Sentinel: Book One of The Sentinel Trilogy Read online

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  No matter how many times he re-read the letter, its magnitude refused to fade. It was the final thread, an invisible spider-spun cord that linked him and his parents together. Nicholas couldn’t put it down.

  The events of the day his parents had left for the train still haunted his thoughts. The last time he’d seen his mother and father, they had been waving from the back window of a taxi. And now Nicholas thought of it, he remembered his mother’s strange, stretched smile. The image lingered in his mind’s eye – the way she had bitten her bottom lip. Nicholas wondered what it could mean. Was it conceivable that, like his father in the letter, his mother had known something might happen to them on the journey? Was that why she had refused to say goodbye to him?

  A chill prickled down his spine. He sensed the air shift behind him and turned, expecting to see that Tabatha had come into the room.

  His bedroom door was still shut and he was alone in the room. He shook the chill off, returning to the letter.

  It left so many unanswered questions. Who was ‘She’? Nicholas had never heard his parents speak of a godmother. And if they had never mentioned her, why were they going to her with such urgency? Why all the secrecy? And why, above all, did they feel the need to send the letter? Nicholas desperately wanted to see Sam again – he was the only person who could provide him with answers.

  “Nicholas.”

  The sound scattered Nicholas’s thoughts.

  A whisper so soft it shivered on the air.

  He turned.

  Across the room, his bedroom door was open a crack.

  Nicholas frowned, sure that just a moment ago it had been closed. He got up from the bed and walked to the door, peering out into the hallway. It was deserted.

  Nicholas turned to walk back into his bedroom.

  “Nicholassssssss…”

  The boy froze. The hairs on his arms stood on end. Slowly, he moved to look back into the hallway.

  There was nobody there, only a slash of moonlight filtering in through the window.

  “Tabatha?” he called out.

  “Nicholassss.”

  The letter fluttered from his hand and rested on the floor.

  “Who’s there?” he demanded. He thought he could feel eyes on him, but there was nobody there. Every fibre of his being screamed at him to stay where he was, but his feet – as if alive with foolish curiosity – stepped him out into the hall.

  “Who’s there?” the boy repeated. “Tabatha?” He walked toward the stairs, his heart hammering.

  “Nicholassss.”

  It was louder this time, closer. Nicholas spun towards the sound.

  There was his parents’ bedroom door. He chewed on the inside of his cheek, his stomach tied up in knots.

  He moved to the door and pressed his ear against the wood.

  Nothing.

  Not a peep.

  Reaching down, he took the door handle just as he had done the day before and twisted it.

  The door fell open.

  The smell of his parents still lingered here. The comforting scent of his father’s aftershave mingled with the heather perfume his mother loved. Grief welled in his chest. Fresh and suffocating. He looked around the room, tidy and modest, rambling roses adorning the wallpaper. The same as it always had been. But somehow more special now, like the letter. Something to preserve.

  There was no sign of life here, though. Nothing that might have whispered, anyway.

  Nicholas found himself scrutinising the far wall. A picture of a younger version of himself hung there.

  There was something strange.

  Where the wall met the floor, a long, horizontal crack of light had appeared. He’d never noticed it before.

  They didn’t want me to notice it before, he thought to himself, though he couldn’t explain why such a thought should occur to him.

  Going to the wall, he crouched down and felt the base of the skirting. Then he pressed his cheek against the carpet.

  A draft sighed through the crack and Nicholas could hear soft murmurs. He strained to make out the words, but found that he couldn’t.

  The sound of Tabatha’s footsteps on the stairs made Nicholas get hurriedly to his feet.

  “Nicholas? Are you still up?”

  “Yes, I’m coming,” he called.

  He backed away from the wall, wondering what could possibly lie behind it. Then he closed his parents’ bedroom door and joined Tabatha on the landing.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Unravelling Threads

  THE FIRST MOMENT THAT NICHOLAS KNEW he was outside was when a rough hand touched his bare arm.

  “You alright?” a voice asked.

  Nicholas blinked.

