The Reddening

by Adam Nevill

  From the rear of the room, one of the two men who flanked the closed entrance opened a white door and stepped outside.

  A second masked figure sat beside Adrian in an identical chair. A woman who turned her head and muttered something to him. She was dressed in white jeans and an expensive print blouse, her pampered feet strapped into jewelled sandals of golden leather. The fingernails of her idle hands were painted red. Adrian wore a blue cotton shirt, tan chinos and leather loafers without socks.

  Had the couple not been wearing the mangy and frightful animal masks, which seemed to have been plucked from a props wardrobe in an unappealing theatre, or from the basement shelves of a museum of curiosities, they would have passed as a wealthy couple relaxing before a private view of the sea.

  One of the chamber’s doors opened and closed, readmitting the retainer who’d gone outside. He returned with a patio chair and carelessly dropped it beside Finn and his mother.

  ‘Taken by surprise, eh?’ Adrian asked, grinning through his black muzzle. ‘News travels. But how much did you get out, Tony?’

  Tony looked to Finn, who answered. ‘Enough.’

  Tony shrugged. ‘They came sooner than we anticipated.’

  Adrian sighed. ‘You trust imbeciles with a job and you get an imbecile’s work. She swam, Tony. From way out. That girl with the recordings. The woman whose brother managed to instal microphones on your land in broad daylight. And from where you dropped her in the water, she swam back to shore. All that way by herself. Can you imagine it?’

  ‘Impossible,’ Finn said.

  Ignoring him, the masked man continued to address only Tony. ‘Fishermen yanked her out near Slagcombe. She’s been in Divilmouth Hospital overnight. From there she was taken by the police to the gates of your proud establishment earlier today. That beating but much exposed heart of your operation.’

  Tony and his son exchanged glances.

  Adrian’s eyes twinkled with competitive, triumphant amusement. To increase their embarrassment and misery, the man in the mask continued to explain their failings. ‘We had word from the hospital early this morning. I doubt you were even awake when the news came in. And I assume you wasted valuable time today, preparing one of your barbaric rites for the journalist. The one you also failed to deal with. By all accounts, she escaped from your care too. You had her on a platter and yet she escaped. Our mutual friend Louie brought us up to speed.’

  ‘We got her again,’ Tony said.

  No longer encumbered by his mother in his arms, Finn stepped forward. His fists were clenched. ‘You knew. You knew the girl we threw in the drink survived? You never warned us?’

  Tony touched his son’s arm gently to bid him be still. ‘She’s gone now, this hack, to the red. She won’t be coming back.’

  The shaggy head upon the throne nodded sagely, the motion grotesque. ‘Yet you waited until this morning to deal with her. You felt it prudent to wait because of your recent profligacy in matters of the red. You couldn’t risk another death so soon after that photographer and the paraglider and the girl in the water. Have I missed anyone, Tony? Hmm? How many people have been taken on your land, or near it, by those painted chimpanzees up at that landfill that you call a farm?’

  Finn took another step at the little dais. ‘The fuck! Who are you to question us?’ His voice was shrill, verging on unpleasantly feminine.

  ‘Son!’ Tony said, reaching for his arm. The father’s hand was evaded. Beside the door the two men stood straighter.

  The figure on the throne ignored Finn’s aggressive posturing and kept his eyes upon Tony. ‘Who knows what these bitches know or what they’ve jabbered to their confidants? Who can truly say what is known and what is not known now and by whom? It’s always been the way with you, old boy. Insecure. And if the events of this morning are anything to go by, I imagine all of us will suffer the consequences sooner rather than later. The whole area, every crop will have to be erased. Scorched earth. All of it.

  ‘So I’ve given this some thought, Tony. I’ve been forced to, even though I’d rather have been doing something else. But I arrived at an interesting conclusion. Hear me out.

  ‘We’ve paid off our debt to you, by protecting your situation for as long as possible, given your errancy, your indiscipline. I don’t think I’m being unfair. We’ve done more for you than you’ve ever done for us. You connected us but we’ve carried you for years, particularly on distribution. So it is you that has accrued the real debt and you no longer have a pot to piss in, do you? Your accounts will be frozen by teatime. Assets seized.’

