The Man in the Moss (88 page)

           
The knife cut through the tourniquets at his wrists and
Dic closed his eyes, feeling nothing in his numb, etiolated arms, and yet
feeling the blood rise in fountains.

           
'I CONJURE THEE!'

CHAPTER
II

'Hey...
stop this bloody car... come on.'

           
Big, shambling guy Macbeth recognized as Stan, the
bartender. But Stan wasn't interested in Macbeth.

           
'You're the copper, aren't you?'
           
'Happen,' Ashton said warily.

           
There was Stan and some of the other guys who'd been in
the bar when Macbeth arrived, but not the kid who'd figured to punch him out.
Also, there was Willie Wagstaff.. Macbeth leapt out, grabbed the little guy by
the arm.

           
'Willie, hey, listen up. The body in the car ... this was
not Moira.'

           
'Oh,' said Willie; his mind was clearly elsewhere; he
kept glancing over his shoulder towards the church and around the street. Stan
was bawling into the car window at Ashton.

           
'Bloody hooligans. Fanatics. You're the police, get um
out!'

           
'Willie, that means she's not dead, you hear me?'

           
'I'm only one policeman, sir, and I'm off duty.'

           
'You knew, Willie. You
knew,
goddamn it.'

           
'They don't
know
you're on your own,' Stan said. 'Supposed to be flaming Christians, should've
heard the language. Just knock on t'door and tell um t'sling their hooks.
What's the problem? We're getting wet.'

           
Macbeth said, 'Goddamn it, you
know
... Willie, where is she?

           
Gary Ashton, annoyed, was out of the car, slamming the
door, holding both hands up. 'All right! Quieten down. What's so important?'

           
Macbeth backed out, looked around the small assembly.
'Cathy know about this?' Willie nodded urgently.

           
Eight or nine of them now, almost a mob. Macbeth said,
'Gary, there's a bunch of well-meaning but seriously misguided people in there.
Take it from me, these guys aren't shitting they need to be got out.'

           
'And we need to get in,' Stan said soberly. 'Just don't
want more trouble than we can handle.'

           
Ashton stood in the rain pulling on his jaw. 'OK,' he
said eventually. 'If I can clear this church out for you, maybe you can do
something for me afterwards, all right?'

           
Stan shrugged, causing his old-fashioned plastic raincoat
to crackle. Willie said something about Mr Dawber, looking upset, his fingers
compulsively chinking the coins in his pocket.

           
'And another thing,' Ashton said. 'I'm not a policeman.
You've never
seen
a policeman here
tonight. You got that?'

Moira pulled on the navy
blue duffle coat. 'Jesus, haven't worn one of these in years. This makes me a
Mother?'

           
'Mother, maiden, hag,' Cathy said. 'It's all the same in
Bridelow.'

           
'Just as well,' Moira said. 'I don't qualify as any of
the above. Where are we going?'

           
Milly led her out into the street. 'Not far. Mind you
don't drown in the gutter.'

           
Not far turned out to be Ma Wagstaff's little stone
terraced cottage, its step awash but still gleaming white in the beam of the
lamp Dic had given to Moira.

           
'Listen, I'm getting worried about Dic,' she'd said a few
minutes earlier to Cathy.

           
'Me too,' Cathy said. 'But they couldn't kill him, could
they? For the same reason they couldn't kill you. Surely?'

           
'No,' Moira had said dubiously. 'But sometimes you can do
more harm to someone than killing them'd be, you know?'

           
Milly unlocked the front door and put on lights. Moira
took in a tiny and ancient parlour with more bottles than a pharmacy. Or maybe
this
was
a pharmacy. There was a
light of sadness over the room.

           
'I don't know where to start,' Milly said.

           
'Well, we don't have much time. Where'd she keep her …
you know, recipes and stuff?'

           
Milly smiled wryly. 'In her head.'

           
'Oh, shit.' Moira began to open cupboards in the side and
found more bottles. There were a few dozen books; maybe there'd be papers
stuffed inside one of them. 'What's upstairs?'

           
'Her bathroom. Her sewing room. Her bed.'

           
'Are we
sure
she copied it down?'

           
'I remember seeing a map, a plan, kind of. I know I did.
Keeping Jack out, it wasn't something you went into lightly, you know.'

           
Moira felt a light breeze on one side of
he
r face. It smelt vaguely of
sage.

           
'Something that hadn't been done for centuries,' Milly
said. 'And it had to be exact. I don't know what to say, maybe if …'

           
Moira turned very casually around and looked back through
the doorway into the hall.

           
Where she saw a little woman in misty shades of grey and
sepia, a little woman who might have been formed - had it been daylight, had
there been sun - by the coalescence of dustmotes.

           
The little woman slowly shook her head.

           
And disappeared.

           
Moira turned back into the room. 'It's not here,' she
said softly. 'Ma Wagstaff had no map.'

Chris picked up the pink
T-shirt and held it up in front of him and started to laugh.

           
Across the front of the T-shirt was inscribed, THANK GOD
FOR JESUS.

