Triskellion

by Will Peterson

Adam saw what Rachel was trying to do. “That’s right,” he said. “That’s what I was talking about…”

  Trying to put her thoughts elsewhere, Rachel became aware of a low humming: the noise of a bee. She tried to look for it, but then the commodore stepped towards her, spoke quietly and menacingly.

  “Are you trying to be clever, girl? Are you hiding something?”

  Rachel suddenly felt her anger rising. She and Adam had been up in front of a kangaroo court of Triskellion dignitaries before and she remembered that going on the attack had been an effective tactic.

  “You’ve got some nerve!” she shouted. “Talking about hiding things.”

  Celia Root gasped at her granddaughter’s audacity. “Rachel!”

  “No, I mean it. You people keep everything secret. It’s like there’s always something unspoken going on between you all. You whisper and you plot, and you’ve treated us like criminals ever since we got here.”

  “Now you listen to me…” the commodore said.

  But Rachel wasn’t listening. She could hear nothing but the blood fizzing in her veins and the low hum of the solitary bee. “Apart from anything else, it’s bloody bad manners.” Rachel was well into her stride and enjoyed spitting out her new, English swearword. Adam kept his head bowed.

  “I don’t think you know the meaning of manners,” Celia Root said, in a trembling voice. “If you are keeping something secret, then you’d better tell us.”

  Rachel looked at her grandmother’s twitching face. This woman was almost her nearest blood relative and in her eyes she saw what, at first glance, she took for hatred.

  Rachel looked again.

  What she could actually see was fear.

  She glanced at the commodore and saw the same thing. She looked from one to the other and saw two old people, somehow smaller now than before, and bowed; shrunken suddenly by a secrecy that held them together but which also tormented them.

  Where moments before they had been deeply scary, they were now just two, frightened old people.

  Movement in the corner of the room caught her eye and she looked up to see the bee. Watched as it buzzed aimlessly around, butting into curtains and circling the dusty light fitting.

  Zzzzz … dnk. Zzzzz … dnk. Zzzzz…

  Rachel turned her attention back to the commodore, and followed a hunch. “While we’re all talking about secrets, perhaps you’d like to tell us about the things that are written in the church? About Wings and Roots. About how they shouldn’t … mix?”

  Rachel’s arrow hit the target squarely. Her grandmother and the commodore stood in stunned silence, their faces drained of blood.

  “You don’t know what you’re meddling with,” Commodore Wing said quietly.

  Rachel saw the expression on the old man’s face and felt the look of defiance slip slowly from her own.

  Reverend Stone stepped forward and broke the silence.

  “Mrs Root, may I?”

  The old woman gave a small nod, wiping a tear from her eye with a lipstick-stained tissue.

  The vicar stepped towards Rachel, took a deep breath and yelled into her face. “Where is my blade?” Rachel flinched at the flecks of spittle that hit her cheek, but said nothing.

  “Leave her alone,” Adam said.

  The vicar turned his gaze to Adam and put a finger to his thin lips. “Shush,” he said. Then, from nowhere, his spindly arm swung wildly round and he slapped Rachel hard across the face.

  Rachel screamed, and Adam moved, balling his hand into a fist and tensing to throw a punch at the vicar’s scrawny throat.

  Rachel’s arm stopped him. “No, Adam,” she said, choking away tears.

  Then the bee landed on Reverend Stone’s cheek…

  He flicked at the insect, trying to remove it, but the bee’s thorny feet held tight and it would not budge. Then another bee landed on his forehead, and another on his neck. Stone yelped as the first bee stung.

  Rachel and Adam watched in amazement as a column of bees flew into the room from the kitchen. A dozen at first, then fifty … maybe a hundred, buzzing in through the open kitchen window, until the air in the room was black with the vibrating bodies and thick with their angry buzzing.

  Celia Root’s shrieks joined the screams of Reverend Stone as he was stung, again and again. The commodore was bent over the wheelchair, like a tweedy shell, heroically protecting the old woman from the insects yet, while bees crawled over the two of them, keeping them in check, neither seemed to sustain any stings.

