The Reddening

by Adam Nevill

  ‘Who is?’

  Did Carol mean the people that Kat wanted her to meet? So had Kat just called her to say that she couldn’t make it but the others were available? ‘Sorry, Carol, who is waiting?’

  Carol ended the call.

  ‘What the . . .?’ Helene reopened the call to her mother. ‘Mom, gotta fly. Someone’s downstairs. I think it’s the people I’m supposed to meet.’ They hurried their goodbyes.

  Once she’d had a moment to consider the two incoming calls Helen guessed that if the visitors were the people that Lincoln had known, then maybe Kat might be with them after all. The solitary ‘Sorry’ on the phone might have been an apology for being so late.

  There’d be no time now to go out and eat. But surely her brother’s acquaintances wouldn’t just show up at the Red Barn? They didn’t know her. At the festival Kat had said they’d been working during the day.

  Confused and irritable, Helene left her room. From the staircase she could see the ground-floor hallway. It was empty.

  The lounge doubled as a dining room and was also deserted. The front door was open but no one stood in the porch. Damp air drifted into the building carrying a vague scent of manure. Beyond the porch, the blue ink of early night pressed the land and chilled the air.

  Helene peered out of the entrance. Only her car was parked on the forecourt. She walked to the reception desk and dinged the bell. ‘Hello? Carol?’

  Earlier, Carol had been civil with Helene, or courteously uninterested, and had discouraged any conversation beyond stilted small talk. Being in receipt of a stranger’s charity had made Helene feel awkward, so when she’d collected the keys she’d mentioned the reason for her visit and thanked Carol for her kindness.

  Carol had merely considered her with blank indifference or even irritation. A reaction that had also suggested she didn’t know Kat. So perhaps the journalist was owed a favour through the magazine and Carol was a contact as opposed to a friend? Helene didn’t know, but ever since she’d arrived, the situation had grown weirder and more frustrating by the hour.

  ‘Hello, Carol?’ Helene repeated over the reception counter.

  ‘They’re here for you.’ That was Carol’s voice in the room behind the reception counter, situated to the side of the desk.

  Helene leaned over the front desk and peered in the direction of Carol’s voice. ‘Sorry, who is?’

  Through an open door a kitchen became visible. Carol was preparing food with her back to the entrance. Helene recognised the thin shoulders and the small birdlike frame topped by a functional bob of thick grey hair. ‘Sorry, Carol, no one seems to be here. Carol?’

  When Carol turned around, Helene understood even less about why she’d been called downstairs but she also wished that Carol had remained facing forwards. The sight of her was a shock because the woman had painted her face red, a bright blood-red from lined forehead to grooved chin.

  Was she injured? But then, did people in pain grin to reveal oversized teeth amidst the stained scarlet flesh of their mouths? The incongruity of the red skin amidst the hood of grey hair appeared especially fiendish: grotesque in contrast to the woman’s ordinary clothing, the brown trousers and floral-patterned blouse.

  The woman’s throat was also stained red, indicating that her entire body beneath the clothing might be dyed.

  As Helene tried to fathom if Carol’s appearance had some bizarre connection to the nearby festival and to those characters waving from the flatbed truck, a patter of bare feet announced a new presence inside reception: behind her.

  Helene turned. What had come in through the open door of the Red Barn, or had been hiding on the ground floor, immediately reduced her to a motionless gawping. And when one of the red things issued the first shriek and rushed at her, all she managed to do was clap a hand to her chest to steady her heart.

  20

  When Kat closed her eyes the darkness spun but nothing came up to dribble into the toilet bowl. After what she'd seen, she hadn't trusted her stomach with more than a few pieces of dry toast and plain biscuits in days.

  The woman in the headscarf was waiting for her on the landing, watching through the open door. Either the woman or the bearded man followed her about her tiny home now, everywhere, from room to room. They were occupying her existence, or what remained of it.

  The bearded man had just retaken possession of her phone. He’d yanked it from her hand once she’d made the pitiful attempt at phoning Helene.