  Tony’s jaw trembled. He tried to swallow whatever had blocked his throat but didn’t seem able to raise the strength. He appeared to be paralysed by a sense of injustice, by the terms of an imminent betrayal. He’d never liked Adrian. The man had expanded the business but he was a detestable snob. He’d always been dangerous too and a tricky bastard, but he was their most powerful neighbour and had guaranteed sanctuary if ever they’d needed it.

  Finn suffered no qualms about his behaviour as a guest. ‘What the fuck! Sanctuary has been requested! You don’t question it, you grant it! We want somewhere where we can clean up, before any decisions are made about what happens next. You’ve no fucking idea what we’ve had to do to keep it in the ground.’ He pointed a thin red arm at the elderly woman he’d placed on the chair. ‘My mother is exhausted. You haven’t a clue how volatile it’s become, or what we’ve given to keep it down. To placate it . . . We must have just lost another eight people. You talk to us about heavy lifting? You haven’t any idea, fucking around the harbour with your toy boats while we take the risks!’

  Sitting upon what increasingly resembled thrones, the two masked figures merely appeared amused by Finn’s outburst. They laughed, though humourlessly. Adrian even slapped his thighs and when he next spoke it was to Tony again. ‘You honestly believe that your shanty town is some kind of mother country? Hmm? And that we all look up to it? That being closer to the queens of old endows you with some divine right? Did you presume that we are your subjects, old man?

  ‘They’re digging their way inside your fetid bowels from those caves at Brickburgh, day by day. Coming right at you through the red earth. You’ve trespassers all over your farm, like ants because you left the sugar out. You’re careless. You lost touch, Tony, a long time ago and you let this psychotic run things.’ He indicated Finn with one lazy hand, without deigning to look at him.

  ‘To be so careless at such a time when things are so good for all in the red, near and far. The ecstasy must be contained, channelled. You’ve always over-indulged. It’s in your background, excess.

  ‘There are times and places for the red. And you’ve been warned, Tony. Plenty of times. You listened to that mutt of a son too much. And your wife is senile. To be frank, I’m disgusted.’ Inside the doggish, hairy snout of the mask, the little tanned nose wrinkled to emphasise its point.

  Too angry to speak, Finn Willows turned and gazed at his mother. He shook his head in exasperation as if the man’s temerity in criticising his family defied belief.

  ‘We know how to run this business,’ the masked woman at Adrian’s side said, with an air of self-satisfaction.

  ‘Shut your mouth, tart!’ Finn cried out, his voice breathless with exasperation. ‘You employed that bitch and the dickhead with the camera. They’re on you!’

  Adrian beckoned those at the door with a flick of his wrist. The two men stepped forward on command. Each man was stocky with a weathered face, over fifty, dressed in expensive yachting slickers and jeans. Besides a sullen determination, their eyes were blank.

  Neither man said a word as Tony’s son turned to face them. ‘What’s this? Are you fucking crazy? Adrian!’

  A few feet from Finn the two retainers lurched. The struggle was short. Before Finn managed to raise an arm he was snapped over. Whining in pain, he was separated from his family.

  Adrian stood up. Rotated his shoulders, stretched his back. He stepped from
his chair and came to stand before Finn, who spat at him as much as spoke. ‘You bastard. You bastard.’

  ‘No, I think you’ll find that you and your sister are the only bastards here. One can only guess at who it was that mounted your mother back in the day, amongst the fucking sheep.’

  ‘Adrian!’ Tony stepped forward.

  Nanna looked to her aged father beseechingly, as if she expected him to bring this scene to a swift end.

  Adrian ignored Tony. He spoke to Finn directly, though still casually as if he were merely discussing sports equipment. ‘You always stuck with the bout coupé up at your place. The original Neanderthal hand-axe. Traditional, you’d probably claim, when used for butchery. But when I feel the red, I tend to favour a leaf-shaped point, with a razor-sharp edge. I like to go deep, Devensian deep, you could say. I’m not a bludgeoner, Finn. None of us are, over this way. We’ve more restraint, more precision. Qualities that you baboons have always lacked.’