  Rachel and Adam stood frozen on the spot, horrified yet unable to take their eyes from the hideous spectacle in front of them.

  Reverend Stone screamed until his voice was cracked and raw. He had fallen writhing to the floor, as every exposed inch of his flesh – his face, his eyelids, his lips, his ears and his hands – was covered with a throbbing layer of bees, stinging him repeatedly.

  Rachel turned away, disgusted by the unearthly howl and the thrashing of Stone’s stick-like limbs as the bees stung him to death. Astonished by the fact that neither she nor Adam seemed of any interest to the swarm.

  That they had been left completely untouched.

  Rachel stepped round the flailing body and ran towards the door. “I’ll get help,” she shouted, though even as she said it, she had no idea where help might come from.

  She opened the door, hoping that the bees might fly out, but they stayed where they were, clustered round the adults in the room. She screamed for help, then saw two figures standing near the garden gate in the lane. She realized that it was Gabriel, and beside him, Jacob Honeyman, and she screamed again.

  Neither Gabriel nor Honeyman moved from the other side of the fence, but as Rachel’s scream died in her throat, the bees began to fly out of the door: a single line of five or six at first, then a thick phalanx, snaking off down the garden like black smoke.

  Rachel turned back into the room, where one or two stray bees still darted and dipped around the ceiling rose. The bodies of hundreds of others – dead and dying after losing their stings – lay scattered across the floor. Celia Root sobbed, and Commodore Wing dared not move. She looked across at her brother. He was still rooted to the spot, staring down at Reverend Stone.

  The vicar’s head had swollen to the size of a football, purple and raw. His eyes had all but disappeared beneath eyelids that had swelled and closed completely. His sharp nose was now like an overripe strawberry, smeared across his face, and his puffed-up lips trickled with blood and drool and venom.

  Rachel’s hands flew to her mouth. “Oh, my God…”

  From the end of his black sleeves, the vicar’s once pale and delicate fingers protruded like those of inflated rubber gloves.

  “He’s dead,” Adam said.

  The twins sat shaking at the rickety table, while Jacob Honeyman put the kettle on. Adam picked at flakes of coloured paint that peeled from the table top while Rachel chewed at her knuckle nervously.

  “Hot sweet tea,” Jacob honked from the kitchen. “That should help.”

  Adam managed a grudging laugh. “Is there anything in this country that can’t be solved by tea?”

  The atmosphere in Honeyman’s shack was not lightened by Adam’s attempt at a joke. The single light bulb over the table illuminated everything with a stark, clinical glare, throwing dark shadows into the corners and making everyone look yellow and ill. In fact, Rachel felt ill; the sickening spectacle of the dying vicar imprinted on her mind’s eye, and the deafening hum of bees still fresh in her ears.

  It was seven o’clock. Three hours since Gabriel and Honeyman had whisked them away from Root Cottage with their grandmother’s screams still tearing jagged holes in the afternoon air.

  Gabriel sat slumped in Honeyman’s battered old armchair staring at the floor. The light cast shadows under his eyes and made his cheekbones look sharper, his hair blacker. Rachel stared at him. He looked serious, and for the first time since they had met, Rachel felt a little scared of him.

  Gabri
el sensed her stare and looked up at her. “Well?” he asked, without opening his mouth.

  “I can’t believe you just stood by and let it happen,” Rachel said. “I mean, the guy died in front of our eyes, in terrible pain. This is serious stuff. This is life and death stuff … not a stupid treasure hunt.”

  “You’re assuming I had some kind of control over it,” Gabriel said.

  “Well, you did. Didn’t you?” Rachel knew only too well what Gabriel was capable of. She had no trouble imagining that he had somehow controlled that swarm of bees.

  Gabriel and Honeyman exchanged a glance.

  “Maybe he had it coming to him,” Gabriel said.

  Rachel couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “What?”

  “Maybe it was just payback for something that happened in the past.”

