vague eddy of dank air making her shudder. Natural refrigeration.

  The burrow smelled of soil and wet stone. Lights glowed orange along the walls, all fed by a wire stapled into the moist, limestone walls. The passage was too smooth to have been wholly formed naturally.

  As if she were on ice, Kat walked slowly in a shaft that tunnelled south of the barn. Her feet were burned in several places, though how badly she wasn’t sure. She’d not wanted to inspect her wounds until her journey was over. But as the adrenalin had drained from her muscles, her feet had begun to throb with an agony that interfered with her ability to think clearly.

  And the further she travelled beneath the earth, the more the madness seeped from her mind. When the tunnel curved from sight, she again reflected upon being in the realm of the abominations that had burst from the earth to dismember anything within their terrible reach.

  She unwisely recalled the skull of the piper in the barn: how it had been squashed flat like a melon under a truck tyre. She felt the cold air of the passage along her prickling arms more keenly then. She thought of Steve too and the horrid goblet from which the red folk had supped their murky brew. Her footsteps shortened, became hesitant. The idea of being lost below the ground took hold of her mind.

  Avoiding whatever this ancient ground had kept hidden was her priority and yet the jeopardy she faced was equal to her need to avenge herself against Willows and his brood. Only the weasel son would pose any serious resistance and she calculated that he was a risk worth taking. So she carried on, her hearing groping ahead of her.

  They would receive no mercy either, because once the red holes in their faces had been shut they’d not be calling it into the world again.

  The tunnel turned once more. Around the bend there were more walls of stone: a rough ceiling, a worn floor, mined and levelled. She doubted that Tony could hobble much farther than this. He’d needed his daughter to support his feeble progress in and out of the abattoir above. Last seen, his queen had also been carried by the rangy stoat she’d sired. Such were the burdens and the haste of their children, they’d failed to seal the door behind them.

  The deeper Kat journeyed, thicker power cables bracketed the walls, attesting to a greater demand for electricity. When the tunnel forked, she found a metal door buried six metres inside the rock. An annexe.

  The main tunnel curved out of sight, disappearing into an unlit void. Down there, the lights were off.

  Kat listened, sniffed the air. Her instincts balked anew at the idea of being drawn deeper inside the earth.

  Instead, she returned her attention to the steel door. Perhaps she might get lucky and find them all cowering behind it. She tugged the handle and the door swung wide.

  Opening the door was akin to drawing blackout curtains from windows bright with sunlight.

  At first she thought the door was an exit, opening onto the outside world. But there was no rain. No diesel sky or grey air when Kat looked up at where she thought the sun must be, where such warmth radiated to bathe her face.

  Instead of the sun, great yellow bulbs hung inside black umbrellas. Cables looped fro
m the rig on the ceiling and reached walls covered in white rectangles of insulation: walls padded with what resembled floor mats in a gymnasium. And what she mistook, at a glance, for a glade of small ferns, carpeting the floor of a wood, were thick rows of identical green plants.

  The bright foliage grew to the height of her knees. From stalks, spiky, blade-shaped leaves protruded. She recognised the serrated shapes of the leaves from her time in London: silhouettes that were often printed on merchandise and smoking paraphernalia in places like Camden Market. Cannabis plants, their aroma overpowering. A perfume she now associated with delirium and terror, with bloodshed.

  Kat stepped inside the room and looked about herself in astonishment. The rumours Steve had heard about Brickburgh’s illegal crops were true. When she hadn’t wanted to listen, Matt Hull had hesitantly tutored her in the same local criminal mythology. Redstone Farm was a drug plantation: it concealed a vast cannabis crop beneath the ground. A red harvest grown close to a ghastly slaughterhouse.

  Whoever threatened this subterranean crop was despatched. Steve, Matt, Helene’s brother, walkers and campers who’d strayed too close: they must all have been deviously or ritually murdered.

