Triskellion (27 page)

Rachel and Adam shook their heads.

“So maybe someone in the village didn’t want them to have any more kids. We know yew was used to terminate pregnancies back then.”

“But they were
both
poisoned,” Rachel said.

Laura nodded. “Good point.” She thought for a few seconds. “The only thing this has in common with any other Bronze Age burial I know about, is that if they were poisoned, then it may have been as a sacrifice to appease the gods. To assure the fertility of the land, of the crops, whatever. You see, usually people were only buried outside the village if they were considered bad luck. If they were outcasts.” She thought about what she’d said for a moment. “That might also explain the state of the bodies.”

“What do you mean?” Rachel asked. “What state?”

“The bodies aren’t … complete. It’s not unusual…”

Adam pulled a face. “Eucchh…”

Rachel stared at Laura, waiting for more, but Laura seemed reluctant to continue.

“Why would anyone have been an outcast?” Adam asked.

Again, Laura hesitated, as though she were deciding whether or not to share something.

“And if they were outcasts, why let everyone know where they are?”

“Right,” Rachel said. “Why would they mark the spot with a big chalk circle?”

“Beats me,” Laura said. “It’s like ‘X’ marks the spot, or
something. Maybe it was so somebody could find them.”

“Maybe so
we
could find them,” Rachel said. “It’s like a signpost.”

Something dark passed quickly across Laura’s face. “Or a warning.”

Their grandmother was waiting at the door for them as they walked up the garden path and beckoned them in.

“Rachel, Adam. I wondered when you were coming back. Come in, we must talk.” Celia Root seemed agitated as she wheeled herself back into the house.

The twins stood awkwardly by the fireplace while their grandmother manoeuvred her chair, positioning herself in front of them. “Darlings, there’s been a terrible fuss about some blade or other,” she said. “Do you know anything about it?”

Rachel and Adam tried hard not to look at one another. Tried and failed not to look guilty.

“Well, we saw that they discovered a blade at the chalk circle,” Rachel said.

“Not that. Everyone knows about that, now. There’s
another
one.”

The twins shook their heads, but Rachel could see that this was cutting no ice with the old woman. “We saw one at the church,” Rachel said.

“And what did you do with it?” Granny Root asked. “Please tell me, darling.”

“We didn’t do anything with it,” Adam said. “The vicar showed it to us in a glass case.”

“I see. And you thought you might like it, as a souvenir of your visit?” Granny Root smiled sadly, as if she had somehow extracted a confession from her grandson.

“No,” Rachel said. “We looked at it, like Adam said. That’s all.” Rachel was trying to sound firm, but she could feel tears pricking at the corners of her eyes. To have been confronted in the church was bad enough, but to be questioned like this by their own grandmother was unbearable. “You’re accusing us, like you think we’re thieves or something.”

“I’m so sorry, but I’m afraid your recent behaviour is against you.” Granny Root’s words and the tears in her eyes were a sharp reminder to Rachel and Adam of their ill-advised break-in at Waverley Hall.

“But surely you’re on our side,” Adam said. “Right?”

The old woman shook her head sadly. “It’s not that simple, darling.” She turned and shouted, “Gerry, you can come in, now. I’m getting nowhere.”

From the kitchen, Commodore Wing stepped into the sitting room. He was quickly followed by Reverend Stone. It was clear that they had been listening to every word.

“I’m sorry, children,” Granny Root said. “I gave you every chance to be honest with me.”

Reverend Stone nodded. “Unfortunately we are going to have to do this another way.”

The look her grandmother gave the commodore caused
something to flip in Rachel’s guts. She had a horrible idea what this other way might be.

“You stole my map!” the commodore bellowed, abandoning any attempt at subtle cross-examination. “Now, what have you done with the blade?” The hot blast of his voice was almost enough to knock the twins back a step.

