Ruins (2 page)

Dr Adams removed the apparatus from his arm and dumped it on the desk, pausing to slip an escaped strand of her own silvery hair back into the neat pile pinned atop her head.

Sam rolled down his shirt sleeve and said nothing. He was glad Dr Adams’ check-up hadn’t involved removing his shirt. He’d never be able to explain the still-yellow mottling of his skin; slow-fading bruises from the fight in the temple beneath the cemetery.

“You know you’re gambling with your health, Sam,” Dr Adams persisted, tapping notes into a computer. The office was small but light, slatted blinds letting in fingers of sunlight. A framed photo of a puffy, toothless child rested on her desk. A scrap of A4 paper was pinned to the wall. Chubby handprints had been eagerly pressed into multi-coloured paint.

“Samuel Wilkins!”

The elderly man nodded and returned the doctor’s stare, twisting the battered grey fedora in his hands.

“You should be taking it easy,” Dr Adams said. “Let the youngsters do the hard work, it’s their turn now. You should be enjoying retirement. Get a dog. Play chess. Learn French. Forget about monsters.”

Sam didn’t tell her that sounded like his idea of hell.

“Would that I could. There’s bad stuff coming, worse than we’ve seen in our lifetimes. You don’t just sit back and let that happen.”

“But you certainly don’t go out looking for it,” Dr Adams told him. She knew him too well. Softening, she touched his liver-spotted hand. “I’m begging you, stop. It’ll be the death of you.”

Sam held her gaze. It was now or never – the real reason he’d submitted himself to Dr Adams’ scrutiny.

“Ever heard of a Dr Snelling?” he asked.

She removed the hand. “Why’d you ask?”

“He worked somewhere here in Cambridge.”

“Smelling?”

“Snelling,” he corrected her. He checked his pocket watch. Two pm. He would have to hit the road soon.

“Doesn’t ring any bells,” Dr Adams mused. “Should it?”

“Nothing important,” Sam assured her. “Though, there is something.”

“I’m not going to help you on any monster hunts. You should know better, and frankly–”

“Just… a nod or a shake of the head,” Sam interjected. “Has anything ever crossed your path, you know, anything regarding possession and the such? I’m asking you as a professional, of course. I don’t want to know what you get up to outside of work hours.”

Dr Adams shot him a look that would have left his left cheek glowing if it had been a slap. “Samuel Wilkins–”

Sam raised his hands and got to his feet, backing toward the door. “Don’t mind me, just an old fool with an overactive imagination,” he said, opening the door.

“Snelling,” the doctor said suddenly.

Sam paused. “Sorry?”

Dr Adams bit her lip. He’d never seen her do that before. “There was something, back in the nineties,” she muttered. “Now what was it? No, I can’t think.” She glared at him, jabbed a pen in the air. “And you shouldn’t be rooting around in anything of the like.”

“I’d best be going,” Sam said. “If you happen to think of anything, drop me a line, won’t you?”

She was sterner than ever. “No more hunting.”

He assured her, as convincingly as he could, that he would do nothing of the sort. Even as he said it, he knew he had no intention of stopping. What else was there? If he went to his grave fighting, that’s the way it had to be. He was born a Sentinel and it was his duty to protect people from the dark things that prowled just out of sight, unnoticed until it was too late. He supposed ignorance was bliss.

Dr Adams prescribed him some pills for the blood pressure and Sam begrudgingly fetched them from the pharmacy. He’d never remember to take them.

The walk home was balmy, the sun heavy on his shoulders as he hurried down the street. The fedora clung to his forehead and the heat made him nervous. The snow had melted the day after that terrible night in the mausoleum, when he’d discovered that even more Sentinels had been turned against them – had become Harvesters. The cold evaporated like a bad dream and the sun blasted apart the lingering clouds.

Sam shuddered. So sudden a change in the weather didn’t bode well. It was a diversion; a distraction from what was to come. How could spirits buoyed by the return of bright August mornings ever imagine the darkness that awaited?

