Triskellion

by Will Peterson

  Hatcham took a deep breath. “They locked Jacob here in the shed, and set fire to it.”

  Celia Root’s hands flew to her mouth.

  Commodore Wing almost laughed. It sounded so ludicrous. “What?”

  “It’s true, commodore.” Hatcham nodded solemnly. “They tried to kill him.”

  “Who did?”

  Lee Bacon pushed his way across the kitchen. He was red-faced and snarling, carrying a wooden mallet that he’d snatched from the utensils drawer. “Them freaks from the woods. With blood on their faces and horns on top of their heads…”

  Gary Bacon looked every bit as fired up as his brother. “Freaks is right,” he said.

  Suddenly Honeyman spoke up, looking intently at the commodore, his fingers clawing at the edge of the blanket round his shoulders. “The boy was in there with me,” he said. “Walked straight through the fire and saved me, he did.”

  The commodore stared at him, then looked across at Hatcham and raised his eyebrows.

  “He’s been going on like that ever since he came out of that shed,” Hatcham said. “I think the smoke might have, you know” – he tapped at the side of his head – “fused a few of the circuits.”

  “Straight through the fire,” Honeyman said. “Like an angel or something.”

  Celia Root turned to Commodore Wing. “Which boy does he mean, Gerry?”

  The commodore shook his head as though the question were unimportant, or else was one he didn’t want to think about. He turned back to Hatcham. “Hilary?”

  The landlord nodded. “It was Hilary who made the others put him in there, I’m afraid.”

  “No…” The commodore looked as though his legs were about to give way beneath him. A woman grabbed a chair and the commodore all but collapsed into it.

  Hatcham licked the end of a finger and dabbed at a stain on his shirt front. “I’m sorry.”

  “Something’s got to be done,” somebody said.

  Celia Root wheeled herself across to the table and looked hard at Jacob Honeyman. “Where did they go? Jacob?”

  Honeyman raised his head to look at her. The wide eyes and broad grin shone through the soot that was smeared across his face. “He made the fire stop, you know. He told it to stop…”

  “Where did Hilary and his men go?”

  “You won’t get any sense out of him,” Hatcham said. He stepped across to the chipped wooden counter top and grabbed the sheaf of papers that Hilary Wing had left behind; the documents he’d been studying before he’d jumped back on his motorbike and led his men away, unnerved by Jacob’s miraculous escape. Hatcham pushed them across the table towards the commodore. “Here…”

  Commodore Wing looked down at the ancient map, at the hand-drawn amendments and the spidery scribble. He tapped a finger at the point on the map where the chalk circle was clearly marked; where Honeyman had written: This is where they must come together!

  Celia Root turned to look out of the small kitchen window at the hills that sloped away at the edge of the fields. She shuddered involuntarily, feeling the menace in the blue-black sky. “What’s Hilary going to do?” she said.

  The commodore looked as though he could scarcely bring himself to consider it, but Tom Hatcham had the only answer that any of them needed.

  “Seeing what’s happened here,” he said, “I reckon he’s capable of doing just about anything…”

  Hilary Wing accelerated hard, urging the big motorbike up to sixty miles an hour as he tore along the winding, unlit lanes around the village. He knew these roads well and had spent many nights driving around them on the old Triumph. He enjoyed the speed, the night air on his face and the time it gave him to collect his thoughts.

  Tonight, though, he had a job to do. A sacred duty to fulfil.

  He’d left the rest of his convoy well behind. Several of those big old vans and trucks could barely get above thirty miles an hour anyway. Most had difficulty negotiating some of the tighter corners and had to pull over if there was anything coming the other way.

  The motorbike, like its rider, gave way to nothing and nobody, and the adrenaline generated by the night’s events made Hilary Wing feel invincible.

