Necropolis Page 6

  MISSING SCHOOLGIRL FOUND AFTER JUST ONE DAY

  POLICE ASK – WAS THIS A PRANK?

  Mystery still surrounds the return of fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, Scarlett Adams, who was discovered by police, just one day after she went missing on a school trip. Scarlett was feared abducted after she vanished during a visit to St Meredith’s church in East London, prompting a national search. She was later found unhurt inside the church itself.

  Although she received hospital treatment for minor scratches, there was no indication that she had been assaulted or kept against her will.

  So far, the girl – described as “bright and sensible” by the teachers at the £15,000-a-year private school that she attends in Dulwich – has been unable to offer any explanation, claiming that she is suffering from memory loss. Her father, Paul Adams, a corporate lawyer, angrily dismissed claims that the whole incident might have been a schoolgirl prank. “Scarlett has obviously suffered a traumatic experience and I’m just glad to have her back,” he said. Meanwhile, the police seem anxious to close the file. “What matters is that Scarlett is safe,” Detective Chris Kloet said, speaking from New Scotland Yard. “We may never know what happened to her in the eighteen hours she was gone but we are satisfied that no crime seems to have been committed.”

  The report had been sent ten thousand miles by fax. It was being examined by a boy in a room in Nazca, Peru. The boy got up and went over to a desk. He held the sheet of paper under a light. There was a picture of Scarlett next to the text. She had been photographed holding a hockey stick with two more girls, one on either side. A team photo. The boy examined her carefully. She was quite good-looking, he thought. Asian, he would have said. Almost certainly the same age as him.

  “When did this arrive?” he asked.

  “Half an hour ago,” came the reply.

  The boy’s name was Matthew Freeman. He was the first of the Gatekeepers and, without quite knowing how, he had become their unelected leader. Four months ago, he had faced the Old Ones in the Nazca Desert and had tried to close the barrier, the huge gate, that for centuries had kept them at bay. He had failed. The King of the Old Ones had cut him down where he stood, leaving him for dead. The last thing he had seen was the armies of the Old Ones, spreading out and disappearing into the night.

  It had taken him six weeks to recover from his injuries and since then he had been resting, trying to work out what to do next. He was staying in a Peruvian farmhouse, a hacienda just outside the town of Nazca itself. Richard Cole, the journalist who had travelled with him from England was still with him. Richard was his closest friend. It was he who had just come into the room.

  “It’s got to be her,” Matt said.

  Richard nodded. “She was in St Meredith’s. She must have gone through the same door that you went through. God knows what happened to her. She was missing for eighteen hours.”

  “Her name is Scarlett.”

  “Scar.” Richard nodded again.

  Matt thought for a moment, still clutching the article. He had spent the past four months searching for Scarlett in the only way that he could – through his dreams. Night after night he had visited the strange dream world that had become so familiar to him. It had helped him in the past. He was certain that she had to be there somewhere. Perhaps it would lead him to her, helping him again.

  And now, quite unexpectedly, she had turned up in the real world. There could be no doubt that this was her, the fifth of the Five. And she was in England, in London! A student at an expensive private school.

  “We have to go to her,” Matt said. “We must leave at once.”

  “I’m checking out tickets now.”

  Matt turned the photograph round in the light, tilting it towards himself. “Scar,” he muttered. “Now we know where she is.”

  “That’s right,” Richard said. He looked grave. “But the Old Ones will know it too.”

  MATT’S DIARY (1)

  I never asked for any of this. I never wanted to be part of it. And even now, I don’t understand exactly what is happening or why it had to be me.

  I hoped that writing this diary might help. It was Richard’s idea, to put it all down on paper. But it hasn’t worked out the way I hoped. The more I think about my life, the more I write about it, the more confused it all becomes.

  Sometimes I try to go back to where it all began but I’m not sure any more where that was. Was it the day my parents died? Or did it start in Ipswich, the evening I decided to break into a warehouse with my best friend … who was actually anything but? Maybe the decision had already been made the day I was born. Matthew Freeman. You will not go to school like other kids. You won’t play football and take your A-levels and have a career. You are here for another reason. You can argue if you like, but that’s just the way it’s got to be.

  I think a lot about my parents even though sometimes it’s hard to see their faces, and their voices have long since faded out. My dad was a doctor, a GP with a practice round the corner from the house. I can just about remember a man with a beard and gold-rimmed glasses. He was very political. We were recycling stuff long before it was fashionable and he used to get annoyed about the National Health Service – too many managers, too much red tape. At the same time, he used to laugh a lot. He read to me at night… Roald Dahl… The Twits was one of his favourites. And there was a comedy show on TV that he never missed. It was on Sunday night but I’ve forgotten its name.

  My mum was a lot smaller than him. She was always on a diet, although I don’t think she really needed to lose weight. I suppose it didn’t help that she was a great cook. She used to make her own bread and cakes and around September she’d set up a production line for Christmas puddings which she’d flog off for charity. Sometimes she talked about going back to work, but she liked to be there when I got back from school. That was one of her rules. She wouldn’t let me come home to an empty house.

