The Chalice (81 page)

      
Powys let out the clutch. 'You saw her sitting on the bed, didn't
you?'

      
'Just like you in the Abbey, I don't know what I saw.'

      
Arnold sat on his rug on the back seat, next to Juanita. Powys
watched him for a moment in the mirror. 'He knows what he saw.'

      
In the mirror Powys saw a figure emerge on to the steps, watching
them, as they passed under the avenue of trees.

She was starting to enjoy her anger and felt no
guilt about this, light 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, Diane's rage fermented pleasurably into the darkest of
wines...

The barns bulked to the
right. 'Kennels beyond that,' Sam said. 'Then you got no road left.'

      
The Mini went into a dip. Powys knew he wasn't going to make
it up the other side.

      
'OK, leave it here. You're out of sight.'

      
They all got out. Sam took the torch, led them up the side of
the hill, Powys concerned when Juanita slipped and went down on her hands.

      
'OK?'

      
'Seem to be. It makes no sense but I do seem to be.'
      
'Not a hag then. Not tainted by the
whatsit of death.'
      
'I feel like I may live forever.
That probably means I'm going to die. Jesus God, will you look at that.'

      
It looked like what Sam had thought it was. The devastation
before a motorway goes through. The outraged rubble of a speedily shaven
forest. You could almost hear the screams of the trees. If trees had ghosts,
this place would be haunted for centuries.

'I've seen this before,' Powys
said. 'They're reawakening the ley. They're going to either bring something
down from me Tor or...'

      
'Or send something up,' Juanita said.
      
'Is that you talking or ... '
      
'I don't know. Do we have to walk
through this?'

      
'Yeah.' Sam stepped over a watery rut. 'Sorry about this.'

      
Somewhere behind them, a hound began to howl. Powys looked
sternly at Arnold, hopping between their legs, before he remembered that Arnold
rarely responded to other dogs.

      
'Where'd you see Pixhill?'

      
'Shut up,' Sam said.

      
'Don't worry. They rarely appear to more than one person. I
think they're scared.'
      
'Ha ha.' Then Sam gasped.

      
Powys stopped. The Tor had arisen before them, a huge black
wedding cake surrounded by candles.
      
'Lamps?'

      
The protesters,' Sam said. 'Woolly's eco-army on the march.
Swelling the ranks of the locals opposing the Tame the Tor Bill. Got here in no
time, didn't they? All those little idealists phoning each other, spreading the
word. Taking a day off work, those who've still got jobs. Piling into their
cars and vans and trucks. Makes you proud to be British, don't it?'

      
'They'll go to the Tor first, and then they'll start looking for
the road.'

      
'Do you think we oughter make sure they find it?'
      
'That's not a bad idea, Sam.'

      
'Give me something to think about. Like the night I first came
this way, I was figuring out how best to sab the hunt. Trying to work off my
temper at Archer.'

      
Juanita said, 'You know what will happen if Diane does that.
If she lets go of the elemental.'

      
'What d'you mean?'

      
'She won't be the Diane you know and ... and love.'
      
'She'll always be the Diane I know
and love,' Sam said. 'That girl don't change'
      
'Yes, she would, Sam.'
      
'You can't go bad, Juanita, not
like that.'
      
'Absolutely like that. That's the
only sure way to go completely bad. I'm not trying to scare you. I'm just trying
to explain what this is about.'

      
Sam didn't like this. 'Where's the old cynicism, Juanita?'
      
'Cynicism is no defence. We're
close to the reservoir. I feel close.'

      
'How can you know that? You're just… Jesus…'

      
Powys handed Sam his car keys and held out his hand for the
torch. 'Do something practical, Sam. You'll feel better. There's a can of
petrol in the boot, Juanita's matches in the glove compartment.'

      
He watched Sam moving away, hunched up against the unknown.
Looked around for his dog. 'Arnold?'

      
Silence.

      
And then a sharp cry that he wasn't sure he'd heard at all.
Wasn't sure if it was in his head. He looked at Juanita, wondering if she'd
heard it.

      
'It said "fetch",' Juanita said.

      
There was a distant, muffled yip, an Arnold noise.

      
Then more silence.

It was coming light. Don
Moulder, against all his best intentions, had moved closer, right to the edge
of his top field, from where he could see the figures moving up the Tor quite
clearly now.

      
He wondered what the Bishop was saying to Dame Wanda Carlisle.
Discussing the terrible weather or Wanda's famous roles.

      
It was a joke. Even Don could see that. Where was that bloody Ceridwen?
Why wasn't she up there?
      
Bloody joke. A stunt for Miss Tammy
White.

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

      
It lay
there quite still, but with a kind of coiled and eager tension about it. She
could feel its back alongside her, its spine pressed against her. It was lean but
it was heavy. It was beginning to breathe.

      
She put
out her arm. Felt an almost liquid frigidity around her hand, over the wrist,
almost to the elbow, like frogspawn in a half-frozen pond.

      
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.

'I can't,' Diane said.

