Ruins

by Joshua Winning

  He retched into the carpet. His mouth and nose were full of something tangy. Blood. He was only vaguely aware of somebody pawing at him.

  “Deep breaths,” a voice said. “Deep breaths.”

  He tried to breathe and slowly the room came back into focus. The seeing stone was still. The books seemed to crane up from the floor to see what all the fuss was about.

  “There you go. Are you well?” Isabel rested her paws on his knee.

  Nicholas wasn’t embarrassed anymore.

  “Malika,” he choked in horror. “She was... there was blood everywhere...”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  At School

  AS THE SUN ROSE OVER BURY St Edmunds, a peach-coloured sky provided an optimistic backdrop for the neat rows of peaked roofs. The shadows slid back and dissolved and the sun’s rays trickled into widening puddles that warmed every cobble and tile. Nosily, it pushed in at windows. One high window confounded it, though. Curtains were drawn to block out the world, and the sun was forced to peek through at the edges.

  The birds woke Nicholas early. He slept deeply for a few hours, exhausted by what had happened at Snelling’s house, not to mention his troubling encounter with the seeing glass. When the unfamiliar squawking roused him, though, his mind quickly began whirring again. Who had Sam seen at Snelling’s house? Who had attacked them? What did the school massacre have to do with it all, if anything?

  Breakfast consisted of eggs and bacon. Sam attempted to help Aileen at the hob, but she quickly established her authority over all things food-related.

  Nicholas smiled weakly as, defeated, the old man seated himself at the kitchen table. He ached from yesterday’s training and he felt sick to his stomach. The image of the dead woman in the classroom burned in his mind. Was she one of the teachers from the school massacre? And then there was Malika slithering out of a vat of blood...

  “You’re going to think a hole through the table-top any second now.”

  Nicholas realised Sam was speaking to him.

  “How you feeling? After yesterday?” the old man asked.

  “Fine,” Nicholas said. “Bit achey.” He told Sam about the vision from the seeing glass, watching the elderly man’s face cloud with concern.

  “Lad, if it’s too much–”

  Nicholas wasn’t having any of it. “I need to do this.” He thought back to the conversation he’d had with Reynolds – Snelling – in the back of his shop. Reynolds wanted to know what motivated Nicholas to fight. Nicholas’s answer remained the same – he had to. It was what his parents would have wanted. Now that he knew about the dark forces in the world, he couldn’t just ignore them. He had a responsibility, one that his parents had stepped up to, as had their parents before them.

  He couldn’t stop thinking about the images from the seeing glass. They didn’t make sense. What did Elvis Presley have to do with tracking down the girl? And the raven pendant? He reached into his pocket and felt his own necklace there; the other gift from his parents. He carried it with him everywhere.

  Isabel wasn’t any help. She’d never even heard of Elvis Presley. She said one interesting thing, though. “The triangle is sometimes used in summoning incantations.”

  Summoning. He was expected to find a way to summon the Trinity... Nicholas’s head ached and he couldn’t wait to get out of the house.

  “It’s all going to pot,” Aileen muttered as she poured herself a cup of tea.

  “Aileen?” Sam asked.

  “Safehouse in Manchester was attacked last night,” the landlady said, her usual cheeriness absent this morning. “Harvesters. And there was an incident at a hospital in Cardiff. Fifty people dead.”

  “What happened to them?” Sam asked.

  Aileen eyed Nicholas.

  “Aileen?” Sam prompted.

  “They were all turned inside out.”

  Nicholas’s stomach contracted in horror and he attempted to control the anxiety that wriggled through him, but the look of concern that Sam and Aileen shared only made it wriggle harder. Things were worsening out there. Awful things were happening all over the country. What next, Europe? The rest of the world?

  He couldn’t help feeling responsible. Esus had made it clear that if he didn’t find the girl and figure out how to resurrect the Trinity, they could all be doomed.

  Nicholas grit his teeth. He had to find that girl.

  “Last I heard, Esus was tending to the survivors in Manchester,” Aileen continued, but Nicholas was too caught up in visions of bodies ripped apart to catch anything else the landlady said.

