Raven's Gate

THE NEXUS

The sun had just dipped below the horizon and night was closing in once again. Mrs Deverill had lit a fire. She was sitting in front of the burning logs with a knitted shawl on her shoulders and Asmodeus curled up on her lap. To look at, she could have been anybody’s grandmother. Even the portrait of her ancestor seemed more friendly than usual. The hair was neater. The eyes were perhaps a little less cruel. Matt was standing in the doorway.

“I think you and I need to have a talk, Matthew,” she said. “Why don’t you sit down?”

She gestured at the armchair opposite her. Matt hesitated, then sat down. Six hours had passed since she had found him in Greater Malling. There had been no work that afternoon. The two of them had eaten dinner together in silence. And now this.

“You and I don’t seem to quite understand each other,” Mrs Deverill began. Her voice was soft and reasonable. “I get the feeling that you’re against me. I don’t know why. I haven’t hurt you. You’re living in my house. You’re eating my food. What exactly is wrong?”

“I don’t like it here,” Matt replied simply.

“You’re not meant to like it. You were sent here as a punishment, not because you deserved a holiday. Or maybe you’ve forgotten that.”

“I want to go back to London.”

“Is that what you told the people in Greater Malling? The people at the newspaper? Just what did you tell them?”

“The truth.”

A log collapsed in the hearth and a flurry of sparks leapt up. Asmodeus purred and Mrs Deverill reached down, running a single finger down the animal’s back.

“You shouldn’t have gone there. I don’t like journalists and I don’t like newspapers. Busying themselves in other people’s affairs. What were you thinking of, Matthew! Telling stories about me, about the village… It won’t do you any good. Did they believe you?” Matt didn’t answer. Mrs Deverill drew a breath and tried to smile, but the hardness never left her eyes. “Did you tell them about Tom Burgess?” she asked.

“Yes.” There was no point denying it.

“Well, that’s precisely the point I’m trying to make. First you get the police involved. Yes… I heard what happened from Miss Creevy. And when that doesn’t work, you go running to the press. And all the time you’re completely mistaken. You actually have no idea what’s going on.”

“I know what I saw!”

“I don’t think you do,” Mrs Deverill replied. “In a way, it’s my own fault. I got you to clean out the pigs and I didn’t realize… Some of the chemicals we use are very strong. They have a way of getting up your nose and into your brain. An adult like Noah can cope with it. Of course, he didn’t have much brain to begin with. But a young boy like yourself…”

“What are you saying?” Matt demanded. “Are you saying I imagined what I saw?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying. I think you’ve probably been imagining all sorts of things since you arrived here. But don’t worry. You’re never going to have to clean out the pigs again. At least, not with disinfectant. From now on, you’re going to use only soap and water.”

“You’re lying!”

“I won’t have that sort of language in my house, if you don’t mind, young man. It may have been allowed with your aunt in Ipswich, but it won’t do with me!”

“I know what I saw! He was dead in his room and the whole place had been torn apart. I didn’t imagine it. I was there!”

“What would it take to persuade you otherwise? What would it take to make you believe me?”

The telephone rang.

“Exactly on time,” Mrs Deverill said. She didn’t move from her seat but waved with a single hand. “I think you’ll find it’s for you.”

“For me?”

“Why don’t you answer it?”

With a sinking feeling, Matt got up and went over to the telephone. He lifted the receiver. “Hello?”

“Matthew – is that you?”

Matt felt a shiver work its way down his spine. He knew it was impossible. It had to be some sort of trick.

It was Tom Burgess.

“I wanted to say I’m sorry,” the farmer said. No. It wasn’t the farmer. It was the farmer’s voice. Somehow it had been duplicated. “I’m afraid I missed you this morning. I had to go down to a market in Cirencester. I’m going to be away for a couple of weeks but I’ll come round and see you when I’m back…”

Was it Matt’s imagination or had it suddenly become very cold in the living room? The fire was still burning but there was no warmth from the flames. He hadn’t said a word to whoever – or whatever – it was at the other end of the line. He slammed down the phone.

“That wasn’t very friendly,” Mrs Deverill said.

“That wasn’t Tom Burgess.”

“I asked him to call you.” The firelight danced in her eyes. Matt glanced at the portrait and shivered. It was smiling at him, just like the woman who was sitting beneath it. “I thought it was best that he spoke to you himself.”

“How did you…?” Matt began.

But there was no point asking questions. He remembered the roads that led round in impossible circles, the cat that had been shot and come back to life. And now there was a farmer who had been dead but was somehow phoning from Cirencester. Matt was in the grip of a power much stronger than himself. He was helpless.

“I hope this is the end of the matter, Matthew,” Mrs Deverill was saying. “And I think you should be careful before you tell any more of these stories. Anybody who knows anything about you is unlikely to believe you. And I would have said that the last thing you need is to get into any more trouble with the police.”

