The Sentinel

CHAPTER SIX: THE RUINS

"Hang on!" Adeline said, raising his hand to stop my narration. "You mean actual monsters? Like long teeth and sharp claws monster?"

"Well yeah," I replied.

"I told you, you should've come," Clark added with a serious look in his face and without taking his eyes away from the road. "You don't know what we are dealing with here."

Adeline went silent for a whole minute, sweeping with her eye each one of our faces, reading our expressions, perhaps trying to figure out if we were playing some sort of prank on her, but after a while she realized we were not joking.

"Wow, I can't believe it," she muttered.

"You don't need to be afraid," I said, trying to calm her down, but her eyes did not show any fear, on the contrary, they became brighter than before.

"That is amazing!" she exclaimed, leaving us all quite confused. "This story is going to be incredible!"

Her enthusiasm for something so dangerous like those monsters made me smile a little. Her attitude was so optimistic and refreshing that for a moment I too felt excited. I had not had a mystery like this before and getting closer and closer to the truth made me feel more alive than ever.

"Now it's your turn," Clark said, with his usual serious look. "What do you know about the tourist?"

"O right, this is what I know," she said and then took a little notebook out of her purse. "A group of Americans hired a tourist agency to visit all the touristic destinations in Dingle. They left their hotel around six thirty in the morning and didn't come back until around eight at night, however one of them never returned. The hotel manager said they were acting weird after they came back," she explained.

"Weird how?" Danna asked.

"Well, they didn't talk much after they came back," Adeline explained, "The manager saw them wondering around at night, alone in the dark, and murmuring by themselves in a strange language. The manager also said that he saw one of the guys, who was in a wheelchair when they arrived, walking like a normal person, although I think he was just trying to impress me."

"Henry Brown," Tyler muttered.

"Yes, that was the name of that guy," Adeline replied.

"What else do you know?" Clark asked.

"Well, the next morning, all of them went missing," she continued. "Three of them are now dead and one in the hospital."

"Wait, the hospital?" I asked, "What happened to him?"

"Nobody knows," she said. "They found him naked in the streets and took him to the hospital. The guy went crazy... He murmurs all day in a different language, repeating the same thing over and over again. The doctor didn't know what language he was speaking."

"Do you?" I asked and instantly a big smile brighten her face.

"Yes," she said and then turned a couple of pages of her notebook. "He was murmuring a lot of words, but he repeated one of them several times, so I recorded it and sent it to a friend of mine in London. He is a researcher specialized in old languages and dialects."

"What language was it?" Clark asked.

"The closest word he could find belongs to the Celtic language or Irish Gaelic. It is very old, from around 500 BC. Although I can't say it's exactly the same word, it's the best he could find," she explained.

"What was the word? What did it mean?" Tyler anxiously asked.

"The word was 'TUISCINT'," Adeline said, but none of us recognized the word. "It means realization, awakening or something like that. Does it mean anything to you?" She asked.