Cunning Folk

by Adam L.G. Nevill

She casts a sharp glance at Tom and he shies away, withered. He feels fraudulent and suddenly detached, uncoupled from these two people who hold him upright in life. He dragged them to a broken-down house with hideous neighbours, so far from school, jobs, friends and comfort.

This house will never stop taking what they have. She can smell its terminal illness, the constant

need of the sickness in the mildewed plaster, in the dusty air currents she hears like wheezes, dragging the dead skin of ages from beneath the floorboards and into their lungs. And this is just the start. They’re not nurses, they’re undertakers.

The narrative of the story – his story – that he endlessly recounted to detectives and doctors and psychiatrists has never changed. But the style of its telling has evolved over time, from impassioned to reasonable to morbid to flat.