Matt didn’t hear her. He had stopped listening. Silently he walked upstairs to his room. He was defeated – and he knew it. He undressed, slid under the covers and fell into a restless sleep.

The building was in Farringdon, close to the centre of London. It was two storeys high, Victorian, a survivor in a street which had been bombed in the Second World War and redeveloped ever since. It looked like a private house or perhaps a solicitor’s office. There was a single black door with a letter box, but the only letters that were ever delivered were junk mail. Once a month the doormat was cleared, the letters taken away and burned. Lights came on and off inside the building but they were on time switches. Nobody lived there. Despite the high cost of property in London, for most of the year the building was unused.

At eight o’clock in the evening, a taxi drew up outside and a man got out. He was Indian, about fifty years old, dressed in a suit with a light raincoat draped around his shoulders. He paid the driver and waited until the taxi had driven away. Then, taking a key out of his pocket, he walked over to the door and unlocked it. Briefly, he glanced up and down the pavement. There was nobody in sight. He went in.

The narrow hallway was empty and spotlessly clean. Ahead, a flight of stairs led up to the first floor. The man had not been here for several months and he paused for a moment, remembering the details of the place: the wooden steps, the cream-coloured walls, the old-fashioned light switch next to the banister. Nothing had changed. The man wished he hadn’t come here. Every time he came, he hoped he would never have to return.

He went upstairs. The top corridor was more modern, expensively carpeted, with halogen lighting and a swivelling security camera at every corner. There was another door at the far end, this one made of darkened glass. It opened electronically as the man approached, then closed quietly behind him.

The Nexus had come together again.

There were twelve of them – eight men and four women. They had travelled here from all parts of the world. They only saw each other very occasionally but they were always connected, communicating with each other by phone or email. All of them were influential. They were linked to government, to the secret service, to business, to the Church. They had told nobody that they would be here tonight. Very few people outside the room even knew that their organization existed.

Apart from the table and twelve leather chairs, there was very little else in the room. Three phones and a computer sat next to each other on a long wooden console. Clocks showed the time in London, Paris, New York, Moscow, Beijing and – curiously – Lima, in Peru. Various maps of the world hung on the walls, which, although there was no way of knowing it, were soundproofed and filled with sophisticated surveillance equipment to prevent the room from being bugged.

The Indian man nodded and sat down in the last empty seat.

“Thank you for coming, Professor Dravid.” The speaker was sitting at the head of the table. It was a woman in her late thirties, dressed in a severe black dress and a jacket fastened at the neck. She had a thin, chiselled face and black hair, cut short. Her eyes were strangely out of focus. She didn’t look at the professor as she spoke. She couldn’t look at anyone: she was blind.

“I’m very glad to see you, Miss Ashwood,” Dravid replied. He spoke slowly. His voice was deep, his accent very precise. “As a matter of fact, I was in England anyway. I’m working at the Natural History Museum. But I’m grateful to everyone else for coming. This meeting was called at short notice and I know some of you have travelled a long way.” He nodded at the man sitting next to him, who had flown in from Sydney, Australia. “As you are all aware, Miss Ashwood called me three nights ago, requesting an emergency session of the Nexus. Having spoken with her, I agreed that it was critical we should meet straight away. Again, I thank you for coming.”

Dravid turned to Miss Ashwood. “Tell them what you told me, Miss Ashwood,” he said.

“Of course.” Miss Ashwood glided her hand to a glass in front of her and took a sip of water. “Seven months have passed since we last met,” she began. “At that time I told you that I was aware of a growing danger, a sense that something was very wrong. We agreed that we would continue to monitor the situation, as we have always done. We are the eyes of the world. Although I, of course, have other ways of seeing.”

She paused.

“The danger has become more acute,” she continued. “For weeks now I’ve been thinking I should call you and I’ve spoken several times with Professor Dravid. Well, I can’t leave it any longer. I am certain, in my heart, that our worst fears are to be realized. Raven’s Gate is about to open.”

There was a stir around the table. But several of them were looking doubtful.

“What evidence do you have, Miss Ashwood?” one of the men asked. He was tall and olive-skinned. He had travelled from South America to be here.

“You know my evidence very well, Mr Fabian. You know why I was invited to join the Nexus.”

“Even so… What have you been told?”

“I haven’t been told anything. I wish it were as simple as that. I can only tell you what I feel. And right now, it’s as if there’s poison in the air. I’m aware of it all the time and it’s getting worse. The darkness is coming. It’s taking shape. You have to trust me.”

