She took one last look at him, then bustled out, closing the door softly behind her.
Pedro was desperate to lie down but first he peeled off the wet clothes, dropping them on the floor outside the door. He went into the bathroom, his bare feet slapping against the floorboards. The bath was old-fashioned with heavy, golden taps and a brown stain leading down to the plug-hole where water had dripped for perhaps a hundred years. He turned the tap. The water coughed then came spitting out in a steady stream and, as Carla had said, it was warm. Pedro got in and washed himself. He even had a block of soap, hard and gritty but effective nonetheless. All around him, the water turned dark brown and he realized that even after everything he had been through, despite the tons of water that had fallen on him when he was on the Medusa, he was still filthy from the Naples sewers. What must Carla Rivera have thought when he turned up in her home?
He used the soap twice, lathering himself all over and then washing it off. He held his head under the tap, letting the water stream through his hair and over his neck. Finally, he got out and dried himself. He caught sight of his reflection in the mirror. Although he had been well fed when he was staying with the Incas, he had gone back to being thin to the point of scrawny. His black hair was long and unkempt. His eyes had sunk into his face. He examined the hand with the broken finger. Despite everything, it had finally begun to heal. At least that was something to be grateful for.
Finally, he climbed into the bed. The mattress was hard but the sheets were clean and the blankets warm. Somewhere, in the back of his mind, it occurred to him that he could still be in danger. What did he know about Carla Rivera or her family? Almost nothing. But it didn’t matter. He couldn’t have run any more, even if he’d wanted to.
Downstairs, the woman waited for her son to return. Upstairs, on the second floor, Pedro slept.
The meeting for the Pontifical Commission for the Vatican City state had come to an end. The seven cardinals who were its members took their leave of the Holy Father, bowing but saying nothing. Pope Pius XIII was a very old man, well into his nineties, and it was quite possible that he had been asleep for the last half-hour. These days, it was impossible to tell. He seldom spoke and when he did mutter something, his words often made no sense at all. “Dogs! Magicians! Murderers!” He repeated the words endlessly. It was possible he was thinking of the Bible … some said the Book of Revelations. Nobody knew for sure.
The cardinals all looked very grand in their bright scarlet cloaks and berrette – the square caps with four peaks and tufts that they were entitled to wear. The room where they had met was equally magnificent, with pillars and tapestries, thick velvet curtains, a swirling marble floor and a ceiling covered in gold leaf. The curtains were closed. The Holy Father could no longer bear to look outside. He spent much of the day in bed with his eyes closed and a young priest reading to him in Latin from the Old or New Testament.
Cardinal Silvio Rivera left the meeting with a sense of dismay. The country was crumbling. There were people starving in the streets … and there were too many of them. It seemed as if the whole world had chosen Italy as a final refuge, and with all the overcrowding, crime and violence were everywhere. The government had responded with a ferocity that he preferred not to think about. He had heard the stories about the transportations, about the prison camps outside Arezzo. How could it have come to this? Could the world really be as evil as it seemed?
The cardinal returned to his office, where his secretary was waiting for him, to help him disrobe. But Silvio shushed him away. He wanted to be on his own. There was a heavy crucifix made of solid gold around his neck – he could always feel it dragging him down – and he clutched it in both hands, dropping to his knees. The crucifix had a precious stone, an amethyst, in the middle, and as was his habit, he stroked it with his thumb, trying to find comfort there.
He knelt beside the desk and prayed.
“Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come…”
The words came out in a soft whisper. The priest had tears in his eyes and as he thought about the state of the world, the tears trickled down his cheeks. He felt the pain of the world as if it were his own. He hoped that he was a good man. It horrified him that there was so little good around him.
He knelt there, praying intently, for two hours. Then, finally, he went home.
FORTY-THREE
Pedro woke up feeling a lot better. He was clean, he had eaten and he had slept for a solid five hours. His only disappointment was that he hadn’t returned to the dreamworld. He was still very much on his own. But as he sat up, throwing back the covers, he noticed that Carla had come into the room while he was asleep. There were new clothes, folded on the floor next to the door; jeans, a jersey, a belt and trainers. Pedro tried them on. The trousers were a little loose and he had to tighten them using the last hole of the belt, but otherwise he looked – and felt – human again. What now? Carla had said that her son would be home soon. She had said that the two of them would talk. Once again, Pedro wondered how much he could safely tell them, how much they already knew.
He heard movement in the house. Somebody had arrived. Softly, Pedro opened the door and stepped out onto the upper landing. Yes, there was a man here. He could hear voices a long way away, perhaps in the kitchen, talking in Italian. He was about to go down when he noticed that the door opposite his was ajar. He remembered Carla telling him to keep his voice down. She had a daughter, Maria, who was sick.