  This cavernous room explained why so much of the crop was incinerated in braziers during those rites in the barn, to facilitate the disordering of minds committing acts of such savage degeneracy. They had produce to spare.

  Had Kat suspected that nothing would ever shock her again, she’d have been mistaken.

  She recalled the sounds of the large vehicles and motorbikes that morning and of a small aircraft landing at the farm the night Steve had been butchered. Here was an established business. The neglected farmhouse and dilapidated outbuildings containing makeshift cells, abattoirs: all a functioning camouflage.

  Matt Hull’s claim of local corruption was no exaggeration either and she considered the smarmy detective, Lewis: he was on the payroll. Others would be too; perhaps those in local government and business. How deep did the scarlet roots of Redstone Farm reach? She could only guess but they’d extended deeply enough to keep all of this hidden for years.

  The discovery of this crop, the sheer industrial scale of the operation, would summon everything that law enforcement commanded, near and far. No wonder the red folk had killed with impunity to protect it. The multiple murders, masquerading as cases of missing persons, would now require fresh investigations. Every local report of a missing person would have to be pursued anew. Willows’s entire operation would need unravelling.

  Kat’s head hurt at the thought of what this tiny part of the world now faced.

  Uniformed officers were already on site. Soon they would be everywhere: cordons and perimeter guards established; men in white suits painstakingly picking across the ground, inch by inch; grisly leavings in the barn encased in polythene tents; samples subjected to forensic scrutiny. This would become another dig and one to rival that of the Brickburgh Caverns: two sites of mass murder from different periods existing on the same land.

  But even here, her instincts as a journalist prevailed: she knew she was on the brink of a monumental story. A story with a final chapter that she’d been instrumental in writing. And she vowed to find every last red tendril that twisted above or below this ground, because she was part of this. Unwittingly, she and her dead boyfriend and poor Helene must have contributed to the sudden demise of the red folk and their operation.

  The Willows must also have known that the end was coming. They’d panicked at the sound of the siren. Perhaps they’d also been losing control of whatever it was that they’d fattened below the ground. Isn’t that what Tony had alluded to? That they’d brought it too close to the surface? Who or what had been in control here?

  How could the forces of reason ever conceive and accept what she’d witnessed in that barn, twice? Surely her narrative would be dismissed as the ramblings of a lunatic, a woman in deep shock, a woman who’d killed. Her own hands were no longer clean.

  Kat recalled, and so brightly that her memory glistened, what she’d recently done in the living room of the house above. An execution.

  Did I?

  She squirmed with revulsion at herself. Squeezing her eyes shut, she forced herself to blank her mind. She leaned against the nearest row of plant beds until the wave of nausea passed.

  Then moved through the crop, desperate for fresh air, her old self reviving and waking from that half-sleep: moment by moment, she felt as if she were breaking from a trance she’d occupied with her eyes open. What she’d seen and done were merging, dreamlike, with the artificial sunshine that warmed her face.

  Between the parallel beds, her fingertips trailed through the spiky fronds until she reached the door at the far end of the subterranean greenhouse. The cave was at least thirty metres long by twenty across and as large as the Grand Chamber of Brickburgh, hidden beside the sea.

  Passing through a connecting door, where the plantation’s rows came to an end, she entered a second chamber. The walls were darker but it was lit from above with the same lights as the greenhouse.

  From black wires, looping like skipping ropes to the far wall, great bunches of what resembled brewer’s hops or bunches of drying oregano hung upside down in fat bushels.

  The wires on the far side of the room had been cleared of their harvest. Detritus, similar to dried spice, littered the floor and stuck to her stinging feet: fragments disrupted from a crop partially and hastily gathered.

  At the far end of the second chamber a metal ladder ascended to the ceiling. Kat saw it but didn’t go to it. Instead, she gaped at what was crafted upon the chamber’s walls.