  I was only eight years old when they died and there’s so much about them I never knew. I guess they were happy together. Whenever I think back, the sun always seems to be shining which must mean something. I can still see our house and our garden with a big rose bush sprawling over the lawn. Sometimes I can even smell the flowers.

  Mark and Kate Freeman. Those were their names. They died in a car accident on their way to a wedding and the thing is, I knew it was going to happen. I dreamed that their car was going to come off a bridge and into a river and I woke up knowing that they were both going to die. But I didn’t tell them. I knew my dad would never have believed me. So I pretended I was sick. I cried and kicked my heels. I let them go but I made them leave me behind.

  I could have saved them. I tell myself that over and over again. Maybe my dad wouldn’t have believed me. Maybe he would have insisted on going, no matter what I said. But I could have poured paint over the car or something. I could even have set fire to it. There were all sorts of ways that I could have made it impossible for them to leave the house.

  But I was too scared. I had a power and I knew that it made me different from everyone else and that was the last thing I wanted to be. Freakshow Matt … not me, thanks. So I said nothing. I stayed back and watched them go and since then I’ve seen the car pull away a thousand times and I’ve yelled at my eight-year-old self to do something and I’ve hated myself for being so stupid. If I could go back in time, that’s where I would start because that’s where it all went wrong.

  After that, things happened very quickly. I was fostered by a woman called Gwenda Davis who was related in some way to my mother – her half-sister or something. For the next six years, I lived with her and her partner, Brian, in a terraced house in Ipswich. I hated both of them. Gwenda was shallow and self-centred but Brian was worse. They had what I think is called an abusive relationship which means that he used to beat her around. He hit me too. I was scared of him — I admit it. Sometimes I would see him looking at me in the same way and I would make sure my bedroom door was locked at night.

 
; And yet, here’s something strange. I might as well admit it. In a way, I was almost happy in Ipswich. Sometimes I thought of it as a punishment for what I’d done – or hadn’t done – and part of me figured that I deserved it. I was resigned to my life there. I knew it was never going to get any better and at least I was able to create an identity for myself. I could be anyone I wanted to be.

  I bunked off school. I was never going to pass any exams so what did I care? I stole stuff from local shops. I started smoking when I was twelve. My friend, Kelvin, bought me my first packet of Marlboro Lights – although of course he made me pay him back twice what they’d cost. I never took drugs. But if I’d stayed with him much longer I probably would have. I’d have ended up like one of those kids you read about in the newspapers, dead from an overdose, a body next to a railway line. Nobody would have cared, not even me. That was just the way it would have been.

  But then along came Jayne Deverill and suddenly everything changed because it turned out she was a witch. I know how crazy that sounds. I can’t believe I just wrote it. But she wasn’t a witch like in a pantomime. I mean, she didn’t have a long nose and a pointy hat or anything like that. She was the real thing: evil, cruel and just a little bit mad. She and her friends had been watching me, waiting for me to fall into their hands because they needed me to help them unlock a mysterious gate hidden in a wood in Yorkshire. And it seemed that, after all, I wasn’t just some loser with a criminal record who’d got his parents killed. I was one of the Five. A Gatekeeper. The hero of a story that had begun ten thousand years before I was born.

  How did I feel about that? How do I feel about it now?

  I have no choice. I am trapped in this and will have to stick with it until the bitter end. And I do think the end will be a hard one. The forces we’re up against – the Old Ones and their allies around the world – are too huge. They are like a nightmare plague, spreading everywhere, killing everything they touch. I have powers. I’ve accepted that now and recently I’ve learned how to use them. But I am still only fifteen years old – I had my birthday out here in Nazca – and when I think about the things that are being asked of me, I am scared.

  I can’t run away. There’s nowhere for me to hide. If I don’t fight back, the Old Ones will find me. They will destroy me more surely and more painfully than even those cigarettes would have managed. After I was arrested, I never smoked again, by the way. That was one of the ways that I changed. I think I have accepted my place in all this. First of all, I have to survive. But that’s not enough. I also have to win.

  At least I’m no longer alone.

  When this all began, I knew that I was one of five children, all the same age as me, and that one day we would meet. I knew this because I had seen them in my dreams.

  Pedro was the first one I came across in real life. He has no surname. He lost it – along with his home, his possessions and his entire family when the village in Peru where he lived was hit by a flood. He was six years old. After that, he moved to the slums of Lima and managed to scratch a living there. The first time I saw him, he was begging on the street. We met when I was unconscious and he was trying to rob me. But that was the way he was brought up. For him, there was never any right or wrong – it was just a question of finding the next meal. He couldn’t read. He knew nothing about the world outside the crumbling shanty town where he lived. And of course he could hardly speak a word of English.

  I don’t think I’d ever met anyone quite so alien to me … and by that I mean he could have come from another planet. For a start (and there’s no pleasant way to put this) he stank. He hadn’t washed or had a bath in years and the clothes he wore had been worn by at least ten people before him. Even after everything I’d been through, I was rich compared to him. At least I’d grown up with fresh tap water. I’d never starved.

