Triskellion 3: The Gathering

by Will Peterson

  The boy had come tearing from the house, panic-stricken. He began chasing after the car, desperately shouting at his mother, pleading with her to stop as she accelerated away.

  The dust had not yet settled again when the peaceful night air was torn apart by the noise of squealing brakes, shearing metal and shattering glass…

  The Packard had not needed gas and had seemed to drive itself smoothly along the highway and then off into the scrubland of the New Mexico desert. Gabriel was behind the wheel now, and sitting in the back seat, Rachel and Adam had drifted into the most disturbing glimpse yet of their grandmother’s past.

  The party, the angry confrontations, and the dreadful … fatal consequences.

  As the vision had unfolded in their minds, the same car that had fulfilled Celia Root’s terrible destiny forty years before now carried them towards their own – and inexplicably, a thousand-kilometre journey which should have taken the best part of twelve hours had taken less than half that time.

  It was only the weather that had made the drive remotely difficult. The day had never become bright. The sky was purple and blotchy, and a howling wind had blown up, throwing tumbleweed and scraps of rubbish into their path and across the windscreen.

  Hailstones battered the bonnet of the Packard and drummed menacingly on its roof. Rachel curled up on the springy back seat, where her grandmother had sat decades before, glad that the steel of the car’s body was thick and protective.

  “Looks like a tornado,” Adam said. He pointed across the desert to where the clouds seemed to be pressing down on the land. A plume of dark vapour spiralled out of the cloud and twisted down to the ground. As they drove towards it, the tornado threw up grit, sticks and plants as if the desert was protesting at their presence – or at least was trying to prevent them from continuing.

  It was only mid afternoon when signs for ALAMOGORDO AIR FORCE BASE started to appear but it was already dark. Adam was driving again. He steered the Packard over the last few kilometres and they saw lights in the distance. As they approached, they could tell that the base was the size of a small town. A perimeter fence sparkled with bright white lamps, and spotlights raked the sky and surrounding desert from conning-towers on each corner.

  “Looks welcoming,” Gabriel said. He smiled at Rachel. “You ready for this?”

  Rachel did not feel in the least bit ready, but if there was any chance at all that her father was being held here then she had no choice but to go in. Her anxiety was only heightened by the reactions of the Triskellion round her neck: it had been vibrating and getting warmer for the last twenty kilometres.

  “Can you feel it, Adam?” she asked.

  Adam fished into his shirt and held up his Triskellion. It spun on its leather thong and glowed bright in the dim light inside the car. “You bet,” he said.

  They pulled up at the checkpoint by the main gates and spotlights immediately focused on the old car.

  “This’ll be a test,” Adam said. He wound down the window and waited for someone to come from the sentry box. It was empty.

  They waited a few seconds, wondering what to do, until the electronic barrier in front of the car lifted, opening the way for them. Adam looked to Gabriel for guidance.

  “Go on,” he said.

  Adam accelerated and drove the car under the barrier. A pair of armoured gates swung open, and they found themselves inside Alamogordo Air Force Base. It appeared to be completely deserted. The gates swung shut behind them.

  “Nice work,” Adam said to Gabriel. “You made the gates do that, didn’t you?”

  “No,” Gabriel said. “Pull over.”

  Adam stopped the car behind an army truck.

  “Can’t you hear that?” Gabriel said.

  Adam and Rachel concentrated for a second.

  “I thought it was just me,” Rachel said. She could hear a faint high-pitched ringing in her ears.

  “I’ve got it too.” Adam rattled his little finger in his ear.

  “They’re blocking us,” Gabriel said. “Like they did at the station in Ohio. Try talking to each other; use your minds.”

  Rachel tried and failed to communicate with her brother. It was as if the frequency in their heads were scrambling their words.

  “So if you didn’t open the gates,” Adam said, “why did they let us in?”

  “I don’t know,” Gabriel said. “And that’s what worries me.”

  High above New York City, in the glass observatory at the very top of the Flight Building, the director cranked up the powerful refractor telescope.

  BETA-coded reports had been landing on his desk all day. The office had been on high alert after operatives had begun reporting freak conditions in the sky from New Mexico all the way up to Alaska. Reports of similar meteorological events were also coming in from Canada, the UK and North Africa.

  Whatever was happening up there was big.

  The Hope astronomers had identified a rare constellation that, according to them, could only happen once every ten thousand years – an alignment of the planets that appeared to be causing hurricanes, freak tides, storms and today, a partial eclipse. The base in Alamogordo was also reporting more than usual activity in the desert sky.

  There was always activity of one kind or another in the skies above Alamogordo, which was why the base had been built there in the first place. Then, of course, there had been the incident in the 1950s and the evidence that had finally convinced the government to take the reports seriously – so seriously that they had created a fake incident some kilometres away to take the attention away from Alamogordo itself.

  The incident…

  The director crossed to the solid steel door behind his desk. It was built into the only wall that was not floor-to-ceiling glass. He reached out a hand, laid his palm flat against the metal.

  He could feel it, he was certain – could feel the power of it, sitting there locked away, waiting for its two com-panions.

