Triskellion (8 page)

Reverend Stone rolled his eyes. He was beginning to look more than a little impatient; almost irritated.

“Who are they?”

“Well … I like to think that it’s an image of Sir Richard de Waverley, off to the crusades, wishing his wife goodbye.” Reverend Stone looked as if he was about to wish Rachel and Adam the same. But Adam had a question of his own.

“What’s the inscription mean?” Adam was crouching down, pointing to the series of symbols engraved along the base of the tomb.

“I think you need several degrees in ancient languages to even make a start on those. Some people think it’s an epitaph or a prayer. Or perhaps even a warning of some sort…”

“What do you think?” Rachel asked.

“I don’t know,” replied Reverend Stone, undoing the buttons on the front of his cassock. “But I
do
know I have a cricket match to umpire in five minutes.” From a hook near the entrance he took a white umpire’s coat and struggled into it, leaning against the heavy wooden door and stepping out into the sunshine.

Adam and Rachel followed. The blast of hot air was like opening an oven.

As he climbed on to his bicycle, the vicar turned back to the twins. “Maybe you’d like to come and watch?” He nodded towards his church. “You think some of the stuff in there is strange and inexplicable, wait until you’ve seen cricket…”

Rachel and Adam exchanged a look, before walking away from the church in the same direction as the vicar.

From the churchyard, the boy with black hair and wide green eyes watched them go. He whistled a simple tune, smiling and leaning back against a gravestone that rose up like fifty or so others, through the overgrown grass.

Blackened and crooked. The names of the dead long since worn away.

“H
e was
what
before
what
?” Adam asked.

The old man smiled, indulgently. “Lbw. Leg before wicket, young man. The ball pitched on off stump and moved back inside, you see?”

Adam nodded, none the wiser, then joined everyone else in clapping enthusiastically, as the batsman who had been dismissed walked off the field, and stamped up the rickety wooden steps towards the small pavilion.

“Well played,” shouted several people in the crowd. The batsman touched the peak of his cap and smiled.

Adam raised his hand to shield his eyes from the sun and stared across the expanse of green until he caught sight of Rachel, who had wandered away to the far side of the pitch. He waved until she noticed him and began to wander back round the boundary.

It seemed as though most of the village had turned out to watch the match. There were people on every spare inch of grass round the edge of the pitch; enjoying picnics on tartan
blankets while children played with plastic bats and balls; dozing in striped deckchairs or perched on shooting sticks.

The sky was duck-egg blue, and only the gentlest of breezes shook the tall oaks and hornbeams that encircled the pitch; shivering in the leaves like the sound of distant applause.

Hearing a murmur of excitement from the people around him, Adam looked up in time to see the ball being fielded by a familiar-looking figure on the boundary and thrown back hard; fizzing into the player behind the stumps, who swept off the bails and clapped.

“Good work, Lee…”

Lee Bacon. One of the boys who had attacked Adam by the war memorial, and had paid so dearly for it in the woods. Adam breathed an enormous sigh of relief. At least they were still in one piece…

“This is bizarre, isn’t it?”

“Huh?” Adam looked up. He hadn’t seen Rachel arrive next to him. She was beaming.

“Apparently, the bowler’s got a square leg.”

“And a hell of a googly,” Adam said. “Whatever that is.”

Rachel giggled. “And I thought baseball was complicated.”

Adam turned away, distracted by the distant sound of a ball being hit. By the growing excitement, and then the alarm of the people around him.

“Catch it!”

“Watch it!”

“Look out…!”

Adam glanced up and saw the dark, speeding blur that could only be an extremely hard cricket ball hurtling down towards him. He heard Rachel scream, then others, and turned away the second before a hand reached out and caught the ball centimetres in front of his face.

There was a gasp from the crowd, then applause.

“Bravo!”

“Did you see that catch?”

“You should be out there playing,” somebody said.

Adam opened his eyes to see Rachel staring at a boy in a hooded sweatshirt. He was somewhere around their own age. The boy’s clothes were as dark as his hair and Adam thought he must have been boiling hot, but he seemed cool enough, moving the ball in his hands for a few seconds before throwing it back to a nearby fielder.

“Nice catch,” Rachel said.

The boy smiled and pushed his long hair back from his face.

“I’m Rachel.”

The boy nodded, as though hearing something he already knew.

Rachel pointed towards Adam. “This is my brother…”

Adam stepped forward and stuck out a hand. “Adam.”

The boy took Adam’s hand, though he seemed unsure exactly what he was supposed to do with it. “My name’s Gabriel,” he said.

The three children stood around a little awkwardly for a few seconds, until the crowd broke into ripples of gentle applause once again and the players began to leave the pitch.

“That’s tea,” someone said.

Granny Root buzzed around the room, skilfully manoeuvring her wheelchair between the tables, chatting with all and sundry, and dispensing tea from an enormous pot, which stood balanced on a tray in her lap.

The small pavilion was heaving; three long trestle tables accommodated the twenty-two men in white, as well as the umpires, scorers and assorted friends of the cricket club. There was a lively hubbub as players exchanged war stories, re-enacting heroic catches or memorable shots, while hungrily scoffing sandwiches and slurping tea.

Rachel, Adam and Gabriel stood in one corner of the room near the small bar. Rachel tried to make conversation with their new friend, but the boy wasn’t saying much. He seemed far more interested in eating, and was still reaching for food long after Rachel and Adam had eaten their fill.

