Triskellion

T
he creature drove its body again and again into the glass, unable to understand why the air had suddenly become impossible to move through, desperately searching for some way out
.

The girl turned away from it and watched her mother opening and closing cupboards on the other side of the breakfast bar. She stared as her mother furiously polished the appliances, buffing up the surfaces of the kettle, the juicer, the coffee-maker that her father had bought the Christmas before
.

Rachel opened her mouth to speak, but with a small wave of her hand, her mother silenced her. A gesture that said, “No, I’m busy and I can’t think. No, I can’t discuss it right now. No, please, I need to finish telling you these things before the tears come again.”

Then, still talking, she was moving across the kitchen to start work on the stainless steel of the worktop, rubbing and rubbing at the metal, until she could look down into it and see her own drawn and determined expression
.

As she went through arrangements for the rest of the summer
.

Rachel stared across the table and tried to get the attention of the boy sitting opposite her. He glanced up briefly, looked over at Rachel with eyes that were the same as her own, then let his head drop again. Grunted to himself
.

Adam. Forty-three minutes younger than she was. But he was a boy, right? So it felt like it could have been a whole lot more
.

Rachel hissed at her brother. His head stayed down. He shook it slowly, and continued to push the cereal around in his bowl
.

The two of them jumped simultaneously at the explosion of a door closing hard upstairs. The boy looked up at his sister, suddenly pale and afraid, and they turned together to watch their mother, her gaze fixed on the doorway, her arms stiff against the worktop. She stood frozen mid-sentence and mid-movement, wincing at the footsteps that thundered down the stairs like a series of rumbling aftershocks. Tensing for the noise that they all knew was coming
.

The front door slammed shut, its echo died slowly, and there were just three of them
.

Rachel felt as if the seconds were thickening, as if time was slowing down, though it was probably no more than a few moments before she and Adam pushed their chairs away from the table
.

The scrape of the metal legs against the floor was terrible, like a hundred pieces of chalk being dragged down a blackboard
.

Rachel’s mother rubbed at her eyes and did her best to smile as her children moved towards her. She opened her arms and Adam walked into the embrace. He pressed his head against her chest, sobbing silently as she stroked his hair
.

Hearing the buzz and the tap, Rachel glanced across again, oddly disturbed by the small drama at the window
.

The bee was still flying headlong into the glass, though a little slower now, with much less enthusiasm as it tired
.

Zzzzz … dnk. Zzzzz … dnk. Zzzzz…

She walked quickly across to the window just as the insect spun and dropped, exhausted, on to the sill
.

The voice in her head was not her own. It was a male voice … a boy’s voice, and it spoke in a strange accent she didn’t recognize
.

Open the window,
the voice said
.

Rachel did as she was told, and watched as the bee crawled slowly up on to the edge of the window, then waited for a few seconds before taking flight
.

When the bee rose up fast and flew back towards her face, she remained completely still and unafraid of being stung, as though the voice in her head had calmed her. As the bee circled twice round her head she followed its movements: seeing the gold and black fur on its back revealed in astonishing detail; clapping her hands across her ears at the deafening beat of its wings; and watching as it finally veered away out of the window
.

Rachel Newman stared, almost hypnotized, as the bee
zigzagged its way into the blue, dancing on the thermals. A whirling speck against the New York skyline
.

R
achel came to with a start as the carriage door slammed. The clattering rhythm, the heat and the plush interior of the old train must have lulled her to sleep for … seconds? Minutes? She didn’t know how long.

She’d caught a little sleep on the plane, but now the lag was starting to catch up and she felt strangely floaty. The reassuring bleeps and electronic melodies of Adam’s PSP were still there as they had been on the night flight from New York, on the high-speed shuttle from Heathrow and on the 9.32 a.m. train out of Paddington. It felt odd: such incongruous, modern noises as they rattled along an antiquated branch line, deep into the West Country. Rachel couldn’t help but wonder what their next form of transport might be on this seemingly endless journey.

Steam engine? Pony and trap? Donkey?

Rachel smiled wearily at her brother as he looked up briefly from under the peak of his Yankees cap, eyes momentarily off the game, but ears still plugged with his Pod’s white
earbuds. Adam seemed happy enough in his self-contained world, alone with his computer game and the thrash metal pounding in his ears.

They had been alone in the carriage for the last hour, but now they had been joined by someone else. As the old lady perched a large wicker cat-basket on top of the luggage rack, Adam widened his eyes at his sister. The lady turned and nodded at Adam, who shifted awkwardly to one side as she shuffled her expansive bottom into the dusty red seat next to him and took out her knitting.

The only other person Rachel knew who knitted was Granny Root. Every year a misshapen sweater or cardigan made from scratchy wool would arrive from England. It would be five sizes too big, with one sleeve longer than the other, or tiny, with a neck hole too small to accommodate a human head. When none had arrived last Christmas they were almost disappointed, but by then Rachel and Adam had grown out of Gran’s sweaters in every way.

Celia Root was the grandmother they had met only once, when they were babies; Mom’s mom, who, in all the twins’ fourteen years, had only managed to make a single trip to New York. They’d spoken twice a year on the phone, Gran’s posh-sounding voice crackling down the transatlantic line on Christmas Day and on their birthday, sounding like something from an old radio play. There were photos, too, and Rachel had loved to look at those old black and white shots of a trim, striking woman in lipstick, with smart clothes and
elegantly styled dark hair. The hair was still immaculate, but white in the more recent pictures and, though the clothes were softer, in earthier colours, the bright red lipstick was still in place. It was difficult for Gran to get around these days, though that wasn’t the only reason she’d never been to visit. As she’d got older, Granny Root had developed a terrible fear of flying.

Mom, on the other hand, enjoyed flying all over the place, but had never seemed all that keen on getting them to England before now. She had told them that she hated the place, that it was stuffy, class-ridden and strangled by its own sense of history, whatever that was supposed to mean. Even if she’d wanted to go, her work had never seemed to fit in with their holidays anyway, and so summers were mostly spent in Cape Cod, in a regular rented house near the beach.

Now though, with the stuff going on between their parents, a trip to England had finally seemed like a good idea. Naturally reluctant to see them go, but with no other choice, their mother had announced that spending the rest of the summer in a quiet little village might be the best way for the twins to cool their heels. Somewhere for them to chill out, while things settled down a bit at home.

Somewhere calm, stable, unchanging…

The old lady smiled at Rachel and Rachel smiled back. She was not the kind of woman Rachel was used to seeing in the street or on the subway. In Manhattan most women were either wearing shabby sweats or else were decked out in a
couple of thousand dollars’ worth of DKNY and designer sneakers. This lady was something else entirely. She wore a small straw hat held in place with a long pin, and brown leather shoes that looked as if she hadn’t taken them off for fifty years. It was a boiling summer afternoon, but she was dressed in a suit of something thick and dark green (closer to armour-plating than clothing) with a dainty lace collar sprouting from her neck, which made her look like she’d stepped out of some historical portrait. Rachel tried not to stare, taking in the details as the old lady concentrated on her knitting, her needles clicking at a ferocious rate.