The Reddening Read online

  Seated in his harness, he’d looked to the green water turning milky turquoise in one great stripe of sea. Further out the waters were stained a bitter Atlantic blue, finally turning indigo and sparkling silver, the distant horizon rimmed with white fire.

  When he glanced back, the land lost the ramparts of natural obstruction at ground level and appeared flatter. No matter how many times he’d looked down upon this earth from altitude, the sight of how Brickburgh was revealed anew always startled him. A velvet fuzz of grass scarred white by tracks and roads. Trees imitating broccoli. Rocks at the shore lumpen and necrotic. Cloud shadows wafting like ghosts wearing actual sheets. Grey farm buildings imitating the hard Lego bricks that found the arch of his foot and cramped his toes to claws when his son stayed for the weekend.

  A column of air had spiralled from the sun-warmed cliff-face and he’d stepped into the invisible, muscular core of a powerful thermal. Get it wrong, drop into the sea and you’re dead. His mate, Bill, had told him that when he started Matt off, a long time ago. Matt had been piloting his glider up and down the coastal area for six years.

  The cliff-fall was two kilometres east of where he’d launched and where he’d watched the earth re-form into an aerial photo. Cliffs that were a part of ancient South Devon. Most of them forged from dark volcanics and shales, forming a mosaic with the regal purple, the rust and brassy pigments of Devonian slates: rocks minted 400 million years before, when this part of the earth was under a sea positioned south of the equator. His own county had given its name to that era in the earth’s long history: the Devonian, when its rocks were smelted in ancient elemental forges of fire, steam and pressure, raging beneath oceans now extinct.

  But the fissure that had released the bones appeared in a strip of different stone. That rent gaped in the farthest southerly reach of the ancient limestone, once heavily quarried by the Victorians: a compression of prehistoric reefs and algae, seamed with the rusty blood of haematite. Mining had reshaped the peninsulas to resemble the prows of vast ships and it was beyond the last bow that Matt now gingerly picked his way.

  Eying the new cliff edge above him, at the rear of the gouge, he could see that a corresponding section of the coast path had vanished. On either side of the collapse, the new cliffs leaned forward, chins out. It didn’t look stable.

  Gotta be quick.

  The top layer of rubble was loose and the first bone he’d found he’d mistaken for a piece of waterlogged wood, until a closer scrutiny revealed a splintered end. In cross-section the inside of the fragment resembled desiccated coral, or the inside of a sea sponge: animal bone that had once held marrow. Possibly a rib from a farm animal?

  Most of the hilly coastal land was used for grazing. All around Brickburgh, herds of Black Welsh Mountain sheep roamed. Slow-moving ensembles of ebony ponies also drifted close to the coast path. But the bone’s brittleness and mahogany to coal-black colouring suggested age. And perhaps a great age, thwarting his theory of sheep tumbling from the cliff before their remains weathered above the sea.

  Nearby, another bone was lighter in colour and camouflaged amongst pebbles, driftwood and chunks of haematite. The object’s shape assured him that he was holding a portion of a jaw; the fragment’s dimensions suggested it must once have belonged to a beast no longer indigenous to the British Isles. Three teeth remained. The most prominent tooth was worn, striated with capillary-sized cracks, and resembled an incisor the size of his thumb. A tooth compelling Matt to examine the ground about his knees more closely.

  He’d seen the remains of the great scimitar cats in the museum in Torquay, their bones chiselled out of limestone at Kent’s Cavern further down the coast: the very limestone that ended here, in Brickburgh.

  Matt moved higher, through the rubble, filling his pockets with what might have been bird bones or the metatarsals of land animals, until he paused to inspect two larger objects, longer bones distinguished by heavy scores and cuts. They’d been worked at the top too: holes were bored into the flaring ends before the shaft concluded in a ball-joint for the hip or shoulder of an animal.

