Triskellion

by Will Peterson

“I think you’d better explain yourself, Hilary,” Hatcham said.

  The village greengrocer stood up. “That’s right. You’re going to start accusing people of something, you’d better tell us what you’re on about.”

  Wing walked to the centre of the room. “How stupid are you people?” He looked at Hatcham, at the Bacon brothers, at all of them, knowing he was not going to get an answer, and spread out his arms. “This village is a special place. You know it is. You take it for granted that the crops around here never fail, that people don’t get ill as often as they might. How many of your parents and your grandparents lived well into their nineties? How old are some of you? You think that’s luck?”

  The air of confusion in the room grew thicker. “What else could it be?” Hatcham asked.

  Wing shook his head, like a schoolteacher losing patience with his pupils.

  “This has always been a lucky village,” a woman said. “Nobody from here died in the First World War, nor the Second.”

  “Blessed, that’s what we are,” another added. “Blessed by the ancient traveller, by the legend…”

  “It’s no legend,” Wing said.

  The women looked at each other, at Hatcham. “I don’t understand,” Hatcham said.

  Wing swore under his breath, exasperated. “Why are you all here?”

  “This business with Reverend Stone,” Hatcham said. “It’s not right, so we just thought—”

  “He was murdered,” Wing said.

  “Now you’re just being daft,” the greengrocer said. “He was stung to death. The commodore saw it happen.”

  Wing waved his hand, dismissing the man’s remark. “I don’t care what anyone saw happen. Those children … the Roots and the … other one. They are responsible for this, and now they have stolen something that does not belong to them.”

  Hatcham nodded. “The blade from the church.”

  “There are three blades,” Wing said. “The three blades that make up the Triskellion. These children already have two of them and thanks to that television show the whole bloody world knows where the third one is.” He looked round, enjoying the reaction as his comments sunk in. “So, what do you think your precious legend has to say about that? Think this place will still be blessed if the sacred symbol of our ancient traveller is disturbed?” He glared at the villagers. “How much bad luck do you think that might bring?”

  Tom Hatcham walked round the bar. He placed a hand on the shoulder of an old woman who looked close to tears; nodded an assurance to several others who looked deeply disturbed by what they were hearing. Then he looked across towards the window. “What do you reckon to all this, commodore?”

  Wing was not about to wait for an answer. “There’s going to be a change around here,” he boomed. “I am taking charge.”

  “You have no right,” the commodore said. “Not until I’m dead.”

  “Watch me,” his son said coldly. “Besides, we might not have too long to wait for that anyway.”

  The commodore lowered his head, the fight all but gone from him. Celia Root took his hand in hers and squeezed. Hilary Wing turned his attention to the rest of the assembly.

  “We must find these children and restore what belongs to us before it’s too late, by whatever means necessary. Then we’ll deal with those television people, and with anyone else who does not have the best interests of this village at heart. Anyone…”

  Wing looked round at the blank faces in the pub. He knew that most of these people had spent their lives keeping themselves to themselves, doing what had been expected of them and never questioning the way things were. Beyond the occasional dispute over a lawnmower or an unpaid bar bill, none of them had ever taken any sort of action in their lives. “Well?” he said. “Those who are with me, let’s go. We need to find those brats now.”

  Tom Hatcham looked towards the commodore, waiting for guidance that did not come. No one else moved.

  “You bloody fools!” Wing spat out the words angrily. “You inert morons. Your existence is threatened and you just sit here waiting for it to happen, like sheep.”

  There was a long silence, before the man from the dominos team finally coughed and spoke up. “Like I said, Hilary, what with the vicar and everything, I think this is a matter best dealt with by the police…”

  Something like a growl began low in Hilary Wing’s throat and, with a single movement, he took one large stride towards the bar and knocked the man off his stool. The rest of the bar gasped collectively. Now there were tears, and stifled sobs.

  “Some of us make our own luck,” Wing said. “And even if you’re content to sit on your fat backsides and let everything you have get taken away from you, I’m not.” He marched across to the door, staring at the corner table, his features widening into a grin when his father resolutely refused to meet his eye. “You’d all best order a lot more drinks,” he said. “Drink and drink and drink until you’re insensible and maybe you can forget what spineless idiots you’ve all been tonight.”

  He unbolted the door and turned away, speaking his last words out at the darkness before he strode off into it.

  “Then pray that when you wake up tomorrow morning, your nice, lucky little world hasn’t fallen apart.”

  It had almost turned midnight by the time Rachel and Adam had left Honeyman’s cottage. They’d walked to the nearest phone box and rung Root Cottage to let their grandmother know that they were safe. There had been no reply. They’d also poured all their remaining pound coins into the box and put in a call to New York to tell their mother the same thing, but had only been able to leave a message on the answering machine.

  “This is Kate. There’s a beep coming, you know what to do…”

  “Mom, it’s us. Nothing to worry about. Just wanted to say, “love you,” really…”

  In truth, Rachel and Adam had felt that there was everything to worry about.

