The Power of Five Oblivion

them with my weight. We didn’t step outside. We didn’t want to show ourselves. We stood in the shadow of the doorway, looking out.
    And there was London.
    We were only three floors up but it felt as if we were higher. London was all around us; the terrible wreckage of what had once been a great city. It was like looking at a million oversized matchsticks, all dropped out of the box, one on top of the other. Almost nothing tall was left … just the broken remains of what had once been offices and flats, battered and corroded, sticking up as if they had somehow grown out of the mess. I’d seen photographs of the city … St Paul’s, the Millennium Wheel, the British Telecom Tower. But they’d all gone, reduced to this hopeless sprawl that stretched as far as the horizon. No. Here and there, whole buildings had survived. I picked out an office, a bank, the tube station we had come out of the night before. There was the yellow M of a McDonald’s. I’d read about those too. There were vehicles everywhere – cars, taxis, lorries and buses … hundreds of them, all of them rusted and broken, many of them lying upside down or on their sides. A bit shocked? Will hadn’t begun to express what I felt. I had never lived here. I had never known what it meant to be a Londoner. But thinking about them, and what they had been through, I felt sickened.
    “Over there…” the Traveller was pointing around the side of the house.
    A single building stood in front of us, and although it was surrounded by debris, it had hardly been damaged at all. It reminded me almost of a ship, moored in a port after a particularly vicious storm. It was a church, almost the size of a cathedral, made of dark red bricks with a steeple that looked as if it had been built at a different time to the rest of it, slightly crooked and reaching up into the sky. Only the windows had been smashed. I could make out the jagged outlines of what remained of the stained glass.
    The church was barely a hundred metres away.
    St Meredith’s. It had to be.
    “There it is,” the Traveller said.
    Jamie stared at it. He seemed to be dazed. “The door…”
    “Scarlett Adams went through it. It took her to the monastery of the Cry for Mercy in Ukraine. Maybe it’s working again. It can take you anywhere you want to go.”
    Jamie was still examining the church. “There doesn’t seem to be anyone around.”
    “Believe me, they’re here,” Will said. “Inside the church and in the wreckage. Look…!”
    Even as he spoke, I saw it. I was so shocked, I almost fell back down the stairs. A spider had appeared, coming round the side of the church. It was monstrous, enormous, and about half the size of the church itself. Its eyes were hideous … as black as oil pools. It had two tentacle-things, protruding out of its head, twitching at the air in front of it. I could see every hair on its body and legs. And as huge as it was, the spider seemed strangely light, moving across the rubble without disturbing it. When I say it was like something out of my worst nightmares, I’m not telling the truth. I had never had nightmares like this.
    I could feel Jamie standing beside me. His whole body was rigid. But what he said next really surprised me. “I have seen it before.”
    “When?” I had no control of myself. The word was like a scream but also a whisper.
    “A long time ago. At the first battle. The spider. The monkey. The condor. They were all there. They belong to the Old Ones.”
    “You see what we are up against,” Will muttered.
    “How long can we stay here?”
    “Three or four days. No more than that. It’s too dangerous … and if we stay here too long we’ll get sick.”
    “Matt said he’d send me a sign. We have to wait for it. Then we go in.”
    “Well, I hope he sends it soon, Jamie. Four days maximum. Then we have to leave.”
    “You leave. I’ll stay.”
    The two brothers looked at each other but there was nothing either of them could say. The spider had disappeared round the back of the church. I had seen enough. I reeled back into the house feeling sick, my heart pounding. I was glad when they closed the door.

THE GOOD PRIEST

FORTY-ONE
    Pedro was coughing up water, litres of it. The water was streaming out of his mouth and over his chin and he could feel his lungs bursting inside him as they strained to push the rest out. He opened his eyes and saw only a blur but gradually his vision cleared and he was able to make out a