The Chalice (68 page)

Extreme and Everlasting

THE OLD VICARAGE

COLN ST MARY
GLOUCESTERSHIRE

My
dear Mrs Carey,

       
Your no doubt somewhat bewildered
receipt of this parcel follows either my death or my discreet removal to some
secluded nursing home where the wheelchairs are locked up at night to ensure
the inmates do not escape!

       
No, do mot mourn for me, my dear. Save
all your grief. You may well need it.
       
Let me say, at the outset, that
burdening you with this matter is something in the way of a last resort, the
flailing gesture of an old, tired and sadly ineffectual man who has, for some
years, been attempting to stay afloat in waters beyond his depth. I was hoping
to, as they say, sort things out myself, with the help of others. This has
clearly not been possible in the time left to me, especially as there now seem to
be remarkably few 'others' I feel able to trust. Also the situation seems to have
escalated at an alarming rate, as poor George implied it might as we approach the
Millennium.

       
Be assured, however, that I would not
expect you to do anything beyond coming to the rescue of my good and staunch
friend, Verity Endicott, who is in grave and mortal danger, standing as she
does directly in the path of (and, God help me, I do not exaggerate) an old and
utterly merciless evil.

       
Oh, Mrs Carey, how it pains me to have to
use language of such Biblical intensity. Yet I beg of you not to dismiss it as nonsense
as I, to my shame, have done in the past.

       
As a highly intelligent and worldly
woman, you must have wondered many times why, in seeking a strictly limited
outlet for George Pixhill's Diary, we approached you. And, indeed, your shop
was hardly picked at random from Yellow Pages.
       
The truth is that, despite your
merits as a bookseller (and, indeed, your not inconsiderable personal charms)
you were chosen primarily because of your long association with Diane Ffitch, a
young woman who, I am obliged to say, may now also be in danger of a most
extreme and everlasting nature. I do not know the girl, but I rather suspect it
would be unwise to show her this material directly. Perhaps the facts could be broken
to her in stages. I leave this to your personal assessment of Miss Ffitch's
state of mind.

       
As you can imagine, my association with
Colonel George Pixhill (and how often I have cursed the poor man) has compelled
me to delve, with a good deal of distaste, into arcane and occult matters
better left, in my view, to moulder among the pages of ancient and disreputable
books. Perhaps your professional knowledge of such volumes will render some of
this more accessible to you than it has, over the years, been to me.

       
As I may have mentioned, the most
important items here are the 'missing' sections of the Pixhill diaries which we
were unable, for reasons which will become apparent, to publish.

       
You have probably asked yourself many
times: what was the point in publishing the diaries at all and in such a
restricted fashion? Well, firstly, as I have tried to explain, George was most insistent
that his knowledge of the Dark Chalice become not widely known but yet accessible
to those might find it meaningful, at a time when the two- thousand-year-old Glastonbury
tradition would face a terrible challenge. (I believe that challenge is upon
us-or, upon YOU.)

       
Secondly, it is especially clear to me
now that had we not published when we did the Pixhill diaries would NEVER have
seen the light of day. I did not realise for a long time how close George was
to the source of it and that some of the danger might emanate from within the Pixhill
Trust itself. It can only have been a rare prescience on my part that persuaded
me to publish the diaries when we did and to entrust them to an outside agency
- that is, your good self.
       
How drastically things have changed
in that short time. I had my health then and there was a sound nucleus of us
old comrades at the heart of the Trust. As I write, I am the only founder member
left alive. When you read this, there will be none of us left unclaimed by
disease, senility or accidents of the kind which tend to befall the elderly.
Had I been a wiser
man, I might have sought protection.
       
Ah, but we are old soldiers, used
to an enemy we can perceive. How could we have had any idea of the possible
implications of helping out a friend?
       
I have no more to say. Let George
Pixhill speak for himself. Thank you my dear. From wherever I am, I pray for
you, for Verity and for Miss Ffitch.

                               
God bless you
all.

Timothy Shepherd.

      
Powys folded the letter.

      
In his head a big book fell from a shelf.

      
A tweed hat swung on a branch.

      
A steaming black bus roared through the night.

