The Chalice (2 page)

      
Of course...

      
Violet smiled.

      
...one
could simply allow oneself to go absolutely and utterly berserk.

      
She began a simple visualisation, letting loose her thoughts,
to roam the wildest of terrain, those places of high cliffs and crashing waves,
black and writhing trees against a thundery sky. As her body lay on its bed, on
a sallow, sunless afternoon in the mellow, autumnal Vale of Avalon, her
thoughts stalked the wintry wasteland of cruel Northern myths. In search of a
suitably savage instrument of revenge. Oh
yes.

      
She was starting to enjoy her anger and felt no guilt about this.
Daylight dripped on to her eyelids like syrup. And in the cushiony hinterland
of sleep, in those moments when the senses mingle and then dissolve, when
fragments of whispered words are sometimes heard and strange responses sought-
Violet's rage fermented pleasurably into the darkest of wines.

'Good dog.'

      
Its fur was harsh as a new hairbrush. It brushed her left arm,
raising goose bumps

      
It lay there quite still, as relaxed as Violet had been, but
with a kind of' coiled and eager tension about it. She could feel it's back
alongside her, its spine against her cotton shift. It was lean, but it was
heavy. And it was beginning to breathe.

      
She didn't really question its presence at first. It was simply
there. She raised her left hand to pat it. Then the hand suddenly seized up.

      
So cold.

      
And Violet was aware that the room had gone dark.
      
Not dark as if she'd simply fallen
asleep and the afternoon had slid away into evening. Dark as in a draining of
the light, of the life-force vibrating behind colours. The most horribly
negative kind of darkness.

      
She opened her eyes fully. It made no difference. The wallpaper
was a deepening grey and the fogged light inside the window frame thick and
stodgy, like a rubber mat. The eiderdown beneath her was as hard and ungiving
as a cobbled street.

      
The fear had come upon her slowly and was all the worse for
that. It chilled her insides like a cold-water enema. A rank odour soured the
room. The air seemed noxious with evil, almost-visible specks of it above her
like a cloud of black midges.

      
Drawing a breath made her body lurch against the creature lying
motionless beside her in the gloom.

      
And motionless it stayed, for a moment.

      
Violet knew what she had to do. She lay as still as she could,
gathering breath and her nerve.

      
Then she put out her left hand. Out and down. Until her fingers
found the eiderdown, hard as worn stone. There was an almost liquid frigidity around
her hand, over the wrist, almost to the elbow, like frogspawn in a half-frozen
pond.

      
It was very hard to turn her head, as though her neck was in a
vice, everything she held holy crying out to her not to look.

      
But look she did. She managed to turn her head just an inch,
enough to focus on her left shoulder and follow her arm down and down to where
the wrist... vanished.

      
Somewhere through the greyness she could detect a dim image of
her fingers on the eiderdown, while the beast's gaseous body swirled around the
flesh of her arm.

      
As Violet began to pant with fear, it turned its grey head,
and the only white light in the room was in its long, predator's teeth and the
only colour in the room was the still, cold yellow of its eyes.
      
I
am yours.

Part One

There is such magic in the
first glimpse of that strange hill that none who have the eye of vision can
look upon it unmoved.

Dion
Fortune

Avalon of the Heart (1934)

ONE

FOR
MYSTICISM ... PSYCHIC STUDIES …
EARTH MYSTERIES ... ESOTERICA

CAREY
AND FRAYNE
Booksellers

High
Street
Glastonbury

Prop. Juanita Carey

14
November

Danny,
love,

       
Enclosed, as promised, one copy of
Colonel Pixhill's Glastonbury Diary. More about that later. After this month's
marathon moan.

       
Sorry. I'm getting hopelessly garrulous,
running off at the mouth, running off at the Amstrad. Put it down to Time of
Life. Put this straight in the bin, if you like, I'm just getting it all off my
increasingly vertical chest.

       
What's put me all on edge is that
Diane's back. Diane
Ffitch.

       
Funny how so many of my problems over
the years have involved that kid. Hell, grown woman now - by the time I was her
age, I'd been married, divorced, had three good years with you (and one bad),
moved to Glastonbury, started a business …

       
I know. A lot more than I've done since.
There. Depressed myself now. It doesn't take much these days Colonel Pixhill
was right: Glastonbury buggers you up. But then, you knew that, didn't you?

       
I've been trying to think if you ever
met Diane. I suspect not. She was in her teens by the time our paths finally
crossed (although I'd heard the stories, of course) and you were long gone by
then. Although you might remember the royal visit, was it 1972, late spring?
Princess Margaret anyway -
 
always kind
of liked her, nearest thing to a rebel that family could produce As I remember
you wouldn't go to watch. Uncool you said. But the next day the papers had this
story about the small daughter of
 
local
nob Lord Pennard, who was to have presented the princess with a bouquet.