  Up to sixty-five now, the wheels squealing against the road as he leant over to take a sharp bend. As he drove, the powerful headlight picked out the bright eyes of creatures in the undergrowth on either side, blazing for just a second and then gone: weasels, fieldmice, foxes. He felt an affinity with these animals, with the world that they belonged to, as he raced through the night. He drew strength, had always done, from everything around him that was untamed. Wild animals fought tooth and nail to protect their territory, their young, and when his father was gone, it would be down to him to do likewise – to protect the villagers.

  From the threat of outsiders and of change. From themselves.

  He would start tonight. He would take back the blades of the Triskellion and return them to the earth. It was the natural order of things and he would do whatever was necessary to make sure that those things did not change.

  It did not matter that the enemies he must go up against were children, or that they were his own flesh and blood. There was no room for emotion or sentiment. He accelerated still further, deciding that the Root children might even pose a threat to his own inheritance, and that if he was forced to take the strongest action against them, he would be killing two birds with one stone.

  Or three birds, if he counted the other child. The outsider…

  The wind lashed against his face as he drove on, and he could feel the streaks of deer’s blood crusted on his cheeks.

  It felt like armour.

  The bike touched seventy, and he almost lost control taking two sharp corners in quick succession. He straightened up and breathed in the cold air. The chalk circle was only a few minutes away.

  Suddenly, something howled away to his left and he took his eyes off the road for a second. When he looked back he saw the boy just a hundred metres ahead, spotlit and frozen in his headlight beam, like a flash photograph. Instinctively he put his foot on the brake, but then took it off again, flicked back his wrist and felt the bike lurch forward beneath him.

  Three birds…

  Fifty metres ahead the boy raised his arms, as though he was waiting. Hilary Wing leant down over the handlebars and drove straight at him. He screamed in rage and excitement as he bore down on the figure of the boy, until, a few seconds from impact, he felt the front wheel torn from his control. He clung on for dear life, but the handlebars jerked beneath his hands as though they had taken on a life of their own.

  There was nothing he could do.

  His last sight of the figure in the road was blurred and shrouded in terror.

  But he could see that the boy was smiling.

  Hilary Wing’s scream grew louder as the machine veered away to the left and roared up on to a steep bank of grass at the side of the road. It smashed through the thick hedge and sailed high into the field on the far side, Wing’s hands still clamped round the handlebars as the motorbike crashed down and exploded in a ball of flame and shredded metal.

  Those creatures near by – foxes, weasels, mice – bolted for cover, alarmed by the noise. But the creature in the road did not move. Unblinking, Gabriel stood and watched as the flames climbed even higher than those over which Hilary Wing had stood, triumphant, just an hour or so before.

  The sun was coming up faster and earlier than usual, though it was still hidden behind the blanket of thick, rapidly moving cloud, and the strange light seemed to change every few seconds as it fell across the moor. The damp couch grass that whipped round Rachel’s knees turned from black, to brown, and finally to a dirty green as she pushed through it towards the chalk circle.

  Adam was a few steps behind her, Dalton’s knife pressed hard into his back.

  “Get a move on,” Dalton said.

  Adam half stumbled and turned to glare at the man behind him, to spit out his defiance. “None of this is going to do y
ou any good, you know. Gabriel’s not going to give you the other two blades.”

  Dalton kept walking. “You’d better hope for your sake that he does,” he said. “I’ve not spent all this time, money and energy to have my greatest discovery nicked by a couple of kids.”

  “It’s not your discovery,” Rachel said, tight-lipped, under her breath.

  They walked over a small rise and Rachel could see the chalk circle a few hundred metres ahead of her, stark against the ground even in the half-light. There were several cows away to her right and a small flock of sheep just beyond them. But the animals were unmoving: frozen, as if waiting for something to happen, or pressed into the ground by the weight of the cloud that by now seemed to be just centimetres above their heads.

  Rachel kept walking. Ahead of her, she could see Gabriel standing equally still in the centre of the circle. He was waiting in the place where she’d first seen him that first night from her bedroom window. She remembered the crack of the glass shattering. The terrible storm.