He surveyed the street. Cambridge was different in the wake of that night. True, it had always been subject to demonic activity, that was the reason he was stationed here. The demonic activity had stepped up in recent weeks, though. Ever since Anita and Max Hallow were killed in a train crash and the demon Diltraa picked its way through the city’s child population. Diltraa was banished, but still Sam worried. There were others, and the Harvester population was only swelling. And then there was Malika, the red-haired witch. There had been no sign of her since Diltraa’s demise, but Sam suspected she was merely licking her wounds before leading a fresh assault.

When he got home, he double-bolted the front door and wound string from the handle to the radiator. The string was lined with little bells that tinkled when he plucked it. He was taking no chances. After checking the back door and downstairs windows, he fixed himself a late lunch. A cup of tea and a few slices of toast. He took them upstairs and climbed the step-ladder into the attic, ignoring the ache in his right knee as he went.

The attic was as he’d left it the day he and Liberty had found the message on the Ectomunicator, the old typewriter-like device that the Sentinels had once used to message one another. He hadn’t been up here since that evening; he couldn’t face it after what had happened at the church. The guilt sat like a stone in his stomach. Immovable and constant. Richard. Vince. Jack. He’d killed them all. They had been Sentinels, but something had turned them; transformed them into bloodthirsty Harvesters whose sole desire was to kill Sentinels.

There was only one thing he could do to stop himself succumbing to the gnawing guilt – he had to find out why. What had turned them? And who was behind it? Somebody was assembling an army. He had to stop them.

Liberty was doing what she could in-between looking after her daughter. Though she was a handy person to have around – Liberty was a Sensitive and attune to psychic activity – Sam was relieved she was focussing on family. He was loathe to drag her into this again, especially so soon after she had been used by Malika to open a portal into Hallow House. The trauma of that nasty ordeal had nearly killed her and, five days later, Liberty was only just starting to resemble her old, sarcastic self.

No. He wouldn’t bother Liberty. The weight of responsibility rested on his shoulders alone.

With a sigh, Sam seated himself at the desk at the back of the attic. He clicked on the lamp and a circle of light fell on the Ectomunicator. Wearily, he drew the dust cover over it and retired the contraption to the back of the desk, making way for his meagre lunch.

He sipped the tea, crunched the toast unenthusiastically, popped one of Dr Adams’s blasted pills, then opened a drawer under the desk and took out a clunky old laptop. He powered it up, hoping he could remember everything Max had taught him – he hadn’t used it in some time. The little lines in the corner of the screen told him he was connected to a wireless network, so he opened a browser and started typing.

He wasn’t sure what he was looking for – there was no information regarding Sentinels or Harvesters on the Internet beyond the ramblings of the conspiracy hounds. He tried a few random searches. Nothing useful came up.

Sam leaned back in his chair. It had all started with Richard. Richard and Dr Snelling. Sam had tried to call Dr Adams when Richard was attacked, but she had escaped the snow for two weeks in Mauritius with her husband. Sam wished she’d been there to see Richard. Maybe she could have figured out what Snelling had done to him. She could have helped Sam save him.

He remembered those cold, accusatory eyes boring into him from the kitchen floor and shuddered.

“Snelling,” he muttered, shaking the image off. He typed the name into the browser, which returned over seven million unique results. Sam puffed in exasperation and clicked through the first few links. Most of them were useless. Building companies, some scientist called Snelling who didn’t seem relevant, and reams of other unrelated news stories.

He paused, his hand hovering over the mouse pad. Sam squinted at the website he’d opened.

“How interesting,” he murmured.

*

The book made a satisfying
thwack
as it hit the wall and thumped to the floor.

Nicholas Hallow grunted, disappointed it hadn’t smashed through into the next room – at least then he wouldn’t have to look at it. Instead, the book sprawled on the carpet. The way it had landed, he could still read the silver words along its spine.

The Sentinel Chronicles – August 1997.

He’d found the book on his bedside table five days ago, the morning after he’d fought Diltraa. It was the one book in the Sentinels’ extensive records that he’d been unable to uncover. The book’s absence from the library had aroused his suspicions because he was born in that very month. And then suddenly there it was, as if the room had coughed it up, taunting him with the promise of answers.

