The Burning (3 page)

“What is it?” Rachel asked calmly, like a patient about to receive bad news from a doctor. “A hospital?”

“No,” Laura said. “It’s an archaeological research centre.”

“And you work here?” Rachel was shaking her head, trying to get things straight.

“I do at the moment…”

“So what about the TV stuff?” Adam said. He sounded more than a little disappointed. “I thought you were a TV producer?”

Laura took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Listen, I’ll try and answer as many questions as I can, OK? I’ll be honest with you.”

“Meaning you haven’t been so far, right?” Rachel said.

Laura sighed and lowered her head for a few seconds.
“Look, some questions I can answer, some I can’t … and some I just won’t have a clue about. Right, the TV thing. Yes, I
am
a qualified archaeologist and I
was
producing the show with Chris Dalton, but it was also a good cover for my research work here.”

“Cover?” Adam’s disappointment hadn’t lasted long. “You sound like a spy.”

Laura smiled. “Dalton makes such a song and dance about everything that nobody notices me getting on with my
real
work. The Hope Project made sure I got the job with him because they knew that TV was a good way of getting close to sites of special interest.”

“What sort of ‘special interest’?” Rachel asked.

“Well, anything that has potential … extraterrestrial connections.”

Rachel felt herself shudder. Glancing across, she saw Adam do the same. “And you thought Triskellion had that connection?”

Laura nodded. “I knew it was an interesting site; that there were lots of things going on in the area that didn’t quite add up. But I never expected the tomb to reveal anything so … conclusive. We’ve excavated tombs all over the world but none have actually produced
remains
.”

“You mean that there are other places like Triskellion?” Rachel voiced the thought as it came to her, but even before she’d finished asking the question, she was afraid of hearing the answer.

“Let’s put it this way,” Laura said. “There are thousands and thousands of tombs and sacred sites all over the globe. The Hope Project believes that
some
of them mark the landing place, or the burial place, of
visitors
.”

“From another planet?” Adam whispered.

Laura swallowed and studied the pattern on Adam’s duvet for a second or two. “What I can tell you is that we have growing evidence that there have been visitors for thousands of years. They are very similar to
Homo sapiens
: they’re human, but their DNA is quite different. Actually, I think we now have proof.”

Rachel stared at the floor.

“So, where do they come from?” Adam asked.

“Wish we knew,” Laura said. “But if they’ve been coming here for a long time, like they did to Triskellion thousands of years ago, I think we can safely assume that they’re more sophisticated than we are in all sorts of ways.”

“Like how?” Adam was breathing hard. He needed more information, and fast.

“Well, these guys were getting here centuries before we even had bicycles. Maybe before we even had the wheel. But apart from the ability to travel, we think they’re a lot more sophisticated in terms of their ability to communicate using their minds – to make things happen through thought alone.” Laura looked from Rachel to Adam and back again. “You’ve got to agree, that’s a pretty powerful skill to have. Imagine what humans could do if
we
had it?”

“But some people already have it,” Adam said. “They can read thoughts, see things in the future, you know? People like—”

“Twins?” Laura nodded again and turned to Rachel.

“Yeah, but not
just
twins,” Rachel protested. “There are other people who can mind-read too.”

“Yes,” Laura said. “There are. And we’re starting to believe that people with skills like that are all descended in some way from these visitors. They all carry a little bit of their DNA, though watered down over the centuries.”

Rachel felt the hairs prickle on the back of her neck. “Like us,” she said.

“Yes, like you,” Laura said. “But you and Adam are a special case. Everything that we discovered in Triskellion stacks up: the two bodies in the tomb were your ancestors. One human, one from … elsewhere. The generations that followed did not generally intermarry, didn’t even leave the area until your mother came along. This means we’ve got an almost completely undiluted genetic connection from you to that original visitor to Triskellion. Do you see what I’m saying?”

“It makes us freaks, I guess,” Adam said.

“No. It makes you incredibly interesting. You’re human, of course, but there is a strand of DNA within you and Rachel that is totally, well …
other
.” Laura put an arm round Adam and hugged him close. He did not resist. “You are the closest thing we have to knowing what the visitors were like. What they
are
like…”

“What about Gabriel?” Rachel said.

Laura Sullivan looked blank. “Gabriel?”

Rachel realized in a flash that Laura had absolutely no memory of the boy who had guided their strange adventure through the village. She wondered if this amnesia had been Gabriel’s doing: a demonstration of the mental powers that Laura herself had just been talking about. Powers that Gabriel clearly had in abundance. Or had she just not noticed him? Either way, Rachel decided to keep quiet.

“No one, really. Just a kid.” Rachel pressed on quickly, ignoring the questioning look from her brother. “Listen, we thought you were taking us home. Mom said…” Rachel’s stomach fluttered as she thought of her mother, desperate to ask where she was, but afraid of what she might hear.

“
I
never said that, Rachel. That was a risk I couldn’t take.” Laura looked her straight in the eye. “I told your mum I’d get you somewhere safe, and I have.”

“Why do we need to be safe?”

“Well, you’ve already seen what the Triskellion can do to people. Hilary Wing hardly had your best interests at heart, and it turned Chris Dalton into some kind of lunatic. He became totally obsessed by it. He would have killed for it.”

“Like the ring,” Adam said. “In the movie … what happened to Gollum!”

