The Chalice (28 page)

      
'Against all the laws of nature! That's the sick truth behind
your pretty little legend. And that's why I could no longer bear to be fronting
a business called Holy Thorn Ceramics alongside an idiot who thinks it's all
sooooo romantic.'

      
Domini snatched the plate from Diane's hands, laid it carefully
on a flagstone.

      
'If that's your idea of art you must be stupider than you look.'

      
Domini jumped on the plate with both feet. A middle-aged man
and a woman holding hands, the first sign of normal life since this episode
began, crossed the street to avoid them.
       
'Excuse
me ...' Diane shouted, but they ignored her and only walked faster.

      
'Don't be such a wimp.' Domini took two plates and clapped
them together in the air like cymbals. Her brittle laughter exploded with the
pottery.

FIVE

Goddess

SWASTIKA CLUE ... The
evening paper was on the table next to Juanita's wineglass, folded through the
headline.

      
Juanita had drunk three glasses of house white and hardly
noticed them go down. Jim was chuntering on about preserving the mystery.

      
The paper had revealed another mystery. The police were investigating
it. Juanita wished to God Tony Dorrell-Adams would drink up and go so she could
discuss this development with Jim, decide what they were going to do. But Tony
just slumped in his chair; whatever he'd been telling Jim earlier, he wasn't
going to talk about it with Juanita around.

      
'It's like the Holy Grail,' Jim said. 'If somebody dug up an
ancient cup under the Chalice Well and it was proved to be the actual Grail the
whole thing would be diminished, reduced to another sterile antique in a glass
case. There'd be no buggering
mystery
.'

      
'Bullshit, sir,' roared a voice from behind. 'The discovery of
that Holy Grail would be the best thing as could happen to this town.'

      
Oh hell. Griff Daniel. Juanita looked up, throwing a defensive
arm over the paper. Just what they could do without.

      
And a reborn Griff Daniel, it seemed. The last time she'd seen
him he'd been grim-faced, his grey and white beard bedraggled, his eyes full of
sour suspicion. Looking, in fact, exactly like a bent builder who'd lost his
seat on the council to a hippy. Now, grinning savagely through a freshly
trimmed beard, he'd virtually erupted at their table.

      
'Now you just imagine. Mr Battle, if we had that bloody Grail
banged up in a glass case. No more weirdos with dowsing sticks claimin' they
knew where it was buried. No more lunatics having visions of the thing and sayin'
they'd been singled out by the Lord. No more bloody speculation. No more room
for dreamers and nutcases. Think what that would do for this town.'

      
'Make it exceedingly bloody boring,' said Jim.

      
'Ah.' Griff accepted a pint of Guinness from the barman and
paid. 'Now that's where we differ, Mr Battle. You look like a regular sort with
a decent haircut, but behind it all you're still an immigrant. One o' them.'

      
'Listen, buster,' Jim said mildly, 'I'll have you know I'm not
one of
them
or one of you either.
There are a few buggering individuals left.'

      
'In this town, Mr Battle, there's only two sides: locals and
hippies. Even if some of 'em does wear jackets and tweed hats and is old enough
to know better.'

      
Juanita saw Jim tense at the mention of his hat.

      
'What gets me, look ...' Griff burrowed into his pint and emerged
with froth spiked in his beard like cotton buds, '... is they d' think they got
somethin' to show us 'bout how to live our lives. By God, I wouldn't live like
that if it ...'

      
'They think', Jim said, 'that if they're living here,
something will help them to become better people. That it's easier to be a
better person here because of a spiritual atmosphere to which you appear to be
oblivious.'

      
'Spiritual!' Griff's tankard connected derisively with a
beer-mat. 'Bullshit, mister. You tellin' me we didn't have our abbey and our
bit of tourism 'fore they come flooding the town with their cranky fads?'

      
'That's not what I'm saying at all, and you …'

      
'And didn't we used to have a proper town centre back then,
with real shops sellin' stuff ordinary fold wanted to buy? And wasn't our
property prices on a par with Somerton and Castle Carey if not better? And did
people laugh at us in them days? No, mister, they did not.'

      
'What days?' said Jim irritably. 'There's always been an alternative
community in Glastonbury. If you go back to the twenties and thirties - Dion
Fortune at Chalice Orchard. And then Cowper Powys wrote that enormous novel …'

      
'Gah,' said Griff. 'Filthy bastard. Bloody ole pervert. Never
showed his face here after that come out, 'cordin' to my old dad.' He finished
his Guinness with a flourish. 'But I'll tell you what's behind all this,
mister. That bloody hill. Brings out the hippies with their weird ceremonies
and such. Pull 'em in like a kiddies' playground. Take that thing away and what
you got is an ordinary, decent country town with a ruined abbey.'

      
'But you
can't
take
it away,' Jim said patiently. 'You're stuck with it.'

      
'No you can't, that's true.' A gleam arrived in Griff's foxy
eyes and a little smile crawled out of his beard. 'But you can keep
them
away. You can make that nasty
little hill into as near as dammit a no-go area. If you goes about it right.'

      
'Got a plan, have we, Mr Daniel?'

      
'Ah, well. You could say that. You could indeed.' Griff Daniel
stood up, looking smugly secretive. 'Glastonbury first, Mr Battle.
Glastonbury First!'

      
'I'm sorry.' Tony
Dorrell-Adams rose unsteadily to his feet 'I didn't come here to listen to an
argument.' He pushed past Griff towards the door. 'Not what this town should be
about.'

