had died. For six years he had managed to live with the knowledge of what he’d done.
I could have warned them. I didn’t.
And finally he had unburdened himself to a journalist who probably hadn’t believed him anyway. He wished now that he hadn’t. He felt embarrassed. He remembered how Richard had dismissed his theories about witchcraft and magic. It wasn’t surprising. If it had been the other way round, he wouldn’t have believed it himself.
And yet…
He knew what had happened. He had lived through it. The dogs had come out of the flames. Tom Burgess had died trying to warn him.
And then there was the question of his own powers.
He had seen the car accident that had killed his parents before it happened. It was the reason he was still alive. And there had been other things too. The jug of water that had smashed in the detention centre. And the night before, the way he had somehow managed to get Richard to stop his car.
Suppose…
Matt lay back against the pillows.
…suppose he did have some sort of special ability. The police report he had found in Mrs Deverill’s bedroom had mentioned his precognitive abilities. By that they meant his ability to see the future. Somehow Mrs Deverill had got hold of a copy and that was why she wanted him. Not because of who he was. Because of what he was.
But that was ridiculous. Matt had seen X-Men and Spider-Man at the cinema. Superheroes. He even liked the comics. But was he really pretending that he had some sort of superpower too? He had never been bitten by a radioactive spider or zapped by a mad scientist inside a space machine. He was just an ordinary teenager who had got himself into trouble.
But he had broken the jug of water in the detention centre. He had gazed at it across the room and it had shattered.
There was a glass vase on the windowsill. It was about fifteen centimetres high, filled with pens and pencils. Matt found himself gazing at it. All right. Why not? He began to concentrate, breathing slowly and evenly, his back supported by the pillows. Without moving, he focused all his attention on the vase. He could do it. If he ordered the vase to smash itself, it would explode then and there. He had done it before. He would do it now. Then he would do it again for Richard, and after that the journalist would have to believe him.
He could feel the thought patterns emanating from his head. The vase filled his vision. Break, damn you! Break! He tried to imagine the glass blowing itself apart, as if by imagining it he could make it happen. But it didn’t move. Matt was gritting his teeth now, holding his breath, desperately trying to make it break.
He stopped. His chest fell and he turned his head aside. Who did he think he was kidding? He wasn’t an X- man. More like a zero kid.
There were new clothes piled at the bottom of the bed: jeans and a sweatshirt. Richard must have come in some time earlier that morning. And although he had threatened to throw them away, he’d also washed Matt’s trainers. They were still damp but at least they were clean. Matt got dressed and went downstairs. He found Richard in the kitchen, boiling eggs.
“I was wondering when you’d get up,” Richard said. “Did you sleep OK?”
“Yes, thanks. Where did you get the clothes?”
“There’s a shop down the road. I had to guess your size.” He pointed at the bubbling saucepan. “I’m just making breakfast. Do you like your eggs hard or soft?”
“I don’t mind.”
“They’ve been in twenty minutes. I have a feeling they’ll be hard.”
They sat down at the table and ate together. “So what happens now?” Matt asked.
“Right now we have to be careful. Mrs Deverill and her friends will be looking for you. They might even have called the police and reported you missing, and if they find you with me, we’ll both be in trouble. You can’t just pick up fourteen-year-old kids these days and hang out with them. Not that I intend to hang out with you. As soon as we’ve found out what’s going on, it’s goodbye. No offence but there’s only room in this place for one.”
“That’s fine by me.”
“Anyway, I’ve been busy. While you were asleep, I made a few calls. The first one was to Sir Michael Marsh.”
“The scientist.”
“He’s agreed to see us at half past eleven. After that, we’re going to Manchester.”
“Why?”
“When you came to the newspaper office you told me about a book you’d found in the library. Written by someone called Elizabeth Ashwood. She’s quite well known. This will probably grab you, Matt. She writes about black magic and witchcraft… that sort of stuff. We’ve got a file on her at the Gazette and I managed to get hold of one of our researchers. She gave me an address for her. No phone number, unfortunately. But we can drive over and see what she has to say.”
“That’s great,” Matt said. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. If this leads me to a story, I’ll be the one thanking you.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
Richard thought for a moment. “I’ll throw you back in the bog.”
Sir Michael Marsh looked very much like the government scientist he had once been. He was elderly now, well into his seventies, but his eyes had lost none of their intelligence and seemed to demand respect. Although it was a Sunday morning, he was formally dressed in a dark suit with a white shirt and blue silk tie. His shoes were highly polished and his fingernails manicured. His hair had long ago turned silver but it was thick and well groomed. He was sitting with his legs crossed, one hand resting on his knee, listening to what his visitors had to say.
It was Richard who was talking. He was more smartly dressed than usual. He had shaved and put on a clean shirt and a jacket. Matt was next to him. The three of them were in a first-floor sitting room with large windows giving an uninterrupted view of the River Ouse. The house was Georgian, built to impress. There was something almost stage-like about the room, with its polished wooden desk, shelves of leather-bound books, marble fireplace and antique chairs. And Richard had been right about the matchbox label collection. There were hundreds of them, displayed in narrow glass cases on the walls. They had come from every country in the world.
Richard had given a very cut-down version of Matt’s story. He hadn’t told Sir Michael who Matt was or how he had arrived at Lesser Malling but had concentrated instead on the things Matt had seen at Omega One. At last Richard came to a halt. Matt waited to hear how Sir Michael would react.
“You say that there were electric lights at the power station,” he began. “And the boy heard a humming sound?”
“Yes, sir.”
“He saw a lorry. Unloading some sort of box?”
“Yes.”
“And what conclusion have you drawn from all this, Mr Cole?”
“Matt couldn’t see very much in the darkness, Sir Michael. But he said that the people carrying the box were wearing strange, bulky clothes. I wondered if they might have been radiation suits.”
“You think that somebody is trying to start up Omega One?”
“It is a possibility.”
“An impossibility, I’m afraid.” He turned to Matt. “How much do you know about nuclear power, young man?”
“Not a lot,” Matt answered.
“Well, let me tell you a bit about it. I’m sure you don’t want a physics lesson, but you have to understand.” Sir Michael thought for a moment. “We’ll start with the nuclear bomb. You know, of course, what that is.”
“Yes.”
“A nuclear bomb contains devastating power. It can destroy an entire city as it did, in the last war, at Hiroshima. In tests in the Nevada Desert, a small nuclear bomb blew out a crater so deep, you could have fitted the Empire State Building into it. The power of the bomb is the energy released in the explosion. And that energy comes from splitting the atom. Are you with me so far?”
Matt nodded. If he had been at school his attention would have wandered already, but this time he was determined to keep up.
