The Burning (16 page)

Morag read the name aloud.
“L’Etoile…”

Adam looked up at the tatty neon sign above the entrance, a blue star with white beams radiating from it.

“The Star,” he said. “Same as the pub in the village.”

Rachel led the way inside, hoping that it was a good sign and not a bad omen.

The man at reception looked up from his newspaper as the children dumped their bags in front of the desk.

“Do you speak English?” Rachel asked.

The man ignored her.

“Guess that’s a no then,” Rachel muttered. She’d studied a bit of French at school, but couldn’t remember much beyond a few useless phrases: “I have lost my exercise book” and “Is this the way to the railway station?” She looked to Gabriel for help.

“Ask him if he’s got a room,” Gabriel said. “I’m sure you can make him understand.”

Rachel cleared her throat and the man glanced up at her. He was stick-thin and balding, though he had tried to disguise the fact by combing over what little hair he had left. “I wondered if you might have a room available for
us?” Rachel’s mouth dropped open in amazement as soon as she’d finished speaking. Though the thought had formed in her head in English, by the time the words had come out of her mouth they were in flawless and perfectly accented French.

Gabriel grinned. “I knew you could do it.”

The man behind the desk shook his head then spoke. Rachel knew very well that he was speaking French, but his answer came to her in English. “Sorry, we are completely full.”

Rachel was still too stunned to say anything, so Adam stepped forward and took over. “Excuse me,” he said. Once again, the thought had been translated – somewhere between brain and mouth – into perfect French. “I’m sure you can find room for
us
.” The man looked up. Adam found eye contact, and held it. “If you look hard enough…”

The Frenchman’s eyes widened and then he shook himself as though trying to wake up. He glanced down at his register and raised his arms, and when he looked at the children again he was beaming. “I’m sorry, I am being very stupid. Of
course
I have room for you.
Plenty
of room.”

Adam leant close to Rachel and whispered, “This is awesome!”

The Frenchman stepped from behind his desk and struggled to pick up all their bags. “Yes, plenty of room, no problem. Will the four of you be requiring dinner?”

“Sorry?
Four
of us…?”

Adam and Rachel turned, but saw only the shining faces of Morag and Duncan staring up at them expectantly.

Gabriel had gone.

The Englishman took a small sip of dark, red wine and looked back across the table. He could not help but enjoy the look of fear on the face of the man sitting opposite him. How much greater that fear would be if he could only see the Englishman’s face…

The bar was not crowded, but the Englishman had taken a table in a quiet corner, with a view of the door and the busy Paris street beyond. He’d sat and watched the world go by while he’d waited, rolling cigarettes with dark, pungent tobacco and studying the faces of the men and women hurrying past on the pavement. They were all so very busy, with such full lives, but each remained ignorant of the real world around them – of its power. Much of the time this amused the Englishman, but when a black mood descended, when he thought of all those things he had been denied, he wanted nothing more than to wipe them all out.

All he needed was the instrument.

“Are you sure you don’t want some wine?” he asked.

The man on the other side of the table shook his head, grimacing. “I … can’t,” he stammered. “The … medication.”

The Englishman nodded. “Of course. You must still be
in very great pain.” He smiled. “I’m not exactly a stranger to that myself.”

The man, who had been disguised as a jogger a few hours before, was indeed in agony. He wore a bloodied patch over his damaged eye and he could barely breathe. To the horror of the doctors, he had discharged himself from hospital – more afraid of the man he was answerable to than of the damage he might be doing to himself. He swallowed hard. He could still feel the hands of the boy on him, the power in those delicate fingers.

“It wasn’t my fault,” he said. “The boy was so strong.”

“The
boy
.” The Englishman winced, as though the word tasted vile in his mouth.

“Next time I’ll be ready for him; I’ll…”

The Englishman smiled. Ignoring the
NO SMOKING
signs, he blew a plume of blue smoke across the table. “Don’t worry about next time. You’re not really in any fit state to do any more.”

The man peered desperately into the shadow under the Englishman’s hood, where his face should have been. The jogger’s voice was high and cracked. “Please. I didn’t mean to let you down.”

“You let all of us down. Now, get out of my sight.”

Out on the street, the Englishman pulled his hood a little further forward. He swallowed a handful of painkillers and began to walk back towards his small, rented room. There would be a good deal to do when he got back. He would
have to put the word out across the network; formulate a new plan of action. It was annoying, but really it was no more than a minor setback.

There were countless others he could turn to, who believed as he did. Others who would follow him. He had no doubt at all that he would find Rachel and Adam Newman eventually and that the Triskellion would be his.

They were only two children, a long way from home.

And he had an army to call on.

It was no more than a trickle – cold one minute and scalding the next – but it was the best shower Rachel could ever remember having.

In the end, the hotel owner – seemingly convinced that they were VIPs of some sort – had given them two large rooms next to one another with French windows overlooking the street. The two sets of twins had decided to split up. Morag had been keen to share with Rachel, who she was starting to treat as an older sister, while Adam and Duncan had been happy enough to share the room next door.

Either would have room to squeeze Gabriel in, if he ever decided to come back.

Rachel scrubbed at her body with the soap and stiff brush she’d found in the soap-dish; scrubbing until her skin was red and sore. She was desperate to wash away the dirt and the exhaustion, but she was also trying to wash away what
for anyone else would have been a lifetime’s worth of bad memories.

The Hope Project.

The village.

Her grandmother’s body…

She stood and let the water run over her, closed her eyes and thought about her mother back there. Was she really as safe as Gabriel had promised? She and Adam had put so much faith in him, had entrusted their lives to him, but perhaps they had been foolish. She was starting to suspect that there were other things he considered more important than their safety.

