Triskellion

by Will Peterson

  Across the breasts of both bodies, the remains of the clothing had been carefully cut away. The rotting fabric had been peeled back from the bodies and laid aside, like tattered, dark wings, revealing the bones and the petrified flesh.

  The huge, ragged hole that had been torn out of the chests.

  When Adam looked up, and across at Rachel, his face was bloodless. “They’ve got no hearts…”

  Jacob Honeyman had heard them coming when they were still a mile or more away, and, unable to remember whether or not he’d locked the gate after the children, had rushed out into the compound to check that everything was secure.

  He had just fastened the padlock when he saw the lights. Dozens of pairs bearing down on him, like the eyes of night beasts. And when he realized how fast they were going, he guessed that he’d been wasting his time.

  He knew that he would never be secure enough.

  The convoy of vehicles accelerated as they rounded the final bend and roared towards Honeyman’s land. He cried out, and threw himself out of the way as a large truck smashed straight across the low, wire fence and roared past him; dozens more followed, gouging huge tracks in the earth, demolishing a small coal bunker and crashing through several of his hives.

  Honeyman picked himself up. There wasn’t time to survey the damage or mourn the loss of his bees. He knew he had to run.

  They were on him before he’d taken half a dozen steps.

  Two Green Men seized him by the arms and marched him across the compound to where Hilary Wing was calmly climbing off his motorbike.

  The terror squirmed in Honeyman’s guts like a snake.

  “What are you running for, Jacob?” Wing asked. He walked slowly across to the beekeeper, shaking his hair loose and brushing clods of earth from his long, black coat.

  Honeyman stammered and shook. “Look what you did. You’re trespassing…”

  “Yes, sorry about that, but time is rather against us, I’m afraid.”

  “I’ll get the police,” Honeyman said. “I’ll have you arrested.” He looked around. The old cars and battered trucks still had their lights blazing: a circle of them, blinding him. Aside from the men holding him, there were maybe two dozen more, half hidden in shadow. The skulls that many had fastened to their heads seemed to leer at him, and the black painted faces snarled and spat.

  He knew that the police would be of little help.

  “Where are the children?” Wing asked.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “So why did you run?”

  “I was scared. I am scared.”

  “Just tell me where they are and we’ll be on our way. I’ll even pay for the damage.”

  Honeyman shook his head.

  “That’s a shame, because, like I said, we’re in something of a hurry and this is what you might call an emergency.” Wing stepped close to him, the streaks of blood on his cheeks dried brown and his breath hot on Honeyman’s face. “I don’t want to do any more damage than I have to.”

  “What are you going to do to them?” Honeyman asked.

  Wing laughed. “Why would I want to do anything?” The smile vanished. “I just want what belongs to us, that’s all. And you should want the same thing, unless you’ve already switched sides of course.” He cocked his head. “You haven’t sold us out, have you, Jacob?”

  The snake in Honeyman’s belly was coiling itself round his innards. He could barely breathe. He took a deep breath…

  “I ain’t telling you nothing,” he said.

  The rage flashed across Hilary Wing’s face, but settled quickly into something like resignation. He signalled to one of his men, then turned away as Honeyman was frog-marched roughly to the corner of the compound and thrown into a rickety woodshed.

  “You can’t do this,” Honeyman squealed.

  Wing spoke quietly through a crack in the door. “I don’t want to do this, but what choice do you leave me.”

  While two of Wing’s men climbed up on to their trucks and passed down large metal cans, the others stood and watched. Beneath the earth that was smeared across their faces there was doubt etched round the eyes of one or two. And guilt.

  But like Honeyman, they had little choice. Everything had gone too far.

  Wing’s men carried the cans over and began to splash petrol across the door and on to the sides of the old shed.

  “Just tell us where they are and you can go back to bed,” Wing shouted.

  Inside, huddled in a dark corner among the logs and the spiders, Jacob Honeyman could hear the splashes of liquid and smell the fumes that crept under the door.