  Whenever he took the Triskellion out to study it, he was excited by the way it made him feel. Just looking at it was enough to make him hyperventilate; enough to make his heart dance in his chest and send the blood coursing a little faster through his veins.

  He could barely imagine what would happen when the three of them were finally reunited. His throat tightened and his mouth went dry just thinking about it. He smiled. Wasn’t that how people sometimes described being in love?

  The director walked back to the telescope, leaned down to the eyepiece and focused on the star they had been watching for days. It appeared to be getting closer. It pulsed with light, and through the powerful lens, the director could see auras of colour radiating around it, flickering and flashing like a signal.

  A signal that none of them could decode.

  The director’s BlackBerry buzzed in his pocket. He looked at it. A text message from Alamogordo: THEY’VE ARRIVED.

  Commodore Wing was watching the sky.

  Merlin had been howling all day at the terrible storm that had driven rain through the leaky windows of Waverley Hall and ripped tiles from its roof. Wing had spent the afternoon with his ground staff, chainsawing trees that had blown over and were blocking the main drive to the hall.

  It had been the same all over the village. Hundred-year-old trees had been torn from their roots, crushing cars and demolishing houses. It would take months to clear up the debris the storm had left in its wake.

  The sky had cleared during the evening and now Commodore Wing swung an old brass telescope around before fixing it on a bright star. He took a reading with a sextant and jotted down co-ordinates on a pad by his side. An ancient yellow document covered with diagrams and calculations was unfolded on his desk. It had been drawn up centuries before and held in the family’s library ever since.

  There were Triskellions etched in three corners of the parchment, and at its centre was what appeared to be a flower shape – as if three Triskellions had been laid one on top of the other.

  Commodore Wing com
pared his co-ordinates with the figures on the piece of paper, and for the hundredth time that evening, read the words written at the bottom of it:

  Wind, Fire and Water

  Will come to pass,

  When Three Become One

  In the City of Glass.

  Disease, pox and famine,

  The world will be done,

  If the heir of my house

  Is Ezekiel One.

  Commodore Wing knew very well what Ezekiel chapter one was about. It had been one of the favourite Old Testament readings in the village church since he could remember.

  But the meaning of the rest of the verse escaped him.

  He took a sip of whisky, and then another, and began to doodle in the corner of the telephone pad on his desk. Flipping over the page, he saw the note he had written down a few nights before: DETECTIVE ANGELA SCOPPETONE, NYPD.

  And suddenly he knew exactly where the City of Glass was.

  Ezekiel Crane was more nervous than he could ever remember having been before – but it was understandable. He was only human, after all. It had only been two days since the bizarre and troubling events at the theatre in St Louis and he was a matter of hours away from the biggest show of his career.

  A matter of days away from the Gathering…

  The Franklin Field stadium in Philadelphia held fifty thousand people, and tonight Ezekiel Crane would draw each one of them to his cause. He would swell the ranks and the coffers of the Triple Wheel, ready for the moment of Truth and Change and Transformation – when the waiting would be over and the journey would begin.

  From every corner of the United States, his followers would be drawn to a city a hundred and fifty kilometres east of where he was at that very moment.

  “Gonna be a big crowd out there, Pastor Crane.” Brother Jedediah brushed lint from Crane’s gold and white striped suit, which was hanging on the back of the dressing-room door. “Yessir, you gonna make history tonight.”

  Crane flashed a sickly smile at Jedediah in the mirror. “It’s only a rehearsal, Jed. Just you wait.”

  Jedediah nodded and chuckled. “Just a rehearsal. Amen…”

  The man was hardly the sharpest tool in the box, but Crane tolerated him. He admired his loyalty, and besides, he was the only one Crane trusted to secure and handle the precious bee venom – an invaluable service now that Crane needed shots of venom three times a day.

  “I was meaning to ask you,” Jedediah said, his voice high-pitched and nervous. “About the other night…”

  “What about it?”

  “That boy. What he did with … with the body…”

  “Mind control,” Crane snapped. “Nothing more. Mass hypnosis of some sort, and amateur pyrotechnics.” He was trying to stay calm, but the anger was bubbling to the surface; clear in his voice, it distorted his unnaturally smooth features into a dark furious mask.

  “I was just asking,” Jedediah said. “You seemed a bit shaken, is all. I’ve never seen you so upset.”

  Crane blinked, remembering those few hours of madness following the events at the Fox Theatre. The rage which had gripped him. The power he had felt surging through him as he had crashed around backstage, smashing equipment, clawing at the walls and screaming curses at anyone who had tried to calm him down. “There are forces such as those we represent,” he said. “And then there are those whose motives are a little harder to fathom – those who hide in the shadows, who can only spread lies and doubt, and live purely to cast suspicion.”

  “So all that stuff he was saying…”

  “What stuff?”

  “About your miracles being party tricks and you being a … being a fake.”

  Crane turned round in his chair. “What do you think, Brother Jedediah?” Jedediah stood stock-still and open-mouthed, like a mannequin brandishing a clothes-brush. “Do you think I’m a fake?”

