Evil Star

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 gate 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.”

“He wants me to be there,” Matt said.

“He wants to meet you first, alone. He’s given us a place and time. On Thursday: three days from now.”

“We’re just asking you for one day of your time,” Fabian said. “If Morton sees you and believes you are who we say you are, maybe then he’ll sell us the diary. Maybe he’ll give it away. I honestly believe that he wishes now that he had never found it. He wants to be rid of it. We just have to give him an excuse, a good reason to hand the diary to us.” He gestured at Matt. “You are the reason. All you have to do is meet him. Nothing more.”

There was a long silence. At last, Matt spoke.

“You keep on saying that I’m one of the Five,” he said. “And maybe you’re right. I don’t really understand any of it, but I know what happened at Raven’s Gate.” He paused again. “But I don’t want to get involved,” he went on. “I had enough the first time and right now I just want to get on with my life and I want to be left alone. You say it’s just one meeting in London but I know it won’t happen that way. Once I get started, I won’t be able to stop. Something else will happen and then something after that. I’m sorry. You can find Morton without me. Why don’t you just offer him more money? That seems to be all he wants.”

“Matt…” Susan Ashwood began.

“I’m sorry, Miss Ashwood. You can manage without me. You’re going to have to. Because I don’t want to know.”

Richard stood up. “I’m afraid that’s it,” he said.

“You’re only here because of the Nexus,” Fabian snapped – and suddenly he was angry. His eyes were darker than ever. “We pay for your school. We have made it possible for you to stay here. Maybe we should think again.”

“We can manage without you.” Now Richard was getting angry too.

“It doesn’t matter!” Miss Ashwood got stiffly to her feet. “Fabian is wrong to threaten you. We came here with a request and you have given us your answer. As you say, we must manage without you.” She reached out and Fabian gave her his arm. “But there is one thing I will add,” she went on. She turned her empty eyes on Matt and for a moment she sounded genuinely sad. “You have made a decision but you may have less choice than you think. You can try to ignore who you are but you may not be able to for much longer. You are central to what is happening, Matt. You and four others. I think you will have to accept it before too long.”

She nudged Fabian and the two of them left together. Richard waited until he heard the front door close, then he sank back into a chair.

“Well, I’m glad they’ve gone,” he said. “And I think you’re absolutely right, by the way. What a cheek! Trying to drag you back into all that. Well, it’s not going to happen. They can get lost.”

Matt said nothing.

“You must be hungry,” Richard went on. “I managed to look into a supermarket on the way over. There are three bags of food in the kitchen. What do you fancy for dinner?”

It took Matt a few moments to absorb what he had just heard. Richard had been shopping? It had to be a first. Now he remembered his surprise when he had arrived at the flat, seeing Richard there at all. “What’s happened?” he asked. “How come you’re home so early?”

Richard shrugged. “Well, I was thinking about what you said this morning. About you and me. And I realized you were right. I can’t look after you when I’m travelling back and forth to Leeds all the time. So I threw the job in…”

“What?” Matt knew how much the job meant to Richard. He wasn’t quite sure what to say.

“I just don’t want you to go back to the LEAF Project. I said I’d look after you and that’s what I’m going to do. I can always find a job in York.” Richard sighed. “Anyway, you’re lucky I was here tonight. Did you really want to be left alone with Mr and Mrs Creepy?”

“Do you really think it was OK to say no?” Matt asked.

“Of course it was. If you didn’t want to go, then why should you? It’s your choice, Matt. You must do what you want.”

“That’s not what she said.”

“She was wrong. You’re safe here. Nothing’s going to happen while you’re in York except – possibly – food poisoning. I’m cooking tonight!”

Seventy miles away, on the M1, a man called Harry Shepherd was just coming out of a service station. He had started earlier in the day at Felixstowe and was on his way to Sheffield. As darkness had fallen, he had stopped for a bite to eat and a cup of tea. He was only allowed to drive a certain distance without a break, and he liked this service station.

There was a waitress he always chatted to.

It was now properly dark as he drove out. Also, it had begun to rain. He could see the streaks of water, lighting up as they slanted across his headlamps. He slammed the engine into second gear, preparing to rejoin the motorway – and that was when he saw her, standing on the slip road, one thumb out. The universal symbol of the hitch-hiker.

It wasn’t something he saw very often these days. Hitchhiking was considered too dangerous: nobody in their right mind would get into a car or a truck with a stranger. Not with so many weirdos around. And here was something else that was odd. The hitch-hiker was a woman. She looked middle-aged, too. She was wrapped up in a coat that wasn’t doing much to protect her from the rain and her hair was dragging over her collar. He could see the water running down the sides of her cheeks. Harry felt sorry for her. Somehow she reminded him of his mother, who was now living on her own in a bedsit in Dublin. On an impulse, he took his foot off the accelerator and pressed the brake. He slowed down. The woman ran forward.

Harry knew that he was breaking every regulation in the book. He wasn’t allowed to give lifts. Especially when he was carrying fuel. But something had persuaded him. An impulse. He couldn’t really explain it.

Gwenda Davis saw the petrol tanker as it slowed down. The motorway lights reflected off the great silver cylinder with the word SHELL in bright yellow letters. She should have been further north by now. It had definitely been a mistake leaving Eastfield Terrace without any money, and she had almost given up trying to hitch-hike. She knew she had let Rex McKenna down. She hoped he wouldn’t be angry with her.

But now her luck had changed. She wiped the rain from her eyes and ran to the passenger door. It was a big step up but she managed it, her bag swinging. The driver was a man in his thirties. He had fair hair and a silly, schoolboy smile. He was wearing overalls with a logo on his chest.

“Where are you going, love?” he asked.

“North,” Gwenda said.

“A bit late to be out on your own.”

“Where are you heading?”

“Sheffield.”

“Thanks for stopping.” Gwenda closed the door. “I thought I was going to be there all night.”

“Well… put your seatbelt on.” The man smiled at her. “My name’s Harry.”

“Mine’s Gwenda.”

Gwenda did as she was told. But she made sure that the seat-belt didn’t restrict her movements. She had her bag next to her with the axe handle sticking out of it and she’d decided she was going to use it as soon as they slowed down. It would be so easy to bring out the axe and swing it into the side of Harry’s head. She had never driven a petrol tanker before but she was sure she would be able to manage it. Rex McKenna would help her.

Ten thousand litres of petrol might well come in useful too.