The Chalice (57 page)

      
Come on, Sammy, where's
your brain gone? It's the road! The sensitive Glastonbury stretch of the
Bath-Taunton fucking Relief Road! It's happening now. Here. In secret.

      
Sam felt like one of-those poor bloody trees, all the sap in
him drying up, everything crashing to earth around him. This was some of the
finest broadleaf woodland in Somerset. A wildlife paradise, with badger sets
and all kinds of birds and wild orchids.

      
Scorched earth, now. He scrambled down, stood in the deep,
wide trench, flashed his torch from one side to the other. It was massive,
surely twice as wide as a dual carriageway. But then, they had to allow for the
banks, the verges and the hard shoulder.

      
It made some sense when you thought about it. If Pennard had
sold a chunk of his precious land for the road, what he didn't want was a few
hundred eco-guerrillas camping out on the site and living in the trees to prevent
them being axed. This was a pre-emptive strike.

      
He shone his torch ahead of him. The beam faded out before the
road did. When he looked up, he could see the Tor again, looking shadowy and
majestic ... and dead straight ahead.

      
The full horror of the plan, the awesome scale of it made him
go cold. He'd never liked the idea, but he'd figured he could live with it Not
quite the stab to the heart it was to Woolly and those guys.

      
But suddenly he wanted to cry aloud. This was England, Ancient
England. He could hear the traffic already, he could smell exhaust and diesel
fumes. See the articulated lorries and holiday coaches and the flash gits in
their Porsches, all the men like Archer Ffitch, all the women like Charlotte.
      
The hounds began to howl in their
kennels. Heard him, maybe. So what? He was going to let this out, what they'd
done - illegally, no doubt - and it would damage Pennard and Archer a whole lot
more than just sabbing their hunt,
      
The howling went on. It dawned on
Sam that this was no ordinary howling. He began to feel uncomfortable. Exposed.
He moved away along the trench, walking quickly along the ruts, dodging the
remains of bonfires, the hounds going at it all the time like the Wild Hunt of
bloody Gwyn ap Nudd. It was creepy, like moving through an open wound, like he
was stumbling into a bleak and ravaged future. Up on the banks, exposed, bare
saplings were writhing and rattling.

      
Unexpectedly, he saw Glastonbury Tor again. It was a shock; it
was so close, and sheer like a castle, the road aimed straight at it. It
couldn't be, of course, because the published plan showed the route giving the
Tor quite a wide berth; it just looked like it the way this section was
aligned, like it would cut directly through the middle of the hill, under the tower.

      
The howling stopped. There was a great stillness. An icy
stillness. Sam had that feeling of being watched. Of someone rearing up behind
him.

      
He spun round irritably, and all the breath went out of him.

      
There was a man standing, staring silently up at Glastonbury
Tor. An elderly, straight backed man in an overcoat.
      
He held a pipe in his mouth. Sam smelled
the tobacco, just briefly. The old man's face was pale and hazy and fibrous, like
soiled cotton-wool; there was a ridged scar under one eye.

      
Least it wasn't Pennard. Sam tried to laugh with relief, tried
to speak to the old guy, but he couldn't find the breath.

      
The man turned very slowly to face him. Sam saw that he wore
very long, dark trousers. So long that they covered up the shoes. In fact he
couldn't see where the trousers ended.

      
This was because the old man was hovering about six inches
above the rutted track. His rigid arm was pointing at the Tor. His jaw fell
open, revealing no teeth, only a black void, and his eyes were like white gas.

      
The old man's scream was silent.

      
Unlike Sam's.

NINE

Meaningless Kind of Violence

It must have been halfway
down Benedict Street, where Woolly lived and worked, that Diane got a bad
feeling. It said,
Go back.

      
She stopped and frowned. She seemed to spend most of her life
responding to feelings, waiting for signals and beacons on the horizon. Never
seemed to think for herself. Never seemed to reason

      
So she walked on. This had, after all, been one of her favourite
places in all the world. Ever such a little shop, in a tiny square, at the end
of a short alley off Benedict Street, and all it said over the door was:
WOOLLY'S.

      
As a child of about eleven or twelve, she used to persuade
Rankin to bring her into town to visit a friend. He didn't, of course, know who
the friend was.

      
She'd spend hours watching Woolly in his workshop in the back.
He was with a lady called Maria then. The business hadn't been going long, and
they were mostly working on specialist jobs, recreating medieval string
instruments for folk groups. Woolly was a fan of people like The Incredible String
Band and Amazing Blondel who Diane was a bit too young to remember, but on
their record sleeves they wore colourful, medieval patchwork clothes and Woolly
said they came from a gentler time and she believed that. It always sounded
like a different dimension. Like Middle Earth, everybody wearing floppy clothes
and laughing a lot, light as butterflies.

      
Diane paused, sure she'd heard a footfall behind her. But
there was nobody. It was unusually quiet, as though the tragedy had made people
want to lock their front doors and cling to their families.

      
It must be wonderful to have a family you cling to.

      
She stopped.

      
A shadow had flitted around a corner about a hundred yards
away and vanished into the alley leading to Woolly's square. And another one,
another shadow. She saw them through a vague mist. So much mist on the street
these nights.

