Raven's Gate

by Anthony Horowitz

  “Survivors,” Ryan whispered. “Don’t worry. They won’t come near us.”

  Even so, we hurried forward. It had been good to be out in the open air for a few minutes. But it was better to be back in the tunnel.

  I never completely understood what had happened in London. It had been destroyed by a dirty bomb but what exactly did that mean? Was it nuclear or biochemical or both? And how much of the city was left untouched? I don’t know how the people I saw had managed to support themselves. What had the man been eating to make himself so fat? Like the rat that I’d seen at Highgate, it was probably best not to ask. All I can say is that everything felt poisoned: the walls, the ground, the very air. I felt that I was walking through a gigantic cemetery and that somehow it was almost an insult to be there and to be alive. There will come a time, I suppose, when historians and scientists will try to make sense of the ninth of May and what happened to Britain on that terrible day. I can only describe what I saw.

  We finally left the Tube system at Moorgate Station and, sure enough, there was an escalator just as Miss Keyland had described – a long, silver staircase with strange teeth at each end. It wasn’t working, of course, and we had to climb up. We passed through an archway, then took a second staircase up to the entrance hall, where a row of barriers stood waiting, all of them open. Amir and Ryan guided us through with their torches and I glimpsed ticket machines, glass booths, and a kiosk selling newspapers and magazines, which were still neatly arranged in rows. If I had looked at their covers, I know I would have seen the date, ninth of May, printed on each one. The exit was closed with a metal grid but Blake had a key and I realized that we were close to the safe house that Miss Ashwood had mentioned and that the Nexus must use this route quite often.

  I was exhausted by now. My legs were aching and I longed to be in bed. The streets that we followed seemed to be filled with rubble. There were cars everywhere – not just parked at the sides but stuck in a traffic jam that would never move again. I saw a bus. A red London bus. I got the impression of shops and restaurants but they were little more than shadows – and empty and broken ones at that. The breeze had dropped and nothing was moving. I think it was the stillness rather than the darkness that made the biggest impression of all.

  And finally we reached the house. It loomed up in front of us, tall and narrow with a solid-looking door with the number 13 and boarded-up windows. Once again, Blake had the key and he let us into a hall with a door on one side and a staircase leading up. He didn’t turn on the lights, if the lights even worked. In fact Amir and Ryan had kept their hands cupped over their torches as we hurried through the London streets. They’d found their way here through memory and instinct as much as anything else.

  “We’ll get some sleep,” Will said. He turned to Jamie. “You and Holly will share a room. I’ll be with Graham next door. The others will be downstairs. Once it’s light, you’ll be able to get your bearings. When you wake up, try not to leave the room. And – I probably don’t need to say this – the toilets don’t flush. There’s a chemical toilet in the basement. Do either of you need to use it?”

  Thankfully, I didn’t. I shook my head.

  “Then I’ll show you upstairs.”

  Amir, Ryan, Blake and Simon went into the downstairs room. Will had a torch of his own and led us upstairs. He took us into a room that was empty apart from two mattresses on the floor. There was a pile of blankets next to them. We grabbed one each and without taking our clothes off, stretched out.

  I meant to say goodnight to Jamie. I meant to thank him for the nice thing he’d said in the tunnel. But in about two seconds, I was asleep.

  Daylight, when it came, was harsh and grey, as if the sun had completely forgotten about such things as warmth and colour. It filtered through the window to reveal a room that had once belonged to a child. The wallpaper was striped – yellow and blue – and although there was no electricity, a lampshade still hung down, shaped like a teddy bear. The room was carpeted and there was a fireplace. It might have been quite cosy at one time. But it made me sad just to think of the child who had once slept here, to wonder what had happened to him or her and to accept that there was little chance that he or she was still alive.

  Jamie was already awake. I wondered if he had visited the dreamworld. I knew that he always hoped to find his brother, Scott, and the best chance was when he was asleep. And I thought about what it must be like to meet someone, to have conversations in your dreams and to remember them all when you woke up. But he said nothing and a moment later the Traveller and his brother arrived, knocking before coming into the room.

