The Chalice (54 page)

      
'Yeah, well, Pennard's in full support of the road. Archer
certainly is. We could, like, work the wider message in somehow while
disrupting their hunt.'

      
Hughie Painter shook his head in disgust. 'This is not so much
the hunt you wanner target, this is Pennard himself, right? What's this sudden
thing you got about that bugger? Something to prove, maybe?'

      
'Bollocks.' Sam felt himself going red.

      
'So what's the angle here?' Hughie grinned. 'Afraid we'll all
think you sold out, going into this magazine thing with Big Di?'

      
'Piss off.' Sam wanted to hit him, half aware of how
ridiculous this was because big Hughie was a really gentle guy, nobody ever got
into a row with Hughie. He walked away into a soup of swirling street noise:
carol-singing, laughter, whoops and cheers. He saw traders in the doorways of
their shops, some of which seemed to have reopened, lots of children of all
ages.

      
There was a roaring in his ears. He looked up at the tree, saw
coloured lights floating down like snowflakes. What?

'Bloody thing,' Woolly shouted
'Sheesh, nothing works for weeks together these days.'

      
And it was because he was fiddling with his stereo, worrying about
the tape snapping and getting all chewed up in the mechanism that he didn't
notice it until it was almost on him.

      
'Oh shit.'

      
Sweat seemed to spring out of the wheel. It was like he'd
suddenly woken up, lights all around him, the big truck behind, people waiting to
cross, and this bus ... rumbling in a leisurely, rickety way down the wrong
side of the road, the driver grinning, or maybe the bus itself was grinning,
its radiator grille hanging open between the bleary headlights.
      
Woolly hit the brakes. Hammered his
foot into the pedal, wrenching at the wheel, lurching inside his seatbelt and
feeling the Renault spinning side on into the middle of the road and the bloody
big lorry behind.

      
Gasp of airbrakes, screech and a ground-wobbling rumble like
an entire block of flats collapsing.
      
Blur of rights, a coloured
blizzard.

Woolly sat for a long,
isolated moment, noticing how bone-chilling cold it was in his car and that his
throat was ash-dry. Only vaguely aware of the screaming all around him, whoops
of terror and pain that didn't stop, not even when he was struggling to open
his door through the Christmas branches.

SEVEN

Lady Loony, Councillor Crackpot

Diane stared up at the
cross.
      
'Did you make it yourself?'

      
What a blindingly stupid question. It was an abandoned telegraph
pole with a fence post crudely nailed across it.

      
'Come away now.' Don Moulder said. 'I don't hang around here
after dark no more.'

      
He led her out of the bottom field, up towards the farmhouse.
It was nearly dark. The cold bit through her sweater. The Tor looked remote.

      
'Dogs won't go down there, n'more,' Don said. 'Night or day.
What d'you say to that, Miss Diane?'

      
Nothing. She said nothing.

      
'Maybe you don't believe me.' Don pushed into the farmhouse
kitchen, kicked off his wellies. Wife's WI night, he'd told Diane in the Land
Rover. They could talk freely. 'Thought it anyone'd believe me, it'd be you.'

      
'Because of my reputation as a loony.' The kitchen was
unmodernised, pale green cupboards with ventilation holes in the doors and a
big, bright fire in the range. Don Moulder waved her to a chair, sat down
opposite.

      
'Did I say that?'

      
'Nobody ever has to.'

      
'I'm a frightened man, Miss Diane. Two years ago, I d'come to
Jesus for protection, all the weirdies round here, the evil, heathen things I
seen when I looks across at… that thing, that hill.'
      
'Can you tell me about it now?
Exactly what you saw?'
      
He wouldn't talk much about it when
they were down in the bottom field. He was genuinely afraid. She was remembering
the night of the fire, the way he'd kept talking about the
black buzz.

      
'I thought it was a one-off thing,' he said now. 'Somethin'
they'd kind of left behind 'em, like most of 'em leaves ole rubbish, this lot
leaves ... well, all the drugs they takes, maybe something in the air, I don't
know, I don't, 'twas just a small hope. But I makes the cross, I prays to the
Lord to bless the field and I tries not to think about it. But then
the dogs ... the dogs won't go in there, look, not even in broad daylight. The
dogs slink off. They can sense evil, dogs can. Then - where are we now? - not
last night, the night before, I'm doin' the rounds, padlockin' the sheds, when
it comes again.'

      
He leaned close to her across the scuffed, Formica top table.

      
'Engine noise. Lord above, it went through me like a bandsaw.
I could smell it. The fumes of oil. I could no more've gone down that field
than dug my own grave. So you tell me, Miss Diane. What was they at? What was
those scruffy devils at on my land that night?'

      
What on earth could she tell him? What did she even know?

      
'Cause what I do know is, what I reckernise now is I seen it
before. I made careful note of every one o' them hippy heaps as they come
through the gate that day. Know what I remember? The ole radiator grille
hangin' off like a scab. Stuck in my mind, that did. Lazy devils couldn't even be
minded to screw the bloody radiator on. I remember thinkin' that. Aye, it stuck
in my mind. And that's what I seen. What they done. Miss Diane, what they done
in that buzz to taint my land?'

      
'Oh gosh.' The fire was so warm, she was so tired, all her
caution dropped away. 'They ... nothing happened in it while it was here. Not
while I was here, anyway. But later I think it was found ... Oh, look, it was the
one they found at Stoke St Michael. The one with the body in it.'

