The Chalice (26 page)

      
'"An obligation'' was all Major Shepherd said. I imagine
the Trust thought there ought to be some sort of memorial to Pixhill. Why they
sat on the manuscript for so long I've no idea. I only agreed to get it printed
because I felt so sorry for old Shepherd, who wasn't in the best of health. Obviously
wanted to get the thing off his hands before he passed on.'

      
Diane held the little green book between her hands and looked
thoughtfully at it. Almost as if she was looking into a mirror, Juanita
thought. She hoped Diane would continue to find parallels between Pixhill's
alleged visionary experiences and her own. And she hoped, as she let herself
out of the shop, that by the end of the book the central message would be
clear.

      
Glastonbury buggers you
up.

It was a bright night, the
crown of St John's tower icy-sharp. On a night like this, this time of year,
there ought to be frost. Why wasn't there frost?

      
All was quiet, save for the clicking of Juanita's heels. Not even
the usual semi stoned assembly with guitars and hand-drums around the war-memorial.
You could sense tonight the nearness of the Abbey ruins, hidden behind the High
Street shops.

      
But surely, Juanita thought, the whole point of Pixhill's book
was that he was saying, don't get taken in by this, don't surrender to the
vibes.

      
He'd come here on the back of a vision. Delirious in his tank
on May 27, 1942, he'd imagined himself to be lying out on the sand under that
same moon, but when he looked up he saw no battle-smoke - indeed it was
awesomely silent.

      
What he saw was a small bump in the sand, a swelling, something
that was buried rising again. There was an eruption - quite silent - and then
there it was, huge before him in all its mysterious majesty: a green hill in the
desert.

      
A conical green hill with a church on top.

      
Next thing, Captain Pixhill awakes on a stretcher and within
days is on his way back to England for months of operations on his legs. When
he can walk again he's given some sort of admin job at the Ministry and ends
the War as a full colonel.

      
By then, he's discovered Glastonbury, convinced it was the Tor
he saw in his Libyan vision after coming so very close to losing his life and
his Faith. Convinced this is where his future must lie and inspired to learn that
this is where the Holy Grail itself is said to have been brought.

      
And so, after the War, he comes to Glastonbury, marries a
local girl, buys an ugly old house and …

      
...and what?

      
As far as Juanita could tell, there was no record of Colonel
Thomas George Hendry Pixhill having done anything significant with his life
from the moment he arrived to the moment he collapsed with a coronary. He
seemed to have moped around the place for thirty years, ingesting the vibes,
contemplating the views, tipping his hat politely to every passing female and
keeping an occasional diary of, in later years, unremitting pessimism.

      
For Pixhill, the Holy Grail of his youth had been replaced by the
Dark Chalice, presumably a metaphor for an increasingly gloomy world-view. In
his last few months he was seeing images of the Dark Chalice everywhere - over
the Tor, among the Abbey ruins, above the tower of St John's. Well, he wasn't
the only amateur visionary to have gone a bit paranoid towards the end.

'Juanita!' As soon as she
entered the pub, Jim was up and beckoning, broad face like an overripe Cox's
apple. It was Jim's kind of bar, all wood and stained-glass; he looked like a
jolly squire from some eighteenth-century painting.
      
'Glass of something cold and white,
barman, for my friend. Juanita, I was coming to see you. Least, I think I was.
Time is it?'

      
'Time you thought about some black coffee and a sandwich',
Juanita said, 'if you're planning to make it home without falling in the
ditch.'

      
He was more than slightly pissed, but at least he was more
like the old Battle, and if he waved goodbye to a few more brain cells it would
wear away the memory of last night's ordeal all the sooner.

      
'Had something to tell you, didn't I? The paper. What'd I do
with the buggering paper?'

      
'I think you were sitting on it.' She saw he was not alone. Tony
Dorrell-Adams shared his table, looking just as flushed but less convivial.

      
'Was too. Bit creased, never mind.' Jim retrieved the
Evening Post
from his chair, placed it
on the table, spread it out. 'It's Archer Ffitch. In the paper. Archer's been
selected as Tory candidate for Mendip South.'

      
'I know, Jim. It explains a lot. Hello, Tony.'

      
Tony nodded, couldn't manage a smile, went back to his beer.

      
'Yes,' blustered Jim, 'but have you seen what the bastard's
saying? Wants this town to be efficient, streamlined, hi-tech, have its own
branch of Debenhams, no veggie-bars, no crystals, no mystical bookshops ...'

      
'This is an exaggeration, right, Jim?'

      
'... no Avalon, no mystery. Wants us, in fact, to be another
bland, buggering lay-by on the Euro superhighway.'

      
'Here, let me read it...'

      
She saw that people were glancing at him, amused. He was one
of those official characters who, like Woolly Woolaston, were allowed, not to
say expected, to go over the top. She tried to tug the paper from him.

      
'Never believe a word I say,' Jim grumbled as the
Evening Post
tore in two. Juanita
collected the segments together and sat down.

      
'Now, which page?'

      
'Just look for a picture of a well known smug bastard. Hey,
that's another thing. He was in here tonight, was Archer, and guess who he left
with ... Juanita, are you listening?'

      
'Yes, just a minute, Jim.'

      
Juanita had found another story. Or at least a headline. Or,
more precisely, the first word of a headline. It made the hubbub around her
recede into mush. The word was 'swastika'.

