Free Triskellion 3: The Gathering by Will Peterson Page B

where they had left Gabriel watching TV and playing with Ben. In the middle of the floor was a building of astonishing complexity made of Lego bricks, drinking straws, cocktail sticks and anything else that had been to hand.
    Holly gasped at the spires, the swooping walkways, the buttresses and the windows made of marbles and ice cubes that were beginning to melt, all lit from inside by a lava lamp and torch.
    “Oh my God,” she said. “That’s so beautiful.”
    Ben looked up at his mother and smiled. “Gabriel showed me how.”
    Holly’s jaw dropped even further. Not only had her two-year-old son built an amazing construction from scratch, but he had also just put his first sentence together.
    “I just helped him along a little,” Gabriel said, grinning.
    Looking at him, Rachel realized suddenly how much she had missed that smile. Seeing Gabriel standing there in her old home, seeing the beauty of what he had accomplished and the joy he had brought to the child and his mother, she felt a rush of warmth towards him. But she also sensed that given their circumstances, such moments as these would be rare and brief. “We need to go,” she said. “Great to meet you.”
    The young mother was still staring at the cathedral her child had built as they let themselves out of the apartment.

R achel was disappointed. She had expected the apartment to yield at least some small intimation of their former life. Some clue as to their father’s whereabouts. Only the kitchen remained as proof that the place had ever been their home – all other evidence of their existence had long since been wiped away. They walked down the staircase in silence, past all the other anonymous apartment doors that concealed other people’s lives.
    Back in the entrance hall they could hear hammering. The noise was coming from an open service door. Inside, a bulkhead light lit up a flight of stairs leading down to the basement.
    Adam paused a moment and looked down.
    Rachel read his thoughts: “Mr Hoffman?”
    Adam nodded. The janitor of the block might still be the same one who had been here since they were small.
    Adam and Rachel ventured downstairs towards the source of the banging, while Gabriel waited in the hall. The basement was concrete and brick: warm and dusty with thick pipes that provided the block with heat. In the corner, a man in a brown duster coat was attacking a heating pipe with a wrench.
    “Mr Hoffman?” Rachel called.
    The man could not hear her above the clanging. Rachel went over and touched him on the shoulder. He jumped and let out an involuntary cry. “What the…?”
    As he turned, Rachel saw that it
was
Mr Hoffman, a little greyer and a touch heavier, but still the same man who had looked after the building for as long as they could remember.
    “You tryin’ to gimme a heart attack? Whadda you want?” He gripped the wrench in his hand as if he might be about to fend them off with it. He looked from one twin to the other, not recognizing either of them.
    “Sorry, Mr Hoffman we didn’t mean to alarm you. We’re Rachel and Adam Newman.”
    “Congratulations,” Mr Hoffman said in a gruff voice. “Now if that’s all you came to tell me, can you leave me to get on with fixing this pipe?”
    Rachel persevered. “Sorry, no. I mean we’re Rachel and Adam Newman who used to live in apartment three zero one.”
    Mr Hoffman looked a little closer. “Lotta people come and gone recently. I can’t remember them all.”
    “Our mother was …
is
Kate Newman. The English woman?”
    “Sure. I remember Kate Newman. She was always polite to me. Good manners. Her husband was a schmuck, though. How could he leave a good woman like that and throw her out of house and home?”
    “That was our mom and dad,” Adam said.
    “Kate Newman had young kids,” Hoffman said. “Twins.”
    Rachel pointed to herself and Adam. “That’s us,” she said. “We’ve grown a bit. It’s been two years, at least.”
    Mr Hoffman looked at