Under a Watchful Eye

by Adam Nevill

  Thin Len.

  From a distance, I watched the visible parts of him circle and then fall upon the accused.

  How the grass seemed to flatten in the wind, the same wind that fanned the fires of this house into the inferno, the catastrophe that left it charred and black, with half the roof open to the sky the following morning.

  I saw Thin Len briefly, a thing dark and long that glided as if swept forwards by the motion of the wind-ruffled grass. A thing that articulated itself like a frantic, damaged insect, when it closed upon those it had come for.

  When it cast about them in the tall grass, I heard their cries. That is when I looked away.

  Crouched down on the dirty floorboards, I scratched at my scalp like a lunatic, and then stuffed my fingers inside my ears.

  I had refused to watch Thin Len take the second one. But I did see him snatch away the first one. Natalie, I think. The sack was suddenly taut on a face at three hundred feet, and up went those arms so tight in the black sleeves. A raggedy scarecrow, striding, flinging itself . . . And then down it seemed to collapse, and up shot the scream of the woman beneath it, and she must have been heard a mile away.

  The other woman fell into the long grass, exhausted or too frightened to move, I don’t know. I never got the chance to ask.

  I hunkered down in the smoke and heat in that room, and I clutched my head and shuddered with a terrible anticipation that he would come for me next, and that Len, that very day, would add three more soul-bodies to the nocturnal procession at the Tor.

  Coughing, my eyes streaming, and no longer able to abide the smoke, I left the building through the kitchen. I’d left every external door on the ground floor open, so that the breeze could assist the progress of the fires inside. Some of the fires seemed to have petered out once the paper had finished burning, but others must have continued. Eventually, like the master of the house, they must have raged.

  Outside, I stood for a long time and waited, with my eyes shut against . . . what never came for me.

  Thin Len.

  I don’t know why, but through the holes in the hangman’s hood, on that fiery day, he only had eyes for the ladies.

  I hadn’t much time to complete the next part of my plan. Perhaps the great house burning upon the hill would have become a beacon, and someone, somewhere within sight, or passing on a distant road, might have called the emergency services. In time, the smoke would have been seen for sure; maybe later that evening when it was still light, and once the fire had really taken hold of the building’s timber frame.

  With an old shovel, the tool that I’d come across in the cottage, I’d already dug two graves in the nearby woods. To which, in an old wheelbarrow, I transported the bodies of the last members of the API. This was the vehicle that Natalie and Wendy had once used to transport their provisions from the front gate to the cottage, and for decades. I took the remains of those disgraced servitors to the makeshift cemetery, but I covered their faces with some old sheets.

  With the very last of my strength, I wheeled them into the woods and then tipped each of them into the trenches. Without a word, I shovelled the soil over the lumps that they formed in the dark ground. A place where the sun could not penetrate the canopy of trees, and where the ground was always soft and moist.

  After that, I ran.

  Crying like a child, and delirious with what might have been joy, or anguish, or relief, or all of these things, I ran through the grass without looking over my shoulder, lest I was being stalked across the overgrown lawns.

  Into the wooded parkland I plunged, crashing past the ivy-smothered follies, and setting aloft the resting butterflies and bees and birds.

  I even closed the gates behind me, and then doubled over, sick from exhaustion and terror and elation.

  It felt very strange to be driving my own car again. And even stranger to spend that night within my own bed, alone, with no others passing about my feet and asking their infernal, meaningless questions. None stood up either, and shivered their sharp backs at the foot of my bed. And none kicked out upon the ceiling, as if tangled in the weeds of black, bottomless waters.

  But I did dream.

  I dreamed of a slender woman, who wore a hat and had dark eyes part hidden behind a veil. This lone figure of a silent woman stood upon the end of a pier and she watched me as I ran across a shoreline made of sawdust.

  My feet sank, and I slipped backwards, and exhausted myself without making much progress, while she remained motionless and watched me.

  Perhaps she waited for another to come and join me, in that place where the black sea hushes over the dust of dead wood.

  THE END [AGAIN, FOR NOW].

  Acknowledgements

  The research and case studies collated by Cecilia Green (Out of Body Experiences) and Robert Crookall (The Supreme Adventure, Intimations of Immortality, Case-book of Astral Projection and The Study and Practice of Astral Projection) were valuable sources for informing the ideas within this story. Francis Wheen’s Who Was Dr. Charlotte Bach? was a fragrant inspiration behind M. L. Hazzard’s own colourful past.

  Much appreciation goes out to my editor Wayne Brookes, for his encouragement, enthusiasm and his insights, and to all at Pan. Special thanks to John Jarrold, Julie and all at Gotham, Anne and Iona Nevill, my parents, Simon Nevill, Melissa and Darren Thomas, and Hugh Simmons for their advice or support. I want to acknowledge various beauty spots and places around my home in Torbay, which often served as inspiration and as a variety of outdoor offices during the writing of this book. The bay provides.

  I’d like to thank the reviewers who consistently support my books and who came out swinging for Lost Girl – a novel about different kinds of horror: Jim McLeod and Kit Power of ‘Ginger Nuts of Horror’, Sean Kitching at ‘The Quietus’, SFX, Charlie Oughton and SciFiNow, Slash, Eric Brown at the Guardian, David Mitchell at the Independent, James Lovegrove at the Financial Times, Fred McNamara at Starburst, Sapient at ‘Pop Mythology’, Pablo Cheesecake at ‘The Eloquent Page’, Dirge Magazine, Anthony Watson of ‘Dark Musings’, Des Lewis at ‘Dreamcatcher: Gestalt Real-Time Reviews’, Pam Norfolk at the Lancashire Evening Post, Marie O’Regan at ‘SciFi Bulletin’, Alex Cluness and all at Literature Works, Tor.com, Theresa Derwin and ‘Terror Tree’, Maxine Groves, Sheila M. Merritt at Diabolique Magazine, Upcoming4.me, Carrie Buchanan at ‘Horror Blog’, ‘Steph’s Book Blog’, Nathan Ballingrud, Ted E. Grau, F. R. Tallis, Jason Arnopp, Gary Fry, Gary McMahon, Mark Morris, Rich Hawkins, Patty Dohle, Matthew Fryer, Jonathan Wood, Diala Atat and Ruba Naseraldeen at the Dubai Reading Group, the British Fantasy Society, Sci Fi Weekender 7, Nightmare, John Connolly, Brian J. Showers, Paul Melloy, Mathew Riley, Toby Clarke, and all of my mates and the sharers on social media.

