Read Online The Red Road by Stephen Sweeney - Free Book Online

my dressing gown
and slippers. How had I gotten out here? I must have been
sleepwalking. I hadn’t done that in years, not since I had first
moved to the senior school. It was quite chilly out, most likely what
had woken me up. I glanced at my watch. It was just after three in the morning. I had
been asleep for about four hours or so.
    I turned around and headed back
through the door I supposed I had exited, actually the main entrance
to the school. Someone had failed to lock it tonight. Either that,
or I had somehow opened the door myself.
    I was surprised to discover how
dark it was inside. Apparently, I hadn’t switched on any of the
lights. How I had managed to negotiate the Marble Stairs and the near
pitch-black corridors I didn’t know. That was dangerous; I could
have fallen and broken something.
    I paused then, not certain I wanted
to walk any further into the school. What if I was still dreaming?
Would the goblins be waiting for me? No , I told myself. They’re not real . Even so, I walked stealthily through the
school, making for the west wing, where Butcher was located, and
looking for the elusive light switches as I went. I failed to find
any until I was back at my dormitory. No one else was awake. I got
back into bed and lay down, but I didn’t sleep.
    I wondered how often I had done
that. I could well be doing it a lot, but just never waking up. Now I
had an idea of how the mud and dirt had gotten on my slippers. It
wasn’t the first time I had noticed it, and I had often dismissed
it as having been trodden in on my everyday shoes and spread about
that way. Perhaps not.
    I found that troubling.

    ~ ~ ~

    “You were sleepwalking?” Sam
asked.
    “From my bed, down the Marble
Stairs, and out the main doors,” I said. “In the dark.”
    “How the hell did you not break
your legs?” Baz wanted to know. “I couldn’t walk down those in
the dark if I was awake.”
    “I don’t know,” I shrugged. “I
somehow did, though.”
    “And you went outside?” Sam
said.
    “Woke up just outside the main
school entrance.”
    “Why?”
    “Because it was cold,” I
answered, a little incredulously.
    “No, I mean why did you go
outside?” Sam said.
    “I don’t know,” I said. “I
was sleepwalking.”
    “Were you having a dream?” Baz
asked.
    “Yes, I was,” I replied, after a
moment of hesitation.
    “What about?”
    I hesitated again at the question. I
knew that even if I told them the truth, they would laugh at me. I
didn’t want them to know the details of the dream, let alone the
fact that they were recurrent nightmares.
    “I was being chased by
someone,” I said. “It was probably me thinking that whoever
killed what’s-his-name was coming for me next.”
    “Do you still think about that?
Seeing the body, I mean?” Sam wanted to know.
    “A little bit,” I admitted. “But
not all the time, no.”
    Sam and Baz nodded, and Sam was
about to add something else when my dormitory door opened and Mr
Somers entered.
    “Ah good, there you are, Joe. Can
you come with me, please?” my housemaster said, sounding practical
and not inviting comment.
    I glanced at Sam and Baz. “Is this
about last night? Because I was genuinely sleepwalking,” I said to
Mr Somers.
    “No, nothing like that. Come on,”
Mr Somers said, before coaxing me to follow after him.

    ~ ~ ~

    Despite reassurances from Mr Somers,
it certainly looked as though I was in trouble. I couldn’t think of
what I had done wrong, other than the sleepwalking. Sure, I had
opened a door that might have been locked and, now I thought about
it, hadn’t locked it behind myself as I had come back in. But I had
been sleepwalking. That was hardly my fault.
    “Where are we going?” I asked my
housemaster as we walked through Butcher and into the main school
building.
    “The headmaster’s office. There
are two police officers that would like to speak to you.”
    I came to an immediate halt and
began to back away quickly. “I didn’t do