The man stopped about a metre in front of the children and stood, casually tossing a cricket ball into the air.
“I’m Commodore Gerald Wing,” he said. “You must be Celia Root’s grandchildren.”
Rachel and Adam nodded, and Rachel managed a nervous hello. The man seemed friendly enough, but despite the smile there was something about him that made them both extremely nervous. Adam thought he was like the crusty old headmaster he’d seen in an old English movie one rainy afternoon.
“And as for you…” Commodore Wing’s steely gaze settled on Gabriel. Gabriel stared right back, still chewing. “That was one hell of a catch, young man.”
Gabriel nodded, the strange half-smile on his face once again.
“One hell of a catch.” The commodore threw the cricket ball a little higher, his eyes never leaving the boy’s, then as soon as he’d caught it, he launched it hard and fast towards Gabriel, grunting with the effort of the throw.
Rachel gasped, and watched as Gabriel reached out and the ball smacked into his palm. He looked at it, turning it in his hand as if he were unsure what it was or where it had come from, before lobbing it lazily back to the commodore.
Rachel looked across at Adam. They realized suddenly that the entire room had fallen silent and that all eyes were upon them.
“Amazing reflexes.” The commodore was red-faced, something tense around his eyes, but his voice was calm and measured. “Absolutely amazing,” he said, before turning quickly away on his good leg.
It was as though someone had turned a radio on, with the conversation in the pavilion suddenly resuming as though nothing had happened. The children watched the commodore move back towards his table, one or two of the other players murmuring to him as he walked past them.
“Nutjob,” Adam muttered.
Rachel hissed. “Adam!”
“Not as nuts as one or two others, mind you,” Adam said. He moved towards the door, in search of a toilet. “But still weird…”
Adam was still drying his hands on a wad of paper towel when he walked out of the door behind the pavilion and all but collided with the Bacon brothers.
Gary and Lee stared at Adam, and the taller one smiled. It was anything but friendly.
“Excuse me,” Adam said.
Gary and Lee were both carrying cricket bats, and it didn’t look as though they were there to practise their shots. Adam could feel his heart jumping against his chest. “Why, what have you done?” Gary Bacon chuckled at his feeble joke, and his brother joined in.
Adam stepped left, and then right, but could find no way past the two, bigger teenagers. “I don’t want to miss the match,” he said.
Lee hoisted his bat up on to his shoulder. “You won’t miss anything. Game can’t start until we’re out there.”
Gary raised his own bat and slowly swung it, as though despatching an invisible ball to the boundary. “We’re opening the batting, see.”
“Look, you’d better move out of my way,” Adam said, suddenly. He was as surprised as anyone that his words sounded so aggressive; at the anger he could feel rising up quickly inside him.
“Or what?” Lee said.
Adam had always been the same. Got the hot temper from his dad’s side of the family, that was what his mom had said. Rachel had been on the receiving end of that temper more than most, but then Adam reckoned that she usually started the trouble by saying the wrong thing.
Rachel and Adam. Big mouth, bad temper.
“Yeah.” Gary took a step towards him. “Or what?”
Not that Adam’s mouth wasn’t plenty big enough…
“Or … or the pair of you might find yourselves tied to a tree again.”
The colour drained in an instant from the faces of the two Bacon brothers. They looked at one another and then back at Adam. This time, there was no smile, not even a sarcastic one. There was something very dark in Gary’s voice when he spoke.
“How d’you know about that?”
Now there was as much fear as there was anger; the air was crackling with it, and Adam wasn’t the only one who was scared. He knew that he’d said the wrong thing. Gary and Lee were suddenly looking extremely worried and now there was no way of telling how they would react.
“We saw you, yesterday,” Adam said. His mouth was dry and he had to suck up spit before he could finish. “We watched them in the woods, punishing you.”
Something like a growl came from low in the throat of one of the brothers and Adam felt tears springing to the corners of his eyes. He knew that his words had hit home.
He also knew that a cornered animal was one that was liable to attack.
Lee cleared his throat. “You saw something you shouldn’t have.”
“That was a mistake,” Gary said.
“Bad mistake…”
As they talked at him, their voices getting louder, tumbling across each other, Adam felt the anger and the fear bubbling up together. He felt his fists clench at his side, his jaw aching as he ground his teeth together, holding his breath…
“Should have hit you harder that first time.”
Gary tipped his head back, then snapped it forward, spitting into Adam’s face. “Much harder.”
“Maybe it’s your turn to get punished…”
And Adam ran at them, springing forward with his head down, barging his way between the brothers who shouted and swore in frustration as they grabbed at him and missed. Adam kept running, wiping the gobbet of spit from his face, furiously rubbing his wet and sticky palm across his T-shirt as he ran back round to the front of the pavilion.
And ran, and ran…
“We can’t just disappear…”
Rachel was still pleading with Adam as they stepped on to the train but her argument continued to fall on deaf ears as it had all the way from the cricket pitch. Adam had not said a word as they had raced back to Root Cottage; as they had grabbed their rucksacks from the bedroom; as Rachel had scribbled a hasty note in worn-out ballpoint.
