serious trouble!” he boomed. And then, an afterthought that was so bizarre it almost made Matt want to laugh. “Why aren’t you wearing your tie?”
“I think you should get out of the school,” Matt said.
There was nothing to be done. The alarm could only be switched off in the bursar’s office, and only with the approval of the fire brigade. Mr O’Shaughnessy grabbed Matt by the arm and the two of them followed the other boys out of the school. In minutes, all the buildings were empty. On the other side of the main road, the dinner ladies had spilled out of the sports centre. The few boys who had arrived for lunch early were with them. They crossed the road and joined the rest of the pupils, who had congregated on the football pitch. The teachers were with them, trying to get them into some sort of order. Everyone was looking for the flames or at least a little smoke but already it was being whispered that the alarm had been set off as a joke and that Matthew Freeman was to blame. The headmaster had also arrived. He was a short, solid-looking man, built like a rugby player and known as the Bulldog. He saw his assistant, who was standing next to Matt, and came striding over.
“Do you know what’s going on?” he demanded.
“I’m afraid I do, headmaster,” O’Shaughnessy replied. “It’s a false alarm.”
“Well, I’m glad of that!”
“Of course.” O’Shaughnessy nodded. “But this boy set the alarm off on purpose. His name is Freeman and…”
But the headmaster wasn’t listening any more. He was staring past Mr O’Shaughnessy. Slowly, Matt turned round to see what was happening. The assistant headmaster did the same.
They were just in time to see the Shell tanker come careering down the hill. It was clear at once that something was wrong. It was zigzagging across the road, seemingly out of control. Matt could just make out the figure – a woman with wild eyes and straggling hair – sitting in the driving seat. He recognized her, and at the same moment he realized that she knew exactly what she was doing, and that she had come especially for him.
Gwenda Davis had her eyes fixed on the sports centre where, according to Rex McKenna, the entire school would be having lunch. The petrol tanker was now facing away from the football pitch. As Matt watched, it left the road, ploughed through a bush and began to career across the playing fields. Matt saw the tyres cutting up the turf.
Some of the other boys had seen it too. Faces turned. Hands pointed. There could be no doubt what was about to happen.
The tanker smashed into the wall of the sports centre and continued right through it. Its window smashed and Gwenda was killed instantly, thrown into the brickwork even as it disintegrated all around her. With its engine screaming, the tanker continued, disappearing from sight, swallowed up by the building. There was a moment’s pause. Then everything exploded. A fireball erupted into the sky, hurling hundreds of tiles in every direction. It rose higher and higher, carrying with it a huge fist of black smoke that threatened to punch out the very clouds. Matt put a hand up to protect his face. Even at this distance, he could feel the fantastic heat of thousands of litres of petrol as they ignited. Flames poured out of the wrecked building, falling crazily onto the grass, the trees, the road, the edges of the main school, setting everything alight. It was like a battle zone.
Matt knew that he had cheated death by minutes. And if the whole school had been in the sports centre, if they had been queuing up for lunch as they should have been, hundreds of children would have died.
The headmaster was thinking the same thing. “My God!” he croaked. “If we had been in there…!”
“He knew!” Mr O’Shaughnessy let go of Matt and backed away. “He knew before it happened,” he whispered. “Freeman knew.”
The headmaster looked at him, his eyes wide.
Matt hesitated. He didn’t want to stay here a minute longer. In the distance he could already hear sirens.
He walked. Six hundred and fifty boys stepped out of his way, forming a corridor to allow him to pass. Among them, Matt saw Gavin Taylor. For just a brief instant, their eyes met. The other boy was crying. Matt didn’t know why.
Nobody said anything as he passed between them. Matt no longer cared what they thought of him. One thing was certain. He would never see any of them again.
THE DIARY
“You don’t have to do this,” Richard said.
It was the first time he had spoken since the train had pulled out of the station on its way to London. Matt was sitting opposite him, his head buried in a book that he had bought at the station. The book was meant to be funny but Matt couldn’t even bring himself to smile. For the last hour he had been skipping from paragraph to paragraph but the story simply wouldn’t let him in.
“Matt…?” Richard began again.
Matt snapped the book shut. “You saw what happened at Forrest Hill,” he said. “It was Gwenda! She’d come to kill me and she’d have killed everyone else in the school if I hadn’t warned them.”
“But you did warn them. You saved their lives.”
“Yes. And they all came running up to thank me for it.” Matt stared out of the window, taking in the rushing countryside. Raindrops crawled slowly across the glass, moving from left to right. “I can’t go back,” he said. “They don’t want me there. And I’ve nowhere else to go. Miss Ashwood was right. Raven’s Gate wasn’t the end of it. I don’t think it’s ever going to end.”
It was the day after the destruction of the school. The blazing petrol had spread from the gymnasium to the old buildings and by the time the fire brigade had arrived, there hadn’t been very much left. By then Matt had returned to the flat in York, joining a shocked Richard, who had already heard the first reports on the radio. The school did their best to keep Matt out of the newspapers – and fortunately nobody yet knew the identity of the madwoman who had been driving the petrol tanker. But there had been too many witnesses, too many boys willing to talk. And all the headlines were screaming the same, impossible story:
BOY FORESEES SCHOOL CATASTROPHE PRECOGNITION BOY SAVES SCHOOL DID FORREST HILL BOY SEE FUTURE?
At least nobody had a photograph of Matt apart from one muddy, almost unrecognizable image that had been taken on a mobile phone. And by the time the first editions of the newspapers came out, Richard and Matt had already gone. Richard had spoken with Susan Ashwood on the phone and she had arranged a “safe house” for them in Leeds – an empty flat where they had stayed overnight. While they were there, Matt had agreed to travel to London to meet the Nexus, just as they had asked. Looking back, it seemed to him that there had been something inevitable about it.
“It was meant to happen. It was planned… ”
Susan Ashwood had said that too. She had been talking about the discovery of the Spanish monk’s diary. But she could just as easily have been talking about him. It was beginning to seem to Matt that his every move was being dictated for him. It didn’t matter what he wanted. Someone, somewhere had other ideas.
“Maybe it’ll work out OK,” Richard said. “All you’ve got to do is meet this guy, William Morton, get him to hand over the diary and then you and I can go back to York or somewhere and start over again.”
“You really think it will be as easy as that?” Matt asked.
Richard shrugged. “Nothing’s ever easy where you’re concerned,” he said. “But at the end of the day, Matt, you’re still in control. Whatever they ask, you only have to say no.”
A taxi had been sent to meet them at the station and it took them to a hotel in Farringdon. Matt hardly knew London. The first time he had been here, he had been under police escort, whisked in and out of an office with barely enough time to smell the air. Farringdon was an old part of the city which seemed to slip further back in time as the evening drew on. There were dark alleyways and gas lamps and even, in places, cobbled streets. If an air- raid siren had suddenly split the air, Matt wouldn’t have been surprised. It was the London he had seen in films that took place during the Second World War.
The hotel was small and so discreet that it didn’t even have a name on the front door. Richard and Matt both had rooms on the third floor – paid for, of course, by the Nexus. After they’d unpacked, they took the tiny lift back to
