The Chalice (12 page)

      
He tried to clench his own fingers on Mort's hand and Steve's.
Only nothing happened. He couldn't work the muscles. Clenched his fingers, but
nothing clenched.

      
A ring. A ring on one of the wiggling fingers, a big one, size
of a curtain ring. Headlice heard, .. .
let
me go ... let me go unto my lord.

      
A figure in black with stains down the chest, this rough cloth
around it, ripped in places, and stains, stains everywhere and a hard, powerful
smell of dirty sweat, fear-sweat, and wet, rusty iron, like when you pull an
old pram out of a pond, all black, the fabric rotted and dripping and the frame
poking through.

      
No, I'm not going for
this. This is dope in the fuckin' water. You get me out of this, you bastards,
hear me?

      
The body was coming towards him in this kind of lopsided crippled
way; it couldn't stand up straight, couldn't lift up its head. He tried to
scream, feeling his throat working at it, pushing, but nothing coming out.

      
And the reason this ragged thing couldn't lift its head was because
it hadn't got one, only stains around the neck of its robe.

      
Help me. Help me to my
Lord
Its hands groping out for Headlice. fingers waving like seaweed in
shallow water. Headlice shrinking away. Fuck off ... fuck off, old man. Leave me
alone.

      
Dom, dom. dom
. Heart
banging away in his chest. Blood throbbing in his head. Drum going
dom, dom, dom
, and he could see the old
man was offering him something. Something that had formed between his hands, a
bowl, and Headlice reeled back; this was all he could do, throw his body' back
from the waist, because his legs had gone now, gone into soup.

      
And the old man pushed the bowl towards him, but it was still
joined to his hands, this bowl, this chalice, his fingers throbbing like veins
in the curved metal. The old man was giving off long sobs, ragged as his
rotting clothes, because he was as helpless as Headlice, this old man, didn't know
what he was at.

      
Holding out the bowl, the old man said,
Alan.

      
Which was Headline's real name.

      
The entity said,
Alan
.
Real sick and sorrowful, and Headlice looked down and saw, briefly, a wavering
shadow of himself in the mist, and he knew that he'd become part of it, another
wiggling thing. Part of the darkness. He started to cry too, because there'd
soon be nothing left of him but tears and snot evaporating in the dark.

      
Alan, however,
Alan
started
to feel dispassionate about this, about his body floating away from his
consciousness, or maybe the other way round, who gives a shit, roll with it.

      
And this was when the air thinned into a paler darkness, and
he became aware that he was out of it, up in the night sky- again, over the Tor
and looking down, and he could see everything very clearly. He was up here in
the sky - thank you, thank you, thank you, gods - and looking down on ...

      
... some miserable little sod scrabbling on its knees in blind
circles, right under the church tower, surrounded by candle lanterns, it's
stupid fingers dipping into the flames, but showing no pain. Just twitching and
scuffling like a lost thing, helpless and pathetic.

      
They were lifting it up from behind, two people, an arm each
and the drum was going
dom, dom, dom
,
like one of them execution drums,
dom,
dom, dom
, and he was looking straight down now, like looking down a chute,
on to the very top of its head, where a swastika ...
      
Oh
shit! Oh shit, man, it 's me That's me!
      
Being propped up like a scarecrow.
      
Rozzie was there too, watching,
white-faced, but the bitch was avoiding touching him, and there was ... it was Gwyn,
but it wasn't. His face was long and black and pointed. His coat was off, his
skin shone - he was naked - and so did his sickle raised, with the moon in it.

      
It was a hell of a shock at first, Mort and Steve holding the
pathetic thing's head back, exposing its throat to the blade, but the next
instant he'd realised this was only Headlice, a naive little tosser, so it
didn't matter he was going to die. Anyway, it had begun ages ago, the death thing;
the cut was like a formality.

      
Alan was above it all, directly above, exalted. Directly above
the swastika, the sun symbol on Headlice's head, the head chakra, the opening he'd
like projected out of - he could see the cord now, a thin strand of silver,
like a wire.

      
All he could see of Headlice was a pair of hands waiting to
receive the chalice, the Holy Grail, and then Alan dissolved into laughter because
the Holy Grail was black and slimy and smelt of piss.

TEN

With You This Night

Verity lit a candle for the
Abbot.

      
Its light might have created the illusion of a warm area at the
heart of ancient Meadwell. It didn't. The light was as wan and waxy as a lone
snowdrop in cold earth.

      
The silver candlestick and a dusty wine bottle, two crystal
wine glasses and two pewter plates rested at the top of the oak dining table,
which was as crude as an upturned barge.

      
On one was a salmon steak. They ate mainly fish, the monks,
Colonel Pixhill had told her.

      
From the other plate, at the bottom of the table. Verity (who
had never before sat alone here, who habitually ate in the kitchen listening to
The Archers
) was picking at a green salad,
which, in this sparse light, looked grey.

      
She was perched like a sparrow on the oak settle under the
window recess. At the top end of the table, behind the candlestick, was a high-backed
oak chair with arms. The chair sat before the platter of salmon. There was a
knife, but no fork.

      
The Colonel had said they did not use forks.
      
Oh,
let this soon be over.