  In front of him, a dilapidated church flexed up into the night sky. Frostbitten and swaddled in snow, its shattered windows gaped like mouths while graffiti-scrawled timber boarded up the entrance. Red and blue lights skipped over the stonework.

  “What’s going on?” he said.

  The owner of the hand took a step forward, blocking out the decrepit structure. He was a tall figure with a wide nose and even wider shoulders. There was a police badge pinned to his chest.

  “Had a bit too much to drink?” the officer asked.

  “What?” Nicholas repeated. He became suddenly aware that he was freezing. Looking down, he found that he was standing barefoot in the snow, dressed in boxers and a white vest. His feet were muddy and nearly purple from the cold.

  “What’s going on?” he mumbled again.

  A minute ago he’d drifted off to sleep – very much in his bed – and now he didn’t know where he was.

  “You better come with us,” the officer said, drawing Nicholas toward a waiting police car. The lights on top whirred about like they belonged in a fairground ride. Nicholas got into the back of the car and was handed a blanket, which he gratefully wrapped around himself. His head was swimming. He was at home in bed and he was in a police car. Everything was a fuzzy muddle.

  The officer took his address and drove Nicholas back to Midsummer Common.

  When they got to the house, Tabatha was already sat on the doorstep, more than slightly resembling a plump pink marshmallow in her fluffy dressing gown. Her face drawn tight with worry, she jumped to her feet as Nicholas trudged up the steps, the policeman just behind him.

  They went inside and Tabatha put the kettle on. Nicholas slumped at the kitchen table, confused and vaguely annoyed. The policeman had performed a breathalyser test and was satisfied that Nicholas hadn’t downed a bottle of whisky and decided to go for a drunken stroll. But he wanted to know what Nicholas was doing out in the middle of the night dressed, in his words, like he was “partying on a Portuguese beach”.

  “Don’t you think I do, too?” Nicholas mumbled defensively. He felt like a freak, and all this fuss was only making things worse.

  “Have you ever sleepwalked before?” the officer asked.

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  “That’s got to be the explanation, though, hasn’t it officer?” Tabatha shuffled over in her slippers and set three steaming mugs down on the table. “How else would you explain it?”

  The officer ignored Tabatha’s question. “I’ve had sleepwalkers rolling around in their front gardens before, but I’ve never known anybody to walk five miles into the countryside at two o’clock in the morning without waking up first,” he said. “And definitely not barefoot.”

  “Five miles?” Tabatha shrieked. “I’m surprised you didn’t catch your death of cold. Do you think he should see the doctor?”

  “As long as you’re alright.” The officer continued to ignore her. Nicholas met the policeman’s gaze and saw that he was genuinely concerned. Perhaps it was the embarrassment of it all, or Tabatha’s persistent fussing, or the headache-inducing muddle the night had turned into, but the man’s pity made Nicholas feel even more pathetic.

  “I’m fine,” he grunted, shoving his chair back. “Cheers for the ride.” He d
umped the blanket on the table and trudged out of the kitchen.

  Up in his room, everything looked as it should. The duvet was pushed down to the foot of the bed, his bed sheets crumpled where he’d slept earlier. Everything looked normal, and everything was normal – except for the fact that Nicholas had just walked miles into the middle of nowhere while unconscious. As far as he knew, he’d never sleepwalked before. And yet he’d surely just set some sort of sleepwalking record. How – and why?

  Nicholas spent the whole night restlessly pondering the conundrum.

  Sam arrived early in the morning. It was the day of the funeral, and Nicholas wished he could just sleep through it.

  As Tabatha told Sam about Nicholas’s night-time saunter, the old man was his usual laidback self, just as Nicholas knew he would be. Sam had barely set foot in the front door that morning before Tabatha swooped on him to inform him of the night’s events. She told the story as theatrically as possible, replete with dramatic pauses and an impression of the burly officer. By the time Nicholas found them in the kitchen, Sam was wearing a polite but weary smile – he’d obviously spent the entire conversation nodding.

