Anthony Horowitz - Necropolis

He stopped. A man had appeared, coming towards him from round the corner of a building. At first Matt assumed he was drunk, on his way home from a late-night party. The man was wearing a crumpled suit with a tie hanging loosely from his neck, dragged round one side, and he was staggering. Matt thought about hiding but the man obviously had no interest in him. And he wasn’t drunk. He was ill. As he drew nearer, Matt saw that his suit was stained with huge sweat patches, and his face was a sickly white. He almost fell, propped himself against a lamppost, then threw up. Matt turned away, but not before he saw that whatever was coming out of his mouth was mixed with blood. The man was dying. He surely wouldn’t last the night.

Slowly, the city began to reveal itself. Matt wasn’t completely on his own after all. There were street cleaners out, sweeping the pavements, their faces covered by white cloth masks. He saw security men sitting on their own in the neon glare behind the windows, only half awake as they counted the long minutes until dawn. He passed the entrance of a subway station, closed for the night, but there was a woman sitting on the steps, a vagrant, her whole body completely wrapped in old plastic bags. She saw him and laughed, her eyes staring, as if she knew something he didn’t. Then she began to cough, a dreadful racking sound. Matt hurried on.

An ambulance raced past, its siren off but its lights flashing, throwing livid blue shadows across the shop windows. It pulled in ahead of him and he saw that a small crowd had gathered round a man lying unconscious on the pavement. The ambulance doors were thrown open and two men climbed out, also wearing white masks. Nobody spoke. The man on the ground wasn’t moving. The ambulance men scooped him up like a sack of meat and threw him into the back. He was either dead or dying and they didn’t care. There were other bodies in the back, lots of them, piled up on top of one another. The ambulance men slammed the doors then got back in. A moment later, they drove away.

The city was huge, silent, threatening. It seemed to be entirely in the grip of the night, as if the morning would never come. Bald-headed mannequins in furs and diamonds stared out of the shop windows as Matt hurried past. Hundreds of gold and silver watches lay ticking quietly behind armour-plated glass. In the day, in the sunshine, Hong Kong might be a shopper’s paradise. But at three o’clock in the morning with the pollution rolling in and the inhabitants sick and dying in the streets, it was something close to hell.

They were looking for him.

He heard the sound of a car approaching and the very speed of it, the angry roar of the engine at this time of the night, told Matt that its journey was urgent and that he should get out of its way. Sure enough, just as he threw himself into a doorway, a police car shot past, immediately followed by a second, both of them heading the way he had just come. He knew that he had to get out of sight before any more arrived. He crossed another wide avenue and began climbing uphill.

And then he heard something coming through the darkness. It was the last thing he would have expected in a modern city and at first he thought he must be mistaken. The clatter of metal against concrete. Horse’s hooves…

A man appeared, riding a horse through a set of red traffic lights. The hooves were striking the surface of the road with that strange, unmistakable rhythm, and the echo was being trapped, thrown back and forth between shop windows. The horse paused under a street lamp and in the yellow glare, Matt saw that it was even more horrible than he had imagined. It was skeleton-thin and in an act of dreadful cruelty someone had driven a knife into its head, the blade pointing outwards, so that it looked like a grotesque version of a unicorn.

Matt saw it and remembered Jamie telling him about the fire riders who had taken part in the battle ten thousand years before. Was this one of them? As the man and the beast went past, he ducked behind a parked car, watching them in the wing mirror until they had disappeared from sight.

He was about to stand up, then froze as something huge fluttered through the darkness, high above the skyscrapers. Matt didn’t see what it was but guessed that it was some sort of giant bird, maybe even the condor that had been part of the Nazca Lines. It was there, a sweeping shadow, and then it had gone. He knew now that the whole city was possessed: the roads, the water, the very air. It could only be a matter of time before he was seen and captured. Every moment he was on the street he was in terrible danger.

He waited until he was sure there was no one around, then straightened up and hurried on his way, keeping close to the buildings so that he could throw himself into the shadows if anyone approached. He came to a junction. A car had swerved and crashed into a bollard. It was completely smashed up, its horn blaring. Matt could see the driver, half hanging out of the front door, pinned in place by his seat belt, his head and chest covered in blood. No one was coming to help.

A street sign. Matt looked up and read two words directly above him. Harcourt Road. The name meant something.

Paul Adams has returned to Wisdom Court… It is here, on Harcourt Road.

He remembered Han Shan-tung, talking to him in the study, pointing it out on the map. Suddenly he knew what he had to do. Somehow he had stumbled onto the right road. If Paul Adams was at the flat, maybe he would let him in. At the very least he would have somewhere to stay until the break of day.

“Help me…”

The man in the car wasn’t dead. His eyes, very white, had flicked open. He seemed to be crying, but the tears were blood. There was nothing Matt could do for him. He turned away and began to run.

The road seemed to go on for ever. Matt went past more shopping malls, a hospital, a huge conference centre. He didn’t see any more police cars but he heard them in the distance, their sirens slicing through the air. At one point, a taxi rushed past, zigzagging crazily, on the wrong side of the road. He turned a corner and came upon a tram, parked in front of an office building. It was an old-fashioned thing. Apart from the Chinese symbols, it was like something that might have driven through London during the Second World War. And it was full of people. They were just sitting there, slumped in their seats, unmoving. Matt didn’t know if they were alive or dead and he didn’t hang around to find out. He guessed they were a mix of both.

Somehow he found his way to Wisdom Court. He had only glanced at the map when he was in Macau and he’d got no more than an overview of the city. But there it was, suddenly in front of him, the name on a block of stone and behind it a driveway leading up to a fountain, a wide entrance and, on each side, a statue of a snarling lion. The building was very ordinary, shrouded in darkness, but there was one light burning on the twelfth floor – Matt counted the windows – and he thought he saw a curtain flicker as somebody moved behind.

The driveway hadn’t been swept. It was strewn with dead leaves and scraps of paper. The fountain had been turned off. As he walked up to the door, Matt got the feeling that the whole place, apart from that one room on the twelfth floor, might be deserted. There were no cars parked outside. He put his face against the glass door and looked into the reception area. It was empty. The door was locked but there was a panel of buttons next to it, more than a hundred of them, numbered but with no names.

Was this really a good idea? He stood there for a few seconds, cold and wet, and tried to work out his options. Han Shan-tung had suggested that Paul Adams might have been working with the Old Ones. He had been there when Scarlett was taken prisoner. But could he really have sentenced his own daughter to death? Surely not.