The Chalice (18 page)

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CAREY
AND FRAYNE
Booksellers

High
Street
Glastonbury

Prop. Juanita Carey

14
November

...
I had to write about this, Danny, put it all down, tell someone, even though
I'm never going to send this one. I can't. Promised Jim. Couldn't even tell
Diane what happened on the Tor or even that we were there last night. Although
there's a lot she's told me in the house between one a.m. and dawn, most of it
stuff I really didn't want to hear.

       
It's seven-thirty a. m I haven't been to
bed. You don't even want to imagine what I look like. Diane's taken a cup of chocolate
(couldn't supply hot carob) to the spare room, with instructions not to emerge
until lunchtime.

       
And ...oh, yes, the morning paper just
came, Western Daily Press. With, at the bottom of page one, the item of news
that explained everything

       
Apparently, the Conservative Party last
night chose the man it wants to replace our MP, Sir Laurence Bowkett, who has
announced he won't be fighting another General Election due to his advancing arthritis.

       
The new prospective parliamentary
candidate for Mendip South is one Archer Ffitch, son and heir of prominent Glastonbury
landowner, the Viscount Pennard.
       
Get it?

       
There's Archer smarming his way through
a selection meeting while his wayward sister is camped on the outskirts of with
a bunch of travelling vagrants living off the state and worshipping heathen
gods. Well, imagine if the Press gets of this! So Lord P sends Rankin and son
off to Don Moulder's field - Moulder having presumably tipped him off
- to remove the troublesome child by night, as discreetly as possible.

       
OK, so one of the vagrants gets beaten
up in the process. Big deal. Hardly going to report the assault to the police,
are they? And even if they did, it's one of the accepted hazards of the
travelling life, getting punched around by local vigilantes, etc.

       
Of course, I could report it myself,
respectable High Street businessperson ... 'Well, no, officer, I didn't
personally witness the assault on the poor traveller by Lord Pennard's man, but
I have it on the very highest authority ... The Hon. Diane Ffitch, actually. You
know, the one they call Lady Loony.'

       
Added to which, I could hardly reveal
how I found out about Diane without telling the whole story. And obviously, after
what happened - I may have nightmares about it for years to come - I'm not what
you might call terribly well-disposed towards these particular New Age gypsies,
anyway.

       
Keep shtumm, then. Say nothing to
nobody. Try and forget it. That's the answer. Always benefit from talking
things over with you, Danny.

       
Actually, that's the easiest problem to sort
out. The big one is tucked up in the spare bedroom, dreaming of past lives.

       
When we got in I lit the woodstove. I didn't
need one, especially at that time of night, but you can't talk meaningfully in
front of an empty grate, and I really wanted to know why. What was the silly
little cow DOING with people like that?

       
I'm no wiser. What I got was Diane at
her most infuriatingly fey. I heard about dreams and visions and portents
(including a vinegar shaker in a fish and chip shop which magically resolved
itself into a little Glastonbury Tor).
       
I heard (again) the story of the
Third Nanny, who Diane believes to be the spirit of the High Priestess of
Avalon, Dion Fortune, half a century dead.

       
The truth is, I can't take this stuff
anymore. Even rather read Colonel Pixhill's Diary - at least the old boy was a
confirmed pessimist. I used to think that, at the very worst, New Age was fun.
I got a buzz out of being the mysterious woman who sold books full of arcane
secrets and therefore I must know most of them. I don't really know precisely
when I stopped getting a buzz out of it, or precisely why, but I suspect that seeing
what it had done to Diane was at least a factor.

       
When your birth coincides with the death
of your mother and your father blames you for that and you grow up in an
all-male household of the worst kind, you become susceptible to the most
absorbent kind of fantasy, and you start to live in your head most of the time.
And when what's outside of your head happens to be Glastonbury, on the legendary
isle of Avalon, and every time you look out of your bedroom window there s the
magical Tor on the horizon
 
. . what hope
is there for you?

       
Because she could always escape into her
secret world, Diane let her family bounce her around, from relative to relative,
boarding school to boarding school. Never known any other life, thought it was
quite normal. Suddenly, at the age of twenty-seven she wakes up m Yorkshire in
an arranged job, with an arranged marriage on the horizon, and she thinks, this
is ridiculous, I'm a grown -up now, a person in my own right

       
For the first time, a rebel. She finds a
suitably outrageous way out, sends back her ring, joins the raggle-taggle
gypsies. Been a long time coming; most of her contemporaries made their absurd
gestures of independence at the age of about sixteen.

       
And because she really knows this is a
fairly adolescent kind of stunt, Diane has to make it Significant by throwing
the esoteric cloak over everything. Oh, it was meant... part of the great
cosmic design ... I was summoned back ... I had magic signals from the Tor.
It's my destiny!

       
Well, bullshit, obviously, but if she
goes around telling people about it at this end of town, they'll just all
screech. Wow, too much man, far out, and set her up as Avalon's Seer of the
Week. Meanwhile, indigenous locals will shake their heads and mutter about what
an awful cross old Pennard has to bear, with that Lady Loony.

       
And here's me in the middle again.

       
Pennard already hates me for exposing an
unstable child to an unlimited supply of occult literature (I hate me for that
as well, but it could've been worse, she might have gone to Ceridwen).

