The Reddening

by Adam Nevill

  ‘What? You fuck!’ she managed to scream.

  A hand squashed her mouth closed. ‘Shut it!’ A command that ended in a hateful hiss, hot inside her ear. Spun around, Kat was dragged backwards. Her heels scraped the road to the man’s car.

  The detective’s hands remained clamped around her middle but someone inside the vehicle opened the rear door. Springs in the upholstery sounded beneath the weight of the passenger with whom she was going to share the rear.

  The opening of the door activated the vehicle’s interior lights and Kat was tugged about-face. What sat in the rear of Lewis’s car grinned at her: a thing that seemed to have climbed out of hell’s mouth to take a seat in a private vehicle.

  Luridly white eyes, set in a face the red of blood drained from veins, expressed a sadistic glee. Two rows of pale teeth split the rust-coloured head.

  Kat pushed back against Lewis. ‘No!’

  He picked her body from the ground and stuffed her inside the rear of the vehicle, headfirst. Right into the naked lap of the thing that reached out with its red arms to receive the new passenger.

  39

  ‘Would you recognise the place if you saw it again? Do you think you could identify the people with the dogs who confronted you?’

  Helene nodded, though her eyes betrayed her discomfort at the idea of going back to the farm she knew as Redstone Crossroads.

  The female police officer, WPC Swan, smiled. ‘You’d be perfectly safe. You wouldn’t even need to get out of the car. But if a search is required of that farm, and arrests have to be made, we need to be certain that we’re looking in the right place. Redstone covers a lot of ground, mostly farmland. Your brother made the recordings in a quarry west of the crossroads?’

  Helene nodded again.

  The policewoman bit the inside of her cheek. ‘A lot of old quarries there, that’s the problem. Seven, in fact. They’re dotted for miles around those crossroads and cover land owned by at least five different farms.’

  ‘His disc was labelled Redstone Crossroads. He must have made the recording close to the farm I visited. And what about the men from the boat?’

  ‘We have an idea who one of them might be. We’re looking for him now.’

  ‘But you don’t have him?’

  ‘Not yet. He’s not home.’

  Helene let that sink in, then sat up in her bed. ‘My daughter. You said you’d get in touch with the West Midlands police.’

  ‘She’s fine,’ the policewoman said and leaned forward, one hand hovering close to Helene’s arm. ‘So is your mum.’

  The police in Divilmouth had previously assured Helene that they would speak to the Midlands force to make certain that her mother and Valda were safe.

  Once her body temperature had been sufficiently restored and as soon as she’d woken from a deep, exhausted slumber, the first thing she’d done was call home, at six o’clock that Sunday morning. Her mother had answered. She’d been asleep and the call had frightened her. No one called that early unless there was a problem.

  Helene’s feat of endurance had left every muscle bruised and aching. Even walking to the toilet had required the support of a nurse and a wall to lean on, but she’d felt she had no choice other than explaining to her mother why she wouldn’t be home that evening. She’d told her that she was in hospital and being treated for hypothermia, dehydration and exhaustion.

  Hearing that, her mother had become breathless. Helene knew that she’d pawed at her heart too. She always did in moments of crisis.

  Helene had reassured her that she was much better. The doctors had said so. She might even be discharged in a day or two, depending on the need for her bed. But she wouldn’t be able to drive and would need to convalesce for weeks at home. Her return would also be delayed while she helped the police with their inquiries.

  Knowing no mother would have been satisfied with so little information, Helene confessed to Lincoln’s connection to something illegal in South Devon. She didn’t say much more beyond telling her mum that the horrible statuette of the dog-headed woman sent to Valda was part of this. Whoever was behind the gift had sent it as a warning for Helene to stop investigating her brother’s last week alive. The people he’d interfered with in Devon had since interfered with her.

  Mercifully, her mother’s shock and disbelief had prevented her asking any further questions. Helene had made her promise to take Valda to her flat. She’d also extracted an assurance that her mother would not open the door to anyone except a police officer with ID. Local police would check on her and Valda that morning. Helene had then ended the call while she’d had a chance.

