The Chalice (13 page)

      
Another reason to get out of here. This was not the convoy
she'd joined.

      
She moved silently across the grass, careful not to bump into
any vehicles, always a risk when there was so much of you.

      
She'd moved her van closer to the field gate, knowing she'd
probably be leaving before the others, knowing Juanita would let her stay at
the flat for a couple of weeks while she sorted herself out.

      
Mort's hearse loomed in from of her
. Love is the law, love over death.
She'd seen another, unpleasant
side of Mort tonight. Another side of all of them. She stopped. There was the
glow of a cigarette.

      
The thin moonlight showed her the hateful Hecate, sitting on
the bonnet of the hearse. Her van was on the other side of the hearse. She
couldn't possibly reach it unseen.

      
Well, gosh, what did that matter? She could leave if she wanted
to. Don't be pathetic!

      
But she
was
pathetic.
She imagined getting into the van, trying to start the engine which always took
absolutely ages to fire. And Hecate standing there watching her, this large, strong
and horribly precocious child smoking a joint. Opening the van door, which she
could do because its lock was broken, and dragging her out, the younger
children hearing the noise and coming to join in, black gnomes swarming over
her.

      
Shivering, Diane crept back to the bus. She'd wait until Hecate
had gone - for a pee or something - and then creep past the vehicles to the gate
and go on foot to Wellhouse Lane and the town. Knock on Juanita's door, beg for
sanctuary.

      
She sat in the front of the bus, in the driver's seat. A night
breeze awoke and made the bus rattle; more sheep began to bleat. Diane felt
like a solitary spectator on the perimeter of an enormous stadium, the
landscape primed as if for some great seasonal festival, Samhain, Beltane or whatever
they called midsummer night.

      
November 14? A day, surely, of no particular import in the
Celtic calendar. Not even a full moon. November 14 …

      
And then, in the sky over the Tor, she saw a light.
      
Not a torch, not a lamp, not a
fire.

      
It hung there for a moment and then went out. Diane caught her
breath.

      
When she was very young she used to go all trembly and run
downstairs, and Father snorted impatiently and the nannies said. Nonsense,
child, and felt for a temperature.
      
Nannies.

      
There was a certain sort of nanny — later known as a governess
- which Father expressly sought out. Nannies one and two, both the same, the
sort which was supposed to have yellowed and faded from the scene along with
crinolines and parasols. The sort which, in the 1960s, still addressed their
charges as 'child'. The sort which, as you grew older, you realised should
never be consulted about occurrences such as lights around the Tor.

      
And then there was the Third Nanny.

      
Her memories of the Third Nanny remained vague and elusive.
She remembered laughter; the Third Nanny was the only one of them that ever smiled.
And one other thing: she would sit on the edge of the bed but never left a dent
in the mattress when she arose.

      
She knew now what the Third Nanny was.

      
Diane tensed. Behind the Tor, the whole of the sky was now
growing lighter. Like a dawn. But it couldn't be dawn; it was quite early in
the night.

      
The light spread behind the Tor like a pale sheet. It was grey
and quietly lustrous, had a sheen like mother-of-pearl. She wondered if Hecate
could see it and suspected not.

      
Diane had certainly never seen a light like this before. The
lightballs she'd watched as a child had fascinated her. They were benign, they
filled your head with a fizzy glow - like champagne. This light was ominous,
like a storm cloud, and it stroked her with dread.

      
She wanted to turn away. She couldn't. She couldn't even
blink.

      
Two dark columns had appeared either side of the silhouetted
tower of St Michael. Rising above the tower into the lightened sky like arms of
smoke culminating in shadow-hands, cupped.

      
And in the cup, a core of intense and hideous darkness.

We are with you this night.
      
But who was with him, Verity
wondered, when they dragged him on his hurdle up the side of the Tor? The mud besmirching
him, the bleak November wind in his face bringing water from his eyes so that
it would appear he was weeping.

      
All the accounts said that Abbot Whiting went to his death
with dignity and stoicism.

      
But the very act of hauling him up the steep cone of the hill,
the
violence
of it! And at the
summit, under the tower, the waiting nooses - three of them, an obscene parody
of the execution, on another hill, of Christ.

      
The other two 'convicted' monks were Roger lames and John
Thorne, treasurer of the Abbey and a skilled carpenter and furniture-maker. All
three went quietly to their God. But the humiliation of Abbot Whiting did not
end with his hanging.

      
Took off his head. Soon
as they cut his dead body down, they look off the Abbot's head ... to be displayed
upon the Abbey gate, a trophy, a warning. Final evidence that Roman Catholicism
was terminated in Glastonbury, that the Church belonged to the Crown. Imagine
the impact of that on a little town in the sixteenth century. It must have felt
like Armageddon.

      
Colonel Pixhill could never go on beyond this point, but Verity
knew the Abbot's body had been drawn and quartered, sections of his poor corpse
sent for exhibition at Bath, Wells, Ilchester and Bridgwater.

      
Where did they carry out this butchery? Where did they take
the axes or cleavers to the body? Not, surely, on the Tor. More likely indoors
... somewhere.

      
Here? This was the inference, wasn't it. That the Abbot was
drawn and jointed in this house.

      
And if not at this very table, which was insufficiently ancient,
then perhaps on another table standing where this one now stood.

      
There
had
been a
body here. It was here that the Colonel had lain in his coffin, for three days,
as stipulated in his will. People had said how brave she was to stay in the
house alone with the corpse, but it had been a comfort to her, a period of
adjustment, of coming to terms with it.

