The Chalice (10 page)

      
'Yes. Well.' Juanita eased herself away. 'Just you look after
yourself, Verity.'

She was glad when she'd crossed
the shadowed car park and was safely behind the wheel of the Volvo. If Verity
was a little unravelled, she was at least in the right place for it.

      
Dear God,
Juanita
thought,
I used to revel in all this, the
excitement of it. A spiritual Las Vegas. The thrill of metaphysical stakes.

      
A lot had changed Or maybe it was just her. Her agitation
threshold had lowered for a start. She worried.

      
About growing old alone. About the business. About whether
selling mystical books was a good and worthy profession any more in a town
where mysticism had become a tourist commodity. About Jim Battle, who ate and drank
unwisely and what would happen if he ever collapsed with a heart attack over
his easel in a little cottage even Hansel and Gretel wouldn't have discovered.
      
About whether this
fourteen-year-old car would start.

      
'Come ...
on
!'

      
The Volvo did, though without much enthusiasm, and Juanita was
able to get into some
serious
worrying. About Diane.

      
Dotty. Confused. Mixed-up. That's all.
      
That's
all
?

      
She edged past the rear entrance of The George and Pilgrims
and round into High Street. Followed all the way by Lord Pennard's voice down a
telephone nearly ten years ago. A cold voice, a voice honed by Gillette.
      
You,
Mrs Carey. I hold you entirely responsible.
      
No. She wasn't having that. This
town was a positive bazaar of the mystical. If it hadn't been Carey and Frayne
it would have been some other bookshop.
      
Diane had looked so utterly
forlorn, shuffling in that first day, another teenage waif appealing for a holiday
job. If you could
have
fat waifs.
What was she supposed to say? Be
gone with you, you overprivileged hussy?

      
You didn't know she was
maladjusted? Don't tell me you close your ears to the local gossip, Mrs Carey.
      
Juanita drove past the venerable facade
of The George and Pilgrims, where modern pilgrims with Gucci luggage slept in
rooms with four-postered beds and sloping walls. Sometimes she drank at the
Pilgrims with Jim and the others, amusing themselves by embellishing the
Glastonbury legends for earnest German tourists, telling them a clear UFO sighting
over the Tor was virtually guaranteed at just before four a.m. on every second
Sunday, especially in winter.
      
As it happened, Juanita had never
actually seen a UFO, which was a pretty shameful admission in Glastonbury.

      
Diane of course, claimed she'd always seen balls of light in
the sky over the Tor. Didn't everybody see them?

      
And the gossips said.
It's
in the genes, isn't it? Always a danger with the upper classes. Interbreeding. You'll
always get one like that, every couple of generations
. And they watched her
padding down the street. Lord Pennard's strange daughter, and they called her Lady
Loony.

      
It was, admittedly, at the Carey and Frayne bookshop that
Diane had discovered the works of Dion Fortune, the Greatest Woman Magician of
All Time.
Oh, Juanita, I'm so excited.
Dion Fortune - Diane Ffitch. Same initials!
Diane's nose in a book,
munching healthy snacks. Nobody should get fat, for God's sake, on quorn and
tofu and carob covered cereal bars.

      
She'd have found those books anyway, sooner or later. In Glastonbury,
the nutter's Mecca, where gateways to altered states seemed as close as the
nearest bus stop. Where on nights like this, you could almost see the subtle
merging of the layers, the way you could in Jim's paintings.

      
Further up the street, only one shop was fully lit: Holy Thorn
Ceramics, owned by thirtyish newcomers Anthony and Domini Dorrell-Adams. The
lights were on because the Dorrell-Adamses were reorganising their window, and
...

      
'Jesus,' Juanita said.

      
Tony and Domini were together in the window. In fact it was
hard to imagine how they could be
more
together while fully clothed and standing up - Domini arching backwards and you
could almost hear the moans.

      
Only in Glastonbury.

      
Juanita tried to smile, accelerated away to the top of the High
Street. It could be a hell of an aphrodisiac, this town. Well, at first,
anyway. Turning into Lambrook Street, she was ambushed by misty moments from
twenty-odd years ago, when she'd left Nigel Carey (sad junkie; dead now) and
she and Danny Frayne had opened the shop with about two hundred books, mostly
secondhand, and a lot of posters. Danny was in publishing now, back in London.
And while it still said Carey and Frayne over the shop, and they still
occasionally exchanged daringly intimate letters on business notepaper, and now
and then had dinner and
whatnot in London, Danny - once bitten - never came back to Glastonbury.

      
Headlights on full-beam, Juanita drove the Volvo off left into
secretive, tree-hung Wellhouse Lane, official gateway to the Tor.

      
Impressionable. That was Diane. Curiously innocent, perhaps
deluded. That's
all.
But if he found
she was with the New Age travellers, her father would . .. what? Have her
committed? Juanita was convinced he'd tried something like that once. Jim was
right. Lord Pennard was not a terribly nice man.

It was very dark. Juanita
drove carefully up the narrowing road, scene of many a near-collision, and took
a narrow right, scraping the hedge.

      
Where the Tor should be visible, there was a night mist like a
wall. The lane swooped steeply into a tunnel of trees, and at the end of it
Juanita swung sharp left into a mud-packed track until the car could go no
farther.

      
The great ash tree leapt up indignantly, as if rudely awoken
by the Volvo's headlights.