Acting on an impulse, Pedro crossed the landing and pushed open the other door. He found himself looking into a room identical to the one he had just left, except that this one contained a hospital bed surrounded by medical paraphernalia that he recognized at once. There was a saline bag with a drip hanging from a metal frame, a heart and pulse monitor, bleeping softly, an oxygen tank, a tray with various pills and liquids. In the middle of all this, a young woman lay on her back, breathing so faintly that it would be hard to tell when she stopped breathing at all. She was wearing a white nightgown with a silver cross around her neck. There was a cross on the wall opposite her too. Her long hair was brushed back and rested on her pillow, forming a crown around her head and shoulders. Her face was very thin and pale. Pedro knew at once that she was close to death. She had been ill for a very long time and she had stopped fighting. And now she was patiently waiting for the end.
She was too young to die, Pedro thought. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-five or twenty-six. She must have been a late arrival, given her mother’s age. He thought for a moment, then stepped quietly forward. There was a wooden chair beside the bed. He could imagine Carla Rivera spending many hours sitting here. He sat down himself. Then he reached out and rested a hand on the unconscious woman.
This was Pedro’s gift, his power. He was a healer. For much of his life in Lima, he had looked after his friends – the other thieves, pickpockets and street urchins who surrounded him – without even knowing that it was his power that was keeping them well. It was only when Matt had been hurt in the Nazca Desert that he had begun to understand what he could do. He had deliberately set out to save Matt, to bring him back from the brink of death. He would do the same now to heal this woman he had never met.
It was a strange feeling … as if he was allowing some sort of heat or energy to flow out of himself, through his hand and into the woman. At the same time, it could have been the other way round. He could have been drawing something out of her. The truth was that he had no idea how it worked. The two of them were together, in a sort of vacuum, and nothing else mattered. Pedro no longer had any idea of the passing of time. He was only aware of his own hand and arm, stretched out with the palm facing down, and the soft rise and fall of the woman’s stomach. Without even knowing it, his heart was beating at the same pace as hers. The two of them had become one. The young woman’s illness was sharing itself with him.
“Pedro!” It was Carla Rivera, calling him from downstairs.
Pedro opened
his eyes. He had done everything he could and he knew that it would be enough. Already there was more colour in the young woman’s face. She was breathing more easily. He had no idea at all what had been wrong with her in the first place. Pedro had barely been to school. He couldn’t read or write. People were sick or people were well … that was as much as he knew and all that mattered to him was that he could turn one into the other.
He left the room, closing the door behind him, and went downstairs. Carla was waiting for him in the hall and it seemed to Pedro that something had upset her. She smiled when she saw him in his new clothes, but the strain still showed behind her eyes.
“How are you feeling, Pedro?” she asked.
“I’m much better, thank you. And thank you for these clothes.”
“I went out and bought them for you. I didn’t know if I would get the right size.” She smiled, but a little nervously. “Silvio is here. I have told him about you. He wants to meet you.”
“OK.”
Pedro followed Carla back into the kitchen, where a man in his mid-thirties was sitting at the table with a mug of hot liquid; judging from the smell of it, some sort of herbal tea. He was wearing a dark suit and a black shirt with a clerical collar – Carla had already told him that her son was a priest. His hair was thick and wavy but it was turning grey. He had a face that looked tired and lined, and the eyes of a man who spent too much time thinking about things but never found a happy answer. The two of them did not look like each other, Pedro thought. There was nothing at all, not even the way they sat, that suggested a mother and son.
“Good evening, Pedro,” the man said. He also spoke Spanish.
“Good evening, sir.”
“Please come and sit down. And you can call me Silvio. Would you like some tea?”
“Yes, please.”
Silvio nodded slightly and Carla went over to the kettle. “You may be wondering how it is that we speak your language,” he went on, “My mother and I lived for many years in the city of Barcelona when I was choirmaster at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross and Saint Eulalia. That is why we are both fluent in Spanish. But that is not where you come from…”
“I am from Lima.”
“When did you come to Italy?”
“A few weeks ago.”
The priest nodded very slightly as if Pedro had just told him a lie, that he knew it was a lie, but was prepared to accept it anyway. “You flew?”
There was no point in lying. Pedro made the decision even as he began to speak. “No. I was in Hong Kong. I came through a door. It brought me to a church but I don’t know where that was. I was taken prisoner and locked up in a place called Castel Nuovo in Naples.” He hadn’t said anything about Scott. Pedro didn’t want to think about him.
“That is what Emmanuel told me,” Carla muttered. She had made a second mug of tea and set it down in front of Pedro.
The priest nodded again, but this time there was a crease of annoyance across his brow. “Are you saying to me, Pedro, that you entered a door in one city and came out of another door here?”
“Yes.”
“You know what you are telling me is impossible?”
“I am answering your questions, Signor Rivera. I am telling you what happened.”
“Describe the door to me.”
“I can’t really. I only saw it for a moment. There was a typhoon in Hong Kong. The temple was being destroyed…”
“The door was in a temple?”
“All the doors are in sacred places. There was another one in Coricancha, which is where the Incas worship, in Cuzco.”
“There are no Incas any more, my child. And when they did exist, they had no true religion. They were pagans.”
