Lost Girl

by Nevill, Adam

  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 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 father’s weak hand pawed about, an injured crab inside a disrupted rock pool. Fingertips brushed steel cuffs, the ball gag, became tangled in a chain then freed themselves. His eyes implored the stinking darkness for help, but the torch was kicked even further away by the ogre’s dance.

  Towards the top of the bag, his fingers located the cold metal of the handgun, and spidered over the shape to find the handle, trigger guard, safety catch. Then he backed himself up the wall, dipping his face to shake it free of the tickling lines of sweat that slathered his cold, ashen cheeks inside his Balaclava.

  Bowles stopped his rampage, bent double on the landing, and the father could see him clutching his wet face, as if the man were attempting to peel away the incendiary vines that smouldered so deep. The ogre spat, gargled and swore. Above these sounds of distress, the father listened for any signs that the neighbours had been roused by the breaking glass, the bullock bellows and wall thumps.

  At the top of the stairs, the father found a light switch and clicked it down. Only one bulb had been smashed, but no light came from the second fitting. The power must have been cut, which explained the ogre’s practised shuntings through the dark. ‘I’ve a gun,’ he called out. ‘I’ll shoot you through the mouth if you don’t shut it.’ The father’s voice was weak and trembled from the pain in his shoulder. He pictured his torso was now rent asunder, with a scapula smashed like pottery, a collar bone leaking marrow.

  ‘I ain’t got nuffing,’ the ogre cried out, before it took to dry heaving.

  Another voice rose from beyond a closed door. ‘Bowwy? Bowwy? You get him?’

  There was another man inside the house, but the father did not know how this could be; he’d seen no one but Bowles enter or leave the building for days. He didn’t know if he should bolt from the house or go for the torch.

  The ogre ignored the other man and continued to cuss at its flooding eyes.

  ‘Bowwy, Bowwy.’ Again the voice, muffled in one of the first-floor rooms. ‘I’m coming out. You get the bastard? Who was it? That junkie cunt?’

  Slapping one hand against the walls and doors, the ogre slobbered and thumped away. Spitting, it finally fell at the bathroom sink and clawed the taps.

  The father moved across the landing, shaking at the agony that was his shoulder, until he reached the torch. Some feeling was seeping back inside the dead arm. He pocketed the handgun and picked up the torch.

  A second door in the passage clicked open. The father turned and shone the torchlight into a pale face that instantly recoiled like a sea creature, back into its stale darkness. The door closed.

/>   Standing outside the room, he heard a scattering of objects beyond the door and guessed that the second man was going for a weapon. He glanced at the ogre on its knees in the bathroom, dousing its face and grunting. If these two men chased him, there would be noise and shouting outside.

  ‘You want it? Eh? You fucking want it?’ the second man cried out from inside the room.

  The father slipped the torch under the armpit of his injured shoulder, whimpering at the merest movement of that joint, drew his gun and booted open the door. The torch shone through, but too low. He leaned his weight backwards, onto his burning heels, to raise the beam. Torchlight whipped across disordered blankets about a camp bed, a floor strewn with clothes, empty bottles, a screen on a table, an old wardrobe, and finally onto a bony face belonging to a small man with thinning grey hair, who wore a t-shirt with a stretched neck and underpants that sagged off his waist. The man held a glass bottle. ‘Weren’t me,’ he said. ‘Ain’t got fuck all to do with me. Bowles brought them here.’ The man then frowned, stupefied, as he took in more of the father’s bush hat and Balaclava. Bending even further backwards, the father raised the torch into the man’s eyes.

  ‘You ain’t the filth,’ the man said, almost joyously, as if he’d bested the father at some ruse, before raising his arm to hurl the bottle. Without a thought the father shot through the torch’s yellow glare.

  The snarling face jerked. There was a brief hint of a small black hole, punched above an eye, before the back of the grey head scattered wetly across the messy room, like a handful of pebbles flung hard through a leafy bush.

