The Chalice (83 page)

      
Where Lord Pennard stood in heavy tweed shooting jacket and
plus fours, the dawn welling wildly up behind him.

      
'Archer?' Pennard's voice rang like steel around the concrete
chamber. 'Where are you, boy?'

      
'Father.' Archer didn't move. 'Go away. This is nothing to do
with you. Go back to the house.'

      
'Who are these people. Archer?'

      
'Not your problem, OK? We'll talk later.'

      
'Is that Diane down there? I can't see.'

      
'Will you leave this to me?'

      
'I wanted very much to believe in you. Archer.' Pennard said.
'Damn it, I
had
to believe. To
support the future For the simple sake of our continuity, I had to believe that
you didn't...'

      
'I ... didn't ... kill her.' Archer ground it out through his
teeth. 'What can I do to convince you?
I
... didn't fucking... kill my fucking mother?

      
'You sicken me,' Pennard said sorrowfully. 'Perhaps you always
did. But now you frighten me too. And that… that is something I really can't
live with.'

      
'Wait!' Archer moved into the pink light at the entrance, 'Listen
to me! You want to know who killed her?' He turned to point into the darkness. The
very heart of the darkness.
      
'
She
did. You see her? You recognise her? That's your midwife,
Father. From the Belvedere clinic. Ask her.
Ask
her!'

      
The moment seemed to last forever. Archer's finger frozen in the
dawn.

      
The finger still hanging there as Powys saw Archer's head
burst like a bud into flower. A free form flower of red and pink and grey.

      
And by the time his brain had registered the explosion, seen the
smoke from the twelve-bore, heard the shouting and the screams, Pennard was
raising the gun again and the shot from the second barrel took Ceridwen in the
throat and she seemed to float to her knees, astonishment in the deep brown
eyes and blood pumping down the robe, splashing on the concrete as her head
fell off into her lap.

      
There was an instant of hollow nothingness.

      
At first, Powys thought he was trembling. But it was the ground.
The ground was trembling.

      
Still it didn't occur to him what was happening.

      
At least, not until he saw the cracks appear in the grey concrete
pillars of the old storage reservoir and he thought idly what a hell of a flood
there would be if it was still in use.

      
Then, amid the incomprehension which preceded the stampede, he
saw Juanita dragging Diane from the hospital bed, and when his legs would move
again he ran to help her and they pulled her, kicking and squealing out of the reservoir
and into the bleak beginnings of the shortest day and the stubbly wasteland from
where Sam Daniel's trio of petrol-fired beacons sent signals, too late, to
Glastonbury Tor.

EIGHTEEN

                                   
DF

At first, Powys thought it
must be a frenzied, knee-jerk reaction to Sam's beacon fires and then he saw
that the three of them were running against a tide of panic. Breaking on the
Tor, flowing across the fields. So many frightened people, so much smoke, so
many abandoned protest- placards. He couldn't see Sam anywhere.

      
He thought he heard another shot. Or maybe he knew that, for
what remained of the honour of that family, there was, sooner or later, going
to be another shot.

      
A big-eyed girl in an orange waterproof collided with him. He
helped her up. 'What's happening? What's exploded?' ,

      
'Earthquake. Tremor. The tower's collapsing. Jesus. Stones and
stuff crashing down like the Middle Ages all over again.'

      
'What?' Powys looked up at the Tor. The shell Of the St Michael
tower looked full and firm as ever against the pink-streaked Solstice dawn.

      
'The rest of the church came down in the Middle Ages.' A guy
with a beard dragging the girl away. 'Leaving just the tower. Doomsday, man.
Doomsday.'

Juanita heard none of this.
She was listening to only one voice and that voice came from far inside her and
it was saying.
Just get her out of here.
Get her away.

      
Diane was wrapped in Juanita's coat - so much weight gone now that
it almost fitted. Her feet sliding about in the clumping shoes Juanita had
snatched from Ceridwen's corpse. Diane seemed completely fogged, walking, head bowed,
between Juanita and Powys, Arnold hopping ahead of them, Juanita wondering if
anyone else had seen the ball of light in the dog's mouth or heard that headmistressy
voice:
Fetch!

      
Occasionally, without looking up, Diane giggled. Sister Dunn
and her drugs. Drugs that might keep you permanently at that stage between
waking and sleeping when, as DF put it, the etheric so easily extrudes. Drugs
which might make it difficult to absorb the full emotional impact of your father
discharging his shotgun into the admittedly unloved face of your only brother.

      
Juanita had seen this happen from behind, feeling a light
splash of something like lukewarm soup on her forehead, refusing to give in to the
nausea, concentrating on Diane.

      
Who, as they were approaching Wellhouse Lane across the field,
stopped at a stile.

      
Juanita followed her eyes. They were just a hedge and a gate
away from Don Moulder's infamous bottom field, Juanita caught her breath. In
one corner was parked a black bus. She turned away at once and, for the first
time, Diane's eyes met hers and an odd, mute plea passed between them, the
struggle of something attempting to surface.

      
Juanita glanced quickly at Powys.

      
The glance said,
Leave
us.

      
Be careful,' Powys said.

There was a wintry silence
around Meadwell.

