The Reddening by Adam Nevill

Author:Adam Nevill [Nevill, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Ritual Limited
Published: 2019-10-30T23:00:00+00:00

21

Outside, four dogs had kept pace with Kat and her captors. Hounds that had come and gone, milling, circling, walking point, pausing to raise their noses into the cold night as she was pulled to a second broken building. Rusting bars had gridded its solitary window.

That room’s interior had resembled a workshop and had reeked of oiled steel, dust, damp wood. Amber light had fallen from bulbs collared by old tin funnels. A long rectangular table dominated, its timber surface scarred, vices attached to the sides. Worn drilling and sawing equipment had rusted in a corner. Dirty rendered walls thickly lined with metal shelves had been crowded with variously sized stones, lumps of rock and long bones.

The surface of a second workbench had been scattered with tools and open boxes, oily rags and dross. But upon that surface Kat had seen a great tusk: bigger, thicker and longer than an elephant’s. Mammoth: she’d seen them at the exhibition in Exeter.

From the workshop two men had carried her through a connecting door and into an annexe, a smaller space with red walls turned powdery from damp. Inside, an elderly man had sat upon an old office chair: a red room with an old red man inside.

His withered form was no longer so straight. He’d wilted and re-aged. Sweat streaking his thin, whiskery face had made the rheumy blue eyes weep blood. Beside his foot, his evil-looking headgear had grimaced in silence.

The old figure had nodded at the two men gripping Kat’s upper arms and they’d released her to the floor, where she’d shivered, gasping, her toxic shock lingering as a permanent electrification of nerve and sense. The liquor from her nausea had made her skin slick.

The old, ruined man had smiled. His teeth had been bad, missing in places, top and bottom at the front. Those remaining were deformed: whittled yellow pegs. He might have been imbecilic had his eyes not leered with such a frightful confidence and cruel intelligence.

‘The red miraculous. You don’t know yourself.’ Like the elderly woman who’d worn an animal mask, his words had purred, a voice enriched by privilege. ‘What comes to us is too great to know.’ He’d said this while nodding his scraggy head as if sharing knowledge that Kat already possessed: a man merely retelling and reaffirming what was known by all present. ‘So be thankful you never saw the pack.’

When the figure had winced and leaned to the side his eyes had lost focus, the smile dying. He’d slumped and sighed, wafting a bony hand in the air. ‘How it comes and goes . . .’ he’d said quietly to himself and she’d been convinced of his madness. ‘There aren’t songs. Why try?’

Kat had swallowed the burning sensation in her throat to speak. ‘Willows . . . You’re Tony.’

One of the old eyes had reopened and filled with a brief awareness of itself, then closed again.

‘The recordings, Tony.’ This new voice had originated from behind her shoulder, from the bearded man who

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