           
He looked at it for long seconds. It made no sense to
him. No sense at all any more. It was gaudy. It was trite. It was meaningless.
The girl, who was called Claudette, looked a whole lot better without it,
curled up asleep under the pulpit draped in velvet curtains torn down from the
vestry.
           
Nice tits, Chris remembered.
Paused. Wasn't that a pretty bloody sinful thing to contemplate in the House of
God?
           
Yeah, well...

           
She'd be pretty cold, though, Claudette, when she awoke.
It was getting bitter in here. Those amber-tinted lights created a completely false
impression of warmth, making the pillars seem mellow.

           
The communion wine had helped a bit. Gerry, the solicitor
from Rotherham, had found two bottles in the vestry. Well, why not? It was a
so-called pagan place, wasn't it? It wasn't a sin to drink heathen wine.

           
Sin. Chris shook his head. So trite.

           
Only problem was, after that wine, he wanted a pee.

           
'Forget it,' he'd decreed automatically about a quarter
of an hour ago. 'Nobody goes out.' Although for the life of him he couldn't
remember
why
nobody should go out.
Except that while it might be cold in here it was extremely wet out there.
Frankly, Chris reckoned he could probably use a piss, a pint and a bag of chips
in that order.

           
Stupidest thing they'd done had been to let the bloody
bus go. That was Joel again, silly sod. Burn your boats, he'd instructed them.
Well, it was all right for him, he'd cleared
 
off somewhere. Least he could have done was left his mobile phone
around; they could have got Reg Hattersley out of bed and bribed him to fetch his
coach back.

           
Chris surveyed his little band, all forty-seven of them,
The Angels of the New Advent. High-flown name, eh, for an assorted bunch of
misfits whose sole connecting factor was the conviction that their lives were
one course short of a banquet. Only
one
course,
note, they all had their own houses and decent cars and dishwashers, etc.

           
Some of them were wandering around, rubbing their heads.
A couple had lit cigarettes. His watch told him it had gone midnight. This was
getting ridiculous.

           
He remembered the singing breaking up into self-parody
and a few of them had torn clothes off, mostly the ones clad in propaganda
clobber like this silly T-shirt. And then there'd been isolated outbursts of
anger and resentment, mostly towards Joel Beard, who'd brought them to this
dump and then abandoned them - but not before going berserk and assaulting
Martin, who'd lost a tooth, and Declan, who was convinced he was suffering
delayed concussion. And, of course, convincing Chantal she'd been raped by an
evil spirit.

           
'I ask you …' Chris said scornfully, aloud.

           
When someone started banging on the door, he wandered
across, suspicious.

           
'Whosat?'

           
'Who am I talking to?' An authoritative kind of voice.
           
'Yes?' Chris said, equally
peremptory.
           
'This is the police,' the
voice said levelly. 'I don't know who you are but I have to inform you that you
have no legal right to occupy this building and I'm suggesting you vacate it
immediately. If you unbolt this door and everyone comes out without any
trouble, I can promise you that no further action is likely to be taken. If,
however ...'

           
'Yeah?' Chris said. This really
was
the police?
           
A distant voice berated him,
his own voice within his chest. He heard it say,
Get thee hence, tempter,
what he might well have said out loud an
hour ago. What a plonker he'd been.

           
I do strongly advise you, sir, not to play silly-buggers.
Open this door, please.'

           
Chris gazed at the oak door, probably six inches thick,
at the iron bolts, four inches wide.

           
Where is your power?
the inner voice bleated
pathetically at the policeman.
Blow it
down, why don't you, with your foul, satanic breath.

           
Must've been nuts, Chris thought. All of us. Mass
hysteria.
           
'Yeah, all right,' he said
resignedly and drew back the bolts.
           
There were cheers of relief
from the brothers and sisters sprawled among the pews.

Though glances were
exchanged, Milly didn't ask her how she knew there was nothing in the house.
There was silence, then Milly said, 'What are we going to do now?'

           
'Don't know about you,' Moira said. 'But I think I'm
gonny cry.'

           
'Moira.' Willie was in the doorway, about a yard from
where Ma's ghost had stood.

           
Milly shook her head. 'It's not here, little man.'

           
Willie nodded, unsurprised. 'She weren't much of a
filer-away of stuff. 'Cept for foul-smelling gunge in the bottom of owd
bottles.'

           
'Don't knock it,' Moira said. Less than half an hour
after forcing down Ma's Crisis Mixture, she was, inexplicably, feeling stronger
than she had in some while.

           
'Moira ...' Willie glanced behind him to where the rain
bounced off Ma's moon-white doorstep. 'Don't you think ... ?'

           
'Yeah,' Moira said. 'I know. I know.' She sighed. 'OK.
Come away in, Macbeth.'

           
Suddenly self-conscious, she found herself mindlessly
reaching for the duffel-coat hood to cover the desolate ruins of her hair.
'Ach,' she said, and let her hands fall to her sides.

           
When he stumbled over the threshold, this Mungo Macbeth,
of the Manhattan Macbeths, he was looking no more smooth and glamorous than the
average drowned-rat hiker from the moor.

           
Willie had told her briefly how the guy had driven all
the way from Glasgow with three crucial words: John, Peveril and Stanage.