The Man in the Moss (77 page)

           
'He was fresh meat, Mr Dawber,' said Cathy. 'Whereas you
- and I trust you won't take offence - are dried-up, wizened and probably as
tough as old boots. What I'm saying is, you wouldn't be much of a sacrifice, Mr
Dawber.'

           
Ernie Dawber cleared his throat. 'In the last War,
Catherine, when Hitler was planning an invasion of these shores from occupied
France, the, er, pagans of southern England ...'

           
'... held a ritual on the beach at Hastings or somewhere
in cold weather, and an old man went naked and allowed himself to die of
exposure, thus setting up a barrier against the Nazi hordes. I don't believe
that old story either, Mr Dawber.'

           
Macbeth could tell by the way Ernie Dawber was turning
his hat around in his hands that the poor old guy was close to tears.

           
Cathy said, 'I know you love Bridelow more than any man
alive ...'

           
'Any
one
alive,
young lady.'

           
'Sorry. But throwing your life away isn't going to help
anyone, least of all the poor devil who's got to do the deed. You won't accept
this, I know you won't, but you're like a number of people who got too close to
the Man in the Moss, you're drawn almost into another world. You contemplate
things that under normal circumstances ...'

           
'Cathy, lass, these are
not
normal circumstances.'

           
'Yes, but
why
are
they not? Why's everything been allowed to go haywire? You've got to ask
yourself when all this started and how. I've spent a long time talking to Pop,
and ...' Cathy pulled damp, pale hair out of an eye. 'Look, you know they've
been seeing Matt Castle in the village.'

           
Willie Wagstaff jerked and stiffened and went white.
Macbeth couldn't take any more. He got up, walked over to the window and
listened hard to the rain until it turned the girl's steady voice into white
noise, crazy disconnected phrases seeping out, like when you drove into a new
state and your car radio was catching some stray police waveband.

           
'… and when she looked into the fryer, the fat had all
congealed and gone black. Black. Like peat.'

           
Macbeth pushed his forehead up against the window,
rolling it repeatedly on the cold, wet glass.

           
He was too tired for this but couldn't imagine how he'd
ever sleep again.

From
Dawber's
Secret
Book of Bridelow
(unpublished):

THE TRIPLE DEATH

Three was a sacred number
for the ancient Celts.

                       
I don't know why. Nobody does, obviously. But
think of Christianity - the Holy Trinity. Now think of the Celtic triple
goddess - maiden, matron, hag Think, if you like, of the Law of Three, as
taught by the cosmologist Gurdjieff. '... One force or two forces can never
produce a phenomenon,' writes his colleague, P. D. Ouspensky, going on to
explain about (i) the positive force, (ii) the negative force and (iii) the
neutralizing or motivating force.

                       
I like to think of a three-pin plug, for the
safe performance of which the third force, the Earth, is so essential, although
I don't know if this is an adequate analogy

                       
Whatever the explanation, the Celtic gods appeared
to have demanded a sacrifice in triplicate before the necessary energy might be
released.

                       
And sometimes the cycle of death seemed to
operate according to some pre-set cosmic mechanism. For instance, the eminent
Celtic scholar Dr Anne Ross has described the legendary demise of the
sixth-century Irish king Diarmaid, whose triple death - by weapon, drowning and
burning - was foretold by seers. Diarmaid poured scorn on this until his
enemies struck at the Feast of Samhain, when the hall was set ablaze and
Diarmaid run through with a spear. Seeking safety from the flames, the king
plunged, fatally, into a vat of ale.

                       
The Celts have always had a great sense of
comic irony.

CHAPTER II

Death. No peace in it.

           
You struggle towards the light and
the light recedes, or maybe it's the bastard darkness has grabbed hold of your
feet, hauling you back. Cloying, sweating darkness. Darkness like a black suit
that's too small for you. Darkness like ... black peat ... the kind of dark you
don't come out of until you're long, long dead and even then its somebody's
mistake.

           
Anything's better than this kind of
darkness. Forget about Heaven
, Hell
would
be
better.

Joke.

           
So, OK, this guy, he goes to Hell,
right, and it's not what he was expecting, no hot coals and stuff. Just all
these other guys standing around drinking cups of tea - up to their necks in
liquid shit. And they pass him a cup and he's thinking, hey, you know, this
could be a lot worse.

           
And then the Devil himself strolls
in - horns, cloven hoofs, spiky tail, the whole getup, plus a big smile - and
the guys' faces all drop.

           
And the first guy thinks, Hey,
what's the problem, the Evil One seems affable enough?
      
And then the Devil beams at them all and he says,

           
'OK, boys, tea break over, back to
your tunnelling ...'

           
This could be the secret of the
damned universe. Tea break over boys, back to the fucking tunnelling.

           
Oh, Jesus, help me. I'm cold and
sweating and dead.

Timegap.

And
you wake up into it again and there's the light in the middle distance, only this
time the light doesn't back off, the light comes right at you, a big dazzling
explosion of light and all you can think is, leave me alone, huh.

           
Just leave me alone, let me go back
into the shit.
           