  He knew other caves discovered in Devon’s limestone had contained multiple entrances that weather and the movements of the earth had buried with rubble. Evidence of prehistoric animals and early man had been found in many of them. It was feasible that a cave might yet lie undiscovered.

  Matt’s breath caught with excitement. Sweat replenished itself beneath his waterproofs and cooled.

  Jesus wept.

  If there was a cave behind that crack and he discovered it, would they name it after him? No one could have spotted the fissure, unless they’d been hugging the shore in a kayak or seen it from the air. During the storms, the sea had been too rough for shipping, let alone pleasure craft. A giant freighter had even beached at Divilmouth. Not even the most extreme paraglider would have considered flying in that weather and he didn’t know anyone else who flew this section. It was too dangerous.

  So who should he tell first? The police? Didn’t seem right. No, the council. Maybe. Or the Land Trust, who managed the public areas around the towns and farmland? Probably them.

  The crack itself was only a foot wide and whatever lay beyond remained pitch dark. Maybe the inner space had seen no light for tens of thousands of years.

  As he drew close to the fissure, he slowed, reminded of an orifice: bloodlike stains in the haematite issuing a sense of fleshy inner walls, moist and intersected by the pale bone of limestone.

  His thoughts turning unpleasant, his comparison switched from ideas of a cliff vulva to those of a horrible head wound. An analogy immediately reinforced by what he recognised as the top of a skull in the debris around his knees. Matt shivered.

  Mottled and tanned brown-black, the object sat upside down and formed a cup, like one half of an Easter egg his son had broken apart to retrieve a little bag of sweets. One half of a leathery egg with a jagged rim of spikes around the broken side. But the frontal and parietal bones were intact and still joined.

  The bone was almost weightless and the exterior was also deeply grooved and scored as if scratched by stones or an implement. And if it was human, it appeared that the entire crown of this skull, from just above the eyebrows, had been roughly chiselled free.

  Carefully, Matt slipped the fragment inside his rucksack and folded his spare hoodie around the object. He didn’t want it crushed under a stampede of rubberneckers when word broke. That is, if this was important. Everyone had bigger things to consider these days: unemployment, a collapsing health system, the price of food, the terrible economy, a plummeting pound, the unpredictable climate, the strikes, unrest. No one might give a damn about a cave full of old bones.

  At the mouth of the fissure he turned his smartphone into a torch and shone it inside the crevice, again wondering when light had last fallen inside this cave, because that is what this was: a cave.

  Across the reddish floor he could see more bones, scattered as the fissure extended into a damp funnel with a low ceiling. At the furthest reach of light the ceiling met a tumble of rock. A restricted space, and nothing tempted him to push inside, his chest compressing at the very idea.

  Instead, he extended his arm and shoulder into the hole to retrieve what resembled another bone with an odd shape.

  Sitting back on his heels, he held the fragment in better light and gently brushed the sides with a thumb. Bone: and he could see where it had been snapped from a longer appendage, upon which the legs of the carven figure may once have been attached.

  The creature’s torso suggested a heavily-breasted woman with wide hips. Part of one arm had been fashioned, the other side was damaged. But if that was a head then it was the head of an animal. A dog, he thought: a hound thing with a boxy muzzle. In fact, the carving was intricate enough to suggest indents for tiny eyes. This had been made by human hands.

  When Matt returned his scrutiny to the darkness of the fissure, his mind leaped into awe at what he held.

  Behind his shou
lders, the sea rushed in and slapped the pebbles. It then withdrew in a susurration across the stony shore as it had done for tens of thousands of years before this very moment.

  Later, when questioned, he would struggle to articulate how he’d felt with the dog-headed thing within his hands. But he did offer, to anyone to whom he told his story, that he’d never felt as insignificant. Tiny, an irrelevant witness and a mere speck upon a great tide of time that surged ever forward. A tide upon which he too would be extinguished: the spark of all he was doused in less than a cosmic moment, just as the mind that had occupied the skull in his bag had been extinguished so many years before.

