The Chalice (46 page)

      
'I owe it to her, OK?' was all she'd say. Then they started work
on the first dummy.'

      
How do we know
, Sam
read on the screen,
that the thorn tree
on Wearyall Hill is even in the same spot as what we like to think of as the
Original?

      
Matthew Banks's original draft had been a sight more cumbersome.
Diane had ripped into it, subbing it down to neat sentences, short paragraphs.
'The Alternative Community,' Diane had said firmly, 'have to learn from the outset
that this is our paper, not theirs.'

      
Sam grinned, remembering that bloody tight-arsed Jenna - a 'Voice
therapist' - coming in with a piece written by The Women of the Cauldron, with
its own headline on top: WHY THE ANGLICAN CHURCH DENIES THE GODDESS MARY. Diane
giving it back without even reading it, pointing out politely that
The Avalonian
would be doing its own
headlines and any comment pieces would be specifically commissioned.
      
Suggesting they cut the piece by
half and submit it as a reader's letter with actual names at the bottom. Jenna'd
gone out with a face like an old shoe.

      
Sam was starting to warm to Diane. One thing about the upper
classes, they knew how to put people down with style.

      
And slave-driving, they knew about that. Three weeks after
starting from nothing - no design, not even a paper size - they now had almost enough
for a respectable dummy, with real features, real news stones. Idea being they
could take it around and show to people to stimulate advertising.

      
The plan was to start out as a monthly then come down to
fortnightly. Anything beyond that, they'd need staff, which they couldn't
afford. Diane insisted every contribution had to be paid for, even if it was
just a token amount. Couldn't rely on volunteers like the guy with the three-legged
dog.

      
You had to start out, Diane said, how you meant to go on: professional.
Incredible. She'd seemed so soggy, that first time she came in.

      
Ah well. Sam stood up. Twenty to nine. Young Paul'd be in
soon, then he could get some breakfast. No carob bars for Sammy, not after
another dawn shift. Funny, everybody was up early this morning. Even Lord
Pennard, who was obviously monitoring Diane's movements. Having her watched.

      
And with this family, it had to be more than just paternal interest.

      
Like she didn't have enough problem:

Mid-December already. The
town-centre Christmas tree had just gone up in front of the Victorian Gothic
market cross. There was a thin glaze of merriment on the streets - carol
singers and also bands of pagan mummers with shamanic drums.

      
The former Holy Thorn Ceramics - now called the Goddess Shop -
had a banner wishing customers a Happy Solstice.

      
Carey and Frayne had no specific wishes for anyone. Diane had
found a box of Christmas ornaments for the bookshop window, including a chubby
little electric Santa Claus with coloured lights around his hat which Woolly
had made last year in his workshop. She hadn't the heart to display it; it
reminded her too much of Jim Battle.

      
Jim's funeral had been awfully depressing. Woolly had rounded
up a bunch of local mourners for the sake of appearances, but there was no family.
His abandoned wife, unsurprisingly, had not attended; neither had his son, who
also lived in Bristol.

      
An inquest had been opened and adjourned until the New Year.
After taking her statement, the police had told Diane an open verdict was
possible, although Accidental Death or Death by Misadventure were more likely.
There'd certainly been nothing to suggest .suicide. Unless she knew otherwise?

      
Diane had shaken her head. In truth, she didn't know what to
think.

      
Through the shop window, she saw a lanky red-haired man in
black jeans and one of those lumberjack shirts slapping something to the side
of a yellow litter bin on a lamp-post.

      
Darryl Davey. The biggest boy at Sam Daniel's school,
apparently.
Like a shark in a goldfish
tank. Case of premature development.
Shaving
at about ten and a dad at sixteen, but now his son's sixteen and Darryl's
pissed off that nobody looks up to him anymore
. He seemed to be employed by
the Glastonbury First people to display their material all over town. Probably
illegally, but nobody stopped him. He was certainly quite open about what he
was doing now, standing back to admire it.

      
It was a sticker, about four inches in diameter, like a no entry
road sign. Diane went to the window to examine it.

      
It was horribly effective. You just knew that it was going to be
all over the old-established shops and pubs in Glastonbury In the back windows
of cars and delivery vans and farm vehicles. On the sides of buses.

      
The idea of restricting access to the Tor had caught on in a
big way ... given immediate and urgent impetus by the fire. Before that
inaugural Glastonbury First meeting had even finished, fire engines had been
struggling to reach the top of a Wellhouse Lane effectively blockaded by
travellers' vehicles.

      
One of those frightful coincidences for which Glastonbury was
famous. The local and regional Press had seized the angle, giving a tremendous
boost to Glastonbury First. And, of course, to Archer, who had been interviewed
on the local TV news.

      
'Had this system been in operation,' Archer had said soberly
and sorrowfully, 'I believe we should not now have a tragedy of this proportion
on our hands. I hope these people, wherever they may be skulking, can sleep at
night.'

      
Efforts by the Press to find these particular travellers had, of
course, failed. Woolly said they'd never even arrived at the road-protest
meeting. Eventually, the rescue services had managed to remove the old bus
which had broken down in the road. It apparently had carried no licence disc, and
all the other vehicles had gone.