  The father lowered the gun and moved away.

  Bowles now sat with his back to the toilet, a dirty towel pressed into his face.

  Dear God. He’d just murdered a man while swept along in a rush of anger, adrenaline, joyous endorphins bathing his shoulder from the inside, and a reckless desire to destroy anyone who opposed his presence. The car was a long and terrible run away. Shots fired would sometimes bring a patrol car. The address wasn’t in the town centre, where violence was habitual, but would righteous neighbours, sharing these hideous walls, know the sound of a handgun? He wondered all of this while aware of the wasted seconds. The weapon had made a short, dull, slapping sound and was hardly fearsome on the ear.

  The father looked to the next set of stairs, which led to the loft conversion. A closed white door was visible. Feet retreated from behind it and lowered voices rumbled. But whoever was there soon fell quiet as if they knew he was listening to them. The father recalled a loft conversion seen from outside. ‘Who is that?’ he said to Bowles. ‘Up there?’

  Bowles stayed quiet.

  Beside his foot, the father saw what he had been struck with: the polished handle of a snooker cue, unscrewed for demolishings in confined spaces.

  Bowles peered at the father around the side of the towel, with one sphincter eye. ‘What you want?’

  The father had to swallow to speak. Still so deeply puzzled by his actions, he also needed to force himself to remember why he had come to this place where he had become so unwound, so quickly. ‘Information.’ His good hand opened the rucksack. Two of his shaky fingers found the photograph of his daughter. He went and placed it on the bathroom floor, stepped back, then retrained the handgun on the big man.

  The father glanced again, over his shoulder, at the loft door when a bed strained its springs as someone above climbed onto a mattress. Curious, the father moved the torch onto the door and saw the padlock, then returned his sweat-stinging eyes to the figure on the bathroom floor. ‘What am I going to find up there?’

  ‘Nuffing.’

  ‘That so?’ The father wanted to fire the gun again before the police arrived, so that Bowles would never get away with what he had done in this house and in other places. ‘The picture. Look at it.’ The father shone the torch on the photograph. ‘Lean forward and take a look.’

  Bowles obeyed, then leaned back. ‘I didn’t take her.’

  ‘Who did?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Give me a clue or this might go off again.’ The father shook the gun in the air.

  ‘I tell you anyfing, youse will kill me.’

  ‘Your friend’s dead. I don’t want to kill again, but I will. The photo.’

  Bowles shifted about where he sat. ‘You have to ask Rory about her.’

  ‘Who’s Rory?’

  ‘He lives down the front. Says to me, he knew who done that one.’

  Bowles’s one available eye closed, issued fresh tears. The father scrutinized the man’s face. ‘Second name? Address?’

  ‘Forrester. Lives in one of them old hotels. The Commodore. You won’t get near him though, cus he’s mobbed up wiv the Kings.’ Bowles smirked as if proud of even a minor association with this group: Kings. He was referring to an organized criminal gang, who would be running something in and out of the area: drugs, wealthy refugees, prostitutes, meat, medicine, like all of the other gangs; mostly stuff that was no longer manufactured in the country any more, or exported from others, which was nearly anything people wanted badly. Kings: they sounded familiar. Yes, they’d murdered a lot of people in Bristol.

  ‘The Kings? More stupid pricks? How many stupid pricks live in this town? If I had known there were this many stupid pricks here, I would never have come in the first place.’

  ‘You don’t wanna know.’ The figure’s anal eye moved to the painting on the wall. Something approximating pride appeared in his plump face.

  The father took out a pair of cuffs. ‘Put these on. You can take me to Rory now.’

  ‘No chance.’

  ‘Better there than here.’

  Upstairs someone had started to move again. Bowles glanced up, unable to conceal his concern. He then peered at the father and opened his mouth as if to explain something. The father shook his head. ‘Cuffs.’

  Obediently, Bowles cuffed his own hands, though as loosely as he could manage on his doughy wrists.