       
And now I've blackmailed the noble lord
into letting the family madwoman loose in Glastonbury again, and he and Archer
are going to be in a constant state of tension about what she might do to
discredit the House of Pennard before the next Election. And when the Ffitches
get tense - as amply demonstrated last night - they can do damage. The British aristocracy's
full of genetic anomalies, and Archer - well, he's sort of Diane in negative, I
suppose: hard and dark where she's nice and squashy and sort of
pastel-coloured. But just as loopy, I reckon, in his way.

       
Everything in Glastonbury inevitably
becomes EXTREME. Who said that? Me, I suppose. New Age mystic turned born-again
agnostic. I'd decided that healthy scepticism was the key to survival in this
town, but if you 're a sceptic what's the point of being here anyway? Should I
get out now, do you think, before something erupts? I don't know. Maybe I need
a man again. Maybe I need a guru. Or God.

       
Talking of Whom, I'm told the Bishop of
Bath and Wells has been making overtures to the New Age community. There's to
be some sort of conference at which Liberal Christians are to 'interface' with
well intentioned Green pagans to try and build a framework for possible
Spiritual Bonding in the run up to the Third Millennium.
       
Only in Glastonbury.
       
Are we ALL going mad, or what?
       
And can anybody out there help us?

       
Don't answer that. Can't anyway, if I'm
not sending it.

       
Goodnight.
What's left of it.

Part Two

The pseudo-occultism of the
present day, with its dubious psychism, wild theorising and evidence that
cannot stand up to the most cursory examination, is but the detritus which accumulates
around the base of the Mount of Vision.

Dion
Fortune
Sane Occultism

ONE

Harmless

The Welsh Border

It was a moody frontier
town squashed between dark English hills and even darker Mid Wales hills. The
stone cottage was at the end of a deep-sunk dirt track, two, three miles beyond
the huddled town of Kington.

      
Locating the place by car had been a problem for publisher Ben
Corby, who hadn't travelled much outside London for a couple of yean now,
except on planes. And who had always - despite his enthusiasm for
The Old Golden Land
- found the
countryside basically hostile.
      
So this place immediately gave him
the creeps.
      
It was a low cottage, barrack-block
long, the last of the light making its windows opaque and sinister, like Mafia sunglasses.
No sooner had he switched off the ignition than something came rushing out at
his car: a black and white dog or maybe a big cat. Something disturbing about
it, the way it moved. Ben nervously wound his window down as a shadow edged
around a door at one end of the long cottage.

      
'OK, Arnold.' Was the voice familiar? Was it him?
      
Ben's headlights showed that the
animal was, in fact, a dog.

      
And that it had only three legs.

      
Uncanny, The disabled dog was just sitting there in the headlights,
not barking, not even blinking. Ben didn't get out; a three-legged dog was
probably a dog with a grudge.

      
'It's a friend,' the dog was told by the shadow. 'Possibly.'

      
Possibly. He'd come to the right place then. And the author of
The Old Golden Land
was evidently
prepared for the worst.

Half an hour later, relieved
to be out of the wild country and by a warmish wood-fire with a can of lager on
the arm of his chair, Ben came, in his blunt Yorkshire fashion, to the point.

      
'Be suicide, mate. For all of us.'

      
The dog lay on his intact side, eyes open and a furry stump
pointing at Ben as if it was his fault, the dog having only three legs.

      
'If we go with this, we might as well pulp our entire back-catalogue.
Britain's premier New Age publisher does not put out a book advising people to hang
up their dowsing rods and trade in their tarot cards for a pack of Happy Families.'

      
The dog lay on a sheepskin rug under a table with a converted
paraffin lamp on it. Next to this Ben had dumped Joe's manuscript:
Mythscapes: The Old Golden Land Revalued.

      
Joe Powys stared into the fire. Ben thought, Where's his
woman? Why just him and a three-legged dog?

      
He'd been on at Joe to write a book about what really happened
at Crybbe and Joe had said nobody would believe it. He'd agreed finally to
produce a follow-up to his New Age classic,
The
Old Golden Land
, and here it was ... and the bloody thing was anti-New Age.
Not to say anti meditation. Anti-fortune telling. Anti-ghost-hunting.

      
But only as much as Hitler had been anti-Semitic.

      
'So, Joe. How do you propose to live?'

      
Powys raised his eyebrows. Hair fully grey now (prematurely,
just about). But the face on the back of the book could still help unload a few
thousand copies on wispy, wistful ladies.

      
'You're still a young ... youngish guy. And almost - you can't
deny it - a cult figure, once, an icon. So, OK, you've had a change of heart,
unfortunately a seriously uncommercial one. You want to talk about it?'

      
This was a phrase Ben Corby had learned never to use to an
author whose book he'd turned down. The bastards always wanted to talk about
it. At length. But this one he did want to know about. What turns a wispy
mystic into a hardened sceptic?

      
'Don't make me feel bad,' Powys said. 'You drive all this way
to bring me a customised rejection slip—'

      
'Because we're old mates.'

      
'Right. Well, I'm sorry, old mate. But how can you write a
book you wouldn't have the nerve to go out and promote and say you believe in
it?'