Raven's Gate by Anthony Horowitz

Author:Anthony Horowitz
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Juvenile Fiction, Horror & Ghost Stories, Action & Adventure, General
ISBN: 9781435233850
Publisher: Paw Prints
Published: 2008-04-11T08:07:02+00:00

OUT OF THE FIRE

The next few days were the worst Matt had experienced since he had arrived in Yorkshire.

Mrs Deverill worked him harder than ever and Noah never left his side. The hours passed in a tedious procession of cleaning, painting, chopping, mending and carrying. Matt was close to despair. He had tried to escape to London and he had failed. He had gone looking for clues in the wood but had found almost nothing. Two people had tried to help him and they had both died. Nobody else cared. A sort of fog had descended on his mind. He had given in. He would remain at Hive Hall until Mrs Deverill had finished with him. Maybe she planned to keep him there all his life and he would end up hollowed out and empty, like Noah, a dribbling slave.

Then, one evening – Matt thought it was a Saturday, although all days had become very much the same – Mrs Deverill’s sister Claire came to dinner. He hadn’t seen the teacher since his encounter with her in Lesser Malling. Sitting next to her at the kitchen table, he found it hard to keep his eyes off her birthmark, the discolouration that covered most of her face. He was both drawn to it and repulsed at the same time.

“Jayne tells me that you have been missing school,” she remarked in her strange, high-pitched voice.

“I haven’t been to school because she won’t let me go,” Matt replied. “I have to work here.”

“And yet when you were at school, you regularly missed class. You played truant. You preferred shoplifting and loitering on motorway bridges, smoking. That’s what I heard.”

“I never smoked,” Matt growled.

“Modern children have no real education,” Jayne Deverill remarked. She was serving some sort of stew out of a pot. The meat was thick and fatty, and came in a rich, blood-coloured gravy. Road kill in a primeval swamp. “You see them in the street in their shapeless clothes, listening to what they call music but what you or I would call a horrible noise. They have no respect, no intelligence, no taste. And they think the world belongs to them!”

“They’ll soon find out…” Claire Deverill muttered.

There was a knock at the door and Noah appeared, dressed in what might have passed for a suit except that it was about fifty years old, faded and shapeless. He wore a shirt buttoned to the neck, but no tie. He looked to Matt like an out-of-work funeral director.

“The car’s ready,” he announced.

“We’re still eating, Noah.” Jayne Deverill scowled. “Wait for us outside.”

“It’s raining.” Noah sniffed the food hopefully.

“Then wait in the car. We’ll be out soon.”

Matt waited until Noah had gone. “Are you going out?” he asked.

“We might be.”

“Where?”

“When I was young, a child never asked questions of his elders,” Claire Deverill said.

“Was that before or after the First World War?” Matt asked.

“Pardon?”

“Forget it…”

Matt fell silent and finished his meal. Jayne Deverill stood up and went over to the kettle. “I’m making you a cup of herbal tea,” she explained.

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