Raven's Gate

more. Remembering only hurt him … every time.
    “What do you mean, you don’t want to go?”
    “Please, Dad. Please don’t make me…”
    They had argued, but not very much. His parents had only one child and they spoiled him. They had thought he would enjoy the wedding because they had been told there would be other children there and a special marquee with a magician and balloons. And now this! His father made a quick phone call. It wasn’t really a big problem. Rosemary Green – their friendly, always helpful neighbour – agreed to take him for the rest of the day. His parents left without him.
    And that was why he hadn’t been in the car when they had their accident. That was why they had died and he had lived.
    Matt lowered his hand and looked out again. The coach had slowed down. He wasn’t feeling very well. He was hot and cold, and there was a dull pounding in his head.
    “We’re here,” Mrs Deverill said.
    They had arrived at another coach station, this one more modern and smaller than Victoria. The coach stopped and they jostled forward with the other passengers. It was colder outside than it had been in London but at least it had stopped raining. Matt collected his case, then followed Mrs Deverill across the concourse.
    A man was waiting for them, standing next to a beaten-up old Land Rover that only seemed to be held together by the mud that covered it. The man was short and very fat with yellow, greasy hair, watery eyes and a face that seemed to be slowly slipping off his head. He was wearing dirty jeans and a shirt that was too small for him. Matt could see the buttons straining. The man was about forty. He had flabby lips that parted in a wet, unpleasant smile.
    “Good afternoon, Mrs Deverill,” he said.
    Mrs Deverill ignored him. She turned to Matt. “This is Noah.”
    Matt said nothing. Noah was examining him in a way that made him feel uneasy. “Welcome to Yorkshire,” Noah said. “I’m very pleased to meet you.” He held out a hand. The fingers were fat and stubby, the nails encrusted with mud. Matt didn’t take it.
    “Noah works for me on the farm,” Mrs Deverill explained. “He has very little conversation, so I wouldn’t bother talking to him.”
    The farmhand was still staring at him. His mouth was open and there was saliva on his chin. Matt turned away.
    “Get in the car,” Mrs Deverill said. “It’s time you saw your new home.”
    They drove for an hour; first on a dual carriageway, then on a B-road, then on a twisting country lane. The further they went, the bleaker the landscape became. Lesser Malling seemed to be hidden somewhere on the edge of the Yorkshire moors, but Matt didn’t see a single sign. He was feeling even sicker than before and he wondered if it was Noah’s driving or some sort of virus that he had picked up.
    They came to a crossroads – a meeting of five roads, all of them identical. There were trees on every side. Matt hadn’t noticed them enter the wood but now it surrounded them, totally enclosed them. The wood had obviously been planted recently. All the trees were the same – some sort of pine. They were the same height, the same colour and they had been set in dead straight lines with an identical amount of space between them. No matter which direction Matt looked, the view was exactly the same. He remembered what his social worker in London had told him. The LEAF Project wanted to keep him out of urban areas, away from temptation. They certainly couldn’t have chosen anywhere more remote than here.
    A single signpost stood at the intersection but the top had been broken off. A splintered pole was all that remained.
    “Lesser Malling is ten minutes up the road,” Mrs Deverill said, gesturing to the left. “I’ll show it to you when you’ve settled in a little more. But we live the other way.”
    Noah twisted the steering wheel and they turned left, following one of the other lanes for about fifty metres until they came to a gateway. Matt just had time to see a name, written in dull brown paint: Hive Hall. Then they were following a gravel drive between two barbed-wire fences that ran down to a courtyard and a complex of barns and buildings. The car stopped. They had arrived.
    Matt got out.
    It was a miserable place. The bad weather didn’t help but even in the sunshine there would have been little to recommend Hive Hall. The main farmhouse was made out of great stone slabs, with a slate roof that was buckling under the