Triskellion (17 page)

Gabriel stared at the ground, then looked up at Rachel. “I don’t know where he is.” A look of what might have been guilt passed over his face. “Something’s gone wrong.”

“Well, do something, will you?”

“Like what?”

“Anything.”
Rachel clasped her stomach and doubled up as if in terrible pain. “You’re the one with all the spooky powers.”

“No, I’m not,” Gabriel said. “Not the only one.”

“What?”

“That’s why you’re feeling his pain. That’s why you can hear me without me talking. I need
your
help.” Gabriel held out his arms and pulled Rachel close to him. “And two heads are better than one.”

Gabriel took Rachel’s head between his palms and pulled her face to his, pressing their foreheads together and shutting his eyes. Still moaning, still in pain, Rachel complied.

And let him into her mind.

“We have to find this tree,” Gabriel said. “You’ve got to concentrate. Picture the tree, picture it in as much detail as you can. I don’t know what it’s called, but it’s like it has five or six trunks, all wound together to make one big trunk. Really wide…”

An image began to form in Rachel’s mind. Roots pushed from the ground, morphing into twisted trunks, growing together, bonding into one large organism a metre or so across. The trunks began to sprout branches in her mind, then leaves. Dark green, not like an oak or an ash, but evergreen and finger-like; spreading out over the trunk and away, wider and wider…

“It’s got evergreen leaves,” Rachel said, “and the bark is kind of reddish and stripy.” Even as she spoke, she realized she didn’t need to; that Gabriel was getting exactly the same picture. He held her head a little tighter between his palms. The picture in Rachel’s mind grew and became more intricate:
the leaf canopy spreading as if they were watching speeded-up film of the tree’s growth.

“The leaves are poisonous.” Rachel spoke inside her head. “And it was planted many years ago to protect against something evil.”

Rachel had no idea where these ideas were coming from, but the sense was loud and clear. Other foliage began to sprout and grow, until the tree, which had been standing alone, was surrounded by other, smaller trees and a carpet of dense vegetation. As the picture became busier, Rachel felt herself rising above it, floating up through the branches until she was above the tree. Going higher, clouds raced by in a blur across a bright blue sky and, looking down, she could see the rest of the forest sprouting around the tree at incredible speed.

“It’s amazing, I can see
everything
,” Rachel said. Rachel thought…

Near by, she watched as a small red-brick cottage rose from the ground in the blink of an eye. Rachel felt herself move, felt herself flying over the woods and, swooping a little lower, she could see two small figures among the trees below. Dipping lower still, within touching distance of the treetops, she realized that she was watching herself and Gabriel who were standing only a short distance away from the tree.

Given the position that she could see herself and Gabriel standing in, she worked out that the tree was about fifty
yards to their right, and around the same distance again from the red-brick building.

“Come back now, Rachel, come back down to the ground.”

Gabriel’s voice echoed in Rachel’s head and she felt herself return to her body. She slipped easily into her own flesh once again, having watched the life cycle of a tree, planted almost three thousand years earlier, pass by in just a few seconds.

Rachel and Gabriel opened their eyes simultaneously.

“It’s over there…” they both said at the same time, and pointed off to the right.

Adam drifted in and out of consciousness.

He thought he had been dreaming. As well as his mother, he had seen images of his childhood: happy days in Cape Cod playing on the beach; watching humpback whales up in Provincetown. Being pushed through Central Park in a buggy by his dad. A warm feeling. Then suddenly, an image of Rachel, anguished and tear-stained, had driven away all others and he had come back to reality with a start.

His sister’s agony gnawed at Adam’s gut like hunger pains, and suddenly his senses felt keener. The orange glow was still just about there, but had faded now. An instinct for survival that had seemed to have left him, began to surge again through his body like a current. He moved his arms and legs until he felt the pins and needles begin to dissolve from his
limbs. Perhaps the rest had done him good, he thought.

Wearily, Adam rolled himself over on to his stomach and began to claw away at the earth either side of the fallen prop, and as he did, a large chunk of flint emerged from the soil.

Rachel stepped over the last of the brambles and nettles that they had trampled down. Her arms were covered in stings and her jeans and T-shirt were stained with the juice of the blackberries that they had beaten out of the way. She looked as if she was covered with hundreds of small, bloody wounds.

Rachel and Gabriel emerged into the clearing, looked up and gasped. Towering over them was the biggest tree that Rachel had ever seen. It was the tree from her vision, certainly, but even bigger in scale than she had imagined; a gigantic tree some ten metres round. They stepped up to where the roots emerged from the ground like sturdy stilts, holding up the whole structure. Where they joined the trunk they formed hollows and great fissures, providing underground homes for all sorts of creatures.

The sun was beginning to go down, bathing the red trunk in golden light.

“So what do we do now?” Rachel said, running her fingers down the crevices in the bark.

“At some point we need to try digging,” Gabriel said. “But we need to find Adam first. I think we’re quite close.”

Rachel didn’t know how Gabriel could be so sure, but her
anxiety over Adam began to fade a little. There was hope, she thought.

“There’s
always
hope,” Gabriel said.

Gabriel pressed his palm against the tree and shut his eyes tight. After a few seconds he opened them again.

“Do what I’m doing, and try to focus your thoughts on Adam. Concentrate really hard. We’ll find him…”

Rachel put her hand against the rough bark and squeezed her eyes closed. She thought about a happier time, a time before they’d ever come to Triskellion, and brought to mind a vivid picture of her brother’s smiling face.

