The Chalice (44 page)

      
'I wouldn't go there,' Don Moulder shouted out, corning after
her. 'Mrs Carey, you wait for me.'

      
She ran down through the trees. Her skirt snagged on some brambles
and she ripped it free, feeling the material tearing under the Afghan coat.

      
Don Moulder stumbling behind. 'You won't get no nearer than I
could, Mrs Carey.'

      
The air grew bright around her, rosy as dawn, but no dawn ever
smelt like this.

      
'You wait for the fire brigade. They d'have machines as'll get
down that track, no trouble. You'll get trapped down there, look.'

      
Juanita found the track at last, ran across the turning area
where she'd parked the other night. On to a grassy hump, stumbling over a root
and sinking to her knees.

      
'…'s far enough, I tell you! Don't be s' damn stupid, woman!'

      
When she stood up, it was like thrusting her head into an enormous
blow drier. She couldn't breathe, her mouth filled up with fumes and she fell
back into the wet grass, Don Moulder screeching,'... Godzake, woman!'

      
She crawled on hands and knees around the grassy mound until she
came to the little wooden gate leading into the tiny, square cottage garden
where Jim would erect his easel on warm evenings, a high hedge protecting his
privacy.
      
She stood up by the remains of an
old trellis, where roses had once hung. Her eyes were already sore and
streaming and she had to blink four, five times before she could see the whole picture.

      
The whole terrible bloody picture.

      
Jim's cottage and the garden were in a little flat-bottomed
bowl with a bank rising up behind it and the enormous ash tree, one and a half
times as high as the cottage.
      
The bowl looked like a frying pan,
with a straight piece of track forming the handle, although she'd never seen it
that way before.

      
But, then, she'd never seen it all lit up like this.
      
The lower windows of Jim's cottage
were bright and warm, like the welcoming windows of a storybook cottage.

      
Especially the floor-to-ceiling studio window, the sunset
window. Looking now as if it had stored up all those thousands of liquid red
sunsets and was starting one of its own.

      
The November night was as warm as a kitchen. The air carried the
breathless rise and fall of distant sirens.

Diane and Don Moulder came
to stand on either side of Juanita.

      
'That's far enough, Mrs Carey. Brigade's here now, look.'

      
The fire-sirens went on and on and got no louder.

      
'He's surely out here somewhere.' Don Moulder was wiping his
eyes with a rag. 'He's not daft, isn't Mr Battle.'

      
The roof timbers of Jim's cottage produced a cheerful, crackling
as fierce little impish flames began to poke through like gas-jets. And still
the sirens went on and on and got no louder. In a gush of panic, Diane
realised.

      
'Oh, gosh Mr Moulder, they can't ... the fire brigade won't
get through! The whole lane's clogged with buses and wagons, we couldn't even
get the car past!'

      
'Whazzat, Miss?'

      
'Travellers. There's a bus broken down right in the middle of the
road.'
      
'A buzz?'

      
'It's blocking the road'' Diane was aware of Juanita pulling
open her Afghan coat and ripping at her skirt.

      
'Oh my God.' Juanita said. 'Oh my God. Look!' Pointing at the
ash tree, something hanging from it.

      
'Aye,' Don Moulder was saying. 'A buzz. Maybe you seen it. But
were it a real buzz? That's the big question, Miss Diane. Were it a real ...
Christ, are you mad, woman?'

      
Beside Diane, a muffled, ragged figure, cloth-raced like a scarecrow,
began to run towards the inferno.

The sunset window cracked
first, like a gunshot, and then it exploded, a thousand fragments of hot glass
blown out at Juanita, muffled like a Muslim woman, a torn -off length of her
skirt wound around her face as she threw herself at the cottage.

      
Diane rushed forward, squealing like a piglet, but Don Moulder
grabbed her, both arms around her waist, and held her back.

      
A huge gush of fire lunged out of the cottage and hit the ash
tree with a lurid splash of sparks, like a welding torch in a foundry. Whatever
was hanging limply from a branch was lit up very briefly before the flame
pounced like a cat on rat and consumed it.

      
Diane screamed wildly inside Don Moulder's arms.

      
Juanita had disappeared.

      
Brittle, burning dead leaves from the ash tree danced like frenzied
fireflies to the futile warbling of the trapped fire-engines.

      
As out of the shattered sunset window toppled a frightful thing,
a monstrous shape ... a fossil tree with rigid projecting branches, a twisted,
blackened pylon.

      
Coughing and retching, with Don Moulder's leathery farmer's
hands clasped over her spasming stomach, Diane saw just about everything.

      
She saw that the tree was something entangled and kept upright
by a metal artist's easel. Or maybe two easels, or even three, entwined, fused
together into a single, horrific fire-sculpture, all black and flaking.

      
At the top of this twisted creation was spiked a charcoal ball,
like a Hallowe'en pumpkin which had fallen into the bonfire. When the
construction teetered, the ball twirled to display ...

      
It was impolite to be sick on someone. Diane found the strength
to pull away. Vomiting into the grass, she could still see it.

      
The grisly twinkle of teeth as the charred remains of Jim Battle
toppled into Juanita's flung-open arms and the cottage roof collapsed into a
gush of pumping blood-orange smoke.