  “I can’t hear you,” Wing said.

  Honeyman began to scream.

  In the church hall, Rachel and Adam were drawn away from the sarcophagus by a noise that grew louder in their heads. It made them dizzy, starting as an insistent buzzing, like that of the deadly swarm they had seen earlier, becoming high-pitched, squealing, like a badly tuned radio trying to find a frequency, before deepening into a terrible, echoing howl.

  The frequency it had found was Rachel and Adam.

  It was an unearthly cry for help that seemed to be coming from some distance away, from someone or something to which they had become attuned. Low and desperate. Rachel heard the noise and felt as if something were squeezing at her heart, wringing the blood from it until it was as dried up as the bodies lying behind her on the platform.

  “Maybe it’s an animal,” Adam said. “Caught in a trap or something…”

  They staggered over to a small window, holding their hands to their heads and peered into the darkness outside.

  “I hope that’s all it is,” Rachel said. The fear squeezed tighter still, crushing the breath and the bravery from her. “I feel like my head’s going to explode.”

  “Look,” Adam said.

  “Where?”

  Adam raised his voice above the noise in his head, in both their heads, and pointed. “There…”

  Rachel pressed her face to the dirty glass and craned her head skywards.

  Electrical flashes illuminated dark purple clouds, which rolled and bubbled like boiling lead, moving fast overhead as if in fast forward. The clouds mushroomed and crashed across the sky in waves, so low that they appeared to be brushing the tops of the trees. Then another light, an orange one, lit the heavy, velvety clouds from underneath. An orange glow, another fire, this time from across the fields. The howl in Rachel’s head grew stronger, more human.

  “That’s no animal,” Rachel said.

  They stared at the flickering light, and, as the howl in their heads changed into a scream, the twins knew that the cry for help was coming from the same place. Though Rachel had thought it many times since she’d first set foot in the village, she finally heard herself saying it out loud.

  “Nothing will ever be the same again.”

  Hatcham and the other villagers could see the flames long before they got to Jacob Honeyman’s place. The nearest fire station was nineteen kilo-metres away, but Hatcham put the call in anyway, as he and the others ran towards the beekeeper’s cottage.

  They stopped at the locked gate. Stared in horror at the overturned hives and the blaze that roared out of control, sending smoke into the purple sky that boiled overhead. At the crowd of Green Men that stood like statues in front of the burning building…

  Hilary Wing marched across, stopping a metre short of the main gate. His eyes moved across the gaggle of villagers until they found Tom Hatcham. “Nothing to worry about here, Tom,” he said. “Just a bit of a bonfire. Not a problem.”

  “I think we’ll be the judge of that,” Hatcham said. “The fire brigade are on their way and we’ll take charge until they get here.” He peered at Hilary Wing. He swallowed hard and spoke in a voice thick with apprehension. “You’ve got blood on your face,” he said.

  Wing dabbed at his cheek with a dirty finger. “Really?” he said.

  “Where’s Jacob?” Hatcham asked suddenly.

>   Wing took a few seconds to answer, then waved a hand dismissively. “He’s around here somewhere, I think.”

  Hatcham and the others craned their heads, began to shout Honeyman’s name.

  “Probably gone wandering off,” Wing said, casually. “We did warn him, but you know what the silly old fool’s like.”

  Save for the roar of the burning shed and the wind hissing in the trees along the edge of the road, there was silence for a few seconds. It was broken by a scream that caused half a dozen of the villagers at the gate to step back in alarm. One woman looked as though she might faint, and others stepped up to comfort her.

  Tom Hatcham felt the hairs prickle on the back of his thick neck; felt his legs begin to tremble. Days before, he had been party to scaring Jacob off, but this was in a different league. He leant against the gate for support and caught Hilary Wing’s glance back towards the fire. Saw the smirk that passed like a shadow across his bloodstained face.