  Since she’d come round, the idea that Lincoln might have experienced her own fate and been dumped in the sea to drown had filled her with rage: a fury recharging her strength more than the seep of vitality that came from resting in a hospital bed. She knew exactly how he would have suffered before succumbing to the water.

  But there had been no body, so Lincoln being thrown into the sea didn’t entirely fit. They tended to find them down here, eventually: that’s what the doctor had said. Most of what she’d remembered of the conversation on the boat was about something the three men had called ‘the red’. One of them had said Lincoln had ‘gone to the red’. The pig captain had also used the phrase as a threat to motivate the man called Phil. But ‘the red’ made no sense to the police at her bedside.

  Helene had also insisted to the officers that the attempt on her life had been carried out by three men acting on the orders of another. She was sure one of them had mentioned someone called ‘the witch-wife’. The constables had tried not to smile.

  At nine, the police had confirmed that her car and some of her possessions had been found on the shoreline of a cove near Plymouth. Her shoes and rucksack had clearly been placed on the shore to make her disappearance look like suicide, and she told the officers just that. It was obvious, but only to her.

  At that stage, to her dismay, the police officers suspected she’d made up the entire story: that she’d entered the water of her own volition. Their eyes gave them away. The sea’s currents were not in her story’s favour: from that cove near Plymouth the current could have eventually washed her to where the fishermen had found her in the water, exhausted, freezing and close to unconsciousness. People who drowned further north, near Brickburgh, were even known to wash up as far away as Dorset. The current patrolled the shoreline.

  Her blood-work had been checked for drugs and alcohol. A trace of the wine that she’d drunk in her room at the guesthouse had shown up. Helene insisted that had she been intoxicated she’d have made poor choices and died within minutes of entering the water.

  ‘The men in the boat can’t know that I survived.’ Helene had blurted that out when the idea struck her. ‘They can’t know. No one can know that I survived. Don’t you see, that leaves me and my family in danger?’

  ‘They can’t know you’re here,’ the WPC with the kind face had said. ‘No one but us and the night staff who attended to you even know who you are. You’re safe here, Helene.’

  She’d succumbed to tears as she attempted to convince the police just how determined and serious her attackers had been. She’d also continued to insist the very same people had killed her brother six years before.

  But the constables had struggled to accept the Lincoln connection from the start. In their defence, as she’d shared her assumptions, the connection she’d made between the sounds that her brother had recorded underground, so long ago, and the recent attempt on her life had seemed just as preposterous to her.

  When two detectives arrived later, she repeated her story to them several times. Repeat tellings did not rid her story of its weird and fanciful character. In her statement she provided information about Carol, the guesthouse, the red people who’d assaulted her. An absurd story detailing abduction and attempted murder by people who’d painted themselves red. The more she insisted the less the police seemed to listen. By early afternoon she’d wante
d to scream and to keep on screaming until they sedated her.

  By midday the WPC brought news that no ‘Carol’ had been traced. The guesthouse had been empty for some time. The nearest neighbours were certain that the owners, a retired couple, were in Spain. And ‘this Kat’, the disturbed journalist who had lured her down for the weekend, had also vanished. A subsequent visit to Kat’s home by a patrol car revealed the cottage to be empty and locked. They were still looking for Kat and no one that Helene had named was available to help the police with their inquiries.

  Only when she’d offhandedly mentioned Kat’s boyfriend Steve, did Helene detect a shift in the detectives’ tepid reaction to her wild tales. All four officers had exchanged glances across the bed.

  A detective had then furtively mentioned that the coastguard and coastal watch volunteers were currently looking for him in the sea. He’d been missing for five days. It was believed that he’d fallen from the coast path during a walk.

