The Reddening

by Adam Nevill

  In other dreams the two of them were chased by what might have been large dogs, across the very land that she’d once wandered to find the place where her brother had made recordings in a quarry. In those dreams, the big muscular forms that she never saw clearly would laugh and chatter and gabble along the valley floors. Valda’s little legs were never able to move fast enough, so Helene would be forced to carry the child in her arms, while her heart thumped fit to burst and her legs turned numb and clumsy.

  Other nights, she’d dream of Lincoln. And she’d most often see him before the pitch-black opening of a cave, or a tunnel, or a gap in some rocks. Apertures all covered in long vines and purple flowers that made her nervous.

  Lincoln would smile and talk to her in these scenes about things she could never recall on waking. But he’d chat innocently and she would awake with a strong sense that he knew everything about her and Valda.

  Sometimes he’d be a small boy, appearing as vividly as anyone can appear in a dream, and he’d be wearing clothes that she’d long forgotten he’d ever worn. The boy Lincoln would play a thin flute inside the mouth of a cave and she would run to him, only to watch the small figure begin to cry and reach for her hands as if she was his mother. But the boy was never able to prevent his own slow progress backwards and into the dark where his voice would fade. No matter how hard she begged him to stay with her, no matter how hard she cried, he’d always walk backwards until his small freckled face vanished from sight.

  Helene felt grateful for any night, or afternoon nap, when she woke without remembering her dreams. On waking, she was happiest if she hadn’t dreamed at all.

  She also swam more than ever before. She would not let her terror swamp her when she looked at the clear blue water of the pool in the leisure centre. She would force herself to get in and she would swim hard and only stop once her shoulders burned and her breath grew ragged.

  The others at the local self-help group she attended in Sutton Coldfield, and the counsellor she was seeing for cognitive behavioural therapy, all thought her swimming was a positive sign of managing her trauma.

  Valda giggled. Something in her show had amused her. Her mother tried to smile but her attention was mostly consumed by what she’d seen on the evening news. And when was the farm and what existed below it, not in the news?

  Seven million pounds: that was the value the police had just revised and affixed to the annual yield of the drug crop discovered in the four underground plantations on Redstone Farm.

  She had difficulty keeping track of how many councillors had resigned from the Brickburgh council and in the neighbouring boroughs. But another two had just gone from their positions in local government amidst the usual allegations of payments of dirty money into their bank accounts, large sums they were struggling to justify being earned from ‘consultancy work’.

  Five police officers, including two senior officers and the Police and Crime Commissioner for the county, had been suspended or had resigned ahead of facing charges. A detective was being investigated for his involvement in several murders and abductions.

  Further down the food chain, a stream of electricians and builders, assorted tradesmen, every employee at a food distribution centre, the owners of four large yachts and even a headmaster had all been arrested. A holiday camp and four new hotels were implicated and had been closed.

  The investigation was in its fifth month. The harbour town and the surrounding farmland had been turned over: every barn and boatshed searched from Brickburgh to the banks of the Divilmouth Estuary. The man Helene had briefly known as Phil, a crew member from the boat that had ferried her out to sea, was found pretty soon after the police had ‘rescued’ her and Kat. She and Kat had been found wandering towards the outbuildings of Redstone Farm, not long after Kat had discovered the first underground plantation. Phil had since proved very useful to the police.

  At Divilmouth police station she and Kat had been separated and Kat was kept in custody for a long time, because of what she had done to the man with the bad leg, the pig captain, who’d taken Helene out to the channel in his new boat so that he could drown her.

  That boat had been another asset purchased with illegal earnings and was also being held as evidence in a police yard, in preparation for another trial that she would have to attend as a witness.

  Kat had also killed an elderly woman during that red and frantic time that they’d both endured. A woman who Kat claimed had been one half of a couple who’d kept her captive at her home: a mother and son whose real names she’d never known. But though the woman’s identity had been established, her body had still not been recovered. The woman’s son, a local man implicated in the criminal organisation at Redstone Farm, remained in a coma, brain-damaged from the injuries the journalist had inflicted upon him.

  The news channels no longer showed the picture of Lincoln, the photograph, sourced from their mother, of him sitting in her garden, taken a year before he’d disappeared. In the picture he had been smiling. Maybe he’d just cracked one of his quips or jokes. Her mother couldn’t remember exactly, but he’d dropped in for a few days after exploring some canals in the centre of Birmingham, where he’d made recordings of echoes and other noises. She had taken a picture because he’d grown a long reddish beard. She’d thought he’d been the spitting image of her father.

  That had been one of seventeen photographs shown of those who’d gone missing, or whose apparent suicides in parts of the South West had been called into question and were being reinvestigated, as far back as the 1980s. Helene had only recognised the pictures of her brother and Steve, the photographer.

  Some remains of the missing had been found in the myriad tunnels and caverns beneath the area referred to as Seven Quarries. Bone fragments and teeth had been connected to six of the missing individuals, though what had reduced the human remains to such a deplorable state had not been caught, or seen, as the police and forensic investigation had continued below the red earth of Redstone.

