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Chapter 1-Rude Awakenings
Lightning shattered the night sky. Rain lashed against a concrete floor. A single dragonfly flew through the air, its jewelled head illuminated for a single second by the light of the storm. Clouds rolled in from the distance, threatening more hours of relentless rain. The air was hostile with a heavy heat, an oppressing humidity.
A single figure walked across the cracked floor, weeds seeming to twist around her ankles as they grew through the gaps. Buildings encircled the square, all but trapping the figure and the concrete surface; the only gap to the left, a road running in.
The figure walked down this road, past a derelict building that had once been a grocery store. It was now owned by a cocaine dealer. It was a woman. She held her jacket closed across the chest, her hood hiding most of her face from the violent weather. She kept looking over her shoulder, walking as if she didn’t have a destination, walking for the sake of walking.
She stopped. She looked ahead and realised she was trapped. The road she had come in by was also the only exit. More crumbling buildings towered around her. Her arms fell down by her sides, her jacket flew open as the wind buffeted against her slight frame. She seemed defeated.
A car pulled up in the square. It stopped beside the woman without a sound, its headlights off despite the storm. It was long, black, with tinted windows on all sides and no registration plate. The back door opened on the same side as the woman.
Another figure stepped out of the vehicle, casting a shapeless shadow on the concrete. It stood still for a moment. The woman was frozen to the spot, looking at the new arrival in stunned silence. Then it moved.
The figure held out a hand, fingers outstretched towards the woman’s heart. She fell to the ground in an instant, still and unmoving.
The figure stepped back into the vehicle and closed the door. The car reversed out of the square.
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Scott Stirling woke up. Cold sweat lay in beads on his forehead, and his breathing was heavy and panicked. He pulled aside the duvet and got out of bed, facing across the room and out through the window. The cold light of the moon shone through the glass and onto a dark wooden floor.
Scott glanced sideways to the clock on his bedside table. It read 5:15 AM. He wiped the sweat from his forehead and tried to remember the events of the dream. It was vague all of a sudden. He could only remember certain things; a dragonfly, overgrown weeds, a long black car and…the death.
Oh God thought Scott. What am I doing dreaming about a woman being killed? He felt sick to the pit of his stomach, and his breathing still refused to slow. The muscles in his abdomen and throat began to contract. He ran through to the small bathroom attached to his bedroom and vomited in the sink. He spat, trying to get rid of the vile taste.
Looking up, he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror above the sink. His dark hair was damp with sweat, still its usual unkempt style, thick and curly. His brown eyes were glazed with recent sleep and half closed with exhaustion. The harsh lighting, reflected off the white tiles, illuminated his broad shoulders and chest. He stripped off and stepped into the shower.
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Scott was fifteen years old. Orphaned at the age of eighteen months, he was now in the guardianship of his uncle. A rich telecommunications millionaire, John Stirling had decided that he had no time or energy to bring up a child, so he had sent his nephew to various boarding schools throughout his education.
Since his twelfth birthday, Scott had attended St. Walstan’s School, a private boarding school in Hampstead, London. It had a brilliant educational record, and extortionate fees to match. At any one time, around 400 students studied at the school, most of which were the children of rich businesspeople or other millionaires. It was the sort of school that expected top marks from all of its students.
And Scott Stirling was only too happy to oblige. He had friends at St. Walstan’s, and had no wish to be expelled for not performing. He enjoyed subjects that he could see as practical and useful: languages and sciences, and he achieved good results in these, diverting the attention of his tutors away from his very average marks in other subjects. All in all, he was happy.
His real love at the school, however, was rowing. The school rented a boathouse on the river Thames, and entered a crew into regular races against other London schools.
Scott was part of the current St. Walstan’s team, which explained the well-developed muscles in his arms and chest that dripped with water as he stepped out of the shower and wrapped himself in a towelling robe. His mouth still tasted vile and his mind was still swamped with the vague memories of his recent dream. Did it mean something? It had obviously been bad enough to make him physically sick, so there must have been something behind it. But he recognised none of it; not the car, not the woman, not even the concrete square with the towering, derelict buildings.
The clock read 5:49. Had he really been in the shower for that long? He had let the hot water beat against his skin, hoping it would wash away the sick, cold feeling that still lay in the bottom of his stomach
He dried and dressed in dark blue shorts and a white sports vest, his rowing uniform. The bus that would take the team to the river left at 6:15 every Monday, Wednesday and Thursday, and this morning was the first practise of the week. He pulled on a pair of tracksuit trousers and a fleecy jacket to keep himself warm on the way, and stepped out of his room.
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St. Walstan’s was not only regarded as a good school, but it was also seen by many as a site of great historical interest. To say it was a one-off building was a definite understatement.
It began life as a farmhouse, with an attached barn, around the sixteenth century. The farmer who had it built owned both the building and a surprisingly large amount of the surrounding land. When the farmer died, the property and the land were passed onto his son, and both have remained in the family to the present day.
This private ownership ensured that the land was not used up by the constantly growing city of London, and meant that the owner could do whatever they wished to the land. Which they did.
Each family member had a different idea of what should be done to the land in order to make the greatest income, and so the purpose of the building, as well as its size and shape, changed constantly. Since its construction, the land had been the site of many buildings, including a mill, an inn and even a prison.
All of these buildings still existed now, but they had all been incorporated into a school; a sprawling mass of haphazard and mismatched structures, covering the entire area owned by the family.
Scott had a room in Dormitory Block J, situated in the original farmhouse and barn building. There were five large bedrooms in the block, two male students and a tutor in the converted barn, two female students in the original farmhouse, as well as a shared common room.
But despite the luxury, Scott was in no hurry to stay and admire the oak floorboards. He wanted out of his room as quickly as possible; it still reminded him of the horrible dream and he needed fresh air.