  She’d seen similar murals at the exhibition in Exeter and the illustrations here told a similar story to those on the walls of the Brickburgh Caves. Between two dense bushels of drying weed, a squashed, doggish snout, fashioned from haematite and charcoal, stained the wall. Red-eyed, jaws open, the hideous jackal-head was supported by human shoulders and the voluptuous body of a woman curved below the creature’s hirsute throat. A figure that might have grimaced upon these walls for forty thousand years.

  In their time below, had the most recent dwellers found something? A thing timelessly vile that former inhabitants had also known intimately? A thing they’d fed each other to, from one frozen era into another?

  The scale of such a thought made Kat dizzy, and she felt the full effects of her fatigue more keenly now than for days, and in every part of her body. Her head teemed with horror: images of shattered bones, the tiny skull of a child, a row of flint hand-axes, a lined mouth suckling a wet jawbone by the red light of a pyre . . .

  All of her waking thoughts and her dreams would lead here, to this farm, and to these caves, always, for ever. And to what she’d seen.

  At the foot of the ladder, before she climbed out, Kat turned and took a final look of startled disbelief. The cave system must be truly enormous. The coast was three miles away but the archaeologists were tunnelling towards the farm. A physical connection between the two places must exist. The dig had slowly and meticulously followed a route inland for three years, moving from one buried cave to another, excavating a hidden story, but always unwittingly heading towards the Willows clan and into the present.

  51

  ‘Tony, Tony, my old friend.’ The voice was muffled by a mask concealing most of the speaker’s head, a visage incompatible with the elegant room in which the man sat.

  Through the hairy black jaws of the headpiece, small blue eyes glittered within two fleshy beds of tanned skin, transmitting a cold, excited gaze. Perhaps a grin was concealed by the mask, one that was mirthless.

  Four ragged, breathless figures gasped and panted beneath the small dais that the beast-headed man’s chair was raised upon.

  Strong light greeted Tony Willows and his family and it made them blink like moles; such an illumination hadn’t existed in the passages they’d traversed for miles to get here. The natural light and white walls also invited an unflattering scrutiny of
their stained and dishevelled bodies. They’d fled their home of decades without coats or shoes.

  ‘An old friend. That is exactly what I am, Adrian,’ Tony called in a jovial, chummy tone, despite his wheezing.

  Tony’s face was waxy and moist beneath what stain remained on his features. The journey had nearly killed him but his rich voice managed to summon itself and fill the room. A chamber tiled in white and blue from floor to ceiling, save where long rectangular windows were divided by Doric columns. Classical Grecian in style, this odd hexagonal space might have been an ostentatious conservatory with a sea view.

  There was no furniture in the chamber beside the two seats on the dais, each upholstered in red velvet. Only a floor that discreetly sloped to a metal grate in the centre suggested the chamber’s function: a form of wet room.

  A hazy grey seascape existed soundlessly beyond its rain-speckled windows. Outside and around the curious chamber, a great white building crowned the cliffs. The impressive structure was visible through the glass roof: a schloss perched on a cliff edge like a forward observation point.

  Tony smiled, spreading his arms. ‘And to this old friend I have come to request that an agreement be fulfilled. A pact made in better times. Old dogs know how times change. So quickly. But there you have it.’

  ‘All over, is it, Tony?’ The masked figure asked.

  ‘Aye, all over.’

  ‘No time for a last encore?’

  Tony bristled at that remark as if he wanted no reminder of his musical past.

  Finn held his mother in his thin arms like she was his babe. He grimaced, his ruddy face streaked with sweat. ‘Would a chair be too much to ask for? You can see who we have here!’

  The masked figure turned his attention to the younger man but only for a moment did his stare linger. All four guests tensed. The eyes within that doglike maw had ratcheted from spiteful mirth to something even less appealing, like wrath, before relaxing. ‘A chair for the witch-wife of Redstone,’ the masked figure called out, his tone droll, irreverent, dismissive. ‘She’s missing her throne.’