The Chalice, page 42
Sam shook his head, mystified. ‘Sorry, Woolly. Slight generation gap problem here. Walk the Line – is this some old Johnny Cash reference I wouldn’t understand?’
Woolly smiled. ‘Sam, man … the St Michael Line. I need to think. I need to walk until I’m shagged out, camp out by the Line and pray something sorts itself out. People don’t wanner see me. I’m bad news, no getting round that.’
‘No,’ Sam said. ‘You’re wrong. Completely. You’re the best councillor we ever had. ’Sides which, you’ll die of exposure out there. Look … Here’s Hughie – he’s got masses of kids, Mr Fertile. Yet, here he is, nailing boards across your window. Hughie, come on, is Woolly gonner weather this one or isn’t he?’
‘Ain’t that simple, Sammy,’ said Big Hughie. ‘My first reaction, I’m angry. I think why’d he do that? Is his brain even working? Then I think, well, he’s a friend, he’s a good guy. Best councillor, as you said, we ever had. Besides which, it could’ve been any one of us.’
Hughie brushed sawdust from his beard.
‘What other people’re gonner think, though, in the final analysis, I can’t say. There’s a lot of shit going round right now, Sammy, lot of extremism. So, well … maybe Woolly does need to get away for a while.’
Sam shoved his hands in his pockets. Not what he wanted to hear. He stared at his trainers for a couple of seconds.
‘OK. Spare me two minutes, Woolly. Over there. Excuse us, lads.’
He led Woolly out of the square, away from Hughie and Gav, over towards St Benedict’s, where it was quiet.
‘I’ve been at a bit of a loose end this morning,’ Sam said. ‘I just walked round, looking for Diane, asking if anyone’s seen her.’
‘Diane’s still missing?’
‘Since last night.’
‘Shit,’ said Woolly. ‘Like I know she’s done this before, but …’
‘I don’t care if she’s done it before or not. Things are different now.’
‘Sheesh,’ Woolly said, looking hard at Sam. ‘I can see they are.’
‘Yeah. Ain’t life funny? Let me get this other thing out. I’ve been talking to people. In and out of the shops. People I haven’t talked to in years. Both sides of the fence – what we thought was a fence. There’s two topics on everybody’s lips. The crash, obviously. But the other one’s Bowkett and his Tor Bill. Most people, they just didn’t realise. They just never thought it could happen.’
‘Most people want it to happen,’ Woolly said. ‘They’ve had it with the New Age.’
‘I reckon most people don’t want it to happen. OK, maybe a lot do, but still less than half. Lot of folk out there got no big feelings about magic and earth-forces and all this crap, but they do care about freedom. And they don’t want bloody Griff Daniel back.’
‘So you stand against him. Take on your old man.’
‘Aw, Woolly, some of these people like to go into the countryside and shoot rabbits, watch the hunt and that. They don’t want me neither. But I reckon you’ll see the size of the opposition, look, at dawn tomorrow, when the Bishop goes up the Tor. This Christian-pagan common ground stuff, it might be crap, but if the Bishop comes out against Archer and Bowkett …’
‘Better I’m not there, Sam. I got a bad feeling about that. Better I’m miles away.’
Sam had a major struggle with himself, at this point, not to tell Woolly about the evil road burrowing through Bowermead, leaving the ashes of slaughtered trees.
‘Also,’ Woolly said, ‘on a personal level, this may be the last chance I get to walk the Line before it’s sliced up.’ He put out his hand. ‘You’re a good boy, Sam. I always said that. Diane could do worse.’
He shook Sam’s hand solemnly and walked towards the church.
And Sam thought, with a horrible jolt, He’s not going to come back. Not ever. He’s going to be found dead in his little tent near some forgotten standing stone.
‘Woolly!’ His sense of loss compounded. ‘Woolly, listen, you gotter help us. We’re all shit scared here. About Diane. About the way this town’s cracking up before our eyes. You can’t just walk out on us. You can’t!’
Verity unscrewed the top of the brown phial. ‘Dr Bach’s Rescue Remedy. If you can hold his mouth open, I shall put three drops on his tongue.’