The weight of guilt and paranoia made Adam’s head throb. He knew that one of the blades was only a few metres above their heads, hidden under a floorboard in the bedroom. It would be so much easier, he thought, just to come clean: to give them the blade, let them deal with Hilary. Then they could go home, forget all about it.

“There’s another blade,” Adam said quietly.

Rachel could have murdered her brother. Even though he was talking about the blade that they had found in the woods, the commodore and his lackeys would presume it was the one that had been stolen from the church. Adam’s admission would convict them of something they hadn’t done.

Rachel thought quickly, kept her cool and spoke.

“Of course there’s another blade,” she said. “Everyone knows that, don’t they? In fact your son Hilary told us all about it, this morning. He showed us how it would fit together with the other two: the one from the church and the one they found at the burial site. It’s just no one knows where this third blade is, right?”

The mention of Hilary’s name seemed to take the wind
from the commodore’s sails, and for a moment he was lost for words.

Adam saw what Rachel was trying to do. “That’s right,” he said. “That’s what I was talking about…”

Trying to put her thoughts elsewhere, Rachel became aware of a low humming: the noise of a bee. She tried to look for it, but then the commodore stepped towards her, spoke quietly and menacingly.

“Are you trying to be clever, girl? Are you hiding something?”

Rachel suddenly felt her anger rising. She and Adam had been up in front of a kangaroo court of Triskellion dignitaries before and she remembered that going on the attack had been an effective tactic.

“You’ve got some nerve!” she shouted. “Talking about hiding things.”

Celia Root gasped at her granddaughter’s audacity. “Rachel!”

“No, I mean it. You people keep everything secret. It’s like there’s always something unspoken going on between you all. You whisper and you plot, and you’ve treated us like criminals ever since we got here.”

“Now you listen to me…” the commodore said.

But Rachel wasn’t listening. She could hear nothing but the blood fizzing in her veins and the low hum of the solitary bee. “Apart from anything else, it’s bloody bad manners.” Rachel was well into her stride and enjoyed spitting out her
new, English swearword. Adam kept his head bowed.

“I don’t think you know the meaning of manners,” Celia Root said, in a trembling voice. “If you are keeping something secret, then you’d better tell us.”

Rachel looked at her grandmother’s twitching face. This woman was almost her nearest blood relative and in her eyes she saw what, at first glance, she took for hatred.

Rachel looked again.

What she could actually see was fear.

She glanced at the commodore and saw the same thing. She looked from one to the other and saw two old people, somehow smaller now than before, and bowed; shrunken suddenly by a secrecy that held them together but which also tormented them.

Where moments before they had been deeply scary, they were now just two, frightened old people.

Movement in the corner of the room caught her eye and she looked up to see the bee. Watched as it buzzed aimlessly around, butting into curtains and circling the dusty light fitting.

Zzzzz … dnk. Zzzzz … dnk. Zzzzz…

Rachel turned her attention back to the commodore, and followed a hunch. “While we’re all talking about secrets, perhaps you’d like to tell us about the things that are written in the church? About Wings and Roots. About how they shouldn’t … mix?”

Rachel’s arrow hit the target squarely. Her grandmother
and the commodore stood in stunned silence, their faces drained of blood.

“You don’t know what you’re meddling with,” Commodore Wing said quietly.

Rachel saw the expression on the old man’s face and felt the look of defiance slip slowly from her own.

Reverend Stone stepped forward and broke the silence.

“Mrs Root, may I?”

The old woman gave a small nod, wiping a tear from her eye with a lipstick-stained tissue.

The vicar stepped towards Rachel, took a deep breath and yelled into her face. “Where is my blade?” Rachel flinched at the flecks of spittle that hit her cheek, but said nothing.

“Leave her alone,” Adam said.

The vicar turned his gaze to Adam and put a finger to his thin lips. “Shush,” he said. Then, from nowhere, his spindly arm swung wildly round and he slapped Rachel hard across the face.

Rachel screamed, and Adam moved, balling his hand into a fist and tensing to throw a punch at the vicar’s scrawny throat.