  “Did you sleep all right?” the Traveller asked. We both nodded and he went on. “Nobody saw us arrive last night so we’re safe here for the time being. We’re in East London. Do you want to take a look before we have breakfast?”

  “Are we going out?” Jamie asked.

  “Not out in the street. It’s too dangerous. We can go on the roof.”

  “You may be a bit shocked,” Will added. “I think you’ll find it’s not quite the same as when you were last here.”

  “Let’s go,” Jamie said.

  We left the room and walked along a short corridor. The house must have been a nice place to live once. There was an antique mirror on one wall, a chandelier, and thick carpets. But there was a mustiness everywhere. The Nexus might have used it from time to time, but the house had been abandoned for too long. It was almost as if it knew that it was no longer wanted.

  We climbed another staircase to a single door, which led onto a roof with a slate floor, a low wall and a chimney stack right in front of us. There was a TV aerial still plugged in and even a couple of deckchairs, although the material looked mouldy and I wouldn’t have trusted them with my weight. We didn’t step outside. We didn’t want to show ourselves. We stood in the shadow of the doorway, looking out.

  And there was London.

  We were only three floors up but it felt as if we were higher. London was all around us; the terrible wreckage of what had once been a great city. It was like looking at a million oversized matchsticks, all dropped out of the box, one on top of the other. Almost nothing tall was left … just the broken remains of what had once been offices and flats, battered and corroded, sticking up as if they had somehow grown out of the mess. I’d seen photographs of the city … St Paul’s, the Millennium Wheel, the British Telecom Tower. But they’d all gone, reduced to this hopeless sprawl that stretched as far as the horizon. No. Here and there, whole buildings had survived. I picked out an office, a bank, the tube station we had come out of the night before. There was the yellow M of a McDonald’s. I’d read about those too. There were vehicles everywhere – cars, taxis, lorries and buses … hundreds of them, all of them rusted and broken, many of them lying upside down or on their sides. A bit shocked? Will hadn’t begun to express what I felt. I had never lived here. I had never known what it meant to be a Londoner. But thinking about them, and what they had been through, I felt sickened.

  “Over there…” the Traveller was pointing around the side of the house.

  A single building stood in front of us, and although it was surrounded by debris, it had hardly been damaged at all. It reminded me almost of a ship, moored in a port after a particularly vicious storm. It was a church, almost the size of a cathedral, made of dark red bricks with a steeple that looked as if it had been built at a different time to the rest of it, slightly crooked and reaching up into the sky. Only the windows had been smashed. I could make out the jagged outlines of what remained of the stained glass.

  The church was barely a hundred metres away.

  St Meredith’s. It had to be.

  “There it is,” the Traveller said.

  Jamie stared at it. He seemed to be dazed. “The door…”

  “Scarlett Adams went through it. It took her to the monastery of the Cry for Mercy in Ukraine. Maybe it’s working again. It can take you anywhere you want to go.”

  Jamie was sti
ll examining the church. “There doesn’t seem to be anyone around.”

  “Believe me, they’re here,” Will said. “Inside the church and in the wreckage. Look…!”

  Even as he spoke, I saw it. I was so shocked, I almost fell back down the stairs. A spider had appeared, coming round the side of the church. It was monstrous, enormous, and about half the size of the church itself. Its eyes were hideous … as black as oil pools. It had two tentacle-things, protruding out of its head, twitching at the air in front of it. I could see every hair on its body and legs. And as huge as it was, the spider seemed strangely light, moving across the rubble without disturbing it. When I say it was like something out of my worst nightmares, I’m not telling the truth. I had never had nightmares like this.

  I could feel Jamie standing beside me. His whole body was rigid. But what he said next really surprised me. “I have seen it before.”

  “When?” I had no control of myself. The word was like a scream but also a whisper.

