Raven's Gate

walking towards the gate when he heard a soft sound like the breaking of a twig. What now? It was getting dark and there was no moon tonight.
    “Who is it?” he called out.
    He looked up and smiled to himself, turning the torch off again. One of the ornate lamps, illuminated for the night, had blown a bulb. That was what he had heard.
    “I am scared,” he muttered to himself. It was a phrase he had learned at foreign-language school only the day before. “You are scared. He is scared.”
    A second bulb blinked out. Then a third and a fourth. Rapidly the darkness made its way along the whole line of lamps, squeezing the life out of the bulbs until none of them remained alight. The guard rubbed his shoulders. It suddenly felt much colder. He breathed out and saw his own breath frost. It was crazy. It was almost the end of April but it seemed that winter had just returned.
    He pressed the switch of his torch. The bulb exploded in his hand, grey smoke curling beneath the glass. That was when the guard decided to call it a night. The museum had its own sophisticated alarm system. It could look after itself. And if he was fired, what did he care? He could always get that job at KFC.
    The guard unlocked the gate and scurried through, then crossed the road, dodging the traffic through to South Kensington tube station. He didn’t see the shadows reaching out to enclose the museum or the soft, white mist that trickled over the grass. All he knew was that he wanted to get away. He didn’t once look back.
    Matt finished his story. He shivered in the sudden cold but neither Richard nor the professor seemed to notice it.
    “Well, what do you think?” Richard asked.
    Professor Dravid turned on his desk lamp. “It’s almost impossible to believe,” he said. “From a warehouse in Ipswich to Lesser Malling and then to here. Nobody would believe it. Even to you it must seem incomprehensible. But let me tell you straight away, Matt, that you are
meant
to be here. There are no coincidences. It’s all happening the way it was meant to be.”
    “But what
is
happening?” Matt asked. “What are Mrs Deverill and the rest of them doing in Lesser Malling? What is Raven’s Gate?”
    “We’re not leaving until you tell us,” Richard added.
    “Of course I will tell you.” Dravid looked at Matt and there was something strange in his eyes; a sense of puzzlement and wonder. It was as if Dravid had been waiting to meet him all his life.
    “If I told anybody else what I’m about to tell you now,” he began, “my reputation – everything I’ve worked for – would disappear overnight. It makes no sense. Not in the real world, anyway. Susan Ashwood may have seemed eccentric to you. You might have thought she was a fraud. However, I’m telling you she was right. There
is
another world. We are surrounded by it. There is an alternative history as alive in the streets of twenty-first-century London as it was many thousands of years ago, when it all began. But only cranks and lunatics are meant to believe in it because, you see, that way everyone feels safer…
    “Raven’s Gate is at the very heart of that alternative history. Few people have even heard of it. Look for it on the Internet, as you did, and you won’t find anything. But that doesn’t make it any less real. It is the reason why you are here now. It may even be the reason why you were born.”
    Dravid stopped. The room seemed to be getting darker and darker. The desk lamp had only pushed back the shadows a little way. They were still there, waiting.
    “Raven’s Gate was the name given to a strange circle of stones that stood, until the Middle Ages, outside Lesser Malling. It was mentioned by name in Elizabeth Ashwood’s book – the only occasion, to my knowledge, that it has ever appeared in print. Standing stones are by no means unique to Lesser Malling. There are at least six hundred examples in Britain. The most famous of them is Stonehenge in Wiltshire.
    “You have to remember how mysterious all these stone circles are. Consider Stonehenge. No one is quite certain why it was built. There must have been a purpose. After all, it took a million and a half man-hours to construct. The stones, some of them weighing up to fifty tons, were carried all the way across England, and actually constructing the circle required a fantastic knowledge of engineering. Obviously it wasn’t put there just for decoration.
    “Some say that Stonehenge is a temple. Some say