  Finally, I want to project my gratitude to the readers who have hindered in my sphere, and who have followed my terrors this far, and also to those who are only beginning their association . . .

  LOST GIRL

  How far will he go to save his daughter?

  How far will he go to get revenge?

  It’s 2053 and runaway climate change has brought civilization to the brink of collapse. Billions are threatened with starvation, and mankind is slowly moving north in a world stricken by war, drought and superstorms – easy prey for the pandemics that sweep across the globe. Easy prey, too, for the violent gangs and people-smugglers who thrive in the crumbling world where King Death reigns supreme.

  The father’s own world went to hell two years ago. His four-year-old daughter was snatched from his garden when he should have been watching her. The moments before her disappearance play in a perpetual loop in his mind, as do nightmarish fantasies of who took her, and why. But the police are preoccupied. Amidst the worst European heatwave on record, a refugee crisis and the coming hurricane season, who cares about one more missing child? Now it’s down to him to find her, even if it means going to the worst places imaginable, to do the unthinkable . . .

  ‘Nevill ornament
s his tale of brutality and bloodshed with florid Gothic prose . . . There’s acute psychological insight amid Lost Girl’s squalid inferno, and the author’s vision of our near future is horribly plausible’

  Financial Times

  NO ONE GETS OUT ALIVE

  Darkness lives within . . .

  Cash-strapped, working for temping agencies and living in shared accommodation, Stephanie Booth feels she can fall no further. So when she takes a new room at the right price, she believes her luck has finally turned. But 82 Edgehill Road is not what it appears to be.

  It’s not only the eerie atmosphere of the vast, neglected house, or the disturbing attitude of her new landlord, Knacker McGuire, that makes her uneasy – it’s the whispers behind the fireplace, the scratching beneath floors, the footsteps in the dark, and the young women weeping in neighbouring rooms. When Knacker’s menacing cousin Fergal arrives, the danger exceeds her darkest imaginings.

  But this is merely a beginning, a gateway to horrors beyond Stephanie’s worst nightmares. And in a house where no one listens to the screams, will she ever get out alive?

  ‘Adam Nevill has forged his reputation as one of the UK’s best horror writers by writing elegantly stripped down, deceptively simple novels. No One Gets Out Alive starts off as a similarly pared back take on the ghost story, but blossoms into something much grander in scale’

  SFX

  THE RITUAL

  In the forests of Scandinavia, an ancient presence starts its nightmare hunt once again . . .

  Four old university friends reunite for a hiking trip in the Scandinavian wilderness of the Arctic Circle. No longer young men, they have little left in common and tensions rise as they struggle to connect. Frustrated and tired, they take a shortcut that turns their hike into a nightmare that could cost them their lives.

  Lost, hungry and surrounded by forest untouched for millennia, they stumble across an isolated old house. Inside, they find the macabre remains of old rites and pagan sacrifices; ancient artefacts and unidentifiable bones. This place of dark ritual is home to a bestial predator that is still alive in the ancient forest. And now they’re the prey.

  The four friends struggle toward salvation, but death doesn’t come easily among these ancient trees . . .

  ‘This novel grabs from the very first page, refuses to be laid aside, and carries the hapless reader, exhausted and wrung out, to the very last sentence’

  Guardian

  ‘Horrifyingly scary . . . Nevill sinuously ramps up the tension’

  Sunday Times

  LAST DAYS

  Winner of the August Derleth award for Best Horror Novel

  They never let you go . . .

  In 1975, a massacre took place in the Arizona desert which shocked the world. The Temple of the Last Days, a cult whose rumoured mystical secrets and paranormal experiences lay concealed behind a history of murder, sexual deviancy and imprisonment, came to a bloody end after a night of ritualistic violence. Now their story wants to be told.

  Kyle Freeman is an indie film-maker with no money and few options, so when he lands a commission to make a documentary about the sinister cult and its mysterious leader, he jumps at the chance.

  As he travels from London to France and then Arizona, tracing the path of the Temple of the Last Days, uncanny events, out-of-body experiences, ghastly artefacts and nocturnal visitors plague him. Finally he discovers the terrible secrets the cult died to protect – but is it too late to escape their hideous legacy?

  ‘The British horror master’s fourth novel sees him in top form with intelligent storytelling, an authentic, authoritative voice, and myth-building akin to Clive Barker at his most ambitious’

  Rue Morgue

  By Adam Nevill

  NOVELS

  Banquet for the Damned

  Apartment 16

  The Ritual

  Last Days

  House of Small Shadows

  No One Gets Out Alive

  Lost Girl

  Under a Watchful Eye

  SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

  Some Will Not Sleep

  First published 2017 by Macmillan

  This electronic edition published 2017 by Macmillan

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan

  20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-1-5098-2042-9

  Copyright © Adam Nevill, 2017

  The right of Adam Nevill to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Pan Macmillan does not have any control over, or any responsibility for, any author or third-party websites referred to in or on this book.

  You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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