  During the call to the guesthouse, Kat had been unable to follow their script and instructions. Her uninvited visitors had been especially displeased when she’d failed to tell Helene: ‘Some people who knew your brother are coming to see you.’ Instead, all she’d managed was a solitary word encased by a sob: ‘Sorry.’ And that might have been the first truthful thing that she’d said to Helene since asking her to return to Devon.

  During the brief call, as with all the calls they’d made her make, the bearded man had been gripping her hair in his fist and his horrid breath had slathered her cheeks and left them moist. In his other hand he’d held a flint knife against her throat.

  But Kat was sorry. So dreadfully sorry. She’d never been as sorry in her life: the apology a caustic blend of guilt, remorse, self-loathing and fear. Pretty much how she’d felt for every waking second of each day and night since they’d come for her. Kat had lured Helene Brown here to die.

  Matt Hull must have been the first to go. Then Steve. Oh, God, Steve. Steve. Steve . . . Now it was Helene’s turn. A mother to that sweet little girl.

  And then you. Then it’s your turn. You’re next.

  Kat hated the people who’d invaded her home and life more than she’d hated anyone or anything in her entire existence. She hadn’t known it was possible to hate someone with a force and fury that burned like an ember swallowed whole. By comparison, her hatred of her ex, Graham, was a petty aversion.

  For brief moments she even believed herself capable of attacking her jailers and tearing their faces apart with her fingernails. But in these passing moments of incendiary fury, she would remember the painful clench of the man’s rough hands whenever the bearded bastard got hold of her arms and dragged her to and from the cottage to make her run their errands. The sensation of those brutish hands on her, twisting and burning the skin of her wrists, had left a permanent trace.

  Her captors had not stood more than a few feet from her since the night they’d tapped at her window.

  They said they aren’t going to kill you if you do what they ask of you.

  Kat hated herself during the moments when she tried to believe her abductors’ assurances about her safety. She was a coward: even after all they had done to her and to the man she loved, she still followed their instructions to the letter. Years of avoiding stress and responsibility had set their own insidious precedent.

  You have no choice.

  She’d seen what they could do and would do again to anyone they decided was a threat to . . . to what? To what they were doing. Those psychotic and loathsome practices out at that awful farm.

  The person she’d been before the night they took her to Redstone Farm was gone, over. Now she was a woman far more broken than she’d ever been in London. That time in her life seemed silly now. Those travails with jobs and bullies and her ex were irrelevant; the breakups and redundancies, the drunkenness and tears, all nonsense.

  She’d not known what rock-bottom was because she’d never before experienced things on this earth that were too awful for most people to even imagine. And she’d done far more than merely imagine these things: while on her knees in the dirt and the stinking darkness of that barn, she’d been forced to bear witness to them. She’d heard every sound that had arisen from the very ground of that place.

  Kat slipped her head back over the toilet bowl, retched, gasped for breath.

  How could anyone defend themselves against that? Steve hadn’t been able to or Matt Hull. Fit men. What chance did she have? She’d never physica
lly struck another person in her life. And the red folk went further than mere beatings. Much further. There were so many of them too.

  So many.

  Her turn would come soon. It would have to. She didn’t know the names of the two people in her home and had never seen them before they’d invaded her life. But she would recognise their faces anywhere now. She’d seen their colleagues too, their partners in crime: those they’d colluded with to murder in ways this land couldn’t have known in millennia. Even though all of their faces had been painted red, she’d recognise them again.

  She also knew who was behind what they were doing and what they’d done to Steve and probably to others. Assuredly, Kat knew far too much. And after Helene disappeared and now her brother’s discs had changed hands then what use was she to the red folk?

  Kat washed her face and left the bathroom. ‘I’d like to go to my room now,’ she said to the woman in the headscarf, who squinted at her in a manner that was now horribly familiar. A scrunched expression, the eye sockets creasing like wrinkled linen about permanently narrowed eyes: as hard and mean as the shard of flint she carried in an old, veiny hand. Bitter eyes, so alight with suspicion at all times, yet suggesting the feral volatility Kat had observed them all to be capable of.