  It was believed that the family at the head of the criminal organisation had escaped shortly before the police had arrived at Redstone Farm, the morning after Helene had swum for her life and for her daughter’s future to reach the shore.

  The very family that Kat had been looking for when Helene came across her in the aftermath of the slaughter at the farm, the now notorious Willows family, had comprised two elderly people and their middle-aged twin children. Helene had briefly encountered the twins but not the parents. None of them had ever been caught.

  The father, Tony, had once been a famous musician, but Helene had never heard of him before that interview she’d given the police in a hospital bed in Divilmouth. Nor had she ever before seen the clips from The Old Grey Whistle Test and the festivals. Broadcasters kept showing a performance recorded in the Seventies of Tony Willows playing a mandolin and another of him dressed as a Morris dancer at Knebworth. He didn’t look at all capable of becoming the head of a vast, organised, ruthless criminal gang and Helene understood why so many people for so long had found the whole story difficult to accept.

  The ‘attack dogs’ to which this family had fed their victims had remained the greatest enigma. They had killed the first two police officers on the scene and dismembered eight members of the strange, ghastly cult that had served the drug empire. But the animals had never been found. They’d either been destroyed and hidden or removed by the fleeing Willows family. Like their owners, they’d remained at large. The police were currently looking for the family in Spain and Portugal.

  The journalist, Kat, whom she’d known so briefly, had remained in hospital for a long time. After they’d been picked up outside the still-smoking barn, Kat had remained under police protection while she’d helped with their ‘inquiries’.

  The charges against Kat had been dropped but there were many rumours about her mental health and she’d been transferred to an institution somewhere up north. She and Kat had not spoken since that afternoon at Redstone Cross, where Helen
e had watched the woman – a lifestyle journalist whom she’d struggled to recognise during their second and third meetings – destroy a human being by hand with a sharpened rock.

  Eventually, Helene turned her attention away from the latest news and from her own grim memories. She checked the time.

  ‘Bedtime,’ she whispered, squeezing her daughter gently and drying her moist eyes in the little girl’s hair.

  53

  The room reminded Kat of her room in her halls of residence at university: a single bed, a laminate desk combined with a shelving unit, one chair, blue carpet tiles as rough as a scouring pad, terrible curtains. She’d felt comfortable and safe there.

  Despite a growing desire to leave, swelling over the last month, her mood was maudlin on the eve of her last night in the room. Her feelings were strangely akin to the day she’d left university, over twenty years ago, to start anew in the world without a job or much money in her bank account.

  Kat had since decided that anyone might benefit from time out in an institution, now and again, to be sealed from what was hurting them out there. The idea was no longer as crazy as it might have sounded to her five months before. With the right medication, gallons of tea, much time spent talking to people who listened and the space to actually think her life through, her time at the hospital hadn’t been so bad. Time, distance, more sleep than she’d ever had in her life and not giving a shit about her weight for once had all been good medicine. All of it.

  She placed her hand on the bed covers and smoothed then out. Her tummy cramped from nerves and she wondered whether she should visit the bathroom.

  Reg and Delia would arrive the following morning: she imagined they’d be prompt too, bang on ten. She imagined their faces whenever they saw the hospital’s sign at the end of the drive, branded by the NHS Trust. What came next would not be easy for them. They’d been kind.

  With a smile, Kat imagined what Steve might have said about the situation that she was about to enter, alone with his parents.

  Well, you did kill two people, Kat. With a rock and a bloody rolling pin. Mum’s bound to be a bit nervous about having you in the spare room. She’ll avoid discussing specifics in any situation but will sleep with one eye open. Trust me.

  Kat looked at her bump, took her hands from the bed and stroked her tummy, caressing their unborn child. A little miracle she often talked to. Steve did too, in her head.

  Through Delia and Reg’s desire to help her with this child, she’d accepted how much they’d loved their son, unconditionally. And now she was carrying their grandson, the sole factor in the entire debacle that brought joy to any of them.

  The forthcoming battles she imagined waging with Delia, a woman who’d be unable to restrain her proprietary tendencies with the baby, Kat vowed to manage with the same techniques she’d learned through her CBT sessions at the hospital. Those skills would help her understand how she’d feel whenever Delia crossed the line. Severe feelings of victimisation and powerlessness still occasionally swamped her, but the aggressiveness that grew from that distress she managed much better now. The red part of her, that’s what she called it and that was how she would always refer to it. She’d always had the red inside her, always. She’d even come to believe that everyone did too. But she’d never imagined that it was limitless.

  Kat would continue her therapy. She liked it. Delia had already sourced a Mind group in North Devon, close to where she’d eventually be living. She’d meet others in her situation, just like she’d done here: people who’d suffered psychotic episodes and been the victims of the violent, of predators.

  Steve’s mum and dad had sold her cottage and found a new flat for her, where she’d eventually live with her son. They’d also paved a smooth path from the door of her room at the hospital to their holiday cottage in Cornwall, where she’d spend her first few weeks outside, with them, before going to her new home: her flat, west of the moors. It looked nice in the pictures they’d shown her.

  At times, Delia even held her hand now. She’d finally entered the inner circle of Steve’s family. Steve would have appreciated that irony too.

