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.
part three:
the tomb
Yellow light from the tallow candles flickers round the circular walls of the hut, dancing across the wooden beams and making the hanging furs seem alive.
The man stands in the doorway, holding back a heavy curtain, a helmet under his arm. His angular face is anxious, his green eyes adjusting to the gloom of the smoky dwelling. He puts his helmet on a bench; his focus fixing on the wooden pallet where the maiden lies, drained and exhausted. Her eyes are shut, but she tosses, turns and mutters, caught in a troubled sleep. Her chestnut curls are damp and stuck to her face.
The man steps further into the room, barely seeing the old woman who emerges from the deep shadows. She is holding something. A baby. No. Two babies, wrapped in cloth – bandaged almost, like tiny mummies.
The old woman holds the infants out to the man, who takes them in his arms and looks down at their tiny faces: eyes the same colour as his own, twinkling, alive. Alive and perfect.
The man looks over at the sleeping girl and smiles, tears rolling down his smooth cheeks…
Adam looked at his sister, asleep in the bed opposite. Her hair was spread across the pillow and her eyelids moved as the eyes darted beneath them. The skin on her face twitched as though she were in pain and her lips mouthed random words.
He shook her shoulder, but she was fast asleep.
He watched as she muttered and thrashed about, and knew that she was having the same dream that had just woken him. A dream of twins; a dream of the distant past. A dream in which an ancient version of Rachel appeared to be married to Gabriel…
The Star was uncharacteristically busy for a Monday night. The television crew, though unpopular with many of the villagers, was undoubtedly good for Tom Hatcham’s business. Not only were the presenter and his producer staying in the rooms upstairs, but so were the cameraman, soundman and half a dozen other people. Hatcham had no idea what they all did, but they all had an apparently insatiable appetite for pub food and beer, and compared to most of The Star’s customers they didn’t seem to care how much it all cost.
“Probably got expense accounts,” a customer muttered from his vantage point on a bar stool.
“They get paid more than what I do, and that’s the truth of it,” said another. He punctuated his point by draining what was left of a glass of beer, nearly three quarters of a pint, before banging his glass down ready for another. Hatcham served him automatically as the kitchen door swung open and a flustered barmaid brought out what seemed like the hundredth plate of breadcrumbed scampi that evening. She looked to Hatcham for guidance.
“Over by the window.” Hatcham nodded towards his largest table, in the corner, where the genial host of television’s Treasure Hunters, held court in a loud voice.
“So Noel says, ‘Why don’t you do the show yourself, if it’s such a good idea?’ And you know what? That’s exactly what I damn well did. The rest, as they say, is history … or archaeology!”
All but one of the people at the table with Chris Dalton collapsed into convivial laughter, while Laura Sullivan, his all-round producer, researcher and right-hand woman rolled her eyes. She had heard the story many times before. It was true, up to a point; Dalton had certainly popularized TV archaeology. But each time the tale was retold, it showed him in an increasingly flattering light. The show’s popularity had made Chris Dalton very rich, but it didn’t make him any easier to work with.
He picked up a large chip from the plate that had just been put in front of him, dipped it in mayonnaise and bit into it. “Bloody chips are cold,” he said to no one in particular. He looked at Laura as if she ought to be doing something about it.
“I think they’re a bit hassled,” Laura said. “I guess they’re not usually this busy.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“Try not to complain, Chris, will you? We don’t want to upset anyone here. Charm offensive, remember?”
Dalton was perfectly capable of creating a major stink over a few cold chips, but he knew Laura was right. It was a sensitive business going into these villages and digging up their past. Some of them welcomed the publicity and the temporary brush with fame, but others saw it as an unwelcome intrusion that had nothing to do with preserving the past and everything to do with making money.
It was clear to Laura that this village was the latter kind. The parish bigwigs had done all that they could to stop the TV show filming in Triskellion, and the local MP had done everything in his power to prevent the dig on the moor. However, the county council had overridden the villagers’ objections. They had argued that Treasure Hunters was a popular TV show and that bringing it to Triskellion would be a huge boost for tourism in the area and a much needed source of income for local businesses.
When the barmaid arrived at the table and asked if everything was all right, Dalton turned on his most dazzling show-business smile. “Absolutely superb,” he said. “My compliments to the chef.” When she shyly asked if he would mind signing an autograph, he happily scribbled on a napkin for her.
“Is that Kelly with a ‘Y’, or with an ‘IE’?”
Dinner over, the table began to break away. The cameraman got up to play darts with the sound engineer, while Amanda, the production assistant, yawned loudly and said something about turning in early as she was pregnant.
Laura leant over to Dalton. She had made sure that all the paperwork was in place to make the dig legal, but something else was bothering her.
“Chris?”
“Yis, me old cobber?” Dalton said. He never missed an opportunity to mimic Laura’s Australian accent with a very bad version of his own.
“I have one big worry about this. OK, we’ve got permission to dig, fine. But there’s absolutely no evidence that there is anything under the chalk circle. It’s really not typical of Bronze Age burial barrows.”
Dalton shrugged. “But this bee guy, Honeybum or whatever he’s called, is absolutely convinced. How many letters and emails has he sent me? How many parcels of bloody fossils?”
“Sure, there’s some stuff there,” Laura said patiently. “It’s an ancient site. But if we go crashing around in our size nines, dig it up and find nothing major, it’s us with lots of egg on our faces.”
“Laura…”
“It’ll set us back for anything else we want to do.”
“Laura, Laura, Laura…”
> Laura took a deep breath. She knew she was about to be patronized.
Dalton sighed. “Laura, love. How much have you learned about telly since you’ve been with me, eh? You are a fantastic producer. You’re organized, you’re thorough…”
“I did actually study archaeology properly for seven years before I joined this circus, you know?” Laura gave him a good hard look, making sure, as she always did, that her credentials as a serious archaeologist were noted. Despite two years working with her, Dalton had a habit of forgetting that she knew her stuff.
“I know, I know,” Dalton said. “You are a top archaeologist.” There was a twinkle in his eye suddenly. It was one he’d turned on for the cameras a hundred times over two series of Treasure Hunters. “And you’re not a bad-looking one either, when we see you on screen…”
“Oh, shut up.”
Laura hated it when Dalton did this. It annoyed her, knowing that he would never have employed her, would never have put her on screen, had she looked like the back of a bus. As it was, she knew she looked better than that. At twenty-seven, she was tall and willowy: honey-skinned, with a mass of curly red hair. But she was so much more than that. She was tough: she had trudged through the outback alone for days on end. She was smart: she had taken all the major prizes at the University of Western Australia for her work on Aboriginal dreaming sites, and her thesis on Bronze Age societies had been published to critical praise.
And now Chris Dalton was doing his “little lady” act on her.
Dalton could see he was annoying Laura, and quickly changed his tone. “Listen, here’s the deal. We’ve got fabulous countryside to film, a picture-postcard village, a church with a crusader tomb and an amazing artefact. We’ve got a local nutter in a patched-up coat who has a knack of finding stupid amounts of coins with a cheap metal detector. Get him down on tape spouting his theories about burial sites, corn circles or whatever, I’ll do a re-enactment as a Bronze Age druid burying my wages for luck … bingo, we’ve already got TV gold.”
Triskellion Page 12