       
Diane would have been about four then
and already distinctly chubby. Waddles up to Margaret - I think it was at the
town hall - with this sheaf of monster flowers which is more than half her
size. Maggie stoops graciously to scoop up the blooms, the photographers and TV
cameramen all lined up. Whereupon, Diane unceremoniously dumps the bouquet, hurls
herself, in floods of tears, at the royal bosom and sobs - this was widely used
in headlines next day - 'Are you my mummy?'

       
Poignant stuff', you see, because her
mother died when she was born. But obviously, a moment of ultimate
embarrassment for the House of Pennard, the first public indication that the
child was - how can I put this? - prone to imaginative excursions. Anyway, that
was Diane's fifteen minutes of national fame. The later stuff- the disappearances,
the police searches, they managed to keep out of the papers. Pity, some even better
pictures there, like Diane curled up with her teddy bear under a seat in
Chalice Well gardens at four in the morning.

       
Years later she turns up at the shop
looking for a holiday job. Why my shop? Because she wanted access to the sort
of books her father wouldn't have in the house - although, obviously I didn't
know that when I took her on.

       
But she was a good kid, no side to her.

       
She's twenty-seven now. Until very
recently, Lord Pennard thought he'd finally unloaded her, having sent her to
develop her writing skills by training as a journalist in Yorkshire. What does
that bastard care about her writing skills? It was Yorkshire that counted,
being way up in the top right hand corner of the country. An old family friend
of the Ffitches owns a local newspaper chain up there, and of course, the eldest
son, heir to the publishing empire, was not exactly discouraged from associating
with the Hon. Diane. Yes, an old-fashioned, upper-crust arranged marriage:
titled daughter-in-law for solid, Northern press baron and the penurious House
of Pennard safely plugged into a source of unlimited wealth.

       
But it's all off. Apparently. I don't
know exactly why, and I'm afraid to ask. And Diane's back.

       
When I say 'back', I don't mean here at
the shop. Or at Bowermead Hall. Nothing as simple as a stand-up row with Daddy,
and brother Archer smarming about in the background. Oh no. Diane being Diane,
she's come down from the North in a convoy of New Age travellers.

       
Well, I've nothing against them in
principle. How could I, with my background? Except that when we were hippies we
didn't make a political gesture out of clogging up the roads, or steal our food
from shops, despoil the countryside, light fires made from people's fences or
claim social security for undertaking the above. Hey, am I becoming a latent Conservative
or what?

       
Anyway, she rang. She's with these
travellers - oh sorry, 'pagan pilgrims' - and do I know anywhere near their holy
of holies (the Tor, of course) where they could all camp legally for a few
days? Otherwise they could be arrested as an unlawful assembly under the terms
of the Criminal Justice Act.

       
Well I don't basically give a shit about
the rest of them being nicked. But I'm thinking, Christ, Diane winds up behind
bars, along comes Archer to discreetly (and smugly) bail her out with daddy's
money... I couldn't bear that.

       
So I thought of Don Moulder, who farms
reasonably close to the Tor He's got this field he's been trying to flog as
building land in some corrupt deal with Griff Daniel. Only, Mendip Council -
now that Griff isn't on it, thank God - insists, quite rightly, that it's a green
belt site and won't allow it. So now the aggrieved Moulder will rent out that field
to anybody likely to piss the council off.

       
I call him up. We haggle for a while and
then agree on three hundred quid. Which Diane is quite happy to pay. She says
they're 'really nice people' and it's been a breath of fresh air for her,
travelling the country, sleeping in the back of the van, real freedom, no
pressure,
 
no cruel father, no smug brother.
And at the end of the road... Glastonbury. The Holyest Erthe in All England,
where, according to the late Dion Fortune, the saints continue to live their
quaintly beautiful lives amid the meadows of Avalon and - Oh God - the poetry
of the soul writes itself.

       
The reason I mention DF is that, for a
long time, Diane was convinced that the famed High Priestess was her previous incarnation
-gets complicated, doesn't it?)

       
God knows what the great lady would have
written had she been around today. Bloody hell, this is the New Age Blackpool!
Shops that even in your time here used to sell groceries and hardware are now
full of plastic goddesses and aromatherapy starter-kits. Everybody who ever
turned over a tarot card or flipped the I-Ching sooner or later gets beached on
the Isle of Avalon.

       
And the endless tourists. Not just Brits,
but dozens of Americans, Japanese and Germans, all trooping around the Abbey
ruins with their camcorders, in search of Enlightenment followed by a good
dinner and a four-poster bed at The George and Pilgrims.

       
OK, I should moan. The shop's never been
more profitable. I've had to take on assistance at weekends (Jim Battle, nice
man). But I'm not enjoying it any more, there's the rub. I'm feeling tense all
the time (mention menopause and you're dead!!!). I see the latest freaks on the
streets and I can see why the local people hated us twenty years ago, I too
hate the New Age travellers blocking up Wellhouse Lane with their buses, marching
up the Tor to tune into the Mystical Forces, camping up there and shitting on
the grass and leaving it unburied.