The secret was to smell something that wasn’t there. To imagine it. He had no idea how it worked, but if he could take himself back to that instant when – even though he hadn’t known it then – his power had first revealed itself to him, it would throw a switch somewhere inside him and then it would begin.
Matt stood where he was, his arms folded loosely in front of him. He was breathing slowly, his eyes still closed. He could feel the cool of the night on the back of his neck. He didn’t struggle, knowing it would do no good. Instead, he waited for it to happen. He felt a sense of calm. He was meant to be here. Everything was meant to be.
And far away inside himself, he felt it. It was like a train at the end of an endless tunnel, except that he was the tunnel and the train was something stirring within himself. He saw a flash of yellow, not here in the desert, but thousands of miles away, six years ago. The kitchen. He was there with his parents. He could see his own legs, in short trousers, dangling over the side of the chair. A wisp of smoke, invisible now, curled beneath his nostrils. There it was. The smell of burning. It had come to him again.
Matt opened his eyes.
He knew what he was going to do. He knew he was able to do it. He didn’t even have to think about it any more. He lowered his hands, palms outwards, and in front of him the silver trailer began to shimmer and bend as if caught in a heatwave. Matt concentrated. It was as if he was pushing himself, or some part of himself, forward. Something invisible was flowing out of him. He heard a shot but nobody had fired. He had torn one of the bolts out of the roof. He smiled to himself and at once another bolt snapped, then two more. The satellite dish groaned, metal fighting against metal. If there had been four men, standing on the lorry, they would have been unable to move it. But Matt was ripping it out as if it was paper.
The entire dish rattled as if it was trying to jerk itself free of the metal roof. Matt helped it. He merely flicked his eyes and off it came, the cables and supports snapping, the whole thing spinning away into the night. And that was it. It was over. Whoever was inside the trailer would no longer have control of the satellite. Matt was astonished that, after all he had been through, the whole thing had ended so quickly.
The door of the mobile laboratory opened and a figure appeared.
It was Salamanda. Matt had only seen him once but of course the elongated head, the mottled skin, the tiny eyes and mouth were unforgettable. He was wearing black trousers and a white shirt, the sleeves open and loose. Carefully, he stepped down from the trailer. Even the three steps were a challenge for him. All his attention was focused on keeping his head upright. It was the same task that had occupied him throughout his life. Behind him, through the open door, Matt saw other men and a woman wearing a white coat. Miss Klein. He remembered her from the hacienda. Salamanda wouldn’t have been able to track the satellite on his own. He had brought along his technicians to help.
Almost idly, Matt wondered what would happen next. Salamanda reached the ground and stood, staring at him. He had something in his hand. A gun – of course. Did he really think he could use that against Matt?
“Why are you here?” Salamanda screamed in fury. His face would have been contorted in anger except that it was contorted already and always had been. His eyes blazed. “How did you get here?”
“What time is it?” Matt asked.
Salamanda stopped. It was as if he had been slapped.
“What…?”
“What time is it?”
The man understood the question and why Matt had asked it. “It’s five minutes to twelve!” he whimpered. “Five minutes … that’s all I needed! Five minutes more!”
He raised the gun and fired.
The bullet exploded out of the barrel and began to travel towards Matt, aiming for his head. It didn’t get anywhere near him. Matt had no idea how he did it. He had never felt like this before. He simply concentrated and the bullet stopped in mid-air. A single movement of his head and he had sent it spinning away into the night. He pushed a little harder. Salamanda felt the waves of pure energy shimmer past him. He wasn’t touched himself but behind him, it was as if the lorry with its mobile laboratory had been hit by a nuclear blast. The whole thing was picked up and flung away like a toy in the hands of an angry child, somersaulting over and over again as it bounced across the ground. It travelled for a hundred metres and at last came to a stop, where it crumpled in on itself and lay still.
Salamanda stood where he was, out in the open, exposed. He had nothing to support him. The gun hung limp in his hand.