‘Does it work on dogs?’ Powys held open the car door. It was snowing freely now.
‘Why not?’ said Verity simply. She leaned into the car from the other side. Arnold lay on the back seat, a tartan travelling rug half over him. Powys patted him and then, as if to give Arnold the chance to bite him, nuzzled his face into the furry neck.
Arnold licked him apologetically. It was different out here.
‘Do you know what this is?’ Powys asked her.
‘I think I do.’ Verity squeezed the rubber bulb on the end of the glass dropper, her wizened face tight with determination. They had bathed quite a deep cut beneath the dog’s ear, where he’d caught it on a nail protruding from the door. They’d felt around his skull, finding no obvious damage. But his breathing was disturbingly erratic.
‘It’s simply the house,’ Verity said, like she was shedding a great weight. ‘All animals hate it here. A few weeks ago I had to take a very placid little cat to the Cats’ Protection League to be re-homed. She went berserk. Attacked me.’
They sat in the front. The snow accumulated on the recumbent wipers. Powys was not anxious to go back in the house.
‘How do you stand it?’
‘I’m a very dense person. I do not See. And lately there’s been Dr Grainger to … help me.’
‘Help you to cope with the dark?’
‘I thought he was harmless. I was very lonely, you see. And my friend Wanda Carlisle is very persuasive.’
‘Between them they persuaded you that this tenebral therapy nonsense was going to help you cope with what the house was throwing at you?’
‘That’s exactly it. Foolish, wasn’t I? And yet when Oliver Pixhill came and made it clear he wanted me out, Dr Grainger was very kind.’
‘This is Colonel Pixhill’s son?’
She nodded. ‘I thought they didn’t know each other. Dr Grainger appeared to be on my side. I thought he was harmless, you see.’
‘He might be harmless. His theories might be complete bollocks. But bonding with the dark, while unlikely to cause problems in most places, could be … Well, in a place like this it could be close to suicidal.’
‘I’ve been very stupid. Loneliness, I suppose.’ Verity looked out at the snow. ‘Do you know why you’re here, Mr Powys?’
‘Joe. I’m here to collect a parcel for Juanita Carey.’
She turned and examined his face.
‘It’s funny,’ she said. ‘You don’t look at all like him.’
‘Hawthorn. Hops. A little rosemary. Some other things,’ Matthew Banks said.
‘What’s it for?’ Juanita felt utterly limp. She’d drunk the herbal mixture and about three pints of water, most of which she’d surely sweated away.
It began in her feet, a prickly heat, like warm goose-pimples, crept up her legs like unwelcome, flaccid hands … and then her whole body, instant sauna, breasts and face burning up.
At least the duvet lay quite comfortably, for the first time, on her flayed thighs, to which Matthew had applied some ointment; it had stung like hell at first, but that was preferable to the other thing which came and came again, a hot tide, four or five times in an hour and left her flung against the headboard like a rag doll.
‘What’s happened to me? Did I just do too much too soon, or what?’
‘Forgive me,’ Matthew said. ‘But when did you last have your period?’
No. No, no no.
‘Missed one. Maybe two. Shock, they said. It’s normal.’
The last transition for a woman …
‘What are you suggesting?’ She panicked, hitched herself up on her elbows. ‘Listen, Christ, it doesn’t happen like this, it can’t be, I mean, it doesn’t happen from nothing like overnight? It doesn’t come at you time and time again. Not … nothing and then … Jesus Christ, Matthew …?’
‘No.’ He straightened the duvet. ‘No. It shouldn’t happen like that.’
They were all there. All the main ones, anyway: Weymouth Sands, Maiden Castle, Wolf Solent, Porius, Morwyn, Owen Glendower, A Glastonbury Romance – well, naturally. And the Autobiography.
Hardbacks, too, several in leather. She had them arranged in what might once have been a bread-oven in the jagged inglenook.
Powys shrank back. He’d never seen all the books together before. Like a reception committee.
Took you long enough, boy.
‘What?’ Almost a yelp. His senses swimming, or maybe drowning.
‘I said I’d be most honoured’, Verity repeated, ‘if you would sign them for me. Later, perhaps?’
