The Chalice, page 46
TEN
Save Them from Themselves
‘It was Archer, wasn’t it?’
She kept opening her eyes but they wouldn’t focus. She saw the blobs of faces around her in the gloom, but their features fled as she tried to identify them, flitting from one to another, very quickly. She thought she saw the Pilgrims: Rozzie and Mort and Viper and Gwyn. She must be hallucinating, dredging memories from the sludge of her subconscious. But in the end she could concentrate on only one thought.
‘It was … Archer. Archer pushed her downstairs. Archer killed her.’
Capturing the certainty before sleep reached out for her.
‘I’ve never met him,’ Powys said reasonably. ‘Never even seen him. Got no reason to think ill of him. Hell, I’m not even very political.’
Working on information now that he hadn’t found in the Pixhill papers. Piecing together what he’d gleaned from Juanita and particularly from Verity. Verity who pattered about the streets and chatted innocuously, sometimes inanely. And heard things.
‘Is this gossip?’ Lord Pennard seemed stunned. ‘Is this talked about?’
‘I don’t honestly think it is. It just … suggests itself. Maybe … maybe it suggested itself to you.’
‘How can I discuss this with you? I’ve never even seen you before tonight. Certainly never heard of you. You lied to get in here; how do I know you’re not lying now?’
Powys said nothing. Pennard had his head in his hands. He’d found another bottle of whisky.
‘My wife died after falling downstairs. She’d been to the nursery. Liked to spend time there. Been redecorated, refurnished in pink. She had her bed moved into the next room. Said she knew it was going to be a girl because … a wise woman had told her. My wife believed in such nonsense. She’d sit in the nursery alone and read for hours, as though the fact of the pink paint could influence matters at that stage.’
He drank some whisky. His face no longer smooth and polished but blotched with tension.
‘Closed that part of the house now. Don’t heat it, don’t light it. Let it damn well rot. If it falls down, it falls down.’
‘Were you in the house at the time?’
‘I was in here. Didn’t like her in her maudlin, nursery-moping mood. One of the maids – still had maids then – came to tell me. They’d found my wife at the bottom of the stairs. Semi-conscious. Called the doctor. And the Belvedere, the private clinic. Sent a midwife with an assistant. Bugger-all use they were.’
‘How near to time was she?’
‘Seven months. Baby came out, but the damned placenta wouldn’t. Because of the fall. Place was like the inside of an abattoir.’
He choked back something and became annoyed with himself and pushed all the bloodsports magazines to the floor.
Powys said, ‘Someone told me Archer and his mother didn’t get on.’
‘Who told you?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘No. It’s true. This … Dark Chalice business. This blasted woman … this Fortune … Firth biddy … spent a lot of time, apparently, with my mother while my father was away at his … clinic. Whatever she told her, my mother evidently passed on to Helen – my wife. One Christmas, few glasses of wine, told the boy about the legend of the Chalice. My wife was furious. Insisted it was up to the women of the family to exercise constant vigilance to counter any attempt arising from “male avarice or poverty”, as she put it, to “unbind” the thing. Archer, of course, was immediately enchanted. We’ll get it back, Father, won’t we? Damn it, if he hadn’t learned about it from me, someone would have told him. Sooner or later.’
‘Was that why your wife was so determined to have a girl? Because the women …?’
‘Doubtless. Archer was ten at the time. Don’t think she was ever close to him again. Almost afraid of him. And, of course, he played up to that. I remember he once walked in while we were having dinner. Solemnly carrying a chalice with a candle burning in it. Said he’d found it buried in the grounds. Helen had hysterics. Turned out some boy had stolen the thing from St John’s. I think Archer paid him. It was smoothed over.’
The sleet had stopped. It was very quiet in the gunroom.
After a while, Lord Pennard said, ‘Had the sheets burned. And the mattress. And then the fucking bed. Chopped up and burned. Sat in the library window, all the lights out. Watching the bed blazing in the walled garden.’
Powys thought, nearly twenty-eight years ago, Pennard would have been around his own age. Never imagined he’d be feeling so sorry for the guy.