  It felt like there was another storm coming. A storm that was bringing the end of everything with it…

  “You won’t do anything stupid, will you?” Dalton said. Rachel and Adam shook their heads. “This goes all right and your weird little friend there doesn’t mess me around, you’ll be back with your gran before you know it.”

  Rachel grunted.

  “Having a nice bit of breakfast.”

  Adam grunted.

  The twins could do no more than half listen above the conversation they were having with each other in their heads, above the panic and confusion and argument that had been passing between them telepathically since Dalton had marched them out of the village hall at knife-point.

  “He’s going to kill us.”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “He’s going to get the blades and then kill us anyway so we can’t tell anyone.”

  “Adam, relax. He’s the guy off the T V. He’s not going to hurt us.”

  “You’re joking, right? I’m being marched across a deserted moor at the crack of dawn with a knife in my back. Nobody knows where we are and the sky looks like it’s about to come down on our heads.”

  Then Gabriel’s voice, cutting loud and clear into both their minds.

  “Stay calm…”

  As they got closer to the circle and Rachel began to make out the expression on Gabriel’s face, she could see that he certainly looked calm enough.

  “Don’t you trust me, Rachel?”

  She wasn’t sure that she trusted Gabriel. Not exactly. Not like she trusted Adam, or her mother. But she had some kind of strange … faith in him, and she certainly didn’t doubt what he was capable of.

  She thought about fire and bees, and slowed slightly as she drew closer to him.

  “You’ve been ages,” Gabriel said, when Rachel and Adam stopped at the edge of the circle. Rachel had not expected Gabriel to be surprised of course. She knew that he would have been able to see them coming from a long way away. That he would have known what was going on before they’d even set foot on the moor.

  She wondered if Gabriel had known that this moment was coming for a very long time.

  Gabriel lifted up his hand; opened his fingers to reveal the golden Triskellion that was two-thirds complete. “I suppose you’ll be wanting this then, to go with what’s in your pocket.”

  Dalton just stared for a few seconds, then reached into his jacket for the single golden blade he was carrying. He let out a hum of contentment as he looked down at it. His expression changed in a flash when Gabriel took a step towards him and he moved quickly, grabbing hold of Rachel and pressing the knife to her neck.

  “You stay where you are.” His voice was trembling with panic. “I can do without any more of your magic tricks. Exploding coins, whatever…”

  Gabriel stepped back. “Whatever you want.” He held out the Triskellion. “Let Adam come over here and get it for you, then when you have it in your hand, you release Rachel. Deal?”

  Adam shook his head, opened his mouth to protest, but Gabriel raised a hand to silence him.

  Dalton took a few seconds, weighing it up. He licked his lips. “Just get the blades and get back over here,” he said, pushing the tip of the knife into Rachel’s neck. “I’m feeling a bit nervous to tell you the truth, and it could get messy if my hand slips.”

  Rachel squirmed as Dalton’s grip tightened round her arm. “Don’t give it to him. He’s bluffing.”

  Dalton kicked Adam in the back of the leg, urging him across the circle towards Gabriel. “Only one way to find out,” he said.

  Rachel looked hard at Gabriel, spoke to him without saying anything. “Don’t do this. You can’t…”

  “It’s fine, really.”

  Adam took the final step, and held out his hand for the Triskellion.

  “Not after everything we’ve been through to get it,” Rachel said.

  Gabriel smiled and held out the Triskellion for Adam to take. His voice in Rachel’s head was perfectly calm and strong. “I told you to trust me.”

  It was all taking too long for Dalton’s liking. “Come on, bring it here,” he snapped. Before Adam had taken three steps back towards him, Dalton reached forward to grab the golden amulet, pushing Rachel aside as he did and stepping back to admire his trophy.

  “I hope you think it’s worth it,” Gabriel said.

  Dalton opened his mouth to speak, and it stayed open as the pieces of the Triskellion moved slowly towards one another as though pulled magnetically, gliding across his palm, the metal edges kissing softly before welding themselves into one, perfect whole.

