Under a Watchful Eye by Adam Nevill

Author:Adam Nevill [Nevill, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509820429
Publisher: Pan Macmillan

14

Greylands

Once Seb had read the SPR files, he organized Ewan’s papers. As much as it was possible to systemize such a disparate hoard of fragments.

He’d not suffered another vivid dream either, for six days and counting. Which was just as well, because the last one had felt too unlike a dream. Seb had subsequently tried to convince himself that the nightmare had been an aftershock, and not an attachment. A week without Ewan, and the house had also returned to its natural state.

As Seb had deciphered Ewan’s jottings, so disturbing had he found their contents that he’d given serious consideration to their destruction. Twice he’d stopped short of consigning every scrap of paper to the recycling bin, and only hesitated because what he managed to read had cultivated more of the green shoots of his desire to really write again. What a story this would make, had been a thought on repeat. And maybe he could even claim the story was factual, as Ewan’s beloved M. L. Hazzard had done with his own obscure works. No one would believe Seb either.

His desk and the floor of his office were soon covered by SPR files and stacks of Ewan’s dog-eared notes, date-ordered where possible. The jumbled dossier that Ewan had left behind, and its considerable marginalia, had taken Seb five long days to struggle through. The unreadable parts comprised two thirds of the documentation and had been consigned to a separate cardboard treasury box. So severe was the text’s illegibility it might have been coded, but without the author to decipher the text, some sections would remain a permanent mystery. Even though most of that consignment had been illegible, Seb worked out enough to know that every sentence began with a thickly scored ‘I’.

The piecemeal journal was entirely handwritten, in a variety of biro colours. At the bottom of the bag Seb had found some small pens, the type that Argos stores put out for customers to fill in their order tickets. Even a pencil had been employed at one point.

Cheap A4 pads, photocopying paper, flyers for National Trust properties and bus timetables had been used by Ewan to record his thoughts and experiences. All of the paper was smeared with grubby fingerprints and some pages had been obliterated by stains. A few folios were stuck together with what Seb hoped was food. He’d even uncovered a Hello Kitty notepad that Ewan must have found, or stolen, before tearing out the pages used by the previous juvenile owner. That spiral-bound notebook had entries dated within the last year, but stank more heinously than anything else, as if Ewan had kept it close to his unwashed flesh; perhaps hidden from sight like a prisoner of war concealing a journal. But concealed from whom, and why?

Seb guessed the archive amounted to a decade’s worth of hastily written notes. Those dated within the last two years appeared on pieces of paper that gradually diminished in size, the handwriting matching the shrinkage of the paper.

The

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