  The old man shrugged the whole thing off with an amiable “we’ll have to furnish you with a bell if you’re going to start going on midnight wanders”, and Nicholas had been grateful for it.

  Hours later, he was sitting in another church. The charcoal smudges under Nicholas’s eyes were even darker than ever. They sort of complemented the occasion, he thought gloomily. Dressed in a black suit and tie, he sat in the front pew of a pretty local church, Sam at his side. The last time he’d worn this suit it had been for a wedding. Now he was at a funeral. His parents’ funeral. There was an unpleasant symmetry in there somewhere.

  He found it almost impossible to pay attention to what the priest was saying. Rain tapped at the church’s stained glass windows and the sound echoed through the melancholy environment. The service blurred into eternity.

  After his sleepless night, Nicholas felt numb to everything, like he was wrapped up in that stuff they used to insulate houses. He’d been dreading this day, but now it was here it just felt strange. Like a part of a movie or a really bad soap opera. He’d seen a million funerals on TV before, but it was different to be in the middle of one.

  And Nicholas really was in the middle of it. He felt all eyes on him – the poor boy whose young parents had been tragically snatched away from him. A band of Nicholas’s school friends were sitting somewhere near the back, but their presence only muddled things further. Nicholas had never seen their faces so serious. The sight of self-appointed class clown Charlie Walker looking so grey was almost crazier than the thought that his parents’ bodies were lying in boxes mere feet away.

  Nicholas didn’t want to look at the coffins, but his eyes were drawn magnetically in their direction. They were surprisingly small, and the more he looked, the harder he found it to believe that his parents were lying in them. Cold. Unmoving. Silent. And they would never move again.

  He almost wanted to lift the lids to make sure they really were in there. It was only the thought of what he might find inside that stopped him. What did his parents look like now? After the train wreck? What was even left of them? Nicholas shuddered and pushed the disturbing images from his head, fixing his gaze on the priest, who had said “Hallows” instead of “Hallow” at least twice now. Just another strange addition to the whole macabre circus.

  When the service moved outside into the rainfall, Nicholas got a sense of just how many people had turned up to pay their respects. Half of them he didn’t recognise, but some he did – his parents’ friends mostly, all looking smarter in their Sunday best than he had ever seen them.

  As the mourners congregated beside two freshly-dug pits in the cemetery grounds, Nicholas caught the eye of a scrawny woman whose hair had been scraped back into a tight bun. He knew her. Alice Gibbons, one of his mum’s livelier colleagues. From across the holes in the ground, Alice fixed Nicholas with such a despairing look of pity that the boy found himself doing the one thing he didn’t feel like doing. He smiled. There was just something about that wretched look that jolted a bizarre response out of him – one that both masked his true feelings and endeavoured to reassure the woman, somehow, that all of this was okay. He was okay. Couldn’t be better. He looked away before she could respond.

  The coffins were lowered into the earth. It swallowed them expectantly and Nicholas sensed the beginning of a horrible finality. His parents were gone, and nothing would ever return them. The rain that pounded the graveyard streaked his face, mimicking the tears that he couldn’t shed here. Sam’s comforting hand on his shoulder couldn’t help.

  In a towering oak that spread finger-like branches above them, a raven perched, hunched against the downpour.

  When it was all over, Sam drove Nicholas and Tabatha back to the house. There was to be no wake – Sam had explained that it would have taken too much organising, but Nicholas knew that the convention had been skipped for his sake. He wasn’t entirely ungrateful for that – at least he wouldn’t have to face all of the people from the church who had looked at him with such cloying compassion.

  At the house, a bleary-eyed Tabatha mumbled something about making a pot of tea before disappearing into the kitchen. Nicholas stood with Sam in the dim hallway.

  “That went as well as can be expected,” Sam said, bobbing on his heels. “Quite a good turn-out, don’t you think?”

  “They knew lots of people,” Nicholas said. He felt leaden inside. Heavy and empty at the same time. A used tin can.

  “Indeed,” Sam said softly. He took a breath, as if mustering the strength to go on. “As we discussed, I have arranged for your departure tomorrow–”

  “Tomorrow?!”