  Almost from the very start we became friends. It probably helped that Pedro decided to save my life when the police chief, a man called Rodriguez, was cheerfully beating me up. But it was more than that. Think about the odds of our ever finding each other, me living in a provincial town in England and him, a street urchin surviving in a city ten thousand miles away. We were drawn together because that was how it was meant to be. We were two of the Five.

  Pedro is pure Inca: a descendant of the people who first lived in Peru. More than that, he’s somehow connected with Manco Capac, one of the sun gods. The Incas showed me a picture of Manco – it was actually on a disc made of solid gold – and the two of them looked exactly the same. I’m not sure I completely understand what’s going on here. Is Pedro some sort of ancient god? If so, what does that make me?

  Like me, Pedro has a special power. His is the ability to heal. The only reason I’m able to walk today is because of him. We were both injured in the Nazca Desert. He broke his leg, but I was cut down and left for dead … and I would have died if he hadn’t come back and stayed with me for a couple of weeks. It’s called radiesthesia, which is probably the longest word I know. I’ve only managed to spell it right because I’ve looked it up in the dictionary. It’s something to do with the transfer of energy. Basically, it means that I got better thanks to him. And as a result, Pedro is more than a friend. He’s almost like a long-lost brother – and if that sounds corny, too bad. That’s how I feel.

  And then came Scott and Jamie Tyler.

  They really were brothers … twins, in fact. Formerly the telepathic twins, performing with The Circus of the Mind at The Reno Playhouse in Nevada. While Pedro and I had been fighting (and losing) in the Nazca Desert, they’d been having adventures of their own, chased across America by an organization called the Nightrise Corporation. They’d also managed to get tangled up in the American election and were there when one of the candidates was almost assassinated.

  Scott and Jamie are more or less identical. They’re thin to the point of being skinny and you can tell straight away that they have Native American blood – they were descended from the Washoe tribe. They have long, dark hair, dark eyes and a sort of watchful quality. Physically, I would have said that Jamie was the younger of the two, but when they finally reached us – they travelled through a doorway that took them from Lake Tahoe in Nevada to a temple in Cuzco, Peru – he was very much in charge. His brother had been taken prisoner and tortured. We’re still not sure what they did to him and Pedro has spent long hours alone with him, trying to repair the damage. But Scott is still suffering. He’s withdrawn. He doesn’t talk very much. I sometimes wonder if we’ll be able to rely on him when the time comes.

  It’s been more than four months since I faced the Old Ones in the Nazca Desert and I still haven’t recovered from my own injuries. I’m in pain a lot of the time. There are no scars but I can feel something wrong inside me. Sometimes I wake up at night and it’s as if I’ve just been stabbed. Even Pedro still has a limp. So between the four of us, I certainly wouldn’t bet any money on our taking on unimaginable forces of darkness and saving the world. I’m sorry, but that’s how it is.

  Jamie is very bright. He seems to see things more clearly than any of us, mainly because he was there at the very start. It’s too complicated to explain right now, but somehow he travelled back in time and met us … before we were us. Yes. There was a Matt ten thousand years ago who looked like me and sounded like me and who may even have been me. Jamie says that we’ve all lived twice. I just hope it was more fun the first time.

  Four months!

  We’ve all been hanging out in this house near the coast, to the south of Lima. It belongs to a professor called Joanna Chambers who’s an expert on pretty much anything to do with Peru. The house is wooden and painted white, constructed a bit like a hacienda, which is a Spanish farmhouse. There’s a large central room which opens onto a veranda during the day and a wide staircase that connects the two floors. Everything is very old-fashioned. There are scatter rugs and a big open fireplace and fans turn slowly beneath the ceiling, circulating the air.

  We’ve passed the time readin
g, watching TV (the house has satellite and we’ve also shipped in a supply of DVDs) and surfing the net, looking out for any news of the Old Ones. The professor insists that we do three or four hours of lessons, although it’s been ages since any of us went to school and Pedro never stepped into one in his life. We’ve played football in the garden, passing the ball around the llamas that wander onto the grass, and we’ve gone for hikes in the desert. And, I suppose, we’ve been gathering strength, slowly recovering from everything we’ve been through.

  But even so, there have been times when it all seems unreal, sitting here, doing nothing in the full knowledge that somewhere in the world the Old Ones must be spreading their power base, preparing to strike at humanity. They’ll be making friends in all the right places… As far as we know, they could be all over Europe. Their aim is to start a total war, to kill as many people as possible and then to toy with the rest, maiming and torturing until there’s nobody left. Why do they want to do this? There is no why. The Old Ones feed on pain in the same way that cancer will attack a healthy organism. It’s their nature.

  Sometimes, in the evening, the six of us will play Perudo, which is a Peruvian game, a bit like liar dice. Me, Richard, Pedro, Scott, Jamie and the professor. We’ll sit there, throwing dice and behaving as if nothing is happening, as if we’re just a bunch of friends on an extended holiday. And secretly I want to get up and punch the wall. We’re safe and comfortable in Nazca. But every moment we’re here, we’re losing. Our enemy is gaining the upper hand.

  What else can we do? The Old Ones have disappeared. And even if we knew what they were doing, we’re not yet strong enough to take them on. Only four of the Gatekeepers have come together. There have to be five.