  Kat dabbed her eyes with the back of a knuckle.

  With her books and computer all packed away and awaiting Reg’s Range Rover in the morning, her thoughts returned to her first night at the hospital, the last time the room had been so Spartan and empty.

  Kat had been detained in the secure hospital for five months. Initially, she’d been taken from the farm to Accident and Emergency in the big hospital in Torbay, where they had a room for conducting psychiatric assessments.

  Her criteria had quickly been established as ‘high risk’ and she’d been judged as someone suffering from a ‘severe psychotic episode’. Under the Mental Health Act of 1983, she was deemed to have presented a ‘significant danger’ to ‘others’ and to herself, because of the ‘profound degree of violence and aggression’ that she’d displayed in her cottage and then at the farm.

  She’d told the doctors and nurses that it was just as well she had been able to summon such a ‘profound degree of violence’, or she’d never have been around to be assessed.

  She’d consented to the treatment the doctors advised, both in A&E and at this hospital, even though they hadn’t needed her consent. That’s how bad a case she’d been in their eyes. And even after all she’d been through, their judgement about her mental health still upset and shocked her. This was how other people saw her now, including Reg and Delia, even though they were careful to hide it.

  The idea that she posed a ‘risk of harm’ to others shamed her more than it hurt. But the diagnosis was not one that she found herself able to convincingly argue against for long.

  No physical restraint had been involved when they took her into care, into the system: she was merely led to a secluded room beside A&E where anti-psychotics were injected to reduce her agitation and the distress that had consumed her outside the boundary of the farm.

  Dry-mouthed, restless and twitching, then drowsy and uncommunicative, often dizzy, constipated, she’d been brought to this hospital and that’s where she’d stayed.

  Her anti-psych medication was soon stopped because of the side-effects, once it had been established that she was pregnant.

  The worst of the side-effects passed within a few days after she was clear of the medication but the taint of her ‘delusional disorder’ had meant she’d needed to be kept in this room. The thoughts and hallucinations about the farm’s barn that she’d persisted in sharing had guaranteed her confinement. Her medical records hadn’t done her any favours either.

  * * *

  Last night.

  Kat went and sat at her desk and recorded her feelings in her diary.

  She’d done a lot of writing at the desk: enough to require massages to ease her lower back pain. From what she’d gathered online and from newspapers and magazines (which never stopped running features about the Willows family, the murders and the drug farm), she’d already produced a pretty good structure for the book she planned to write.

  Her own story would form the narrative spine. The prologue she’d already written and augmented with excerpts from her diary in a psychiatric hospital. From that point, she’d take the reader all the way back to the press conference in Plymouth, where the contents of the first cave were officially shared with the world.

  She had contacts in publishing and knew there would be significant interest in her story; she’d even fantasised about a newspaper serialisation. And she would include the story of what it was like to be a new mother who’d barely escaped death several times, but who’d emerged a survivor blessed with a child that she’d been told she was incapable of conceiving. A miracle baby.

  When she closed her diary, Kat checked the corridor outside her room. All was quiet so she returned to her desk and opened her makeup bag. She’d not worn cosmetics for months, not even when Sheila or Steve’s parents had visited. But she’d go out there tomorrow with her face on.

&
nbsp; She began applying her favourite red lipstick and her fingers trembled enough to irritate her. As she applied the cosmetic to her mouth she also felt a curious, reckless impulse to allow the slippery head of the stick to skirt her mouth: to go out of bounds, to slide beyond her lips.

  The colour of the lipstick must have excited her imagination because when she closed her eyes, she acknowledged a now familiar idea that another red face existed behind her own.

  When Kat opened her eyes she wiped at the lipstick on her top lip to produce a crimson streak at the side of her mouth. She smeared the cosmetic further, across the pale skin of her cheek.

  This made her whole face and scalp flush, her throat too. She felt hot all over and absurdly guilty.

  Her limbs loosened.

  Restless, she leaned back and placed her hands upon her womb and acknowledged what had been a rare and sudden episode of arousal. There’d not been many of those inside this room. And again, so strangely and unexpectedly, she’d also recognised a need to run. A compulsion born of a body that seemed to have discovered a trapped source of energy. These sensations were not unpleasant; they were the opposite.

  Out of curiosity, Kat wiped a little more of the lipstick onto her cheekbones, on both sides of her face. Then she leaned forward in her cushioned seat and, using the pads of her fingertips, rubbed the cosmetic into her skin with more purpose, circling the bones below her eyes: slowly, sensually, applying a rouge with fingertips, reddening her pale skin.

  When she sat back, the sight of her face in the mirror made her breath catch.

  Closing her eyes, she calmed herself and this time she didn’t repress the images that appeared inside her mind. She let them form, let them grow.

  And so clearly did that land, beneath the white sky, appear to her: a long pale place, so open and so wild.

  Story Notes: About This Horror

  Although I set most of Lost Girl and Under a Watchful Eye in South Devon, the part of England where I've been living since 2014, The Reddening is the first story in which I sensed the landscape, climate, atmospheres and tones were finally settling at a more meaningful depth in my imagination and thoughts.