The stairs emerged inside a vast chamber filled with people … thousands of them. They were packed together on benches or swaying on their feet, dressed in the same bits and pieces they had worn when they attacked the World Army. Many of them were holding their swords and shields, banging one against the other. This was the noise Richard had heard. There had been an extra food ration. They were drinking wine out of skins which they passed along the rows, tearing up thick slabs of bread and meat with their bare hands.
Richard looked up. The ceiling was so high above that it was invisible and he realized that he must be in one of the towers that he had seen across the ice shelf, that this was indeed the fortress, the very heart of the Old Ones’ lair. Blue light, shining with a harsh almost radioactive intensity, was pouring in through caverns and grottoes that had eaten into the walls all around. Stalactites, needle-sharp, hung down. Narrow ledges – pathways – connected the different entrances and there were crumbling, uneven staircases connecting all the levels. The crowd continued all the way to the top, disappearing into the shadows. Every step, every patch of ground was occupied by men and women with long, straggling hair and wide eyes, screaming, laughing, waving their fists or pounding their shields, all of them fixed on the spectacle below.
A boxing ring, with wire instead of rope, had been constructed in the very centre of the cavern and the crowd was arranged on all four sides of it. Richard felt a fist punch him in the small of the back and he continued forward. Grief tore at his throat and heart.
Matt was there.
He was standing up with his arms outstretched, tied to a wooden frame so that the crowd could see him. It was impossible to guess how much pain he had already endured. His clothes were in rags and his body was a mass of lacerations. Richard barely recognized him. Matt’s hair had been shaved off. His face was horribly swollen. His nose had been broken. Barbed wire had been twisted around his neck.
Two men, dressed in butcher’s aprons, stood close to him. One was holding a knife which he had taken from a trolley, waving it first at the audience for their approval before using it on Matt. As Richard drew closer, approaching the edge of the ring, Matt’s eyes flickered open. He was still conscious, but he showed no emotion. He didn’t even seem to understand what was happening any more. But he knew Richard was there. Something deep inside him – it might have been sadness or it might even have been acceptance – appeared briefly in his eyes. Yet even as Richard began to climb up, his head lolled forward and the audience jeered and booed.
“Keep going,” the chairman said. “I want you to be nice and close.”
Sick, hollowed out, Richard climbed the short flight of steps that led into the ring. The crowd fell silent as the chairman followed. The two guards remained below. Matt was still alive but the breath was rattling in his throat. Blood was running down into his eyes, which were dazed and out of focus.
“It’s time to finish the performance right now,” the chairman announced, speaking directly to Richard but loudly enough for everyone else to hear. “I’d say the boy deserves a rest. But we want him to take away some very special memories of what happened here today, so you can say goodbye to him before we kill you.
“This is where it ends for you, Mr Cole. But not for him. I think it’s important for you to know this. When you’re dead, we’re going to take your little friend somewhere quiet and let him recover. I’d say it’ll take a couple of months. There are a lot of broken bones in there. But we’re going to look after him really well, and in the end, he’ll heal. He’ll get strong.
“And then we’re going to do this again. We’re going to bring him in here and we’re going to tie him up and start all over again. And again, and again, and again – we’re going to keep doing it for the next one hundred years. He’ll be an old man and we’ll still be working on him. Can you imagine that?
“So why don’t you say goodbye while you still can? Then we’re going to kill you in front of him. But in a way you’re lucky. You only get to die once.”
The chairman gestured. The crowd was still silent, hoping that Matt would speak, maybe cry for mercy. Matt’s lips were cracked and swollen but they seemed to be moving slowly, trying to form words. No sound came out.
Richard glanced at the chairman with more loathing than he had felt for anyone or anything in his life. He knew now exactly what he had to do. He understood at last why he had been given the knife.
Before anyone could stop him, he took two steps forward, pulled it out of his belt and, looking Matt straight in the eyes, plunged it into his heart.
LONDON (HOLLY)
I will never forget those terrible last moments at St Meredith’s church.
My heart was already pounding as we slipped out of the house where we’d been hiding … number 13, although I never found out the name of the street. Everything was very quiet – it was still early morning – but in a way that made me even more nervous. There was so much wreckage, so many broken-down buildings and rusting cars, that I could almost feel the ghosts wandering along the pavements. And there must have been millions of those. It was incredible to think that in the space of less than ten years, a whole city could have been reduced to this wasteland. But then I suppose in other parts of the world, with earthquakes and super-volcanoes, it had happened in minutes. I can’t even begin to imagine how London had been before the terrorists came. I just don’t have that much imagination. What I saw that day was just the vaguest impression of a city, a few scraps blowing in the wind.
We came out into the road, or what was left of it. I could make out some of the white lines painted in the middle and the yellow lines, which used to mean you weren’t allowed to park, but they were partly concealed by dust and debris, and actually it was impossible to tell where the road was or where it went. The church was very close to us, only a hundred metres or so away, and as it was just about the only building that was still standing, more or less intact. It seemed enormous. It could have been a monument to the whole dead city of London. There were bits of shops and offices on either side of us, so we weren’t completely exposed. But like everyone else, I wished Jamie had chosen a time when it was darker or rainier to bring us out.