“You think you’ve won,” he said. “But you haven’t. The world belonged to the Old Ones and it will belong to them again. It said so in the diary…”
“Maybe the diary was wrong.”
“It can’t be.”
Matt gazed at the man who had caused him so much torment, who had tried to kill him and who had been responsible for the deaths of his friends. “Why did you do it?” he asked. “You’re rich. You have all these houses. You’ve got a huge business. Why isn’t it enough?”
Salamanda laughed. “You’re a child!” he wailed, “or you’d understand. There’s no such thing as enough.” He fell silent. Nothing moved. The people inside the laboratory were either unconscious or dead. Still there wasn’t a hint of a breeze. “Do you have any idea how much I hate you?” Salamanda asked.
“Hate is all you have,” Matt replied.
Salamanda lifted the gun and fired the five remaining shots.
Once again, Matt turned the bullets around and scattered them. But this time there were too many. He couldn’t control where they all went. Three of them spun away into the night but the other two smashed into Salamanda’s chest and shoulder. On their own, they wouldn’t have killed him – but they were enough to throw him off his feet and onto his back. Matt heard his neck break instantly. The huge head rolled to the side. The eyes stared blankly up at the night.
It was over.
Matt let out a deep breath. He would go back to the helicopter and stay with Pedro until the morning if he had to. By then, Richard and the others would have arrived. They would probably be on their way even now. He shivered. It seemed to him that it had gone very cold. And there was something else. He hadn’t noticed it before, but there was the smell of decay in the air. Rotten meat. He looked up, remembering the condors. There was no sign of them. But the sky had changed colour. There was something pulsating inside the blackness. A sort of dark mauve light. The stars seemed more intense than ever, unnaturally so. They were like light bulbs that were about to fuse. Matt’s head was aching. He looked over to the mountains. And there it was.
A single, brilliant light was travelling horizontally across, making for a point between two peaks. It was very low in the sky. From where Matt was standing, it looked as if it was just metres above the ground. He knew at once that it wasn’t a star. Nor was it a plane. It was the satellite. It had to be. With a terrible sense of emptiness, Matt thought back over what had just happened. Salamanda had lined up the satellite dish. He had been guiding it into position. Then Matt had arrived and destroyed the laboratory.
But he’d been too late. It was as if he had destroyed a gun after the bullet had been fired. He hadn’t had time to change the trajectory of the satellite and even without guidance it had continued moving, making for its final resting point. Of course, it wouldn’t stop. Perhaps it would end up crashing into the Earth. But that didn’t matter. At the very instant that it reached its correct position, the alignment of the stars would be complete, the combination lock would be forced and the gate would open.
And that was what was happening.
The gate was opening after all…
Matt felt something tremble beneath his feet. He looked down and saw a crack appear in the ground. It began quite close to where he was standing and then twisted and zigzagged into the distance. Another crack ran across it. Several more began to spread in every direction. It was as if the entire desert was breaking up. At the same ti
me, some sort of liquid began to ooze out from below, spilling onto the earth. It was dark in colour, somewhere between brown and red, with the consistency of glue or treacle; except that it was obviously blood, because Matt could smell it everywhere in the air, sweet and sickly. The cracks widened. Matt actually felt himself moving. It was as if he had been caught in an earthquake, but this was somehow slower and more deliberate. The mauve light in the sky was pulsing harder than ever. Something somewhere began to scream. The sound was all around, thin and high-pitched. Matt wanted to put his hands over his ears but he knew it would do no good.
He understood something now that he hadn’t understood before. He had come to Peru looking for a second gate and had thought it would be found somewhere in the Nazca Desert. But he had been wrong. They had all been wrong. Because the Nazca Desert was the gate. The whole thing. He could actually see the famous lines from where he was standing even though it should have been impossible. They were glowing. There were circles and triangles, rectangles and squares, drawings on a vast scale, activated and ready after a wait of more than twenty thousand years.
