Triskellion (35 page)

G
abriel was becoming something else in front of her eyes but, as Rachel tried to follow the shafts and beams of white light that danced and flashed about her, she realized that she was completely calm about what was happening. The voice in her head was soothing her, guiding her thoughts.

While Gabriel was clearly changing, he still somehow remained himself. It was as if thin layers of molten wax were peeling away from him, so he looked less formed, foetal almost, covered in a thin membrane. Then the layers would regenerate, morphing and reshaping into a new version of Gabriel: the changes rapid and fluid, as if multiple versions of the same person were appearing at incredible speed. As if new images were being projected on to him.

The vision settled momentarily, as Gabriel became the knight from Rachel’s dreams. It was still Gabriel, but this version was subtly different: the cheekbones a little higher, the eyes more slanted, the whole bearing more …
foreign
somehow. The “knight” smiled, fixing Rachel with deep, black eyes, and she felt her heart jolt.

She turned to look at Adam who was watching, transfixed, frozen in a weaving vortex of light.

“Let my voice go with you,” Gabriel said. He spoke to both their thoughts, his voice more resonant than before. “Follow my mind.”

Both twins replied simultaneously. “We already are.”

“Good…”

The knight held up a long finger, close to the pointed helmet that appeared moulded to his head, while the Triskellion, spinning somewhere above them, sprayed tiny droplets of light around the circle like a garden sprinkler. The amulet then dropped slowly, hovering lower and lower until it was almost touching the ground, before rising swiftly up again, the tiny particles of light weaving together, creating a human form as Adam and Rachel watched.

As the Triskellion spun away into the air, the figure of a girl grew up from the ground before their eyes; a figure at first made purely of light but which then fused and solidified until it appeared to be as real as the knight himself. Real and yet unreal, as if covered by a fine, translucent mist.

The girl took a step towards the knight, then turned to face the twins. Rachel gasped as she looked into the deep, brown eyes of her double; at the face she had seen moulded in clay on a potter’s wheel. The girl smiled, and Rachel smiled back, feeling instinctively warmed by the presence.

“Who are you?” she heard the voice in Adam’s mind ask.

“We are your ancestors,” came the answer, though neither the knight nor the maiden moved their mouths. “You are descended from our children. Our beautiful twins. Our son generated the male line of this village and our daughter, the female.”

Wings and Roots, Rachel thought.

“And Gabriel…?” Adam’s thoughts ventured further.

“I am Gabriel,” said the knight. “The Gabriel you know comes from me. From the same place as me.”

Both Rachel and Adam felt reluctant to ask the obvious question, but their curiosity quickly got the better of them. “Where is it, this place?” their minds asked as one.

The knight looked at them benignly and raised his finger again, pointing skywards into the shaft of light which bathed them all.

The canopy of beams in which they were encased began to crackle and shift again, reworking itself; weaving different patterns until Rachel could see a new shape forming round them.

The chapel from the church…

It was as if the chapel was being holographically generated round them, there on the moor, in the middle of the chalk circle. Rachel and Adam stared in amazement. The chapel was complete in every detail, but glowing with a sparkling inner light.

The knight pointed towards the tomb, and Rachel saw
instantly that the stone effigy carved on top was not a crusader but the knight himself. The two figures walked slowly towards the carved figure, the knight taking the maiden by the hand. Rachel and Adam watched the knight slide open the lid of the stone tomb as if it were no heavier than a sheet of cardboard, and reach inside.

Rachel and Adam moved closer and saw that the stone casket was lined with lead, and that something was resting on the bottom, laid out on a small pallet of dried straw. Rachel’s first thought was that the two blackened lumps looked like ancient lumps of coal, but then another thought quickly took hold. A thought that was both shocking and comforting at the same time.

“It’s their hearts,” she said.

The two figures turned and smiled at the twins while reaching into the tomb. The knight took out one of the hearts and the maiden the other. In their hands the two organs began to glow, and they turned to each other and embraced and, as they did so, the figure of the maiden melted into that of the knight and disappeared.

The knight folded his arms across his chest and bowed his head to Rachel and Adam. Then, as Gabriel had done before, he began to change, layer by layer. The projection of the church began to fade while the beams of light, darted around, faster and faster; moving between them until the three remaining figures were bound by a lasso of light that wove round them in the shape of a Triskellion.

When the layers had peeled away for the final time, Gabriel stood before Rachel and Adam as a boy again. As he had appeared the very first time they had seen him, marching round the chalk circle in the rain.

“Does that answer some of your questions?” he asked.

“Yes,” Rachel said.

“Good. I’m glad.”

“But…”

“No,” said Adam. “I want to know why…”

“Why what?” Gabriel’s voice asked as he smiled.

“Everything,” Adam said. “Where you come from, why you’re here, why we’re here.”

“We needed to be together to make this happen,” Gabriel said. “You were born to make this happen, and it was only when you were old enough that I could come and find you.”

“But if we’re related, and your ancestor …
our
ancestor came from…” Adam pointed skyward. “Then had kids with a girl from …
here
…” Adam looked at Rachel, trying to grasp the growing implication of his own words. “Then that means that we’re, you know, part … same as you.” Adam pointed at the sky again, his eyes widening, unable to say the word that would describe finally what he had clumsily pieced together.

The Triskellion dipped and hovered, spinning slowly between them as if to confirm Adam’s thoughts.

“So is that what you came all this way for?” asked Rachel, looking at the floating amulet.

“No,” Gabriel said. “But that was what made it possible.”
Gabriel placed his hand flat on his chest. “I’ve got what I came for.”

The hearts of his ancestors. Of their joint ancestors. Rachel felt her own heart lurch in her chest.

