The Burning (41 page)

She hung back with Laura, waiting for her daughter to resurface. They moved from chamber to chamber together, picking up small artefacts: stone tools, pieces made from fish bones and other items, like the metal bowl, that were far more sophisticated in design. As they travelled further back from the grotto, the passage widened and the chambers on either side became progressively larger. They were covered in paintings and decorative carvings that were even more elaborate than those in the cave’s main entrance.

“Look at this one,” Laura said. “It’s beautiful.” She traced the outline of a large painting with her finger. “Looks like a mountain.”

Kate nodded.

The mountain was flattened on the top and had been daubed with reddish pigment. Laura looked closer. “It could almost be Uluru in Australia,” she said. She leant away so that her head did not cast a shadow across the painting. Above the mountain, a large star was painted. To the right of it were five smaller stars arranged in a diamond pattern. “And look at the stars … Alpha Centauri and Beta Centauri … if I’m not mistaken that’s the Southern Cross constellation; you know, like the one on the Australian flag.” She paused for a moment. “I didn’t think you could see the Southern Cross from this part of Europe. Wait a minute…”

Her finger traced a line down from the stars to the base of the mountain. Animals had been drawn there. Animals that looked like begging dogs but with back legs that were too big, tails too powerful and front paws too tiny. “Kangaroos,” she said. Her voice was trembling, her mind reeling with the implications of what she was looking at. “These are kangaroos. This is Australia.”

She turned round and realized why she seemed to have been speaking to herself. Standing and looking at the opposite wall, Kate Newman was speechlessly pointing at the paintings that stretched out in front of her across the rock.

Unmistakably drawn out in black, sooty lines was a primitive rendering of the New York skyline. The Empire State Building was there as well as the Chrysler Building. There was a large figure with an arm held aloft: the Statue of Liberty.

“It’s not possible,” Laura said. Underneath the cityscape,
matchstick figures of a mother and two children were represented. The hands of the children were joined together by a Triskellion.

“It’s us,” Kate said weakly. She edged slowly along the wall, following the painting. Where the Manhattan skyline stopped, a painting of the sea began. A large white bird hovered over it, carrying two children on its back. Across the sea, a small triangular island had been painted, with a Triskellion in the bottom left-hand corner.

“It’s our story,” Kate said. “It’s the kids’ story. This place represents
us
.” She turned and looked at Laura. “I don’t understand. How could these cave people have seen so far into the future?”

The implication of the paintings made Laura’s head pulse with possibilities and extraordinary ideas. She ran her hands through her hair as if trying to contain the thoughts bursting from her skull.

“I don’t think it was them,” she said. She nodded out towards the passage, towards the tomb. “Whoever those bones back there belong to … he knew we were coming.”

G
abriel pressed his hands against the rough edges of the sarcophagus. He had wanted to be alone for this part. To gather together the remains of his ancestor. One day he would have recovered all his ancestors’ remains, would have the chance to lay them to rest, as he had done with the hearts he had recovered from the village of Triskellion. As he had hoped to do with the hand of the “saint”. He would keep them away from the probes and scalpels of the scientists. The less genetic material they possessed and could analyse, the better.

He had sent the others back. He needed this moment, and he needed to be near Rachel, who was swimming somewhere beneath his feet. He leant over the stone trough and looked down at the scraps of tooth, bone and skull…

The first blow glanced off the side of Gabriel’s head, twisting him round and knocking him face-first into the gritty stone wall. The second blow landed squarely on the front of his skull, felling him instantly.

He could feel blood trickling into his eyes and he tasted something metallic where the force of the blow had driven his teeth through his bottom lip. Weakened as he was, he knew he had to lead his attacker away from the chamber, away from the entrance to the lagoon. Summoning every ounce of remaining strength, he got to his feet and rushed at the dark figure, the force of his attack driving the man back out into the narrow passage.

Gabriel held his hand up across his face and felt something snap as his forearm took the weight of another blow. He attempted to wipe the blood from his eyes and looked up to see the figure towering over him. A tall figure in a hooded cloak.

A figure with no face.

Supported by a heavy, black stick, Hilary Wing reached down and extended a twisted and scarred hand. Gabriel felt the claw scrape his neck as it grabbed at the leather thong, tugging until it snapped and gave way. The gold blades of the Triskellion glinted and swung momentarily in front of Gabriel’s eyes, before disappearing beneath his attacker’s cloak. The stick came raining down again and again, on ribs and arms and legs, sapping the remaining strength from Gabriel’s limbs; battering him into submission…

Wing knelt down, and Gabriel could smell the rot on his breath and in his wounds. Gabriel blinked through bloody eyelids and stared into the hood of Wing’s robe. Despite the lack of features, Wing’s eyes shone out: cold and blue.

He smashed the stick down on Gabriel’s head one final time.

The water was freezing at first, but as she floated down, feet first, towards the bottom, Rachel felt a current wash over her, as if somewhere a heater was pumping out warm water. Turning, she kicked her legs out behind her and pushed herself down through the water; down to where Inez and Carmen were swimming along the bottom, turning over stones and sifting through pebbles.

The main pool was lit by the glow from the tomb above, and tiny, phosphorescent jellyfish were caught in the beam. But there was another, stronger light that came from somewhere across the water and which gave the bottom of the lagoon an odd radiance, like a swimming pool illuminated at night. Rachel swam along with the twins and then signalled that she needed to go back to the surface to breathe. They swam back up to the top, treading water while they took mouthfuls of air.

“We should go towards the light,” Rachel said.