“I hope that isn’t why you’ve brought us all here tonight.” An elderly man had spoken. He was a bishop, dressed in a clerical collar with a gold cross around his neck. He took off his spectacles and cleaned them as he continued. “I’m very well aware of your abilities, Miss Ashwood, and I have great respect for them. But can you really ask us to accept that something is the case just because you believe it to be so?”

“I thought that was what faith was all about,” Miss Ashwood retorted.

“The Christian faith is written down. Nobody has ever written a history of the Old Ones.”

“That’s not true,” Dravid muttered. He raised a single finger. “You’re forgetting the Spanish monk.”

“St Joseph of Cordoba? His book has been lost and he himself was discredited centuries ago.” The bishop sighed. “This is very difficult for me,” he said. “You have to remember that, officially, the Church does not believe in your Old Ones any more than we believe in demons or devils or all the rest of it. If it was known that I was part of the Nexus, I would have to resign. I am here only because you and I have the same aims. We are all afraid of the same thing, no matter what we choose to call it. But I cannot accept – will not accept – guesswork and superstition. I’m sorry, Miss Ashwood. You have to give us more evidence.”

“Maybe I can be of assistance,” another man said. He was a policeman, an assistant commissioner based at Scotland Yard. “I did notice something very recently that might be of interest. It was very minor, so I didn’t report it to you, but in the light of what you are saying now…”

“Go on,” Professor Dravid said.

“Well, it concerns a petty criminal, a drug addict by the name of Will Scott. He was last seen following a woman into an alleyway not very far from here, in Holborn. Presumably she would have been his next victim. He had a knife. And a record of armed violence.”

“What happened?”

“It wasn’t the woman who ended up as the victim. She disappeared. It was Scott who was found dead. He killed himself. He pushed the knife into his own heart.”

“What’s so strange about that?” one of the women asked.

“He did it in broad daylight in the middle of London. But it wasn’t just that. I saw his face…” The policeman paused. “I knew at once that this was something completely abnormal. The look of terror. It was as if he had tried to fight it. As if he didn’t want to die. It was horrible.”

“The power of the Old Ones,” Miss Ashwood whispered.

“Why should one death in Holborn have anything to do with the Nexus?” the bishop insisted.

“I agree with you,” Dravid said. “One isolated incident. A possible suicide. But there is something else, and it happened only this morning. That in itself is rather strange, because of course I knew I was coming here tonight. But I was at my office, in the museum, and I was online. This was around lunchtime. And my computer picked up an enquiry into Raven’s Gate.” He hesitated. “I have a program,” he explained. “Whenever anybody, anywhere, puts those words into a search engine, I get to hear about it. It’s only happened twice in the last year – both times academics. But this was different. I managed to instant-mail the person at the other end. And I have a feeling it was a teenager or maybe even a child.”

“Did he say so?” the policeman asked.

“No. But he used the letters r and u instead of writing ‘are you’. That’s very much the sign of a young person. He called himself Matt.”

“Just Matt?”

“He gave no surname. But here’s something else that’s interesting. The enquiry came from a computer in the library at Greater Malling.”

The statement caused another stir around the table. This time, even the bishop looked concerned.

“Shouldn’t you have contacted us straight away, Professor?” the South American asked.

“I hardly had time, Mr Fabian. As I told you, this only happened today and I knew we would all meet this evening anyway. On its own, it might not have been significant. A schoolboy might have stumbled across Raven’s Gate and made enquiries about it for no particular reason. But given Miss Ashwood’s feelings and what we’ve just heard…” He let the sentence hang in the air. “Maybe we should try to find this ‘Matt’ and discover how much he knows.”

“And how are we meant to do that?” a silver-haired man with a French accent asked. His name was Danton and he was connected in some way to military intelligence. “Give me a full name and we could find him in seconds. But Matt? Short for Matthew? Or he could be from my country… Matthieu. Or he could even be a girl… Matilda.”

“He’ll find us,” Miss Ashwood said.

“You think he’ll just walk in here?” the bishop asked. He shook his head. “It seems obvious to me. If you really think something is happening in Yorkshire, we should go there and try to prevent it. We should be there now.”

“We can’t,” Dravid said. “It would be far too dangerous. We don’t know what we’re looking for. And anyway, we agreed from the start that we cannot become personally involved. That’s not our role. We exist to watch, to share information and – when the time comes – to fight back. That’s when we’ll be needed. We cannot do anything that will put us at risk.”

“So we sit back and do nothing?”

“He will find his way to us,” Miss Ashwood said. “You have to remember. It is meant to happen. Everything in the history of the world has been preparing itself for this moment, for the return of the Five and the final struggle. There is no coincidence. Everything is planned. If we don’t see that, we lose one of our greatest weapons.”

“Matt.” The Frenchman spoke the single word. He didn’t sound too impressed.

Miss Ashwood nodded slowly. “Let’s just pray he finds us soon.”