      
She got out. 'Jim?'

      
A little chillier than of late, and it'd be quite cold on the
Tor. Pulling on her coat, Juanita very nearly screamed when hand patted her
shoulder.
      
'My, my.' Jim grinned like a
Hallowe'en pumpkin behind his lamp. 'We
are
being traditional tonight.'

      
'Say what you like about the Afghan.' Juanita pushed her hair inside
the sheepskin. 'But it's damned warm. Help me reverse?'

      
Jim, also, was dressed for action. In his hat and scarf and
overcoat he looked like something from
The
Wind in the Willows
, Mole or Ratty. With Toad's physique, however and
probably just as hopeless. But without Jim Battle there'd be nobody quite sane
enough to turn to in this kind of crisis.

      
'Leave the car here, Juanita. Better off walking. Take us about
twenty minutes. The old feet can virtually find their own way after all this
time.'

      
'You sound a good deal more cheerful than you did on the
phone.'

      
That's because I haven't been out with you at night for a good
while.' She felt his smile.

      
'Yes. Well. Unfortunately, we won't have time for a candlelit
dinner.'

      
'I've got a bar of chocolate.'

      
'We'll have it to celebrate, afterwards. How are we going to
handle this, Jim?'

      
'Bloody hell, I thought you were supposed to be in charge.
Suppose there's some sort of orgy going on up there? Wouldn't be the first
time.'

      
'In which case, Diane'll be somewhere on the edge looking
terribly embarrassed and a bit lost.'

      
'People do change, Juanita. Erm ... before we go any further...'

      
'That's a myth. People don't really change at all. Sorry, Jim.'

      
'I was going to say, on the question of heroics ...'
      
Juanita squeezed a bulky, overcoated
arm. 'I'm not suggesting you barge into the middle of a bunch of naked squirming
travellers and sling her over your shoulder.'

      
'No, I ...'

      
'I mean, I know you'd
do
it. If I asked you.'
      
'Actually, I was thinking more
about you. What I'm getting at is, the Tor's a funny place.'
      
'Tell me about it.'

      
'Sometimes you can get carried away. You know what I mean?'

      
'No.' Juanita rammed her fists into the pockets of the afghan.
'Not any more. Carried away is what I don't get.'

NINE

No Booze, No Dope

It was like being on a
strange planet.

      
Like they'd climbed up the night itself and emerged on to some
other sphere, and the moon and the stars were so much nearer and so bright it
was like they were swimming in and out of your head.
      
All this without drugs.

      
'
Magic,'
 
Headlice breathed, understanding at last why
Mort had been handing out this strict no booze, no dope stuff.

      
The pilgrims, all standing up now, had gathered around the
tower, which rose out of this small space on the summit of the Tor, over an
ocean of lights far, far below.

      
The tower. So close. Like a silent rocket ship in the centre,
and they were like joined to it and it was part of them. Literally. If he
stretched out his legs his bare feet would touch the stone.

      
His feet should have been dead cold up here, in November, but
this was a very special year, the summer heat clinging to Avalon, and the Tor
was
where the
real
heat was stored, all the sacred earth-energy. This was like the spiritual power
station of Britain and tonight Headlice was gonna get charged up like a
battery.

      
All the pilgrims were in a circle, holding hands. Headlice's
left hand had found the clammy fingers of this raggy-haired older woman called
Steve. His right hand had been grabbed, unfortunately, by Mort. Mort was
holding the finger he'd bent, which still hurt, the bastard.
      
But - hey! - it was suddenly
immaculately
weird.
      
The mist had come up behind them,
surrounding them like this chilly, fuzzy hedge, forming yet another circle. So
they were kind of locked into the pattern of the old maze
which had been around the Tor in prehistoric times.

      
And there was one more inner space: the tower was roofless,
like a chimney; you could stand inside - the flags underfoot dead slippery on
account of all the zillions of pilgrims over the centuries - and you could gaze
up the stone shaft into the night.
And the
night could come down it.

      
Gwyn was in there now, in the centre of everything, catching
the night.

      
He hadn't seen Gwyn arrive. The man was just suddenly among
them, in a long coat, no telling what he was wearing underneath.

      
Gwyn the Shaman, who walked with the spirits. Headlice didn't
know who Gwyn was or where he came from. There were stories about how Gwyn had
been in Tibet with the Masters, or been initiated into the Wiccan coven at the
age of ten then studied for the priesthood just to get both sides. All this
might be total bullshit, but if you knew for a fact that Gwyn was, say, an ex-garage
mechanic from Wolverhampton or just some toerag who'd found a copy of
King

of the Witches
in the prison library,
it'd like seriously detract, wouldn't it?

      
Gwyn had lit a candle, in a glass lantern because of the breeze,
and he stood behind it in the arched doorway which led into the tower's bare
interior and then out through an identical arch on the other side. His beard
was gilded by the candlelight. Bran had set up this slow heartbeat on his hand-drum.
Then more lanterns were lit until there was a semicircle of them around the
archway, sending Gwyn's priestly shadow racing up the stone.

      
Shaman. Mort swore he'd once seen Gwyn conjure a fire out of
dry grass from six feet away. 'Magic, eh?' Headlice said to Steve, and Steve
glanced at him and smiled and said nothing.

      
The throb of Bran's drum made the air vibrate, like the night
sky itself was one big stretched skin.