Necropolis

I never asked for any of this. I never wanted to be part of it. And even now, I don’t understand exactly what is happening or why it had to be me.

I hoped that writing this diary might help. It was Richard’s idea, to put it all down on paper. But it hasn’t worked out the way I hoped. The more I think about my life, the more I write about it, the more confused it all becomes.

Sometimes I try to go back to where it all began but I’m not sure any more where that was. Was it the day my parents died? Or did it start in Ipswich, the evening I decided to break into a warehouse with my best friend… who was actually anything but? Maybe the decision had already been made the day I was born. Matthew Freeman. You will not go to school like other kids. You won’t play football and take your A-levels and have a career. You are here for another reason. You can argue if you like, but that’s just the way it’s got to be.

I think a lot about my parents even though sometimes it’s hard to see their faces, and their voices have long since faded out. My dad was a doctor, a GP with a practice round the corner from the house. I can just about remember a man with a beard and gold-rimmed glasses. He was very political. We were recycling stuff long before it was fashionable and he used to get annoyed about the National Health Service – too many managers, too much red tape. At the same time, he used to laugh a lot. He read to me at night… Roald Dahl… The Twits was one of his favourites. And there was a comedy show on TV that he never missed. It was on Sunday night but I’ve forgotten its name.

My mum was a lot smaller than him. She was always on a diet, although I don’t think she really needed to lose weight. I suppose it didn’t help that she was a great cook. She used to make her own bread and cakes and around September she’d set up a production line for Christmas puddings which she’d flog off for charity. Sometimes she talked about going back to work, but she liked to be there when I got back from school. That was one of her rules. She wouldn’t let me come home to an empty house.

I was only eight years old when they died and there’s so much about them I never knew. I guess they were happy together. Whenever I think back, the sun always seems to be shining which must mean something. I can still see our house and our garden with a big rose bush sprawling over the lawn. Sometimes I can even smell the flowers.

Mark and Kate Freeman. Those were their names. They died in a car accident on their way to a wedding and the thing is, I knew it was going to happen. I dreamed that their car was going to come off a bridge and into a river and I woke up knowing that they were both going to die. But I didn’t tell them. I knew my dad would never have believed me. So I pretended I was sick. I cried and kicked my heels. I let them go but I made them leave me behind.

I could have saved them. I tell myself that over and over again. Maybe my dad wouldn’t have believed me. Maybe he would have insisted on going, no matter what I said. But I could have poured paint over the car or something. I could even have set fire to it. There were all sorts of ways that I could have made it impossible for them to leave the house.

But I was too scared. I had a power and I knew that it made me different from everyone else and that was the last thing I wanted to be. Freakshow Matt… not me, thanks. So I said nothing. I stayed back and watched them go and since then I’ve seen the car pull away a thousand times and I’ve yelled at my eight-year-old self to do something and I’ve hated myself for being so stupid. If I could go back in time, that’s where I would start because that’s where it all went wrong.

After that, things happened very quickly. I was fostered by a woman called Gwenda Davis who was related in some way to my mother – her half-sister or something. For the next six years, I lived with her and her partner, Brian, in a terraced house in Ipswich. I hated both of them. Gwenda was shallow and self-centred but Brian was worse. They had what I think is called an abusive relationship which means that he used to beat her around. He hit me too. I was scared of him – I admit it. Sometimes I would see him looking at me in the same way and I would make sure my bedroom door was locked at night.

And yet, here’s something strange. I might as well admit it. In a way, I was almost happy in Ipswich. Sometimes I thought of it as a punishment for what I’d done – or hadn’t done – and part of me figured that I deserved it. I was resigned to my life there. I knew it was never going to get any better and at least I was able to create an identity for myself. I could be anyone I wanted to be.

I bunked off school. I was never going to pass any exams so what did I care? I stole stuff from local shops. I started smoking when I was twelve. My friend, Kelvin, bought me my first packet of Marlboro Lights – although of course he made me pay him back twice what they’d cost. I never took drugs. But if I’d stayed with him much longer I probably would have. I’d have ended up like one of those kids you read about in the newspapers, dead from an overdose, a body next to a railway line. Nobody would have cared, not even me. That was just the way it would have been.

But then along came Jayne Deverill and suddenly everything changed because it turned out she was a witch. I know how crazy that sounds. I can’t believe I just wrote it. But she wasn’t a witch like in a pantomime. I mean, she didn’t have a long nose and a pointy hat or anything like that. She was the real thing: evil, cruel and just a little bit mad. She and her friends had been watching me, waiting for me to fall into their hands because they needed me to help them unlock a mysterious gate hidden in a wood in Yorkshire. And it seemed that, after all, I wasn’t just some loser with a criminal record who’d got his parents killed. I was one of the Five. A Gatekeeper. The hero of a story that had begun ten thousand years before I was born.

How did I feel about that? How do I feel about it now?

I have no choice. I am trapped in this and will have to stick with it until the bitter end. And I do think the end will be a hard one. The forces we’re up against – the Old Ones and their allies around the world – are too huge. They are like a nightmare plague, spreading everywhere, killing everything they touch. I have powers. I’ve accepted that now and recently I’ve learned how to use them. But I am still only fifteen years old – I had my birthday out here in Nazca – and when I think about the things that are being asked of me, I am scared.

I can’t run away. There’s nowhere for me to hide. If I don’t fight back, the Old Ones will find me. They will destroy me more surely and more painfully than even those cigarettes would have managed. After I was arrested, I never smoked again, by the way. That was one of the ways that I changed. I think I have accepted my place in all this. First of all, I have to survive. But that’s not enough. I also have to win.

At least I’m no longer alone.

When this all began, I knew that I was one of five children, all the same age as me, and that one day we would meet. I knew this because I had seen them in my dreams.

Pedro was the first one I came across in real life. He has no surname. He lost it – along with his home, his possessions and his entire family when the village in Peru where he lived was hit by a flood. He was six years old. After that, he moved to the slums of Lima and managed to scratch a living there. The first time I saw him, he was begging on the street. We met when I was unconscious and he was trying to rob me. But that was the way he was brought up. For him, there was never any right or wrong – it was just a question of finding the next meal. He couldn’t read. He knew nothing about the world outside the crumbling shanty town where he lived. And of course he could hardly speak a word of English.

I don’t think I’d ever met anyone quite so alien to me… and by that I mean he could have come from another planet. For a start (and there’s no pleasant way to put this) he stank. He hadn’t washed or had a bath in years and the clothes he wore had been worn by at least ten people before him. Even after everything I’d been through, I was rich compared to him. At least I’d grown up with fresh tap water. I’d never starved.

Almost from the very start we became friends. It probably helped that Pedro decided to save my life when the police chief, a man called Rodriguez, was cheerfully beating me up. But it was more than that. Think about the odds of our ever finding each other, me living in a provincial town in England and him, a street urchin surviving in a city ten thousand miles away. We were drawn together because that was how it was meant to be. We were two of the Five.

Pedro is pure Inca: a descendant of the people who first lived in Peru. More than that, he’s somehow connected with Manco Capac, one of the sun gods. The Incas showed me a picture of Manco – it was actually on a disc made of solid gold – and the two of them looked exactly the same. I’m not sure I completely understand what’s going on here. Is Pedro some sort of ancient god? If so, what does that make me?

Like me, Pedro has a special power. His is the ability to heal. The only reason I’m able to walk today is because of him. We were both injured in the Nazca Desert. He broke his leg, but I was cut down and left for dead…