Mislaid & The Wallcreeper: The Nell Zink Collection. Nell Zink

      

      

       Copyright

      Fourth Estate

      An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.4thestate.co.uk

      MISLAID

      First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2015

      First published in the United States by Ecco in 2015

      Copyright © Nell Zink 2015

      THE WALLCREEPER

      First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2015

      First published in the United States by Dorothy, a Publishing Project in 2014

      Copyright © Nell Zink 2014

      Nell Zink asserts the moral right to

      be identified as the author of this work

      Jacket images © Norman Arlott

      A catalogue record for this book is

      available from the British Library

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      These novels are works of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

      Source ISBNs: 9780008139605 and 9780008130862

      Ebook Edition © June 2015 ISBN: 9780008139933

      Version: 2015-05-22

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

       Copyright

       Mislaid

       The Wallcreeper

       About the Author

       About the Publisher

      

      

      Contents

       Title Page

       Dedication

       Epigraph

       One

       Two

       Three

       Four

       Five

       Six

       Seven

       Eight

       Nine

       Ten

       Eleven

       Dedication

      My life would be harder

      without the magnificent collective

      Zeitenspiegel Reportagen,

      to whose members and supporters

      I gratefully dedicate this book

       Epigraph

      … among the rabble—men,

      Lion ambition is chained down—

      And crouches to a keeper’s hand—

      Not so in deserts, where the grand—

      The wild—the terrible, conspire

      With their own breath to fan his fire.

      —E. A. Poe, “Tamerlane”

       One

      Stillwater College sat on the fall line south of Petersburg. One half of the campus was elevated over the other half, and the waters above were separated from the waters below by a ledge with stone outcroppings. The waters below lay still, and the waters above flowed down. They seeped into the sandy ground before they had time to form a stream. And that’s why the house had been named Stillwater. It overlooked a lake that lay motionless as if it had been dug with shovels and hand-lined with clay. But the lake had been there as long as anyone could remember. It had no visible outlet, and no docks because a piling might puncture the layer of clay. Nobody swam in the lake because of the leeches in the mud. There was no fishing because