Sentinel

by Joshua Winning

  “Seen that Garm thing again?” he asked the shopkeeper.

  “Nah,” Reynolds breathed, the sound blasting from deep in his gut. “It’ll be off nursing its pride after it failed to eat you for dinner.”

  “I would’ve given it indigestion,” Nicholas said.

  “Out of spite,” Reynolds laughed.

  Nicholas nodded.

  “How long has it been hunting round here?” he asked.

  Reynolds raised his eyes to the ceiling. The circular discs of his glasses caught the light.

  “Four, five… Seven weeks maybe,” he said finally.

  “Seven weeks! Why hasn’t anybody done anything about it?”

  “Fear,” Reynolds said simply, batting a hand at the air. He reclined in the armchair, resting his mug on his stomach. “They’re simple folk round here. Quiet folk. They wouldn’t know the first thing about demons.”

  “And you do?”

  Nicholas was wary of asking Reynolds outright about the Sentinels. For some reason it felt like a dirty word. A sinister word. Sentinel. He was only just getting used to it himself. It was one of those words that felt heavy. If you uttered it, it clunked to the floor and sat there.

  “More’n I’d like to,” Reynolds sighed. He tapped his temple. “There’s stuff in here I’d rather not know, truth be told. Demons that paralyse their prey with a stinger. Others that devour you whole and digest you alive over a period of days.”

  “Nice.”

  “Why else do you think people turn them into fairytales. Deny their existence? It’s too much to accept. Demons on the six o’clock news? Now that would be interesting.”

  Nicholas laughed.

  “‘A Kaijo demon is on the loose in the Norfolk Broads,’” Reynolds intoned, impersonating a news reporter. “‘Police have advised people not to panic, and not to approach the Kaijo under any circumstances. Unless they want to see what their entrails look like. Now onto the weather…’”

  Nicholas almost snorted his tea through his nose. He spluttered and wiped his mouth with his sleeve.

  “So what do we do about it?” he asked.

  “We?” Reynolds looked taken aback.

  “The Garm,” Nicholas persisted. “We need to stop it.”

  “Lad, there can’t be any ‘we’ where demons are concerned.”

  “Of course there can.”

  Reynolds leaned forward in the armchair.

  “Boy,” he said slowly. “This isn’t like hunting foxes. There’s no horse-riding or fancy red jackets or ‘tally-ho, old boy!’ These are wild things from another world and they’d sooner gut you as look at you.”

  “I know that.”

  Reynolds held his gaze, not blinking for a very long time. He seemed to be having an internal wrestling match with his conscience.

  “Why do you want to hunt it?” he asked. His voice was unnervingly, uncharacteristically soft.

  Nicholas peered down into his mug, hunched over it like a fortune teller.

  “Dunno,” he said, jerking one of his shoulders.

  Reynolds steepled his fingers over his own cup.

  “People fight for lots of reasons,” he began quietly. “If you separate out the details, though, it generally boils down to three things: duty, self-defence and revenge.”

  The boy’s crop of curly hair barely moved as he raised his eyes to peer at the shopkeeper’s fingers. He couldn’t meet his gaze.

  “There’s an elusive fourth, though,” the shopkeeper continued. “It’s most common in young men. It’s the most dangerous of them all, because what drives these young men isn’t a sense of duty, or a need for self-preservation, or even a desire for vengeance. It’s a yearning to destroy – not others, but themselves. To find an end. A peace.”

  The room fell silent.

  “Nicholas,” Reynolds said. “Why is it you want to fight?”

  Finally, Nicholas looked at the shopkeeper. There was kindness in that big, red-cheeked face. Without saying anything, Nicholas tugged at his sleeve to reveal the bandage that Reynolds had put there.

  “I know what that thing can do, and I don’t care. I want to help you kill it.”

  The boy paused.

  “There’s nothing else. I think… I think this is what my parents would want me to do.”

  Reynolds’s gaze was unwavering. At last, he released a breath.

  “If you lose an arm, I shan’t be the one carrying it to the hospital for you,” the shopkeeper said.

