Triskellion (33 page)

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…

B
y 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.

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.

T
he 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 you 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.