Rachel’s arm stopped him. “No, Adam,” she said, choking away tears.

Then the bee landed on Reverend Stone’s cheek…

He flicked at the insect, trying to remove it, but the bee’s thorny feet held tight and it would not budge. Then another bee landed on his forehead, and another on his neck. Stone yelped as the first bee stung.

Rachel and Adam watched in amazement as a column of bees flew into the room from the kitchen. A dozen at first, then fifty … maybe a hundred, buzzing in through the open kitchen window, until the air in the room was black with the vibrating bodies and thick with their angry buzzing.

Celia Root’s shrieks joined the screams of Reverend Stone as he was stung, again and again. The commodore was bent over the wheelchair, like a tweedy shell, heroically protecting the old woman from the insects yet, while bees crawled over the two of them, keeping them in check, neither seemed to sustain any stings.

Rachel and Adam stood frozen on the spot, horrified yet unable to take their eyes from the hideous spectacle in front of them.

Reverend Stone screamed until his voice was cracked and raw. He had fallen writhing to the floor, as every exposed inch of his flesh – his face, his eyelids, his lips, his ears and his hands – was covered with a throbbing layer of bees, stinging him repeatedly.

Rachel turned away, disgusted by the unearthly howl and the thrashing of Stone’s stick-like limbs as the bees stung him to death. Astonished by the fact that neither she nor Adam seemed of any interest to the swarm.

That they had been left completely untouched.

Rachel stepped round the flailing body and ran towards the door. “I’ll get help,” she shouted, though even as she said it, she had no idea where help might come from.

She opened the door, hoping that the bees might fly out, but they stayed where they were, clustered round the adults in the room. She screamed for help, then saw two figures standing near the garden gate in the lane. She realized that it was Gabriel, and beside him, Jacob Honeyman, and she screamed again.

Neither Gabriel nor Honeyman moved from the other side of the fence, but as Rachel’s scream died in her throat, the bees began to fly out of the door: a single line of five or six at first, then a thick phalanx, snaking off down the garden like black smoke.

Rachel turned back into the room, where one or two stray bees still darted and dipped around the ceiling rose. The bodies of hundreds of others – dead and dying after losing their stings – lay scattered across the floor. Celia Root sobbed, and Commodore Wing dared not move. She looked across at her brother. He was still rooted to the spot, staring down at Reverend Stone.

The vicar’s head had swollen to the size of a football, purple and raw. His eyes had all but disappeared beneath eyelids that had swelled and closed completely. His sharp nose was now like an overripe strawberry, smeared across his face, and his puffed-up lips trickled with blood and drool and venom.

Rachel’s hands flew to her mouth. “Oh, my God…”

From the end of his black sleeves, the vicar’s once pale and delicate fingers protruded like those of inflated rubber gloves.

“He’s dead,” Adam said.

T
he twins sat shaking at the rickety table, while Jacob Honeyman put the kettle on. Adam picked at flakes of coloured paint that peeled from the table top while Rachel chewed at her knuckle nervously.

“Hot sweet tea,” Jacob honked from the kitchen. “That should help.”

Adam managed a grudging laugh. “Is there anything in this country that can’t be solved by tea?”

The atmosphere in Honeyman’s shack was not lightened by Adam’s attempt at a joke. The single light bulb over the table illuminated everything with a stark, clinical glare, throwing dark shadows into the corners and making everyone look yellow and ill. In fact, Rachel
felt
ill; the sickening spectacle of the dying vicar imprinted on her mind’s eye, and the deafening hum of bees still fresh in her ears.

It was seven o’clock. Three hours since Gabriel and Honeyman had whisked them away from Root Cottage with
their grandmother’s screams still tearing jagged holes in the afternoon air.

Gabriel sat slumped in Honeyman’s battered old armchair staring at the floor. The light cast shadows under his eyes and made his cheekbones look sharper, his hair blacker. Rachel stared at him. He looked serious, and for the first time since they had met, Rachel felt a little scared of him.