  ‘Tighter.’

  The father listened to the clicks as Bowles ratcheted the metal tighter. When the steel indented the man’s flesh, the father lowered the gun. ‘That door to the loft, where are the keys to the padlock?’

  Bowles’s swallow was audible. ‘It was Nige who brought them . . . Anyways they like it here. Council says we gotta take in refugees, if we’s got spare rooms, like.’ The man’s voice was almost a whisper by the time he completed the final sentence. Whatever he’d told himself about why he kept the attic door padlocked was losing veracity and validity the more he saw of the father’s eyes within the Balaclava.

  The father listened for sirens. Heard none. ‘Keys.’

  On the verge of tears, Bowles said, ‘Please don’t, mister.’

  NINE

  I am an imposter. A tired, so tired, father. An idiot with a spray can and a gun. A fool in a land of monsters, who took up arms and became a clown.

  Lying on the bed, the spent muscles in the father’s legs thumped with aftershocks. Furnace heat swelled from the baked and dusty ground outside the hotel and beat against its steel, glass and oven bricks.

  The gun rested on the bed beside his knee, taunting him with estimations of his future: the years that must now be spent in a stifling prison. Unable to stand the sight of it, he used what little of his strength remained to zip the handgun inside the rucksack. Using a foot, he pushed the bag to the bottom of the mattress.

  As soon as he’d returned to his room, he’d surrendered to his body’s desire for stillness and for fuller assessments of damage sustained. Morning’s searing light had already revealed torn trousers and bloodied knees, collected in the rout, and his forearms were blotted by cuts and striped with scratches. The pain in his shoulder continued to pulse through his left arm and across his back.

  At least this strange passivity supplanted the riot of thoughts that had driven him through the early hours. Partial recollections of those intense, furious seconds in the darkness had lessened, then dispersed
like a tired but once frantic crowd, to leave a curious calm about the wreckage in his memory. His body was loose-limbed but heavy now, flat, exhausted, and he was no longer the man who had done that. Whatever electricity had crackled along his nerves and roared through his blood had earthed itself. The hate-filled ape inside him had slipped away, in shame or astonishment, and gone back to the dark to leave a frail, shaken soul in its place. How many times would that creature have to come out shrieking before it cindered him, or refused to leave?

  Pulling hard on the neck of a bottle of Welsh rum, he closed his eyes and prayed for this all to end, and for him to find, or bid farewell, to his daughter. Her picture lay on the pillow beside his head. Her father, he knew, had gone too far.

  The father had now waited a long time for the throwing wide of the door. Even though he had shot and killed two men that morning, the police had not come for him. He’d expected their swift arrival, preceded by distant but encroaching sirens: the ancient song that trilled the blood’s memory and alarmed ne’er-do-wells into fights and flights. But who knew what would even be investigated any more? And in the slow, hot hours behind drawn curtains, the father discovered ample time to consider his retreat.

  After the killing was done, a man in the house neighbouring Bowles’s unlit hive had come out of his back door, naked save for a pair of jeans. He’d turned his torch on the father: a bush-hatted felon in a scrapyard. The neighbour had confronted the father’s wet, white face, and illumined a man aghast at his sudden commitment to terrible, irreversible actions. Right after he’d shot Bowles, the father had yanked off his Balaclava and been sick in the kitchen. A reluctant executioner with no stomach for what the world asked of him, he’d then dripped half-digested tofu Bolognese and DNA all through the crime scene. It had been the second killing that had rendered him witless and harrowed him ashen in a stranger’s yard. He had been reborn a man permanently removed from the safe ground of a decency that he’d always taken for granted.

  Just after the neighbour appeared, the father had launched himself at the rear fence, and careered over the crooked paving slabs on rickety, half-numb legs, his knees reduced to creaking hinges, his mind jumping with subliminal flashes: blooded flesh, white faces, loud voices, gun shots.