‘I’m sorry?’ He was imagining all the books spinning out of the black hole, whizzing around his head, blown by unearthly laughter.
‘I doubted him. Poor Major Shepherd assured me that someone would come. He said
I would know.’
‘Um, look … Maybe we’re both in danger of over-reacting. Do you think?’
The high melodrama of it might normally have made him smile. Anywhere but here, in a room like an ancient vault, haunted by the leather-bound spirit of Uncle Jack of blessed memory.
The collected works seemed to shimmer on the shelves in triumph. Pre-ordained. In this hard, cold, uncompromising house, it all seemed horribly pre-ordained.
He thought about what Diane had said. About the three of them. George Pixhill, John Cowper Powys and Dion Fortune. The Avalonians.
Grey-green light from mean, leaded windows tinctured the silver lettering on the spines of Uncle Jack’s books. Verity and Powys sitting once more at the old, shadowed dining table, where the Colonel’s body had lain in state. A brown teapot and cups on it now.
‘He came here?’ Powys said.
‘Only once while I was here. A tall and immensely striking man with curly hair and a hooked nose. He sat … well, where you are sitting now. I was so much in awe, having read his work, that I could not speak to him, let alone ask for his signature on the books.’
A brown-paper parcel lay on the table between them.
‘Are you going to open it?’ Verity asked.
‘It isn’t addressed to me.’
MRS J CAREY. VERY PRIVATE.
Very firmly written, fountain pen job.
‘Do you know what’s in here, Verity?’
‘I’m perhaps as curious as you are, Mr … Joe.’
Powys felt on edge. The nervous part of him needed to be well out of Meadwell by nightfall. Something was building here, and it wasn’t a new Jerusalem. Blake’s dark, Satanic mills: in this house you could almost hear those mill wheels grinding.
The other side of Glastonbury. It had always been here.
As had Verity. And not being sensitive was not necessarily a defence. She’d survived, perhaps, because she hadn’t yet been personally attacked. But now Grainger would go back and report to whoever had set him up – and Wanda – to come on to Verity, get inside Meadwell, and into the well itself, for whatever reason.
This puzzled him, too. If they wanted to penetrate that well, why not come at night – Grainger’s chosen medium – go through the field, as Powys had done, hack it open at their leisure?
‘Can I use your phone?’
The telephone was in the kitchen, a lighter room because of its white walls, one of which bulged out unpleasantly, like a corpse under a sheet.
Powys called Carey and Frayne. He didn’t get the answering machine, he got Matthew Banks.
‘She’s sleeping at last,’ Banks said. ‘I’ve made her comfortable. She shouldn’t be disturbed. I shall stay with her as long as I can.’
He left a severe pause.
‘Glastonbury as we know it, Mr Powys, may be about to collapse into a chaos unseen since the Dark Ages, but, as Juanita appears to be my patient now, I must put her interests first. I hope you understand that.’
‘Yes,’ Powys said. ‘I’m glad. If she wakes up before I’m back, tell her everything’s … tell her I’m doing my best.’
Whatever that meant.
He went back to open the brown-paper parcel.
SIX
Extreme and Everlasting
THE OLD VICARAGE COLN ST MARY GLOUCESTERSHIRE
My dear Mrs Carey,
Your no doubt somewhat bewildered receipt of this parcel follows either my death or my discreet removal to some secluded nursing home where the wheelchairs are locked up at night to ensure the inmates do not escape!
No, do not mourn for me, my dear. Save all your grief. You may well need it.
Let me say, at the outset, that burdening you with this matter is something in the way of a last resort, the flailing gesture of an old, tired and sadly ineffectual man who has, for some years, been attempting to stay afloat in waters untold fathoms beyond his depth. I was hoping to, as they say, sort things out myself, with the help of others. This has clearly not been possible in the time left to me, especially as there now seem to be remarkably few ‘others’ I feel able to trust. Also the situation seems to have escalated at an alarming rate, as poor George implied it might as we approach the Millennium.