  ‘Then winders stay shut, or else,’ the creature said in a tobacco-roughened voice, blanched of compassion. ‘You even fink –’

  ‘I know! I know.’

  ‘Just so’s you do know, door still stays open till you can be trusted.’

  The woman sat down on the kitchen stool on the landing outside Kat’s bedroom. She’d positioned it there three days before so that Kat could be observed in her bedroom even when she slept.

  Downstairs, the bearded oaf opened the fridge door to take out her milk. The electric jug bubbled.

  How would they do it when the time came? That was her enduring concern now. In here? She doubted that. Too messy, which made her recall their own unique method for the disposal of human remains and her body chilled to nausea once more.

  No matter the endless circling of sickening anxiety and terror, her preoccupations always returned to that question: when the time comes, when their use of me has finished, will they butcher me in that place? And then her interior, her weight, her sense of permanency in the world, would appear to diffuse into thin air like a gas and she would rush for the toilet.

  Short of being caught up in a war, or involved in a catastrophic accident, she would never have believed that it was possible for a person’s life to change beyond recognition in so short a time and by the most brutal means.

  Oh, Steve.

  ‘God, no.’ Pressing her face deep into the pillow to stifle her anguish, Kat acknowledged an urgent desire to run. She’d gladly run across broken glass with bare feet and she wouldn’t stop, to avoid what they’d done to Steve.

  Kat closed her eyes. And again, her self-tormenting thoughts returned her to that place.

  * * *

  When the stinking black hood had been yanked from her head, the vision confronting Kat’s blinking eyes might have been one of hell itself. A version of damnation recreated in mud and wood.

  Through the enclosure of shadow, long tongues of reflected firelight had leaped across an earthen floor, soil strewn with matted straw, the tall flames glowing upon the wall’s stained planks. Where gaps existed between the boards obsidian night had swallowed the outside world.

  A stench of manure, blood and farm animals had arisen from the wet ground. A noisome stink only partly tempered by the pungency of a spicy fragrance, reminiscent of citrus fruit. Intoxicating and so strong, her eyes had watered from exposure to the fumes. Overpowering smoke with a fragrance similar to the skunk weed that Steve had occasionally smoked in her presence. Only this smell was one thousand times stronger and almost living: visible as a bluish smog among rafters intermittently revealed by the spiking flames.

  The assault on her senses – her sight, sense of smell, her hearing, the taste in her mouth and the instinctive primal sense that screamed danger – had immediately killed the desperate entreaties she’d been making to her abductors.

  During the journey in a vehicle she’d never glimpsed while hooded, she’d pleaded, begged for mercy. But inside that place, Kat soon stopped whimpering. Slumped beside the fire, she’d been rendered mute in horrified awe.

  They’d unmasked her a few feet from the snap and crackle of a fiery conflagration. Sweat, joining tears, mucus and the horrible condensation from inside the sack, had run freely off her chin, secretions both smearing her face and sliding down her throat.

  Red sparks had circled upwards through rags of dirty smoke while embers had spat onto the earthen floor where they’d forced her to kneel. Instantly, the heat had cupped and dried her eyeballs.

  Her hands had been secured with green twine. Gardeners used the same string on rose stems. Earlier, in her home, she’d been wrestled to the ground like a steer. A bony, naked knee had been forced between her shoulders and she’d been trussed like livestock. Her one attempt at a scream had been silenced by a blow to the side of the head. One ear had seemed to fill with warm water. A thickening lump had grown on her right temple and pulsed like a small heart. Moving her jaw had remained painful.

  Kat didn’t know which of the four intruders had struck her. But one of the frightful red things that had broken into her home had knocked her near senseless at the first sign of resistance, enabling the gang to gag her mouth with a rag, bind her, hood her and carry her from the cottage into the cold night.