      
'Who the hell's he to know what the bloody town should be
about?' Griff dropped into Tony's seat.

      
'Just a dreamer,' Jim said sadly. 'Just a nutcase.'

      
'Aye, well,' said Griff, 'I got to say I'd hoped for better from
you, Mr Battle. I knows you're a bit of an artist an' that, but … You're very
quiet tonight, Mrs Carey.'

      
'And you', she said, 'are looking unusually buoyant, Mr Daniel.'
He'd once made a pass at her when she and Danny had ventured down to the
Rifleman's Arms and had a row and Danny had walked out. Griff evidently
assuming, prior to getting his face slapped, that ex-hippies had few morals and
no taste.

      
'I'll say this, lady.' Griff wagged a bloated forefinger.
'I'll say this an' no more. There's a change on its way. An' when it comes
we're gonner have 'em out. Every phoney healer. Every fortune telling charlatan.
Every last dinky cult-follower. Run out of town, with their bloody jazz sticks
up their arses. So them that's old enough to know better maybe oughter be
thinkin' which side you're really on. 'Cause from now on, my friends, it's
gonner be Glastonbury First.'

      
He beamed at them, smugly.

      
'It's, erm, joss sticks,' Jim said.

      
'What?'

      
'You said "jazz sticks".'

      
'Gah!' Griff Daniel pushed back his chair and slouched off in
search of more malleable company. After a few moments he turned on his heel,
raised a hand to the barman and went out.

'Oh my Gods'. It's him. He's
coming. Quick! Mustn't let him see us. Where can we go?'

      
'Into the bookshop.' Diane pulled out her keys, seizing the
opportunity to get the crazy woman off the street.
      
Inside, she steered Domini into the
back parlour and flung a log into the stove.

      
'Energy.' Domini pulled at her hair. 'I had to use the energy.
The spore's in the air. Now or never, Diana.'

      
She'd left a trail of coloured plates perhaps a hundred yards
long from The George and Pilgrims to the door of Holy Thorn Ceramics. Except it
wasn't Holy Thorn Ceramics any more. Domini had gone into the shop and switched
on the lights in the window.

      
The lights were purple now. They spotlit a crudely repellent
squatting earthenware woman with a hole between her legs the size of a chimney
pot. Around her lumpen head with its jagged grin was a wreath of brambles.

      
'No more Holy Thorn!' Domini had screeched. The Goddess lives
here now. The Goddess
lives
!'

      
'Tea, I think,' Diane said.
      
'No wine?'

      
'The last thing you need is wine.'

      
She'd half expected Domini would suddenly collapse into tears,
shattered by the realisation of what she'd done while carried away on this
dangerous overflow of energy.

      
But the golden woman had slipped gracefully into the rocking
chair, crossing her legs, the diaphanous white dress gliding back along her
thighs.

      
Diane put the kettle on. 'This is really ever so silly, you know.
It's not incompatible at all.'

      
'That's what I thought at first,' Domini said. 'I became aware
of the need for a religion, and this was the only really English one. I mean,
all that stuff about Israel - the Holy Land. Well it never seemed very holy to
me, all these Jews and Arabs killing each other. This was my holy land. England.
I mean, why not?'

      
She stretched her neck, leaned her golden head into the spindly
back of the rocking chair. At least some of the hyper-urgency had gone out of
her. She was like a racehorse steaming in the winners' enclosure.

      
'That hymn, I suppose, turned me on to it, when I was at
school.
And did those feet in ancient
times
... ? All those lovely lines,
the
bow of burning gold
... Wonderful. Until you get to the last bit.'

      
'"Till we have built Jerusalem ..."'
      
'Exactly. If you've got a green and
pleasant land why deface it with a filthy warren full of Arab muggers? Anyway, our
religion's so much older than theirs. They'd heard about this legendary holy
island in the West with the power to transform people's lives, a place where
you could walk with the spirits, and they wanted a piece of the action. Simple
as that.'

      
A ragged voice came from the street.

      
'Where are you, you heartless, evil bitch?'

      
'Ah.' Domini didn't move. 'Tony seems to have found one of his
plates.'

      
There was a ringing silence. Then a long wail of pure, cold
anguish from the street. As if the man out there had suddenly taken a knife
deep into his stomach.

      
And then a window shattered.

'Something afoot,' Jim said.
'Something involving Daniel and Archer Ffitch. You hear what he said?
Glastonbury First. You see, that's Archer's new slogan. It's all in here ...'

      
He fumbled at the paper. Totally ignoring the swastika story,
Juanita noticed.

      
'Can Archer Ffitch afford to lose that much credibility?' she
wondered.

      
'Don't underrate that man.'

      
'Which of them do you mean?' Juanita got up. 'Same again?'

      
'Either. Both. Stay there, sit down, I'll get them. I owe you
more than a few drinks.'

      
'You don't owe me a thing.' But he'd already gathered up their
glasses.

      
While he was at the bar, Juanita took the opportunity to open
out the evening paper. The headline was no less shaking.

Swastika Clue in Bus Body
Mystery

New-Age travellers all over the West were being questioned by detectives
today following the discovery of a man's body in an abandoned 'hippy' bus.

       
The dead man, believed to
have head injuries, was found inside the vehicle early this morning by a woman
walking her dog in woodland at Stoke St Michael near Shepton Mallett.