Adam spat out a mouthful of earth and damp splinters. The sharp edge of the flint wore easily away at the edges of the rotten wood. Miraculously, he was still breathing, despite the effort involved in hacking away at the fallen prop. Just when things had seemed completely hopeless, he had felt a rush of new energy move through him, like a second wind. The feeling filled him with hope and, as he whittled down the rotten wood in front of his closed eyes, the orange disc of light that had guided him this far throbbed with a bright, strong glow.

Adam drew back his fist in the narrow space. He imagined it as a steel piston crashing through damp cardboard, and smashed away what remained of the rotten prop with a single punch. The earth on the other side was soft and yielding and Adam scooped it away in handfuls, at the same time trying to clear debris from his nose, mouth and ears. The
further he had got into the tunnel, the thinner the air had become, and Adam knew that he had to make one, final, desperate attempt at freedom.

He moved his hands faster and faster and, as Adam scooped and pushed handfuls of soil behind him, he became aware that his tunnel was taking a slight upward turn.

He became aware of the ground above him.

Rachel clung on to the rough bark with both hands. The image of Adam was strong in her mind and she was sure she could feel the whole tree tremble beneath her fingertips.

“Can you feel that?” she called to Gabriel, trying to maintain her concentration.

A metre away from her Gabriel nodded. “Something’s happening,” he said. “Don’t stop. Whatever you do, don’t stop…”

Adam felt the earth shudder a little as soil began to fall away from him under its own force. He guessed that just as he might have been getting somewhere, the removal of the prop had started some sort of avalanche, and he was now certain that he was going to be buried alive.

The earth seemed to be moving and rolling beneath his stomach; moving him along on a slow wave as it filled his mouth and nose and ears. Adam stopped digging for a moment, frozen with panic, and felt himself being pushed, squeezed upward through the earth like toothpaste from a
tube. Smashing through the wooden prop had clearly triggered something; something that was doing its best to expel him from beneath the ground.

“It feels like an earthquake,” Rachel said, her fingers held tightly in the ribs of the bark. She raised her voice over the deafening roar inside her head. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” Gabriel shouted. “But I think we’re about to find out…”

Adam’s face was being pressed into the soft soil. He felt his whole body being crushed, then released, by the ground around him, massaging him forward and upward until, with his eyes still shut, he sensed light.

Pinpricks at first, then bigger splotches of pale light that shone like stars.

Thick tendrils reached into the ground either side of him. They seemed to move like tentacles, dragging him along, pushing his head into a cavernous opening surrounded by roots. He pulled himself along, guided by the length of a root and strained his head upward into the opening, as if emerging from quicksand.

Shaking and blinking and spitting out earth, Adam gasped at the moist air and opened his eyes. He was no more than head and shoulders above ground and it was still quite dark.

But he could see again.

Illuminated by shafts of golden sunlight that shone
through fissures between the roots, Adam appeared to be in a shallow cavern beneath a tree – maybe a fox’s earth or home to a family of badgers. Twisted roots formed a canopy directly over his head and, dragging an arm from the soil, he pulled himself up a little further, while the earth continued to spew him out.

The space was tight and there was only room for Adam to continue crawling, panting for air, towards the golden glow coming from what looked like a wasps’ nest; a huge, fleshy fungus the size of a space hopper that hung down from the bole of the tree over his head. As Adam tried to work out what the object was, he realized that the earth was still pulsing behind him, pushing him upward against the roots, trying to force him out. He kept crawling, scrabbling towards the source of the light, towards the nest or whatever it was, and found himself being pressed up against it.

It felt more like a large, deflating balloon or airbag than a nest. A bladder of some kind, filled with liquid.

The earth kept rising behind him and pushed Adam harder and harder against the bulbous, waxy skin. He tried to keep it away with his hands, but the membrane stretched and they disappeared into the pulpy mass. The earth was closing in behind him, pressing hard against his back, pushing his face into the soft, musty-smelling sac, suffocating him.

And as the earth gave a final surge forward, the bladder burst. What seemed like gallons of milky liquid poured over
Adam, filling his eyes and nose and mouth with sticky, disgusting-smelling goo. Adam tore his hands free and thrashed around blindly, reaching out, once again, to save his life…

The trembling seemed to have stopped. Rachel waited a few seconds to be sure and then called out to Gabriel. “Look, there’s something coming out of the tree!”

Gabriel jumped down and ran to the large hollow at the base of the tree’s roots. Just as Rachel had said, something was emerging from a hole beneath the tree.

Rachel looked closer, screwing up her face in distaste. “What is it?” Nothing would have surprised her now and, at a first glance, she thought that the clammy, white thing waving from the soil might be some kind of giant, bloodless maggot.

“It’s a hand,” Gabriel said. “Help me…”

Gabriel grabbed the slippery hand and with Rachel’s help started to dig away at the soil round the hollow. Moments later they pulled Adam from the earth into the last rays of orange light. He was soaked, filthy and stinking; his head shrouded in the tatters of the burst membrane and every inch of him covered in soil.

Adam fell to his knees, exhausted. He rubbed away the earth from his eyes, then howled triumphantly as he lifted up his hand.

Rachel and Gabriel gasped.

It was dirty, and dripping with a thick, creamy liquid, but
there was no mistaking it as the late afternoon light passed across Adam’s face and arms and mud-encrusted hands. As it played across the golden blade of the Triskellion that was clutched between his trembling fingers.