He saw an empty space and made for it. With the tray in front of him, he didn’t see the foot that was stretched out in his path. The next thing he knew, he had been tripped. Helplessly, he pitched forward. The tray, two plates, a glass, his knife, fork and spoon left his hands and hit the floor with a deafening crash. Matt followed them. Unable to stop himself, he fell on top of what was meant to be his lunch. The entire room fell silent. Even before he looked up, Matt knew that everyone was staring at him.
It hadn’t been Gavin Taylor who had tripped him up. It was one of his friends. But Matt had no doubt that it had been Gavin’s idea. He could see the other boy a few tables away, standing up with a glass in one hand, a stupid smile spreading across his face. Matt got to his knees. Ice cream was dripping from his shirt. He was surrounded by pieces of salad, kneeling in a puddle of fruit juice.
And then Gavin laughed.
It was a cue for the rest of the school to join in. It seemed to Matt that just about the entire room – the entire school – was laughing at him. He saw Mr O’Shaughnessy making his way towards him. Why did the assistant headmaster have to be on lunch duty that day?
“Why do you have to be so clumsy, Freeman?” The words seemed to be coming from a long way away. They echoed in Matt’s ears. “Are you all right?”
Matt looked up. Gavin was pointing at him. He could feel the anger coursing through him – and not just anger. Something else. He couldn’t have stopped it, even if he had tried to. It was as if he had become a channel. There were flames flowing through him. He could actually smell the burning.
The chandelier exploded.
It was an ugly thing, a tangle of steel arms and light bulbs that some architect must have thought would suit the room. And it was directly over Gavin Taylor. Now, as Matt stared, the bulbs shattered, one after another, each one bursting apart with the sound of a pistol shot. Glass showered down, smashing onto the tables. Gavin looked up and cried out as a piece of glass hit him in the face. More glass rained down on him. A few wisps of smoke rose to the ceiling. Nobody was laughing any more. The entire room was silent.
Then the glass that Gavin was holding exploded too. It simply blew itself apart in his hand. He screamed. His palm had been cut open. Gavin looked at Matt, then at his hand. His mouth opened but it seemed to take him for ever to find the words.
“It was him!” he shouted. “He did it!” His whole body was trembling.
The assistant headmaster stared helplessly. He looked bewildered, unsure what to do. This sort of thing had never happened before. It was beyond his experience.
“It was him!” Gavin insisted.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Mr O’Shaughnessy said. “I saw what happened. Freeman was nowhere near you.”
Gavin Taylor had gone pale. It might have been the pain, the sight of his own blood welling out of the cut in his hand. But Matt knew that it was more than that. He was terrified.
Mr O’Shaughnessy tried to take charge. “Someone get the matron,” he snapped. “And we’d better clear the room. There’s glass everywhere…”
People were already moving. They didn’t know what had happened. They just wanted to get out of the dining hall before the whole ceiling came down. They had forgotten Matt for the moment but if any of them had looked for him they would have seen that he was no longer there.
A SECOND GATE
The streets were beginning to empty by the time Matt got home. These were the summer months and tourists were arriving every day. The queues round the Viking museum and the Minster were getting longer. The medieval walls were more crowded. Soon there would be more people visiting York than actually living there, or so it would seem. From city to tourist attraction, it was a process that was repeated every year.
Matt stood in the narrow, cobbled street called The Shambles and looked up at the flat that rose on three floors over a souvenir shop. He had been happy here for a while. Living with Richard was odd – the journalist was more than ten years older than him – but after all they had been through together in Lesser Malling, it had sort of worked. They needed each other. Richard knew that Matt could provide him with the newspaper story that would make him famous; Matt had nowhere else to go. The flat was just about big enough for the two of them and anyway, they were both out all day. At weekends they went hiking, swimming, go-karting … whatever. Matt tried to think of Richard as a big brother.
But during the past weeks, he had become increasingly uncomfortable. Richard wasn’t his brother, and as the memories of their shared nightmare faded, there seemed to be less and less reason for them still to be staying together. Matt liked Richard. But there wasn’t going to be any Pulitzer-prize winning scoop and the simple truth was, he was in the way. That was why he had suggested going back to the LEAF Project. Despite what Richard had said, an ordinary family somewhere in the country couldn’t be so bad.
And there was a second reason to leave York.
Matt wondered if the school would have phoned Richard and told him what had happened. There was no reason why they should. Despite Gavin’s accusations, none of the teachers seriously believed he had been responsible for the explosion in the dining hall. But Matt knew differently. He had felt the power flowing through him. It was the same power that had stopped the knife and snapped the cords when he had been a prisoner, tied down in Omega One. But this time there had been one difference. It had been directed at someone his own age. Gavin wasn’t his enemy – he was just a stupid kid.
He couldn’t stay at Forrest Hill. Not now. Another taunt from Gavin, another bad morning with Mr King and his English class and who could say what might happen? All his life, Matt had known he was different. He had been aware of something inside him … this power … whatever it was. Sometimes, when he’d gone to films like Spider-Man or X-Men, he’d wondered what it might be like to be a superhero, saving the world. But that wasn’t him. His power was useless to him because he didn’t know how to use it. Worse than that, it was out of control. Once again he saw the blood oozing from Gavin’s hand, saw the terror in his face. He could have torn the chandelier out of the ceiling. He could have crushed the other boy, buried him under a ton of twisted metal and broken glass. It had almost happened. He had to leave, go far away, before it happened again.