      
The gate seemed to click against it when Powys lifted the latch.
He saw the house door hanging open, but he didn't go in.

      
Verity was standing on the path, a rigid porcelain doll in a
body-warmer.

      
She saw him, bit her lip. And then beckoned, turning away to
walk across the lawn to the wilderness part, and Arnold set off after her,
which was curious.

      
The air was icy-still and the tower on the Tor seemed suspended
in milky light. Verity led Powys to the concrete plinth, a perfectly circular black
hole in it now. A rusting cast-iron lid lay amid the rubble.

      
So Oliver Pixhill had done it. Feeling so tired he could hardly
stand, Powys contemplated the final irony of a Dark Chalice liberated into a
world where the only remaining Ffitch had tripped over from airy-fairy to
obscenely possessed.

      
Verity said nothing. From the wet grass to one side, she
produced a big, red, rubber-covered flashlight and handed it to Powys.

      
He knelt above the hole and shone it down, recoiling at once,
looking up at Verity.
      
'Oliver Pixhill,' she said.
      
'Dead?'

      
'He…
 
he was down there
when the tremor came. That is, I suppose ... Perhaps he lost his balance.'

      
He glanced back down the well, without the light. All you
could see was a white hand, fingers bent.

      
What did it mean?

      
'Most likely he was waiting for the dawn, Verity. He had to
bring the Chalice out at dawn. At that moment. It was as if they knew about the
earth tremor. Or that something would happen.'

      
He was thinking of the alignment of the Tor, Meadwell,
Bowermead. The reservoir precisely on it. The way the road had been dug out.
The way the trees had been taken out. A build-up of violence.

      
'Maybe they needed to unblock the well in advance, like you
let old wine breathe for a while.'

      
But what they really needed was for Verity to lay down her defences
and invite Grainger in to do it. The little woman was as much a part of the
defence system as the binding ritual itself. She had to be gently defused, like
a bomb.

      
'Getting you out of the house was a last resort,' he said.
      
'But if you hadn't responded to
Wanda's invitation, they'd have had to use a blunter instrument.'

      
Verity winced. But he knew that Oliver Pixhill could never have
killed Verity. Such a forcefield surrounding her, the little woman who could
not See.

      
'Have you called the police?'

      
'Oh. No. I've been praying. With Mr Woolaston.'

      
'Woolly ... ?'

She let him in through the
back door so he wouldn't have to see Woolly, whose battered body she'd sat
beside for perhaps two hours. Unconcerned about the smells, the atmosphere of
brutal violence. She'd lived in the ever-darkening Meadwell; she did not See.
Powys couldn't believe how strong she was.

      
Surprisingly, Arnold followed him in.

      
A plastic bag stood upside down, covering something on the
table. On the hag, it said,
SAFEWAY.

      
He swallowed. He was very scared. Rose light dribbled in from
the high window, tinting the bulging white walls with the effect of watered
blood.

      
'Don't you go near it, Mr Powys,' Verity said.

      
He stared at it, bitter and sickened Whatever it was.
      
Woolly had died for it. Beaten to
death with a brick. The bag went in and out of focus. He wanted to find that
same brick and hammer the Chalice flat.

      
'We should never have left him,' he said. 'We should've called
the police.'

      
'No. It was my fault, if anyone's. I should have stayed. It was
my duty.'

      
'And then you'd have been ...' He shook his head. 'We were
expecting Grainger. We didn't know what we were dealing with.'

      
'I must have arrived quite soon after... That is, I didn't know
he was still here. There was just the hole. I thought he'd gone. I thought it
was too late. I went back to the house and sat with Mr Woolaston. Praying.'

      
How could she explain any of this to the police? Still, someone
would have to try.

      
'Do you wish to see it, Mr Powys?'

      
'Why not?' he said wearily.

      
Verity grasped the ears of the plastic bag and tugged.

      
Arnold sat at the foot of the table and growled, but didn't
move, as Powys looked, with revulsion, at the Dark Chalice.

Don Moulder unlocked the
bus, pulled back the rusted sliding door.

      
When Juanita tried to follow Diane, she shook her head.
      
She took off Juanita's coat, handed
it to her.

      
Moulder's eyes widened at the long, black nightdress.
      
'What's she gonner do?' He watched
Diane as she stepped from the platform into the body of the bus. 'Because that
buzz, look, that buzz is full of evil, Mrs Carey, I don't care what anybody
says.'

      
'In that case come away, Don. We'll wait over by the gate.
Whatever happens you don't want to see it, do you?'

      
'I don't understand none o' this no more.' He was wheezing a
bit, looking starved. 'Tis a black day, Mrs Carey. You coulder sworn that ole
tower, he were gonner go, look. Swayed, like in a gale. Some masonry come down,
they d' say. The Bishop, his face was as white as his collar, look. You had the
feeling we was barely ... barely a breath away from ... I dunno ... the end of
it. The ole sky changin' colour, night a-changin' back to day and day to night.
I never, all my years at this farm, never seen nothin' like it.'

      
Diane appeared at the bus door. She sat on the platform and
took off Ceridwen's shoes, tossed them on to the grass.
      
Then she went back.