Don’t worry. We’ll call you…
The sliding door of the empty carriage hissed shut and Rachel noticed, with pleasure, that the compartment was new and smelled clean and plastic. An electric sign scrolled the list of destinations across the West Country and, much as Rachel had her doubts about leaving, the newness of the train made her feel optimistic. It would whisk them quickly and efficiently across the country.
It would take them back to the real world.
The engine whirred into life and the train pulled slowly out of Triskellion station. As the hanging baskets of pink geraniums floated past, Adam allowed himself a tight smile and glanced at his sister.
Rachel smiled back sympathetically, but unable to conceal a little regret. Although the past couple of days had been unsettling and, on more than one occasion, downright scary, Rachel had begun to feel oddly at home in the village where her mother was born.
“Gran’s going to be really mad…” Rachel said.
Adam shrugged. “I don’t care. I’m out of here. This place is messing with my head. It’s like you’re not noticing any of this weird stuff any more.”
“Maybe it just seems weird to us,” Rachel said. “Like the cricket, or whatever, because we’re not from around here. Have you thought that we might be the ones who are weird?”
Adam didn’t look convinced. “I want to go home. And don’t worry about Gran. She didn’t seem to want us around anyway.”
“Come on, that’s not fair.”
Adam leant back, gazed out of the window. “I’m not sure anyone wanted us around.”
Celia Root cleared away the tea things in the pavilion, stacking plates in the basket on the front of her wheelchair, trundling across to the serving hatch, where the other village women took them from her to wash.
“Has anyone seen Rachel and Adam?” she asked no one in particular. No one in particular gave her any answer beyond the shake of a head, so she wheeled herself back to remove the tablecloths from the trestles. When she
had finished, she took a powder compact from her handbag and checked her make-up in the small mirror.
Outside on the veranda, Tom Hatcham, padded-up and waiting to bat, lumbered over to Commodore Wing, who stood on the steps, looking out over the pitch, his eyes narrowed against the sun.
“They’ve gone,” Hatcham said.
Commodore Wing gave Hatcham no sign that he either knew or cared what the landlord was talking about. He shouted out a brief “Shot!” as Lee Bacon hit a four across the boundary, the red ball speeding into the rope that marked the edge of the pitch, bouncing up and thudding into the flaking, wooden steps beneath the commodore’s feet.
As the train gathered speed, Rachel looked out at the green blur of trees that sped past the window, and let out a deep breath that she realized she had been holding for the best part of a minute. She could see Adam’s spirits visibly lifting as the train headed away from the village. He flopped back in his seat, his feet up on the chair opposite, and his smile that little bit broader than it had been for several days.
But no sooner had the train reached full speed than it suddenly began to slow down again. The green blur outside the window refocused into trees and hedgerows. The brakes squealed against the hot rails and the train ground to a halt.
“Just the signals, I guess,” Rachel said. She summoned a smile, but was unable to contain a glance back along the track herself, to shake off the feeling of having been followed. The engine ticked over, clicking and whirring, then slowly the carriage began to roll backwards along the track.
Adam glanced round nervously, then jumped up from his seat and paced over to the sliding door. The train continued to reverse for a few metres, then, its engine powering down, finally stopped altogether.
Adam stabbed at the buttons that would open and close the doors if activated by the driver.
Nothing.
Rachel realized that, unlike those on the old carriage in which they had arrived, these electric doors could not be opened from inside. “So much for a nice, new train,” she said.
“I’m going up front. See what’s happening.” Adam pushed his way along the aisle and opened the door at the end of the carriage that joined it to the next one. Rachel did not fancy being alone in the otherwise empty carriage and quickly followed.
Three carriages down, Rachel and Adam found the guard’s cabin, empty, but with a window open on to the side of the track. Adam stuck his head out and Rachel craned her neck to see through the small gap that remained. A man in a blue uniform, holding a dayglo orange flag, was walking away from them along the curve of the carriages, moving slowly towards the front of the train, which was obscured from them by the bend.
“Hey,” Adam called, but the man didn’t seem to hear. Adam turned back to his sister. “I’m not staying in here. I want to know what’s up.” He stretched his arm out of the window and reached down to where a handle on the outside released the guard’s door. It swung open against the side of the train with a clang. Adam jumped down the metre or so from the train on to the coarse gravel of the track. Rachel hesitated a moment then, when Adam turned round, his arms open as if to catch her, she jumped too.
They walked alongside the train until the engine came into view, but instead of the signals they had expected, saw a vast oak tree lying across the rails. The driver had climbed down from the engine and was talking to the guard with the orange flag. As Rachel and Adam approached, the men looked tiny against the tree, its thick, scaly trunk as high as their necks and the dense green foliage spreading well beyond the limits of the track. It looked like a dead dinosaur guarding the line. Keeping intruders away.
Ensuring that, for a good while at least, as far as this stretch of railway was concerned, nobody was coming or going anywhere.
* * *
Concealed within the branches of a similar, but still upright tree, Gabriel watched the two small figures crunch along the gravel. He watched as they joined the guard and driver, studying their body language, and, even from a distance, he could see the twins visibly slump as they absorbed the news that they were going nowhere.
