Silence. Everything had stopped.
Then the creatures began to appear.
There was an eruption as if from a volcano and a huge bird exploded out of the ground in front of Matt and hung static in the air, its wings beating so fast that they were barely visible. The earth boiled all around it. Matt felt the air buffeting against him and covered his face with his arms, afraid of being blinded. It was a hummingbird. Its eyes were black and brilliant and full of wickedness. Its beak was half open and Matt knew that if it chose to, it could swallow him whole.
Four massive, hairy legs, then four more, suddenly appeared, reaching out over the edge of the desert, and a gigantic spider pulled itself up from below. Matt saw the poison sac hanging under its belly. Two glistening fangs jutted out of its neck. It paused for a moment, twitching, then scurried away.
There was a screech and a monkey leapt out of nowhere, its tail curling and uncurling, its teeth bared in a grotesque smile. One by one, the pictures that he had once seen from the air sprang to life. Matt stayed where he was, on his knees, waiting for his own death to come.
For perhaps twenty seconds, nothing more happened. Matt heard a buzzing sound. It started low and distant, then rose, getting louder and louder until it was as if there was a chainsaw trying to cut the world apart. Matt pressed his hands against his ears and the next moment a vast cloud of insects burst out of the cracks in the ground and twisted into the air. They were flies with fat, black bodies and beating wings. They flew out of the cracks in an endless swarm – thousands of them, then millions, then thousands of millions, a plague of flies thicker than the air, filling the entire sky. Then, as Matt watched in horror, they began to reform themselves. They flew together, forming the shapes of men, armed soldiers. Each man was made up of perhaps ten thousand flies and in an instant there was a whole army of them, standing to attention in long lines that stretched all the way back to the mountains.
They were the advance guard. But there were still more creatures climbing out of the bowels of the earth, finally breaking free from the world where they had been held captive for so many centuries.
The ones that came now were like no recognizable forms of life. They were just strange, freakish shapes with the beginnings of arms and legs stretching out of them. Some had horns, some teeth, some gleeful, bulging eyes. Some were part animal and part human – an alligator on men’s legs, a pig the size of a horse, a huge toad with the head of a bird. Each one was more deformed, more horrible than the one before, and they continued to pour out of the ground until the entire desert floor was covered by them. Some were black. Some were grey. Occasionally there were bursts of colour: green feathers, glistening white teeth, the dirty yellow of pus dripping from an open wound. They stood there, breathing the air of the world they had come to destroy, with the fly soldiers stretching out behind them, waiting for their first command.
But their true commander was still to come.
A fork of lightning splintered through the night sky and the rumbling deepened. One after the other, thirteen more figures in the form of men appeared on horseback, dressed in rusting armour and rags. Each one of them was a giant, ten feet tall. There was a flash of lightning – the entire sky blazed – and in that instant their shapes changed. Now they were skeletons, on skeleton animals. Another flash and they were ghosts, creatures made of smoke and air. They made no sound and moved like shadows, rippling across the desert surface. Once again they seemed to shimmer and become solid and stood in a semi-circle, waiting. It was colder than ever. Their breath was turning white, curling around their lips.
And at last the King of the Old Ones rose from the desert floor.
Matt trembled. The king was larger than any of the creatures that had appeared so far. If he had wanted to, he could surely have stretched up and touched the clouds. Each one of his finger nails would have been larger than Matt himself. It was difficult to see very much of him. Darkness clung to the terrible creature like a cloak hiding him. The King of the Old Ones was too gigantic to be seen, too horrible to be understood.
Very slowly, he became aware of Matt, scenting him in the same way that a poisonous snake might sense its prey. Matt felt the creature turn its eyes on him. He began to search for any of the power that might still be inside him even though he knew he would never have enough. There had to be five of them. But he was on his own.
Matt got to his feet.
“Go back!” he shouted. His voice was tiny. He was nothing more than an insect. “You have no place here.”
The King of the Old Ones laughed. It was a hideous sound, deep and deathly, like thunder, echoing all around.
A quarter of a mile away, lying beside the helicopter, Pedro heard the sound and turned to where he knew Matt must be standing.
“Matteo…” he whispered.
Matt heard him. The prophecy had been wrong. He wasn’t quite alone after all. Pedro was near by and if there were two of them, that doubled his power. With renewed strength, he got to his feet and lashed out, sending all the energy he had left towards the huge creature that was standing in front of him. The whole desert rippled. The King of the Old Ones screamed and fell back a pace; feeling his pain, all the other creatures screamed too. Later it would be said that the sound had been heard all over Peru, though nobody had been able to say what it was or from where it had come. It seemed to Matt that he was winning. The Old Ones were withering in front of him, shrivelling like scraps of paper in a bonfire. Pedro was with him and if the two of them could just continue a few seconds more…
But Matt had taken his power to its limit and it was burning him up. He saw two suns, searing his eyes. Something huge and black, bigger than the night itself, rushed in on him and struck him down. He was thrown backwards, crashing to the ground. Blood trickled from his nose and out of the corners of his eyes.
The King of the Old Ones, badly wounded and weakened, took one last look at the limp body, then calling his hordes around him, folded himself into the night.
THE HEALER
The doctor was a small, neat man with light-brown hair and glasses. He was holding a scratched and battered leather case that was too full to close properly. His name was Christian Nourry and he wasn’t Peruvian, but French, working with the Red Cross in some of the country’s poorest towns.
“I’m sorry, Professor Chambers,” he said. “There’s nothing more that I can do.”
“Is the boy dying?”
The doctor shrugged. “I’ve already told you. This is outside my experience. Matthew is in a deep coma. His heartbeat is far too slow and there seems to be very little activity in his brain. My guess would be that he is unlikely to recover. It would help me if you could explain how he got himself into this state.”
The professor shrugged.
“Well, in that case I can’t say for sure what’s going to happen. There is one thing I am sure about, though. He’d be a lot better off in a local hospital.”
“I don’t agree. There’s nothing a hospital can do for him that we can’t do here. And we’d prefer to keep an eye on him.”
“You mentioned another boy. What about him?”
“Pedro? He is in hospital. He broke his ankle and they had to put it in a cast. We’re expecting him back this afternoon.”