  Honeyman nodded. “Something in the past…”

  “Things catch up with people eventually.” Gabriel shrugged, coolly, as if he were talking about a minor debt.

  “So a guy gets stung to death because he’s a nasty old vicar?” Adam asked, shocked.

  Gabriel smiled, but just for a second or two. “I’m not talking about him specifically,” he said. “But perhaps someone like him did something bad a long time ago. He hit you, Rachel, because you tried to stand up to him, because you’re strong-willed. A few hundred years ago, he would have burned you as a witch. A thousand years before that, he might have sacrificed you to please the gods.”

  “A thousand years is a long time,” Rachel said. The vision of the knight and the maiden – of their final resting place and the hooded man brandishing the curved knife – flashed momentarily through her mind; an image rapidly replaced by a picture of the twisted, mummified bodies in the log coffin.

  “Sometimes revenge takes a long time.” Gabriel sat back in his chair. He looked almost pleased with himself.

  “Whoa. I don’t get this,” Adam said. “You mean, he’s taking the rap for something that happened in the past? Someone else did something bad and he pays the consequences? How’s that fair?”

  “Who said anything about fair?” Gabriel said. “Do you think people have been fair to you? We’re all paying for stuff that was done in the past in some way or another. For things that were done by others.”

  “Yeah, well, you can’t take it out on innocent people,” Rachel said. “If everyone thought like that we’d still be fighting the grandchildren of soldiers who did terrible things in the Second World War.” Adam nodded. They both remembered with horror the stories their father had told them about his grandparents being driven out of Poland during the war. How other family members had not been so lucky; how they had stayed and died. “We’d still be at war with people whose fathers and grandfathers killed members of our family in the concentration camps. It doesn’t work like that, Gabriel. It can’t. You have to forgive…”

  “Not where I come from,” Gabriel said, standing and looking from one twin to the other. “Where I come from, we get even.” After a few seconds he grinned suddenly, as if the conversation had never happened.

  “What?” Rachel said.

  Gabriel reached into his pocket. He pulled out a glinting Triskellion blade and placed it on the table in front of the twins.

  “You stole it from the church,” Adam shouted. “Do you know how much trouble we got into because of that? They blamed us…”

  “That’s not the blade from the church,” Honeyman said, putting cups of tea down in front of the twins. “It’s the one you hid under the floorboards in the cottage. It wasn’t very hard for him to nip in and grab it while you two were having a ding-dong with your nan. He was worried you’d spill the beans and tell them about it.”

  Adam felt himself redden. It was true, he almost had told them. “Talking about spilling the beans,” he said. “You were the one who blabbed about the blade we found in the woods.”

  Honeyman looked at his feet. “I didn’t have no choice,” he said. “They’d already hurt me once. Who knows what Hilary Wing might have done?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Gabriel said.

  “Listen, you need to do what he tells you,” Honeyman said. “You’ve got to trust him.” He looked at Gabriel, who smiled at him benevolently.

  “I’m glad somebody thinks so,” Gabriel said.

  “You’ve got to stop blaming him or me, or worrying about what the old people think. None of it’s important. This is bigger than all that, and we’re nearly there now.”

  “Nearly where?” Adam asked, confused.

  “Nearly at the end of it all,” Gabriel said. “We’ve got different journeys home, but we all need the Triskellion back together before we can move on.”

  “But we’ve only got one piece of it,” Rachel said, flatly. “The other one was stolen, remember?”

  Honeyman took a quick slurp of tea, and began to fish in the deep pockets of his baggy trousers. “If you want to know who done the stealing from the church…” He pulled out a second blade, which he lay on the table next to the first.

  Rachel and Adam looked open-mouthed at the blades which, seen together for the first time, looked brighter, more vibrant than either had done separately. They looked like new; better than new and their gleam seemed to give off more light than the single bulb that had begun to sway gently above the table.

  “They’re beautiful,” Adam said.

  The blades seemed to shimmer, then vibrate, rocking from side to side as if controlled by a magnetic force. Then slowly they began to spin, until they were positioned, point to point, their flattened centres overlapping.