  Jedediah shook his head vehemently.

  “That’s good,” Crane said. “Because I’m not.”

  And he wasn’t…

  He knew many people who claimed to have been born again in a religious sense, but none could claim as he could, to have been born again twice. Crane could not explain why, but since the second of his … rebirths, he had found himself able to perform such “miracles” as those he demonstrated at the rallies and meetings. He could make pain disappear and restore feeling where there had been none.

  He had acquired the power to heal.

  Jedediah had given up preparing the costumes for the evening’s show. Instead he had fallen to his knees in front of Crane and was muttering heartfelt thanks for Ezekiel Crane and for being allowed to help – albeit it in a small and insignificant way – in the wonderful work the Triple Wheel was doing.

  But Ezekiel Crane could not enjoy the moment. He was still thinking about the boy at the theatre, remembering the look on his face as he had stared across the stage at him and the light in his eyes that had seemed to be blue one moment and green the next. What is my name?

  No, Crane was not a fake.

  But neither was the boy…

  Crane felt a surge of anger move through him, and suddenly he was out of his chair, clamping his hands tight to the sides of Brother Jedediah’s head. “Do you doubt me, Brother Jedediah?”

  His assistant opened his mouth to speak, but only a whimper emerged as Crane’s grip tightened still further.

  “Do you doubt my power?”

  The whimper became a low moan, and Jedediah’s eyeballs rolled up until only the whites were showing, and he began to tremble.

  “Good, because faith is important. Faith can change the world, and very soon that’s exactly what is going to happen. I was given this power for a reason. Do you understand that?”

  Jedediah just about managed a nod. The trembling had now taken hold of his entire body and he was beginning to bleed.

  “I was given it!” Crane continued. “I was chosen! And I will do whatever is necessary to ensure that when the time comes that power is put to its proper use.” He was shouting now, his hands clamped tight round Jedediah’s head, the fingers whitening as he increased the pressure. “Now, you’re either with me or against me, is that clear?”

  The blood was running down Jedediah’s shirt, dripping on to the floor of the dressing-room as it poured from his nose and ears.

  “You need to choose a side, Jedediah.” Crane stared down at the man on his knees in front of him. “You need to decide, and you need to do it fast. Tick-Tock, Brother Jedediah. Tick-Tock…” He leaned down until his face was only inches from the bloodied and agonized face of his assistant. “Because power like mine can work in all sorts of ways. I can take pain away…” He released his grip on the man’s head, and with a groan, Jedediah dropped to the floor. Crane smiled before turning and walking calmly back to his chair. “Or I can make it happen…”

  Adam drove the Packard past what looked like the base headquarters – a two-storey building above which the United States air force flag was highlighted by a single spotlight – and parked it on a narrow street opposite a small row of shops: a grocery store, a hairdresser’s, a post office.

  Everywhere appeared to be deserted.

  Not wanting to take any chances, they moved quickly into an area of shadow and crept along a block of warehouses, which Rachel guessed housed military vehicles or other heavy equipment.

  “It’s getting stronger,” Gabriel said. “This way…” He pointed.

  Whatever else happened, they needed to do something about whatever was blocking their abilities to communicate with one another – or else they would be unable to use their powers of persuasion to deal with any immediate threat.

  They were sitting ducks.

  “There…” Gabriel said, and they ran across a parade square and over an area of lawn towards a low grey building. Its walls were metal and windowless. A low hum was coming from inside and there was a light issuing from a glazed roof, but there seemed no obvious way in.

  They moved all the way round t
he building until they came back to where they had started. Gabriel pressed himself against the wall, slapping his hands against the metal in frustration. “It’s in there,” he said. “Whatever’s doing this to us.”

  “That’s the problem,” Adam said. He was staring into the gloom of the base, keeping an eye out for trouble. “While it’s blocking us, there’s not very much we can do to get at it.”

  “We have to find some way to get in there,” Gabriel said. “Some … ordinary way.”

  “Where’s Rachel?” Adam asked suddenly.

  Gabriel turned round. There was no sign of her. Adam was about to risk shouting his sister’s name when he saw her moving through a shaft of light at the far corner of the building. He grabbed Gabriel’s arm, and the two of them ran to catch up with her.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “We need to go this way,” Rachel whispered. “It’s the way she went.”

  Adam started to protest, but Rachel was already moving off again, walking towards another grey and utilitarian building fifty metres away.

  “Maybe she knows where they’re keeping Dad,” Adam said.

  They followed her.

  The building had DANGER signs and symbols indicating the presence of hazardous materials posted every six metres around its perimeter. Rachel was walking calmly towards it, moving in and out of shadow as the automated searchlights from the conning-towers moved across the landscape.

  Adam was a few metres behind her. “When you say ‘she’ you mean our grandmother, right?”

  “It’s the same feeling I got in the back of the Packard,” she said. “That we’re walking in her footsteps, you know.”

  “So what are we looking for?” Adam asked.

  “I’m not sure. But I think we’ll know when we find it.” She stopped dead suddenly, her hand flying to her neck – to the amulet that hung from a thong round it. “Can you feel that?”