Be assured, however, that I would not expect you to do anything beyond coming to the rescue of my good and staunch friend, Verity Endicott, who is in grave and mortal danger, standing as she does directly in the path of (and, God help me, I do not exaggerate) an old and utterly merciless evil.
Oh, Mrs Carey, how it pains me to have to use language of such Biblical intensity. Yet I beg of you not to dismiss it as nonsense as I, to my shame, have done in the past.
As a highly intelligent and worldly woman, you must have wondered many times why, in seeking a strictly limited outlet for George Pixhill’s Diary, we approached you. And, indeed, your shop was hardly picked at random from Yellow Pages. The truth is that, despite your merits as a bookseller (and, indeed, your not inconsiderable personal charms) you were chosen primarily because of your long association with Diane Ffitch, a young woman who, I am obliged to say, may now also be in danger of a most extreme and everlasting nature. I do not know the girl, but I rather suspect it would be unwise to show her this material directly. Perhaps the facts could be broken to her in stages. I leave this to your personal assessment of Miss Ffitch’s state of mind.
As you can imagine, my association with Colonel George Pixhill (and how often I have cursed the poor man) has compelled me to delve, with a good deal of distaste, into arcane and occult matters better left, in my view, to moulder among the pages of ancient and disreputable books. Perhaps your professional knowledge of such volumes will render some of this more accessible to you than it has, over the years, been to me.
As I may have mentioned, the most important items here are the ‘missing’ sections of the Pixhill diaries which we were unable, for reasons which will become apparent, to publish.
You have probably asked yourself many times: what was the point in publishing the diaries at all and in such a restricted fashion? Well, firstly, as I have tried to explain, George was most insistent that his knowledge of the Dark Chalice should become not widely known but yet accessible to those who might find it meaningful, at a time when the two-thousand-year-old Glastonbury tradition would face a terrible challenge. (I believe that challenge is upon us – or, rather, upon YOU.)
Secondly, it is especially clear to me now that had we not published when we did the Pixhill diaries would NEVER have seen the light of day. I did not realise for a long time how close George was to the source of it and that some of the danger might emanate from within the Pixhill Trust itself. It can only have been a rare prescience on my part that persuaded me to publish the diaries when we did and to entrust them to an outside agency – that is, your good self.
How drastically things have changed in that short time. I had my health then and there was a sound nucleus of us old comrades at the heart of the Trust. As I write, I am the only founder member left alive. When you read this, there will be none of us left unclaimed by disease, senility or accidents of the kind which tend to befall the elderly. Had I been a wiser man I might have sought protection.
Ah, but we are old soldiers, used to an enemy we can perceive. How could we have had any idea of the possible implications of helping out a friend?
I have no more to say. Let George Pixhill speak for himself. Thank you, my dear. From wherever I am, I pray for you, for Verity and for Miss Ffitch.
God bless you all.
Timothy Shepherd.
Powys folded the letter.
In his head a big book fell from a shelf.
A tweed hat swung on a branch.
A steaming black bus roared through the night.
The irony of it did not escape Don Moulder.
He laid the ten-pound notes one by one in the scrap-dealer’s outstretched hand.
‘… three-thirty, three-forty, three-fifty.’
Fat grey snowflakes came down on the yard like sheep at feeding time.
‘What you gonner do with it, then?’ the scrap dealer asked.
‘None o’ your business.’ Don Moulder wound the rubber band round the remains of his wad.
Three hundred and fifty. Exactly what he’d been paid for letting the parasites in. A terrible rip-off, but it could be bad luck to haggle.
‘You wanner start ’im up, have a gander at the engine?’ The dealer trying it on now.
‘No, thank you.’
‘Bloody morbid, you ask me,’ said the dealer, bold bugger now he’d got his money.
‘Well, no bugger is askin’ you. So you keep your trap shut, mister.’
The scrap-dealer grinned, pocketed the money. The extra fifty for the time of delivery.
Don Moulder drew him a little map. ‘After dark. Well after dark, all right? No need to knock on the door, I don’t want the wife to know. You just leave it there, got that?’
Don walked out to his old Subaru. He didn’t want anyone to see it till the Bishop arrived at dawn.
*