‘Rankin did the burning. Been with us about a year. Soaked everything with paraffin. Lit up most of the lawn. When the fire burned low, Rankin went away. Then Archer came out.’
Pennard pushed his whisky away.
‘Had enough. Can’t get drunk any more. Can’t get merry. Yes. Archer came out. Arms full of toys and baby bedding from the nursery. Pink teddy bear. I remember the pink teddy bear. With a bow. Archer burned them all. He was grinning. The baby was born. I couldn’t look at her. She had blood on her. So I sat in the library in the dark and watched Archer burn all the toys. Saw his grinning face in the firelight.’
Lord Pennard began to weep.
After much frantic struggling, Juanita managed to get the shop door open and she threw herself out into the street, blue coat under her arm.
Into the empty town, moving in a staccato, sporadic fashion. Stubbornly doing ‘normal’ things. Taking in images of ordinariness. She walked across the zebra-crossing to the post office. Looked into the phone box, an old-fashioned red one but the coinbox and phone were modern. A stand-up sandwich board said:
LPS, TAPES,
CDS, BOOKS
BOUGHT, SOLD
On the other side, a sticker had been slapped across the board:
Put Glastonbury First
– TAME THE TOR.
It was cold, but the sleet had stopped, leaving a thin glaze of slush on the pavement; few feet tonight to trample it away. The sky was clear again, almost starlit. There could be a hard frost, icy roads.
Alone on High Street, Juanita felt utterly wretched, but she couldn’t go back. Couldn’t live with those pictures. Couldn’t take them down or hide them away, that would be the final rejection for Jim.
She struggled into her coat and stood for a while outside the delicatessen near the crossing. She felt agitated. Her body twitching, itching. Her hands ached abominably. She felt used and betrayed. As if her body had been strengthened just sufficiently to support the mind-twisting terror which began with the painting altering, recreating itself in her head, an unseasonal fly from the attic mutating obscenely into a symbolic black bus.
There were no roads at all in that picture, no hazy ley-lines. Somehow her mind had created them as an opening for the horrid black bus which came out of the shadow-Tor and tunnelled into her brain.
A black bus was not a real hippy bus. Hippies had rainbow buses.
The Pilgrims, though, they were different. Gwyn ap Nudd, lord of darkness, his sickle raised. The Pilgrims laughing because they knew the Tor had betrayed Jim and Juanita. The hill of dreams where she’d sat all night and drunk cheap wine and watched for the good aliens, the mystic hill which Jim had painted reflecting the last light … had reversed dramatically into the negative image of itself, thus becoming a dark hill, and spewed out the black bus of death.
And the good, hopeful hippies who danced like butterflies and wished people love had given way to twisted, embittered hippies, children of the Dark Chalice.
She felt the whole town twisting and turning and tightening around her like the grey snake-hair of the black priestess, Ceridwen.
Who had Diane.
‘Diane!’ Juanita screamed. ‘Where are you? Answer me!’
Nobody answered her. Alone on the cold wet street, she sobbed and scuttled away, a Verity in the making.
There were questions he didn’t have to ask any more.
Like why Lord Pennard had abandoned attempts to get Meadwell back.
Why he’d placed his daughter in the care of strict, old-fashioned nannies who would take no nonsense. Who could be relied upon to keep her away from Archer.
Why he’d sent her away to school after school. Why he wanted her to marry a man in distant Yorkshire.
‘You could never be sure, could you? Whether it was real or the whole thing was fantasy. Whether Archer had actually pushed his mother downstairs and might one day do something similar to Diane. You were just trying to keep them apart as long as it was in your power to do so.’
‘He’s my only son.’ When Pennard looked up, his face had hardened again. ‘My heir. The next Viscount Pennard. And before that he’ll be the MP for Mendip South. It’s coming right again, Powys. We’re selling the land for the road. The future’s sound. We never needed the bloody chalice.’
‘That’s what Archer thinks too, is it?’
‘Get out. Go on.’ Pennard turned away. ‘We never had this conversation. I’ve never seen you in my life. Just get out of my house.’