Into the black peat.

           
I'm not afraid of the dark. I'm crying,
but I'm not afraid.

The minister's daughter,
Cathy Gruber, pushed through the multitude of the Born Again, into the Rectory
drawing room.

           
Mungo Macbeth following, wondering how come, she didn't
throw all these jerks into the street.

           
A fire was blazing in the hearth, a sofa pushed close to
the heat, a woman stretched across it; she had her eyes shut and she was
breathing hard. Her long, dark hair hung damply over an arm of the sofa. A
small group of people was clustered around. One guy was on his knees; he held
an open prayer book.

           
It looked as still, as solemn and as phoney as a
Pre-Raphaelite death scene, Macbeth thought, as Cathy knelt down next to the
guy with the prayer-book.

           
'How is she now?'

           
'In and out of sleep.'

           
'Has she spoken about it? She has to, you know, Chris. If
she keeps all the details bottled up, it's going to cause a lot of trauma.'

           
Chris said, 'Who is this man?'

           
'I believe we talked on the phone.'

           
'Oh. The American. I passed you on to Joel, didn't I?'

           
'Some asshole zealot,' said Macbeth, and Cathy frowned at
him.

           
'I'm sorry to say poor Joel's still in there,' Chris
said. 'Still in the church.'

           
'Best place for him,' Cathy said. 'Let him cool his heels
for a while. Chantal, can you hear me?'

           
The woman on the couch moved, eyelids twitching like
captive moths. Cathy held one of her hands. 'This really is a wonderful lady,'
Chris said to Macbeth. 'I don't know what we'd have done.'

           
'Cathy?'

           
'Makes you think you underestimated the benefits of an
old-fashioned Anglican upbringing. She's not at all fazed by any of this.'

           
'Why I'm sticking close to the kid,' said Macbeth. 'I was
fazed clean outa my tree some hours back.' He nodded at the sofa. 'This lady
your wife?'

           
'We're united in God,' Chris said as Chantal's eyes opened
and then shut again.

           
'What happened to her?'

           
'She was raped,' Chris said baldly.

           
Chantal moaned. Macbeth focused cynically on Chris, who
looked to be about his own age and still had the remains of that bland, doped
look you could guarantee to find on a proportion of fundamentalist Christians,
Children of God, Mormons and sundry Followers of the Sublime Light.

           
Cathy stood up. 'Keep her warm. Call me if she wants to
talk.' Maybe sensing the tension, she led Macbeth away.

           
The house seemed stuffed with men and women feeding their
bland, doped faces with biscuits and potato-chips, drinking coffee from paper
cups. They were in small groups, many holding on to each other, and they
weren't talking much, although a few were praying silently, heads bent and
palms upturned against their thighs.

           
Macbeth decided this was probably better than mass hysteria.

           
'You want coffee?'

           
Cathy shook her head. He followed her into the hall; she
brought out keys, unlocked a door,
 
led
him into an unoccupied room with book cases and an upright piano.

           
Macbeth said, 'Cathy, reassure me. That woman really was
raped
? In addition to everything, we got
a rapist on the loose?'

           
The girl pushed the door into place, stood with her back
to it. 'She
thinks
she was raped.
Seems she'd gone back alone to the church to plead with Joel to come out. Says
she was thrown across a tomb and had sensations of... violation.'

           
Cathy looked him in the eyes, unsmiling. 'I'm afraid that
what we have on the loose is something that used to be Matt Castle.'

           
The room was silent, apart from the rain on the window,
which, by this time, Macbeth hardly registered.

           
'You believe that.' Already he knew better than to make
it a question.

           
'It's a lot for you to swallow in one night,' Cathy said,
'but Bridelow used to pride itself on having a certain spiritual equilibrium.
And now somebody's turned the place into a battlefield. Opposing forces. Black
magic, as I understand it, doesn't work quite so well without there being
something equally extreme to ignite it.'
           
'Like, opposites attract.'

           
Cathy nodded. 'My old man is an ordinary, old-fashioned
country clergyman who's learned not to ask too many questions. Joel Beard's an
extremist - same background as this bunch. Somebody engineered it that Joel
should come to Bridelow with a mission to wipe out the remains of some very
innocuous, downbeat paganism. We thought there was an understanding in the
diocese that you don't put unstable fanatics into Bridelow, but I'd guess
somebody was simply blackmailing the Archdeacon.'

           
'This is the boss-cleric.'

           
'As you say, the boss-cleric. Simon. Who's gay. And who's
been more than a bit indiscreet in his time.'

           
'And the blackmailer? Stand up, John Peveril Stanage?'
           
'This is the one man whose
name is never mentioned in Bridelow. The one writer whose books you will never
see on the paperback rack in Milly's Post Office.'

           
'You were outside when I told them about that stuff with
the bones in Scotland?'

           
Cathy went on nodding. She looked very young. Still had
on her damp dufflecoat and a college scarf wound under her chin. 'Mungo, I
can't tell you how sorry I am about Moira. I sincerely blame myself. I should
never have let her drive away in that state.'