      
'He killed your mother.' Ceridwen spoke softly. 'She stood at the
top of the stairs. She was always very careful coming down them, afraid that the
size of her belly would make her overbalance. She came down one stair at a
time. One hand on the banister, the other holding the pink teddy she'd bought
for her baby daughter. The teddy had a bow around its neck. Do you remember
that teddy?'

      
'No.'

      
'Of course you don't. Because Archer burned it on the bonfire
your father had Rankin build to destroy the blood-caked sheets. All the toys your
mother had bought for you. Archer threw them on the bonfire, horrid yellow
flames leaping into the night. He killed your mother and then he burned her
dreams ...'

      
Diane's head turned in anguish on the pillow. She saw the
flames in the eyes of the beast.

      
'Let it go,' Ceridwen said, ever so softly.

      
'Yes.' Diane closed her eyes. 'Yes Nanny.'

SEVENTEEN

Ours

The sky over the Tor was,
for a moment, as bright and shiny as the membrane over a cow's eye. And then it
blistered, lost its focus; A fan of flickering colours sprayed up behind the
tower before the ragged-edged clouds closed in, like the night coming back, and
there was a low roaring like thunder deep underground, and Don Moulder got
scared.

      
He was a superstitious man. Weren't all good farmers superstitious?
Wasn't this what it was all about? Understanding nature. Getting a feeling for
nature. 'Cause nature, whatever they said, nature wasn't scientific. And a dawn
that wouldn't decide whether to break was not in Don Moulder's previous
experience, not even living where he did.

      
So Don, as a superstitious man, thought straight off.
They done wrong. The whole thing. Wrong.
Christians and pagans. Conciliation, you can't have it. Isn't meant. There is
but one God and He is sore offended.
And not only at the trendy bishop and
the crazy pagan actress, neither of whom was up to the job. Not only at them,
but at the bloody ole mad farmer who'd brought back Satan's buzz. Why the hell
had he ever done that?

      
Miss Diane. She'd brought that thing in. Miss bloody Lady
Loony. What she'd got, it was catching.

      
The heavens over the Tor, still locked in debate, had gone into
black and white. Like Dame Wanda's cloak. Another Lady Loony. All drawn to that
abnormal hill. Maybe Griff Daniel was right when he said they oughter ram a JCB
through Glastonbury Tor. No more Tor, no more loonies, no more bad dreams for
honest God-fearing farmers.

      
All of a sudden, the sky above the tower went as black as Old
Nick's arsehole and there was a great loud crack that had Don Moulder backing
off in something like cold terror.

She saw the pale lightball
again. It shimmered like a second chance, but she made the black mist cloud
over it. Out of the foetid, feral-scented air, Ceridwen spoke and the voice
came gutturally, like a burp, from out of Diane's own solar plexus.

      
There, that's better.

      
Ceridwen smiled and stood before her. Diane felt very weak,
enormously relieved. But the relief enclosed an equally enormous sense of loss
which she couldn't comprehend. It was like a nightmare where you'd done something
frightfully wrong but awoke before you could put it right, and so the relief
was relief only at having awakened.

      
There were more smiles. She saw little Rozzie, her monkey face
split in two with glee; Mort, with his braided hair and his warrior's face and,
inside his robe, the biggest dick you ever saw. She squirmed in the hospital
bed. Visiting time? But it wasn't right. Was it?

      
'Welcome, sister.' Ceridwen stood in the misty candlelight
between the great, grey concrete pillars, her serpentine hair alive with
electricity. 'Welcome to the Inner Circle.'

      
'Where's it gone?'

      
'It? Why, it's gone about its business,' Ceridwen said.
      
Ceridwen had been with her forever.
She must accept this.

      
Diane giggled. She did. She felt better. The truth was she'd
never been so relieved. That was the truth, wasn't it?

      
She clutched the darkness to her body, wallowed in the dank,
cloudy vapour, got high on the stench.

      
A man she didn't know said, 'I think there's someone outside.'

      
'So let them in. It's probably Gwyn. You remember Gwyn, don't
you Diane?'

      
When the wooden doors opened, Diane expected a great and
hurtful surge of daylight, but thankfully there was only more darkness. And
people.

      
'Well, my goodness,' said Ceridwen, and she no longer looked
quite so happy. 'If it isn't sister Carey.'

St was like entering an
elf's house in a children's storybook, but vaster inside; the hall of the
Mountain King, the subterranean lair of Gwyn ap Nudd.

      
In fact, it was a small storage reservoir, half underground,
with a mound over it like a tumulus. It must have been out of commission for
over twenty years judging by the size of some of the trees which overgrew it.
But it was the dream temple. A hollow shell inside organic matter. Directly on
the ley. Virtually under the Tor itself. Any time other than this, Powys would
have been fascinated.

      
Inside, there were no trappings of a temple, white or black. No
pentagrams, no inverted crosses. Only a few dark couches and rugs between the
utility concrete pillars, brown-stained like nicotine fingers. Bizarrely, in
the very centre of the former reservoir, there was a utility hospital bed,
metal framed, white sheeted.