‘Do you know where your daughter is now? Have you any idea?’
‘Get out!’
‘Don’t you think it might be a good idea to report her missing? To the police? They’d listen to you. They’d pull out the stops.’
Pennard didn’t reply. He didn’t move. He was like marble.
Powys found his own way out down a shabby, leather-smelling passageway, frugally lit.
Rankin was waiting for him at the front door.
‘Get what you wanted?’
‘More or less, thanks.’
‘I was listening,’ Rankin said. ‘Other side of the door.’
‘What?’
‘The aristocracy.’ Rankin shook his head. ‘Sometimes they can be very naive. Quite often we have to save them from themselves.’
He was half a head taller than Powys, held himself very straight. His face was without expression.
‘Because we need them, you see. They’re our backbone. You might not think much of him and his kind, Mr Poe-is, but they’ve made this country what it is. They deserve our protection.’
‘Most people have to protect themselves,’ Powys said nervously.
‘I can’t let you spread this around,’ Rankin said, very matter-of-fact. ‘You know that. I had my son break into your car, take it round the back of the house for tonight. We’ve killed your dog, sorry about that. Sorry about all of this, but I take my job seriously and that man in there and what he stands for is worth ten of you and all the pathetic sods down in that town, with their medallions and their dowsing sticks. You understand that, don’t you, sir? All I’m saying, this is nothing personal.’
Rankin held open the door.
‘After you,’ he said.
ELEVEN
Blood of the Goddess
Powys went quietly.
Rankin held open the double-glazed door of the porch for him. Not good form to soil your master’s premises. Powys noticed that it was cheap, aluminium double-glazing. The economic way to cut heating bills.
He felt almost light-headed as he turned to Rankin and said, ‘You don’t really have to do this, do you? You don’t have to kill me?’
Wanting to sound at least frightened but aware that it only came out puzzled. Faintly incredulous that there could still be men like Rankin who would murder without compunction if it was a matter of supporting the system which supported them.
Wondering distantly, as if he was watching from above or on a closed-circuit TV, how exactly it would be done. One of those SAS blows that drove your nose bones into your brain, perhaps. Or a slim knife to the heart. He wondered if his body would end up drawn and quartered like Abbot Whiting’s and buried under what would become the Central Somerset (Bath-Taunton) Relief Road.
‘It’s the way things are,’ Rankin said apologetically. Immediately outside the door he put on his leather cap. ‘Preserving what has to be preserved. So much of it’s gone, you see.’
‘Yes.’ Arnold was gone. We’ve killed your dog, sorry about that.
Well, that wouldn’t be hard, a three-legged dog, recovering from shock. While Rankin was neatly closing the porch door, he thought about Arnold, the night the vet had taken his leg off, everything they’d been through since, the long walks along Offa’s Dyke after which he’d sometimes have to carry Arnold home.
‘Please,’ he said, knowing this time that there were real tears in his eyes. ‘Can’t you …?’
And seeing a definite naked contempt in Rankin’s eyes in the half second before he felt his face contort in blind fury as he sank his left fist into the man’s gut.
Distantly aware, as Rankin doubled up, of all his rediscovered New Age credentials floating away into the ether. Surprised at the surge of maddened strength, which hurled Rankin back into the porch, snarling,
‘… fucking scumbag cunt …’ A face smashing again and again into the double-glazed door, which did not break.
Aware with a sense of dismay that it was his voice and Rankin’s face. Fully aware that all this would have been entirely beyond him if Rankin had not blithely mentioned having killed his dog.
‘Hey, shit, come on …’ Pulling on Powys’s shoulder. ‘Stop it. You don’t wanner go to gaol for shit like this.’
Powys’s hands were covered in blood. He got back to his feet.
Rankin sat up on the top step and spat out blood. His eyes were moving, coldly weighing up the situation, working out his best move.
Powys kicked him in the throat.
‘Bugger me,’ Sam Daniel said, as Rankin went down gagging. ‘I thought this was the Age of Aquarius. Just let’s get the hell out, eh?’