  An hour later, he, Sam and Isabel stood together scrutinising a squat, grey building. It was dry-baking in the sunlight, appearing to harden with every passing second, like a fried toad.

  Royal Birch Primary School was a twenty minute walk outside the town centre. A petrol station down the road was its nearest neighbour and the school field at the back blended into rolling fields.

  Nicholas remembered what the paper had said happened at the school. Seven teachers, all murdered. Ripped apart. One of them had been called Vicky; she was a Sentinel. Unease pinched his temples and he tried to shake it off. The heat was drying him out, too.

  Isabel’s tail curled around his neck, and despite the suffocating warmth, Nicholas was glad she was there. He couldn’t let his nerves overwhelm him. He had to be strong for Sam. And Isabel.

  He’d almost convinced himself that Diltraa’s attack on Hallow House was the end of it. He’d survived that confrontation, and the one with Snelling, and he was quite finished with the supernatural, thanks very much. If anything, though, things were snowballing. If they carried on the way they were...

  “Remember what I taught you yesterday,” Sam said. Nicholas nodded and thought he caught pride twinkling at him from beneath the old man’s fedora, but he couldn’t be sure because then Sam was striding towards the school, his satchel over one shoulder.

  Police tape criss-crossed the double front doors. Blue and white. Almost festive. Flowers lay in bundles, too. Dried to a crisp by the sun. The written notes were already bleached and illegible. As Nicholas scanned the flowers, an image needled into his mind.

  Bodies in chairs. Blood slides across the floor. A fist clenches in agony.

  He was sensing something from inside the school. Had using the seeing glass opened something up that couldn’t be closed again?

  He took a breath and focussed on Sam.

  The elderly man had taken out his lock-picking kit. His hands weren’t as jittery as they had been at Snelling’s house, and it wasn’t long before they were standing in the reception hall.

  “Wait,” Sam said, drawing the doors closed behind them. “After what happened here, we’re going to have to be very careful. Who knows what foul things were summoned in this place. If we disturb anything, it could prove fatal.”

  “There is a foul stench,” Isabel added, her finer senses picking up what they couldn’t.

  “Just give me a moment,” Sam said. He rummaged in his satchel, setting it on the front desk and retrieving a black feather, a Zippo lighter emblazoned with a skull and crossbones and a tightly-bound package of dry twigs. He removed his fedora and Nicholas watched Sam as he lit the herbs.

  Dark smoke and the musty scent of cedar wafted up from the bundle. Sam took the feather and, elbows crooked, used it to waft the smoke purposefully before them. He stroked the air in one direction, then another, before finally turning and wafted it directly at Nicholas.

  Nicholas coughed.

  “Hey–” he began, but Isabel dug a warning claw into his shoulder and Nicholas fell silent.

  When the twigs had burnt out, Sam returned the objects to his briefcase.

  “What did you just do?” Nicholas asked.

  “For protection.” Sam shrugged. He replaced the fedora and pushed open a pair of double doors. Nicholas followed him into a long corridor.

  “You didn’t do that at Snelling’s,” he said.

  “I have a bad feeling
about this place.”

  Nicholas was glad he had the Drujblade sheathed at his hip. Esus had used the bone dagger to kill Diltraa, which offered Nicholas some small comfort.

  Colourful displays adorned the walls, and under the whiff of cedar, Nicholas caught that undeniable school bouquet – a chemical mix of bleach and pencil shavings. He had been out of school for a couple of weeks now, but it felt like a lifetime. If his friends knew what he was doing at this very moment...

  Their footsteps resounded loudly. They sounded like prison wardens. Or victims in a horror film. Nicholas loved horror movies, but he’d seen enough of it for real. And he and Sam were behaving exactly how stupid characters in those films behaved. Who else would look into what had happened at the school, though? Besides, they were Sentinels.

  Sentinels.

  It sat a little easier now. He had a name for what he was; what his parents had been. The name gave him a purpose. While his friends would go back to school in September and struggle to figure out what they were going to do with their lives, Nicholas knew what he had to do with his. Of course, Maths and Science exams were a little easier than the tests that Sentinels underwent. Chances are you wouldn’t be skinned by a demon while taking your Maths A-Level.