      
'I think', Jim was saying from, it sounded like, a long way
away, 'that this must be the time for you to think seriously about that scheme
of yours for relaunching
The Avalonian
.
I can sense dirty work afoot and somebody ought to be saying it. We have to
preserve the buggering mystery.'

      
'I don't know.' Juanita, who had glanced through the swastika
story, was sure she'd gone pale, just hoped it wouldn't show under the muted
pub lights, I don't know about that anymore.'

                                                      
FOUR

The Huntress

'Essentially,' Dr Pel
Grainger said, 'we are talking readjustment. Reprogramming the organism to
self-regulate photo-sensory input. We're talking …'

      
Dr Grainger moved to the very front of the platform, a portly
figure all in black. He breathed in through his nose, abdomen swelling. Then he
exhaled languidly and noisily from his mouth, flung his arms wide ... and all
the lights died at once, as if he'd blown them out.

      
'Penumbratisation,' he said.

      
Although it was obviously staged, there was an intake of breath
from the audience. Verity jumped in her seat before realising, after a fraught
second, that this was not Meadwell, but the Assembly Rooms, the alternative
Town Hall, centre for esoteric lectures, meeting place for all who sought, in Glastonbury,
a new level of Being. At the Assembly Rooms one expected - even hoped for - the
unexpected.

      
'Marvellous,' said Dame Wanda Carlisle. 'Bravo.' But her
voice, normally warm and perfectly pitched, sounded strident and intrusive.
Nobody else had spoken.

      
The now invisible Dr Grainger waited for total silence before
continuing.

      
'If you think that was a shock, my friends, it's nothing
compared to the sense of dislocation I guarantee you will feel when we put on
the lights again at the end of the session. For those who haven't figured it
out yet,
penumbratisation
means
permitting our consciousness to merge with the shadows. It is the preliminary
to bonding with the dark. Lesson one: learn to
penumbratise.
'

      
So far, Verity had not been terribly impressed with Dr Pel
Grainger (the Pel apparently short for Pelham) not least because of his
somewhat theatrical appearance. In his long, black jacket, he resembled the
magicians she remembered from children's parties before the War. He had a trim,
black beard which contrasted so dramatically with his puny, pale face that it
must surely be dyed.

      
With the lights extinguished, however, Dr Grainger was in his
clement, his voice as rich as black coffee, the voice of a hypnotist or one of
those evangelical American clergymen. It soothed. It was, Verity thought, a
rather dangerous voice.

      
'You may think that you cannot see me. But the Tenebral Law
says you can see me clearer than ever now, without the interference of light.
Light itself is random, haphazard, volatile. Artificial light
is
an interference.'

      
He paused. The little hall was packed, but nobody shuffled or
coughed the way they had when the lights were on.

      
'Only darkness,' intoned the voice of Dr Pel Grainger, 'can
connect with our inner being. In tenebral therapy, we learn to locate what I will
call the
inner
dark. The darkness inside
ourselves ... about which there are a number of ancient misconceptions.'

      
Verity tensed.

      
'People say to me, "but darkness ... surely we fear the dark
because darkness is the oldest metaphor for evil "'
      
Verity flinched.

      
'This,' softly now, 'brings us to the oldest misconception of
them all. One so endemic in our society that the modern world seeks to cancel
the dark. Throughout history, societies have run towards the light because the
light is easy. It makes no demands upon us. See, what you have nowadays, people
go for south-facing houses, right? They go for plate-glass walls, French-doors,
conservatories - they got to open everything to as much light as they can get.
Because light makes no demands.'

      
Verity felt people around her nodding agreement.

      
'OK, let's deal with evil. The word "evil" is a
terse, blanket condemnation of anything it does not suit us to understand. We
know that it is essential for the development of the soul to undergo periods of
hardship and so-called negativity. We talk of the soul travelling
out of the darkness and into the light.
Therefore, the darkness must be "evil". To that I say ... bullshit!'

      
Verity thought of what she'd said to Major Shepherd about the
presence of Abbot Whiting exuding evil. Because the lights had gone out? Was
that really all it was?

      
'Let us consider darkness,' said Dr Grainger, 'as a sentient
being. As something sensitive and vulnerable. In the States, our cities are so
damn bright at night now, you can no longer see the stars. Plus we have
high-powered security lamps on our houses, we blast through the night with our headlamps.
Instead of melding with the dark, we
brutalise
it.'

      
As he said this, he snapped his fingers and the house lights
came on for a blazing instant before going out again, and Grainger shouted,
'What do you see? Tell me what you see now. Come on, tell me what you see!'

      
'Big yellow spots,' a man called out.

      
'Alarming purple circular things,' described Dame Wanda, 'with
a sort of spongy core.'

      
'OK, OK,' Pel Grainger said. 'You've all seen them before,
just you didn't know what you were seeing. Well now, I'm gonna tell you. What
happened was we blasted the dark with brutal, artificial light, and what you
saw, maybe are still seeing are the bruises. Now, you want me to do that again,
you want me to hit the darkness one more time?'

      
'No way, man.' someone behind Verity said nervously, as if Dr
Grainger had threatened to hit a child.

      
'Any of you? Anybody want the light back? Anybody feel happier
with a little illumination around here?'