Powys remembered now. How he’d called up Woolly on the offchance he was still around, needing someone to be at Meadwell if Verity got the call from Wanda. And Woolly had turned up with Sam who’d offered to go with Powys to Bowermead Hall. Slipped out of the car at the bottom of the drive to find his own discreet way in, keep an eye out.
‘He killed Arnold,’ Powys said. Rankin didn’t move, lay wheezing quietly to himself.
‘He what?’
‘Where’s the car?’
‘It’s down there, by those bushes,’ Sam said. ‘You left it unlocked, remember? I let the handbrake off and rolled it a few yards to the bushes, out of the light. To give me some cover, as we eco-guerrillas say.’
‘Arnold?’
‘He’s lying on his rug. What did you think?’
‘Why would this guy say he’d killed him?’
‘It’s the kind of guy he is, Powys. Or maybe he was going to. Or maybe somebody else … Shit.’
Powys turned and saw a mirror image of Rankin at the foot of the steps.
‘Dad?’
‘This is Wayne Rankin,’ Sam said. ‘He’s training to be as big a psycho as his old man.’
Wayne Rankin was looking at Powys’s hands. ‘What you done to my dad?’
‘Your dad,’ Sam said, ‘made a slight miscalculation about the aggression quotient of New Age Man. Now just back off, son, it’s two against one and neither of us is in the best of moods.’
Rankin moaned.
‘You can get him to hospital when we’ve gone, look.’ Sam walked slowly down the steps. Wayne Rankin moved away, but he didn’t take his eyes from Sam.
‘You’re a friend of Lady Loony, yeah?’
Sam stopped.
‘We banged her last night,’ Wayne said.
Sam froze.
Wayne kept on backing off. ‘Gave her a good seeing-to.’
‘Don’t react,’ Powys said in a low voice. ‘If his dad lied about the dog …’
‘Come here, Wayne,’ Sam said. ‘Tell me all about it.’
‘Three of us.’ Wayne had vanished beyond the feeble house lights. ‘One after the other.’
Sam charged out. Powys grabbed his arm. ‘Don’t go out there. He’ll be waiting.’
Wayne Rankin’s voice came out of the darkness.
‘Squealed like a stuck pig, she did.’
Woolly told himself he and Meadwell deserved each other. Sitting in the dark here was probably as close as you could get on this earth to authentic purgatory.
Sitting waiting for Pel Grainger.
He’d actually been at that lecture of Grainger’s at the Assembly Rooms. Been unimpressed. Superficial bullshit. Even if you could welcome the night like you did daylight, how was that really going to expand your life?’
The exercise, when Grainger had all the lights put out, that felt good. On the surface, it was the harmless kind of meditation exercise Woolly’d done a thousand times. But that night it produced a serious buzz.
But that was a weird night anyway. Woolly had had to leave before the end after getting a message that somebody was smashing windows out on the street. Whatever you were doing that night, it was going to be intense, off the wall. Something had been happening. Somebody doing something. He should have seen it then.
Dark Chalice rising.
He wondered what he’d really do when they came for the well.
Simple, JM Powys had said. You just call the police. Report intruders. Let them handle it. Nobody knows you’re there; don’t enlighten them. Don’t even think of going out there after them.
But he might. The fuzz might not make it in time. And he didn’t have a lot to lose. He might well go out there. Needing to do something.
Dark Chalice rising. Corrupting everyone in its path.
Like Grainger. Grainger had been corrupted.
He could stop Grainger, if he was on his own. Pompous, fat git. Woolly felt he really needed to stop somebody. He was feeling totally useless. A whole pile of bad shit coming down and nothing that soon-to-be-former Councillor Woolaston could do about it.
Right now, he didn’t want to leave this kitchen. Wasn’t that wimpy? He didn’t want to go anywhere in this spooky old house. Just to sit tight by the Aga, listen for a car, the sound of the gate opening, and then maybe …
Face it, any kind of action outside was better than being in here. Little Verity had to be a really strong person to have survived this. A really good person, Mother Teresa class.