There was a movement behind the first-floor window and Matt saw Richard standing with his back to the street. That was strange. The journalist had said he wouldn’t be late, but even so he was never home before seven o’clock. The editor of The Gipton Echo liked to keep him in the office just in case something happened – although it very seldom did. Richard was talking to someone. That was unusual too. They didn’t often have visitors.
Matt let himself in, using his own key, and climbed the stairs. As he went, he heard a woman’s voice. It was one he recognized.
“There’s a meeting in London,” she was saying. “Three days from now. We just want you to be there.”
“You don’t want me. You want Matt.”
“We want both of you.”
Matt put down his school bag, opened the door to the living room and went in.
Susan Ashwood, the blind woman he had met in Manchester, was sitting in a chair, her back very straight, her hands folded in front of her. Her face was pale, made more so by her short, black hair and unforgiving black glasses. A white stick rested against her chair – but she hadn’t come alone. Matt also knew the slim, olive-skinned man who was sitting opposite her. His name was Fabian. He was the younger of the two, perhaps in his early thirties, and Matt had also met him before. It was he who had first suggested that Matt should continue living with Richard and who had managed to get him a place at Forrest Hill. As usual, Fabian was smartly dressed in a pale grey suit and tie. He was sitting down with one leg crossed over the other. Everything about him was very neat.
Both Fabian and Susan Ashwood were members of the secret organization that called itself the Nexus. As they had made clear from the start, their role was to help Matt and to protect
him. Even so, he wasn’t particularly happy to see either of them here.
Miss Ashwood had heard him come in. “Matt,” she said. It wasn’t a question. She could sense it was him.
“What’s going on?” Matt asked.
Richard moved away from the window. “They want you,” he said.
“I heard. Why?”
“How are you, Matt? How’s the new school?” Fabian smiled nervously. He was trying to sound friendly but Matt had felt the atmosphere the moment he had walked in and knew that it was anything but.
“School’s great,” Matt said, without enthusiasm.
“You’re looking well.”
“I’m fine.” Matt sat down on the arm of a sofa. “Why are you here, Mr Fabian?” he asked. “What do you want me for?”
“I think you know.”
Fabian paused as if unsure how to continue. Even though he had changed Matt’s life, Matt knew very little about him, or about anyone else in the Nexus.
“The first time I came here, I warned you,” Fabian went on. “I told you that we believed there might be a second gate. You destroyed the first one, the stone circle called Raven’s Gate in the woods outside Lesser Malling. But the second one is on the other side of the world. It’s in my country. In Peru.”
“Where in Peru?” Richard asked.
“We don’t know.”
“What does it look like?”
“We don’t know that either. We hoped that after what happened here in Yorkshire, we would have time to find out more. Unfortunately, we were wrong.”
“The second gate is about to open,” Susan Ashwood said. There was no doubt at all in her voice.
“I suppose you’ve been told this,” Richard said.
“Yes.”
“By ghosts.”
“Yes.” Susan Ashwood was a medium. She claimed that she was in contact with the spirit world. “You still don’t believe me?” she continued. “After what you’ve been through, after everything you’ve seen, I’m frankly amazed. You didn’t listen to me last time. This time you must. It’s as if winter has come in the spirit world. Everything is cold and dark and I hear the whispers of a growing fear. Something is happening that I don’t understand. But I know what it signifies. A second gate is about to open and once again we have to stop it, to prevent the Old Ones’ return. We want Matt to come to London. Only he has the power to prevent it.”
“Matt’s at school,” Richard growled. “He can’t just get on a train and take a week off…”
Matt looked out of the window. Soon it would start to get dark. Shadows had already fallen over The Shambles. Richard reached out and turned on the lights. Light and dark. Always fighting each other. “I don’t understand,” Matt said. “You don’t even know where this gate is. Why do you think I can help you?”
“We’re not the only ones looking for it,” Susan Ashwood replied. “There has been a strange development, Matt. You would doubtless call it a coincidence, but I think it’s more than that. I think it was meant to happen.”
She nodded at Fabian, who produced a DVD. “Can I play you this?” he asked.
Richard waved a hand at the TV. “Be my guest.”
Fabian fed the DVD into the player and turned on the television. Matt found himself watching a news report. “We recorded this last week,” Fabian said.
The DVD began with a shot of a leatherbound book, lying on a table. It was obviously very old. A hand reached forward and began to turn the pages, showing them to be thick and uneven, covered with writing and intricate drawings that had been made with an ink pen or perhaps even a quill. Matt had seen something very like it at school: the history teacher had brought in pictures of a fifteenth-century book of poetry rescued from some castle, and the letters had been drawn so carefully that each one was a miniature work of art. Many of the pages in the diary were the same.
