The Chalice (84 page)

It happened very quickly. Almost
as soon as she entered the bus, she knew it was waiting for her.

      
It was just as she'd last seen it. The seat and the couch bolted
to the floor, the cast-iron stove, the filthy windows you could hardly see out
of. This was where something began.

      
'Oh!' A sudden stomach cramp made her double up and then fall
to her knees. The pain was briefly horrible and when it ebbed she found she had
both arms curled around the bus pole. She felt like Ulysses, when he lashed
himself to the ship's mast to prevent him responding to the call of the Sirens.

      
When the sob came, it seemed to have travelled a long way. All
the way from North Yorkshire. In a white delivery van with pink spots.

      
Diane hugged herself to the pole. The sob seemed to make the
pole quiver and the whole bus tremble. At some point, it had begun to creak,
its chassis groaning as if in some frightful arthritic pain. Diane clung to the
pole, she and the bus bound together in the longing for release. The dark air
seemed to be rushing past as she and the old bus strained to shed their
burdensome bulk, to soar serenely towards...

      
The light?

      
But just as she was beginning to feel ever so shimmery, as if
those excess pounds had begun to float away and she could be as slim as a faun,
gossamer-light, as beautiful as a May queen, as pure as a vestal virgin ...
just as the warmth spread over her tummy and down between her legs and she yearned
to touch it ... and just as she began to uncurl her arms from the pole ...
      
'Stop!'

      
A bell rang, quite sharply.

      
Diane's neck arched, her arms still enfolded around the metal
pole, her head thrown back, and, oh lord, the bus begin to move. It had been
the bell which told the driver to start and stop. It had rung only once, but it
kept on in Diane's head, a tiny, shiny
ting.

      
And then her face was slapped.

      
Quite lightly, but it was done. A voice, crisp as the snapping
of a wafer.
      
Don't
you dare!

      
The other check was slapped, and this time it was not done
lightly, but briskly and efficiently and it stung, spinning Diane around to
look up, eyes wide and straining with shock, beyond the platform, along the
deck of the bus.

      
'Who ... who are you ... ?' Her voice faltered and she hugged the
pole. It had not been an ordinary slap, and she went clammy with fright at what
was beginning to happen.

      
For, along the deck, all the interior lightbulbs were coming
on: small yellow ones in circular holders set into the carved metal ceiling
just above the windows. The bulbs were feeble, nicotine-grimed, dust-filmed and
fly-spattered.
      
And they didn't work. They didn't
work anymore, those lights.

      
The lights that didn't work shone bleakly down on two rows of
seats. They put a worn sheen on dark red vinyl. They reflected dully from
chromed metal corners.

      
Diane began to blink in terror, wet with live sweat, lights
where the lights were broken. Seats, where there weren't any seats. This was a
Bolton Corporation bus again, which rattled and hissed down grim, twilit
streets.

      
About halfway down the bus, there was a blur of presence, a
haze of movement.

      
The bell rang again,
ting.
The scene froze. Clinging to the pole, Diane saw a grey finger curled in the
air. There was a red push-button in the curved part of the roof, and a grey
finger crooked over it.

      
The grind and hiss of faraway brakes, a smell of old polish,
damp raincoats and perspiration.

      
The pole was cold in Diane's arms, cold against her cheek.

      
Come on now ... pull...
'self... 'gether... not a baby.

      
The words happened in the air, like the brake-hiss. Diane saw
a grey lady. Severe hair enclosing a face without features, only sternness. A
hat. Large beads. The face was a swirling of grey, black and white particles,
like blown cigarette ash.

      
Diane tried to pull herself to her feet, using the pole, but she
couldn't feel her feet at all.

      
And the woman glided towards her along the bus's dusty aisle.
Diane began to gasp convulsively with fear; the shiny pole misted from her
breath.
      
None
of... 'onsense now...

      
The voice was thin and fractured like a car-radio on FM during
a storm in the hills. Diane sagged against the pole.

      
Sorrow settled in her chest. Sorrow received from the
grey-woman, sorrow shimmering in the vagueness of her, in the half formed face
like a scratched old photograph. The scent of old dust and lavender.

      
'Nanny...'

      
Essence of long-ago nights, pillows damp with tears, lonely little
motherless girl in a house of cold leather, guns and uncompromising maleness.

      
Diane's arms pulled away from the pole at last and she came to
her feet and reached out for the crumbling bundle of dusty, moth-ravaged
fragments, as the lights in the bus died, one by one.
      
'Oh, Nanny...'

      
And she saw, in a comer, the yellow eyes in the mist. The eyes
of her own hatred, the evil in her.

