[Sarah Jane Adventures 06] - The Lost Boy

by Gary Russell

  BBC CHILDREN’S BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Australia) Ltd, 250 Camber^vell Road, Camberwell, Victoria, 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Canada, India, New Zealand, South Africa

  Published by BBC Children’s Character Books, 2008 Text and design © Children’s Character Books, 2008

  109876543 2 I

  Sarah Jane Adventures © BBC 2007

  www.thesja.com

  BBC logo ™ & BBC 1996. Licensed by BBC Worldwide Limited All rights reserved.

  ISBN 978-1 -40590-506-0

  The Lost Boy

  Written by Gary Russell

  Based, on the script by Phil Ford

  ‘I saw amazing things, out there

  in space. But there’s strangeness

  to be found wherever you turn.

  Life on Earth can be an

  adventure, too.

  You just have to know

  where to look.’

  SARAH JANE SMITH

  Table of Contents

  Face

  Copyright

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter One

  The nightmare begins

  Afew months ago, the residents of Hambleton Estate had been a happy lot. The estate had been built in a secluded part of the Lake District, an area that people could move to, to get away from the hustle bustle of cities, of intercity trains and mucky buses. A nice, gentle, new housing development. A place to chill out and relax in.

  Which was all fine until the new people moved into Number 64, along with their rusty red van (which might’ve once belonged to the Royal Mail!), on the corner of the street leading to the park and the road with the fields of ponies and sheep. You see, the people of the estate had moved there from across the UK to escape the drudgery of city life, and they were a friendly lot. They had all got to know one another, sharing shopping trips to Carlisle, running each others kids to school and the cinemas, that sort of thing. So when the new people moved into Number 64 Grass Street, one of the neighbours, Mrs Townsend, made it her business to visit, with a flask of tea, a tray of biscuits — covered in clingfilm, naturally to keep them fresh — and even the traditional bowl of sugar.

  But the response had been sullen, almost rude. The newcomers were a couple and their son. The couple were in their early thirties, but had a look that made Mrs Townsend think they were much older. They barely made eye contact, either with her or each other, and the man seemed perpetually angry. Mrs Townsend noticed he had a scar just below the left ear (she noticed things like that) and it crossed her mind he might have got it in a fight — it had that jagged, almost torn look, which such scars do. But she averted her eyes, desperately hoping the man wouldn’t notice her gaze, and smiled instead at the woman.

  ‘Thought you might like some tea,’ Mrs Townsend started. ‘A sort of “Welcome to our neighbourhood” gesture,’ she ended, lamely, as the new woman never smiled.

  Thank you,’ said the woman, with about as much warmth as an abattoir. ‘That’s… kind of you.’ She smiled and Mrs Townsend thought it was an action she wasn’t used to. ‘My name is June Goss, this is Marco,’ she pointed at her husband. ‘We prefer our own company.’

  Mrs Townsend wasn’t quite sure how to deal with that, but soldiered on, bravely. ‘That’s nice,’ she said. ‘Well, if you ever want to chat, you’ll find everyone around here friendly enough.’

  The back door opened and a boy walked in. As sullen and withdrawn as his parents were, Mrs Townsend could see he was full of life and cheer.

  ‘This place is great, mum,’ he said, dropping a football bag on the kitchen floor. ‘There are horses and everything down that way, and the bus stop for school is over in the next street and there’s a lovely dog in one of the houses and —’

  He stopped as he took in Mrs Townsend. ‘Oh, hello,’ he said. ‘I’m Nate.’ He politely offered his hand, and Mrs Townsend shook it, relieved that someone in this strange family had a smile.

  Nate Goss was about twelve or thirteen years old, Mrs Townsend guessed, and quite rugged, looked like he played a lot of sports. He had mousey brown hair and piercing blue eyes that Mrs Townsend guessed would melt a few hearts in years to come. She glanced at the Everton bag he had put down.

  ‘Local team?’

