Lost Girl by Adam Nevill

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.
    Bowles’s neighbour, a father too, who had dared to brave all odds by bringing children into an old world down on its knees in the heat, and adrift upon its back in the floods, had quickly
retreated through the back door of his home, struck dumb with fear and disgust at what he’d seen over the garden fence: the bush-hatted puker, the stumble-wreck killer, tripping his way to
bustle through the fence’s rotted planks like an animal affrighted in a pen.
    To have made another father even more afraid of what lapped at the shores of every home in treacherous nocturnal tides now smote the father’s heart as he lay alone in his hotel room. At
this he felt a terrible shame creep through him, more than at the red deeds he’d performed in that dim nest of molesters that were never to be undone. For his own sake, the father had already
assumed that the darkness of the ogre’s grim halls would eventually settle into a persistent though manageable trauma, but that the family next door would have to linger in perpetual
anticipation of another killer’s arrival in the night.
    Hours passed and the heat in the room broiled the father out of brief sleeps, basting him in an animal lard of remorse and misery, outlining his scarecrow bones with sweat, as a corpse leaves
tracings in a winding sheet. He periodically gulped warm water from a plastic bottle, wincing. Even swallowing hurt his shoulder. Had he not been so lean, muscle meats and fats would have borne the
impact of the ogre’s club. As things were, the snooker cue had ricocheted off actual bone. Left him splintered and tattered: a messenger of judgement and death, but one ungraceful and
ramshackle in the grim businesses he now conducted at the houses of men who ended childhoods.
    He watched the foul flower of the shoulder bruise open in the noon light that spiked silvery-yellow through the solitary window. An indigo stamen grew upon his back: seeded,
black-and-green-veined like a new tattoo, Japanese vivid. A pistil and petals, scarlet as roses, bloomed over his collar bone. The arm below was near-unusable, the skin curiously nerveless from the
elbow to fingertips. A deeper magma of molten pain glowed from the wrist bones to his neck and threatened to erupt if he moved. The father imagined the X-ray that he could not risk having taken of
the ghost bone in its darkness: a split humerus, the acromion reduced to debris, a skin-balloon of hot water fattened with pink jellies. But at least it was the left arm.
    Accident and Emergency was a white glaring precinct