Out of Nowhere Read Online Free Page A

since he’d first woken the day before: who was he? what had happened? where was everyone else?
    It was all too much. Stephen felt light-headed and a weak surge of panic welled up in him. He stopped by the well, leaning on its old stone parapet, breathing in the cool, damp air that drifted up from its depths. The bucket, hung from a long rope coiled around a wooden winch, had been recently used – maybe by the monk who was scrubbing the floor. Fat drops of water were dripping from its base. It took a while for each drop to plink into the water below. It was deep water that would be cool on the hottest day.
    Stephen leaned over the well, looking in. Far below he saw the surface of the water, a little circle of reflected blue marred by the dark reflection of his own head. As he looked, the reflection of another head appeared beside his own, a very blond-haired head. He felt the physical warmth of someone standing right beside him, brushing against him. It was Kirsten. He hadn’t heard her coming. He looked up, smiling. Then he stopped. The smile froze on his face. There was nobody there. He looked around frantically, but he was alonein the courtyard. He was sweating again. He shivered in the heat.

6. The Shoplifting List
    Inside the kitchen wing it was cool. When he walked through the doorway, Stephen found himself in another stone room with more wooden furniture. It looked like a storeroom. The walls, from floor to ceiling, were covered with cupboards and shelves of various sizes. The centre of the floor was taken up by an enormous table with rank after rank of large, closed drawers from table top down to the ground. To either side of him were two doorless arches leading to other unseen rooms beyond.
    He heard Kirsten’s voice off to his left and went that way. He paused before entering the room. The incident in the courtyard had shaken him badly. Perhaps he was going mad too. But he simply refused to think about it. He would put it down to weakness and confusion, to the shocks that his system had certainly had. What he had to do now was to appear as normal as possible, otherwise they mightn’t let him go along, and he felt he simply had to see this empty world. He couldn’t really believe in it until he did.
    ‘Fresh fruit,’ Kirsten was saying as he walked into the room. She was standing beside the big, bearded monk he’d seen in the courtyard the night before. He’d been right, this was Brother Philip.
    The room was very like the first one he had come through, but here there was an enormous, old-fashioned cooking range and shelves of pans and utensils. Kirsten and the monk were concentrating on a notebook she was holding, both of them looking hard at it as Kirsten checked off items with a pen. Stephen was quite close before either of them noticed him. It was the big monk who looked up first. For a moment he frowned, and it was an ugly look, as though he resented anyone coming so near without his noticing. Then it passed, and his face was pleasant again. Kirsten looked up and smiled.
    ‘Hello,’ she said brightly. ‘Philip, have you met Stephen?’
    ‘Ah yes,’ he said. ‘Our new helper. Hello, young fellow. I’m Brother Philip – the monastery’s token Irishman.’
    Stephen shook the monk’s extended hand. It was a hard hand, strong and capable.
    ‘I’m Stephen,’ he said. He felt he sounded too sure. Was that really his name? It sounded stupid when he said it out loud.
    The monk seemed to read his mind. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘names aren’t cut in stone. All of us here – we monks – chose new names when we came to the monastery. Sometimes it’s good to get away from what you were before.’
    ‘That’s what I told him,’ Kirsten said. ‘Maybe he was a thief before! Or a murderer!’
    Philip smiled down at them through his beard. He pretended to examine the boy, who was maybe half a metre shorter than him.
    ‘Aye,’ he said, ‘he’s a dangerous-looking type all right.’
    He took the