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

disconcerting.
    Sickened and disoriented, the father continued to frown at the picture with an appalled incomprehension, until a door was yanked open and banged against a wall beyond his torchlight.
    He flinched.
    Heavy feet bumped loose floorboards. Frantic breaths of animal excitement filled the unlit cave.
    Behind you
.
    The father’s torchlight raked the ceiling as he turned.
    The blue lightning of smashed nerves erupted through one shoulder, and he fell forward, his arm dead. Pins and needles sparked in the pads of his fingers, at the end of his distant hand,
swinging below the agony of his shoulder. The torch dropped, bounced, rolled, and shone sideways across dirty canvas shoes and a grubby ankle bandage: Bowles. The encroaching scuffles of the big
feet filled his vision, until the father staggered away, across the dirty carpet.
    Air whisked past his ear, ending in a plaster-gouging thud as a second blow narrowly missed his head. The air was then carved in two again, as a long weapon was pulled back high, eager to
achieve its pulverizing designs upon his skull. A light fitting exploded on the backswing. This and the entanglement of the weapon with a light cord bought the father time.
    He could see little, but with what remained clear in a mind traumatized by pain, he interpreted the location of his opponent’s exertions and motions within the smelly passage, and shambled
towards the end of the corridor and to the window as if to pitch himself through.
    Big feet thumped after him, carrying the phantom whose rage seemed fuelled by the laboured breaths of this wounded stranger on invaded terrain. Another swipe of air, accompanied by a grunt,
brought an object whisking close to the father’s spine. Whatever was swung clipped his buttock then smashed into the heel of his booted foot.
    After dragging himself the last two steps to the window, crazy and sick from the fire inside his shoulder, and now his heel, the father fell against the curtains. And knew at once that he was
trapped. His skin iced all over at the idea of being smashed apart like kindling.
    Foul fabrics issued a tomb’s trapped fragrance. Distant light from his discarded torch glimmered about a bulk silhouetted a few feet before him. The figure appeared gigantic, grazing the
ceiling and struggling to forge its vastness through the cramped passage. Again the ogre’s club fell.
    The father dropped until his buttocks rested upon his ankles.
    Out smashed and tinkled the glass of the window above his head, the violence swaddled to a muffle by the wretched drapes.
    The father rose from the gritty floor as the club was yanked free of the dusty impediments, whooshing backwards to prepare for another blow. His useful hand stretched itself towards the great
shadow. And he sprayed, aiming for the boulder of a tatty head. A shoal of small droplets, an invisible rain, pattered over the colossus.
    Down came the club as the ogre roared at the first sting of venom. The father launched his body under the falling club and struck a thick paunch with the shoulder not ablaze with pain. The ogre
clutched at him. Fingernails grazed the father’s nape like tines across pastry. And the two of them huddled, briefly, like worn-out wrestlers, held up on sweat-glossy shins, before the father
slipped away, under a wet armpit redolent with farmyard scents, and hurled himself back towards the staircase.
    Behind his noisy rout, the nerve agent’s caustic sizzle found fine tissues in the giant’s yawning head. Puffy sinuses and fleshy tear ducts now blazed with chemical fire. There was a
scream, a chaos of a living intruder alarm.
    Enfeebled by the gouging pain inside his shoulder, the father stumbled down the first few stairs, then fell down a few more. In the torch glow, and through the bannisters, he glimpsed the
bear-like shadow above, banging its great feet and swiping the air in rage, spitting out what burned its sinuses like inhaled cumin.
    Inside the rucksack, the