  “Then I won’t lose an arm.”

  Reynolds peered at the boy out of the corners of his eyes. Nicholas couldn’t tell if he thought he was mad, or if he was admiring his courage. Probably the former.

  “Alright,” the shopkeeper finally said, setting his mug down on the tray with a bang. “Tomorrow we go hunting.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The Ectomunicator

  ‘COLD CLAIMS LIVES’ DECLARED THE FRONT page of the Cambridge News. According to the article, more elderly people had died in this snowy summer than in the last two winters combined. Frozen pipes, swollen electricity bills, bad road conditions. All were being blamed, while certain angry fingers were being jabbed at the Environment Agency for failing to warn about the effects of global warming.

  Sam tutted and shook his head, his breath frosting in the air. That headline seemed particularly insensitive considering they’d found the body of another dead child yesterday; another boy. Young too. Unimaginably young. Though Sam had felt disheartened and drained the previous evening, the discovery of the dead boy had doubled his resolve to get to the bottom of whatever was happening in Cambridge. Esus was right. Though he was loath to admit it, Sam was the closest to all of it. Richard had made sure of that. He had to do something.

  “Things are going to pot, Judith,” the old man muttered. “No two ways around it.” He shivered.

  Outside the Fitzwilliam Museum, Trumpington Street was eerily quiet. Four days had passed since the disturbance at the museum, and only the odd straggler had braved the iced-over roads to sneak a glimpse at the plinths where the famous lions had once rested.

  Sam scanned the remainder of the front-page articles. The only other thing of note was a small story reporting that travel agents had seen a “phenomenal rise in last minute holiday bookings”, which surely accounted for the lack of people milling about on the streets. Those who hadn’t planned any time away this summer were now hastily booking last minute flights to exotic locales in pursuit of warmth. Sam’s friend, Geraldine Adams, had done as much. She was a doctor, and he’d attempted to get in touch with her after Richard was attacked - she might know something about Snelling and what he’d done. The receptionist had informed him that Dr Adams and her husband were away for the next couple of days.

  Sam didn’t blame them; he’d probably have done the same if it weren’t for more pressing matters.

  He tossed the paper into a nearby bin as he spotted Liberty approaching. She looked tired.

  “Been burning the midnight oil, Ms Rayne?” Sam greeted her.

  “Midnight would’ve been an early one,” the woman replied drily. She cradled a Styrofoam cup in her gloved hands and sipped her coffee. “I’ve been trying every trick in the book to get a fix on Richard, but he’s moving around so much it’s damn near impossible. I’ve trawled every text I could get my hands on. Even cracked open a box of my dad’s old things; Mum wasn’t too pleased about that. But I’ve never heard of a Harvester turning somebody like that. Not overnight. Not ever, if the lack of information in the books is anything to go by.”

  “This is dangerous new territory, to be sure,” Sam breathed. He turned to look at the museum. The grand stone building looked colder than ever, hunched under the slate sky. Unusually, the overhead lights behind the columns were on, and the friendly glow spilled out into Trumpington Street, as if attempting to cheer those who had ventured into the city centre.

  “You think the break-in has something to do with Richard?” Liberty ventured. Sam was gra
teful that she didn’t ask him about the frantic phone call he’d made the previous evening. She was perhaps hoping to spare him any embarrassment. She probably knew that, if it was important, he’d tell her.

  “I’m hoping you can answer that,” Sam replied. “The police are clueless I’m afraid; the few remaining contacts I have there aren’t talking. There’s word of CCTV footage, but I’ve not been able to get my hands on it yet.”

  Liberty handed him her coffee.

  “Help yourself,” she said, “you look how I feel.”

  She took a hold of the ice-encrusted railings that surrounded the museum. Sam watched her focus on the steps that led up to the entrance and even out her breathing.

  “Yes,” she said almost immediately. “The woman. Malika. She went up these steps.”

  Liberty’s breathing slowed further still.

  “She left this way, too, through these gates. And… the lions.” Liberty turned her head. “The lions were just for fun.”

  “Anything else?” Sam probed. “What brought her here?”