  They walked towards the village across the freshly ploughed fields that bordered the beekeeper’s smallholding. The ground sloped away, rough and rutted. The moon was full, but muted behind a thick layer of cloud, and with the torch that Honeyman had given them proving worse than useless, they both stumbled more than once as they made their way slowly across the fields in near darkness.

  Adam slammed the torch into his palm in an effort to extract a little more light, but the thin milky beam only flickered, before dying altogether.

  “Piece of crap,” Adam said. “It’s the only torch I’ve ever come across that seems to make things darker.”

  “It’s been that kind of a trip,” Rachel said.

  They kept their eyes on the ground, picking their way carefully towards the distant outline of the church spire.

  “Why us?” Adam asked.

  “Why us what?”

  “Why do we have to go and get this blade? Why can’t Gabriel do it? We both know he could get it easily enough, right? He always seems to make stuff happen if he wants to…”

  Rachel was glad that Adam couldn’t see her blush in the dark. It was true that Gabriel seemed capable of making extraordinary things happen, but if he wanted Rachel to do something, all he had to do was ask.

  “We’ve got all these pieces of a puzzle,” Adam said. “The crusader’s tomb, the stained glass window and the bodies under the chalk circle. But it still feels like there’s a piece of the puzzle missing. The one that will actually show us what the picture is.”

  “I think we’re the missing piece,” Rachel said. “That’s why it has to be us. I think we were chosen.”

  Adam shook his head, none the wiser. “What does this Triskellion do, anyway? Even if we can get all the pieces together.”

  Rachel shrugged, then shivered, though it wasn’t particularly cold. “I’m not sure, but I think we’re the only ones that can make it happen. Kind of how you need the right sort of battery to make a light come on.”

  “Yeah, like this thing.” Adam gave the torch another good hard smack and lobbed it into the bushes a
t the edge of the field. The effort caused him to trip slightly and he instinctively reached out for Rachel. She took his hand. “It doesn’t make any sense,” Adam said. “There’s nothing special about us.”

  Rachel could tell when Adam was scared and trying his best not to show it. She squeezed his hand.

  “I think there is,” she said.

  They moved towards the edge of the field and over a low wall, on to a narrow trail where the open space gave way to the woods. The going started to get easier, and they had just begun to pick up a little speed when they both stopped dead in their tracks.

  A tall, dark figure was moving towards them fast.

  Without a word they ducked into the bushes and crouched down, then watched, hardly daring to breathe, as a man they both knew to be deeply dangerous passed within a metre of where they were hiding.

  * * *

  Hilary Wing stomped into the woods, swatting aside branches and kicking leaves and clods of earth before him as he turned on to the muddy track and hurried towards the Green Men’s encampment.

  He muttered furiously under his breath as he walked, deciding that those idiots back at The Star deserved everything they got if they weren’t willing to stand up and protect themselves. He could not be sure if their reluctance to follow him was simple cowardice or something else, but it didn’t much matter either way.

  He was content to follow his own path, as he always had.

  He knew very well that most of those he’d grown up around didn’t care for him a great deal, or were, at any rate, hugely suspicious of what he and his followers got up to when they gathered at night, deep in the woods. Actually, few in the village had really trusted him since he was a teenager; since he’d been expelled from endless schools and had begun running amok in the village and starting fires in the woods. He had never much minded what the locals thought, but his father’s mistrust had been far harder to bear. It was when the rumours about the drink and the drug taking had begun, when the gossip about Hilary killing things for fun and sacrificing rabbits or worse in midnight rituals had become too much, that the old man had banished him from Waverley for good.

  When he had been cut out of his father’s life, of village life, once and for all.

  The confrontation in the pub had certainly not improved his mood, but Hilary Wing had been seething all day, and, as he walked, his mind was still racing with dark suspicions and white-hot jealousies. Not only had he been obliged to grease up that idiot from the television to keep things sweet, but he also had been forced into an unwelcome closeness to the American brats. Now, to add insult to injury, that archaeologist woman was about to reveal that they were related.

  In truth, Laura Sullivan’s suggestion that Wings may have at one time or another bred with Roots, that they might have gone against the ancient warning spelled out in the runes, had hit painfully home. Now, someone had stumbled upon something that Hilary Wing had known for a long time; that he had hidden away in the back of his mind. It was something that he had always tried to deny.

  Something that he was now going to have to confront.

  He barely remembered his mother. She had died when he was three or four. He vaguely remembered an Air Force base; somewhere hot and dusty where his father had been stationed in the late 1950s. He remembered the big American car that his father had driven: the car in which his mother had been killed.

  His father, too drunk to drive, had lost his leg in the accident, and the passenger in the back had suffered irreparable damage to her spine.

  Celia Root…

  Hilary Wing bristled, remembering how Celia, who had been his father’s Air Force secretary, had comforted the commodore after the terrible accident in which he’d lost his wife and they had both themselves been so badly injured. He’d always wondered if she had perhaps been comforting him for a lot longer than that.

  In contrast to his mother, a dignified and somewhat aloof woman, Celia Root had always seemed a little … racy. Her lipstick was always brighter and more plentifully applied, and her uniform, as the photographs of the period showed, fitted rather better than most.

  They had all returned to England a year or so after the accident. They had settled down. And then there had been the delicate matter of Celia’s daughter, Kate.