“Stay close,” Will said, speaking in a whisper.
I didn’t need to be told. I had Amir and Ryan in front of me. Simon and Blake were in front of them. Jamie was next to me. And the two brothers, Graham and Will, were behind. Jamie and I had each been given a gun too and I hoped that if I had to use mine, I’d be more effective than I had been on the Lady Jane. To be honest, I was glad to be surrounded by so many armed men, and as we moved down the street – quickly but carefully, looking in every direction – I did my best to stay right in the middle.
The attack, when it came, was completely unexpected. It didn’t come from shape-changers, the evil policewoman or anything to do with the Old Ones.
It came from dogs.
It was probably quite by chance that they found themselves in this part of the city, but there were a dozen of them and they were out hunting for food.
When London was attacked, they must have been pets that had been left behind and they had banded together, just like the people we’d seen in the Tube station, forming a pack. As they came rushing towards us I saw that they certainly weren’t anyone’s pets any more. They were horrible. There were little fat ones, running as fast as they could on stupid stunted legs, and tall, raggedy thin ones with matted fur and blank eyes. They were all mongrels, the worst bits of every dog you ever saw thrown together to make the ugliest creatures you could possibly imagine. It was obvious that all of them had only one thought in whatever was left of their brains: food. They were howling and barking, snapping at the air with teeth that were jagged and as sharp as razors. Obviously they spent quite a bit of time attacking each other. There wasn’t a single one of them that didn’t have some dreadful injury … bites on the stomach and chest, throats torn open, ears and eyes missing. One of them was dragging itself after the others on
two legs.
They must have been downwind of us when we came out of the house and had picked up our scent. God help any of us if we had been alone and unarmed. The dogs would have gleefully torn us apart and eaten us. From the look of them, they must have often done exactly that. Of course, we had weapons. We had plenty of time to see them coming. So although they were like something out of a nightmare, there really was no chance that they could do us harm.
But that wasn’t the point. I saw Blake raise his machine gun and send a spray of bullets, which cut into them, killing four or five instantly and halting the others, as if they had run into a sheet of glass. Several of the dogs were wounded, not killed outright, and they went completely mad, snapping at their own bodies, trying to bite out the cause of the pain. One or two of them sniffed at their dead companions, realizing that there was an easier meal right in front of them … although maybe it would be better if they came back later. In any event, the attack was over. But at the same time the sound of the machine-gun fire had echoed across the city and now anyone in St Meredith’s or nearby would know that we were here.
“Run!” Will ordered.
He was right. If we were going to reach St Meredith’s and find Jamie’s door, we had to get there as quickly as we could. We had lost the advantage of surprise but there might still be a few moments before the enemy worked out which direction we were coming from. Forgetting the dogs, we belted towards the entrance to the church. As we went, I saw Will take something from his belt and throw it. It was a grenade! It only occurred to me then that the entrance to the church was almost certainly locked, and although he might have been planning a more cautious approach – picking the lock, for example – we couldn’t waste any more time. We just had to get in.
Will put up his arm to signal us to stop and we crouched down. The grenade exploded, smashing open the wooden door which had stood there for centuries, even surviving the destruction of London … until we had arrived. We were about thirty metres away now and out of the corner of my eye I saw something move and felt my legs turn to jelly as the spider scuttled round the side of the church and stood there, quivering, looking down at us with the dozens of glittering black discs that were its eyes. There was a huge, heaving sack of venom under its belly. I had seen the spider the day we first came to St Meredith’s but it was even more horrible now because it had seen us. It knew we were there.
We couldn’t go back. If we turned round, it would leap onto us in a second, and anyway, what would be the point? We had to get into the church. We had no choice but to continue forward, racing towards it. Twenty-five metres. Twenty metres. We weren’t going to make it.
It would have killed us all. I’m sure of it. It was already tensing itself to jump right onto us. But then, before it could make its move, something else happened – so extraordinary and inexplicable that I couldn’t believe it. I really did think I must be dreaming or hallucinating. Or maybe my fear had driven me insane.
The sky burst into flames.
I mean, the whole sky. If you can imagine dousing all the clouds in petrol and then putting a match to them, that was what happened. We didn’t feel any heat. Perhaps there was none. But the whole of London, the church and the spider were bathed in a deep red glow. At the same time, I thought I heard a bell strike somewhere in the far distance, coming from another church or maybe from St Meredith’s, and later on I realized that it must have been exactly eight o’clock – twelve o’clock in Antarctica – and if ever there was a moment of truth, this was it.
The sky blazed. The spider froze. We didn’t stop. It took us less than a minute to reach the front entrance where the door was shattered and the stonework charred, wisps of smoke still rising. For just a second, Jamie and I were close to each other, our shoulders touching and I saw him turn and look back, the flames reflecting in his face. I had never seen him look so dismayed.
“What is it? I asked.
“Matt,” he said. Just the one word, but I knew it meant that something dreadful had happened.
