The Chalice (11 page)

      
Then Headlice felt a tug, and they were moving. Round and
round the tower. The only sounds the drumming and the slithering of their feet
on the grass, and he felt like a cog in an ancient, sacred mechanism and was
totally blissed out.
      
At first.

'The problem is,' Juanita
said, 'I don't know where I stand any more. Whose side I'm on.'
      
Watching the Tor by night.

      
From less than half a mile away, it looked mysteriously pretty,
with the lights, above a band of mist, making a faint frill around the base of
the St Michael tower. They'd stopped on the edge of a small wood, unsure about
this now that they were so close.

      
Jim's lamp had found a tree stump, and Juanita sat on it and
talked.

      
'When Danny and I arrived it was very exciting, in an innocent
way. We used to come here and watch for flying saucers. There'd been that big
flap over at Warminster. Close Encounters. And books by John Michell and then J.
M. Powys, and this all-pervading sense of... optimism, I suppose. Simple and
naive as that.'

      
'I do believe there was a special optimism then,' Jim said.

      
Although, naturally, we were very po-faced about it at the
building society. Love-ins and be-ins and squats - not many mortgages in all
that
nonsense. I suppose I was just
annoyed because I was rather too old for it all.'

      
' Then the spontaneity seemed to dissipate.' Juanita lit a cigarette.
'It became institutionalised and politicised. And you ended up with what we
have now - New Age cliques and elitism. Like The Cauldron.'
      
'Oh. That.'

      
'There you are, you're alienated.'

      
'I'm not alienated. I
like
women. The Cauldron's all right as far as I'm concerned.'

      
'But
you're
not as
far as they're concerned, that's the problem, Jim.'

      
'Everybody's got the answer,' Jim said. They're all so certain
about it. Nobody seems content with mystery any more. Except me. I love mystery
for its own sake. I think a true appreciation of the quality of mystery is the
most the majority of us can ever hope for.'

      
The glow on the Tor began to flicker in and out, as though
people were moving through it.

      
'We never saw any saucers,' Juanita said sadly. 'I didn't,
anyway. But we knew that when the star people landed they'd land here. Because
this was the centre. And we knew they'd be good aliens who'd respond to our
spiritual aspirations. I used to imagine them coming into the shop - you know,
at night. I'd hear a noise and creep down, and there'd be a couple of benign
beings in shiny suits leafing through the books. To work out how far we'd got
up the spiritual ladder.'

      
Jim was silent for a while, looking up at the gauzy lights on
the Tor. Then he said, 'That's why you've stayed, isn't it? In Glastonbury.'
      
'Sorry?'

      
'Unfinished business. The hippy dream. Peace and love. You still
hope that out of all this chaos there might be the seed of harmony and this is the
place to nurture it. You're still hoping the good aliens will land.'

      
'Don't be ridiculous.' Juanita felt herself blush. 'That would
make me a
very
sad person, wouldn't
it?'

      
She felt his smile. And his own hopeless longing.

waken
stone and darkness gather
waken stone and darkness gather
nahmu nahmu nahmu nah
in the bowl of darkness gather
nahmu nahmu nahmu nah.

The half-whispered chant
was still hissing in Headlice's ears when the circle stopped turning.

      
When he was sure he was still, he looked up to find the whole
of the sky was still revolving, going round and round and round the tower, moon
and stars and wisps of cloud.

      
Moon and stars and wispy
cloud, moon and stars and moon and stars and ... and everything turning into a
chant.
Everything with its own rhythm. Magic.

      
Was it, though? Was it? He glanced at Mort, whose head was
bowed into his chest, dead relaxed as usual. Headlice felt a pulse of anger.

      
Come
on. Get real, you 're just dizzy, man. Magic? Magic's the chemicals working on
the brain. Magic's what you conjure up in yourself to get your head uncluttered
of all that shit about finding a job and taking your place in, like, 'society'.
This pilgrimage, this is a celebration of freedom. This is our country, man,
ours, not yours to put fuckin' fences around. This is where we can come and
breathe the free air and light fires and tell tales about the old gods and get
well pissed and stoned and shag our brains out, and when we wake up in the jingle-jangle
Arabian morning we'll sit around and talk about what it was like up the Tor,
all the presences we felt around us, how, like, holy it was. But it'll all be
in our heads, stoned memories. On account of nothing happened, not really
.

      
Yet this was the real place. The place. Go with it. It may never
happen again like this. Like when they took you into all those St Michael
churches, made you go in backwards; you didn't question that. How are you ever
gonna change if you don't, like, submit, roll with it?
      
He let himself go limp. Rolled with
it.
      
Gwyn was on the stones outside the
tower, the light from the candles on his feet and all the objects around him, which
included a metal cup - like a chalice - and a whip with a leather handle and kind
of thongs, like a cat o'nine tails And a curved, ritual knife, like a little
scythe with the moonlight in its blade.

      
A woman was handing a bowl to Gwyn. It was Rozzie, in a long,
dark, loose robe twitching in the night breeze. (So when, exactly, had his
woman been picked as Gwyn's
handmaiden?) ,

      
Then the people either side of him, Mort and the woman called
Steve, tightening their grip on Headlice's sweating hands as the cup was filled
from the bowl - holy water from
the Chalice Well, someone whispered - and the hands parted to receive the cup
as it was passed around the circle. Holy water from the Chalice Well, cold water,
metal-tasting, passed round anti-clockwise and again and again, and each time
it got to him -
drink deep, drink deep
- the cup always full, so maybe there were two of them or maybe the sacred water
was replenishing itself by... magic.

