was when the guard decided to call it a night. The museum had its own sophisticated alarm system. It could look after itself. And if he was fired, what did he care? He could always get that job at KFC.
The guard unlocked the gate and scurried through, then crossed the road, dodging the traffic through to South Kensington tube station. He didn’t see the shadows reaching out to enclose the museum or the soft, white mist that trickled over the grass. All he knew was that he wanted to get away. He didn’t once look back.
Matt finished his story. He shivered in the sudden cold but neither Richard nor the professor seemed to notice it.
“Well, what do you think?” Richard asked.
Professor Dravid turned on his desk lamp. “It’s almost impossible to believe,” he said. “From a warehouse in Ipswich to Lesser Malling and then to here. Nobody would believe it. Even to you it must seem incomprehensible. But let me tell you straight away, Matt, that you are meant to be here. There are no coincidences. It’s all happening the way it was meant to be.”
“But what is happening?” Matt asked. “What are Mrs Deverill and the rest of them doing in Lesser Malling? What is Raven’s Gate?”
“We’re not leaving until you tell us,” Richard added.
“Of course I will tell you.” Dravid looked at Matt and there was something strange in his eyes; a sense of puzzlement and wonder. It was as if Dravid had been waiting to meet him all his life.
“If I told anybody else what I’m about to tell you now,” he began, “my reputation – everything I’ve worked for – would disappear overnight. It makes no sense. Not in the real world, anyway. Susan Ashwood may have seemed eccentric to you. You might have thought she was a fraud. However, I’m telling you she was right. There is another world. We are surrounded by it. There is an alternative history as alive in the streets of twenty-first-century London as it was many thousands of years ago, when it all began. But only cranks and lunatics are meant to believe in it because, you see, that way everyone feels safer…
“Raven’s Gate is at the very heart of that alternative history. Few people have even heard of it. Look for it on the Internet, as you did, and you won’t find anything. But that doesn’t make it any less real. It is the reason why you are here now. It may even be the reason why you were born.”
Dravid stopped. The room seemed to be getting darker and darker. The desk lamp had only pushed back the shadows a little way. They were still there, waiting.
“Raven’s Gate was the name given to a strange circle of stones that stood, until the Middle Ages, outside Lesser Malling. It was mentioned by name in Elizabeth Ashwood’s book – the only occasion, to my knowledge, that it has ever appeared in print. Standing stones are by no means unique to Lesser Malling. There are at least six hundred examples in Britain. The most famous of them is Stonehenge in Wiltshire.
“You have to remember how mysterious all these stone circles are. Consider Stonehenge. No one is quite certain why it was built. There must have been a purpose. After all, it took a million and a half man-hours to construct. The stones, some of them weighing up to fifty tons, were carried all the way across England, and actually constructing the circle required a fantastic knowledge of engineering. Obviously it wasn’t put there just for decoration.
“Some say that Stonehenge is a temple. Some say it’s a sort of stone computer or even a magical tape recorder. Some believe it’s an observatory and that it can calculate the exact time of a solar eclipse. There are dozens of different theories. But the thing is, even in the twenty-first century, with all our knowledge and science, nobody knows for sure.”
“But you know,” Richard said.
Dravid nodded gravely. “Yes.” He leant forward. “Stonehenge is four or five thousand years old. But it wasn’t by any means the first stone circle ever built. In fact it was nothing more than a copy of one that had been around a lot longer. Raven’s Gate was the first stone circle and all the later ones were nothing more than imitations.”
“But where is it?” Matt asked. “What happened to it?”
“A great many of the stone circles in Britain have been destroyed over the years. Some were pulled down by farmers who needed the land for agriculture. The spread of towns and cities finished off others. A few simply collapsed or crumbled away over the years.
“But something very strange happened to Raven’s Gate. At some time in the Middle Ages it was deliberately taken down and smashed. More than that. Each and every one of its stones was ground to powder. The powder was loaded on to carts and carried to the four corners of Britain: north, south, east and west. Then it was poured into the sea. Something about the circle seemed so frightening, so evil, that the people who set about this fantastic task were determined that every grain should be separated. Nobody ever spoke of it again. It was as if Raven’s Gate had never existed.”
“So how did you hear of it?” Richard asked. It seemed to Matt that he still sounded doubtful.
“You’re a journalist, Mr Cole. You obviously think that if something hasn’t been written down, then it can’t possibly be true. Well, there have been some written records. The diary of a Spanish monk. A carving on a temple. A few letters and other documents. And of course there has always been a strong oral tradition. How did I hear of it?” Dravid half-smiled but his eyes were dark and serious. “I belong to an organization – you might call it a secret society – and we have kept the story alive for centuries. We have passed it from generation to generation.
“That society is called the Nexus.”
There was a jug of water on the desk. Dravid reached out and poured himself a glass. He drank half of it, then continued.
“There are twelve members of the Nexus, as there always have been. Incidentally, a nexus means a connection – and we are, I suppose, connected by what we know. Susan Ashwood is a member and there are ten others apart from myself from all over the world. In due course you will meet them, Matt. They will certainly want to meet you. The whole purpose of the Nexus, the reason that it exists, is to help you with what you have to do.”
“What do I have to do?” Matt asked. “You’re talking about stuff that happened thousands of years ago. Why are you telling me this now?”
“I’m about to explain. But it isn’t easy. I can understand how hard it must be for you to take all this on board.”
Professor Dravid finished his water while he collected his thoughts.
“There are some who believe that a great civilization existed on this planet before the Greek empire of 600 BC. Even before the Egyptians, who had flourished two thousand years earlier. I’m talking about the time of Atlantis, perhaps as long ago as ten thousand years. In a way, I suppose, I’m talking about the beginning of the world as we know it today.
“This first civilization was destroyed… slowly and deliberately. Creatures of unimaginable power and evil arrived in the world. They were called the Old Ones and their only desire was to see pain and misery all around them. The Christian Church talks about Satan, Lucifer and all the other devils. But these are just memories of the greatest, original evil: the Old Ones. They thrived on chaos. Once they had gained a foothold on the planet, they started a war. Torturing, killing, spreading mass destruction everywhere they went. That was their only pleasure. If they’d had their way, they would have reduced the whole world to an empty swamp.
“But according to the stories, there was a miracle, and it arrived in the shape of five young people: four boys and a girl.
“Nobody knows where they came from. They have no names. They have never been described. But together they organized the resistance against the Old Ones. What was left of humanity joined together behind the Five and there was a single, final battle in which the future of the world would be decided.
“The five children won that battle. The Old Ones were expelled, sent to another dimension, and a barrier, a magical gate, was built to make sure they could never come back. This gate took the form of a stone circle and later on it came to be known as Raven’s Gate.”
“Wait a minute,” Richard cut in. “You said Raven’s Gate was destroyed because it was evil.”
“I said it was destroyed because the people thought it was evil,” the professor corrected him. “They were mistaken. They gave it a name, Raven’s Gate, because the raven has always been associated with death. They had a memory that connected the stones with something horrible… But after all the years that had passed, they had forgotten what it was. And in the end they came to think that it was the stones themselves that were evil. So they tore them down.”
“So the gate was destroyed!” Matt exclaimed.