That there was no way out of Triskellion.
Gabriel looked away, through the branches, focusing his wide, green eyes directly into the afternoon sun. He seemed to breathe in the light and, as he did so, the branches trembled, as if ruffled by an imaginary breeze.
“Roots were rotten,” the guard said to Rachel and Adam, as he used a special key to open the carriage doors. “We should count ourselves lucky no one was hurt.”
Resigned to the fact that their escape bid had failed, the twins stepped meekly back into the carriage. The door hissed shut behind them. The engine powered up and the train began to reverse back along the track towards Triskellion.
Minutes later, the pink geraniums of Triskellion station came back into view, like a rewound film, and this time, unlike the first occasion they had pulled into the station, there was someone waiting to meet them.
As the carriage pulled in and came to a stop, Rachel saw the distinctive figure of Gabriel standing in front of her window. Despite her disappointment, Rachel felt her face flush. She tapped Adam, whose own face had not left his hands during the journey back, and he looked up.
Gabriel gave a little wave. “You didn’t think leaving would be that easy, did you?”
And strangely, though she had not seen the boy’s lips move, though the glass in the train window was thick and virtually soundproof, Rachel had heard him loud and clear.
part two:
the woods
Corn stretches out in front as far as the eye can see: tall, thick and golden, almost reaching eye level. The sun is vast in the sky, producing a light so strong and white that it bleaches the colour from the landscape. Whispering, coarse and dry, the corn falls aside, creating a path. It parts, as if pushed by unseen hands. Then it stops; falling flat, stalk upon stalk, in a domino effect, round a crater filled with black water.
The water is thick, still and oily, and something stirs deep down, snaking towards the surface like a fat eel, its skin now and then catching the light with a dark flash. Bigger now, and lighter, changing shape as it nears the air. Bubbles rise and burst, greasy as the sleek head breaks the surface, wet black hair stuck to the face. A neck and shoulders emerge, muscled and fully formed, yet also newborn. Rivulets of dark water run over the fresh body as it emerges from the pond, gliding through strands of weed and slime. Gasping for air.
The boy shakes his head, hair flying in slow motion. Beads of water captured, static, in the blinding light.
He stops and stands, staring at the sun. His eyes, green—
Rachel sat bolt upright in bed, the faded roses on the wallpaper moving sharply into focus. A wave of embarrassment washed over her as she turned and looked at Adam. He was also sitting up in bed, and Rachel knew instantly that he had had the same dream.
“That was seriously strange,” Adam said. He jumped out of bed and rushed to the window, as if to reassure himself that the dream had not materialized outside the bedroom. “What did it mean?”
Rachel felt as though she knew exactly what the dream had meant, but it was not a feeling that she could put into words. “Dunno,” she said to her brother. “Nothing probably. We’ve just been going through a lot of strange new stuff … and you know how sometimes we, like … you know…”
Adam did know.
Since they could remember, the two of them had woken some mornings with a shared vision from the night before. But this one stirred something new within Rachel, something a little scary, but also exciting. Something that gave her a warm feeling in the pit of her stomach.
It was a warm sensation that Rachel continued to feel throughout the morning and one which helped her calmly resign herself to staying in the village. Adam, on the other hand, had been unsettled by the dream in a completely different way, and renewed his efforts to escape.
The phone was still not working.
“It’s not unusual, dear,” Gran had said.
“It’s only been two days. Things can take a little longer to sort themselves out here.”
Adam had slammed down the receiver in frustration, earning himself a steely reprimand from his grandmother. He knew there was little point asking if she had a computer, or if the village had an internet café. At Rachel’s suggestion, he had taken himself off into a corner and attempted to communicate with his mother using more primitive tools: a pen and paper.
Adam grumbled over every sentence. At home, he fired off emails all day long, but this was the first letter he’d written to anyone in a long time.
After a lunch that was little more than some sardines from a tin, a few slices of bread and the almost tasteless, lemony drink that Granny Root diluted from a bottle, Rachel sat down to read a book. It was an old, dog-eared paperback she had found on the shelf in the sitting room. Her eye had been caught by the title: Chalk Circles of Great Britain. She found it hard to concentrate on the old-fashioned prose as Adam laboured and sighed over his letter, and Granny Root settled in the big chair for her afternoon nap and began to snore quietly.
The atmosphere in the room was stuffy and oppressive, but the sun was too hot for comfort outside. Rachel read the first line of the chapter again, then looked up as Adam mouthed the words to her, “I’m starving.”
Rachel nodded her agreement, then attempted to read the first line for the tenth time.
A “tink” on the windowpane broke her concentration yet again. Then another as a pebble struck the glass. And another, the stone thrown so hard that Rachel was afraid it would crack the pane. Adam looked round, and he and Rachel jumped up to see where the stones were coming from.
Rachel adjusted her eyes to the bright sunlight outside and saw Gabriel, standing, framed by the archway of roses that led to the bottom of the garden. He was eating from a party-sized bag of crisps, and, seeing Rachel at the window, he waved and gestured for her to join him. Rachel looked at her grandmother sleeping, nodded to Adam to follow, and went outside.
Triskellion Page 6
