Free Lost Girl by Adam Nevill

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