      
Diane felt her stomach shrivel in disgust. She just wasn't that
kind of person. She had no natural aggression. She was the sort who ran away and
hid and never wanted to harm anyone or anything.

      
... allow it, then ...

      
'What?'

      
... take your...
edicine, girl... swallow it'.

      
Diane closed her eyes.

      
Do it now! Now!

      
Diane opened her mouth.

      
She breathed it in.

      
And it filled her.

      
Inflating her checks, swelling her throat and then her breast,
bloating her abdomen and finally throwing her to her knees, her arms
outstretched like a legless, rocking doll.

      
So cold… so cold inside her that it froze her eyes wide and
stiffened her tongue. She saw then her lower body had become luminous blue,
radiating icy light, and she had no control over any of it, was aware of being
squeezed out, reduced to a small, helpless fragment of consciousness, a
particle of floating fear, only a moment away from ceasing to exist.

      
She watched her radiant body tossed on to its back on the
filthy floor of the bus like an old mattress, was aware of the air corning out
like vomit, in a long
swooooosh
, as
if someone was sitting on her stomach.

      
Diane rolled over. It seemed as if she'd been separated from her
body for a long time, but it must have been no more than a couple of seconds.
It felt strange to want to move an arm and for that arm to move. She began to crawl,
and as the energy returned so did the panic, in a rush.

The Dark Chalice glistened
palely on the kitchen table.

      
'That's disgusting,' Powys said. The words sounding so trite
and ludicrous he almost broke out laughing.

      
'Its base was of old, blackened oak, like the beams of Meadwell.

      
The wrists emerged from the oak like the stems of yellowing
fungi. Whatever kept the bones of the hands and fingers together, it still held
strong and the skeletal hands still gripped the bowl of bone, the upturned cranium.

      
'Who is it, Verity?'

      
Verity said nothing.

      
'Is this ... I mean, is this the Abbot?'

      
Verity pulled the Safeway bag back over the horror.

      
She'd said vaguely that she must have found it by the side of
the well. Where he'd placed it so that he would have both hands free to pull
himself out.

      
Powys banished for ever an image that came to him of Verity,
fresh from her discovery of murdered Woolly, kicking Oliver Pixhill's groping
fingers from the rim of the well, shutting out his scream.

She came down from the bus
in floods of tears. She didn't know if it was over. How was she ever going to
know?

      
She saw Juanita and Don Moulder over by the gate. On the other
side of it, Joe Powys stood with little Verity and Arnold the dog, who had brought
the lightball into the cold heart of it all.

      
And then came a strange jolt in her breast.

He was shambling slowly
across the field towards the bus, his head down as if he was scared to look at her.
His buccaneer's hair was matted, he'd lost his famous earring.

      
Diane, full of tearful longing but still uncertain, looked back
along the deck of the bus.

      
Go
, said the Third
Nanny.

      
She had a nice smile.

Epilogue

Prophecy is a dangerous
trade, but we may hazard the guess that history will look back to our English
Jerusalem as the cradle of many things that have gone on to enrich the
spiritual heritage of our race.

Dion
Fortune
Avalon of the Heart

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

CAREY
AND FRAYNE
Booksellers

High
Street
Glastonbury

Prop. Juanita Carey

24
December

Danny,

       
OH
GOD, Danny where do I start?
       
Where's it going to END?

       
You'll have read the papers, seen the TV
reports (all concentrating on the Pennard madness, nobody making the right
connections) and I know Powys phoned you.

       
Maybe this is entirely superfluous. As
usual, I don't know whether I'm writing to you or to myself.

       
Today, I'm going to try to have a long talk
with Diane. I've seen a lot of her, of course, but there's always been someone
else there. Policemen. Her solicitor, Quentin Cotton.
       
And Sam, of course - she's moved
into his flat, doesn't like to let him out of her sight. She hasn't really
taken it all in, of course. Still talks about her father as if he were still
alive and still the owner of Bowermead Hall.

       
Which SHE is now, of course. I don 't
think any of us have quite taken that in.

       
'Two hundred acres,' Powys keeps saying.
'Three vineyards. And a pack of hunting hounds.' At which he grins delightedly
at Sam, and Sam looks terribly embarrassed.

       
We're still staying, Powys and me, at
The George and Pilgrims. He brought the old Amstrad across and I sit at the
window and tap out this nonsense, looking down on High Street, very
un-Christmas Eve, but still there, you know? Still there. Still with the candle
lit in the window of the Wicked Wax Co. Even the quake didn't put that candle
out.