      
Diane slipped into the doorway of a dry cleaner's about
seventy yards away from Woolly's alley. Just as there came one of those sounds
that instinctively made you cringe: the shattering of glass.

      
And then,

      
'Woolaston!' Echoing from the square. 'We've come for you,
Woolaston! Get yourself out here, you murdering little fucker!'

      
A rolling, local accent. Young. Diane dragged in a long,
trembling breath, held herself close to the shop door.

      
More breaking glass, but a blunter sound this time. She pictured
a boot hacking out the shards left at the edges of
the window.

      
Woolly's shop had just the one window, about the size of a
living-room window in a small terraced house. It screened a little museum
display of reproduction antique instruments, usually a narrow,
eighteenth-century Spanish guitar and a tiny mandolin with lots of mother
of-pearl. And, unless he'd sold it at last, one of Woolly's own inventions with
a long neck and a terracotta sound box the size of a football.
         

      
There was cackling male laughter, then a different voice,
mock-official.
      
'Councillor Woolaston?'

      
Silence. Oh gosh, don't let him be in. But where would he be?
Where could he go tonight and not have to endure the stares and the righteous
abuse?

      
'Councillor Woolaston, sir!' Louder, rougher. A roar. 'You
better get into your best suit and your dinky little bobcap. You've just been
invited to a special meeting of the beating-the-shit-out-of-mangy-little-hippies
sub-committee'

'And are you?' Juanita
said.

      
'I doubt it. I doubt he was capable by then.'
      
The self-service restaurant had a
Christmas tree and all the counter staff wore little Santa hats. It was quite
crowded and Juanita was feeling jittery, holding her hands in front of her like
pieces of cracked porcelain.

      
She sat down at a window table, as far away from other people
as possible. She needed to find out very quickly whether J.M. Powys was someone
she could trust.

      
'So, if you aren't his son ...?'

      
'Then it's probably in some way down to me. Some aspect of me
comes down in the night, rearranges the shelves, untidies the room. Something
in me that hates being a has-been recluse and would like to be a great and famous
writer like his namesake. Something that wrecks the little refuge to force me
to get my act together.'

      
'And dispatches you to Glastonbury?'

      
'That was Dan Frayne. And coincidence.'

      
'That's not very convincing, Mr Powys. I'm slightly horrified
to hear myself say it, but this is one of those cases where the paranormal
explanation seems the more logical.

      
She watched him unwrap a straw and put it into his coffee.

      
'That's the slippery slope, Mrs Carey. Some things we are not
meant to make sense of.'

      
'That's the coward's philosophy,' Juanita said. 'OK, it's been
my philosophy too. Otherwise, Glastonbury buggers you up. Pixhill's parting message;
ignore it at your peril, Glastonbury Buggers You Up.'

      
'And how did it bugger him up?' Powys asked. 'In the end.'

      
'He went out one cold morning in November and had a fatal
coronary halfway up the Tor. They brought him back and hid him out on the
dining table at Meadwell. Where he lay for three days, guarded by little
Verity, his housekeeper. That, er ... that room, according to legend, was where
the last abbot of Glastonbury had his final meal. Before they strung him up. On
the Tor. On November 15. Which was, of course …'

      
'The date Pixhill died?'

      
'Another coincidence for you.' Feeling slightly foolish,
Juanita sipped her coffee through the straw, the first time she'd done this in
public.

      
'Mrs Carey,' Powys said. 'I - I'm not sure how to put this - I
seem to have walked into a ... a situation.'

      
'Oh yes.'

      
'Diane says it's meant.'

      
'Diane thinks everything is meant,' Juanita said. 'Let me guess
- you're John Cowper Powys, she's Dion Fortune and you've both been brought to
Glastonbury to help deal with something of apocalyptic magnitude.'

      
Powys stirred his tea. 'So you think she's ... ?'

      
'Off her trolley?'

      
Juanita thought for a while, watching the young waiters
looking overworked, underpaid and sullen in their Santa hats.

      
'No,' she said at last. 'There've been times when I've thought
she was ... shall we say psychologically stretched. A victim of
 
her upbringing. Living a fantasy life of her
own creation because real life at Cold Comfort Hall was so bloody dire and
restrictive. I feel a bit ashamed of thinking that now.'

      
'Now?'

      
'Being in hospital you have a lot of time to think. That's not
always good. I don't know. Maybe I'm just as screwed up as she is.'

      
'What do I do about these?' Powys pulled over a plate with two
chocolate muffins on it.

      
'Embarrassing.' Juanita said. 'Can't pick it up, Powys. In
hospital they fed me like an animal in the zoo. Little Karen was probably right,
I could be in deep trouble out here.'

      
'How about this?' Powys presented a muffin in a napkin. 'I'll
hold it while you take a bite. Or I could take a bite out of the other side at
the same time and then everyone will think we're soppy lovers and they'll be
embarrassed.'

      
Juanita smiled.

They'd smashed the window
with a brick and pulled out about five instruments. The
eighteenth-century-style guitar was clamped to the stomach of a stocky,
wide-shouldered man who was standing in the middle of the street trying to prise
heavy metal chords out of it.

      
Another, much younger person was banging on a shamanic drum
with half a brick and bawling up at the window over the shop, 'Come on out,
Woolly. Join the band. You little piece of dogshit.'