  She’d been dropped onto the unforgiving metal floor of a vehicle that had stunk of dogs and engine oil and driven from her home as her mind had swirled with images of beheadings, figures kneeling before trenches and the wretched remains unearthed in woodlands by policemen who held their forearms across their mouths as they dug . . . The whole process of her capture had felt like a one-way street to a morgue and a coroner’s report.

  Beside the great fire in the barn, the bearded man and the thin woman with the headscarf had held her still. Her appointed handlers’ horrid hands had been clenched in her hair. ‘See. See!’ the woman had shrieked. And Kat had finally seen: the naked body of a man, a few feet from where she’d knelt.

  So smeared with dried blood was the figure and with the filth of the dirty floors that he had lain upon, and so great were the black-green bruises blossoming from swollen puncture wounds and wet rents in the flesh of his limbs, that it had taken Kat a few seconds to recognise her lover, Steve.

  He truly had been missing. He’d been snatched from out of the world, like her, and brought here too.

  It took Steve far longer to recognise her.

  ‘Love . . . Steve. Steve!’ Then, ‘What did you do?’ she’d screamed at her captors.

  In response, her head had been yanked to the side. ‘Shut it,’ the bearded man had commanded.

  Frantic, her burning eyes had swivelled, desperate for understanding, for a sympathetic look, for anything that wasn’t the fire and dirt and Steve so physically ruined. And it had hurt her eyes to focus when her teary vision had groped the walls. Firelight had only flickered so far but in places it had pawed at the black edge of the building’s grubby interior. Against these walls, where the darkness reddened, murky forms had stood upright. A dozen or so people. All unclothed, their flesh made oily with the scarlet stain. Bare legs, sloppy breasts, rotund bellies, thin legs, the moonlike whites of eyes maddened by fear or excitement, perhaps both. Faces showing even more than that: those teeth-bared expressions had appeared awestruck. To keep her feet, a woman had clung to the wall with her stained hands as if suffering a swoon.

  Kat’s gorge had risen. Exhausted either by unrelenting terror or by what she suspected might be shock, she’d shivered hard enough to lose control of her body. Coherent thoughts barely forming, her paranoia so intense, she’d hyperventilated. Ever averse to the sight of blood, now exposed to it on the body of someone she loved, she'd retched freely into the soil.
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br />   From the braziers mounted on iron stands and set against the walls, the suffocating fumes from the burning drug had potent effect upon her mind. The same smoke must have been disordering Steve’s, but for longer.

  Stricken by the idea that her mind was unravelling and erasing itself, she’d believed that her brain was shredding its files in some deluded sense of self-protection, shutting down her system to prevent her continued exposure to what was around her. She’d recalled things she hadn’t thought of in years.

  Her mother and father at her graduation.

  Graham sitting on the end of their bed, staring at the blinds.

  Waking up beside a bed after a binge, her nose bleeding.

  Her flat in London as the sun poured through the windows in summer.

  Viewing her cottage in Devon for the first time.

  Slipping down the stairs in a nightclub.

  Steve in his wetsuit, shaking water from his hair.

  A birthday cake she had as a child, a castle made from chocolate fingers . . .

  Opening and closing in fast motion, memories had flashed vividly then disappeared, like the film of a flower opening but speeded up. Her heart had beat four times the recommended speed. She’d retched saliva.

  Her straining senses had then become dimly aware of a new and equally undesirable stimulus: another fresh exposure to a horror unwilling to pause. Voices had raised themselves near her. Shrill wails joining each other, forming a piercing falsetto and rising into a horrible skirl as much animal as human.

  A reedy piping had caught the clamour of caterwauling voices and directed them higher. Some vocal cords had even broken into shrieks seeking the black rafters high above, smoke-stained, web-choked beams. A crude hole had been fashioned in the tiled roof to let out the smoke, but not enough of it.

  Kat had imagined that her skin was about to blister. Her hair would surely catch alight. She’d been placed too close to the pyre and was soon only able to taste smoke and her own stomach acid. A terrible thirst had made her cough. When she’d tried again to pull away from the fire she’d been held fast.