Necropolis by Anthony Horowitz
“Has he talked to you about it?”
Jamie shook his head. “He’s put up barriers. He won’t go there. He’s not the same any more. I know that. But you have no idea how he looked after me all those years. When Uncle Don was beating me around or when I was in trouble at school, Scott was always there for me. The only reason he got caught was that he was helping me get away.” He suddenly took off his sunglasses and laid them on the table. “Don’t underestimate him, Matt. I know he’s not himself right now, but he’ll never let you down.”
I hope Jamie is right. But I’m not sure.
I looked across the road. There were some little kids throwing a ball on a lawn beside the beach. A couple of rollerbladers swung by. A pale green convertible drove past with music blaring. And just a few metres away, we were talking about torture and thinking about a war that we might not be able to win. Two different worlds. I know which one I’d have preferred to be in.
We finished eating and went back to the hotel. Our car was already there. The concierge carried out our cases and then it was a twenty-minute drive across the causeway. The water, stretching out on both sides, looked blue and inviting. We reached Miami International Airport and went in, joining the crowds at the check-in desks. Thousands of people travelling all over the world. And this is what I was thinking…
Suppose the Old Ones are already here. Suppose they control this airport. We are allowing ourselves to be swallowed up by a system … tickets, passports, security. How do we know we can trust it, that it will take us where we want to go, or even let us out again?
We got to the baggage check. Richard took one look at the X-ray machines and stopped. “I’m an idiot,” he said.
“What is it?”
He was carrying a backpack on his shoulder, cradling it under one arm. He’d had it with him at the restaurant too and I knew that among other things, the monk’s diary was inside. But now he was watching as people took out their computers and removed their belts and I could see that he was furious with himself. “The tumi,” he said. “I meant to transfer it to my main luggage. They’ll never let it through.”
The tumi is a sacrificial knife. It was given to him by the prince of the Inca tribe just before we left Vilcabamba. I could understand Richard wanting to keep it close to him. It was made of solid gold, with semi-precious stones in the hilt, and it must have been worth a small fortune. But this was a mistake. He might try to argue that the tumi was an antique, an ornament or just a souvenir, but given that the airlines wouldn’t even allow you to carry a teaspoon unless it was made of plastic, there was no way it was going to be allowed on the plane.
It was too late to do anything now. There was a long line of people behind us and we wouldn’t have been allowed to turn back. Richard dumped the bag on the moving belt and grimaced as it disappeared inside the X-ray machine. I suppose he was hoping that the security people might glance away at the right moment and miss it. But that wasn’t going to happen. The bag came out again. It was grabbed by an unsmiling woman with her name – Monica Smith – on a badge on her blue, short-sleeved shirt.
“Is this yours?” she asked.
“Yes.” Richard prepared for the worst.
“Can you unzip this, please?”
“I can explain…” Richard began.
“Just open it, please.”
The tumi was right on the top. I could see the golden figure of the Inca god that squatted above the blade. I watched as the woman, wearing latex gloves, began to rifle through Richard’s clothes. Briefly, she picked up the diary, then put it back again. She examined a magnifying glass that Richard had bought in Miami, trying to decipher the monk’s handwriting. But she didn’t even seem to notice that the tumi was there. She closed the bag again.
“Thank you,” she said.
Richard looked at me. Neither of us said anything. We snatched up our belongings and hurried forward. It was only afterwards that we understood what had happened.
The tumi has another name. It’s also known as the invisible blade. When the prince of the Incas gave it to Richard, he said that no one would ever find it, that he would be able to carry it with him at any time. He also warned Richard that one day he would regret having it – something neither of us really like to think about.
But now we both realized what we had just seen. It was a bit of ancient magic. And it was all the more amazing because it happened in the setting of a modern, international airport.
Monday night
We took off exactly on time and once the seat belt signs had been turned off, I sat back in my seat and began to write this. In the seat next to me, Jamie had plugged himself straight into the TV console, watching a film. Richard was across the aisle, working with a Spanish dictionary, trying to unravel the diary.
A bit later, I fell asleep.
And that was when I went back. I had wanted to visit the dreamworld again, ever since I had discovered the path set into the side of the hill. Was it really possible that a civilization of some sort had once lived there? Might they be living there still? The dreamworld was a sort of in-between place, connecting where we were now with the world that Jamie had visited and where he had fought his battle, ten thousand years ago. It was there to help us. The more we knew about it, the better prepared we would be.
I was right where I wanted to be, back on the hillside, half-way up the path. But that was how the dreamworld worked. Every time I fell asleep, I picked up exactly where I had left off. So if I woke up throwing a stone into the air, when I went back to sleep I would immediately catch it again. And I was wearing the same clothes that I had on the plane. That was how it worked too.