      
Verity stared down into the well of shadows around her feet.
Why was she doing this to herself, as if she was obliged to unravel every last
strand of sadness and horror from the unhappy tapestry? She was unable to
suppress the sickening image of the Abbot's body, chopped into crude joints of meat,
and her eyes rose inevitably to the lump of red salmon on the plate and saw …
that it had gone.

      
The Abbot's pewter plate was clean.

      
Verity felt her mouth tighten into a rictus; both hands grabbed
at her face like claws, eyes closing as her nails pierced her forehead and cheeks
in a sudden, raging fever of fear.

      
She stayed that way for over a minute, rocking backwards and
forwards on the settle, feeling her chest swelling ... but she must not scream,
must
not...
moaning feebly through her
fingers, not daring to open her eyes, because the membrane of darkness shut in
by her eyelids, that at least was
her
darkness,
not Meadwell's.

      
She should not have to go through this. Her fear was spiked
with an anger now at Major Shepherd for being so ill, too ill to realise what
it took out of her. It's my duty to
receive
the Abbot,
she'd told Juanita Carey, almost gaily! In truth, it would be upsetting
enough for anyone, woman or man, to prepare a meal for a person long dead and
then sit down to dine. Alone. With that person's spirit.

      
Oh, but she was getting old. She'd be with them all soon, the
Abbot and the Colonel and Captain Hope her almost-lover who had died of
peritonitis in 1959.

      
Telling herself again that the Abbot was such a
kind
man, known for his generosity towards
the old and the sick, Verity rocked more slowly and became calmer, pulling her
hands away from her face, making them relax on her knees under the table,
retracting her claws like a cat. Of
course
the plate was not empty. With the worry and tension of the Abbot's dinner,
anyone could be subject to minor hallucinations.

      
Why, the ancient stone and timbered dining hall was quite
normal: silent and cold and still. Quite normal.

      
Until the very moment that Verity opened her eyes. When, as
abruptly as if someone had plucked out the snowdrop or flattened it between two
clapping hands, the candle went out.

      
And when the room was fully in darkness, not even the ghost of
the flame still discernible, the Abbot's chair creaked. The way that a chair
creaks when someone rises from it.

      
And Verity, alone in the reaching darkness -
where it no longer mattered that she Did Not
See
- gave in at last to the pressure of that long-withheld scream.

ELEVEN

The Wrong God

'What the buggering hell's
going on here?'

      
It might have been the erratic candlelight making Jim Battle appear
to quiver. Or it might - Juanita couldn't be sure - have been real, Jim
trembling not, of course, with fear but with barely suppressed anger at these
bloody pagan scroungers taking over his beloved Tor.

      
What the buggering
hell's going on here
? Juanita couldn't believe he'd said that. It was just so
Jim,
but so completely out of
context. Standing there defiantly, shoulders back, on the concrete apron at the
foot of the St Michael tower, candles all around him: Jim Battle, building
society manager turned mystical artist, being a dumpy little hero.

      
Juanita just hoped the pagan Pilgrims had a sense of humour.

      
Actually, there weren't as many of them as she'd imagined.
Maybe a dozen. People always exaggerated where travellers were concerned. Juanita
stayed behind Jim on the fringe of the assembly, a foot on the last step of the
path, her nostrils detecting a soiled sweetness in the air - not marijuana.

      
No music either. Not even the rattle of the wind which normally
haunted the summit of the Tor. Jim's outburst had erupted into a yawning
vacuum, as if he'd stormed into church in that moment at the end of a prayer
before the scuffling begins.

      
Juanita lightly squeezed his arm, a squeeze supposed to convey
the message,
Back off, Jim
  
Make an excuse. Walk away, pretend you
didn't see anything. You don t have anything to prove. Say you're sorry for
interrupting. Just back off.

      
'Well?' Jim glared belligerently at the shadowy travellers.
'What have you buggers got to say for yourselves?'
      
Oh,
Jim.

      
Nobody replied. 'The only sound was a choking gasp from up
against the tower. Juanita felt Jim's hand groping for the lamp and before she
could think about it she'd let it go and he'd flicked it on, stabbing the beam
at the tower.

      
The gasping person wasn't much more than a boy. His eyes,
speared by the lamplight, were glazed. A man and a woman were holding his arms.
Juanita realised, with distaste, that the smell on the air was vomit. And it
lingered; the air up here was dense, like wadding.

      
'What's the matter with this lad, eh?' Jim tried to spread the
beam over the other travellers, but they moved away. 'Well? Too bloody stoned
to explain ourselves, are we? I really don't know what to think about you
buggering people, I don't indeed.'

      
Juanita peered over his shoulder as he sprayed the light
about, looking for Diane and not finding her or any recognisable face.

      
Actually, it was all a touch unnatural. Only the candle flames
were in motion, burning in a semi circle of lanterns around the tower, the glowing
buds magnified by glass. At Jim's feet, there was a chalked semi-circle around
one of the entrance arches; inside it, metal bowl and cups and implements of
some kind. Probably some sort of altar, Juanita recalled fragrant summer nights
here with Danny
Frayne and bottles of Mateus Rose. And laughter, lots of laughter. Why
was nobody laughing? Why weren't they making fun of Jim, old guy in a silly
hat.
Have a drink, dad, Danny Frayne
would have said. Have a joint. Be cool.