Free Last Days by Adam Nevill Page A

like old wet carpet in a cold room. He thought of what Susan White had said. And then forcibly suppressed his uneasiness.
    ‘Yeah, I’m getting it now,’ Dan said. ‘Watch where you’re putting your feet.’
    Kyle peered about the boxes, but it was too dark to see if anything leaked or dripped or decomposed amongst the shadows. Maybe there was an old bin bag from a former tenant, left down here and forgotten about.
    ‘Bingo,’ Dan said.
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    Kyle turned to look at where Dan shone the camera’s spotlight, on the wall behind a disorderly jumble of broom- and mop-handles, their shadows thin and insect-like against the old plaster. ‘What?’
    ‘The wall. Something’s leaked. See?’
    Upon the murky plaster a dim cloud of damp, as wide and long as a door, was streaked with thicker brown veins of moisture that shone wetly. As Kyle looked at it, the miasma intensified about his face. ‘I better tell Max to call the estate agents. Pipe’s burst. That wasn’t here earlier. I’d have smelled it when I came down this afternoon.’
    Dan removed the camera light from it. ‘Let’s get started.’
    ‘OK. But start over here. By the stairs. There’s an airbrick too. And my face is going to be clamped to it soon. Shoot from here to the window. Try and get it all in. We can use that creepy window with the nursery narration.’
    ‘Can do.’ As Dan manoeuvred himself and the camera tripod into position, set up the two small lights, and chalked up the clapperboard: Scene 6: London, indoors, basement, night , Kyle read through his script and refamiliarized himself with his narration about the first births of the Gathering.
    ‘Ready?’ Dan asked.
    ‘Let’s go.’ Kyle cleared his throat and spoke into his tie mic, out-of-shot.
    Dan operated the clapperboard and then stepped back behind the camera.
    ‘It is no surprise that after a year of enforced celibacy, when Sister Katherine began pairing members of her Gathering into couples in 1969, and allowed limited, but often very public sexual relations between members of the group, these unions would begin to bear fruit. Although most of the 68
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    children born into the Gathering were begat at the farm in Normandy, and later still in the Sonoran desert, at least four children were born at the headquarters of the organization, shortly before the diaspora to France. The babies were kept down here. And their birth mothers’ access to them was limit -
    ed. Katherine made it clear to her adepts that any child born into their elect was to be parented by the community. To be raised without the hang-ups of their natural parents. Looking after the infants was seen as a punishment—’
    ‘Shit,’ Dan said looking up at the ceiling.
    ‘I heard that,’ Kyle whispered.
    And again, there it was; a bumping against a door, somewhere above them in the building. And what sounded like a faint scuffle of feet, unsteady steps, completed the ensemble of muffled noises above their heads.
    ‘Someone is definitely in here,’ Dan whispered fiercely. ‘You must have left the front door open.’
    ‘I didn’t. I locked it. I remember.’
    Kyle was sure the sound had carried from the first-floor apartment, the door of which was still unlocked and open from the afternoon’s shoot.
    ‘Fuck’s sake,’ Dan whispered.
    ‘Better go look. Come on. Might be nothing.’
    Dan didn’t reply, or lead the way, so Kyle climbed the stairs first. Guided himself upwards by the light that fell between his legs from the camera’s spotlight. ‘Keep it running,’ Kyle whispered. ‘Just in case.’
    ‘What am I, an amateur?’
    ‘Hello!’ Kyle shouted up the stairwell from the reception hall, as much to build his confidence as to make contact with an intruder. ‘This is private property!’
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    ‘Maybe say the police are coming,’ Dan muttered.
    But Kyle couldn’t bring himself to; it sounded foolish. He dialled 999 into his mobile and rested his thumb on the