  From the small of his back Adrian produced a long piece of dark flint chipped carefully into a spear blade.

  ‘Cease!’ Jess finally called out from her chair, her voice frail yet imperious. ‘You don’t know the red. You never did, Adrian. You only know what I’ve shown you. The shallows. The river bank. Not the depths where your blood would run so cold. We’re in the depths now. All of us. The cycle was started when you were but a baby. So enough, or you’ll know a rage as red as this earth. It’s so close now. It never abates. It abides. So don’t you go thinking that I can’t bring it here.’

  Adrian looked up, grinning. He raised his voice to be heard over the woman’s snarling son. ‘What did you tell me, Jess, right at the very beginning? How did you explain it? Let me see if I can remember. Ah, yes, it was when you set an example with that druggy, the one with the microphones. You said that the only thing that mattered, the only thing that counted, was survival.

  ‘You said the tribes must always be pitiless to survive. Survive. And did one ancestral people not always succumb to another? Over and over again, right here? It’s our story, dear. You said so yourself.

  ‘And this is a time of plenty, not struggle. Or it was. None of this should even be happening. But some of us have not reached the end yet. We won’t, not for some time either. Your sources are imprecise.

  ‘You see, you’re not alone, Jess. Not as the wife. There are others. The red favours strength, nothing else and it’s been reaching out, further west, while your glorious era approached its sell-by date. Problem is, you never recognised it. You entered a most typical period of . . . degeneracy. Alas, history just repeats itself. We’ve all seen the writing on the walls, down below.’

  Adrian seized strands of Finn Willows’s hair, wisps clotted together with haematite, and raised the head as if he were holding a lamb in a slaughterhouse.

  The action of his arm beneath Finn’s ear was swift, the sawing back and forth. But the sound of the practised despatch was lost beneath the screams of his twin, Nanna Willows, which filled the elegantly tiled room to the rafters.

  Tony fell to his naked buttocks, his old face aghast, his eyes glassy, and watched his son’s blood stream hotly and splash brightly onto the tiles. Scarlet tributaries rushed for the grate.

  As Adrian worked, he spoke through clenched teeth. His porcine eyes within the doggish maw were truly awful to behold as the red came upon him: vicious and bestial but alight with an intelligent purpose that eschewed compassion.

  The cutting process seemed to last longer than it actually did and the Willows family beheld it with only the dregs of their earlier intoxication serving to dull their communal horror. And when the head of the heir of Redstone Farm was entirely severed from his bony shoulders, it was raised aloft by its sodden pony tail.

  Finn’s one good eye remained fixed upon his folk with a look of surprise. His bearded jaw feebly twitched at the air but he’d already said his last.

  From the chair his mother wailed. A terrible sound that might yet reverberate beneath the earth to echo through hidden, lightless spaces and vibrate along the old stone walls tunnelling below.

  Tony Willows tried to join her in this old lament but lacked the breath to form the customary chorus. He looked winded and broken at the death of his son, an act he hadn’t imagined possible until only a few moments before.

  The men who’d held Finn released his spent form and took his sister, pulling her away from her elderly parents. She looked no further than her mother for help. The terrible wear grooving her once beautiful face she earned anew in a heartbeat, her silence serving as perverse acknowledgement of a fate long anticipated. She never made another sound.

  With Tony on his bare, red backside, and his daughter held at the side of the chamber, Adrian wasted no time and moved to the witch-wife, dropping Finn’s head on the tiles behind his speckled heels. The thump of the skull on the ceramic surface was far more sickening than the preceding sounds of flint carving through a spinal column.

  Adrian clamped a tanned hand over Jess Usher’s mouth to silence the gruff baying of the elderly woman. ‘You’ve served us well, you old jackal. What you brought here was marvellous. I can’t thank you enough. Though that bit with the marrow? I know you’re one for tradition and for an exactitude drawn from what you see, but I’ve always thought that detail unnecessary.

