Synchronicity

A short story about the number three...

I was told once that synchronicity was often no more than mere coincidence.  When you start to see a pattern, you start noticing things simply because they fit it.  The human mind is a marvellous device for recognising patterns in chaos.  I mean, just look at a television tuned to static; even though we know it is nothing but random flashes of light and dark, we see images and faces.  Others suggest that the laws of causality break down in times of great metaphysical significance.  Coincidence is a warning, they say.

For myself, I cannot say that I know what I believe either way.  I was raised a spiritual man, looking to the divine for guidance when all else failed, but humble enough to find my own answers and fight my own battles when I could.

Thus, I found myself chuckling quietly to myself as I arrived at my sister's home.  The third child and youngest of our generation, she needed someone to look after her three daughters for three hours.  Three threes in quick succession, a magical square.  

As a Wiccan high-priestess, the number three was nothing new to her.  While not generally given to flights of fancy, she was apt to remark that the triple goddess she favoured had in turn favoured her with three children, but I was never sure how seriously she meant that; it did seem that she waxed most spiritual when around those of her faith and (perhaps out of respect for my own beliefs) maintained a more rational and mundane tone with me.

Tonight, she was off 'doing her thing' with the coven she led.  I had never pried too deeply into what that meant, but it was generally understood that jokes about dancing naked around bonfires would earn you a roll of the eyes at best and a dead arm if she was in a particularly foul mood.  From the outside, I suppose most faiths look a little fanciful and strange, so who was I to talk with my own faith eating their god  and clergy trussed up in greater finery than some drag-queens.

"I'll be back by two," she told me. "Don't let them get out of bed, don't let them tell you that mummy lets them watch TV past eleven-thirty and whatever you do, don't feed them after midnight."

I had looked after my nieces often enough to know the drill, but it is probably just a quirk of parenting that you find yourself developing these routines and speeches.  She'd leave, the girls would try to convince me to let them come downstairs, I'd send them back to bed, fall asleep on the sofa and then be woken by an amused-looking high-priestess so she could send me home with a twenty-pound note to cover my petrol.

"There's beer in the fridge," she told me. "Pop-corn in the cupboard, don't smoke in the house, don't bring strange people around and I'll call you if anything changes." 

The practised and well-worn speech over, she finally grabbed her ritual bag and headed out to the car.  I waited for the sound of her car pulling away and then the inevitable sounds of feet on the stairs.

"Back to bed.  You know what your mother would say..."

Retreating footsteps answered my words, as I knew they would and as they had before.

Babysitting is not the world's most challenging job, it must be said.  I turned on the TV, headed to the fridge for a drink (lemonade rather than beer) and settled down to watch something that appeared to be Hammer Horror.  Dracula, much to everyone's surprise, was back and so Van Helsing came to finish the job he had obviously botched the first time.  As usual, I never learned how it ended.  An old man (or so it seemed) nearing forty years old, I could not take the excitement of these late nights.  Sleep took me quickly.

I woke to the sound of a telephone.  It was annoyingly insistent and apt to wake the girls, so I forced myself upright and reached for the handset.

"At the third stroke, the time will be three oh three precisely."

The voice was chillingly emotionless, a pre-recorded message designed to inform callers of the time, but I could not understand the reasons for it.  

Third stroke...  Three oh three...

The handset fell from my hands, three threes.

I looked up at the television screen, the film having ended and given way to a news program.  A familiar face stared back at me, the mother of the three girls sleeping peacefully and unaware upstairs of the horror I now saw.

"Three Counties killer claims a third victim."

I was told once that synchronicity was often no more than mere coincidence.  Now I know better...