  Kat’s mental state at the fête quickly acquired a new and startling significance. Helene’s mind whirred until it ached. The journalist's instability at the Redhill festival might not have been a sign of Kat’s heartbreak but an indication of something much worse. If the same group who’d tried to murder her had taken Steve, then it was even possible that Kat might have been coerced into making Helene travel to Devon: as a means for someone to get Lincoln’s recordings? Kat had been desperate to take the discs and now she was missing too.

  ‘Kat,’ Helene had insisted. ‘You have to find Kat. Steve’s girlfriend. She’s involved. This is all connected. Steve. Me. Kat. My brother. His bloody recordings. I don’t know why, or how, but Kat had information about my brother. Or claimed she did. That’s the only reason I came down here. And Kat was so bloody desperate for those discs. Don’t you see?’

  Unfortunately the police didn’t.

  Frustration burning more fiercely as each rebuttal registered, Helene had eventually closed her eyes against the impossibility of her situation. ‘How many of you will be in the car when we look at the farm?’ she’d asked in resignation.

  ‘Er, it’ll be us two.’

  Helene had looked them over carefully: a small, earnest woman, and a man who couldn’t have been older than twenty-four and appeared to be more of a veteran of the rugby pitch than of murder inquiries. Neither carried a sidearm.

  ‘Our colleagues,’ the WPC offered, ‘will also be checking the other farms in that area, backed up by what the neighbouring force can provide in support. It’s a joint task. Once we’ve identified the owners of the land that is relevant, we’ll make thorough inquiries. We’ll be sure to get you home to your daughter too.’

  This was said almost apologetically, as if the police were desperate to get her out of their jurisdiction. ‘Can you have a look at this map now?’

  On a tablet, upon which a Google map had been downloaded by the WPC, Helene traced her route on the coastal path and through each of the places where Lincoln had made the recordings.

  The two constables then conferred with each other near the door until WPC Swan nodded decisively and said, ‘We’ll start with Willows.’

  40

  In anticipation of her own slaughter, a palsy came to Kat’s limbs. To be here again: the scene of Steve’s butchery, the abattoir.

  A highlights reel of stored grotesques ran through her mind: the shrieks, the crack of bone, the flecks of scarlet upon stone, a pale body glistening in thin light . . .

  Stop!

  Cap the bastard.

  Bestial whines, cutting through the narcotic fog, that yapping of devils. Claws scrabbling upon rock below the barn, the haste for succour: such noises left echoes in the mind. Feeding. The feeding. As above so below. White eyes in red faces. All to be endured again.

  Near her cell on the farm, that very metal grate where her lover’s broken body had lain confused and delirious awaited her now.

  Steve’s torments were over and she envied him. Being conscious here was intolerable. With consciousness came its twin: awareness.

  Kat felt ready to take her own life. Better to do it herself before she was torn apart and fed to . . . dogs.

  ‘No. No. No.’

  She rocked back and forth inside the fusty, unlit room she’d been dragged into by Lewis and the grinning red fiend. Her hands itched maddeningly, the circulation almost cut off by the plastic tourniquet about her wrists.

  They’d left her kneeling on the dirty cement floor of an agricultural outbuilding where rank odours stained each air molecule. Maybe a wet carpet had once mouldered within the damp confines. A bare floor now served to signify the reduction in her status and her diminishing prospects, because the only way out of here was down there: into the red.

  In a few hours the sun would rise, but until then the barred window, encrusted with cobwebs and grime, would reveal nothing but a black square of deep night.

  When would they come?

  When she’d been delivered to her final destination earlier that evening her captors had eschewed a hood. It had no longer mattered that she’d seen bits of the farm because she was never leaving it. And in a darkness raked by headlights, a communal expectation had thickened the atmosphere. Cars had been parked in a lane outside an old house, a few people had milled in the road, torches scything their haggard silhouettes. A small gathering. For her. For the reddening.

  What she saw of the house had sagged about a weed-corrupted lane of holed tarmac. Dim yellow light, edging the windows of the ground-floor rooms, offering a glimpse of ragged hedgerows, long grass, a deck where motionless figures had gathered to watch the detective’s car pass: the carriage driving her deeper into where it all began and her final destination.