  “Dear God, tell me you haven’t,” he said.

  “Haven’t what? You’ll need to be a bit more specific,” Wing said. He turned and strolled casually back towards the shed, swishing at burning cinders with a stick, letting his final remarks drift back over his shoulders with the wood smoke. “I’ll tell you this though, since you bring it up. It won’t be God who saves this village…”

  Hatcham clambered across the gate and dropped down heavily on to the gravel. With the Bacon brothers following at his heels, and the rest of the villagers not far behind them, he ran, panting towards the flames, screaming out Honey-man’s name and looking desperately around for some way of putting out the fire.

  Five metres short of the shed, he was beaten back by the temperature. Holding his hands up to protect his face from the heat, he shouted across to the Bacon brothers; told them to go into Honeyman’s kitchen for water and buckets; told them to hurry.

  The Bacons found the way to Honeyman’s cottage barred by a trio of Green Men brandishing thick, wooden staffs. They turned back to Hatcham, helpless, waiting for further instructions, while another of Wing’s men came running out of Honeyman’s front door and handed a mass of papers to his leader.

  Wing studied the documents and whistled quietly to himself as the flames climbed skywards.

  Hatcham and the others could do nothing but watch, and weep, and cover their ears as another desperate scream exploded from inside the burning shed.

  Huddled in the corner, with sparks and shards of red-hot wood flying about his ears, Jacob Honeyman moaned, and coughed, and waited for death.

  The smoke was thick and black, and when he breathed it in, it felt as though hot soil were being poured down his throat.

  He could feel the skin on his arms and legs beginning to blister.

  He’d never really believed in too much, only stuff that everyone else thought was weird and freaky, but as he sank towards the floor he found himself hoping that there might be something afterwards. He thought about his mother who had died a few years before. He thought about friends that were long gone, and he worried about who was going to take care of his poor, poor bees…

  He sucked in what he knew would be his final breath, felt it burning his lungs.

  “That’s touching.”

  Honeyman looked up at the voice and saw a figure walking towards him through the black curtain of smoke.

  “Thinking about your bees, I mean.”

  “Sweet Jesus,” Honeyman said.

  Gabriel smiled. “It’s getting pretty hot in here; I think we should be going, don’t you?”

  Honeyman was too stunned to speak. How could the boy have got into the shed? And why was he seemingly untouched, unaffected, by the fire? The smoke seemed to weave round him, as though he were moving inside some sort of glass case. The beekeeper watched, dumbfounded, as the smoke began to clear. It was almost as if it had become a living thing: rushing for the cracks in the sides and roof of the shed, towards the fresh air, as though being sucked out by some giant vacuum cleaner.

  Gabriel held out a hand. “Up you get, Jacob…”

  Outside in the compound, Hilary Wing, Tom Hatcham and the dozens of others watched in amazement as the flames sputtered and died. One or two of the older villagers crossed themselves and whispered thanks as the door crashed open.

  Honeyman staggered out, his blistered hands stretched in front of him like a zombie, smoke billowing from his tattered clothing and his face blackened by the soot. He dropped to his knees and let out a volley of hacking coughs. Finally his lungs felt clear, and clean.

  He stood up and turned round.

  Gabriel was nowhere to be seen.

  Rachel took a step back from the window and let out a long sigh of relief. The screaming in her head had died away. She turned to Adam. “Jacob’s safe,” she said. “Gabriel wants to meet us at the chalk circle when we’ve got the blade.”

  “I know,” Adam said. “He talks to me too.”

  “Right. Sorry…”

  Rachel drifted away from the window, back towards the centre of the hall. When she pushed aside the thick, plastic flap and stepped back inside the square of blue light, her eye was taken by two shapes on a table away to her left. Each was about forty-five centimetres tall and covered in a brown cloth. She remembered Laura explaining, and the woman who was working at the potter’s wheel.

  The clay heads.