  Liberty closed her eyes. “She’s cradling something,” she said. “A jacket… and something else. It looks like some kind of dish. Very old.” Releasing the railings, Liberty took back her coffee. “That’s all there is,” she sighed. “Without getting inside, that’s all I’ve got.”

  “Shame,” Sam tutted. “Seems we’re ten steps behind her again. Come on.”

  Together they moved away from the museum and its mysteries, and Liberty slipped her arm through Sam’s as they trudged down the snowy path. For once he didn’t shake it off in embarrassment.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t be focussing on her so much,” Sam pondered, stomping his feet to get the blood flowing. “We need to change how we’re looking at this.”

  “I’m open to suggestions.”

  “Richard, he’s the key,” Sam mused. “Malika helped the doctor corrupt him, which means he’s now even more of a threat than she is.”

  Liberty nodded. “Not only is he a maniac with an insatiable bloodlust, he’s a man on the inside.”

  “She already has the Harvesters in the palm of her hand, and now she has a corrupted Sentinel,” Sam said, his voice catching with unease. “He knows everything about us. Everything. How we work. How we’re organised. How we’d retaliate if attacked. He’s perfectly positioned to cause grave damage.”

  “So where does he start?” Liberty said.

  Sam stopped in his tracks.

  Further up the street, he thought he’d seen a small child watching them. How long the youngster had been there he couldn’t guess, and he was gone before Sam got much of a look at him. But it had definitely been a boy. Dressed in a suit. And he’d been smiling in a way that made Sam’s stomach shrivel queasily.

  “Sam?” Liberty looked at him. She followed his gaze down the street.

  There was nobody there.

  “I– I could’ve sworn,” Sam began. “There was something–” Then he shook himself. “Never mind.” He motioned to the Morris Minor at the kerb. “Get in. I’ve got an idea.”

  They drove back to Sam’s house without talking. Sam had known Liberty for long enough that he didn’t feel the need to fill the silences. And she was polite enough not to pry, though she could surely sense something was troubling him. Sam pitied anybody who tried to untangle his current knot of thoughts. He remembered that Liberty had previously confessed to occasionally slipping into somebody’s mind without meaning to. “Channel-surfing” was what she’d called it; the ability to absent-mindedly flick between her own thoughts and somebody else’s.

  Sam didn’t have anything to hide, though. For the most part. There was a certain something that could prove devastating if revealed, though, and Sam shoved that thought away. Of course, he knew he could trust Liberty. After his wife Judith had died, he’d spent a lot of time at the Rayne family dinner table. They were a good sort and he’d found comfort in the bustle of their family home. Then when Liberty’s father had passed, Sam and Liberty had grown closer still. Sam realised she was the closest friend he had who had evaded the Harvesters thus far. He had to make sure it stayed that way.

  When they got to Sam’s house, he let them both in and barely paused to hurl his fedora at the coat stand before hurrying up the stairs. With Liberty behind him, Sam pulled a cord attached to the landing ceiling, from which a collapsible ladder dropped down. The old man swiftly climbed and Liberty clambered up at his heels.

  Like the rest of the house, the attic was immaculate. It had been semi-converted into a small but functional office. Boxes were neatly stacked under the sloping roof and the drawers of two filing cabinets were neatly packed with important files. There was even a beautiful old rosewood wardrobe standing against the tallest wall which was lined with vintage fur coats and attractive dinner dresses, all wrapped up in plastic. All once worn by Judith.

  “Here we are,” Sam sighed, plonking himself down at an ancient mahogany bureau. He clicked on a lamp, illuminating a bulky object that rested on the desktop, draped in a white dust cover. Liberty stood behind him as he pushed back a portion of the protective sheet.

  It was a smart, well-preserved apparatus; a mass of bright brass cogs and wheels. An old-fashioned set of keys – almost like those of an upmarket typewriter – were embellished with letters, numbers and symbols, and the strange mechanism shone like new, though it was obviously extremely old.

  “What is it?” Liberty asked.