  3

  Two weeks later.

  Shelly couldn’t decide if their campsite possessed a single redeeming feature.

  The landscape was all that Greg had promised: it was open, wild, hewn from steep valleys, framed by great vistas of sky and sea, and uninhabited. Though the land must have been more hospitable once and even crowded with trees before deforestation had left it barren. There had been a lot of mining here, a long time ago: Greg had said so. But despite man’s devastations nothing appeared tamed. Here all remained intimidating and was as wild as it had been before, but in a different way to her eye: here was mistreated and feral, not healthily wild.

  But by the second day of the trip, what really exceeded her considerable physical discomforts from the hike, followed by a sleepless night in the tent, was a curious, persistent murmur of anxiety: an enduring unease not dissimilar to mild vertigo combined with an apprehension akin to trespassing with confident friends, while secretly wishing that you weren’t.

  Maybe the strange emptiness of the land was troubling Shelly, or the paucity of colour accounted for the dissonance, the sheer relentlessness of the tones that she associated with camouflage. Whatever the cause, she’d remained unable to read the land about herself adequately, to acclimatise or orientate.

  She must have moved too far from the familiar because her imagination had additionally been lured into epochal considerations she’d not entertained since childhood. Too clear here were reminders that she was a mite on a great chunk of rock, one formed by distant and monumental collisions and processes in deep space, occurring billions of years before. Awareness of the great absences above the inert earth and the vast, unbroken stretch of empty water unto the horizon seemed to intensify her loneliness while making her strangely fearful.

  More discomforting still was the notion that this place and this planet were part of some divine plan and that her belittlement here was both intended and punitive.

  Perhaps her feelings had inspired a growing suspicion, too, that their campsite was being observed from the top of the steep valley.

  From the corner of her eye, the trees suggested figures that only became stationary when you looked at them directly. They seemed to alter their positions when she wasn’t looking. And though this odd perspective was caused by her movements below, the imagined manoeuvres above were hard to disregard.

  Hardest of all to judge were the distances around the tent. The top of the valley didn’t appear far away and yet she was only too aware of how long it had taken them to descend just one side. In her memory, the very coast path they’d walked to get here had additionally greyed into mist as if swallowing the world they’d known. A unique set of perspectives – and Greg’s enthusiasm for the valley had only served to increase her estrangement.

  To even reach Slagcombe they’d crossed two similar beaches to the one they’d camped behind, all three formed from boulders rolled down by waters draining through valleys across millennia. At each beach the sand between the rocks was as dark as emery cloth. Neither of the first two beaches had offered car parks or public access by road, but at least they were closer to Divilmouth. Shelly had wondered out loud if they’d needed to walk any further, as the first pair of shorelines were empty enough for their purposes.

  But Greg had described those beaches as ‘too popular’. Once or twice before he’d seen a few fishermen use them. And because of what a local man had recently found in a hole inside a cliff near Slagcombe, even it would soon be ‘fenced off’ and ‘full of twats’.

  Sometime during their stay, Greg intended to find the hole that had been in the papers.

  More of these vast stretches of rubbly beaches lay ahead of them too, in the direction of Brickburgh. In Shelly’s imagination they were all more of the same thing, rugged and inhospitable.

  They’d subsequently spent their first night at least seven miles from Divilmouth harbour. And except for hearing the distant grunt of a motorbike and seeing the drifting, luminous orange flag of a paraglider, they’d had no reminders of their own species. It was to be just the two of them for two nights: their tent beside the beach under an open sky.

  A chilly breeze scoured from the sea again, blowing her hair into a tangle and prickling her pale, untrained body. From arrival, she’d stayed huddled inside her fleece and Gortex jacket, while occupying the sole fold-out chair that Greg had humped all the way from Divilmouth.