The Triskellion!

Rachel suddenly realized that she didn’t know what had happened to it. She’d been clutching it tightly in her fist
aboard that helicopter but didn’t recall seeing it anywhere in her room when she’d woken up. She tried to keep the panic from her voice as she spoke. “Where is it now?”

“It’s in a safe place,” Laura said. She took both their hands and squeezed. “But it’s not just the Triskellion that needs keeping safe. It’s you.”

“Why?” Rachel asked. “Are we in danger?”

“You’re not in danger
here
,” Laura said quickly. “But people are interested in you. In what you are. In what you can do.” For a few seconds nobody said anything and only the rumble of traffic outside Adam’s window broke the silence.

Laura got to her feet. “OK, that’s enough questions for now,” she said. “We have plenty of time. You must be hungry, Rachel.”

Rachel nodded, suddenly starving, and Adam announced that he could manage another BLT if there was one going.

“Right, let’s get you something to eat and I’ll show you around.”

They took a step towards the door, then Rachel caught Laura’s arm. “One more question,” she said.

Laura nodded. “You want to know about your mother, right? Look, we’ll get to that, I promise.”

K
ate Newman sat on the edge of the bed, flicking through the pages of a magazine, trying and failing to distract herself. Every time her thoughts began to drift elsewhere, just when it looked as though she might forget for a few precious seconds, she was pulled back into the nightmare of her current situation. A jolt that felt like a fist in her stomach.

She had tried to piece together the blur that had been the last few days and the chaos and grief of the month that had preceded it. She felt sick with guilt at the thought of having let her children down. When they had needed her the most, she hadn’t been there for them.

The situation with Ralph, her husband, had been brewing for a long time, and the split had been inevitable. But some of the ugly things he had said – his reasons for not being able to stay – had shaken her to the core. Her duty, first and foremost, was to the twins, but back then things had been falling apart. She had thought her head would burst if she tried to
cope with anybody’s feelings but her own. She had felt like she was in no fit state to look after her children: to protect them. The only place she could think of where they might be able to get away from it all was at their grandmother’s, in England.

She had made a terrible mistake.

She had sensed it in her mother’s terse note acknowledging their arrival. She had heard it in the tone of the brief calls she had received from the kids. Her fears had been confirmed by the bizarre and cryptic email from Jacob Honeyman, the old beekeeper she had known as a child. Then the worries had blossomed into full-blown panic when she’d taken the call from the Australian archaeologist in the middle of the night. When she’d been told that she must come straight away. That Rachel and Adam needed her.

That they were in grave danger.

Laura Sullivan, or someone close to her, had arranged everything. Within hours of the call, the taxi was outside on the New York street and the British Airways ticket was waiting for her at JFK airport. After a sleepless and anguished flight, Laura Sullivan had met her on the tarmac. She had been driven to an outlying aircraft hangar, where a helicopter had already been warming up, ready to whisk them down to the West Country. Whoever Laura Sullivan was, she clearly had powerful resources at her disposal.

It must be the TV company she works for, Kate had thought.

Like the twins, Kate had assumed that the aim of the
exercise had been to get them all home. Instead they were here. In this place, somewhere in England, in a room that looked like her own, but was not. She felt like a guest in a comfortable but featureless hotel. A hotel in a nightmare, where the door was locked from the outside.

Since she’d arrived her conversations with Laura had been brief, and mostly conducted over the ear-splitting clatter of rotor blades. The kids had been involved in an archaeological dig, Laura had said. There had been one or two unexpected results and it had been important to get them away from the site. Kate had had questions, many of them. Were they sick? Had they been contaminated in some way? Laura had been vague, had told her that it would all become clearer in the next couple of days.

And stupidly, Kate had believed her.
Stupidly…

The guilt was worse, biting harder, because deep down Kate believed that what had happened was because of her: was something to do with the hidden feeling that had eaten away at her since she was a child. Feeding off her: curled in the pit of her stomach like a malevolent black worm.

The feeling that something bad had happened, and was about to happen all over again.

It was a feeling that had driven her from her mother; one that had made her leave England, but which had stayed with her even in New York. It was something she had tried to hide, to bury, like the shameful fact that she didn’t have a father. But it had become woven into her personality and
infected her with an all but permanent state of fear and melancholy.

Kate looked down at her chewed fingernails. And now she had been separated from her kids. Her babies. She had been tricked into letting them go. Laura Sullivan had tried to reassure her; had said that it would only be for a short time, until the experts – whoever they were – had checked that they were OK.

“Just until they’re acclimatized,” she had said.

Kate almost felt as if she had been sectioned in a psychiatric institution for her own protection. For the protection of her children. Her mind began to race. Maybe she had? Perhaps that was what this place was. As her brain began to fizz and bubble with bizarre and worrying thoughts, Kate threw herself back on the bed and buried her face deep in the starchy pillow.

And then she heard the door being unlocked.

She sat up as a man and woman came into the room. They were smiling, but their smiles were fixed and there was no warmth in their eyes. The woman offered her some medicine on a tray: a couple of pills and a small cup full of liquid. To make her feel better, the man said. Kate politely refused and then a coldness crept into their voices, and the man took Kate’s arms, restraining her, pushing her back on to the bed.

Then the woman took a syringe from her pocket and Kate felt the needle prick…