Pedro knew full well that the descendants of the Incas had survived to the twenty-first century. He was one of them. And as to their religion, he had personally seen one of their most sacred objects, a gold disc with a portrait of Manco Cápac, son of the sun god, Inti. The face that he had been shown looked remarkably like his own. Nonetheless, he thought it better not to argue with what the priest had just said. “The doors all look the same,” he went on. They’re quite small, made of wood.” Pedro thought for a moment and suddenly remembered. “They have a star printed on them. A five-pointed star.”
The woman turned excitedly to her son and spoke quickly to him in Italian. He listened to her for a moment, then held up a hand for silence. It seemed strange to Pedro and somehow wrong that she should do what her son told her, rather than the other way round.
Silvio turned back to Pedro. “I will tell you what I know,” he began. “I know who you are. I have read some of the pages from the diary of Joseph of Cordoba. There was a copy made many years ago and it is kept locked up in the Vatican. It is a forbidden text … and with good reason. What this man writes is impossible. It is blasphemy.
“He writes about the Old Ones. This is the name that he gives to creatures … what shall we call them, demons? … who have come into the world simply to cause evil, to destroy mankind.”
“They are here now,” Pedro said.
“I do not believe that is true.”
Pedro stared at the priest. “Of course they are here. They kept me prisoner in Naples. They took my friend Scott and made him bad. They caused the volcano to erupt…”
“All these things may have happened. But have you seen the Old Ones?”
“They tried to kill me twice. The first time it was condors that came out of the sky in the desert. And then they sent people who were dead, who came out of the grave.”
“I asked you if you had seen the Old Ones themselves.”
“No.” Pedro couldn’t lie. “But we have to fight them,” he went on. “The five of us must be together. That’s why I have to find my friends.”
“Now you are talking about the Gatekeepers. Is that what you mean?”
“Yes. Matteo, Scarlett, Scott and Jamie. And me.” Pedro was ignoring his tea, which was getting cold in front of him. “Why is nobody allowed into St Peter’s Basilica?” he asked.
Silvio spread his hands. “There are too many people in Rome,” he explained. “The authorities are afraid that it will become overrun. A few pilgrims are still allowed in and out but they have to have special permission and must show their identity papers first.”
“Is it because there is a door inside? Is it because they want to stop me?”
Silvio looked as if he was about to deny what Pedro had just said but before he could speak, his mother leant forward and there was an excitement in her eyes that he had not seen before. “There is a door,” she said.
Silvio glowered at his mother but she wasn’t backing down. He shrugged. “It is true that there is a door such as the one you describe,” he admitted. “It is beneath the tabernacle, in the grotto. But I have opened and closed it myself. It leads nowhere: a short corridor and a solid brick wall.”
“It only works for us,” Pedro said. For the first time in many weeks he felt a surge of hope. “If you can get me inside the church, I can leave Rome. I can go anywhere I like.”
“We can do that for you, Pedro,” Carla said. She continued quickly, before her son could interrupt. “There is a secret passage that runs from the Vatican to St Peter’s. Very few people know it is there. You are right when you say they are waiting for you. The basilica has never been closed but now there are soldiers, twenty-four hours a day. Silvio may not agree with me but I am certain they are only there to stop you.”
“I do not believe in this door!” Silvio brought his fist crashing onto the table. He turned angrily on his mother. “St Peter’s is at the very centre of our faith. It has existed in one form or another since the fourth century and today it is unquestionably the greatest church in Christendom. Saint Peter himself is buried beneath the altar. Are you going to tell me that it also houses a magic trick … a door that opens into a Buddhist temple in Hong Kong or a ruin in Cuzco?” He forced himself to calm down, then turned back to Pedro. “I am sorry,
” he said. “I am sure you have been through many troubles. You are not alone. Sometimes even I find it hard to understand what has happened in the world. But I find the answer in my prayers. It is not the Old Ones who cause volcanoes to erupt, Pedro. It is part of a greater purpose, a testing time for humanity, but in the end, if we have faith, we will be better and stronger. That, I believe with all my heart.”
“But you don’t believe what I say,” Pedro muttered. “You don’t care who I am or why I’m here.”
The priest fell silent and looked away.
“What is wrong with Maria?” Pedro asked.
At that, Carla started in her chair. “Why do you ask?” she demanded.
“Please, Signora Rivera. You told me that she was your daughter.” He glanced at Silvio. “Your sister. She is in the opposite room next to mine. Why is she ill?”
Neither of the adults spoke, as if they didn’t dare to put it into words. Then Carla nodded. “She has cancer,” she said. “It is in her pancreas. It is the very worst kind. She has been slipping away from us for many months. We have tried everything but the doctors say there is nothing more they can do. Fortunately, she has little pain …”
“That is God’s mercy,” Silvio muttered.
“… but she has only weeks left to her. She is much younger than Silvio. Only twenty-four. She was the joy of my life.” Carla bowed her head.
“She’s not dying,” Pedro said. “She’s better.”
“That is not true.”
“It is true, signora. I have healed her. I’m only telling you because I need you to believe what I am saying. All five of the Gatekeepers have powers. If you have read the diary, you must know this. We can read minds. We can change the weather. But my gift is the power of healing and before I came down here, I went into Maria’s bedroom and I took her illness away. Go upstairs and see for yourself.”