The hill became steeper and the path turned into a series of steps. They had definitely been made by human hand. As I continued climbing up, they became ever more defined and when I finally reached the summit I found myself on a square platform with some sort of design – it looked like a series of Arabic letters – cut into it. The letters made no sense to me, but then I lifted my head and what I saw was so amazing that I’m surprised I didn’t wake up at once and find myself back on the plane.
I was looking at a city, sprawling out in all directions, as far as the eye could see. More than that. From where I was standing, high up on the hill, I could see thousands of rooftops stretching all the way to the horizon, perhaps ten miles away, but I got the impression that if I managed to walk all the way to the other side, it would continue to the next horizon and maybe to the one after that.
It was impossible to say if the city was ancient or modern. It somehow managed to be both at the same time. Some of the buildings were huge, cathedral-like with arched windows and domes covered in tiles that could have been silver or zinc. Others were steel and glass structures that reminded me of an airport terminal and then I realized that there were actually dozens of them and they were all identical, radiating out of central courtyards like the spokes of a wheel. Towers rose up at intervals, again with silver turrets. Everything was connected, either by spiral staircases or covered walkways.
There were no parks and no trees. There weren’t any cars or people. In fact, I wasn’t looking at a city at all. This vast construction was one single building: a massive cathedral, a massive museum, a massive … something. It was a mishmash of styles, some parts must have been added hundreds or even thousands of years after others – but it was all locked together. It was one. I couldn’t work out where the centre was. I couldn’t see where it had originally begun. Nor could I imagine how it had come into being. It was as if someone had taken a single seed – one brick – and dropped it into a bubbling swamp. And this, after thousands of years of growth, was the result.
Leaving the platform behind me, I walked down the other side of the hill and made my way towards the outer wall. I was now following a road with a marble-like surface and it was taking me directly towards a great big arch and, on the other side of it, an open door. The air was very still. I could actually hear my heart beating as I approached. I
“Can I help you?”
Another shock. I wasn’t on my own. And the question was so normal, so polite that it just didn’t seem to belong to this extraordinary place.
There was a man standing behind a lectern, the sort of things lecturers have in front of them when they talk. He was quite small, a couple of inches shorter than me, and he had one of those faces … I won’t say it was carved out of stone (it was too warm and human for that) but it somehow seemed ages old, gnarled by time and experience.
From the look of him, I would have said he was an Arab, a desert tribesman, but without any of the trappings such as a headdress, white robes or a dagger. Instead, he was dressed in a long, silk jacket – faded mauve and silver – with a large pocket on each side and baggy, white trousers. A beard would have suited him but he didn’t have one. His hair was steel grey. His eyes were the same colour. They were regarding me with polite amusement.
“What is this place?” I asked.
“This place?” The man seemed surprised that I had asked. “This is the great library. And it’s very good to see you again.”
A library. I remembered something Jamie had told me. When he met Scarlett at Scathack Hill, she had mentioned visiting a library to him.
“We’ve never met.”
“I think we have.” The man smiled at me. I wasn’t sure what language he was speaking. In the dreamworld, all languages are one and the same and people can understand each other no matter where they’ve come from. “You’re Matthew Freeman. At least, that’s the name you call yourself. You’re one of the Gatekeepers. The first of them, in fact.”
“Do you have a name?”
“No. I’m just the Librarian.”
“I’m looking for Scarlett,” I said. “Scarlett Adams. Has she been here?”
“Scarlett Adams? Scarlett Adams? You mean … Scar! Yes, she most certainly has been here. But not for a long time. And she’s not here now.”
“Do you know where I can find her?”
“I’m afraid not.”
We were walking down the corridor together, which was strange because I couldn’t remember starting. And we had passed into a second room, part of the library … it was obvious now. I had never seen so many books. There were books on both sides of me, standing like soldiers, shoulder to shoulder, packed into wooden shelves that stretched on and on into the distance, finally – a trick of perspective – seeming to come together at a point. The shelves began at floor level and rose all the way to the ceiling, maybe a hundred rows in each block. The air was dry and smelled of paper. There must have been a million books in this room alone and each one of them was as thick as an encyclopaedia.
“You must like reading,” I said.
“I never have time to read the books. I’m too busy looking after them.”
“How many of you are there?”
“Just me.”
“Who built the library?”
“I couldn’t tell you, Matt. It was already here before I arrived.”
“So what are these books? Do you have a crime section? And romance?”
“No, Matt.” The Librarian smiled at the thought. “Although you will find plenty of crime, and plenty of romance for that matter, among their pages. But all the books in the library are biographies.”
“Who of?”
“Of all the people who have ever lived and quite a few who are still to be born. We keep their entire lives here. Their beginnings, their marriages, their good days and their bad days, their deaths – of course. Everything they ever did.”
We stopped in front of a door. There was a sign on it, delicately carved into the wood. A five-pointed star.
“I know this,” I said.
“Of course you do.”
“Where does this door go?”