  Nate shook his head. ‘Used to live in Guildford, but I learned to love Everton at school.’ He looked at his mum. ‘My old school.’ Then back at Mrs Townsend. ‘But I guess my new school here will be good too.’ He eased out of the kitchen, pausing only to nick a biscuit from the plate. ‘Nice, thanks,’ he smiled and was gone. Mrs Townsend noticed a family photo on the sideboard as he passed, showing a grinning Nate clutching a skateboard, his parents stood at either side of him.

  Mrs Townsend excused herself from the dour parents and headed home. Such a nice boy — shame about the parents. She wondered what their story was, but guessed she was unlikely to find out. ‘Not the chatty types,’ she told Mrs Galagher next door, later that day.

  Over the next few weeks, the new family made themselves unpopular with the neighbours in a variety of ways. They’d shout at the kids going to and from school. Once, they threw things at a dog, when it was going nowhere near their house. And they called the police to complain about a party held two roads away by a lovely young couple who were making no noise at all. And it was a Friday, so it wasn’t as if Marco was working the next day.

  During that time, Mrs Townsend gathered that Marco Goss worked in telecommunications and had been transferred up north. His wife stayed at home all day and young Nate was a popular kid at the school, not terribly bright, but a team player, and really good at sports (as she’d guessed) and woodwork. He’d quickly become popular with a lot of the girls at school, and Mrs Townsend wasn’t surprised. All of which made his parents’ lack of social graces all the more depressing.

  It was on a Thursday night, when June Goss had got involved in a particularly heated debate with young Mr Robinson (who was bringing up two daughters by himself after his wife had passed on so tragically young) about dustbins. Specifically, about where they were placed on the street for collection by the binmen. As a result, Mrs Townsend really began to feel quite cross with the new family. The Hambleton estate was about being nice, getting on with your neighbours, and above all, about getting away from aggro and unpleasantness and the Goss’ seemed to have brought all their city hang-ups with them from Guildford (which, Mrs Townsend had always believed, was a rather nice place, actually).

  At about ten o’clock that night, after dark, Mrs Townsend heard a noise outside in the street. She flicked her curtains apart a smidgen and saw a big truck in the street. Almost as big as a removal truck, but certainly larger than a Transit van. She couldn’t really see who was driving, and could only really make out vague shapes. Two adults and a child, a bit on the large size it had to be said, were getting out of the truck.

  One of the adults pointed at the Goss’ house and all three of them moved up the driveway.

  Mrs Townsend switched her lamp off, trying to see the newcomers more cl
early, but it didn’t help. However, there was something about them, about the way they walked, shuffled in fact, up that driveway, which concerned her. There was definitely something… wrong. That was the only way she could describe it. Wrong.

  And then, with a sigh, she let the curtain drop. After all, it was just Goss family business. “We prefer our own company” June had told her, so best to leave them to it.

  As Mrs Townsend got ready for bed that night, she was dimly aware of voices (she could recognise Marco Goss’ straight away) in the street outside. A couple of shouts followed. Then a brief silence, followed by laughter. She’d never heard either of the adult Goss’ laugh before, and it was a strange laugh. Almost mocking. Actually, she wasn’t sure if it was the Goss’ or the newcomers. As she was halfway up the stairs to bed, she couldn’t check the view outside, but by the time she got into her room, she was aware of the sound of the truck driving away followed by the Goss’ rusty red van, then nothing else.

  It didn’t really upset anyone that the Goss family had gone overnight. No one liked them, and at least dogs, kids, parties and Mr Robinson’s dustbins were free from their angry moans and grumbles. Nate was missed at school certainly, and Mrs Townsend learned that no one even realised that they had opted to move away. One day they were there, the next they’d gone.

  Deep down everyone was a bit relieved. The house was auctioned off not long afterwards and a lovely young couple who liked tea, biscuits, dogs and never objected to dustbin placement moved in a week or two later, and everything went back to normal.