      
The hands joining again, like clasps in some kind of bracelet,
and the movement re-starting, the cog in the machine, round and round and round
and the drum drumming deep down in his gut and the chant,
nahmu, nahmu,
and the sudden weight of the sky, and when he looked
up the sky was turning around the tower and ... and ...

      
He couldn't feel his feet anymore; he was starting to float.
Aware of Gwyn speaking, hearing the words but like making no sense of it; like
it was coming from way off, and
some of it was in Latin, which figured, if Gwyn had trained as a priest to get
both sides.

      
Gwyn's mellowed out voice was soaring.

      
'
Emitte tenebrae tua et
medacia tua. Ipsa me deduxerunt et adduxetunt …'

      
Headlice suddenly felt very emotional, felt like crying.
      
...
in montem, sanctum tuum ...
'

      
Hands. The skin on the hands gripping his seemed to be putting
up like foam rubber and then Headlice felt something streak through him, hand
to hand to hand ...

      
... like an electric current, and he ...

      
.. . was well off the ground, the air sizzling coldly around him,
all lit up, an ice cascade. Perspective somersaulting; St Michael's tower
groaning at his feet; he was up there. In the darkness.

      
. ..
montem sanctum tuum
...

      
Gwyn's voice rising and sliding and the responses from the
others, a drone, enfolding him like soft curtains. The drum so loud, like it
was inside his head, like he was inside the drum. It was brilliant. He was
truly alive, man.

      
And the priest said,

      
'… oh,
Gwyn ap Nudd, lord of the hollow, guardian of the dark gates, we call upon thee
and offer to thee this …'

'Jim,' Juanita said. 'Jim,
look, I think I'm changing my mind about this.'

      
She crouched, panting, in the grass which was slick with night
dew.

      
They were almost halfway up the Tor. She looked over her shoulder,
in the dark it was like being on a cliff-face; vertigo seized her and she
grabbed at the hillside for support, her hand closing around something she
realised was a hard lump of sheep shit. She ran her fingers convulsively
through the damp grass.

      
'I mean, are we going to make fools of ourselves? When you
think about it, what are we supposed to be preventing? After all, come on,
nobody ever got murdered or anything on the Tor, did they?'

      
'Depends what you call murder,' Jim said. 'Don't imagine Abbot
Whiting saw much justice in what they did to
him
. Anyway ...' He suddenly expelled an angry sigh. 'I'm curious
now. It's a free country. National Trust property. We've got as much right...'

      
'Jim, why don't we just get the police? I was stupid. They won't
arrest Diane, and even if they did ...'

      
'
They
won't want to
know. What's in it for them? Couple of cannabis arrests? They haven't got the
manpower anymore.'

      
'It's just. ..'

      
Jim turned towards her. 'Too old to look after myself?'
      
'No, I ... Oh God'

      
What it came down to was, whatever these neo-hippies were doing
she didn't want to see it. Because she'd been there and it was beautiful once
and she didn't want to watch a sweaty parody of her youth, didn't want to feel
old, didn't want to have to feel disgust.

      
'Why don't we get the car and drive down to Don Moulder's
field and wait for them to come back to their camp? We'll see where Diane goes
and we'll try and snatch her.'

      
'No.' Jim's voice was pitched almost at conversational level. 'I'm
tired of being timid. Too old to be a hippy. Missed the boat. Missed too many
boats.'

      
'Jim …'

      
'Why don't you stay here with the lamp and I'll go up alone.'

      
Juanita looked down at the lights of Glastonbury, thinking,
God, one minute I'm worrying about his heart and his liver and the next ...

      
'Jim!'

      
He'd pushed the lamp into her hands and when she looked up
he'd vanished into a wall of
 
mist.

      
Bloody hell. He was going up there to make a scene. At some
point tonight he'd got this image of himself as a bumbling, ineffectual little man
considered too old to kick ass, and now he had something to prove.
      
No
way
.

      
Juanita went after him, stumbled, her Afghan falling open. She
was aware of a fringe of lights, and a man's hollow voice lifted up into the
night, rhythmic and ecclesiastical, and that didn't sound like what they used
to do in the seventies, not at all.

It started to go wrong very
quickly, all in a rush, and it was so strong Headlice was just dragged down,
like he'd lost the use of his feet, like they'd rotted into mush.

      
Because he was no longer above the Tor, he was
inside
it.

      
In this giant cave, full of mist.

      
It didn't matter too much at first that he had no control ...
got to roll with it, man
. I'm a shaman
now, me. This is where they go, inside the earth, inside themselves
...
Until he realised that without feet you couldn't run away.

      
At some stage, he saw what seemed at first like only a darker
part of the mist. It writhed. It became like a tree, with fuzzy outstretched
branches and little knotty twigs, the kind of wintry tree you see through fog
from a train.

      
And then it wasn't a tree because trees don't move like this:
the branches were dark arms and the twigs were fingers, thin fingers, bony,
wiggling like they were underwater and the currents were doing it, and he saw
arms inside sleeves, torn sleeves, hanging like sodden leaves gone black.