“It goes anywhere you want it to.”
“It’s like the door at St Meredith’s!” I said.
“It works the same way … but there you have only twenty-four possible destinations. In your world, there are twenty-five doors, all connecting with each other – although none of them will bring you back here. This library, on the other hand, has a door in every room and I have absolutely no idea how many rooms there are and wouldn’t even know how to count them.”
The Librarian gestured with one hand. “After you.”
“Where are we going?”
“Well, since you’re here, why don’t we have a look at your life? Aren’t you curious?”
“Not really.”
“Let’s see…”
We went through the door and for all I knew at that moment we crossed twenty miles to the other side of the city. We found ourselves in a chamber that was certainly very different from the one we had left, with plate-glass windows all around us, held in place by a lattice-work of steel supports. Maybe this was one of the airport terminals I had seen. The books here were on metal shelves, each one with a narrow walkway and a circular platform that moved up and down like a lift but with no cables, no pistons, no obvious means of support.
We went up six levels and shuffled along the ledge with a railing on one side, the books on the other.
“Matt Freeman… Matt Freeman…” The Librarian muttered my name as we went.
“Are they in alphabetical order?” I asked. All the volumes looked the same except that some were thicker than others. I couldn’t see any names or titles.
“No. It’s more complicated than that.”
I looked back at the door that we’d come through. It was now below and behind us. “How do the doors work?” I asked.
“How do you mean?”
“How do you know where they’ll take you?”
He stopped and turned to look at me. “If you just wander through them, they’ll take you anywhere,” he said. “But if you know exactly where you want to go, that’s where they’ll take you.”
“Can anyone use them?”
“The doors in your world were built just for the five of you.”
“What about Richard?”
“You can each take a companion with you, if you’re so minded. Just remember to decide where you’re going before you step through or you could end up scattered all over the planet.”
We continued on our way but after another couple of minutes, the Librarian suddenly stopped, reached up and took out a book. “Here you are,” he said. “This is you.”
I looked at the book suspiciously. Like all the others it was oversized, bound in some grey fabric, old but perhaps never read. It looked more like a school book than a novel or a biography. I noticed that it had fewer pages than many of the others.
“Is that it?” I asked.
“Absolutely.” The Librarian seemed disappointed that I wasn’t more impressed.
“That’s my whole life?”
“Yes.”
“My whole life up to now…”
“Up to now and all the way to the end.”
The thought of that made my head swim. “Does it say when I die?”
“The book is all about you, Matt,” the Librarian explained patiently. “Inside its pages you will find everything you have ever done and everything you will do. Do you want to know when you next meet the Old Ones? You can read it here. And yes, it will tell you exactly when you will die and in what manner.”
“Are you telling me that someone has written down everything that happens to me before it happens?” I know that was exactly what he had just said but I had to get my head around it.
“Yes.” He nodded.
“Then that means that I’ve got no choice. Everything I do has already been decided.”
“
“But my decisions don’t mean anything!” I pointed at the book and suddenly I was beginning to hate the sight of it. “Whatever I do in my life, the end is still going to be the same. It’s already been written.”
“Do you want to read it?” the Librarian asked.
“No!” I shook my head. “Put it away. I don’t want to see it.”
“That’s your choice,” the Librarian said with a sly smile. He slid the book back into the space it had come from. But I had one last question.
“Who wrote the book?” I asked.
“There is no author listed. All the books in the library are anonymous. That’s one of the reasons why it makes them so hard to catalogue.”
I was beginning to feel miserable. The dreamworld seemed to exist to help us, but every time we came here it was simply confusing. Jamie and Pedro had both found this too. “You call yourself a librarian,” I snapped at the man. “So why can’t you be more helpful? Why don’t you have any answers?”
He tapped the spine of the book. “All the answers are here,” he said. “But you just refused to look at them.”
“Then answer me this one question. Am I going to win or lose?”
“Win or lose?”
“Against the Old Ones.” I swallowed. “Am I going to get killed?”
“We are experiencing some turbulence…”
The Librarian was still looking at me, but he hadn’t spoken those words. With a sense of frustration, I felt myself being sucked away. There was someone leaning over me. A member of the cabin crew.
“I’m sorry I’ve had to wake you up,” she said. “The captain has put on the seat belt sign.”
I looked at my watch. We still had four more hours in the air. Richard and Jamie were asleep but I knew I wouldn’t be able to join them. I took out my notepad and started writing again.
Four hours until London.
Soon we will be home.
CROSSING PATHS
Scarlett thought she’d be safe, back at school. She’d slip back into the crowd and nobody would notice her. After all, nothing exciting ever happened at school. Wasn’t that the whole point? So, for the first time in her life, she found herself looking forward to the next Monday morning. There would be no bombs, no strange men in cars, no cryptic messages. She would be swallowed up by double maths and physics and everything would be all right.