“I was nineteen when I told my father that I wanted to take holy orders. He was horrified. I was his only son and he had always assumed that I would go into politics, like him. He tried to talk me out of it. He arranged for me to travel around the world, hoping that if I saw all the riches that the West had to offer, it would change my mind.
“In fact, it did the exact opposite. Everything I saw in Europe and America disgusted me. Wealthy families with huge homes and expensive cars, living just a mile away from children who were dying because they could not afford medicine. Countries at war, the people killing and maiming each other because of politicians too stupid to find another way. The noise of modern life; the planes and the cars, the concrete smothering the land. The pollution and the garbage. The people, in their millions, scurrying on their way to jobs they hated…”
Scarlett shrugged. “So you weren’t happy,” she said. “What’s that got to do with me?”
“It has everything to do with you and if you interrupt me again I will have you whipped until the skin peels off your back.”
Father Gregory paused. Scarlett was completely shocked but didn’t want to show it. She said nothing.
“I entered a seminary in England,” he continued, “and trained to become a monk. I spent six years there, then another three in Tuscany before finally I came here. That was thirty years ago. This was a very beautiful and very restful place when I first arrived, a refuge from the rest of the world. The weather was harsh and, in the winter, the days were short. But the way of life suited me. Prayer six times a day, simple meals and silence while we ate. We cultivated all our food ourselves. I have spent many hundreds of hours hacking at the barren soil that surrounds us. When I wasn’t in the fields, I was helping in the local villages, tending to the poor and the sick.
“A holy life, Scarlett. And so it might have remained. But then everything changed. And all because of a door in a wall.”
Father Gregory hadn’t touched his tea, but suddenly he picked up his glass between his finger and thumb and tipped the scalding liquid back. Scarlett saw his throat bulge. It was like watching a sick man take his medicine.
“It puzzled me from the start. A door that seemed to belong to a different building with a strange device – a five-pointed star – that had nothing to do with this place. A door that went nowhere.” He lifted a hand to stop her interrupting. “It went nowhere, child. Believe me. There was a brief corridor on the other side and then a blank wall.
“The monastery was then run by an abbot who was much older than me. His name was Father Janek. And one day, walking in the cloisters, I asked him about it.
“He wouldn’t tell me. A simple lie might have ended my curiosity, but Father Janek was too good a man to lie. Instead, he told me not to ask any more questions. He quickened his pace and as he walked away, I saw that he was afraid.
“From that day on, I became fascinated by the door. We had an extensive library here, Scarlett, with more than ten thousand books – although most of them have now mouldered away. Some of them were centuries old. I searched through them. It took me many years. But slowly – a sentence here, a fragment there – a story began to emerge. But in the end, it was one book, a secret copy of a diary written by a Spanish monk in 1532 that told me everything I wanted to know.”
He stopped and ran his eyes over the girl as if she were the most precious thing he had ever seen. Scarlett was revolted and didn’t try to hide it. The eyes underneath the white eyebrows were devouring her. She could see saliva on the old man’s lips.
“The Old Ones,” he whispered, and although Scarlett had never heard those words before, they meant something to her; some memory from the far distant past. “The diary told me about the great battle that had taken place ten thousand years ago when the Old Ones ruled the world and mankind were their slaves. Pure evil. The Bible talks of devils… of Lucifer and Satan. But that’s just story-telling. The Old Ones were real. They were here. And the one who ruled over them, Chaos, was more powerful than anything in the universe.”
“So what happened to them?” Scarlett asked. Her voice had almost dropped to a whisper. Apart from the flames, twisting in the hearth, everything in the room was still.
“They were defeated and cast out. There were five children…” he spoke the word with contempt. “They came to be known as the Gatekeepers. Four boys and a girl.” He levelled his eyes on Scarlett and she knew what he was going to say next. “You are the girl.”
Scarlett shook her head. “You’re wrong. That’s insane. I’m not anything. I’m just a schoolgirl. I go to school in London…”
“How do you think you got here?” The monk pointed in the direction of the corridor with a single trembling finger. Some sort of liquid was leaking out of his damaged eye, a single tear. “You have seen the monastery and the snow. You know you are not in London now.”
“You drugged me.”
“You came through the door! It was all there in the diary. There were twenty-five doorways built all around the world. They were there for the Gatekeepers so that when the time came, they would be able to travel great distances in seconds. Only the Gatekeepers could use them. Nobody else. When I pass through the door, I find myself in a corridor, a dead end. But it’s not the same for you. It brought you here.”
Scarlett shook her head. Nothing she had heard made any sense at all. She didn’t even know where to begin. “I’m not ten thousand years old,” she said. “Look at me! You can see for yourself. I’m fifteen!”
“You have lived twice, at two different times.” He laughed delightedly. “It’s beyond belief,” he said. “Finally to meet one of the Gatekeepers after all these years and to find that she has no idea who or what she is.”
“You mentioned there was an abbot here,” Scarlett said. “I want to talk to him.”
“Father Janek is dead.” He sighed. “I haven’t told you the rest of my story. Maybe then you will understand.” He nodded at her glass. “You haven’t drunk your tea.”
“I don’t want it.”
“I would take what you are given while you still can, child. There is much pain for you ahead.”
Scarlett’s tea was right in front of her. Briefly, she thought about picking it up and flinging it in his face. But it wouldn’t do much good. It was probably lukewarm by now.
“The discovery of the diary, along with all the other fragments, changed my life,” the monk continued. “I began to think about the reasons why I had come to the monastery in the first place. Did I really think that religion – prayer and fasting – would help me change the world? Or was I just using religion to hide from it? Suddenly I knew what had brought me here. Hatred. I hated the world. I hated mankind. And praying to God to save us was ridiculous. God isn’t interested! If He was, don’t you think He’d have done something centuries ago?
“My whole life had been devoted to an illusion. All those prayers, the same words repeated again and again. Did they really make any sense? Of course not! The cries for mercy that would never come. Kneeling and making signs, singing hymns while, outside in the street, people were killing each other and trying to make as much money as they could to spend on themselves and to hell with everyone else. Do you never read the papers? What do you see in them except for murder and lust and greed, all day, every day? Do you not see the nature of the world in which you live?
“There is no God, Scarlett. I know that now. But there are the Old Ones. They are our natural masters. They deserve to rule the world because the world is evil and so are they.”
He paused for breath. Scarlett looked at him with a mixture of pity and disgust. She had already decided that this wasn’t about God or about religion. It was about a man who had nothing inside him. The years had hollowed out Father Gregory until there was nothing left.