Triskellion (31 page)

Back to the traveller and his bride. To their twin children. To the bodies whose recent desecration had signalled the beginning of the end.

“Gerry?”

He looked up, realized that he had been deep in thought. Buried as deep in the past as those bodies had been. “Sorry, I was miles away.”

“What’s going to happen?”

He tapped arthritic fingers against the top of his walking stick. “Probably nothing that any of us will see straight away, but things will change. It’s special here, you know it is, we
all
know it is … and it’s the Triskellion that has given us these … gifts.”

“So if it goes, the gifts will be taken with it?”

“I’m afraid so…”

Celia Root nodded, as though the commodore were confirming her worst fears. She lifted up her face to his. “What about Rachel and Adam?” she asked. “What will Hilary do?”

“I’ve never known what my son was going to do.”

“I won’t let any harm come to them.”

“Of course not…”

“Then we must do something.”

The commodore shook his head. He needed that drink more than ever. “I can’t stop it.”

With a shaking hand, Celia Root reapplied her bright red lipstick. She snapped the compact shut and waved an arm towards the empty bar. “Those people needed your guidance, Gerry, and it wasn’t there. You still owe them something. You still have a duty.”

For a few seconds there was only the deep
“tock”
of the old clock above the bar, and the bells and beeps from the fruit machine in the next room. Then Commodore Wing rose slowly from his chair and began to push Celia Root towards the door.

“Let’s hope we’re not too late,” he said.

They moved through the door and outside into the chill, began to move towards the commodore’s car.

“It’s funny,” the old woman said.

“What?”

“How a blessing can become a curse.”

R
achel and Adam spent five minutes looking for the light switches and then gave up. It wasn’t
completely
dark inside the hall. Pale, blue-white work lights glowed from the sealed-off area in which the archaeological team had been working, pulsing softly from behind the curtains of thick plastic that had been hung in a layered square round the centre of the room.

The hall was surprisingly high-ceilinged, and even though they were whispering, the children’s voices seemed dangerously magnified as they moved slowly through the eerie half-light.

“Could this place be any spookier?” Adam asked.

“I doubt it,” Rachel said. Gabriel’s voice was still there inside her head, telling her not to worry, but it was getting harder by the second.

“What’s that?” Adam froze, and the urgency of his question made Rachel start.

“What?”

“That noise…”

They stood and listened. Coming from the other side of the room, from the part where they knew the bodies to be, they could hear a faint hissing sound. Rachel thought it sounded like a long, sad sigh.

Adam had read her thought. “Like a dying breath, more like.”

Then Rachel remembered the tour that Laura had given them earlier, when she’d taken their DNA samples. “It’s the sprinkler they use to make sure the bodies don’t dry out. They must have it on a timer or something.”

“I knew that,” Adam said.

They moved slowly towards the first layer of polythene sheeting. The shadows that had been cast against the thick, creamy plastic by the equipment tables and by the sarcophagus beyond, seemed to shift and shudder as they approached. This time it was Rachel who knew what Adam was thinking. “It’s probably just the spray moving across the lights,” she said. “Or maybe it’s the movement of the plastic sheets, you know? A draught from somewhere…”

“There is no draught,” Adam said.

“Well,
something’s
making me feel cold…”

They stepped closer and Rachel lifted a hand to push aside the polythene.

“Are we sure it’s here?” Adam asked. “I didn’t see it before.”

“It has to be here.”

“Well, if it is, they’ve probably got it under lock and key. It is gold, you know.”

Rachel reached into the back pocket of her jeans, produced the chisel and the rusty screwdriver that Jacob had given her before they’d left. “Well, it shouldn’t be a problem. They thought we were thieves before, right? Might as well live up to our reputation.”

Adam held out a hand. “I’d best take them. I’m stronger.”

Rachel handed them over, feeling a surge of affection for her brother, still brave – or still pretending to be – after everything that he had been through. “Let’s get this over with,” she said.

They moved inside the first layer of plastic sheeting. In front of them lay the long table displaying artefacts from the dig. Each one was labelled and had been carefully cleaned.

“It’s not here,” Adam said.

“You take a closer look,” Rachel said. “I’ll see if there’s anywhere they might have locked it up.” While Adam stayed at the table, Rachel moved on, skirting carefully round the edge of the raised platform on which the sarcophagus itself was laid. She pushed through another two layers of plastic sheeting until she had emerged at the far side of the hall. It was even darker here, but she could see that she was wasting her time. There was a low stage and an old piano. There were a few dusty bookshelves, some cupboards containing old parish newsletters, a tea set and hot-water urn.

There was nowhere secure enough to have stored the golden blade.

“Any luck?” Adam whispered.

“Not so far. What about you?”

Adam said something in response, but Rachel didn’t really take it in. She had pushed aside another translucent curtain and moved back inside the cordoned-off area and was walking slowly towards the platform.

Towards the sarcophagus.

Gabriel’s voice was still there inside her head, but fainter now, all but drowned out by a buzzing; by a low hum like the pulse of something electrical. Like a powerful current that flowed through her as she was drawn to the coffin. To the bodies…

She stepped up on to the platform, inched slowly to the edge of the sarcophagus and looked down.

