Anthony Horowitz - Raven_s Gate

“I hope that isn’t why you’ve brought us all here tonight.” An elderly man had spoken. He was a bishop, dressed in a clerical collar with a gold cross around his neck. He took off his spectacles and cleaned them as he continued. “I’m very well aware of your abilities, Miss Ashwood, and I have great respect for them. But can you really ask us to accept that something is the case just because you believe it to be so?”

“I thought that was what faith was all about,” Miss Ashwood retorted.

“The Christian faith is written down. Nobody has ever written a history of the Old Ones.”

“That’s not true,” Dravid muttered. He raised a single finger. “You’re forgetting the Spanish monk.”

“St Joseph of Cordoba? His book has been lost and he himself was discredited centuries ago.” The bishop sighed. “This is very difficult for me,” he said. “You have to remember that, officially, the Church does not believe in your Old Ones any more than we believe in demons or devils or all the rest of it. If it was known that I was part of the Nexus, I would have to resign. I am here only because you and I have the same aims. We are all afraid of the same thing, no matter what we choose to call it. But I cannot accept – will not accept – guesswork and superstition. I’m sorry, Miss Ashwood. You have to give us more evidence.”

“Maybe I can be of assistance,” another man said. He was a policeman, an assistant commissioner based at Scotland Yard. “I did notice something very recently that might be of interest. It was very minor, so I didn’t report it to you, but in the light of what you are saying now…”

“Go on,” Professor Dravid said.

“Well, it concerns a petty criminal, a drug addict by the name of Will Scott. He was last seen following a woman into an alleyway not very far from here, in Holborn. Presumably she would have been his next victim. He had a knife. And a record of armed violence.”

“What happened?”

“It wasn’t the woman who ended up as the victim. She disappeared. It was Scott who was found dead. He killed himself. He pushed the knife into his own heart.”

“What’s so strange about that?” one of the women asked.

“He did it in broad daylight in the middle of London. But it wasn’t just that. I saw his face…” The policeman paused. “I knew at once that this was something completely abnormal. The look of terror. It was as if he had tried to fight it. As if he didn’t want to die. It was horrible.”

“The power of the Old Ones,” Miss Ashwood whispered.

“Why should one death in Holborn have anything to do with the Nexus?” the bishop insisted.

“I agree with you,” Dravid said. “One isolated incident. A possible suicide. But there is something else, and it happened only this morning. That in itself is rather strange, because of course I knew I was coming here tonight. But I was at my office, in the museum, and I was online. This was around lunchtime. And my computer picked up an enquiry into Raven’s Gate.” He hesitated. “I have a program,” he explained. “Whenever anybody, anywhere, puts those words into a search engine, I get to hear about it. It’s only happened twice in the last year – both times academics. But this was different. I managed to instant-mail the person at the other end. And I have a feeling it was a teenager or maybe even a child.”

“Did he say so?” the policeman asked.

“No. But he used the letters r and u instead of writing ‘are you’. That’s very much the sign of a young person. He called himself Matt.”

“Just Matt?”

“He gave no surname. But here’s something else that’s interesting. The enquiry came from a computer in the library at Greater Malling.”

The statement caused another stir around the table. This time, even the bishop looked concerned.

“Shouldn’t you have contacted us straight away, Professor?” the South American asked.

“I hardly had time, Mr Fabian. As I told you, this only happened today and I knew we would all meet this evening anyway. On its own, it might not have been significant. A schoolboy might have stumbled across Raven’s Gate and made enquiries about it for no particular reason. But given Miss Ashwood’s feelings and what we’ve just heard…” He let the sentence hang in the air. “Maybe we should try to find this ‘Matt’ and discover how much he knows.”

“And how are we meant to do that?” a silver-haired man with a French accent asked. His name was Danton and he was connected in some way to military intelligence. “Give me a full name and we could find him in seconds. But Matt? Short for Matthew? Or he could be from my country… Matthieu. Or he could even be a girl… Matilda.”

“He’ll find us,” Miss Ashwood said.

“You think he’ll just walk in here?” the bishop asked. He shook his head. “It seems obvious to me. If you really think something is happening in Yorkshire, we should go there and try to prevent it. We should be there now.”

“We can’t,” Dravid said. “It would be far too dangerous. We don’t know what we’re looking for. And anyway, we agreed from the start that we cannot become personally involved. That’s not our role. We exist to watch, to share information and – when the time comes – to fight back. That’s when we’ll be needed. We cannot do anything that will put us at risk.”

“So we sit back and do nothing?”

“He will find his way to us,” Miss Ashwood said. “You have to remember. It is meant to happen. Everything in the history of the world has been preparing itself for this moment, for the return of the Five and the final struggle. There is no coincidence. Everything is planned. If we don’t see that, we lose one of our greatest weapons.”

“Matt.” The Frenchman spoke the single word. He didn’t sound too impressed.

Miss Ashwood nodded slowly. “Let’s just pray he finds us soon.”

Matt was chopping wood again. There were blisters on his hands and the sweat was running down his back, but the pile never seemed to get any smaller. Noah was sitting a few paces away, watching him. Matt split another log apart and threw down the axe. He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.

“How long have you been here, Noah?” he asked.

Noah shrugged.

“Where did Mrs Deverill find you? Were you born here or did you escape from the local lunatic asylum?”

Noah glared at him. Matt knew he had difficulty understanding sentences with more than four or five words. “You shouldn’t make fun of me,” Noah replied at last, scowling.

“Why not? It’s the only fun I have.” Matt picked up a handful of wood and dumped it in the wheelbarrow. “Why don’t you go anywhere?” he asked. “You’re always hanging around. Don’t you have a girlfriend or anything?”

Noah sniffed. “I don’t like girls.”

“Do you prefer pigs? I think one or two of them fancy you.”

Matt leant forward to take the axe and as he did so Noah’s hand shot out, grabbing hold of him. “You don’t know,” he rasped. He was so close that Matt could smell the rotten food on his breath. His fat lips twisted in an unpleasant smile. “Sometimes Mrs Deverill lets me kill one,” he said. “A pig. I put the knife in and I listen to it squeal. We’ll do the same to you…”

“Let me go!” Matt tried to pull away but Noah was incredibly strong and his fingers were clamped on to Matt’s arm in a vice-like grip.

“You laugh at Noah. But when the end comes, it’ll be Noah who laughs at you…”

“Get off me!” Matt was afraid his bone was going to break.

Just then a car pulled into the yard. Noah released his hold and Matt fell back, cradling his arm. There were four welts where the fingers had held him. The car was a Honda Estate. The door opened and a man got out, dressed in a suit and white shirt but no tie. Matt recognized him at once. It was Stephen Mallory, the detective who had interrogated him after the Ipswich break-in.