Free Apartment 16 by Adam Nevill Page B

were allotments grown over with weeds. Straight ahead of them, he could see a playground.
    They walked towards it. Every few feet they would pass a coil of dried dog shit and shards of glass from smashed bottles. The hooded boy started to skip and hum to himself. He seemed pleased with the way things were going.
    In the playground there was a slide and four chain-link swings with plastic seats hanging from an iron frame, and a roundabout made from rusty sheet metal with wooden bars across the top. It had been solidly anchored into a concrete square. The bright paint on all of the apparatus had chipped down to brownish metal and then been varnished with the grease from many little hands. There was a giant sandpit full of broken glass and slugs. Part of a smashed plastic doll languished in a rain puddle. Its head was cracked. Seth could see a dark hole through its curly blonde hair. The wound looked real. An eye was missing too. The violence of the thing made him shudder. Beside the doll were a few pages from a porn magazine. Glancing at it, Seth saw a woman with her legs open and one finger between her big purple lips.
    ‘Shit hole, ain’t it,’ the boy said.
    Seth nodded and followed the boy out of the playground until they came to two enormous tower blocks rising so far into the clouds the height of them made him squint. There were no lights on and they looked derelict. Graffiti covered the walls up to the height of a child and there was rubbish blowing about the pathways between the buildings.
    Seth looked at the things around his feet – crisp packets, cans and tins with faded labels, a tyre, something from a car engine, a smashed television and a pair of tights that had been soaked by the rain and dried out so many times it took him a while to work out what the crispy thing with long tentacles was. The remnants of a child’s scribblings, drawn with coloured chalk – pink, yellow and blue – had stained some of the paving slabs. The rain hadn’t managed to wash it away. And it must have just rained. All the concrete was wet and there were still some puddles on the pavement. Seth assumed the place was always damp. He shivered. Wrapped his arms around his ribs. Even in summer it would be horrible. The closer they got to the buildings the stronger the smell of urine and bleach became.
    As they walked between the giant tower blocks, a gust of wind whipped between the walls and made Seth cringe from the cold. When he looked up, the buildings seemed to be tilting and ready to fall down on him. He put a hand against a pebbled wall for support.
    Next they came to a small, brackish stream that dissected the endless, flat, dull landscape and its struggling grass full of excrement and glass.
    The mud of the banks and bed of the stream were bright orange and smelled of the spaces beneath kitchen sinks where plastic bottles are kept. Under Seth’s feet, a lethargic trickle of water moved between a rusty paint tin and a broken pram that had been made for a child to wheel its dolls around with. Purple canvas hung in rags from the white plastic frame. Further down the stream, Seth could see a large grey sewer pipe. Inside the mouth the concrete was stained orange. He looked down at the hooded boy, who nodded without speaking. What a place to die.
    They crossed the stream. As far as he could see the view never changed: disused allotments, empty playgrounds, litter, and tower blocks dotted about the stagnant plain. It went on for ever.
    ‘There’s toilets too,’ the hooded boy said, without turning his head to look at Seth. ‘I never showed you them. And in some of the flats I found people.’
    ‘They trapped too?’
    The boy nodded.
    Seth shuddered. ‘Can’t you get them out?’
    The boy shrugged. Then he said, ‘Nah. They’re done for. I found a mongol kid with a plastic bag on his head that he couldn’t get off. He couldn’t understand anything I said to him. And there was an old lady who breathed in fumes from a