The Chalice (15 page)

      
Headlice was writhing on the grass, clutching his stomach, his
head flung back. She saw a heavy-booted foot crunch into his face, under his
nose. Bright blood fountained up. Headlice started to snuffle.

      
The lamp was wrenched from her hand.

Juanita kicked backwards
with the heel of her boot and someone went,
Aaah
.
Then she was punched hard in mouth, tasted salt-blood.

      
The naked man raised his hand and the blade of the sickle was
white gold in the candlelight.

      
Juanita screamed through swelling lips.

      
'Oh, come on.' Jim Still trying to bluster through this. 'Don't
be so damned stupid.'

      
Only about half a dozen so-called pilgrims remained, two of
them gaunt, unsmiling women.

      
'Do you know me?' The voice, still a whisper but raised high
like the blade, had a horrid triumphant ring.

      
'Thankfully no,' Jim snapped. 'Now tell your lackey to get his
bloody hands off that woman.'

      
'I am Gwyn ap Nudd. Do you know me now?'

      
Juanita spat blood.

      
'Bring him here.'

      
Jim, spluttering, was pulled from the wall by the warrior-looking
man with the tight plait, and the priest pointed with his sickle to a patch of
grass beside the concrete path. One of the other male pilgrims - he had a black
cap and two large earrings like a pirate - went down theatrically on one knee,
and when they flung Jim down, his head was bent back across the shelf of the
man's other thigh.

      
His hat fell off; they pulled his hair to hold his head back.
Most of the candles had been extinguished. Jim had to stare up at the moon.
They had removed his scarf, exposing his neck. He'll catch cold, Juanita
thought ludicrously.

      
'The date', said Gwyn ap Nudd, the goat priest, 'is November
the fourteenth.'

      
Not a
goat-priest... a dog-priest. Hound, Gwyn ap Nudd, lord of the Celtic Hades
which could be entered through the Tor, Gwyn 's hall. Gwyn was the leader of
the wild hunt. It was a dog-mask.
      
As if this mattered.

      
Jim retched. Someone balanced one of the remaining candle lanterns,
on his heaving, overcoated chest.

      
'On this day in the year 1539, the last Abbot of Glastonbury.
Richard Whiting, was convicted of petty theft and treason, then brought up
here, to the church above the hall of Gwyn ap Nudd, fairy- lord of death. And
then, side by side with two of his monastic underlings, he was ... hanged.'

      
'Let him go,' Juanita pleaded. 'Can't you see he's choking?
He's an old man, for Christ's sake.'

      
'Whiting was also an old man,' the priest whispered. 'A rich
and powerful old man. His public execution, on the spot where we stand, signified
the fall of one of the wealthiest monastic establishments in the land. His God couldn't
save him.

      
The lips smiled. 'He was
worshipping
the wrong god.'
      
The sickle was raised until the
moon once more was in the blade.

      
'And so his death was a sacrifice. To me.'

      
Juanita expelled all her breath in a long scream, kicked out
and kicked nothing, and then her head was wrenched back by the hair and some
disgusting rag was shoved between her teeth and halfway down her throat until
she gagged.

      
Out of the darkness, quite close, a drum started up.

      
Behind the man who presumptuously called himself Gwyn ap Nudd.
the mist had cleared and Juanita could see the lights of Glastonbury, so
bloody, bloody close. Where were the police? Where were the courting couples?
Where were the night-joggers?

      
'Imagine it bump, bump, bumping down the Tor,' Gwyn said.
'Whiting's head.
Bump, bump, bump.'

      
In time to the measured drumbeat.

      
Juanita's eyes streamed. This couldn't be happening it couldn't.
Not
here
where she and Danny had lain
and shared a joint, drunk cool wine, made love, watched for the good aliens ...
She felt her stomach heave and began to choke on her own rising vomit. She
tried to close her eyes, and she filled her head with prayers to God and all
the other stupid gods that lived up here.

      
'They hung his head on the town gate,' Gwyn said.
      
'Where should this one hang?'

      
In the end Juanita had to open her eyes, if only because she
knew she couldn't close her ears to the whistle of air against blade.

      
Jim's mouth was slightly open. She couldn't see his eyes;
they'd put his hat back on and tipped it raffishly over his brow.

      
There was no sound from him, but there was movement, it might
have been the candlelight, or it might have been that his cheeks were
quivering.

      
Gwyn, the goat dog-priest, raised his sickle to the slender moon
and Juanita saw his long, thin cock begin to rise to the thrill of hacking off
the poor man's head.

TWELVE

A Little Canary

'The number you have dialled has not been
recognised
.' said the heartless computer-voice, and Verity cut the line again. Her
finger dithered over the buttons on the receiver. It was easy to misdial
because not only was her finger shaking but many of the numbers were obscured
by blood

      
She tried again. Telephones quite often malfunctioned in Glastonbury,
 
especially cordless
 
phones
 
and mobiles. Because of the valley formation, according to the
engineers. Because of the Shifting of the Veil, according to the mystics.

      
She'd brewed some camomile tea, sipping it with lips that still
felt rigid with shock.
  
There was no
comfort tonight in the kitchen, even though it was in the more modem part of
the house. No matter how many jolly mugs and copper pans and tomato-red
casseroles one placed around the room, the drabness would filter through.
Nothing would glint. The electric lights hanging limply between the beams would
glow as though on rationed power.