      
The following day, an entirely innocent travelling couple, just
passing through, had returned to their van on the central car park to find all
four of its tyres slashed and the words MURDERING SCUM spray-painted along one
side. The chairman of Glastonbury First, Mr Quentin Cotton, had appealed for
calm and restraint although, as he told the
Evening
Post
, it was understandable that emotions were running high.

      
Poor Jim Battle would have been sickened.

      
As the afternoon trailed dismally away, Verity Endicott sat in
the deepest corner of the dining hall and welcomed the dark by inhaling it.

      
Dr Grainger had taught her how to do this. You breathed in,
expanding the diaphragm, imagining the air inside your body to be of the same
consistency and texture as the atmosphere in the room. And then you directed the
smooth, dark air to the extremities of your body, to your hands and feet and
along your spinal cord until the restful darkness filled your head. Finally,
you exhaled through the mouth, sending some of your essence out into the room.
A mingling.

      
Thus, Verity had taken her first tentative steps along the path
to penumbratisation: fusion with the dark. Dr Grainger had spent hours with her
over the past few weeks, refusing to take any payment because, he said, Meadwell
was 'a real palace of shadows' in which it was a privilege to work.

      
He was an earnest, humourless man, and Verity seemed to be
becoming rather dependent on him. On three occasions, they had meditated
together in one of the upstairs rooms, sitting side by side on straight-backed
chairs with their hands on their knees, a tincture of moonlight on the rim of a
wardrobe. Here, Dr Grainger had instructed her in the techniques of tenebral chakra-breathing
which, he said, would put her in tune with the dark physically, mentally and emotionally.

      
'There are five other stages after this,' he said, 'but it's gonna
take you maybe a couple more weeks of nightly exercise before you're ready to
move on up.'

      
Verity clung, with little confidence but certainly no misgivings
any more, to the tenebral exercises. The house might be growing ever darker,
but the real oppressor was Oliver Pixhill, whose undisguised intention was to
dispense with her services, presumably seeing her as the final link with his
despised father.

      
Dr Grainger was right. If she could not love the dark as he
did, at least she might learn to live with it. It was her duty to stay, to
resist all attempts to force her out. To hold out until…

      
Until when? Colonel Pixhill had always said she would know.
Major Shepherd had said someone would help her, that she would not have to be a
canary until she finally succumbed to the gases. All she was sure of was that
the person coming to help her was not Oliver Pixhill.

      
She just couldn't get him out other head. He had never returned,
but his sneers lingered. He obviously hated Meadwell too; had he inherited it,
he would doubtless have sold it at once. Which was perhaps one of the reasons the
Colonel had laid the foundations of the Pixhill Trust.

      
Verity felt very lonely. Day to day, she seemed to see only Dr
Grainger. Wanda never telephoned; she was, it seemed, spending much of her time
persuading influential people to support the campaign against the Bath-Taunton Relief
Road. And was also, apparently, involved in setting up some sort of Christmas event
uniting pagans and Christians in the person of Dr Liana Kelly, the
liberal-minded new Bishop of Bath and Wells.

      
All fine and good in its way. This, surely, was what Glastonbury
was about: a healing of ancient rifts. So was Christmas. It should be a time of
rejoicing. But on the town streets there were few smiles to be seen. She missed
very much the joviality of Mr Battle, with his sketchbook and his bicycle. And the
careless elegance of Juanita Carey, even if she was always too busy to talk for
long.

      
Such an unbelievable tragedy. In its wake and in the aftermath
of the unpleasantness at Holy Thorn Ceramics, there seemed to be in the air of
Glastonbury a cold hostility which Verity had never before experienced. Not
what the holy town was about. It was as though Avalon itself- awful thought -
was going the way of Meadwell.

At least Woolly looked cheerful,
in orange trousers and a yellow jacket over a lurid Hawaiian shirt. But then he
always looked cheerful; apart from that one suit, clothes like these were all
he had.

      
His face was doleful though, today.

      
'Tis slipping away from me, Diane. I can feel it. They're taking
over.'

      
He pulled a stool to the counter.

      
'Daft to complain. On one level, 'tis a wonderful job she's
doing.'

      
'Dame Wanda?'

      
'Knows more famous folk than I even heard of, that woman.
Actors, artists and such.'

      
'Yes, but Woolly, the sad fact is that when it comes to infrastructure,
I'm afraid it's the kind of people Archer and my father know who really count.'

      
'Infrastructure. There's a clever word. You gonner use words
like that in
The Avalonian
?'

      
'Certainly not,' Diane said. 'It's going to be simple and direct.'

      
'It's really gonner happen?'

      
'Of course it's jolly well going to happen.' Diane lowered her
eyes. 'I think.'

      
She worked on
The
Avalonian
every waking hour, even when she was in the shop, with the little
laptop she'd borrowed from Sam. Studied the customers for people who might be recruited
as correspondents. Preferably straight people. Well, as straight as you could
find among customers at an Alternative bookshop.