  At least a big fire had been promised to add some much-needed colour and warmth to the excursion and its fulfilment was well underway. Where the wetland at the foot of the valley met the stony shore, Greg was building the pyre. He was going to cook on it: tinned sausages that would be slipped between open buns. Shelly watched her man toil, beyond the impossibly flat water of the marsh that glimmered like a huge pane of broken glass. Reeds the colour of wheat obscured much of the surface. Brightly coloured waterfowl continually flew over their tent.

  And now they were back again, the stinking black rams. Their shit was everywhere. Shelly watched the group of black lumps moving down the valley sides towards the tent.

  Shortly after their arrival, the previous afternoon, the sheep had descended and occupied the grass around their tent, a welcoming committee content to stare and crap. At first she and Greg had laughed, thinking the arrival of the animals an exciting addition to their weekend adventure in the wild. But it hadn’t taken long for the unbroken gazing of so many amber eyes, bisected by a horizontal black slit, to unnerve her: a stolid watching presence increasing their exposure at the foot of the valley, the intense, unreadable eyes embellishing her suspicions that other eyes, higher up the slopes, were also observing them just as keenly.

  Shelly wondered who owned the sheep. There were farms inland and a Land Trust house that was too far to reach, all uphill from the beach. Perhaps the sheep expected her to feed them. Their fleeces were matted with dung, their nostrils encrusted with snot, their presence a fitting epitaph to the ‘romantic’ weekend. She needed Greg to shoo them away.

  ‘What?’ she asked the one nearest the tent, but the ram stared, unblinking. ‘Piss off!’ she hissed. ‘You actually stink of shit.’ As if to mock her, the animal released a stream of black balls from its tangled backside.

  She would ignore them. She had far bigger things to worry about. The row at first light had been far worse than the annoyance of random sheep and the cold. The tense, spitting exchange still echoed through her thoughts. Greg had even said, ‘Never again.’ She’d responded with, ‘It’s shit, Greg. Shit. It even stinks of shit. It’s all round the tent in case we needed convincing. I didn’t sleep at all and I’m freezing. I can’t get warm. Divilmouth calling, mate.’

  He’d paled at her outburst, called her ‘ball-ache’ and walked off to see the quarry.

  She’d only seen him get that angry with her twice in six years. Ball-ache. Once Greg lost it he could take days to return to himself. They had another night to get through and the sulking was now wearying and wearing them both down.

  Shelly stood up. Her knee joints ached from being stationary for too long in the cold. Stumbling about to ease the stiffness and to get a better sense of what Greg was up to, she moved away from the sheep.

  As she did so, her enduring sense of a distant scrutiny found a startling definition and confirmation. A human figure was now standing at the top of the southern slop
e of the valley.

  At first glance, she hoped the form was one of the odd-looking trees in her peripheral vision: bereft of leafage and made skeletal by the wind. But a closer scrutiny confirmed that it was indeed a person up there, because the thin figure, silhouetted against the ashen sky, was moving its arms. It was raising something into the air.

  Shelly heard a note. A single piped note.

  They weren’t trespassing. The shoreline was public land managed by the Land Trust. You weren’t supposed to light fires but ‘Who’d ever know?’ Greg had said.

  Another note wavered behind her, from a distance. Shelly turned and spotted a second figure. What sunlight seeped through the clouds no longer smarted her eyes and she saw this piper more clearly than its partner: a man standing on the ridge, thin, scruffy-haired and blowing into a flute or pipe. He was naked too: she caught the hint of dangle at his groin. Across the valley his note was matched.

  There was fresh movement behind the tent. Another four rams had made their way to the campsite as if directed downwards by these distant shepherds.

  Shelly raised her eyes towards the inner depth of the valley and identified an additional trio of the spindly human silhouettes. They were also naked; it’s why they all appeared so slight. What she didn’t understand was why their skin was so dark.

  Five of them now.

  She called out to Greg. The wind buffeting up the valley from the sea prevented her voice extending much further than her lips.

  She edged towards the wetland. If she walked at an angle she’d skirt the boundary of reeds and pick up the track that led to the shore.