      
Don Moulder sat up, stiff. 'By golly, I d'remember readin'
'bout that. I never thought. By the ... How'd he die?'

      
'I don't know.'

      
He stood up, began rapidly to pace the kitchen. 'Why's he come
here? Why's he come back here?' He went to the window, snatched the curtains
across. He looked terrified.

      
'I don't know,' Diane said.

      
'I don't want 'im. I can't live with this. I don't want no
dead hippy and his black buzz. Could you live with that - knowing it's out
there? Black evil? I'm afeared to set foot outside that door when it's dark,
case I hears it again, c
hunner, chunner, chunner
.
How'm I gonner do my lambin' now?'

      
'These things ... it won't harm you, Mr Moulder.' But terror
was contagious; Diane bit her lip.

      
'Won't it? Won't it, Miss? That cross don't keep it off. What
kind of evil defies the Christ?'

      
'I don't know, I don't
know
.'

The cold blue flashing lights.
The hysteria of ambulances. The stolid red hulk of a fire engine. Steam rising.

      
Figures were in motion in the half-light, fluorescent
paramedics with stretchers and oxygen equipment. And out of the murky stew of
noise - moans and yells, a baby crying and the escalating whirring, whining,
keening of a saw attacking metal - there was a woman wailing.
      
'Const...
ance
....'

      
The name caught in Sam's head. He heard it again in the squealing
of the saw reaching a frenzy and the rending of metal before two firemen backed
into view with most of a lorry door held between them, trampling sawn-off Christmas
tree branches into the tarmac.

      
' Naaaaaaaaaaaaw!!!'

      
Echoing across the market-place like some old street-trader's
cry, a woman's shredded shriek. Close to Sam, a man was being eased out of a
metal cave like a snail from its shell, squirming into vicious life when his
boots touched the ground.

      
'…was that little tosser!' Jabbing a finger. 'Slams on and
just fucking...'

      
A pool of newly spilled oil shimmering like smoked glass with
beacon blue light. A police boot slapping into the pool.

      
'Get back. Get back, please.' A stretcher shape coming through:
red blankets, paramedics.

      
As the policeman pushed him back, Sam saw the lorry skewed
across the road, the new Christmas tree snapped like a matchstick, the lorry's
crushed-in cab garlanded with branches and little coloured lights, red and
yellow and green and white.

      
The cab was crushed because behind the tree had been the great
rigid finger of the market cross. They'd had to cut away the side of the cab to
get the driver out, and he was snarling in self-defence, '... didn't have no
choice, mate, that fucking lunatic ...'

      
'Come on, now, back,' a policeman snapped. 'It's not a flaming
funfair. Everybody back!' The first ambulance squealing away, revealing a
small, muddied, maroon car in the centre of the road. A sticker on its rear
side window.

      
RESIST ROAD RAPE.

      
The car was a Renault Six. Sam stared at it in horror and disbelief.

      
'Ask him. Ask that little bastard!' the lorry driver yelled.

      
And there was Woolly standing in the middle of the road, blood
on his fingers, one sleeve torn away and bloody skin peeling from his wrist
like curled shavings from planed wood, and he was weeping. 'Oh, Jesus.' His
face ragged. 'It ... shit. It's ... I'm going outer my fucking head, man.'

      
'You hear that, officer?' Ronnie Wilton, the butcher, normally
a jovial bugger amid the blood and offal, his face bulging and twisting now.
'He's admitted it. You take that down. I'll be a witness, look.'

      
Another one who hadn't voted for Woolly.

      
'Yes, thank you, sir, now if you'd just ...' One of the policemen
wore glasses, twin ice blue beacons strobing in the lenses, concealing
expressions, feelings. 'Mr Woolaston, you better go in the ambulance.'

      
'No, I'm not taking up ambulance space.'

      
Woolly's agonised face was frozen by a flashgun, some Press
photographer dodging in front. And then there was an awful sound - all the
worse because in other circumstances you might have thought it was a howl of
glee - as a ball of crashed and bloodied metal was handed through the despoiled
jungle of the great, festive tree

      
'Oh,
Chrrrrrist
!'
Woolly's hands covered his face.

      
Sam saw that the metal ball handed from fireman to fireman was
the crushed remains of a baby's pushchair.

Iridescent. Mesmeric.

      
With rage, it looked like.

      
Bad move, he thought. Wrong night. He would have turned round
and left quietly, but she'd seen him.

      
Powys had started having second thoughts about this as soon as
he was inside the hospital. If she wouldn't have visitors except for Diane, wouldn't
even talk to Dan Frayne on the phone ...

      
It you're another one come to talk me out of it, you can sod
off now,' said Mrs Juanita Carey, acid in her voice.
      
Powys said nothing. Just gave her a
smile.
      
The session with the Rt Rev. Liam
Kelly had left him disturbed. And dismayed that anyone who thought Glastonbury
Tor was 'just a hill' could get to be Bishop of Bath and Wells. Wonderful
material, obviously, for a book. He'd be there at dawn on Thursday, no question.
Fascinating stuff.

      
Fascinating for an author. Fascinating if you were outside
looking in. If you didn't let your viewpoint become cluttered by something
plump and vulnerable.

      
All the stuff Diane had told him, about Dion Fortune, Pixhill
and the Dark Chalice was still washing restlessly around his head. He'd wound
up in Bristol because, to get a handle on whatever was happening, or whatever
Diane imagined was happening, he needed to talk to someone who wasn't Diane.
Someone who knew the score but was temporarily apart from the game.