  The story that got trotted out was that Celia Root had been married overseas to a pilot who had been killed in action, flying with the US Air Force in Korea. But the maths simply didn’t add up. Kate was several years too young for that. Besides, if she had been married, why did Celia mysteriously keep her maiden name? “Root” was certainly a well-respected old village name, but there might have been a little less gossip had she taken the name of her dead husband.

  If there had ever been a dead husband.

  Wing and Root shall never bear fruit…

  It didn’t take a genius to work out why Kate Root had got out of Triskellion and escaped to New York at the first opportunity. Growing up in a small village could not have been easy for her and she was almost certainly picked upon by some of the older villagers who had perhaps made a moral judgement on Kate’s parentage.

  Kate Root had been strong-willed, like her mother, and whenever the young Hilary had come across her during holidays from boarding school, he had hated her.

  Wing and Root…

  Now, as he tramped down the dark, narrow track into the woods, a horrible thought cemented itself in the mind of an older and wiser Hilary Wing. It made him hot with fury – at himself as much as anyone else, for failing to see it before. Not only did the very idea undermine his sense of who he was, but it threatened the inheritance that he was so grimly hanging on for.

  For fifty years, Hilary Wing had considered himself an only child and sole heir to Waverley Hall, the estate and most of the village. However far apart he and his father had drifted, he had told himself that once the old man had fallen off his perch, it would all be his. He would finally be able to run things his way: to govern his personal kingdom.

  But now, it was suddenly clear as day to him: that he and Kate Root shared the same father. That she was the poisoned fruit of Wing and Root.

  Worse still, that his own father, Commodore Gerald Wing, was the grandfather of Rachel and Adam Newman.

  Rachel and Adam weren’t taking any chances. They waited until they could no longer hear Wing’s footsteps crashing into the woods, before they came out of hiding.

  “Where’s he going?” Adam asked.

  Rachel didn’t hesitate. “He’s looking for us.”

  “Oh, that’s terrific.” Adam began trudging away. He picked up a fallen branch and smashed it against a tree trunk. “Anything else we need tonight? A few landmines on the path, maybe? A small hurricane?”

  Rachel jogged to catch her brother up and took his hand again. “It’ll be OK, really. This feels like the right thing to do.”

  But Adam wasn’t listening. “I mean, I know we’re not his favourite people,” he said. “I kind of figured that out when he locked me in a cellar then started shooting at you in the woods. But I’d really like to know what we’ve done to get on this guy’s bad side.”

  Ahead of them, the church spire pointed black into the night sky, like a warning.

  “It’s not what we’ve done,” Rachel said. “It’s what we are.”

  Tom Hatcham paced up and down behind the bar, continuing to dispense drinks with the same ill-humour as he had done since Hilary Wing’s exit. Though the immediate shock and hubbub had died down, Wing’s words still gnawed away at Hatcham.

  He knew he should have gone with him.

  “Hilary was right.” Hatcham raised his voice to address everyone in the bar. “What we’ve got here is far too precious to lose. Not to any TV company and certainly not because of a pair of American brats. I don’t know about all this legend stuff and all the supernatural mumbo jumbo, but I do know that the life we’ve got here is worth protecting, and that somewhere along the line it’s to do with that gold thing.”

  Ther
e were nods and grunts from assorted tables and someone shouted, “Go on, Tom!”

  “It’s our duty to make sure these people don’t nick our village treasures. So I’m going after them.” He paused, looked from group to group. “Who’s coming?”

  A murmur went round the bar, and finally the commodore spoke, summoning every last ounce of his former authority.

  “I appreciate the sentiment, Tom, but don’t let my son fool you. Hilary’s not out to preserve anything. I’m afraid … I’m ashamed to say, that Hilary is in it for Hilary. He thinks that by commandeering this artefact, he will assume some … power over us all. But he’s an idiot. He has no more idea than I do what the Triskellion is capable of.”

  Hatcham hesitated, then spoke. “With respect, commodore, whatever it is this thing does, we do know that if those kids have got it, it’s in the wrong hands, and we need to try and get it back.” The landlord grabbed his jacket from behind the bar and marched over to the door.

  The commodore could do nothing but watch helplessly.

  “Well?” Hatcham said, looking back at the expectant faces. A table comprising half the village cricket team, who were now quite drunk, stood on their feet.

  “We’re coming,” said the burly fast bowler.

  He was followed by three or four others in the team, by most of the parish council, men and women, by the dominos players and by the Bacon brothers, who had been lurking near the fruit machine in the back bar.

  The group of a dozen or so, slapping each other’s backs and egging each other on, staggered out into the night air, and off across the green, crossing the path that Rachel and Adam Newman had taken just moments before.

  * * *

  The pale rectangles of light from the windows guided Rachel and Adam across the graveyard towards the church hall. Dalton and the crew had moved out of The Star the night before and his BMW was parked outside, silhouetted against the purple night sky.

  Rachel and Adam had dragged their heels across the wet grass of the churchyard. Its scattered and chipped gravestones were spooky at any time of day, but the voice in Rachel’s head had urged her on.