  Tabatha had emerged from the kitchen, red-eyed with a scrunched up tissue in her hand. Apparently realising her outburst, Tabatha blushed and hastily added: “Meaning no disrespect, but we’ve only just had the funeral. You don’t think it’s a bit soon, Mr Wilkins?”

  “I admit, things have been put on something of a fast track,” Sam mitigated. “But I feel that it would be for the best if Nicholas–” he turned to address the boy directly, “–the best for you if you were with your godmother as soon as possible. I’ve spoken with social services and they agreed, though it took some convincing that they didn’t need to come and see Nicholas. Luckily I know somebody there.”

  Nicholas was grateful for that. He didn’t understand any of the legal stuff that happened in a situation like this, but he didn’t fancy having to sit and talk to an overly-friendly therapist about his feelings. He was quite happy keeping them to himself.

  “Are you really sure that’s the best thing, Mr Wilkins?” Tabatha asked, stuffing the tissue up her sleeve.

  “I do,” Sam persisted. “It is in the interest of all that Nicholas is given a chance to settle down after all this. I believe that Nicholas is most safe – by that of course I mean safe emotionally – with the people that his parents wished him to be with. Fresh surroundings will do him a world of good.”

  “What do you think, Nicholas?” Tabatha asked, rubbing his arm.

  “If it’s what Dad wanted...” Nicholas said. “I want to meet her, whoever she is.”

  Whether he realised it or not, the mystery of this enigmatic and conspicuously absent godmother was the only thing keeping Nicholas going. He couldn’t understand all the secrecy, and he wanted to get to the bottom of whatever his parents had been up to when they died. It seemed like the most important thing in the world now. The only thing.

  Tabatha nodded and wiped at her eyes. “I’ll go see how that tea is doing.”

  “You’ll be going by bus,” Sam told Nicholas. “I have been led to believe that they are quite comfortable. I do regret, however, that I won’t be able to accompany you–”

  “You won’t?” Nicholas was taken aback. “You’re not coming?” The thought that he would have to travel by himself hadn’t even
crossed his mind. Suddenly he felt more alone than ever.

  Sam ruffled the boy’s hair affectionately. “Oh lad, I am sorry. You know I would if I could.”

  He would if he could. Now he thought of it, Nicholas couldn’t help wondering just what Sam got up to in his spare time – surely a man in his seventies should be taking life easy, playing chess in the park and scribbling poisonous letters to local newspapers about vandals and street gangs. Yet Sam seemed to spend his time constantly running around putting out fires all over Cambridge.

  “Don’t fret,” Sam went on. “A good friend of mine is headed the same way, so he’ll be getting the bus with you. You’ll get on with Richard; he’s a thinker like you.” Sam checked his watch. “Is that really the time? I’m afraid I must be off. I’ll be back at nine a.m. sharp to take you to the bus station. Best have everything ready before then, eh? No playing on that x-cite all evening, or whatever it’s called.”

  “Xbox.” Nicholas smiled despite himself. “I’ll be ready.”

  “Take care, lad. Get some sleep.”

  It was only when Sam had gone that Nicholas realised he’d forgotten to ask him about the strange wall in his parents’ bedroom.

  *

  The remainder of the day crawled torpidly by. Hostile clouds lingered in the sky while rain slicked the streets, reducing the snow to mulch. Nicholas despised being cooped up inside, hated the stale air and lying about the house with nothing to do. It gave him too much time to think.

  When he could stand the drumming on his ceiling no more, the boy dragged on a grey hoodie and trudged out onto Midsummer Common. It wasn’t long before he was soaked through, but Nicholas didn’t care. Squelching across the sodden grass, he made his way towards the river, seeing that a number of Red Poll bullocks had been set out to graze on the grassy land. Confronted with the inclement conditions, the cows huddled under a tree, barely moving. Solid mud statues.

  At the riverside, Nicholas stood alone and peered down into the cloudy water. Boats that had been moored on the other side rocked against one another, jostled by the current.