Lost Girl by Adam Nevill Read Free Book Online Page A

was no longer drinking to forget but to remember, to access revelations arising from his outlaw deeds.
    The supermarket had once functioned as a hotel for tourists, three decades gone. The place once boasted a small pool and a ballroom. A sign for satellite television and the Jacuzzi was still
attached to the car park wall, like graffiti made in bad taste.
    The upper two storeys of the building had been partitioned like most properties in what used to be a functioning town centre, appropriated by local government and now a seething ghetto of
dysfunction, bordering a redoubt of beleaguered families, who maintained their own neighbourhoods’ security arrangements in the surrounding areas of Preston, Goodrington, Churston and
Galmpton. This former hotel suggested it was now a ground-floor pharmacy for alcoholics and elderly residents unable to migrate like rare butterflies; those with no option but to flutter about
their bleached, toxic habitat in the town centre, behind the vast concrete seawall of the esplanade.
    Every south-facing window upstairs blotted out the sun with blinds, curtains, blankets, duvets, faded sleeping bags and plastic sheets, suggesting a familiar hot, dark, unbreathable atmosphere,
reeking of sanitation issues, bleach, tobacco, fried oil and sweat.
    Bottle in hand, the father returned to the car and unlocked it, instinctively moving his head in feigned nonchalance to watch for faces at windows. But as he made to duck inside the vehicle, he
saw a large and strange figure, painted upon one wall of the parking court. On the way towards the store he’d mostly looked at nothing but his feet, and had somehow missed this mural. But it
demanded his attention now.
    Striding, as if gripped by a purposeful haste, the long figure was depicted as if it were heading swiftly across the rendered cement wall towards the dented bins. Above the tacky rind of dried
piss at knee level, an erect posture suggested the thing swept, wraithlike, on thin legs, through the variety of scrawlings, logos, statements, mad gibberish and gang taggings. Curiosity made the
father pause and look more closely.
    The portraiture had been artful. The father could not fathom the true motives behind such a creation, though maybe the mural had been created in irony, amongst so much apelike vandalism.
    There might even have been a fire here once, a vehicle booming and fiercely roaring up the wall of the car park, during some sudden explosion of local frustration, and from out of the oily
scorch marks, this rangy thing had subsequently been etched and extended across the grimy cement, as if it had appeared from soot and belching smoke, some grim abyss or coke-choked oven that fumed
beneath the tarmac.
    The gown or cloak was tattered, frayed away from sticklike limbs, so loose and spare, that spiked the folds and billows. Like trailing rags of cloth around a disintegrating kite frame, a vessel
flung aloft and battered in strong wind, a fluidity was also evident in the entirety of the picture: an effortless prance, or a leap in a ballet for the graceful dead preoccupied this figure, and
the length of the stride was unpalatably feline.
    Ashy fragments fell away from the garment’s hem and great round sleeves, becoming a slipstream of finer dusts, or a black aerosol of dross. Pebbles or seeds drifted from the bone hands
too, sifting through a metacarpal sieve to the littered ground.
    The father moved around the car for a better view, but soon recoiled at the sight of the impression of fleshless feet, vaguely sandalled.
    But there was something close to beauty as well as terror in this graffiti. A sense of a diminishing of the begrimed and overcrowded town around the blackened wall, as if the crooked world was
mocked by this figure, or utterly absolved of . . .
significance
.
    There was no street lighting at night in the area, so it was doubtful the figure had been drawn then. By day it seemed unlikely that an artist would have remained