  Isabel’s fur bristled against his neck and Nicholas was overcome with a tingling heat. He was only wearing shorts and a T-shirt, but it was unbearable. Sweat clung to his top lip.

  Sam removed his fedora and mopped at his own brow with a handkerchief. Clearly the heat was affecting them all.

  “Did somebody forget to turn the heating off?” Nicholas asked.

  “This isn’t a natural heat,” Sam said.

  They reached the end of the corridor. A doorway was covered in black plastic. It was tacked all around the doorframe like a shroud.

  “This is it,” Sam said under his breath. “The staff room. Hold this.”

  He placed the satchel in Nicholas’s arms and opened it again, this time removing a box-cutter. With great care, he sliced through the plastic, dragging the blade from top to bottom. It yielded as easily as warm butter.

  Nicholas stood, still holding the satchel as Sam peeled the plastic back and peered through a small window.

  Nausea punched Nicholas in the stomach and he doubled over in pain.

  Eight chairs. Arranged in a circle. An old woman observes, smiling as dark things swarm about the other teachers. Lecherous claws grasp for them. Open them like meat packets. Blood spills. And a pair of cold blue eyes watch dispassionately as the teachers are gutted.

  Nicholas attempted to steady himself. The ground seemed to be tilting beneath him and he felt as if he was about to hit the floor.

  “Boy,” came Isabel’s voice.

  Her voice brought him back to the corridor. A hand seized Nicholas’s other shoulder, and he found himself peering into Sam’s wizened face.

  “Don’t look,” the old man said, though it came out as a barely-controlled choke. Their eyes locked and Nicholas saw that Sam was worried. Scared, even. He couldn’t help trembling.

  “I’ve already seen,” Nicholas said softly. “They were sacrificed in there. Something cut them all open.”

  Sam dropped his gaze, still clutching Nicholas’s shoulder.

  “A sacrifice,” he said. “This place has been desecrated.”

  “For what?”

  Laughter punctured the air. A child, perhaps. Or a woman. A filthy, high-pitched snigger.

  “Samuel. Nicholas. Isabel. Welcome.”

  It was an inhuman sound that reminded Nicholas of Diltraa. The guttural rasp that had come from the demon’s throat. The voice skittered over the floor and penetrated his heart.

  “Don’t listen to it,” Sam said.

  “What’s here?” Nicholas asked, his blood running cold as a face appeared in the window behind the black plastic. A withered, pale countenance like a skull. Lips peeling into a leer. Dark smudges for eyes. It was the old woman from his vision; the one who had watched the teachers being butchered.

  “It’s her,” Nicholas said.

  By the time Sam whirled to look, the face had vanished.

  “The headmistress,” Nicholas said. “She killed them all.”

  “Harvester,” Isabel spat.

  “Let’s go,” the old man said, seizing the satchel from him. “Come on.” He marched away from the door. Nicholas hurried down the corridor alongside him.

  “Leaving so soon? Won’t you stay? I’m sure we can find ways to entertain you.”

  “Ignore it,” Sam barked.

  The heat was unbearable. Nicholas felt clammy and leaden. It was as if he was wading through cement. He grabbed the Drujblade from its sheath and clutched it tightly. The corridor ballooned out before him and the exit was impossibly far away. The colourful paper on the walls shivered. Nicholas’s gaze snapped up to the ceiling. Something was there. A gathering pool of darkness.

  “They’ve fed, but they’re still hungry.”

  The corridor was watching him.

  A buzz of electricity shuddered through the air and the strip lighting blazed. Nicholas threw a hand up to shield his eyes. White light battered him. Finally, darkness collapsed back in around him.

  Red and yellow spots simmered in Nicholas’s vision and he wasn’t able to see. He stumbled blindly. Just as he began to grow accustomed to the dark, the lights turned on full blast once more. Above his head, the drone of electricity throbbed and then, one by one, each of the lights emitted a crack-pop and shards of glass rained down.

  Nicholas squeezed the Drujblade. He staggered away, crashing into the wall. His hands felt slick with sweat. No, not sweat. As his vision cleared, he saw that they were red. Red with blood. The walls were bleeding.

