Evil Star Read Online Free PDF Page B

Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star seen, I'm frankly amazed. You didn't listen to me last time. This time you must. It's as if winter has come in the spirit world. Everything is cold and dark, and I hear the whispers of a growing fear. Some-thing is happening that I don't understand. But I know what it signifies. A second gate is about to open, and once again we have to stop it if we don't want the Old Ones to return. We want Matt to come to London. Only he has the power to prevent it."
    "Matt's in school," Richard protested. "He can't just get on a train and take a week off. ..."
    Matt looked out the window. Soon it would start to get dark.
    Shadows had already fallen over the Shambles and the streetlamps had come on. Richard reached out and turned the lights on inside, too. Light and dark. Always fighting each other.
    "I don't understand," Matt said. "You don't even know where this gate is. Why do you think I can help you?"
    "We're not the only ones looking for it," Susan Ashwood replied.
    "There has been a strange development, Matt. You would doubtless call it a coincidence, but I think it's more than that. I think it was
    meant to happen."
    She nodded at Fabian, who produced a DVD. "Can I play you this?"
    he asked.
    Richard waved a hand at the television. "Be my guest."
    Fabian fed the video into the player and turned the television on.
    Matt found himself watching a news report. "We recorded this last week," Fabian said.
    The DVD began with a shot of a leather-bound book, lying on a table. It was obviously very old. A hand reached forward and began to turn the pages, showing them to be thick and uneven, covered Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star with writing and intricate draw-ings that had been made with an ink pen or perhaps even a quill. Matt had seen something very like it at school. The history teacher had brought in pictures of a fifteenth-century book of poetry rescued from some castle. The letters had been drawn so carefully that each one was a miniature artwork.
    Many of the pages in the book were the same.
    "Some people are already describing it as the find of a lifetime," the commentator explained. "It was written by St. Joseph of Cordoba, a Spanish monk who traveled with Pizarro to Peru in 1532 and witnessed the destruction of the Inca empire. St. Joseph later came to be known as the Mad Monk of Cordoba. His diary, bound in leather and gold, may explain why."
    The camera moved in closer on the pages. Matt could make out some of the words — but they were all in Spanish and meant nothing to him.
    "The diary contains many remarkable predictions," the voice continued. "Although it was written almost five hun-dred years ago, it describes in detail the coming of motor cars, computers, and even space satellites. On one of the later pages, it manages to predict some sort of Internet, working inside the church."
    Now the television program cut to a picture of a Spanish town and what looked like a huge fortress with a soaring bell tower, surrounded by narrow streets and markets.
    "The diary was found in the Spanish city of Cordoba. It is believed that it had been buried in the courtyard of the tenth-century mosque known as the Mezquita and must have been unearthed during excavations. It passed into private hands and may have been sold many times before it was discovered in a market by an English Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star antiques dealer, William Morton."
    Morton was in his fifties, plump, with silver hair and cheeks that had been burned by the sun. He was the sort of man who looked as if he enjoyed life.
    "I knew at once what it was," he said. His accent was very English, very upper class. "Joseph of Cordoba was an interesting chap. He traveled with Pizarro and the conquis-tadors when they invaded Peru. While he was out there, he stumbled onto some sort of alternative history. Devils and demons . . . that sort of thing. And he wrote down every-thing he knew in here."