She stepped out of the shower and rubbed at her wet hair with a towel.

Where
was
he?

Gabriel – or whatever his real name was – had been disappearing, for days at a stretch sometimes, ever since that night she had first set eyes on him, marching around the chalk circle in the rain. She had learnt early on that there was little point in asking for an explanation. His answers were always annoyingly vague or just plain meaningless. There was a part of him, Rachel knew, that would always be hidden, but she would have given anything to know why.

“Rachel! Come and look.”

She wrapped the towel round her chest and walked out of the bathroom. Morag was beaming proudly, pointing to the clothes which she’d taken from Rachel’s backpack and
laid out neatly at the end of her bed, as if she had been arranging her dolls.

“Just trying to make it feel a bit more like home,” Morag said.

“Thanks. That’s great. But…” Rachel quickly scanned the room and began rummaging in the pockets of her empty backpack. She could not find the Triskellion.

She sat on the bed.

“Can I brush your hair?” Morag said, kneeling behind her, already dragging at the wet curls with a brush.

“Sure,” Rachel said distractedly, panic rising over the missing Triskellion. Morag’s brush tugged at her hair then slipped, causing a sharp pain between Rachel’s shoulder blades.

“Ow!”

“Sorry— What’s that?” Morag squealed, prodding Rachel’s back. “You’ve hurt yourself. I’ll get a wee mirror.”

Rachel craned her neck as the younger girl held the mirror up to her. She began reaching round, trying to touch whatever it was that had made Morag so alarmed.

“Between your shoulders. It’s a scar or a boil or something…”

Rachel manoeuvred the mirror until she was able to see her back. She could just glimpse a small, angry bump sitting beneath the skin. It was the size of a kidney bean, raised and red. Rachel froze, thinking about those first few days at the Hope Project, about the way time had passed in a slow haze
or a crazy rush. She’d been convinced they were drugging her in some way; disorientating her.

She began to wonder what else they might have done.

Rachel flung open the door and tore down the corridor, Morag a step or two behind her. When she burst into Adam’s room, he and Duncan were lying on their beds, giggling over some TV show. Adam glanced up.

“I think you forgot to get dressed.”

“Take your T-shirt off,” Rachel said.

Adam and Duncan were already laughing again. Adam pointed at the small TV set. “This is fantastic.
The Simpsons
, in French.
Les Simpsons
, right?”

“Shut up and take your T-shirt off, Adam.”

Seeing the look on his sister’s face, Adam got off the bed and did as he was told.

“He’s got one too,” Morag said. “What is it?”

“Got one what?” Adam began to reach round, as Rachel had done.

“That’s how they know where we are,” Rachel said. “We’re being tracked.”

G
abriel marched slowly up and down between the lines of standing stones.

He was some way down the coast and, although the air was clearer, a strong wind buffeted him and blew his hair over his face. The sound of the waves crashing on the nearby coastline added to the roaring inside his head as he tried to focus; tried to home in on a signal that he was sure was there.

He knew he was in the right place. The symbol carved into the rock in front of him told him so. These two lines of stone had stood in the remote French countryside for as long as the chalk circle had been carved into the moor at Triskellion. They had been planted by similar people. To mark a similar event. Now, Gabriel needed to find the descendants of the villagers who had marked this spot, who had lived here, isolated for many centuries. People who had stayed close to home in an effort to protect their bloodline.

People who, at some point, had produced twins.

As the dusk deepened into darkness, the stones appeared blacker and more jagged. They were like two rows of teeth about to snap shut and devour anyone who ventured too close. To swallow the boy who paced their length, holding out a gold, three-bladed instrument in front of him as if it were a compass.

Gabriel sat on a stone in the darkness. Rounded and flattened on top, it was like a stool, worn smooth by more than a millennium of use. Instantly, he became aware of the thousands and thousands of people who had sat on this same stone over the many centuries; he began to feel the microscopic imprint each of them had made. His fingers tingled, as though a low-voltage current was passing through them; as if he was in touch with every one of their souls. He could feel the vibrations that pulsed through every molecule of the rock gradually seeping up into his limbs. Then, one by one, he felt the pulsation from the other stones, each one a slightly different pitch from the last. He felt the vibrations build until he was in tune with every last stone; the frequencies growing and layering, like a monolithic orchestra conducted by his hands, and creating a harmony that surged through his body.

And then the Triskellion glowed, rocking from side to side in Gabriel’s hand, then slowly spinning, hovering, in the air and glinting with the pale blue beams of the reflected moon.

Somewhere across the field, in the sparsely populated
village, dogs began to bark and a light went on in a cottage window. Then another, and another, until the ten or so cottages that made up the entire community were all lit up. Gabriel smiled, as if he had given the village a wake-up call it had long been expecting.

Hello…?
The voice in Gabriel’s head was no more than a whisper at first, but it quickly grew louder.
Hello? Ariel?

“I’m here,” Gabriel said aloud. As he spoke, he felt a powerful surge of excitement rush through him from somewhere deep underground, his mind fizzing with the energy that he had harnessed from the rocks. “I’ll be with you very soon. I promise.”

Rachel lay face down on the thin mattress and cushioned her face on her arms. Morag and Duncan sat together on the other bed, silent, impassive, afraid of what was about to happen.

“Do it,” Rachel said.

Adam was tentatively probing the bean-sized bump on her back. The nerves were all too clear in his voice. “OK, OK. I’m … doing it.”