  Before she’d been interned in the grubby cell, her scant mental capacity, the fraction not consumed by fear, had grown aware of voices outside the detective’s car: raised voices suggesting that everything might not have been going to plan for the red folk. She presumed she’d posed a setback, a thin pyrrhic victory, and the only satisfaction she might derive from despair turning into a permanent state of mind.

  The torment of having been so close to freedom before it was snatched away was near-impossible to acknowledge. She’d come so close to evading a death that she’d not imagined possible in the twenty-first century. Any hope of escaping that was a mirage now.

  What she’d done in her cottage had not been enough, because now there was this. As if marked indelibly during her first visit, her current dilemma appeared like destiny. She’d dealt with Beard and Headscarf in ways only conceivable in the psychotic fantasies of her lowest ebbs. Buried aggression maybe, stored up since secondary school, then embellished by bad relationships and terrible jobs and finally given vent? She didn’t know. Though once she’d started down that path with weapons gripped in her manicured fists not only had her actions become uncomfortably satisfying but her will had seemed to surrender itself to . . . she wished she knew.

  And Lewis, that false saviour, who’d assaulted her and carried out the second abduction she’d endured within a week, had been displeased with his hosts on arrival. He’d pulled up beside the row of dilapidated buildings slumped beyond the sunken house and ranted at someone near the vehicle. She’d heard some of what the Judas had said, his voice hissing with rage. ‘There was fuck all on those discs. A few noises. What the hell were you thinking?’

  Two motorbikes had passed then, the sounds of their engines hurting her ears. A car’s headlights had followed the bikes.

  It was Tony’s son, Finn, that Lewis had confronted. Kat recognised the ferret’s voice when he spoke. ‘He got a lot from round here. Film too. All we know is that we don’t have it all. There must have been stuff in his flat we couldn’t get out. We didn’t know what the sister had.’

  ‘Too late now! And you topped that photographer? You bloody mad? Madder than I gave you credit for. You’re fucking everything up for yourselves. Do you think you’re invincible?’

  ‘He saw things.’
>
  ‘We had an agreement this wouldn’t happen again. You swore no one else would go!’

  ‘Sometimes shit has to happen.’

  ‘Pay them off! But don’t . . . for God’s sake . . . What are you doing? What the fuck are you doing?’

  ‘What’s necessary. And it gets worse so you better get your head straight, Louie. We’ve also taken our local flyer, the one with the big mouth, on a journey he won’t be returning from any time soon.’ Willows’s son had only found the detective’s distress amusing. ‘And your maths is way off too. Keep up, Louie. There’s the sister who came south for the ghost of her rubbernecking brother. We picked her up as well. She was blathering about uploading the recordings. Can you imagine that? We’d no idea what else she knew, which wasn’t much, as it happened. By then it was too late. She was in the middle of a red roaming. We put her over the side of a boat.’

  At this news of Helene, Kat’s head had dropped. She’d let the tears fall.

  ‘This bitch of a hack’s next.’

  That news had swiftly returned her to the present.

  ‘Jesus wept,’ Lewis had said. ‘This stops. Now.’

  Finn Willows had spat on the ground. ‘Have you seen what she did to E and his mum?’

  ‘The journalist will make it four. Four! Missing in a matter of weeks? This isn’t bloody Mexico. Two of yours need hospital. Enough of it.’

  ‘Our own will be taken care of but listen carefully. Everyone’s going to be keeping their heads down until we know what’s in the wind. We’re out tomorrow, we’re leaving. And that’s where you come in, Detective. You’re really going to earn your keep now. Plenty of your esteemed colleagues not familiar with the enchantments of this red earth and its ways may soon be poking their beaks in. When this nosy bitch can’t be found –’

  ‘Enchantments? That what you bloody call this? It’s murder. Multiple murder.’