“I don’t know where you put it all,” Adam said. It was a reasonable comment considering how slight and stick-thin the boy was. Adam couldn’t help wondering how long it had been since Gabriel had eaten a decent meal. The boy just stared back at him, half smiling, and continued to eat.

After about twenty minutes, the players began to drift away from the tables, preparing to continue with the match.
Rachel, Adam and Gabriel were about to head back outside themselves when an elderly man with slicked back white hair got up from his table and walked purposefully towards them. The walk was laboured and without saying anything to one another, both Rachel and Adam came to the conclusion that he wore a false leg.

The man stopped about a metre in front of the children and stood, casually tossing a cricket ball into the air.

“I’m Commodore Gerald Wing,” he said. “You must be Celia Root’s grandchildren.”

Rachel and Adam nodded, and Rachel managed a nervous hello. The man seemed friendly enough, but despite the smile there was something about him that made them both extremely nervous. Adam thought he was like the crusty old headmaster he’d seen in an old English movie one rainy afternoon.

“And as for you…” Commodore Wing’s steely gaze settled on Gabriel. Gabriel stared right back, still chewing. “That was one
hell
of a catch, young man.”

Gabriel nodded, the strange half-smile on his face once again.

“One hell of a catch.” The commodore threw the cricket ball a little higher, his eyes never leaving the boy’s, then as soon as he’d caught it, he launched it hard and fast towards Gabriel, grunting with the effort of the throw.

Rachel gasped, and watched as Gabriel reached out and the ball smacked into his palm. He looked at it, turning it in
his hand as if he were unsure what it was or where it had come from, before lobbing it lazily back to the commodore.

Rachel looked across at Adam. They realized suddenly that the entire room had fallen silent and that all eyes were upon them.

“Amazing reflexes.” The commodore was red-faced, something tense around his eyes, but his voice was calm and measured. “Absolutely amazing,” he said, before turning quickly away on his good leg.

It was as though someone had turned a radio on, with the conversation in the pavilion suddenly resuming as though nothing had happened. The children watched the commodore move back towards his table, one or two of the other players murmuring to him as he walked past them.

“Nutjob,” Adam muttered.

Rachel hissed. “Adam!”

“Not as nuts as one or two others, mind you,” Adam said. He moved towards the door, in search of a toilet. “But still weird…”

Adam was still drying his hands on a wad of paper towel when he walked out of the door behind the pavilion and all but collided with the Bacon brothers.

Gary and Lee stared at Adam, and the taller one smiled. It was anything but friendly.

“Excuse me,” Adam said.

Gary and Lee were both carrying cricket bats, and it didn’t
look as though they were there to practise their shots. Adam could feel his heart jumping against his chest. “Why, what have you done?” Gary Bacon chuckled at his feeble joke, and his brother joined in.

Adam stepped left, and then right, but could find no way past the two, bigger teenagers. “I don’t want to miss the match,” he said.

Lee hoisted his bat up on to his shoulder. “You won’t miss anything. Game can’t start until we’re out there.”

Gary raised his own bat and slowly swung it, as though despatching an invisible ball to the boundary. “We’re opening the batting, see.”

“Look, you’d better move out of my way,” Adam said, suddenly. He was as surprised as anyone that his words sounded so aggressive; at the anger he could feel rising up quickly inside him.

“Or what?” Lee said.

Adam had always been the same. Got the hot temper from his dad’s side of the family, that was what his mom had said. Rachel had been on the receiving end of that temper more than most, but then Adam reckoned that she usually started the trouble by saying the wrong thing.

Rachel and Adam. Big mouth, bad temper.

“Yeah.” Gary took a step towards him. “Or
what
?”

Not that Adam’s mouth wasn’t plenty big enough…

“Or … or the pair of you might find yourselves tied to a tree again.”

The colour drained in an instant from the faces of the two Bacon brothers. They looked at one another and then back at Adam. This time, there was no smile, not even a sarcastic one. There was something very dark in Gary’s voice when he spoke.

“How d’you know about that?”

Now there was as much fear as there was anger; the air was crackling with it, and Adam wasn’t the only one who was scared. He knew that he’d said the wrong thing. Gary and Lee were suddenly looking extremely worried and now there was no way of telling how they would react.

“We saw you, yesterday,” Adam said. His mouth was dry and he had to suck up spit before he could finish. “We watched them in the woods, punishing you.”

Something like a growl came from low in the throat of one of the brothers and Adam felt tears springing to the corners of his eyes. He knew that his words had hit home.

He also knew that a cornered animal was one that was liable to attack.

Lee cleared his throat. “You saw something you shouldn’t have.”

“That was a mistake,” Gary said.

“Bad mistake…”

As they talked at him, their voices getting louder, tumbling across each other, Adam felt the anger and the fear bubbling up together. He felt his fists clench at his side, his jaw aching as he ground his teeth together, holding his breath…

“Should have hit you harder that first time.”

Gary tipped his head back, then snapped it forward, spitting into Adam’s face. “
Much
harder.”

“Maybe it’s
your
turn to get punished…”

And Adam ran at them, springing forward with his head down, barging his way between the brothers who shouted and swore in frustration as they grabbed at him and missed. Adam kept running, wiping the gobbet of spit from his face, furiously rubbing his wet and sticky palm across his T-shirt as he ran back round to the front of the pavilion.

And ran, and ran…