The ground was rumbling. He could feel the vibrations travelling through him. He tried to refocus, to gather in his own power, but it was hopeless. He was completely alone, as he had been told he would be, and there was nothing more he could do. The rumbling grew louder and at the same time an icy wind sprang up all around him, throwing the dust into his eyes and sending his hair flapping against his forehead. Matt lost his balance and staggered. He heard laughter, echoing across the plain. His vision shimmered and then there was the sound of what could have been a huge whip cracking, so loud that it almost threw him off his feet. Light burst out of the desert floor, slicing through the air, lancing up into the sky. Blinded and battered, Matt fell to his knees.
Silence. Everything had stopped.
Then the creatures began to appear.
There was an eruption as if from a volcano and a huge bird exploded out of the ground in front of Matt and hung static in the air, its wings beating so fast that they were barely visible. The earth boiled all around it. Matt felt the air buffeting against him and covered his face with his arms, afraid of being blinded. It was a hummingbird. Its eyes were black and brilliant and full of wickedness. Its beak was half open and Matt knew that if it chose to, it could swallow him whole.
Four massive, hairy legs, then four more, suddenly appeared, reaching out over the edge of the desert, and a gigantic spider pulled itself up from below. Matt saw the poison sac hanging under its belly. Two glistening fangs jutted out of its neck. It paused for a moment, twitching, then scurried away.
There was a screech and a monkey leapt out of nowhere, its tail curling and uncurling, its teeth bared in a grotesque smile. One by one, the pictures that he had once seen from the air sprang to life. Matt stayed where he was, on his knees, waiting for his own death to come.
For perhaps twenty seconds, nothing more happened. Matt heard a buzzing sound. It started low and distant, then rose, getting louder and louder until it was as if there was a chainsaw trying to cut the world apart. Matt pressed his hands against his ears and the next moment a vast cloud of insects burst out of the cracks in the ground and twisted into the air. They were flies with fat, black bodies and beating wings. They flew out of the cracks in an endless swarm – thousands of them, then millions, then thousands of millions, a plague of flies thicker than the air, filling the entire sky. Then, as Matt watched in horror, they began to reform themselves. They flew together, forming the shapes of men, armed soldiers. Each man was made up of perhaps ten thousand flies and in an instant there was a whole army of them, standing to attention in long lines that stretched all the way back to the mountains.
They were the advance guard. But there were still more creatures climbing out of the bowels of the earth, finally breaking free from the world where they had been held captive for so many centuries.
The ones that came now were like no recognizable forms of life. They were just strange, freakish shapes with the beginnings of arms and legs stretching out of them. Some had horns, some teeth, some gleeful, bulging eyes. Some were part animal and part human – an alligator on men’s legs, a pig the size of a horse, a huge toad with the head of a bird. Each one was more deformed, more horrible than the one before, and they continued to pour out of the ground until the entire desert floor was covered by them. Some were black. Some were grey. Occasionally there were bursts of colour: green feathers, glistening white teeth, the dirty yellow of pus dripping from an open wound. They stood there, breathing the air of the world they had come to destroy, with the fly soldiers stretching out behind them, waiting for their first command.
But their true commander was still to come.
A fork of lightning splintered through the night sky and the rumbling deepened. One after the other, thirteen more figures in the form of men appeared on horseback, dressed in rusting armour and rags. Each one of them was a giant, ten feet tall. There was a flash of lightning – the entire sky blazed – and in that instant their shapes changed. Now they were skeletons, on skeleton animals. Another flash and they were ghosts, creatures made of smoke and air. They made no sound and moved like shadows, rippling across the desert surface. Once again they seemed to shimmer and become solid and stood in a semi-circle, waiting. It was colder than ever. Their breath was turning white, curling around their lips.
And at last the King of the Old Ones rose from the desert floor.
