Chapter Thirty-Four

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Three years ago

ERIN

Erin meets Senna online when Senna comments on her tarot TikToks, asking for a reading. Sure , she messages back. It’s fifteen for a three-card read. We can do it by WhatsApp?

It turns out that Senna lives in Glasgow, too, that she’s into paganism just as much as Erin. They decided to meet up for a bubble tea in Partick. Erin admires Senna’s black space buns and the badges pinned to her velvet blazer, which are a mix of goth Barbie-core and pithy statements about Trump and late capitalism. They have some of the same pins, too, one for the TV show Good Omens and one that says “Socially Awkward.”

“I’m part of a pagan group, actually,” Senna tells Erin when they sit at the window table looking out on to Dumbarton Road.

“Really? Like, Druids?”

“Better than Druids,” Senna says. “I was a Druid but this group is way better.”

“Oh my God,” Clem says. “Tell me it’s not some Dungeons and Dragons thing?”

“Course not,” Senna laughs. “We meet up every week, usually in the park. We have picnics when the weather’s nice, sometimes barbecues. Chat about nature and shit. Everyone’s super chill.”

“You chat about nature?”

“Yeah. And life. And magic.”

“Do you do spells?”

Senna smiles broadly. “You’d love it. The Triskele. That’s the name of the group.”

···

Several things happen after that first meeting in the bubble tea café that change the course of Erin’s future:

First, her best school friend, Bella, tells her that her father has booked a daddy-daughter trip for the two of them to Egypt after her exams. A week in Luxor. Nothing to do with grades. Just a chance to hang out together. When Erin tells her how lucky she is, Bella pulls a face and says she wished he’d booked Ibiza instead.

Second, she stops sitting with Bella at lunch, then stops speaking to her entirely, because every time she looks at her she’s reminded of how unbearably shit her own dad is, and how much his absence burns her.

And last, Senna messages her constantly, telling her all about the Triskele. They have a leader known as “the Brother,” and he has specifically said that Erin can come to their next meeting, even though she’s not a member.

···

Erin feels alive with excitement as she takes a bus with Senna to the Triskele weekender. She had expected the meeting to be somewhere central, like Kelvingrove or Queen’s Park, but they end up in the Trossachs National Park, on the grounds of a derelict castle. There are tents and gazebos set up, more than a hundred people gathered together, like a mini-festival. There are dogs of all breeds—Rottweilers, Alsatians, cute little dachshunds wearing hand-knit jumpers.

“It’s not a cult,” Senna had said, very early on, when they met over Zoom. “You’ll hear people say it is, but it’s not.”

“Why do they say it’s a cult?” Erin had asked.

“People are so fucking narrow-minded,” Senna said. “It’s because we have a so-called leader, right? And he’s a guy with long hair and robes.”

Erin smiled. She’d seen photos of the leader. She liked the idea of someone heading up an organization but calling themselves “brother.” And there was nothing in the Triskele’s code of ethics that she disagreed with. Triskele was like coming home. She liked the emphasis on tarot and spells, the strong connection to nature. She liked the feminist edge and the environmental advocacy. Most of Triskele’s work was based on rewilding and pressurizing big corporations to stop killing the planet. She was absolutely in favor of that. She’d heard rumors that Greta Thunberg was connected to Triskele, which made her heart stir with hope.

The more she found out, the more it seemed that Triskele was where she was meant to be. Everything was falling into place since she found it. She knew it wasn’t a cult. No one was asking for money, for a start. They invited donations, but that was to pay for the workers and the venues. It was just like Patreon or Ko-fi. Triskele wasn’t a MLM or a Ponzi scheme. They weren’t asking her to sell stuff for them, and they weren’t controlling her. They were a community. They weren’t a cult.

They were a family.

···

The Triskele meetings are intoxicating. Sometimes the Brother will talk for five hours without stopping. He’ll sit by the campfire, getting up only to pace and light a spliff, and talks without a single note about what life really is, about who all of them really are, about their real identities. He shares all his wisdom about the world, which means everyone who isn’t Triskele, and how they are all blind, and stupid, a herd of dumb sheep.

She comes to love the weekenders nestled in the woods. Everyone like one big happy family, enduring the Scottish weather, eating soggy sandwiches and smoking spliffs, talking about the important stuff. She learns about the Crossing. The Brother tells her there is so much more to learn, an ocean of knowledge into which she can dive. He tells her that sometimes he offers scholarships to students who are sincere in their efforts to learn. It doesn’t involve money, but it involves time, and attention, and education.

“How do I get a scholarship?” she asks.

The Brother grins. “You have to commit,” he says. “Are you ready?”

Three weeks later, he tells her she has been accepted. She is taking the most important first step of her entire life.

