Read Online Lost Girl by Adam Nevill - Free Book Online Page A

not directly connected to finding
only
those who took his little girl.
    On his way into the rear yard, the father passed a plastic water barrel, a bulging shed, soaked and dried out too many times. A trellis had sprung free from a painted cement wall. Weeds and tree
roots extending for water made the patio uneven like the deck of a ship coming apart on black rocks. He stepped over a sink, its pipes plumbed into nothingness, and skirted greening sacks of
sun-bleached refuse. At the kitchen door a taint of sewage wafted about his face. Only one first-storey window was uncovered.
    The father found the right tool in his rucksack and began working at the door, in the gap between the frame and the lock. A secondary glazed door, but cheap, the glass all tapioca bubbles and
mist.
    He entered the kitchen soon after, stun spray and torch in either hand, and stood in a room long and narrow like a galley on a canal boat. A scrap merchant’s mound of mismatching pots and
crockery and plastic formed a small mountain over the draining board, the sink and small kitchen table. Packets of soya meals for one were stacked in a precarious tower. The father could smell gas
mingling with damp-softened wood. A silent, lightless house lay beyond an open door at the far end.
    What carpet there had once been in the hall was worn through to flattened threads, spider-webbing wooden floorboards. There were no decorations on the walls peppered with ancient Rawlplugs
protruding like grubs; the interior had not seen paint or new wallpaper for decades.
    A front room was choked with boxes and cases and shadowy humpbacks of junk piled over dim furniture. A dining room facing the garden had mustard-coloured curtains, red lino peeling off the
floor, pale but dirty walls. Someone had broken the brick fireplace apart with a hammer but left the rubble on the floor, as if work had been abandoned as strength failed and futility numbed good
intentions.
    Moving up the narrow staircase, he felt the newel post and bannisters moving under his hand, and a sebaceous odour clung to the dark and warm space of the stairwell. The first-floor landing was
the same, the smell even stronger, as if a hot animal had been driven indoors by the heat of the day and settled to its heavy respirations in the gloom.
    Four doors on the first storey: all closed and painted a sickly vanilla colour. He thought they must open onto three bedrooms and a bathroom. Frosted-glass panes above each door suggested
distorted views upon horrors selected and refined by what sparked inside Murray Bowles’s vast and shaggy skull. The father imagined the ghosts of former tenants: an elderly working-class
couple, retired from council jobs in Walsall, now shivering and aghast at time’s remorseless disintegration, and its rehousing of villains inside their old home.
    There was a solitary picture on the wall of the first floor, between two of the doors; a curious place to hang a frame, almost as if it was a warning of what inhabited the nearest rooms. He lit
it up.
    And recoiled.
    A flat black, but somehow receding, background pushed out a figure in the centre of the canvas: a painted corpse. Naked and grinning, its ribs were exposed through the sickly green wash of its
skin and the belly was hollowed out. It held up two thin arms and upon each hand was balanced what could have been a rose-coloured fruit.
    The father squinted, moving closer. At the grey paps of the skeletal figure, lifeless babes swung, suckling. Three others seemed to squirm like larvae between the dead figure’s legs.
Ghastly cherubim, pallid and puffy, the infants looked up with tired white eyes. Below the babes were words within a small scroll:
Nihil. Nemo
. They meant nothing to him. Latin again, and
an uncomfortable reminder of the graffiti in Paignton; here was another emaciated figure suggesting decline, perhaps even death with a hint of depravity. In the darkness, the father found the
connection deeply