  “An Ectomunicator,” Sam told her proudly. He pulled a pair of reading glasses from his shirt pocket and blinked through them, mole-like, at the machine. “Every Sentinel family used to have one. Some people called them ‘talkies’, like the movies, because of what they were used for. We called ours Crosby.” He gave one of the keys an affectionate polish with the cuff of his sleeve. “Didn’t we, eh Crosby?”

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Liberty said, admiring the antediluvian device. “Never even heard of them.”

  “People stopped using them years ago,” Sam said with a shrug. “They use spirit frequencies or some such to carry messages. I never really understood how they worked. We used them to communicate, but then somebody found out that kids were receiving Sentinel messages through their Ouija boards, so Ectomunicators were abandoned. By then we had telephones and telegrams, of course, so it wasn’t a great loss. I always loved Crosby, though. I’d beg my father to let me send messages when the occasion arose.”

  For a moment Sam was lost in memory, his dry lips crinkled in a semi smile. Then he remembered that they had pulled Crosby out of retirement for a reason and he threw off the rest of the dust cover.

  “There,” he breathed, almost despondently now, as he uncovered what he’d hoped he wouldn’t find. At the top of the Ectomunicator, a faded brown scroll of paper like a receipt roll curled up out of the guts of the machine. There were characters marked on the paper in dark ink. Tearing the scroll from the device, Sam moved over to the bare bulb that hung from the ceiling.

  “It’s from him. Richard.” He tutted as he squinted at the message. “See there, the ID number in the top corner, unique to him. His father must’ve kept his old talkie and shown Richard how to use it.” Sam studied the manuscript. “This was sent in the small hours of this morning. Richard must have doubled back to his house to send it.”

  “What does it say?”

  Liberty peered over the old man’s shoulder.

  “‘Emergency,’” Sam read slowly. “‘Sentinel summit. St. John’s Baptist Church. Tonight. 10.30. Urgent. Trinity blessings.’ That’s how we used to sign off.” Sam’s forehead creased into a frown. Something about the message was nagging him, but he was too rattled to figure out what.

  “He’s setting a trap,” Liberty murmured. “They’ll be like lambs to the slaughter. How many people do you reckon still use their talkie things?”

  “Not many,” Sam said, his glasses slipping to the end of his nose, “but enough to spread the word by more contemporary means
, I’d imagine.”

  Liberty rushed to the desk. “Can we send a message? Tell people to stay away?” she demanded, seating herself in front of the archaic mechanism.

  “We can, though there’s no guarantee anybody will receive it in time.”

  “Better that than nothing,” Liberty persisted. “How does this thing work?”

  Sam went over, peering down at Crosby affectionately.

  “Press the key with the house picture first,” he instructed patiently, wetting his lips in excitement. He looked younger suddenly, the memories of his youth a little fresher in the presence of the brass apparatus. “That’s the one that tells the receiver who’s sent the message.” He watched Liberty locate the right key and press it. It gave a tiny tinkle. “Now type the message.”

  Liberty read aloud as she pressed each of the keys, which all emitted jingles of differing pitch. “‘Warning,’” she read. “‘Stay away from St. John’s Baptist Church. Seized by Harvesters. Await further notice.’ Is that enough, do you think?”

  “I’d say so,” Sam said encouragingly. “Now press the key with the wings icon, that says you’re sending it. And then type ‘5, 6, 2, 9’, that’s the code for Cambridge. Every Sentinel with an active talkie in Cambridgeshire will receive it.”

  Liberty followed his instructions. As soon as she pushed down the final ‘9’ key, the mechanics inside the Ectomunicator began to whir, and the cogs and wheels span. The desk trembled beneath the mechanism, and it gave a final ping! before falling silent.

  “Done,” Sam said, removing his glasses. “Now we wait.”

  Liberty raised herself out of the chair. “I’ll ask Mum to keep hold of Fran again tonight, she’s already there now,” she said. “Come fetch me tonight. We’ll go to the church.”

  “Are you sure? It could be quite dangerous.”

  “It’ll definitely be dangerous,” Liberty said sternly, “and I have no intention of letting you go there alone.”