  Honeyman clapped his hands together, delighted. “See, they’re finding themselves. Getting their bearings.”

  “Their bearings for what?” Adam asked, staring at the blades as they continued to hum softly against the wooden table top.

  “We need the third one to find out,” Gabriel said. “We know where it is.”

  “That’s right,” Honeyman said. “We know where it is all right.”

  “But there’s only two people here who can go in and get it.”

  As Adam and Rachel returned the stares of Gabriel and Jacob Honeyman, it became very clear to them who those two people were.

  As soon as Hilary Wing had closed the door of The Star behind him, Tom Hatcham threw the bolts and drew a curtain across the window. Wing studied the silent faces, the forlorn figures sitting at tables staring back at him.

  Most of Triskellion seemed to have gathered in the small saloon: the Bacon brothers; the couple from the bakery, the greengrocer, the butcher and the old woman who ran the post office; the entire staff of the village school, the cricket team and the committee that maintained the green and the village’s floral arrangements.

  Hatcham went back behind the bar and poured a large glass of red wine. Wing took the glass, all but emptied it in one.

  “Stone’s dead,” Hatcham said. “Toxic shock, the ambulance men reckoned.”

  “I know,” Hilary snapped.

  “Freakiest bloody thing. All those bees…”

  Hilary turned to see his father sitting in the large armchair beneath the window, nursing a glass of whisky. Celia Root sat looking drained and traumatized beside him.

  “There was nothing we could do,” Commodore Wing said. The old man had tried to sound authoritative, but his voice sounded as frail, as empty, as Celia Root looked. In truth, the terrible events at Root Cottage had shaken them to the core, and both were riddled with fear and doubt. And worse, with guilt…

  Was any way of life, any secret, worth dying for?

  Perhaps they had held on to the past for too long, and now they were paying in blood.

  Wing could see the uncertainty in their faces and, with it, his chance to seize control. He leant down close to the table so that no one else in the room could hear. “So we still don’t know if they’ve got the blade?”

  The commodore shook his head.

  Wing turned round and addressed the room. “So where have these blo
ody children gone?” He looked from face to face. “Someone’s sheltering them.”

  “All we know is that they’ve disappeared,” Hatcham said.

  “They’re not with the telly lot either,” one of the domino boys added. “We checked.”

  His friend nodded and chimed in. “They disappeared from the scene of a fatality, that’s all we need to know. Perhaps this really is a police matter.”

  “Shut up, you moron,” Wing barked across the bar. The room fell silent as the man reddened, and Wing wiped away the smirk on Hatcham’s face with one withering glance. “Nothing in Triskellion is a police matter.” Wing stepped away from the bar, began to move slowly between the tables. “Things that happen in Triskellion are Wing matters and have been for centuries.” He turned to look straight at the commodore. “They used to be handled by my father…”

  “Still are,” the commodore growled. He tried to stand, but Celia Root reached across the table and laid a hand on his arm.

  “I don’t think so,” Hilary said. “You’ve lost control.”

  “That’s not true…”

  “I’m afraid it is.” Hilary Wing raised his voice for all to hear. “There was a time when a TV camera wouldn’t have got within miles of this place. There was a time when we paid no heed to outside opinion and ran the village by ancient rules.” He turned his gaze to Celia Root. “And there was a time when bastard offspring wouldn’t have been welcomed back here with open arms.”

  Celia Root took a sharp intake of breath. “Watch your mouth, Hilary,” she spat. “These are my grandchildren here and they’ve as much right to be here as you do. I am as keen to preserve our way of life as anyone else here.”

  “Maybe that’s because you have more to hide than anyone else.”

  “Shut up,” the commodore said, steel in his voice again.

  Wing pointed an accusing finger at his father. “Maybe that’s because both of you have something to hide. Because, actually, you have done more to damage this village than anyone else has ever done.”

  Some of the villagers began to murmur and to look from one to another in confusion.