Anthony Horowitz - Necropolis

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 reading, 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.