  “That’s … incredible,” Dalton said.

  Gabriel beamed. “I’m glad you like it. Not so sure it’s going to feel the same way about you though.”

  Before Dalton could respond, the Triskellion began to hum and spin on his palm. Dalton moved to cover it with his free hand but the Triskellion was already rising into the air, drifting up and away until it was hovering, just out of his reach. He stood on tiptoe, trying to grab it.

  “Nearly got it,” Gabriel said. “Just another few inches…”

  Dalton made one final lunge and as he did so, a beam of white light shot from the Triskellion, knocking Dalton several metres back through the air. He screamed as the bolt hit his chest, and was deeply unconscious by the time he crashed back to the ground, his limbs twisted like a broken action figure.

  “Deadly in the wrong hands,” Gabriel murmured as the Triskellion drifted back towards him, spinning gently back down on to his palm. “But in the right ones…”

  Rachel and Adam watched as beams of bright light burst from each blade, shooting in straight lines as far as the horizon on three sides of them. Then, the lines began to blur and shift, and the beams moved down and around, sliding across each other, dancing and weaving like ribbons round a maypole. Now they were more like water than light and, as the twins stared, the three beams flowed between and round them, gathering them in and easing them across the circle towards Gabriel.

  Rachel and Adam moved without being told, without needing to look where they were going; guided by the beams that snaked round them on the moor, by the bright Triskellion of light that was pulsing and wrapping itself tightly within its own shape, carved into the earth many centuries before.

  The chalk circle was suddenly brighter than the twins had ever seen it, and looking up they saw a thousand more beams thirty metres above their heads; a latticework of light bursting from the amulet that still spun in Gabriel’s hand.

  It hung above them like a dome, like a shield.

  “Rachel, Adam…”

  Gabriel had spoken with his mind, and Rachel and Adam were drawn still closer to him, watching as a constantly changing pattern of light began to move at incredible speed around him. It span in a complicated vortex. It curled in strings and fell in dazzling sheets and from within it Gabriel’s voice began to sound different.

  “I suppose we need to t
alk about a few things,” he said.

  Rachel and Adam held up their hands to shield their faces, but their eyes adjusted quickly to the light, and, as they stared into it, Gabriel began to change.

  By the time the Green Men reached Hilary, it was almost light. Abnormally light…

  All they could do was stand and stare at the blackened skeleton of the old Triumph. Its tyres were melted, the fuel tank had been shredded by the explosion, and a black circle was scorched into the field round it. Blackened springs showed where most of the big saddle had burned away, leaving tatters of leather round the edges like scraps of blistered skin.

  They found Hilary’s body in damp grass several metres away. The clothes were still smouldering, and two of his men took off their long coats and covered him to prevent the body from burning any further. The acrid smell of scorched flesh and burnt rubber hung in the chilly dawn air, so heavy that they could almost taste it. One or two retched at the roadside as the foul smell caught in their throats. Others began to wipe away at their black face paint with tissues and rags; the charade of dressing up suddenly seeming absurd and childish in light of the night’s events.

  Tom Hatcham and several of the villagers caught up with them soon after, having taken the same narrow lane from Honeyman’s place towards the moor. Hatcham shook his head as he trudged through the wet grass and took in the grisly scene. He dutifully took out a mobile phone and called for an ambulance, though he guessed it would be far too late by the time it had driven from the nearest town.

  The villagers and the Green Men shuffled about uneasily, throwing guilty glances at one another. It was as if they had all woken from a shared bad dream of which they were now all terribly ashamed.

  Tom Hatcham could not meet anyone’s eye. Instead he stared at the rolling grey clouds overhead, which began to disperse as a beautiful shaft of yellow light broke through and shone down in finger-like rays on to the moor.

  It looked as though it was going to be a beautiful day.

  Hatcham wondered who was going to tell the commodore what had happened to his son.