Omega (13 page)

'The
Guardian
wouldn't miss a thing like that. They reported the inquest - badly, for them, but they
did
report it. So they'd report any follow-up.'

'The papers haven't been exactly themselves recently,' Moira said. 'Not even your sea-green incorruptible
Guardian.'

*Yes, but
..
.' Dan plunged in, then hesitated, his battle-ready shoulders slumping. 'I wish I could say you were wrong, love,' he admitted finally.

Moira dropped her book on to her lap and stared through the open French windows at the bright little garden. 'Me too.
...
Something's going to happen, Dan, and soon - but what
is
it? More earthquakes? A full-scale witch-hunt?'

'Both?' Dan wondered, and when she did not reply, he went on: 'What do your cards say?'

She smiled, a little ruefully. 'That shows how worried you are.'

He looked surprised. 'But, Moira - you know how I trust your Tarot readings. You're bang on, time and again. I'm always asking you - I don't wait till I'm worried!'

T know you don't, darling. But this time you have. You've been dying to ask me for days - but you've been afraid to. Not like you at all. Which means
you
feel it, too.'

'Of course I bloody feel it.'

'Then why don't
you
read the cards? You're as good as I am, if you'd let yourself be. If you'd trust yourself.'

It was Dan's turn to smile. 'Stop changing the subject. You haven't answered me.'

She was silent for what seemed to him a long time. Then she said 'Yes, I've read them. And they frighten me even worse. . . . Darkness and evil and I can't see the shape of it.'

'Why didn't you tell me?'

'Because you looking cheerful and confident keeps
me
going. Sometimes I don't want to disturb it.'

Dan shook his head; this was an old argument. 'If you're depressed, I want to know - and why. Me being falsely cheerful's no help.'

'Darlinig, you're never falsely cheerful. My own personal St George - you never lose heart even when you can
see
the dragon and it's ten times bigger than you are.'

'More fool me, probably,' he said, but looked pleased. 'And you're still changing the subject.'

'No I'm not. Right now neither of us can see the dragon. But it's there, all right.'

Dan had the familiar look in his eye which told her he was about to try cutting through the metaphors to the facts; but the point was never reached, because Rosemary suddenly appeared in the French windows, backlit by the sun.

'Hi, there,' Moira said. 'Come in and cheer us up. We're feeling low.'

Rosemary joined them, dropping into an armchair. 'That makes three of us. So / won't be much help.'

'On an afternoon like this too. . . . Hey, what are you home for anyway? I thought this was your Saturday on.'

'It was,' Rosemary said. 'I've been sacked.'

They stared at her, unbelieving. Rosemary, now twenty-four, had been a cashier at the biggest supermarket in the High Street ever since she left school at eighteen. Even to Moira, who was her closest friend, her daytime personality seemed a part of the place; Moira always shopped there and always brought her trolley to Rosemary's till, even if it had the longest queue. Somehow, it was impossible to visualize the supermarket without her.
Sacked?

'What did you do?' Dan asked, as bewildered as Moira. 'Shoot the manager?'

'I didn't do anything.'

'What, then?'

'Would you believe -
redundancy}'
Dan said, 'Oh, balls.'

'You may think so. I may think so. But that's what it says in my polite letter of dismissal, which was handed to me an hour ago with the exact amount of redundancy pay called for under the union agreement.' Her ironic calm was belied by the angry flush on her cheeks. "Want to see it?'

'But - weren't you showing the ropes to a new girl, only last week?' Moira demanded.

'I was.'

'Oh, Rosemary! What the hell goes on?'

'Someone else went, too. We were called into old Jepson's office together. .
..
Gilly Stevens, from delicatessen. Odd, don't you think, that Gilly and I were the only two known witches on the staff?'

There was a pause and then Dan said quietly: 'Oh, Jesus.'

Rosemary laughed. 'The old devil slipped up on one thing, though. He forgot to ask for our staff discount cards back. So we went straight out and loaded ourselves up with . enough shopping for a week, paid for it on discount at Claire's till, and
then
trundled our trolleys to Jepson's office and handed in our cards. He'd have whipped the lot back if he could - you could see his nasty little brain working - but he knew it was too late and it was his fault.' She sighed. 'At least I can soften the blow to Greg by giving him a slap-up dinner, cheap. Want to join us?'

As July wore on, Moira and Dan began to realize that the 'redundancy' of Rosemary was not an isolated phenomenon. The widely believed version of what had happened on Bell , Beacon had had more impact than had at first appeared; and there was still no news of perjury charges against Wharton and Miss Chalmers, or of a resumption of the inquest. Ben Stoddart and his Anti-Pagan Crusade were not allowing the issue to die. Few people had heard of the Crusade before Bell Beacon but now it seemed to be getting almost daily publicity - and, as Dan observed, to be immune to the
sub judice
laws. Little by little the blood-sacrifice story was becoming established 'fact', and if few people openly maintained the theory that the earth tremors had been the judgement of God on the witches and on those who tolerated them, there were signs that it was seeping into current folklore.

Anti-pagan feeling was becoming a public issue. Between the two committed viewpoints - the witches themselves and the Crusade - mass opinion, habitually either tolerant or indifferent, was beginning to polarize.

