Sentinel Read Online Free

wandering a tomb. The house had become a powerful reminder of what he had lost.
    Before he knew why, the boy found himself outside his parents’ bedroom. He stared at the closed door.
    Images of his mother and father flashed before his eyes; imagined, blurry conjurations of them battling to escape an exploding train. Snatches of their panic. The pain that they must have endured. The confused emotions inside of him surged. Nicholas found that he couldn’t tear his eyes away. Almost independently of his thoughts, his hand reached out to take the door handle.
    “Nicholas? Are you there?”
    His chest tightened and a smothering hand seemed to clamp over his mouth.
    His mother! The boy’s mind raced. His mother! She was on the other side of the door!
    The door handle burned into his palm. Moulded to his skin. Air refused to enter his lungs. There was a distant rattling sound. His entire arm was shaking, making the metal handle rattle with it.
    “M–mum?”
    He managed a throaty croak and the sound of his voice sent shivers across the back of his neck, as if a ghostly breath had fallen there.
    “Nicholas? Lunch is ready!”
    Nicholas’s hand dropped to his side, free of whatever madness had seized it.
    It hadn’t been his mother calling to him; it was Tabatha shouting up the stairs. He couldn’t tell if that realisation was a comfort.
    Turning slowly to traipse down the stairs, he eyed the closed bedroom door with uncertainty. What had drawn him to it?
    He found Tabatha in the kitchen. Her hands were concealed by large, flowery oven gloves and she was heaving a saucepan from the stove by the pantry. She shuffled across the floor, straining under the weight of it, before pouring soup into bowls on the table.
    “Blast!” she muttered as a quantity missed the second bowl entirely and slopped across the tabletop. She mopped the mess up with one of the oven gloves, only for a clump of hair to come loose from behind her ear. Juggling the saucepan, she swiped the hair back with the glove.
    “Well isn’t that perfect, now I’ve got soup in my hair!”
    The saucepan was consigned to the hob with a bang.
    Looking annoyed, Tabatha flapped off the oven gloves and pulled at her hair.
    Nicholas peered down at the murky contents of his bowl. It looked like watery paint.
    “Well, that was a learning process,” Tabatha declared, sitting down with a sigh. “Don’t look at me like that, young man,” she scolded lightly. “How you could call that contraption an oven I’ll never know. I might as well have tried to cook on a park bench.”
    Nicholas stirred the soup with his spoon.
    “You should eat something,” Tabatha urged. “Don’t want you ending up like a skeleton, do we? You’re skinny enough as it is.”
    Nicholas sipped a spoonful, if only to humour the woman, and grimaced.
    “Not my best, I admit,” Tabatha complied, meekly sucking at her own spoonful. “Maybe it needed just a touch more salt. How are you feeling today?”
    Nicholas pushed the bowl away and slumped back in his chair.
    “I’m not hungry,” he muttered.
    “Oh, come, come,” Tabatha reprimanded. “What would your mother sa–”
    She stopped abruptly, realising what she had been about to say. Her cheeks flushed a violent, guilt-ridden crimson. “Oh Nicholas, I’m sorry,” she puffed. “I didn’t mean... Oh I am a fool! Curse this stupid trap of mine.”
    “It’s okay.”
    They sat in silence as Tabatha picked awkwardly at her bread.
    Nicholas dug into the tabletop with his bread knife, chiselling out little fragments of wood.
    “Mr Wilkins is popping round later,” Tabatha told him with strained exuberance. “Won’t that be nice?”
    Nicholas merely nodded.
    In a soothing voice, Tabatha added: “It might help to talk about it.”
    Nicholas stopped his carving, paused with the blade embedded in the table.
    “Sometimes it helps,” Tabatha added.
    “I don’t feel like talking,” Nicholas said through clenched teeth. He felt his