Matt trembled. The king was larger than any of the creatures that had appeared so far. If he had wanted to, he could surely have stretched up and touched the clouds. Each one of his finger nails would have been larger than Matt himself. It was difficult to see very much of him. Darkness clung to the terrible creature like a cloak hiding him. The King of the Old Ones was too gigantic to be seen, too horrible to be understood.
Very slowly, he became aware of Matt, scenting him in the same way that a poisonous snake might sense its prey. Matt felt the creature turn its eyes on him. He began to search for any of the power that might still be inside him even though he knew he would never have enough. There had to be five of them. But he was on his own.
Matt got to his feet.
“Go back!” he shouted. His voice was tiny. He was nothing more than an insect. “You have no place here.”
The King of the Old Ones laughed. It was a hideous sound, deep and deathly, like thunder, echoing all around.
A quarter of a mile away, lying beside the helicopter, Pedro heard the sound and turned to where he knew Matt must be standing.
“Matteo…” he whispered.
Matt heard him. The prophecy had been wrong. He wasn’t quite alone after all. Pedro was near by and if there were two of them, that doubled his power. With renewed strength, he got to his feet and lashed out, sending all the energy he had left towards the huge creature that was standing in front of him. The whole desert rippled. The King of the Old Ones screamed and fell back a pace; feeling his pain, all the other creatures screamed too. Later it would be said that the sound had been heard all over Peru, though nobody had been able to say what it was or from where it had come. It seemed to Matt that he was winning. The Old Ones were withering in front of him, shrivelling like scraps of paper in a bonfire. Pedro was with him and if the two of them could just continue a few seconds more…
But Matt had taken his power to its limit and it was burning him up. He saw two suns, searing his eyes. Something huge and black, bigger than the night itself, rushed in on him and struck him down. He was thrown backwards, crashing to the ground. Blood trickled from his nose and out of the corners of his eyes.
The King of the Old Ones, badly wounded and weakened, took one last look at the limp body, then calling his hordes around him, folded himself into the night.
THE HEALER
The doctor was a small, neat man with light-brown hair and glasses. He was holding a scratched and battered leather case that was too full to close properly. His name was Christian
Nourry and he wasn’t Peruvian, but French, working with the Red Cross in some of the country’s poorest towns.
“I’m sorry, Professor Chambers,” he said. “There’s nothing more that I can do.”
“Is the boy dying?”
The doctor shrugged. “I’ve already told you. This is outside my experience. Matthew is in a deep coma. His heartbeat is far too slow and there seems to be very little activity in his brain. My guess would be that he is unlikely to recover. It would help me if you could explain how he got himself into this state.”
The professor shrugged.
“Well, in that case I can’t say for sure what’s going to happen. There is one thing I am sure about, though. He’d be a lot better off in a local hospital.”
“I don’t agree. There’s nothing a hospital can do for him that we can’t do here. And we’d prefer to keep an eye on him.”
“You mentioned another boy. What about him?”
“Pedro? He is in hospital. He broke his ankle and they had to put it in a cast. We’re expecting him back this afternoon.”
“What have these two young people been doing? Fighting a war?”
“Thank you for coming, DrNourry.”
“Well, call me day or night. I’ll come immediately.” The doctor sighed. “I think you should prepare yourself. It seems to me that he’s hanging onto life by a thread – and that thread could snap at any time.”
Professor Chambers waited until the doctor had gone, then went back into the house. Inside, everything was cool, the air circulated by fans in every room. Slowly, she climbed a wooden staircase and went into a large, square room with rush mats on the floor and bright plaster walls. Two open windows looked over the garden. There was a sprinkler just outside, rhythmically pumping water onto the lawn.
Matt was lying in bed with his eyes closed, covered by a single sheet. There was an oxygen mask strapped to his face, and a plastic bag hung over him with a saline drip connected to his arm. He was very pale. The rise and fall of his chest as he breathed was so slight as to be almost imperceptible. Professor Chambers thought about what the doctor had just said. Matt didn’t just look close to death – he looked dead already.