It took him a matter of three minutes to reach the minibus, which was parked in an area of tarmac in the centre of the school complex, which meant that he still had over twenty minutes to waste before the rest of the team arrived. The driver was still asleep in his seat.
Scott leaned against the side of the vehicle, hands in his pockets, shaking a few strands of hair from his eyes. He tried to clear his head. The air was cold and smelled of a fast approaching dawn, and the empty darkness felt clean and refreshing, but he couldn’t help thinking about what he had seen. Okay, it had only been a dream, but it had felt so real, as if he was watching from only yards away. But it couldn’t be real. It was a dream; things didn’t happen like that, people didn’t die like that…
Oh God, he thought again. What am I doing thinking about it again? Just forget it.Already, the sick feeling was getting worse, and Scott had to control his breathing carefully to stop himself from throwing up in the nearby grass.
Get a hold of yourself Scott. It was just a dream.
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The bus arrived at the Thames just after 6:30, and the April sky was filled with the vibrant colours of the sunrise. Birds chorused and the only sign of human life was the occasional sight of an early-morning rubbish collector in a fluorescent jacket. The sprawling expanse of London stretched out into the distance, where it met the reds and oranges of the new sun at the horizon. The still water reflected the light as a single swan skimmed its surface with remarkable grace.
Scott walked out of the boathouse behind the rest of the team, a pair of oars resting over his shoulder. He dumped them on the ground and they landed with a crash, scaring away the swan as the noise shattered the silence.
“Stirling! Mind the equipment!” The bark came from Mr. Steiner, or, as he was known by the whole team, the Coach. He was a short-tempered man with the biggest biceps Scott had ever seen, and an ego to match. He was currently standing outside the passenger door of the minibus, shouting orders while refusing to help with the unloading of the equipment.
Scott walked away from him, swearing under his breath before helping to untie the boat from the racking inside. He ignored the rest of his teammates as he helped them lower it to the water; his mind caught somewhere between the sick feeling in his gut and the foul mood directed at the coach.
In twenty minutes, they were on the water, the sleek, eight-man boat cutting through the water with its streamlined carbon-fibre hull. The oars pulled the boat and the team through the water, all eight blades breaking through the surface in complete harmony.
For the first few minutes, Scott was once more part of team, part of the boat as it ploughed silently across the water. Adrenaline took over and he followed the pace dictated by the front rower, his mind focused on nothing but getting to the next landmark as quickly as possible. He was nothing more than a single component in a well-oiled machine.
But after twenty minutes, none of which were fast enough according to the coach, Scott’s mind began to wander. He stopped running on autopilot, his mind no longer completely devoted to the sport. No matter how hard he tried to put it out of his mind, the dream of last night still haunted him as he struggled to pull the heavy oar through the water.
The pond was calm, and resistance from the water or the wind was virtually non-existent, but still Scott found it difficult to keep in time with the rest of the team. He began to get frustrated with himself. He knew that he was just as good, if not better, than any other member of the team, but for some reason he wasn’t pulling his weight. The muscles in his shoulders cried for oxygen, his hands began to blister and once, he even knocked his oars from its bracket, slowing down that particular section dramatically. Even without seeing him, Scott could feel the eyes of the Coach drilling into his skull. Mr. Steiner was not the sort of person who easily forgot mistakes, nor the sort of person who made them.
So it came as a mixed blessing when the shrill call of the whistle told them they were back at the boathouse. Scott stomped out, his chest and arms screaming, a welt on his left hand bleeding and stinging. On one hand, he was glad that the training session was over, but on the other, he didn’t want to face the Coach. To Scott, today’s performance was awful. To the Coach, it would be the worst thing he had ever seen.
As the team loaded the final pieces of equipment into the boathouse, the Coach patted each member between the shoulder blades with his huge hands, commenting on their performances with a quick “Good work”, or “Keep it up”. But as Scott approached, he disappeared and made his way back into the passenger seat of the minibus. Scott considered confronting him and apologising for his lapses in the session. But he knew that he would only be rewarded with a shouting match or a lecture about his concentration.
Head and arms hanging low in exhaustion and frustration, he climbed into the minibus.
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Scott slept for the whole journey, only to be woken up by the loud tapping of a key against a window. He opened his eyes wearily, taking a few seconds to get his bearings. He was still where he had fallen asleep, which was a good sign, but the bus was empty. He undid his seatbelt and rubbed his eyes with his knuckles.
The tapping had come from the window next to him. The Coach was standing outside, tapping his key against the glass and staring through, seemingly waiting for Scott to wake up. All of a sudden, Scott wished he could just drift back off and ignore the face outside the window, but he had no choice. The Coach gestured with his head for Scott to come outside.
“What was wrong with you today Stirling?” he asked as Scott leaned against the bus next to him. Scott remained silent.
“Answer me when I ask you a question!” he barked.
“Nothing Coach.”
“Nothing? You dropped your oar for God’s sake!”
“I said nothing,” Scott insisted. He had no wish to tell this man what he had seen in his dream, what had made him so sick in the morning and so distracted during training.
“Well you’d better go to the nurse and get this “nothing” sorted out then Stirling, because I need a full team on top form. You got that?”
“The nurse? I said I’m fine!” Scott kept his eyes glued to the floor.
The Coach moved closer to him and grabbed Scott’s jaw, lifting up his whole head so that their eyes were about level.
“We’ve got a major race coming up next week, and I need you at training on Wednesday. And I mean, at training, not in some world of your own where being totally out of time and losing control of your equipment is acceptable. So you’re going to go to the nurse, and I’m going to phone her to make sure you get there. Clear?”
“Yes Coach,” Scott replied through gritted teeth, before writhing out of the man’s grip. He swore under his breath and walked away towards the nurse’s office.