  “A long time ago. At the first battle. The spider. The monkey. The condor. They were all there. They belong to the Old Ones.”

  “You see what we are up against,” Will muttered.

  “How long can we stay here?”

  “Three or four days. No more than that. It’s too dangerous … and if we stay here too long we’ll get sick.”

  “Matt said he’d send me a sign. We have to wait for it. Then we go in.”

  “Well, I hope he sends it soon, Jamie. Four days maximum. Then we have to leave.”

  “You leave. I’ll stay.”

  The two brothers looked at each other but there was nothing either of them could say. The spider had disappeared round the back of the church. I had seen enough. I reeled back into the house feeling sick, my heart pounding. I was glad when they closed the door.

  THE GOOD PRIEST

  FORTY-ONE

  Pedro was coughing up water, litres of it. The water was streaming out of his mouth and over his chin and he could feel his lungs bursting inside him as they strained to push the rest out. He opened his eyes and saw only a blur but gradually his vision cleared and he was able to make out a dark-haired, bearded man, leaning over him. At the same time, he felt the man’s hands pressing into his stomach and with a groan he spewed up what felt like another few litres.

  He was lying on his back on the deck of the Medusa. The boat was still afloat. And he was still alive. He wasn’t sure which of the two facts was more surprising. The last thing he remembered was a roaring, thundering mountain of water, which had fallen on him and smashed him off his feet. The eruption of the volcano had caused a tsunami and they had sailed right into it as they tried to escape from the port of Naples. The boat should have been torn to pieces, or turned upside down at the very least. But the engines were still running. Pedro could feel them vibrating underneath him. They were moving at speed, skimming across the surface of the sea. Somehow, they had survived.

  The man – Pedro remembered that his name was Angelo – called out in Italian and suddenly the other members of the crew were gathered around him, grinning and reaching out to pat him on the shoulder. Giovanni was among them, soaking wet and as white as a sheet, but still smiling.

  “What happened?” Pedro asked, but although he formed the words, no sound came out. His throat was burning from the salt water, and anyway, he had spoken in Spanish so nobody would have understood him. Angelo spoke again and one of the men came over and knelt down.

  “You speak English?” he asked.

  “Yes.” Pedro nodded.

  “My name is Emmanuel.” He was young, about nineteen or twenty, with tangled fair hair and blue eyes. He didn’t look Italian and spoke perfect English, with no trace of an accent. He was wearing jeans and a thick-knit jersey so waterlogged that it had lost all its shape. “You are very lucky to be alive,” he went on. “Angelo steered the ship through the wave. He hit it straight on and he was able to climb over the crest. It was the only way to escape. Otherwise we would all have been killed. As it was, you were swept overboard and if you hadn’t tied yourself with the rope, you would have been killed. We were able to drag you back … but not before you had drunk a lot of the ocean. For a minute, we thought you had drowned. But you are OK now.”

  “Where are we?” Pedro asked. This time, the words managed to come out.

  “About a kilometre out and following the coast.”

  “The volcano…?”

  Pedro allowed Emmanuel to help him to his feet. The Medusa seemed to have come through the tsunami intact. There was water all over the deck and the bilge pumps were already working, pumping out the main cabin. The crew – there were three men along with Pedro and Giovanni – looked washed out in every sense. But at least the sea was more manageable, the waves huge and choppy but no longer lethal.

  Pedro turned back to the mainland, searching for the port they had just left. He couldn’t see it. The entire coast around Naples was wreathed in impenetrable black smoke. The waves simply rolled into it and disappeared. The sea, the land and the sky had all bled into each other. And yet Vesuvius was still making itself known with a hellish red glow that seemed to flicker on and off as the clouds passed in front of it. Balls of lava were still streaking down and more shafts of orange and scarlet glimmered briefly in the haze as the city burned.