  His heart hammered in his chest.

  “Sam?” he yelled. “Sam, where are you?!”

  He couldn’t feel Isabel, either. She was gone from his shoulder.

  The blood was everywhere. It dripped from the ceiling and dribbled warmly down his cheeks.

  Something swooped and Nicholas instinctively ducked. He cast about in confusion. Whatever had bowled at him hadn’t made a sound, had swept as noiselessly as a kestrel, but he’d felt an odd flush as it whisked past.

  “Isabel?”

  Another movement, and this time Nicholas caught it as it rippled across the wall. Fangs stretched wide and snapped shut. Bony claws snaked over the wall.

  A living shadow with horns and awful cut-out eyes.

  It was red against the bloody wall, then grey on the floor.

  It watched him for a moment, then frantically lunged.

  Before Nicholas had time to react, the shadow tore through him, drenching him in heat, and he gasped in shock. Within seconds there were more of them. Undulating in waves, the monsters surfaced through the shadows, fixing their cut-out eyes on him before thrashing in his direction, clawing from the floor and walls, any surface within reach.

  Nicholas slashed the Drujblade, but it had no effect. He keeled from one wall to the next, attempting to evade their blows.

  The shadows towered over him; immense, distorted, alien things that writhed from the ceiling. Barbed claws snatched at him, erupting from the floor to seize his legs.

  Nicholas twisted and pulled, but there was no escaping them. They held fast.

  One of the shadows pressed a claw to his chest. He felt a wrench inside his rib cage. A horrendous pulling. The monster was inside him, feeling for his heart, attempting to rip it free.

  He collapsed to the floor in agony.

  A liver-spotted hand seized his shoulder and Nicholas peered up. As light broke across Sam’s face, though, Nicholas cringed away in fear.

  The old man’s eyes were gone. Ghastly, bloodied hollows gaped blankly at him and Sam’s face contorted into a mask of hatred.

  “Nicholassss,” the old man hissed. “Join us. Join ussss...”

  “ENOUGH!”

  Sweet relief came in an instant. The shadows tumbled away, as if dragged by an invisi
ble tide. Just like that, they were gone, along with the horrible vision of Sam.

  Gulping for breath, Nicholas peered down. The red was still on him. The blood. Already, it was congealing on his clothes, his skin, in his hair. He fought the urge to vomit.

  Light returned to the corridor and he spotted Sam leaning against a wall, panting for breath. His eyes were back to normal. His satchel was further down the corridor, near the exit.

  It wasn’t Sam who had bellowed, though. It took Nicholas a moment to process the fact that the voice had been female.

  It had been Isabel.

  Nicholas searched for the cat, finding her at the centre of the corridor. She looked double her normal size, her fur had puffed up so much. The cat stared intently at a figure lingering outside the staff room. A scrawny woman. All bones and wrinkly flesh. Her hair was pinned atop her head and her hands were mittened claws.

  The headmistress, Nicholas realised with a start. The one from the paper. Miss Fink.

  It was the face he’d glimpsed peeking through the window. Aileen had said the headmistress was seventy, but she looked almost twice that, as if the Dark Prophets had drained her of all life, leaving her little more than an emaciated corpse.

  “The Tortor will rise,” the hag hissed. “The Tortor will rise and you will all perish writhing in agony.”

  “Your parlour tricks hold no power over us,” Isabel spat. “You will desist.”

  Nicholas blinked at the cat, not believing what he was seeing.

  Golden fire flickered in her eyes and a shadow towered over her. It was the shadow of an old woman, attached to the cat’s paws. The shadow raised an arm and pointed toward the staff room. The fire in Isabel’s eyes flashed.

  “DESIST!”

  There was a moment of tension. The air crackled. Then, without saying a word, the headmistress was gone.

  Peace settled over the hallway.

  “You’ll have to forgive Miss Fink. She has the manners of a stray dog.”

  Nicholas tensed. Another figure had appeared in the headmistress’s place. A man with blond hair and high cheekbones. He was broad-shouldered, his voice low and arrogant.

  “No,” Sam murmured beside him.