“The first lesson of the scholarship is very simple,” the Brother says. “No Google searches. No reading anti-Triskele stuff. All that shite will poison your mind. It’s intended to poison your mind, so don’t fall for it. We’re hated, remember?”

She nods, feeling the sting of those words. We’re hated.

“No school,” he continues. “No university. Stay away from that shite. Mind rot. Your friends who aren’t Triskele? They aren’t friends. Don’t tell your family about the Triskele because they won’t get it. We’re your true family.”

The scholarship is intense, with many hours of personal study required. The Brother’s seminal text is six hundred pages long, and she is required to read it three times, cover to cover, a kind of Bible for Triskele members. Stories. There are multiple exams, none of them written—everything is done in person, interview style. She is examined by the Brother and once by Senna. A few times she comes close to failing, and has to take the exam again, faced by a panel of six members.

When they tell her she has passed, she cries with relief.

Her graduation is called “the Crossing,” before she becomes proper Triskele, part of the clan.

But as Senna helps her into her robes, and the Brother tells her what the Crossing involves, the word “cult” crosses Erin’s mind for the first time since her first meeting.

“People have made sex so taboo,” he says, “but think about the way plants and trees do it. Sex is natural. It’s a celebration.”

“Yes, but in front of, like, everyone?” Erin says. “With a stranger?”

Why had no one mentioned that the Crossing would mean she had to shag someone? And not just shag them but as a kind of performance, with an audience. Was it too late to back out? They’d think she was a coward, or a traitor. Her palms turn clammy.

But then Senna wraps her arms around her, pulling her close for a hug. “Oh, babe. I know exactly how you feel. I was nervous, too.”

“You were?” Erin says, followed quickly by: “You did this, too?”

Senna pulls back. “Yeah. I did. And I remember feeling like I wanted to back out and run away.” She giggles at the memory of it, at how silly she’d been. “God. If I’d only known what lay on the other side. I think that’s part of the reason for it, you know.”

“For what?” Erin asks. “The Crossing?”

Senna nods. “Yeah. Like, if it was easy, everyone would do it, and they wouldn’t be ready. Not really.”

“But if you have the balls to do something that society deems so illicit, so pagan ,” the Brother adds, “then you’re halfway there already.”

Erin takes a breath. That makes sense. It is about courage, and thinking with your higher brain, the one that hadn’t been conditioned by society. She’d always known that school was just a conformity vehicle, churning out lots of obedient little workers who would never challenge the system. And adulthood was like that, too. Her mum struggles with council tax and water bills and bin day and bloody income tax, for what? The whole world is set up as a distraction from the Truth. No one is who they think they are. Triskele is a groundbreaking project aimed at getting people to wake the fuck up and realize who they really are.

“So who do I have to shag?” she says, sniggering a little as her own words reach her ears.

“You know Arlo already, yeah?” Senna says, and Erin follows her gaze to the boy standing in a huddle, about thirty feet away, closer to the fire.

“Oh.” Erin is a little relieved. She likes Arlo. She is slightly disappointed that she doesn’t get to have sex with a girl, as that is her preference, and they already know she is bisexual. For a moment she wonders why the setup is so heteronormative.

“What about, you know, contraceptives?” she asks, but then Senna is asking her to get to her feet and the drums are louder and she realizes it’s time, oh God, she is really doing this. She feels excited and sick: her body wants to go into the circle where the people are waiting and to run away, all at the same time. And then she’s drinking something from a wooden goblet that instantly makes her head feel light as a feather, and she thinks of a line from Romeo and Juliet , “Thy drugs are quick”…

It all feels like a dream, the Crossing. Erin is conscious of people standing in a circle, at least forty of them, all dressed in robes like hers, but masked, too, black cloths covering their faces. Some of them wear helmets made of deer antlers, while others wear elaborate vests and aprons made of braided twigs. Four guards stand in a square holding flaming torches around a large wooden platform, about the size of a double bed, made of logs and padded with black blankets, and beyond that is a small bonfire, the heat of it beating through the forest like a living heart. It strikes her that the whole thing is a health and safety nightmare, but then the drumbeat ratchets up, pulsing through her, shaking the very ground beneath her feet and rustling the trees overhead.

She senses Arlo’s nervousness beneath his ardor, but she focuses on him, pretending he’s a lover instead of someone she’d chatted with once or twice. She’s just glad it’s over quickly, a wild shout rising up from the crowd. And instantly they are covered again, her and Arlo, and Senna is there, saying, “Well done, well done.”

But she does not feel accepted, or swept up in a beautiful sense of belonging. She feels used, and nauseous, and tearful, even when they stumble forward into the midst of the well-wishers and the Brother shouts, “Tonight, we drink to love!”