      
Verity chewed on a lettuce leaf which felt like crepe paper in
the desert of her mouth. Among beams and pillars of oak, huge shadows shifted
sluggishly, like black icebergs. The lump of fish islanded by juices on the
Abbot's plate looked - although she squashed the thought at once - like some grisly
organic remains on a surgeon's tray.

      
The curious thing was that Verity had searched through all the
records, the Church histories, the local histories - and there had been many of
them, as writer after writer sought to explain the holy glamour of Glastonbury
- without ever finding documentary evidence that Abbot Richard Whiting had
eaten such a meal, or indeed that his last, sombre night upon this earth had
been spent at Meadwell.

      
Colonel Pixhill, you see, had always
said
it was so. After the Dinner, relaxing a little with a small
Panatella, the Colonel would ruminate on the Abbot's fate.

      
Of course, quite apart
from his differences with the church over, er, marital matters, Henry VIII was
an extravagant blighter. Never had enough money. And there was, Glastonbury,
wealthiest religious house in Britain outside Westminster. Had to get his hands
on that wealth somehow. Greed - that's the orthodox version. That devil Thomas
Cromwell, Henry's hatchet man, as it were ... only a matter of time before he
was ordered to focus his scheming brain on Avalon...

      
The Colonel would pour red wine, brought up that evening from
the cellar. Tonight Verity also had a bottle ready. Such a terrible waste, she
drank hardly at all and hated the cellar. She'd taken the biggest flashlight in
the house, but its beam down there had been but a flimsy ribbon. A cobweb was
still laced around the bottle of vintage claret she'd snatched from the nearest
rack, ramming it under her arm to grope for the iron handrail to the cellar steps.

      
But, of course, it was
more than money. Henry was capturing Jerusalem, do y'see? Jerusalem Builded
Here, as Blake was to put it, on England's green and pleasant land. How could the
king break from Rome, establish himself as the head of the Church, if he didn't
smash the power of the place where ... where those Feet walked in ancient
times. And old Whiting would've realised this, of course he would, and suspected
his own days were numbered, poor chap. But he stayed, and he waited. For a
miracle. How could God possibly permit the very Cradle of Christianity to fall?

      
For Verity, the Colonel had illuminated the history of Glastonbury
as no book ever had. She pictured the great Abbey soaring, in all its golden
splendour, into a flawless blue heaven. Who, indeed, could have imagined it
then as broken and derelict? Certainly not the Abbot.

      
At last, laying down her knife and fork - she could not eat with
only a knife, like the Abbot - Verity composed herself and said, in a tiny,
tremulous voice like the
tink
of china,
the words enunciated for so many years by Colonel Pixhill.

      
'Have courage, have fortitude, My Lord Abbot. We are…'

      
She paused to correct herself, nervously fiddling with the
lace handkerchief in the sleeve of the woollen pinafore dress she wore against
the cold in here. For November, it was quite a warm night. Outside.

      
'I mean,
I
am ...'

      
No! She had to believe that Major Shepherd was here at the
table and so was Colonel Pixhill himself. Had to believe she was not alone.

      
'We
are with you
this night.'

      
The candle flame swayed to the left, as if a fresh draught had
spurted into the room. Verity sat very still and did not See.

      
... no
possible escape, of course. Royal Commissioners searching the old boy's chamber
and coming up with writings critical of the king's divorce - as if anyone would
commit such things to parchment. Plus a book about - Ha', that other famous
cleric with the temerity to criticise his kind, Thomas Becket. And then they
find a gold chalice hidden away and accuse Whiting of robbing his own abbey!

      
The first time she heard this, Verity had asked hesitantly, Might
this not have been ... ? I mean, a precious chalice that he was so anxious to
hide ...?

      
The Grail, Verity? I
hardly think so. If the cup from the last supper was indeed preserved, it was
surely not precious in that sense. Certainly not made of gold. Wood or
earthenware, more likely.

      
The Colonel had raised his glass, peered into the clouded wine,
repeating,

      
We are with you, Lord
Abbot. With you this night.

      
Drawing an obvious parallel with the Abbot's own last supper.

      
In October 1539 - Verity remembered all the dates as clearly
as if she had been there - Thomas Cromwell, the King's agent, had ordered that
Richard Whiting, a kind old man who was always mindful of the poor and the sick
and known for his generosity, should be 'tried and executed'.

      
The 'trial' took place at Wells, where the Abbot and two monks
said to be his 'accomplices' were swiftly sentenced to death and brought immediately
back to Glastonbury. This was November 14.

      
The following day, the Abbot was brutally stretched and bound
to a wooden hurdle, dragged through the streets by horses past helpless, horrified
townsfolk, past the forlorn Abbey.

      
And so to the Tor.

      
Verity now rose among the shadows, poured wine into the Abbot's
crystal glass and a little drop to moisten her own parched lips. It tasted
bitter and salty, like blood.

There was a hazy- necklace
of light around the St Michael tower, just where it sprang free of the watery
mist that rose from the Levels and gathered on the sides of the Tor.

      
Clutching her shawl around her, Diane stepped off the bus
platform. Somewhere, a sheep bleated, a rare sound at night outside the lambing
season.

      
It was OK; this was ordinary light. Perhaps a circle of candles.
It wouldn't be visible at all from the edges of the town. So they were all up
there, doing whatever they'd come to do. Gwyn the Shaman presiding. With his
ceremonial sickle.

      
That had been a pretty scary moment. All alone, and raising
his sickle to the moon.