“Thank you,” Gabriel said. And then he began to fade. This time, the layers seemed to melt and peel from him and he became fainter, almost transparent.

Now Rachel’s heart felt heavy and she saw tears rolling down her brother’s face. “Don’t go, Gabriel,” she cried. “We need you, we’re scared.”

Adam shouted through his tears, reaching out towards Gabriel, who was fading fast, the sunlight already visible through him. “It must be such a long way for you to go. You’ll be lonely. You can’t go alone…”

The fading outline of Gabriel smiled and held out his hands towards Rachel and Adam, the voice in their heads dropping to little more than a whisper. “I’m not alone,” he said.

Then, as the network of light around them evaporated, Gabriel disappeared for the last time.

Rolling clouds cast a shadow across the moor as Rachel and Adam stood sobbing in the centre of the chalk circle.

Rachel looked down.

In her hands she held the complete Triskellion…

The moment was broken as Adam grabbed her arm and pointed into the sky at the edge of the moor. Out of the clouds, a dark silhouette was approaching, dropping low and
moving quickly across the sky, coming their way.

Faster now, black and menacing…

The twins turned and started to run as the noise of the machine drowned out all other sounds, but they had barely gone a few steps before the wind from the giant blades knocked them flat and pressed them to the ground.

R
achel could barely lift her head from the flattened grass around them. The helicopter hovered directly above, manoeuvring this way and that, like a giant insect looking for a suitable leaf on which to land; the draught from its huge blades making the coarse grass thrash about the twins’ heads. With tears streaming from her eyes, Rachel reached out and grabbed Adam’s hand.

She squeezed it, finding solidarity with him, as if these might be their final moments.

The black skis beneath the helicopter dipped into their field of vision ten metres away, closer and closer to the ground but barely touching it, the huge rotors continuing to beat the air. Their vision blurred, Rachel and Adam saw two figures jump from the cabin of the craft and run towards them, ducking low beneath the whirling blades. Rachel squeezed Adam’s hand tighter, and as the figures approached, they could see that they were men.

Men wearing white, protective jump suits and headsets.

Together, the twins tried to get to their feet, and when they could not, to crawl away, but the fear twisted in their guts and turned their legs to jelly, making escape impossible.

Then a third figure dropped from the helicopter. A woman. A tall woman in a puffa jacket whose red hair blew around wildly in the wind, almost obscuring her face.

Laura Sullivan.

The two men grabbed Rachel and Adam by an arm each and hoisted them to their feet.

“C’mon,” one of them shouted from behind his plastic mask. “Let’s go.” He jostled the twins forward, forcing them in the direction of the waiting helicopter. Laura beckoned them towards her, shouting something urgent, her voice lost in the thwack of the blades.

Rachel and Adam fell into Laura’s arms momentarily but she, too, shoved them forward, urging them to climb up into the hovering aircraft. Helped by the men in jump suits, Rachel and Adam put a foot on the skis beneath the helicopter and climbed up a small, steel ladder into the cabin.

Laura Sullivan hesitated, holding her hair away from her eyes, looking at the forlorn figure of Chris Dalton, lying on the wet moor several metres away. His hands were moving shakily towards his head. He was alive. Laura chewed her lip, as if she were considering helping him.

“Doctor Sullivan.” The voice barked from behind her, and she turned to see one of the jump-suited men hanging from
the helicopter by one arm, holding out the other to pull her in. “We’ve got to go…”

Laura took the outstretched hand and climbed aboard as the noise of the engine rose to an unbearable level and the helicopter lifted into the air.

The sudden upward thrust threw Rachel and Adam back against the bulkhead inside the cabin, and one of the white-suited men moved fast to steady them. He guided them down on to a thinly cushioned bench and fixed tight safety belts round their waists. Laura crowded into the tight space, pulling the hatch shut behind her, and as she sat down opposite them, clearing their line of vision, the twins saw that there was another person in the cabin.

Their mother.

Rachel and Adam sat and stared, their mouths open wide – the rush of emotion as dizzying as the rise of the helicopter. They looked to Laura, who grinned, then nodded, as though to confirm that it wasn’t a dream. Kate Newman unclipped her safety belt and threw open her arms, a sudden lurch of the helicopter launching her across the cabin and on to her children.

She hugged them, smothering them with teary kisses. “My poor babies,” she said.

The childishness of the phrase made Adam smile instinctively, but at the same time it released a powerful pang of longing in the heart of both twins. They returned their mother’s hugs and kisses, bawling and blubbering, trying in
vain to describe their feelings.

After a minute, Rachel put her hands on her mother’s shoulders, steadying her, holding her slightly away in order to focus properly on her face.

“Mom, how did you…?”

“I knew something was wrong,” her mother said. “And Jacob emailed me…”

“You know Jacob?”

Kate Newman smiled. “I’ve known Jacob since I was a little girl. And for someone like him to get it together to mail me, I knew I had to come. Then when Adam called…” She mussed her son’s hair, her lip trembling, new tears forming on her eyelids, kissing him again. “You were being so brave, but I could hear it in your voice. I knew something had happened.”

Rachel just nodded, taking it all in. She glanced at Laura Sullivan and her mother caught the look.

“Then Doctor Sullivan got in touch with me and told me what was going on. She even arranged my travel. She’s been
amazing
.”

Rachel reached out and took Laura Sullivan’s hand as well. Laura smiled, then pulled away when a walkie-talkie crackled inside her jacket. She listened to a distorted message from the pilot that none of them could quite understand, then stepped through into the cockpit leaving the twins and their mother alone in the cabin.

Rachel glanced through the porthole at the shrinking landscape below.