And then we were inside the church. It was a big place, five times the size of St Botolph’s back in my village and a lot gloomier too, with most of the windows broken, rubble over the floor, the pews all smashed up and most of them taken away, probably for firewood. There were huge pillars holding up the ceiling and chapels leading off at the sides. Everything was very dark and red.
I didn’t know what to think. Part of me thought that we’d done it, that we’d made it here and nothing was going to stop us finding the door. Jamie and the Traveller would soon be on their way … on yet another journey. I suppose I should have been glad. But I wasn’t. I would never see Jamie again and without him I had no reason at all to be here. What would happen to me? The Nexus would look after me, I guessed. And if Jamie won the fight against the Old Ones, perhaps I’d be able to return to the village, or one like it. But George was dead. Rita and John were dead. Just about everybody I knew was dead. And on top of that, the world was on fire. I was in the middle of a ruined city. There was no way back.
Blake, Simon, Ryan and Amir had fanned out in front of us. I had my gun. Jamie had his. The Traveller and his brother were covering us from behind.
Blake pointed. “There it is,” he said. “The door…”
There was a burst of gunfire, horribly loud, deafening in the empty space, and Blake was hurled off his feet, dead before he hit the ground. I cried out. The ginger-haired woman who had come in the helicopter to the village and followed us to Little Moulsford before she lost us at the Sheerwall Tunnel had caught up with us again. She was striding towards us in her long coat with a look of grim determination on that pale, thin face of hers. It was she who had fired the shots but she was surrounded by armed policemen and I knew at once that they weren’t going to stop, that there weren’t going to be any warnings or questions. They would kill us all – Jamie too, this time – and that would be the end of it.
But Jamie had his power, didn’t he? I waited for him to tell the woman that he wasn’t there or to order her to simply drop her gun or whatever. It never happened. A gas cylinder exploded – I didn’t even see who threw it – and suddenly there was smoke everywhere, thick yellow clouds gushing out around our feet. I gasped for breath. My throat was raw. My eyes were burning and I could feel the tears streaming down my cheeks. It was some sort of tear gas. The woman knew just what Jamie could do and she’d taken no chances, disabling him and the rest of us before she closed in. How had she got to St Meredith’s? It was obvious. She had known where we were heading and she had simply waited for us to turn up.
Blake was gone but the others were shooting back. Bullets exploded all around me. Once again I found myself in the middle of a gun battle, unsure what to do. I didn’t dare fire myself in case I hit Jamie or the Traveller.
“Go, Jamie! Go!”
I think it was Will who shouted the order. It was impossible to be sure. There must have been hundreds of bullets being fired and I screamed as one hit my hand, going right through the palm. With what little vision I had, I saw Jamie start forward and even then the thought occurred to me that it was a shame that he hadn’t had time to say goodbye properly. Maybe that was why I followed him or maybe it was simply because I didn’t want to be left on my own. Either way, four of us made the sprint to the door, although Will only took a few more steps before he was shot down. I couldn’t tell if he’d been wounded or killed. A second later I saw the Traveller turn round and fire off three shots: at least one of them found its target – a perfect target – because I saw the policewoman throw her head back, and when she lowered it again there was a round, red hole where her left eye had been. She fell onto her knees, but then the Traveller cried out and went sprawling, and suddenly there was just Jamie and me with the door right in front of us and there was no chance of the Traveller following so Jamie just grabbed me instead and the two of us burst through.
The church was behind us. The policemen were still firing. There was smoke everywhere. And I remem
ber thinking that, this time, I really, really hoped the door would work.
ANTARCTICA
It was exactly like being electrocuted.
Scott felt the terrible shock running through him, and even if he had wanted to let go of the lock it would have been impossible because his own hands were fused to it. He was burning up. It seemed to him that the world was on fire … the sky, the ice. He could barely see, his vision torn away from him. He knew that he was dying on his feet.
But this was for Jamie and he refused to black out. He refused to die. He fought back, ignoring the pain even as it shuddered through his arms, and instead he focused all his remaining strength on separating the white ivory hands, pulling them apart. He had forgotten the injuries that Jonas Mortlake had inflicted on him. He had forgotten everything that had happened since he had walked out of the door from Hong Kong and into the Abbey of San Galgano. All that mattered was that he should succeed and, sure enough, in the half-second before he collapsed, unconscious, he felt his hands come apart and knew that the chain had been unfastened, that the door was open and that Jamie could come through.
Scarlett felt herself being released from Scott’s power and ran over to Scott, who was lying dead still, his hands and wrists blackened, smoke seeping out of the corner of his mouth. He looked hideous, like the victim of some terrible accident. Lohan was right behind her.
“What’s happening?” Lohan shouted. “The sky!”
It was true. Scott hadn’t imagined it. Flames were rippling across the Antarctic sky. It was a shocking, horrific image. The end of the world.
“I don’t know!” Scarlett was next to Scott, certain he was dead, cradling him in her arms.
Lohan looked past her, at the two chains with the ivory hands, now lying apart. “He did it!” he exclaimed. “The door is open. You and I can leave! You can take us anywhere in the world!”
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