      
Before she fainted on Don Moulder, Diane glimpsed something at
the very centre of the billowing.

      
Obscenely like the hands of a conjuror letting loose a black
dove, it was a smoking cup of shadows, a dark chalice.

SEVENTEEN

Of the Heart

The cottage was fine, just
as peaceful as it had ever been. Arnold limped contentedly around, Mrs Whitney
brought homemade soup and all the books stayed on the shelves. Outside, there was
snow on the hilltops and a stack of logs, nicely dried and split, in the old
barn.

      
Winter was at the door, season of rough walks and hot fires,
and whatever had been happening inside Joe Powys to cause that period of upset,
that blip, it was obviously in remission.

      
So... fine.

      
Well, except for the no Fay aspect, and even that was fine for
Fay, who was a people-person and had been getting increasingly restless through
the summer. It hadn't been
love - Joe Powys kept telling himself this - so much as mutual need, the need
for someone who had also experienced these things to be there when you awoke
before dawn, in terror and self doubt. Would Fay still awake in terror in
Brussels or Munich or Amsterdam? Perhaps not.

      
So, fine. OK Really.

      
Anyway, there was another woman now.

In hazy sepia, a cheerful, buxom lady in a hat and
a long woollen skirt pushes a bicycle with a shopping basket over the handlebars.
Colours slowly fading into the picture as she crackles through autumn leaves in
a half-wooded lane to a steep and narrow path; at the end of this, a big shed
with lace curtains at the windows, the shed built into the flank of a hill of
cucumber green rising, almost sheerly it seems from here, to a church tower of
grey-brown stone, a church tower without a church.

Her real name was Violet
Firth, Evans when she married, She was born in 1890 in North Wales, although
her family later moved to Somerset. As a young woman, during the years of World
War I, she became quite a successful psychotherapist, initially attracted to
the new ideas of Sigmund Freud.

      
Which she rapidly outgrew, realising there were phenomena of the
mind and spirit which Freud could not approach.
      
During this period she discovered she
was telepathic, psychic and a natural medium.

      
She also discovered Glastonbury.

      
Somebody gave her a redundant army hut and she put it up
directly under Glastonbury Tor and it was here that she founded the mystical
order which became the Society of the Inner Light.

      
Powys already knew a little about her. During his research for
The Old Golden Land
he'd learned that
she was the first writer to discuss the psychic aspect of leys, those
mysterious alignments of ancient sites across the countryside.

      
What had put him off further reading was the name under which she
produced her novels and magical studies: Dion Fortune. It was developed,
apparently, from her family motto
Deo Non
Fortuna
. Not her fault that, from this end of the century, it sounded like
a fifties rock and roll singer.

      
Anyway, this was probably one of the reasons he'd never got
around to reading
Avalon of the Heart.

      
'All hokum, well over the top,' Dan Frayne had said, presenting
him with the paperback to read on the train home. 'But it left me with a kind
of warm glow, you know? Made me feel, yeah, this is The Place. Dangerous stuff,
in retrospect.'

      
Powys read it twice. It was just over a hundred pages long, a personalised
guide to Glastonbury and its mysteries in a style which was kind of Helen Steiner
Rice meets Enid Blyton.

      
Dan Frayne was right. It was wonderful.

      
When he came off the train, he went directly to the Hereford
Bookshop (beside a famous ley-line near the cathedral) and ordered everything
of Dion Fortune's still in print. Then went to the library to find out who she
was, really.

      
The book glowed. It was concise, vivid and haunting. It was a
love story, about a torrid affair between a woman and a town. It told you
exactly why people did what Dan Frayne and this Juanita had done - going to
Glastonbury in search of something they couldn't define.

      
While Uncle Jack Powys, in a book more than ten times as long,
explained why they all failed.

      
No wonder Fortune hadn't exactly taken to
A Glastonbury Romance,
published just two years earlier.
Do we behave like that at Glastonbury
?
she wrote
. I must have missed a lot. We
do not quite come up to Mr Powis's specifications.
      
Mischievously misspelling
Powys.

      
Joe Powys decided he really liked this woman. The night he got
home he made a space on the shelf next to the
Romance
and inserted
Avalon
of the Heart.

      
The antidote.

      
Powys grinned and went to bed and slept the whole night
through without interruption. And another six.

But last night he'd been
appalled to find himself lying awake almost wishing it would happen again.
Having awoken first of all feeling cold, feeling empty, missing Fay. And then wondering.
Am I slightly mad?

      
This was an unnatural situation. Mrs Whitney had said as much.
No life, Joe, just you and that dog ...
walking the hills ... hair going greyer ... circles under your eyes getting bigger.

      
And Dan Frayne, before he left London:
All I'm asking, Joe, is why not spend a couple of weeks in Glastonbury?
Absorb the vibes. I guarantee a pivotal experience ... alter your life, one way
or the other. If you agree there's a book in this, I'll hare the first
instalment of the advance in the post inside a week. I'm empowered to go to
twenty grand, half up-front. Can't go higher for non-fiction, these are hard
times.

      
Powys, down to his last two thousand in the bank and
Golden Land
royalties slipping fast, had
said, 'Can I think about this?'