  And Mrs Townsend barely gave the Goss family another thought over the next six months, until one Sunday teatime, when she was watching the BBC news with the sound turned down.

  And there, on the screen was what looked like June Goss, tearful, animated. Emotional. All the things she’d never really been when living on the Hambleton estate. That was why she turned the volume up, because it seemed so… out of character for her old neighbours.

  But she quickly realised she was wrong. These people weren’t June and Marco Goss. But they looked terribly similar. How odd, she thought, they look like dead ringers.

  Their names were Jay and Heidi Stafford, according to the names flashed up beneath them, and they were appealing for the return of their son, who it seemed had been kidnapped or lost or stolen or something. It crossed Mrs Townsend’s mind that something awful had happened to dear Nate — was that why they’d left in a hurry all those months back? But why wait till now to appeal for his return?

  Then a photo of the missing boy was flashed up, accompanied by a banner that said

  ASHLEY STAFFORD - HAVE YOU SEEN HIM?

  It wasn’t Nate, this was a good looking tall lad, maybe a year or two older, dark hair, bright eyes, thin as a rake. A bit geeky looking, Mrs Townsend thought the phrase was.

  A pretty boy, but certainly not Nate Goss.

  So, she’d got it wrong, these people looked similar but weren’t quite —

  And then she stopped and gasped.

  Jay Stafford had turned to hug his distraught wife and there, just below his left ear, was a jagged, rough scar.

  Now that was weird, Mrs Townsend thought. Not only did they look like the errant Goss parents, but the father had an identical scar to Marco Goss.

  Mrs Townsend was wondering what to do, when the doorbell rang.

  It was Mr Robinson. One of his girls had torn a skirt and although he could do many things, he explained, sewing wasn’t one of them.

  And delighted to help a lovely neighbour, Mrs Townsend invited him in and busied around getting her sewing kit out of a cupboard. She casually turned the TV off, all thoughts of missing Goss’ people, and missing Stafford boys, out of her mind.

  The last image on the TV screen as it powered down was a photo of the missing Ashley Stafford.

  A few hundred miles south of Mrs Townsend, and an entire day earlier, Maria Jackson had stared at her father in horror. Well, dismay. Well, shock. Well all right, dismay and shock, but above all, horror.

  The weekend before, Alan Jackson had discovered something new about his daughter. All fathers like to think they know their teenage daughters quite well. Few do, obviously, but Alan prided himself on being very much in tune with Maria. This was mainly due to the fact that Alan was a nice guy, liberal, open-minded and really the coolest dad out there. And because he and Maria only had each other. Alan and Chrissie Jackson had separated a year or two earlier, then divorced. That had prompted a relocation, and father and daughter had ended up choosing a house together in Ealing, a pleasant borough on the very border of west London. 36 Bannerman Road, a charming modern two bedroom semi in a quiet neighbourhood. There were shops, parks and a good school, Park Vale. Ealing Broadway was about a twenty minute walk away, central London only about 25 minutes from there by tube.

  What Alan Jackson hadn’t expected to discover six months or so later was that the lady who lived opposite, Sarah Jane Smith, had secrets. To Alan, Sarah Jane was a journalist, clearly well-off (her house was huge!) and she had adopted a teenager called Luke, who called her ‘Mum’ and was Maria’s best friend. Alan doubted there was anything more than friendship, mainly because Luke was lovely but a bit… weird. Alan once called him a dork, which got Maria very cross and she called Luke adorable. So Alan and Maria had come up with a new phrase for him, ‘adorkable’, which soon smoothed that problem out.

