Out of Nowhere Read Online Free

spotlessly clean. He presumed they’d been laundered since his arrival. Although he knew that the monks would already have checked, he still went through the pockets carefully. There was nothing in any of them. He hadn’t really expected to find anything, but he was disappointed anyway.
    ‘You’re stupid,’ he said to himself. He suddenly felt that he was standing on a very thin surface, and that under the surface there was a great, sucking depth of something thick and black and smothering. He dressed quickly, trying hard to think of nothing except the journey ahead and what they might find.

5. Fresh Air
    Stephen walked down the stone corridor outside his room. At its end was a stairway. His soft soles made no sound on the stone steps. At the bottom of the stairs he startled a young monk who was on his knees, scrubbing flagstones in the hallway. The monk jerked back in surprise, nearly knocking over the bucket of sudsy water that stood beside him. Stephen recognised him as the young monk from the courtyard the night before. The big, bearded man must have been Brother Philip – he’d suspected as much.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ Stephen said. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you.’
    The young monk’s face reddened. ‘You … you’re the guest from upstairs,’ he stammered.
    ‘Yes,’ Stephen said. ‘I am.’ He repeated his apology.
    ‘It’s nothing,’ the monk said. ‘Really. It’s just that I didn’t hear you coming, and when I saw you standing over me …’ His voice trailed off, embarrassed, and he made a vague gesture with the wire-bristled scrubbing-brush in his hand. ‘I thought you might be one of the confined ones. They get out sometimes, no matter how closely we watch them. Some of them are very strong and … crazy.’
    Stephen realised that the young monk was very afraid. He could think of nothing reassuring to say, so instead he askedfor directions to the kitchen. The monk indicated an open, arched doorway beside them that led outside.
    ‘Right across the courtyard,’ he said, pointing with the scrubbing-brush. ‘Go through the door directly opposite. That’s the kitchen wing. I don’t know whether Brother Philip and Fräulein Herzenweg are in the kitchens or the storeroom, but both rooms are right through there.’
    The courtyard was neither as small nor as bare as it had looked from his upstairs window. Looking around and up, Stephen saw that his own room was in one of the two longer arms of a building that was shaped like a square-cornered U. The kitchen was in the opposite arm. To his left, forming the shorter base of the U, stood the main building of the monastery. It was built around a bell-tower that rose above two great wooden doors, which were standing open. On the fourth side, to his right, the top of the U was closed off by a high stone wall, pierced by a large gateway. The wooden gates, which were even bigger than the doors in the bell-tower, were also open.
    The courtyard itself was partly flagged, partly gravelled. The well stood in the centre. In front of the main building was a strip of lawn, and between the lawn and the wall of the building itself lay a flowerbed riotous with colour. A flagstone path leading to the great doors bisected both flowerbed and lawn.
    It was a very pleasant place in the morning sun. Overhead the sky was a brilliant, cloudless blue. The air was fresh and sweet, heavy with the scent of flowers and the humming of bees. A summer world. It seemed far too beautiful a world tohave spawned a great disaster.
    He walked carefully across the stone flags – after several days in bed, his legs felt unsteady. The fresh air alone made him dizzy. His head swam with a riot of sensations – the bright light and the heat, the colours and the buzzing of bees, the scents of flowers. The world seemed completely strange to him, as though he’d spent years locked up in an airless cell. And still the questions chased each other round and round in his mind, as they’d done