  He stood watching this, feeling utterly drained. If he could have imagined the end of the world, it would have looked much like this: the dead sea, the dying land. Suddenly he felt very alone, far from his home, separated from the other Gatekeepers. He barely knew Giovanni, Angelo or the others. He didn’t speak their language. His broken finger was throbbing painfully. His stomach was empty. He thought back to the moment when he had first met Matt in Lima – and had tried to steal his watch. He wished now that he had made a different decision and gone another way. How could he have known that the meeting between the two of them would one day bring him to this?

  Angelo and Emmanuel spoke together for a while. Then Emmanuel turned to Pedro.

  “We know who you are,” he said. “We know that you are important. Francesco Amati, Giovanni’s uncle, told us about you. Our job is to get you to Rome, to the home of Carla Rivera. I know where she can be found and I will come with you and Giovanni because the others speak only Italian.”

  “How do you speak such good English?”

  “My father was English. We will be in Anzio in six or seven hours. From there we can get a train directly into Rome. I would suggest that you get some sleep but that won’t be easy. We have no dry clothes … and no hot food either. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m very glad to be here,” Pedro said. “Please thank Angelo for saving my life. And tell Giovanni that I’m sorry he had to separate from his family.” Pedro thought of Francesco and the others, huddled together in the three rooms. If the police hadn’t killed them, Vesuvius probably would. He fought back a great wave of tiredness. Where was this all going to end?

  It was one of the most miserable nights of Pedro’s life. As the light failed – apart from the endless glow of red in the sky behind them – the Medusa ploughed through the inky water, following the coast of Italy, heading north. Still wearing his sodden clothes, there was no chance of sleep, no relief from the cold. He could only stand shivering as Angelo turned the wheel and Giovanni crouched in a corner. Eventually, and despite himself, he did manage to drift into a light doze, although he wasn’t aware of it at first. He only realized what had happened when he found himself back where he most wanted to be, in the dreamworld, at the bottom of the hill that led down from the library. He was sure that no time had passed. It was as if he had been arguing with Jamie, and Scarlett only seconds before, refusing to tell them the truth about Scott.

  He wished now that he hadn’t walked away in such a hurry. He wanted to be with the others, especially with Matt, who always had the answers. He still remembered the moment in the desert in Paracas, when Matt had worked out the location of the second gate and had set off to face t
he King of the Old Ones on his own. And later, when they had been making their plans after the death of Professor Chambers, the woman who had looked after them in Nazca. It seemed to Pedro that command came easily to Matthew Freeman. It was as if he had been born to lead them.

  He wanted to ask what he was supposed to do in Rome. Carla Rivera might have connections but how exactly could she help him? How was he meant to reach Oblivion, far away at the southernmost tip of the world? He thought of going back to the library and was both pleased and surprised when Matt suddenly appeared, walking over the crest of the hill and towards him.

  “Matteo…!” In the real world he was cold and exhausted. But in the dreamworld he was smiling. There was nobody he would have been happier to see.

  “You’re doing the right thing,” Matt said. “You’ve had a worse time than any of us. I know that. But there’s the door in Rome that will take you to Antarctica. Just be careful who you trust, Pedro. We’ll see each other soon.”

  Pedro examined his friend with concern. Matt was talking as if everything was all right. But he himself looked broken, defeated. Pedro had never seen anyone who looked so sad.

  “I don’t understand, Matteo. Why don’t you tell me what’s wrong? What did you see in the library?

  “Pedro…”

  But there was nothing more. With a sense of despair, Pedro felt himself being sucked away and opened his eyes. He was swaying on his feet, next to the steering wheel. He had barely been asleep at all. If Matt had been about to tell him something more, he was doomed never to hear it.

  Somehow the next day arrived and although the smoke from Vesuvius had followed them even a hundred and fifty kilometres up the coast, the sun managed to break through and Pedro did his best to dry himself in the early rays. He heard the tone of the engine rise and saw Angelo spin the wheel. The Medusa changed course and began to head for the coast and Pedro saw Anzio spread out in front of them and, high up on a cliff, a single white tower, a lighthouse, sticking up like a finger.