Anthony Horowitz - Raven_s Gate

Matt couldn’t quite see what was going on. He had to get closer. He followed the fence back to the gap he’d discovered the last time he was here and waited, making sure nobody was looking in his direction. But all the villagers were concentrating on the lorry. Matt chose his moment, then dived forward, head first. He felt the jagged edge of the wire tear his shirt and scrape his back, but he was lucky. He hadn’t drawn blood. He landed face down on the grass and lay still.

A large, bearded man walked across the clearing, heading towards the lorry. It was the butcher from Lesser Malling. The ginger-haired chemist was there too. And Matt also recognized Joanna Creevy, the woman who had been at Glendale Farm when he returned with the police. She was talking to Jayne Deverill. Matt looked back at the bonfire. The village children were standing round, poking sticks into the flames, making the sparks leap up. There were forty or fifty people at Omega One and suddenly Matt knew that he was spying on the entire village. Young or old, every one of them had made the journey into the forest. They were all in on it.

All his instincts screamed at him to slip away before he was spotted. But at the same time he knew that what he was seeing was important. He just had to work out what these people were doing, why they were here. And what was inside the silver box? The men had disappeared inside. The villagers were queuing up, about to follow them. The man with the signet ring began talking to Mrs Deverill. Matt was desperate to hear what they were saying.

He crawled over the ground, keeping low, hardly daring to raise his head. The closer he got, the greater the chance of his being seen. He hoped the long grass would provide some sort of cover, but the light of the flames seemed to be reaching out to him, eager to show that he was there. He could even feel the warmth of the fire on his shoulders and head. He heard laughter. The man with the ring had cracked a joke. Matt wriggled further forward. His hand caught something and pulled it away. Too late he saw the thin plastic wire that ran along the ground. Too late he realized that he should never have touched it.

The stillness of the night was shattered by a siren. The villagers spun round, staring out over the field. Three men ran forward, shotguns appearing in their hands. The children dropped their sticks into the fire and ran over to the lorry. The man with the signet ring slowly passed through the crowd, his eyes scanning the ground. Matt clutched the earth, burying his face in the grass. But there was no use trying to hide.

Mrs Deverill was standing beside the bonfire. She shouted a brief sentence in a strange language and took something out of her pocket. Then she waved her hand over the flames. It was trailing a cloud of white powder, which hung for a moment in the air before falling.

The flames exploded, leaping almost as high as the power station itself, bright red light flooding the field. Something black began to take shape within them, moulding itself out of the shadows. In seconds the blackness had solidified and now it sprang – seemingly in slow motion – out of the fire and on to the ground beyond. It was some sort of animal and, moments later, a second one appeared, bounding forward to join it. Behind them the bonfire shrank back to its normal size. The wail of the alarm stopped abruptly.

They were dogs, but like no dogs Matt had ever seen.

They were huge, two or three times bigger than Rottweilers – and more savage too. The flames of the fire that had given birth to them still flickered in their black, shark-like eyes. Their mouths hung open, with teeth like two lines of kitchen knives jutting out beyond their lips. Their heads were high and uneven, their bulging skulls topped by two tiny ears, like horns. Slowly, one of them turned its ugly snout up to the sky and uttered a ghastly howl. Then, as one, they padded forward, their heads slanting unnaturally to one side as if listening to the ground.

Matt had no choice. He had to get away. If the dogs found him, they would tear him apart. No longer caring if he was seen or not, he stumbled to his feet and began to run. His legs were as heavy as lead but desperately he forced them to carry him. The fence was still about ten metres away. Arms outstretched, he raced towards it, not wanting to look behind him. But he couldn’t stop himself. He had to know. Where were the dogs? How near were they? With a grimace, he looked back over his shoulder. And regretted it.

The first of the creatures had already halved the distance between itself and Matt, yet it didn’t seem to be moving fast. It hovered in the air between each bound, barely touching the grass before jumping up again. There was something hideous about the way it ran. A panther or a leopard closing in for the kill has a certain majesty. But the dog was deformed, lopsided, ghastly. The flesh on one of its flanks had rotted and a glistening ribcage jutted out. As if to avoid the stench of the wound, the animal had turned away, its head hanging close to its front paws. Strings of saliva trailed from its mouth. And every time its feet hit the ground, its whole body quivered, threatening to collapse in on itself.

Matt reached the fence and clawed at it with his hands, crashing his fingers against the wire. He thought he had run in a straight line, following the way he had come, but he seemed to have got it wrong. He couldn’t find the gap. He looked behind him. Two more bounds and the dogs would reach him. There was no doubt that they would tear him apart. He could almost feel their teeth tearing into him, ripping the flesh away from his bones. He had never seen anything so ferocious

… not in a zoo, not in a film, not anywhere in the real world.

Where was the gap? In blind panic he threw his whole weight against the fence, almost crying with relief as the edge buckled, revealing the jagged hole. Without hesitating he dived forward. His head and shoulders went through but this time the wire hooked into his trousers. Thrashing out with his arms, expecting to feel the jaws of the dog close on his leg at any moment, he struggled like a fish in a net. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a huge black shape plummeting towards him. He gave a last frantic heave. His jeans ripped and he fell through, rolling into a ball on the other side.

Blood oozed out of a gash in his leg, but he was safe… at least for the moment. He struggled to his feet, then staggered back as one of the dogs lunged at the fence, its mouth foaming, its teeth gnashing at the wire. The two creatures were trapped. The hole had barely been big enough for Matt to pass through and they were bigger and more awkwardly built than him. But then, even as he watched, the dogs began pounding at the earth, raking the soft soil with their claws. They weren’t going to allow the fence to stop them. They were going to burrow their way under it.

Matt fled into the wood. Low-lying branches whipped into his body. Pine needles cascaded on to his hair and into his face. He blinked, trying to keep them out of his eyes. There was nowhere to hide, no way of knowing if he had taken the right path. He was trapped in a vast grid system where every direction looked exactly the same. But the dogs had the advantage. They didn’t need to see him. They would smell him out.

Matt didn’t care where he was going. His only thought was to get away, to put as much space as he could between himself and the two dogs. How long did he have? Thirty seconds? A minute or two at the most. Then they would emerge from the ground on the other side of the fence as if rising out of a grave. They would stalk him through the wood, outrun him and rip him to shreds.

He crashed into the trunk of a tree and reeled away, spinning round. The lights from the power station were already a long way behind him, barely visible through the branches. Matt was exhausted but he couldn’t let himself rest. He needed to find a stretch of water, a river or a stream. Maybe he could throw the dogs off his scent. But there was no such thing in this artificial wood. It stretched on endlessly, with not a glimpse of water in sight.