Anthony Horowitz - Evil Star

About an hour later, Sebastian came in. Matt saw, to his dismay, that the man was quite drunk. He staggered over to his bed and collapsed onto it without removing any of his clothes, not even his shoes. Within seconds he was fast asleep and snoring.

It took Matt much longer. Half the night seemed to slip by before his eyelids finally closed. To his relief, because this time he knew exactly where he was, he wasn’t afraid to be there. He was with Pedro on the beach. The reed boat was moored just in front of them, waiting to take them away.

“Matteo,” Pedro said.

“I’m glad to see you, Pedro.”

“Yeah. Me too. I suppose…”

And here was the strange thing. Matt was speaking in English. Pedro was speaking in Spanish. And yet somehow the words were changing in mid-air so that both boys understood each other perfectly. Did this island only exist in a dream? Matt had always thought so. But now that there were two of them, sharing the sand, the sea, the boat and all the rest of it, he wasn’t so sure. Part of him was aware that even as he stood here facing Pedro, the two of them were also lying just a metre apart in Poison Town. Perhaps this was why they were finally able to talk to each other, why they never had before.

“I don’t get any of this,” Pedro began.

“You’re one of the Five,” Matt said.

“Yes. I know. One of the Five! One of the Five! I’ve been hearing that all my life, but I don’t know what it means. Do you?”

“Some of it. There are five of us…”

“I’ve seen the others. Over there…” Pedro pointed, but there was no sign of the two boys and the girl on the mainland.

“We’re Gatekeepers.”

“What gate?”

“It’s a long story, Pedro.”

“We’ve got all night.”

Matt nodded. For the moment, they seemed to be out of any danger. In Poison Town everything would be quiet. On the island, they were alone with no sign of the swan that had twice come swooping out of the darkness. And what was the significance of that, Matt wondered? There was still so much he didn’t understand.

He told Pedro as much as he knew, starting with the death of his parents, his growing awareness that he was never going to have a normal life, his life with Gwenda Davis in Ipswich, his involvement with Raven’s Gate and everything that had happened since then.

“I came to Peru to find the second gate,” Matt concluded. “That was two days ago, although it feels a lot longer. Everything went wrong the minute we arrived. If I can find the Nexus, maybe they can help. Or they may be looking for me. I don’t know.”

Matt took a deep breath. The reed boat rocked gently on the water. He wondered if they should get into it – and if they did, where it would take them.

“I knew you’d come,” Pedro said. “I’ve always been expecting you. But there’s something I want you to know. When you were asleep… when I took your watch… I thought you were just some rich tourist kid who’d got lost. I didn’t know it was you. I’m sorry.”

“When did you realize?”

“When you woke up. I recognized you then. And the truth is, I wasn’t too happy to see you. I wish you hadn’t come.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re going to bring trouble with you. Everything’s going to change now.” Pedro paused. “You may not think I have much of a life but it’s the only life I’ve got and I was sort of happy with it. I’m sure that’s not what you want to hear. But this isn’t what I want.”

“No. I understand.”

Matt knew exactly what Pedro meant. He felt the same.

“I don’t know anything about you,” he said. “Only your name. Do you have another name? What do you do in Lima when you aren’t juggling in front of cars or stealing from tourists? And who is Sebastian? Why do you live with him?”

“I don’t like talking about myself,” Pedro said. He paused. “I will, because I suppose you ought to know. But I’m telling you now, there’s not a lot to say… and anyway, you probably won’t remember any of it when you wake up.”

That possibility hadn’t occurred to Matt. He sat down on the sand, wondering what time of day it was in this strange dreamland. Was it even day? The sky was dark but he could see quite clearly. The sand was warm although there wasn’t any sun. It wasn’t day or night but something in between.

Pedro sat down opposite him with his legs crossed.

“First of all, Pedro isn’t my real name,” he began. “Everyone just calls me that. It’s what Sebastian called me when I first came to Poison Town. He used to say he named me after his favourite dog. I know I had a family before I met him although I don’t remember very much about them. I had a sister. She was a few years younger than me.

“I used to live in a village in the province of Canta, which you’ve probably never heard of. It’s about sixty miles from Lima. A three-day walk. It was a very boring place. The men went out to work in the fields – they grew potatoes and corn – and the women stayed at home and looked after the kids. There was no school in the village but I went to one that was two miles away. I didn’t learn very much though. I mean, I learned some of the letters of the alphabet but I’ve never been able to read.”

He reached out and drew a capital P in the sand with his finger.

“That’s P for Pedro. It’s also P for parrot – papagayo. I remember the letter because it always looked like a parrot to me.

“My mother used to say that I was born under an evil star but I don’t know what she meant. There were four of us in our family and we had a nice house even if it was mainly made of wood and cardboard. And we had a big bed. All four of us used to sleep in it. I can’t tell you much about my mother. I don’t want to think about her. Sometimes I remember the feel of her next to me in the bed and that makes me sad. That was always the best part of the day for me… falling asleep.

“The worst thing about Canta was the weather. The wind used to come down from the mountains and it went right through you. I never had enough clothes to wear. Sometimes I only had a T-shirt and my underpants and I’d think I was going to turn into a block of ice.

“It used to rain at the start of the year. You never saw rain like it, Matteo. Sometimes it would rain so hard that all I could see was water and I used to wonder how I could live if I wasn’t a fish! It would be raining when I woke up and it would never stop. You couldn’t walk from one end of the village to the other because of the great sheets of rain and if you slipped over in a puddle you might drown.

“And then there was a day – I must have been about six years old – when it rained so much that the river burst its banks. The River Chillon… that was what it was called. There was too much water and it got out of control and this great flood came pouring down. It was like a monster… brown and freezing. It swallowed up our house and just threw it away. I remember someone shouted a warning but I didn’t know what they meant and then the whole world exploded. Not with fire but with water and mud. It all happened so quickly. All the houses were smashed up together. People and animals… they were just killed. I should have died. But someone grabbed me and put me high up in a tree and I was lucky. The tree must have had strong roots because it wasn’t ripped out like the others. I stayed in the branches of that tree all day and all night and when the morning came my village wasn’t there any more. It was just a sort of swamp with dead people floating on the surface. I guess my parents and my sister were among those who were killed. I never saw them again and nobody told me. So they must have all drowned.”

Pedro stopped. Matt was amazed that he could tell all this in such a matter-of-fact way. He tried to imagine the horror of what it must have been like. A whole community had been destroyed. He realized that this sort of thing must happen often in some parts of the world, but that it wouldn’t have been given more than half an inch in a British newspaper.