  ‘You should have moved with the times. You never did and look at you now, you old fool. You’ve not long left as it is. You can’t even walk. When your legs went, your folk should have nested you in stone. That was when the trouble began. You kept on going. On and on and on and now the wheels have come off your chair, lass. The red has taken its toll. I know, I know. We’ve all watched it happen and it’s been sad to see. But we’ve another queen. All will be well under new management.

  ‘I promise you’ll be well cared for and placed in a good nest, deep in the floor. Our descendents will honour your bones too, those that survive us. Your remains are going deep too, where no one can dig ’em up. There will be reverence, tradition, all the rites at your funeral. You have my word. We know how it’s done.’

  Adrian moved further behind Jessica Usher and cut her wizened throat, scything his flint from beneath one shrivelled ear to the other. When her tatty head flopped to the side of her shoulders and lolled, spilling warmth from a new mouth beneath her jawbone, Adrian pointed his blade at Tony.

  ‘Old boy, you and Nanna are going to run. Not very far, I expect, because the sides of my combe are steep. But over here the grove isn’t a cave. We intend to make our provision of what must be given above the ground. You brought it up this far, way too far, but we’ll take it from here upon the red earth. There are other ways of managing them.’

  He nodded toward the windows. ‘It’s incredible. You’ll get to experience it first-hand too. We’ve a nice moon due and providing there’s no cloud, the old Creel will fall upon you in sufficient light so that we can watch it happen from up here. Personally, I cannot wait.

  ‘And even though you’ve fed the red like it’s a favourite hound, I don’t expect you’ll be shown any favours. You’ve noticed how boisterous they’ve become. That’s on you. All the other clans are in agreement. You’ve had this coming, old boy, and we need to get those bitches back on a leash.’

  Adrian paused to follow Tony’s horrified gaze: he wasn’t listening and only had eyes for Jessica Usher’s carcass.

  Adrian’s expression turned to disgust. ‘I don’t think she had long. What do you think? Sooner or later Creel would have had the lot of you in that shack and left you in bits. You brought them far, far too close. They should never have left the grove. You overfed them. You must have been fucking insane.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ Tony gibbered. ‘You think we wanted to? You don’t know what they demand –’

  ‘Yes, yes, Tony. But I want you to recognise this judgement as a kind of penance for endangering the rest of us. We’ve been the poor cousins but we’re absolutely pitiless when it comes to our survival. So out with t
he old, aye? Has ever been thus.’

  Adrian then took a moment to look down his front. His trousers and shirt were wet through. ‘Darling,’ he said to his wife. ‘I need to change. We’ve guests coming.’

  Rising from her chair, Sheila nodded. She stepped off the dais, moving carefully on shaking legs.

  52

  Helene's nose nuzzled Valda’s hair and inhaled the aroma of cherry shampoo. Under it the fragrance of infancy was still strong, a scent unique to small people.

  Slumped across her lap, her daughter was concentrating on the cartoon flashing on the television screen: a scene hectic with pink explosions, glamorous fairies and what resembled toads.

  Helene had watched the news headlines while Valda took her collection of toy squirrels through complicated social routines, before changing the channel so that Valda could watch a show before bedtime.

  Valda stayed up until 8.30 now. An extra hour granted each night since her mum had returned from Devon. And even when her daughter was tucked in, Helene still sat beside her bed, or lay alongside her until she fell asleep. Five months before, she’d come close to never being able to do that again.

  She anticipated no end to the bad dreams either. At night, Helene often returned to Redstone before awaking with a jolt, her hair soaked.

  Those nights, she’d always get out of bed to check on the small sleeping figure next door because in most of these dreams she and Valda were in the water. Black water beneath a lightless sky and no matter how hard Helene swam towards the distressed cries of her daughter, towards glimpses of that small, pale head that bobbed between the waves of night, she never reached the girl, or even moved any closer. Instead, she’d drift further away.