It was her first real look at what had been found beneath the chalk circle. The images that she had seen on the TV screens could not do justice to it.

It was the heads that drew her. The faces…

At first she could not be sure if the faces – the bones exposed beneath tattered, leathery remnants of flesh – were preserved as masks of happiness or horror. A cap of some sort, almost fused to the male head and indistinguishable from the flesh itself gave the head a pointed appearance. Expressionless eyes stared hollow, their eyeballs long gone, but their lids dried into almond shapes, making the male
figure look almost oriental. On the female, a thin row of dark lashes still framed the empty sockets, softening them, as did the remaining hank of chestnut hair that was twisted round her face. Desiccated lips had drawn back to nothing: thin-lipped holes exposing rows of browned teeth, which made the mouths look like those of chattering monkeys.

Were those grimaces or grins?

Seeing their arms still locked in an eternal embrace, Rachel had just decided that the expressions were closer to contentment than terror when her eyes dropped down to the torsos, and she quickly changed her mind.

She covered her mouth to stifle a scream, then called for Adam.

He came running, bursting through the plastic curtains and leaping up on to the platform beside her. “What? Jeez, you scared the life out of me…”

Rachel just pointed.

Adam leant forward and peered into the coffin, the milky half-light casting a pale glow across the bodies.

“What Laura said about them not being complete. She wasn’t kidding…” Rachel could still hear Gabriel’s voice, but now it was fractured and faint. It sounded as though he was crying.

Across the breasts of both bodies, the remains of the clothing had been carefully cut away. The rotting fabric had been peeled back from the bodies and laid aside, like tattered, dark wings, revealing the bones and the petrified flesh.

The huge, ragged hole that had been torn out of the chests.

When Adam looked up, and across at Rachel, his face was bloodless. “They’ve got no hearts…”

J
acob Honeyman had heard them coming when they were still a mile or more away, and, unable to remember whether or not he’d locked the gate after the children, had rushed out into the compound to check that everything was secure.

He had just fastened the padlock when he saw the lights. Dozens of pairs bearing down on him, like the eyes of night beasts. And when he realized how fast they were going, he guessed that he’d been wasting his time.

He knew that he would never be secure enough.

The convoy of vehicles accelerated as they rounded the final bend and roared towards Honeyman’s land. He cried out, and threw himself out of the way as a large truck smashed straight across the low, wire fence and roared past him; dozens more followed, gouging huge tracks in the earth, demolishing a small coal bunker and crashing through several of his hives.

Honeyman picked himself up. There wasn’t time to survey
the damage or mourn the loss of his bees. He knew he had to run.

They were on him before he’d taken half a dozen steps.

Two Green Men seized him by the arms and marched him across the compound to where Hilary Wing was calmly climbing off his motorbike.

The terror squirmed in Honeyman’s guts like a snake.

“What are you running for, Jacob?” Wing asked. He walked slowly across to the beekeeper, shaking his hair loose and brushing clods of earth from his long, black coat.

Honeyman stammered and shook. “Look what you did. You’re trespassing…”

“Yes, sorry about that, but time is rather against us, I’m afraid.”

“I’ll get the police,” Honeyman said. “I’ll have you arrested.” He looked around. The old cars and battered trucks still had their lights blazing: a circle of them, blinding him. Aside from the men holding him, there were maybe two dozen more, half hidden in shadow. The skulls that many had fastened to their heads seemed to leer at him, and the black painted faces snarled and spat.

He knew that the police would be of little help.

“Where are the children?” Wing asked.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“So why did you run?”

“I was scared. I
am
scared.”

“Just tell me where they are and we’ll be on our way.
I’ll even pay for the damage.”

Honeyman shook his head.

“That’s a shame, because, like I said, we’re in something of a hurry and this is what you might call an emergency.” Wing stepped close to him, the streaks of blood on his cheeks dried brown and his breath hot on Honeyman’s face. “I don’t want to do any more damage than I have to.”

“What are you going to do to them?” Honeyman asked.

Wing laughed. “Why would I want to do anything?” The smile vanished. “I just want what belongs to us, that’s all. And you should want the same thing, unless you’ve already switched sides of course.” He cocked his head. “You haven’t sold us out, have you, Jacob?”

The snake in Honeyman’s belly was coiling itself round his innards. He could barely breathe. He took a deep breath…

“I ain’t telling you nothing,” he said.

The rage flashed across Hilary Wing’s face, but settled quickly into something like resignation. He signalled to one of his men, then turned away as Honeyman was frog-marched roughly to the corner of the compound and thrown into a rickety woodshed.

“You can’t do this,” Honeyman squealed.

Wing spoke quietly through a crack in the door. “I don’t
want
to do this, but what choice do you leave me.”

While two of Wing’s men climbed up on to their trucks and passed down large metal cans, the others stood and
watched. Beneath the earth that was smeared across their faces there was doubt etched round the eyes of one or two. And guilt.

But like Honeyman, they had little choice. Everything had gone too far.

Wing’s men carried the cans over and began to splash petrol across the door and on to the sides of the old shed.