“Some people are already describing it as the find of a lifetime,” the narrator explained. “It was written by St Joseph of Cordoba, a Spanish monk who travelled with Pizarro to Peru in 1532 and witnessed the destruction of the Inca empire. St Joseph later came to be known as the Mad Monk of Cordoba. His diary, bound in leather and gold, may explain why.”
The camera moved in closer to the pages. Matt could make out some of the words but they were all in Spanish and meant nothing to him.
“The diary contains many remarkable predictions,” the voice continued. “Although it was written almost five hundred years ago, it describes in detail the coming of motor cars, computers and even space satellites. On one of the later pages, it even manages to predict some sort of Internet, created by the church.”
Now it cut to a view of a Spanish town and what looked like a huge fortress with a soaring bell tower surrounded by narrow streets and markets.
“The diary was found in the Spanish city of Cordoba. It is believed that it had been buried in the courtyard of the tenth-century mosque known as the Mezquita and must have been unearthed during excavations. It passed into private hands and may have been sold many times before it was discovered in a market by an English antiques dealer, William Morton.”
Morton was in his fifties, plump, with silver hair and cheeks that had been burned by the sun. He was the sort of man who looked as if he enjoyed life.
“I knew at once what it was,” he said. His accent was cultured. “Joseph of Cordoba was an interesting chap. He’d travelled with Pizarro and the conquistadors when they invaded Peru. While he was out there, he stumbled onto some sort of alternative history. Devils and demons … that sort of thing. And he wrote down everything he knew in here.” He held up the diary. “There are plenty of people out there who said that the diary didn’t exist,” he went on. “For that matter, there are people who think that Joseph himself didn’t exist! Well, it looks as if I’ve proved them wrong.”
“You’re planning to sell the diary,” the commentator said.
“Yes, that’s right. And I have to tell you that I’ve already had one or two quite interesting offers. A certain businessman in South America – I’m not mentioning any names – has already made an opening bid in excess of half a million pounds. And there are some people in London who seem very keen to meet me. It looks as if I may have an auction on my hands…” He licked his lips with relish.
The camera cut back to the diary. More pages were being turned.
“If anyone can untangle the strange riddles, the often illegible handwriting and the many scribbles, the diary could reveal a completely new mythology,” the voice concluded. “St Joseph had his own, very peculiar view of the world and although some think he was mad, others call him a visionary and a genius. One thing is sure: William Morton has struck it lucky, and for him the book is quite literally pure gold.”
The pages were still turning. Fabian froze the image. Matt gasped.
At the very end of the film, the camera had rested on one page with handwriting – hundreds of tiny words compressed into narrow lines – at the top and the bottom. But in the middle there was a strange symbol. Matt recognized it at once.
He had seen it at Raven’s Gate. It had been cut into the stone on which he had almost been killed. It was the sign of the Old Ones.
“You see?” Fabian said. He left the image frozen on the screen.
“We believe the diary will tell us the location of the second gate,” Susan Ashwood said. “It may also tell us when, and how, it is supposed to open. But as you’ve heard, we aren’t the only ones interested in it.”
“A businessman in South America…” Matt remembered what the report had said. “Do you know who he is?”
“We don’t even know which country he lives in, and William Morton isn’t saying anything.” Fabian scowled.
“You’re the people who wanted to meet him in London,” Richard said.
“Yes, Mr Cole. We contacted Mr Morton the moment he went public with what he’d found.”
“We have to have the diary,” Miss Ashwood said. “We have to find the second gat
e and either destroy it or make sure it never opens. Unfortunately, as you heard, we’re not alone. This ‘businessman’, whoever he is, got in there ahead of us. Since that DVD was made, he has quadrupled his offer to William Morton. He’s now offering to pay two million pounds.”
“But you can pay more,” Richard said. “You’ve got plenty of money.”
“We told Morton that, the last time we spoke to him,” Fabian explained. “We said he could more or less name any price he liked. But it’s no longer a question of money.”
“He’s afraid,” Miss Ashwood said. “At first, we didn’t understand why. It seemed to us that maybe he was being threatened by whoever he was dealing with in South America. They’d shaken hands on a price and he wasn’t allowed to speak to anyone else. But then we realized it was something more than that.”
She paused.
“He’d read the diary,” Matt said.
“Exactly. He had the diary for the best part of a month and in that time he read it and understood enough of it to know just what it was he had in his hands. Right now he’s in London. We don’t know where, because he won’t tell us. He has a house – in Putney – but he’s not there. As a matter of fact, there was a fire a few days ago. It may be connected. We don’t know. William Morton has gone into hiding.”
“How do you contact him?” Richard asked.
“We don’t. He calls us. He has a mobile phone. We’ve tried to trace the calls but without any luck. Until yesterday all we knew was that he was going to sell the diary to the businessman and we weren’t even going to meet. But then he telephoned us again. I happened to take the call.” Miss Ashwood turned to Matt. “And I mentioned you.”
“Me?” Matt didn’t know what to say. “He’s never met me…”
“No. But he knows about the Five. Don’t you see? He must have read about them in the diary, and the fact that you’re one of them, Matt… he couldn’t believe it when we told him and he agreed, at last, to meet us. But he made one condition.”
Evil Star Page 3
