And then Matt smelled it again. Burnt toast. And at exactly the same moment, the doors burst open and as he stared in horror, a river of flame rushed in towards him, rolling down the corridor, peeling away the walls, scorching everything in its path. There were two boys standing there and suddenly they were black, skeletons, X-rays of themselves as they had been seconds before. It was as if hell had come to Forrest Hill. Matt saw a dozen more boys swallowed up instantly, too quickly even for them to cry out. They were incinerated where they stood. And then the fire reached him and he flinched, waiting for his own death.
But it didn’t come.
There was no flame.
Matt must have closed his eyes. When he opened them again, everything was exactly as it had been before. It was two minutes to one. Morning lessons had ended. Everyone was on their way to lunch. He had simply imagined it.
Except that he knew. It wasn’t his imagination.
He couldn’t just walk out of the school after all. The fire hadn’t happened but it was about to. That was what he had been sensing from the moment he had arrived that day.
He looked around him. A bell sounded. The lunch bell. It told him what he had to do. He took three steps down the corridor and found a fire alarm, set behind a glass panel and mounted on the wall. He used his elbow to smash the glass, then pressed the alarm button with his thumb.
At once, much louder bells sounded throughout the school. Everyone stopped what they were doing and began to look at each other, half-smiling, wondering what was going on. They knew the sound of the fire alarm. There had been fire drills often enough. But it was as if no one wanted to make the first move, afraid of looking foolish.
“There’s a fire!” Matt shouted. “Move!”
One or two boys began to make their way past him, walking away from the double doors and back towards the other side of the school. The main assembly point was a football field next to the chapel. As soon as the first few had started moving, others followed. Matt heard doors opening and slamming. People were asking questions but the alarm was so loud that Matt couldn’t make out any words.
Then Mr O’Shaughnessy appeared. The assistant head-master was looking flustered. His face, never cheerful at the best of times, was thunderous. There were pinpricks of red in his usually pallid cheeks. He saw Matt standing next to the fire alarm. His eyes moved and took in the broken glass.
“Freeman!” he exclaimed. He had to shout to make himself heard. “Did you do that?”
“Yes.”
“You set off the alarm?”
“Yes.”
“Where’s the fire?”
Matt said nothing.
Mr O’Shaughnessy took his silence as an admission of guilt. “If you’ve done this as a prank, you will be in 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.”