Nightrise

intend to find out. They were climbing down. The ground had fallen away so steeply that they had to use their hands and feet to guide themselves down. The road was high up above them and unless the police followed them over the fence, they would be out of sight. With Jamie leading the way, they scrambled down the last few yards, using the lower branches of the fir trees to stop themselves from falling. At last their feet hit shingle. They had reached the edge of the lake. The water spread out in front of them, millions and millions of gallons of it. And despite everything that had happened and the exertion of the descent, Jamie felt strangely at peace. It was as if he had come home. He-still didn't know for certain that he would find what he expected to find, but he was glad he was here.
    He turned around — and there it was, just as Derry had said. A path of pure, white sand led to an opening in the rock. The cave was very dark and twisted back underneath the road. There was a design scratched into the surface, just above the entrance, so faint that he might not have noticed it unless he had been looking for it. A five-pointed star. Anyone else might think it had been carved recently but Jamie knew differently. It had been put there a long, long time ago.
    Someone shouted, high above. One of the policemen. Jamie took a deep breath. It was finally over. It was time for him to go.
    He took hold of his brother. The two of them walked up the path and together they went into the cave.

    ***
    The police never found them. They climbed down and searched along the shoreline. They even looked inside the cave although they had heard of the Washoe traditions and knew they had no right to be there.
    By the time the sun began to set, there were more than a dozen officers in the area. But if Scott and Jamie Tyler had ever been there, they had now completely disappeared. Had they walked into the lake and drowned? It seemed impossible. They would surely have been seen from above, and anyway, there was no sign of the bodies.
    Alicia was admitting nothing. In fact she and Danny denied that the two boys had ever been in the car.
    She demanded to speak to Senator Trelawny.
    And while the police were calling off the search and discussing what to do next, many thousands of miles away, a door in a church had opened and two boys were stepping out into a strange and unfamiliar world. A few tourists glanced at them curiously. A priest who had seem them emerge scratched his head in puzzlement. The door had been kept locked for as long as he could remember and he was sure that there was nothing more than an empty storeroom on the other side.
    It took Scott and Jamie half an hour to find a tour guide who spoke English, and from her they learned that they had arrived in Peru, even if they had managed to wind up in quite the wrong part of the country. They were in the city of Cuzco, high up in the Andes. The church was called Santo Domingo and had been built by the Spanish on top of another sacred site…Coricancha, the temple of gold, once a place of worship for the ancient Incas.
    They were far away from Nevada and although everything — including the language — was very alien to them, they knew they were safe. That night, they stayed in a hotel. At the very last moment, acting on impulse, Alicia had pressed a hundred dollars into Jamie's hand. The money would pay for a room and a meal. The next morning they would use it to buy two bus tickets to a little town on the western coast. A place called Nazca.
    In fact, the journey took them more than forty-eight hours. Scott still wasn't talking — he wasn't even sending any thoughts — and at night, when he was asleep, he would mutter and cry out and his body would twitch as if it were being prodded or given electric shocks. Jamie forced himself not to worry.
    Pedro was waiting. The healer. Scott would see him and he would be all right.
    Three days later, they arrived. A taxi dropped them at an attractive, whitewashed house set in a large garden with fountains playing and llamas wandering across the lawn. As they walked through the gate, the front door of the house opened and a boy emerged. Jamie recognized him at once. Dark hair cut short. Broad shoulders. Blue eyes.
    It was Matt.
    Another boy stepped out behind him, and again Jamie knew at once who he was. Pedro. It seemed strange to think that the last time they had met, they had been drinking wine together in a field just hours after