The Chalice (41 page)

      
'Come and have a drink.'

      
'No. I've got to get out of here.' He wiped his eyes again; it
certainly wasn't rain this time. 'I don't claim to understand any of this. I won't
be able to explain it to anyone. I wish I could, but I can't.'

      
'Just hang on a minute, OK? One minute.'

      
Juanita gave him the umbrella to hold and ran across the road
to the bookshop. She was back inside the minute to find Tony standing at the
kerb, arms by his side, the umbrella pointing at the pavement. Soaked through
and he didn't seem even to have noticed it was raining. She shoved the book
into his cold, damp hands.

      
'What's this?'

      
'You said you wished you understood. It might help.'
      
He peered at the book, 'I can't see'
      
'It's Colonel Pixhill's Diary.'

      
'Oh. That.' He didn't seem impressed. 'Domini had one, threw
it away.'

      
'People do,' Juanita said. 'Some people do. He can make you
feel very depressed. Until something like this happens and then maybe he's the guru
you've been searching for. I'm not even supposed to sell it to people unless
they specifically ask, so I'm giving it to you. Read it when you get to
wherever you're going.'

      
'Harlow, Essex. Harlow New Town. My parents live there. No
legends. No history to speak of. A real sanctuary. Thanks. Thanks for the book.'
Tony raised a hand, unsmiling, climbed into his Cavalier and started the
engine.

      
But it was a while before he could pull out into the road, and
a while before Juanita could cross it. Because of the sudden traffic.

      
From a distance, it looked like a motorbike. When she saw what
it was, Juanita went weak.

      
A bus with only one headlight and an engine like a death-rattle.
Then a converted ambulance with NATIONAL ELF SERVICE across its windscreen. And
then a hump-back delivery van, the kind the Post Office used to have, only with
a window punched in the side. And then an old hearse. And more of the same, gasping
and limping through the endless rain, a mobile scrapyard.

      
Oh no.

      
Juanita shrank into the Holy Thorn doorway, both hands around
the umbrella stem. Holding the thing in front of her like a riot-shield, as
they rumbled past and clattered past and groaned past, under the diffident,
crane-necked gaze of the seen-it-all Glastonbury streetlamps.
      
The convoy from hell.

      
The umbrella shook rigidly in Juanita's hands. A sick ritual
on the Tor, followed by a death. And they had the nerve, the arrogance, to come
back.

      
Maybe they'd returned for the meeting - that was all poor old
Woolly needed.

      
But no. She watched them proceed like a ramshackle funeral
cortege, along High Street. For Chilkwell Street. For Wellhouse Lane. And the
Tor.

The house lights dipped
dramatically and Archer Ffitch became a powerful silhouette against a pure
white rectangle.

      
He was suddenly so much like their father. Because all you
could see was his shape, thicker but no hint of fat. Because you couldn't see
their mother's moist lips and their mother's grey eyes. Because, like Father,
he seemed at his most relaxed standing up, or erect on a hunter. And he was awfully
relaxed at the moment.

      
'I want to show you some pictures,' he said. 'I want to show
you a possible solution. But I want, first of all, to make it clear that I am
acting here not as a politician but as a concerned resident of this area. What
I am about to outline is a preliminary proposal, to be tossed around the democratic
arena, adjusted, refined and perhaps, at the end of the day - who can tell? - rejected.
I hope this will not be the case, because I believe it is the only way to
correct an unhealthy imbalance in this fine old town.'

      
The hall was hushed.

'I believe,' said Archer, 'that
the only solution to the problem must lie in restricting the activities of
hippies, travellers and undesirables, without in any way diminishing the rights
of local people.'

      
Archer lifted a hand and a picture appeared on the screen behind
him: the top of Glastonbury Tor, the St Michael tower ruling the screen from
top to bottom.

      
'The Tor,' said Archer, 'is the property of the National Trust,
a body responsible for making our nation's heritage accessible to the general
public, and none of us would wish that to be otherwise.'

      
The next picture was an aerial photograph, looking down on the
St Michael tower and the discoloured grass around it.

      
'I have been unable to establish,' said Archer, 'precisely how
many tons of earth have been replaced here in recent years because of erosion
caused by human feet. Or how many sheep have been killed by uncontrolled dogs.
I would hate to estimate how many tons of human excreta have remained unburied
by people flouting the fairly unenforceable laws about camping out on the Tor.
And there are no records of how many innocent people - and children - have been
disturbed or disgusted by the most shameless and perverse sexual shenanigans taking
place in full public view. Is this - I ask you now - what we expect of a
National Trust site?'

      
The response was immediate and deafening.

      
Diane didn't reply; she was struggling with a terrible sensation
of foreboding. Oh, Archer would be canonised, all right. Archer was very good
at sincerity.

      
The slide changed to a less dramatic picture: a close-up of an
Ordnance Survey map intersected by hand drawn black lines. Archer tapped the
map on the screen with a pen.

      
'Let us first of all ask ourselves why these members of what
they like to describe as an Alternative society flock like lemmings to this
tiny hill. It is because of an unfortunate legacy.'

      
Archer paused.

      
A memory came to Diane of a Christmas when she was seven or
eight, a Boxing Day afternoon spent hiding in her bedroom, trying to read her
book and blank out the sound of the hunting horn. She'd fallen asleep in her
mother's old rocking chair and awoken to find ...