Taking another breath, they all dived back to the bottom of the pool and swam towards the glow. It came from a tunnel that led into what appeared to be another cave a little further on.

Carmen signed that they should swim through. With her breath running short, Rachel swam after Carmen, pushed along from behind by Inez. The tunnel was longer than it
had at first appeared, but became brighter and higher, and Carmen swam upwards. They broke the surface of the water and found their heads in a small pocket of air, just beneath the roof. The surface of the rock glittered with tiny crystals and brightly coloured coral. Rachel panted, taking deep breaths of the heavy, sulphurous air.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” she gasped.

“You must,” Carmen said, pushing black strands of hair back off her face.

“You must rely on us to help you, Rachel,” Inez said. “You can do it. You just need to relax.”

“Relax?” Despite the circumstances, Rachel managed to laugh.

They took another breath and pushed on. After a few more strokes, the tunnel opened out into a wider underwater cavern. The white light was dazzling and seemed to come from above, like the beams of headlamps, flooding the water with light. Carmen swam upwards again and Rachel followed quickly, anticipating more air – but there was none. The water seemed to go on for ever and Rachel began to panic. The lack of oxygen was burning her lungs, and her limbs began to fail wildly in the water.

Don’t panic
, Inez said with her mind.
Don’t be afraid of the water; breathe it
.

And suddenly, Rachel could breathe again, as though the water had become air. Inez pushed her onwards, upwards towards Carmen, who was floating above.

Carmen pointed into the light and, as she came closer, Rachel could see another colour emerging between the fragmented beams.

Gold.

She swam towards the gold, which was glinting and rippling through the blue water. She reached out … getting closer.

Gabriel dragged himself across the wet floor. He knew he had been foolish to go it alone and allow himself to be caught off guard. If only he had managed to keep Adam and Rachel close, their combined power would never have allowed this to happen. It was one of the reasons he had brought them all together: to enable him to achieve things he could not manage alone. They thought he was protecting them, which, up to a point, he was. But neither Adam nor Rachel had realized that they were also protecting him.

Would he fail here, at the final hurdle? Beaten and destroyed by the brutality of men like Hilary Wing? Men who had murdered his ancestors and scattered their remains, so that now, tens of thousands of years later, Gabriel had been sent to retrieve them.

He could hear a shuffling further along the passage that led away from the tomb. He took a second to gather some strength. He could overcome the pain with his mind – that was easy – but the shock and the beating had drained his body of energy. He could not channel any of his usual powers.

He dragged himself to his feet and, staying close to the wall, moved along the passage. He followed the shuffling noise that echoed back along the corridor. It seemed to be coming from a chamber some way ahead – one that was concealed by a twist and turn in the rock, as the tomb had been.

Gabriel hugged the wall until he was outside the entrance to the room, then peered cautiously inside. It was decorated with paintings like the others, and there were several doors leading off to smaller, adjoining rooms. A carpet of bees crawled over the ceiling and buzzed lazily in and out of one of the side rooms. Many alcoves had been carved into the walls, each of which held metallic bowls, cups, bangles and lumps of clear crystal which glowed in the half-light. Hilary Wing was hunched over a pile of artefacts. He was stuffing as many as he could into his cloak, dropping priceless items on to the stony floor in his haste.

“I suppose you think these belong to you too?” Gabriel said weakly.

The hooded figure spun round, his scarred skull protruding from the hood like the head of a snake.

“Put them back,” Gabriel said.

“Are
you
going to make me?” Wing hissed. “You can barely stand. I’m surprised you are still alive. They make you freaks out of tough stuff.”

The irony of being called a freak by Hilary Wing was not lost on Gabriel. “I think the phrase is something about ‘the
pot calling the kettle black’, isn’t it? And while we’re on the subject of who is and isn’t a freak … don’t you think that there might just be a
little
bit of me in you?”

Despite the lack of expression on the papery skin drawn over Wing’s bones, there was a sudden change in mood. A strange gurgle came from the back of his throat. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, how do you account for your amazing powers of recovery? Your ability to withstand pain? Anyone
normal
would have died in that crash … and certainly from those burns. Perhaps you are more like us than you like to think?”

“Shut up!” Wing screeched. Dropping the remaining bowls, he flew at Gabriel, pinning him against the wall; his stick across the boy’s throat, squeezing the breath out of him.

“They knew all about you,” Gabriel whispered hoarsely. “Look on the walls…”

Wing’s reptilian face twitched, the flesh tautening around his open nose cavity. The blue eyes broke contact with Gabriel’s and widened, scanning the painting on the wall behind the boy’s head.

It was all there.

Hilary Wing’s life was drawn out in front of him. A big house the shape of Waverley Hall: his family home. Then the village: tiny little huts leading to a moor on which was painted a big Triskellion. Next to the Triskellion were twins and a man with long hair and a beard: Wing himself.

“What is this?” His eyes darted around the walls. He was keeping the pressure on Gabriel’s throat, but there was panic in his voice. Everywhere he looked there were moments from his life displayed in swirls of colour against the rock. His eyes went to the picture of a man alone, seated on a kind of horse, with wheels where its legs should be. Further on, the “horse” was painted in flames, with the next image depicting a man in a hood, brandishing a long stick and looking like the Grim Reaper.

Wing seemed to recover his composure and turned his eyes back to Gabriel. “If that’s supposed to be me, the artist has made me look like Death himself.” He pressed down on Gabriel’s neck and smiled. “Which, as far as you’re concerned, is exactly what I am…”