  What Alan had never guessed was that Sarah Jane spent most of her time dealing with aliens from outer space. Nor had he suspected that Luke wasn’t an ordinary fourteen year old boy, but had been created by an alien race of would-be conquers called the Bane. That Luke was a genetically-engineered ‘superboy’, whose amazing intellect was only equalled by his astonishing naivety, and that he had effectively been born only a few months ago. Alan was also coming to terms with words and phrases such as Slitheen (they were responsible for switching the sun off for a few minutes and had been based at Maria’s school), Gorgons (they were responsible for turning him to stone, apparently) and most recently the Trickster, who had sent the world’s time-stream into chaos, resulting in firstly Sarah Jane, and then Maria ceasing to exist. It had fallen to Alan, protected by a special alien box it seemed, to save the world. Which he did, just in time to enable Sarah Jane and her amazing sentient computer, Mr Smith (also alien), to divert a meteor that threatened to wipe out all life on Earth when it crashed. Heaven knows what the meteor did after it went spinning off into space, but Alan had been relieved that Sarah Jane had saved the world.

  And not for the first time, it transpired.

  ‘Maria,’ he was saying, ‘Maria, you are fourteen years old.’

  ‘Dad,’ she replied, ‘without Sarah Jane the world would have died. It’s what me and Luke and Clyde do.’

  Alan thought of Clyde. Cocky, streetwise and super-cool Clyde, Luke’s best friend and as much of an opposite of Luke’s reserved geekiness as it was possible to be. Not that Clyde was dim, far from it in fact, but he hated seeming clever and tended to be flippant and a joker and as a result his schoolwork was always a bit behind.

  ‘I’m your father. You never thought I should know about any of this?’

  ‘Like you would’ve believed me,’ she countered. ‘Sarah Jane knows what she’s doing. She used to work with the Doctor…’

  ‘A man from another world who flies around in space and time, if I remember correctly what you said?’

  ‘Yeah, and now she has a robot dog computer thing called K-9, but he’s stopping universal entropy by guarding a black hole or something. And then there’s Mr Smith.’

  Alan remembered his first encounter with the talking computer, which was built into the chimney stack in Sarah Jane’s amazing attic. It had a suave, slightly pompous voice, which was accompanied by weird pulsating, gyrating patterns of light on the screen, which glowed whenever it spoke.

  ‘And which High Street store did he come from? I mean, I know computers, I build programmes for them, and Mr Smith’s… w
ell, I’d like to know his specifications, anyway.’

  ‘He’s an alien, remember,’ Maria said quietly ‘I don’t know if Sarah Jane knows exactly where he’s from.’

  ‘Right. That fills me with confidence,’ Alan said. ‘Look, this is serious stuff.’

  ‘You’re not going to tell Mum, are you?’

  Alan snorted. That was something he and Maria could agree on. ‘Like she’d believe me.’ Alan actually liked his ex-wife, more so now they weren’t married, but he knew her limitations. Open-mindedness wasn’t one of Chrissie’s attributes and she’d taken an instant dislike to Sarah Jane the moment they’d met. ‘No, I’ll say nothing to her. But…’

  And it had been what followed that “but” that had so shocked, horrified and above all, dismayed Maria.

  ‘But tomorrow morning, I’m putting this house on the market. What Sarah Jane does is her business and I’m sure the world’s a better place for it. But it’s not kids’ stuff, Maria, it’s dangerous. And we’re going to have to move.’

  Chapter Two

  Wall of lies

  Across the road, in Sarah Jane Smith’s amazing attic, full of alien artefacts, pictures, computers and post-it notes stuck to the walls, Sarah Jane and Luke were looking through a telescope up at the stars in the dusky night sky.

  ‘There,’ Sarah Jane said. Just below Bellatrix, on Orion’s shoulder. Do you see, Luke? That’s where they’ll appear.’

  Before Luke could focus, the attic door was loudly pushed open and Maria stood there, clearly upset.

  She ran to Sarah Jane, and hugged her. ‘Dad says we’re moving. He says I can’t have anything to do with you any more. He says it’s too dangerous.’

  ‘Well, it is dangerous,’ Luke said.

  ‘That’s not the point,’ Maria shot back.

  Sarah Jane eased Maria away from her, smiling. ‘But no parent wants to see their child in danger,’ she explained. ‘I know your father has a lot more to worry about than most dads. You can’t blame him for wanting to keep you safe.’