Every page was blank. Every single one of them.

The disappointment thudded in his chest.

Another dead end.

Nicholas couldn’t help feeling he was the punchline to a particularly stupid joke. Jessica Bell, the leader of the Sentinels, had revealed something that even now made his skin crawl, as if he’d shrunk inside of it. Almost sixteen years ago, he’d been born in the village of Orville, less than a mile from here. His birth had almost destroyed the village and every single person living in it. They were all killed, their souls frozen in time.

“
They’re dead
,” Jessica had said, “
but they continue to live undead lives, caught there for all eternity.
”

Remorse wrenched at his insides and Nicholas glared at the book. There had to be a way to find out how he’d caused such destruction. And there had to be a way to fix it. Jessica had been so busy since the night in the garden, though. That was five days ago, and he’d barely seen her since. They’d burned Diltraa’s remains together; the Garm’s, too. Pounded the bones into ash, and that was the last of it.

Nicholas suspected that he was still being protected from something. He wished they would just be straight with him. He’d survived a demon – what could be harder than that?

“Not a fan of the ending?”

Nicholas jumped. A cat peered at him from the door. Isabel’s fur was black, zigzagged with silver. The fact that she could speak was as unremarkable to him now as the fact that all other cats couldn’t.

“You’re getting good at being stealthy,” he remarked. “I didn’t hear you at all that time.”

The cat regarded him coolly. “Or perhaps you were too busy daydreaming, as usual.”

“I need to find out what happened in Orville,” he said, shoving a hand through his dark, curly hair.

Isabel couldn’t help. Technically, she’d been dead when he was born, her spirit trapped in the pentagon-shaped room on the ground floor of Hallow House. She was as clueless about the town as he was. She’d taken the time, though, to explain certain things to him. He’d learned words like ‘Harvester’, which were Sentinel-killing bounty hunters, and he’d overheard conversations as Jessica met with visiting Sentinels. A mad man with a katana had rampaged through the streets of Manchester, killing twenty people; a chemical plant had a meltdown, incinerating hundreds of workers; thousands of dead fish washed up at Beach Rock in Norfolk.

Isabel had uttered the word that nobody else dared.

“
Apocalypse.
”

“There’s plenty of time for that later,” Isabel said. “They’re about to start. Come.”

In a blink she was gone.

Casting a final look at the book, Nicholas resisted the temptation to give it one last kick and hurried after her, plunging through the empty corridors of Hallow House. When he’d arrived here two weeks ago, the never-ending warren of hallways had given him a headache. Now, he knew the house inside out.

By the time he arrived at the entrance hall, the cat had vanished. Instead, he found Sam waiting for him.

“Come on, lad, let’s not miss it, eh?” the elderly man said. Nicholas noticed rings under his eyes and Sam seemed thinner than usual. His grey suit was practically baggy.

“How are things?” Sam asked as they left the house.

“Oh, you know. Paying the bills by killing demons. It’s a grind but the kids need new shoes.”

Sam chuckled. He could always count on a chuckle from Sam, no matter how poor the joke.

Together, they trudged into the countryside. The evening air was warm, but Nicholas shivered. He noticed orange flickers as they approached the forest and he looked at Sam nervously, hoping they were safe out in the open.

A ring of poplar trees bordered a wide clearing. The sky was a cheek-blushing pink, and at the clearing’s centre, a large crowd had already gathered. Nicholas’s insides leapt when he realised every one of them must be a Sentinel. He could count the number of Sentinels he’d met on one hand, and he scanned the horde keenly, discovering Sentinels of all shapes and sizes. They looked utterly normal. Supermarket people. The fear that he was under-dressed in shorts and a T-shirt – summer clothes Sam had fetched for him from Midsummer Common – quickly evaporated. Aside from the odd raven feather or silver pendant, the others were completely unremarkable. He couldn’t help feeling a twinge of disappointment.