'People are still nervous about the earth tremors,' was Greg's opinion, 'but they don't understand them and they don't know if they're coming again - so they work out their nervousness on something they think they do understand. Us. Bell Beacon happened at a bad time. Gave 'em something to get their teeth into when they were frightened. Just our bad luck, that it happened when it did.'

'I'm beginning to think it's more than that,' Dan said.

'What do you mean?'

'I don't
know.
There's something stage-managed about it, Greg. I'm not sure whether it was planned though or just a coincidence the powers-that-be latched on to. . . . Look at the media, since the tremors. There's an unreal feeling about them - too smooth altogether. There are things they're not telling us, I'm bloody sure of it. . . .
Something's
going on and I wish I knew what it was.'

Dan's worrying had a personal element as well. The property market had remained paralysed by uncertainty, and the few country places still for sale were fetching very high prices; so although Dan and his partner Steve Gilchrist were partly cushioned against the financial effects of the slack market by higher commissions on the sales they did handle, in fact they had little work to do. Habitually, Dan was the outside man, the meeter of clients, while Steve stayed in the office watching over the legal chores. But in the last week or two their roles had tended to become reversed. Dan knew that Steve was quietly arranging things that way without openly referring to the change and that he was embarrassed about it. For the sake of the business, the known witch was being kept out of sight. . . . Steve had also avoided commenting on the fact that two properties which had been withdrawn from their list had reappeared on another agency's, and his very silence implied that he knew, or had guessed, the reason. Steve and Dan were friends, but how much of this would it take to break up their partnership?

Worry was one thing and could be openly voiced at home. Fear of actual violence was another, and although none of them had spoken of it since the first days after Bell Beacon, Moira knew it was in the back of all their minds. At their weekly Circles, she noticed that they were all especially careful in drawing the curtains, lest a careless chink should reveal the telltale arrangement of candles around the room; and each time she ritually cast th
e Circle she could feel the more
-than-usual concentration of the others behind her willing its psychic ramparts into being. Till now, little Diana had sometimes been present in the Circle and sometimes not, according to the hour and her own wishes; now she was always included and the Circles began on time to allow for it.

When the violence did begin, it was not near home; but Moira witnessed it none the less. About once a fortnight, she was in the habit of leaving Diana with old Sally and going up to London for a few hours, shopping for things she could not get in Staines. She always made a point of visiting Atlantis Books, near the British Museum. Though it was not large, for a couple of generations Atlantis had been the best occult bookshop in the capital and it had a reputation for friendliness. Even occasional customers seemed to be remembered and recognized when they came again. Moira, being a regular, loved the place, with its ceiling-high shelves of new and second-hand books, its central display of latest issues and the little corner barricade of magazines behind which sat whatever member of the owning family happened to be on duty.

Today it was a round smiling young woman of the latest generation of that family, who said 'Hullo, Moira!' as soon as she walked in. 'Nice timing. We've just got the new Liz St George in. You'll be wanting it.'

Moira took the volu
me the girl held out and leafed through it. ‘I
think tha
t woman's immortal. One a year,
since before I was born.'

'Oh, more than one, some years. . . . Yes, she is. She was in here yesterday, like a laughing tornado....' Atlantis was not only a bookshop, it was a clearing-house for personal news. Few people knew whether the family were witches, Golden Dawn magicians, spiritualists, or of any other occult persuasion; they had a natural gift for ecumenism, so everybody talked to them and listened to them. The girl went on exchanging news with Moira while Moira browsed.

She bought two books and a magazine, and was still lingering and chatting when the fire-bomb was flung through the door. Moira ducked instinctively as it flew past her and burst into flame at the back of the little shop, behind the central display. They both screamed in disbelief and shock, but the very speed with which the fire took hold jerked them into action. The girl cried, 'Take the till!' as she grabbed the phone and dialled
999
for the fire brigade. Moira swept the till off the cash table and took some seconds to open the door inwards with the awkward load in her arms; whoever had thrown the bomb had slammed it shut afterwards. By the time she had got the till across the narrow street to the opposite pavement, the girl had run to join her.

Already it was too late to save anything else. Whatever the bomb had been made of, it engulfed the whole shop in less than a minute. They stood watching helplessly among
the fast-growing crowd, while tears of rage and grief poured down the girl's face.

Nobody had seen the attacker, although two policemen were on the spot almost at once asking for witnesses, so no one was ever charged with the crime. Of the entire stock, fourteen undamaged and just over a hundred slightly damaged volumes were salvaged. The rest was a dead loss.

Gregory said: 'I think we ought to be ready to take to the woods,' and for a while nobody in the candlelit Circle spoke.

It was the quiet time after the ritual, when they all sat on the floor around the chalice of wine for a while, relaxed, savouring both the wine and the comfort of the still un-banished Circle. Diana had fallen asleep, her small head cradled against old Sally's ample naked belly; they had all been keeping their voices low so as not to waken her, and somehow the very quietness of Greg's pronouncement loaded it with drama.

Dan eventually broke the silence with a cautious: 'Let's not panic, Greg. It may just be a passing phase.'

'You don't believe that any more than I do,' Greg told him. 'And I didn't say we should rush off right now. I said we should be
ready.
For when the balloon goes up, if it does. Come the crunch, it'd be too late to pack, we'd have to
go.
Not even stand and fight, with Sally and Di to think of.'

'I'm not senile yet,' said Sally predictably.

Equally predictably, Dan insisted, 'Cut the metaphors, Greg - what balloon - what crunch?'