      
This time, thank God, the telephone rang at the other end. But
Major Shepherd's wife was outraged at the disturbance. The Major was unwell;
she did not wish him agitated.

      
'I'm so sorry, Mrs Shepherd, I just didn't know who else to ...
?'

      
'Is it the blasted guttering again. Miss Endicott?' Mrs Shepherd
evidently thought Verity was a querulous old ditherer who should have been
pensioned off years ago.
      
'No.' Verity almost sobbed 'It
isn't the guttering.'
      
'
Tim!
' she heard. 'What are you doing out of bed? Oh, very well, but
don't blame me, when you …'

      
'Verity?' Major Shepherd was wheezing badly. 'Are you all
right?'

      
'No,' Verity said after a pause. 'I really don't think I am.'

Funny how quickly you forgot
how it was. The hard-pile office-type carpet. All those white or transparent
lampshades, designed for illumination, never for mood, the dominant colour: dark
brown; pervasive smell: wet leather.

      
The arrogant, rigid maleness of the place.

      
As if to emphasise it, her father took her into the gun-room,
where she saw the old oak panelled cabinets had been replaced by revolting
metal ones, floor to ceiling. It was truly horrible, sort of semi-military.

      
'Basic security,' he said, noticing her dismay. 'Can't be too
careful with guns anymore.'

      
'You could always just get rid of them, of course,' Diane said.
'Then you wouldn't need security.'

      
He didn't even bother to react. Gerald Rankin hung around in
the doorway, as if she might try to escape. She could still smell his glove
over her mouth and nose; the whole house seemed to be impregnated with the oily
essence of Rankin's glove and the sense of being closed in.

      
'Thanks, Rankin,' her father said. 'Good man. Close the door
behind you.'

      
When his farm-manager had gone. Lord Pennard pointed to the
worn leather sofa, scuffed as an old wallet. 'Sit down, please, Diane.'

      
Her legs felt weak, but she stayed stubbornly on her feet, her
back to the bay window with its steely, industrial Venetian blinds. She folded
her arms beneath the shawl, tightened her mouth.

      
'As you please. Drink?'

      
She shook her head minimally. Picked up and brought home, like
a little girl again. So who'd informed on her this time? Don Moulder, doubling
his three hundred and fifty?
Times is
hard, my chicken, got to earn your crust where you can, look.

      
Diane glared at her father, at the marbled coldness of him.

      
She knew how bitterly angry he must be at the way she had, as
he would see it, let him down. But if she didn't go on the offensive, she'd be
nowhere. It had taken her many
years to learn this.

      
'Did ... did you phone an ambulance?'
      
Her father raised an eyebrow. 'Did
...
I
?'
      
Incredulity. He didn't waste words
any more than cartridges in his twelve-bore. Rather like a double-barrelled shotgun
himself: heavy, steely-grey, polished and greased and functional.

      
He went across to the dresser, the last remaining piece of old
oak in the room. Coming through the house, she'd noticed how many pieces of
fine furniture and pictures had gone. He poured himself a small whisky from a
decanter. His movements so elegant for a big man. He was perfectly balanced,
his stomach still tauntingly flat. He'd always made her feel like some sort of awful
throwback: the fat one.

      
Diane thought of Headlice lying where Rankin and his son,
Wayne, had left him, snuffling on his own blood.

      
'He could be really badly hurt, you know.'

      
'I'm sorry.' Lord Pennard sipped his whisky. 'Who are we
talking about?'
      
'Damn it, you ...'
      
Calm
down!

      
'His name's Alan. He's actually a sort of human being who
hasn't done you any harm.'

      
The foxes and the pheasants hadn't done him any harm either;
unlikely to lose sleep over a hippy.

      
'Diane, I ...' He raised his voice, grey eyes wide and unblinking.
'I rang Patrick to tell him you were safe. He offered to come and collect you.
Told him there was no need. Pointed out there was a train tomorrow. Said you'd be
on it.'

      
Frightfully precise. Absolute concrete certainty in every syllable.
It should be her cue to run out of the room, hands over her face, mumbling
I hate you, I hate you,
in a pathetic, drowning
voice. She felt familiar small prickly movements in whatever part of the brain
was responsible for manufacturing tears. She thought, I can't. I'm nearly
twenty-eight years old.

      
'Look ...' Knowing her voice was all over the place. 'Are you
going to call an ambulance? Or let me call one?'

      
He looked at her, his severely handsome face almost sorrowful.
He looked her up and down, from the messed-up hair to the fraying shawl to the
moon-patterned skirt of washed out blue from the Oxfam shop.

      
'Yes I know,' she said. 'I know you won't have it done from
here. I know that so far there's absolutely nothing to connect you or even
Rankin with a ... a hippy in a field. But why -
please
- why can't you let me at least go to a telephone box?'

      
His face darkened. 'Because ...' His body flexed then straightened
like a broken twelve bore clacking into place. 'I won't have you wandering
around the town like a streetwalker. Because Rankin tells me the injuries were superficial,
nothing such an individual wouldn't get in a pub brawl. And because …'

      
He came close enough to her to smell the Scotch on his breath
and see the small veins in his checks like the veins in marble or the palest
Roquefort.