Anthony Horowitz - Evil Star

He was standing at the end of the nave, which stretched out to an altar some distance away. There were no electric lights in the church and the stained glass windows were either too dusty or too darkly coloured to let in any light. But there were about a thousand candles illuminating the way forward, flickering together in little crowds, gathered round the chapels and alcoves that lined the sides of the building. As Matt’s eyes got used to the gloom, he made out various figures, older men and women, kneeling in the pews or hunched up in front of the tombstones, looking like ghosts that had somehow drifted up from the catacombs below.

He swallowed. He was liking this less and less and he wished now that he had insisted on Richard coming with him. The journalist had wanted to, but Fabian and the other members of the Nexus had dissuaded him. Matt was to enter alone. That was what they had agreed with William Morton and if they broke faith, they may never see him again.

Matt looked around but there was no sign of the bookseller. He remembered the face he had seen on the DVD. At least he would know what he looked like when Morton chose to reveal himself. Where was he? Hiding somewhere in the shadows, perhaps. Well, that made sense. He would check that Matt was alone. If someone had come with him, there would be other ways out of the church. Morton could slip away without ever being seen.

Matt continued down towards the altar, passing a carved wooden pulpit shaped like an eagle. The priest would address the congregation from above its outspread wings. The walls of the church were lined with paintings. A saint shot full of arrows. Another broken on a wheel. A crucifixion. Why did religion have to be so dark and cruel?

As he arrived at the apse, just in front of the altar where the east and west wings of the church spread out, forming a cross, a man stood up and gestured to him. The man had been sitting in a pew, his head half hidden in his hands. Matt recognized him at once. He was overweight, with silver hair in tufts on either side of a round, bald head, ruddy cheeks and small, watery eyes. The man was wearing a crumpled suit and no tie. There was a package, wrapped in brown paper, in his hands.

“Matthew Freeman?” he asked.

“I’m Matt.” Matt never used his full name.

“You know who I am?”

“William Morton.”

The bookseller appeared to be a very different man from the one Matt had seen in the television interview. Something had cut through his arrogance and self-regard: both physically and mentally he seemed to have shrunk. Now that they were closer, Matt could see that he hadn’t shaved. Silver stubble was spreading across his cheeks and down to his neck. And he probably hadn’t changed his clothes in days. He smelled bad. He was sweating.

“You’re very young.” Morton blinked a couple of times. “You’re just a child.”

“What were you expecting?” Matt didn’t try to keep the annoyance out of his voice. He didn’t like being called a child. He still didn’t know what this was all about.

“They didn’t tell you?” Morton asked.

“They told me you had a book. A diary…” Matt glanced at the brown-paper package and Morton drew it closer to him, holding it more tightly. “Is that it?”

Morton didn’t answer.

“They said you wanted to meet me,” Matt went on. “They want to buy it from you.”

“I know what they want!” Morton glanced left and right. Suddenly he was suspicious. “You came here alone?” he hissed.

“Yes.”

“Come this way…”

Before Matt could say anything, Morton scurried along the length of the pew and began to move down the side of the church, leaving the other worshippers behind. Matt followed slowly. It occurred to him that the bookseller might be a little mad. But at the same time he knew it was worse than that. He thought back to the farmer, Tom Burgess, who had spoken to him outside the nuclear reactor at Lesser Malling and had later died. He had been just the same. As he walked into the darkness in the furthest corner of the church, Matt realized that William Morton was scared out of his wits.

Morton waited for him to catch up, then began to speak, the words tumbling over each other in a low gabble. There was nobody else around in this part of the church. Presumably that was why he had chosen it.

“I should never have bought the diary,” he said. “But I knew what it was, you see. I’d heard of the Old Ones. I knew a little of their history… not very much, of course. Nobody knew very much. But when I saw the diary in a market in Cordoba, I recognized it immediately. There were people who said it didn’t even exist. And many more who thought that the author – St Joseph of Cordoba – was mad. The Mad Monk. That’s what they called him.

“And there it was! Incredibly. Waiting for me to pick it up. The only written history of the Old Ones. Raven’s Gate. And the Five!” As he spoke this last word his eyes widened and he stared at Matt. “It was all there,” he went on. “The beginning of the world, our world. The first great war. It was only won by a trick…”

“Is that the diary, there?” Matt asked a second time. This was all moving too quickly for him.

“I thought it would be worth a fortune!” Morton whispered. “It’s what every bookseller dreams of… finding a first edition, or the only copy of a book that has been lost to the world. And this was much, much more than that. I went on television and I told everyone what I had in my hands. I boasted – and that was the most stupid mistake I could have made.”

“Why?”

“Because…”

Somewhere in the church, someone dropped a hymn-book. It fell to the floor with a thunderous echo and Morton’s eyes whipped round as if a shot had been fired. Matt could see the sinews bulging on the side of his neck. The bookseller looked as if he was on the edge of a heart attack. He waited a moment until everything was silent again.

“I should have been more careful,” he continued, speaking in a whisper. “I should have read the diary first. Maybe then I would have understood.”

“Understood what?”

“It’s evil!” Morton took out a handkerchief and wiped it across his brow. “Have you ever read a horror story, Matt? One that you can’t get out of your mind? One that stays and torments you when you want to go to sleep? The diary is like that, only worse. It speaks of creatures that’ll come into this world, of events that will take place. I don’t understand it all. But what I do understand won’t leave me alone. I can’t sleep. I can’t eat. My life has been turned upside down.”

“Then why don’t you just sell it? You’ve been offered millions of pounds.”

“And you think I’ll live to enjoy a penny of it?” Morton laughed briefly. “Since I read the diary, I’ve had nightmares. Horrible nightmares. And then I wake up and I think they’re all over but they’re not. Because they’re real. The shadows that I have seen, reaching out for me, aren’t just in my imagination. Look…!”

He pulled back a sleeve and Matt winced. It looked as if Morton had tried to cut his wrists. There were half a dozen mauve lines, recent wounds, criss-crossing each other a couple of centimetres from his hand.

“You did that…?” Matt asked.

“Maybe I did. Maybe I didn’t. I don’t remember! I wake up in the morning and they’re just there. Cuts and bruises. Blood on the sheets! And I’m in pain…” He rubbed his eyes, fighting for control. “And that’s not all. Oh no! I don’t see things properly any more. Ever since I read the book, all I see are the shadows and the darkness. People walking in the street are dead to me. Even the animals, the dogs and the cats… they look at me as if they’re going to leap out and…”