      
'... a legacy of nonsense from that most unstable of decades,
the nineteen-sixties, when a so-called culture founded upon psychedelic drugs
and led, I imagine, by bearded gurus from Tibet decided that the Tor was A
Place of Power ... where many so-called ley-lines intersect. The fact that no
archaeologist or anyone with even basic common sense gives any credence whatever
to this famous rubbish ...'

      
He would know, of course, that the person in Glastonbury most
obsessed with leys was Councillor Woolly Woolaston, whose reputation would be
seriously eroded tonight.
      
Diane briefly closed her eyes.

      
And remembered half waking in her mother's chair that Boxing
Day and stroking fur. She'd wanted a dog as a pet; her father had refused; he
said dogs were for working and hunting, dogs were for outside.

      
Archer was laughing. '... gullible and rootless people who
believe that they can get 'high' on Glastonbury Tor. With or without the use of
mind-altering drugs. Is this what that august body, the National Trust, exists
to promote?'

      
This was just awful.

      
'Now the Tor,' Archer said, 'is, as my friend Mr Daniel pointed
out a few minutes ago, a pretty place on a summer's day. A place where, doubtless,
some of you would like to take your children or visiting relatives, were you
not afraid of what they might see.'

      
'Or tread in,' Griff Daniel commented from a few yards along the
stage.

      
'Quite. I'm also quite sure that none of you would wish to go
there at night, or on some pagan solstice, or for the purpose of altering your
perceptions ... So let me outline to you a comprehensive plan.'

      
As a new slide appeared on the screed, Diane remembered
sleepily stroking the fur in her lap, wondering vaguely why her skirt was wet
and her hand sticky. Oh dear, perhaps the puppy had ...

      
But it hadn't been a puppy at all. It was a fox. Or rather its
head. A trophy from the Boxing Day hunt. One of its eyes was missing. Its jaws
had been prised open. Its needly teeth gleamed with blood. Blood from its neck
had soaked through Diane's Christmas kilt.

      
The old image brought tears of horror and pity to Diane's
eyes. She blinked them away, tried to focus on the screen. The picture on the
screen was not of Glastonbury, but it was instantly familiar.

      
Diane remembered Archer denying having anything to do with the
fox's head, denying it with such appalled
vigour
and absolute sincerity that, by the end of the afternoon, Father was almost
accusing Diane of having planted it to get her brother in trouble.
Blooded at last, eh?
Archer had whispered
in her ear as they left the room.

      
On the screen, storm clouds glowered over the grey sentinels
of the world's most famous prehistoric monument, Stonehenge.

      
'No ...' She clapped a hand over her mouth.

      
He couldn't. He
couldn't
be suggesting ...

      
But Archer didn't do anything he wasn't fairly sure of. Archer
hated the thought of ever looking silly. Which, always the picture of sober
sincerity, he never did. Diane stood up slowly, her back to the rear wall. She
fell as cold as marble. Realising she'd always hated him; it just never seemed
right to loathe your only brother.

      
Archer explained his proposal simply and concisely, connecting
with the fears and prejudices of his audience. Diane felt an undercurrent of
excitement in the hall, as if each person was linked to the people on either
side, to the front and the rear, by a thin copper wire.
     
With the ceiling lights out and Stonehenge still on the screen,
she looked down and thought she saw a softly glowing net, a grid of pulsating energy.

      
She felt an utter despair. And something else that squirmed
inside her, wanting to get out.

      
'So you see,' Archer was saying, 'there is a very clear and
obvious precedent for these restrictions. All I need to know at this stage, is
... do you, the people of Glastonbury, want it to happen?'

      
'Too bloody true,' a man shouted out. 'Soon as possible.'

      
And there were other cries of affirmation and support. A mindless
response, the most alarming sound Diane could ever remember having heard.

      
She couldn't see Archer's eyes across the darkened hall, but
she knew they were focused on her. As their gazes locked, triumph with dismay,
an odd smell came to her: salty, earthy and fleshy. Not the fresh-blood,
violent-death smell of the poor fox. More like the inside of an old- fashioned
butcher's shop. There was a horrible warmth to it and a sour kind of voracious
life; it pulled at her stomach; she felt disgusted, and somehow strengthened.

      
On her other side, in the dark canal of the aisle, she knew
that a shadow-form crouched, could feel it rising with her own bruising fury.

      
She moved into the aisle. At once, something swirled around
her denimed legs. There was a roaring in her head.
      
The stage seemed miles away, the
screen a distant window. 'Archer!' Diane called out in a voice so loud and
precise that it scared her.

      
Silence made a hollow in the hall. Diane felt as if she was standing
in mercury.

      
Oh my God, what am I
doing?

      
Her jaw fell. She felt limp and soaked with sweat.

      
'I ...'

      
Heads turned. People recognising her at once.

      
'I...'
      
No...

      
She could feel a cool but urgent pressure. A hand on her wrist.
Resist, it said. Resist.
      
'Nanny?'

      
People began to laugh as Diane turned, stumbled and ran
sobbing from the hall.

Juanita called Jim, for the
eighth time that day, on the cordless from the upstairs sitting room.
Come on, come on, answer the damned phone,
you stupid, proud, opinionated old bastard.