  Rachel walked slowly across to the table. She reached out towards the edge of the cloth and then hesitated. Did she really want to know? Or was it that she knew already?

  She tugged at the cloth and it slid away, revealing the moulded clay head beneath.

  “Adam…”

  Adam wandered across, muttering about how they needed to find the blade and get the hell out of there. He stopped talking when he got close to Rachel; when he saw what she was staring at.

  “Rachel…”

  Rachel said nothing. She was looking at her own face.

  The face of a young girl on her wedding day: the sunlight dancing across it, radiant.

  Beaded in sweat, as she gives birth to a son and daughter: the pain and the joy indescribable.

  Ashen in death. The expression frozen and unclear as she is laid in the ground next to her husband. As their hearts are torn out.

  At her own face…

  “It’s amazing, isn’t it?”

  Rachel and Adam spun round at the same time, stared at the man stepping out of the shadows.

  Chris Dalton.

  “I mean, you could be sisters,” Dalton said. “Most incredible thing I’ve ever seen. Don’t you want to see what the other face looks like? You’ll never guess…”

  Rachel and Adam didn’t move.

  “Never mind. There isn’t really time anyway.” Dalton smiled at them, the strange light making his perfect teeth look almost luminescent. “I don’t really need to ask what you’re doing in here, do I? Or how you got in?”

  “We were just looking round,” Adam said.

  “In the middle of the night?”

  “We weren’t bothering anybody.”

  “Looking for anything in particular?”

  “No,” Rachel said.

  Dalton smiled again and raised his arm. He opened his fist revealing the golden blade. “Not looking for this?” Adam took a step towards him and the fist closed tight. “I don’t think so.”

  “That doesn’t belong to you,” Rachel said.

  “Right now, I’ll think you find it does,” Dalton said. “But it’s no use without the other two, is it? You know what I’m talking about.”

  Rachel leant towards her brother and eased him towards the curtains. “Come on, Adam…”

  Dalton bent towards the table where the tools had been laid out and in the next second a knife had appeared in his hand. When Adam took another step, Dalton held the knife out hard in front of him. “You’re not going anywhere just yet,” he said.

  Rachel and Adam froze, their eyes on a blade that was rather less valuable than the one they had com
e looking for. The one Dalton still clutched tight in his fist.

  “Now,” Dalton said. “What was it that you were saying about the chalk circle…?”

  * * *

  Thin fingers of black smoke waved high above the village, drifting slowly across a sliver of moon, now all but eclipsed by the bruise-coloured clouds, rolling and bunching, low in the sky.

  Roosting birds called out in alarm and gathered close together. Insects and small animals skittered towards their burrows. A couple out walking their dogs along the edges of the great moor stared at the heavens open-mouthed before hurrying quickly inside.

  Once under cover, the dogs themselves took shelter beneath tables and chairs, sensing the change of atmosphere and tasting it, metallic on their lolling tongues.

  The electricity in the air.

  And something more…

  By the time the commodore’s Land Rover pulled up outside Jacob Honeyman’s place, the beekeeper was wrapped in a blanket in his kitchen, talking to himself and being force-fed tea by one of the barmaids from The Star.

  The Green Men had gone.

  Commodore Wing helped Celia Root down from the car and into her wheelchair. He pushed the chair across the rutted ground to Honeyman’s cottage, where half a dozen villagers were still gathered outside, staring at the smoking remains of the woodshed and muttering about Hilary Wing.

  They all fell silent when they saw the commodore approach.

  “What happened here?” he asked.

  He asked the same question to several of the villagers by name, but nobody would answer. Nobody would so much as look at him. The smell of burning wood was almost choking.

  Celia Root reached behind to lay a hand over one of Commodore Wing’s. “Let’s go inside,” she said.

  Hatcham and the rest of the villagers were packed into the tiny kitchen. Honeyman sat at the table, staring off into space and saying things that nobody could understand.

  “What’s been going on, Tom?” the commodore asked.