The irony of it did not
escape Don Moulder.

      
He laid the ten-pound notes one by one in the scrap dealer's
outstretched hand.

      
'… three-thirty, three-forty, three-fifty.'

      
Fat grey snowflakes came down on the yard like sheep at feeding
time.

      
'What you gonner do with it, then?' the scrap dealer asked.

      
'None o' your business.' Don Moulder wound the rubber band
round the remains of his wad.

      
Three hundred and fifty. Exactly what he'd been paid for letting
the parasites in. A terrible rip-off, but it could be bad luck to haggle.

      
'You wanner start 'im up, have a gander at the engine?'

      
The dealer trying it on now.
      
'No, thank you.'

      
'Bloody morbid, you ask me,' said the dealer, bold bugger now
he'd got his money.

      
'Well, no bugger is askin' you. So you keep your trap shut,
mister.'

      
The scrap-dealer grinned, pocketed the money. The extra fifty
for the time of delivery.

      
Don Moulder drew him a little map. 'After dark. Well after
dark, all right? No need to knock on the door, I don't want the wife to know.
You just leave it there, got that?'

      
Don walked out to his old Subaru. He didn't want anyone to see
it till the Bishop arrived at dawn.

Verity put the letter down,
      
'Such a kind man,' she said.
      
'Is that all you can say?' Powys
drank half his disgusting camomile tea without blinking. 'This guy thinks
you're in mortal danger, standing - he picked up the letter - ''in the path of -
and, God help me, I do not exaggerate - an old and utterly merciless evil,"
What Does he mean? Do you know? Do you have any idea?'

      
Verity went prim. 'I really don't consider myself qualified to
attempt a definition.'

      
Powys tried another one. 'What does Grainger think is inside
that well?'

      
'Energy. That is what he said. Energy which has been stifled...'

      
'I heard that, Verity. I didn't believe it. I don't think you
believed it.'

      
They had taken the parcel into the kitchen.
Even with all its lights on, the dining room was not the most suitable place in
which to read for long.

      
Verity poured him, to his dismay, more camomile tea.
      
'Joe, I'm sorry. You will have to
excuse my apparent unwillingness to cooperate. I'm unsure. Unsure of what I
know and what I only think I know. More than that, I'm unsure of how much the
Colonel would wish me to say.'
      
'He's dead, Verity.'

      
'He remains, through his Trust, my employer.'
      
'Who runs the Trust now then?'

      
'Faceless people,' Verity said. 'Solicitors, accountants. And
Oliver. I don't know how Oliver worked his way in. As an employee, I am not
party to such administrative details.'

      
'But they didn't get on.'

      
'I fear that's something of an understatement. After Mrs
Pixhill had her breakdown, she and the boy went to live in a rented flat in the
town. Neither of them would have understood why the Colonel could not sell
Meadwell.'
      
'Meadwell was the reason for her
breakdown?'
      
'It couldn't have been easy,'
Verity said, 'for any of them.'

      
'And Oliver was resentful?'

      
'Oliver hated his father, Joe. The thought that the work of
the Trust might now be influenced by a man who would do anything to besmirch
the Colonel's memory fills me with horror.'

      
'And what is the work of the Trust? What's its actual purpose?'

      
'Officially,' Verity said, 'to further the cause of peace and
harmony in a troubled world. Rather inexact, I'm afraid.'
      
'But unofficially?'

      
'Unofficially ...' Verity hesitated. 'Unofficially, to prevent
Meadwell falling once more into the hands of the Ffitch family.'

'How did my mother die?'

      
I wondered when you
would ask that.

      
'They told me what she died of. They never told me how she…'

      
Go on.

      
'I don't know what I'm asking.'
      
I
think you do.

      
Sometimes she awoke thinking it was morning. Thinking she'd
slept a very long time. Sometimes it was as if she'd only minutes before closed
her eyes. Sometimes she felt relaxed, sometimes frightfully agitated. Always
this question at the back of her mind.

      
'Someone ... someone said she was pushed downstairs.'

      
Well,
there you are. You do know, don't you? Do you need the bedpan again? Nurse,
fetch a bedpan, please.

      
'Why won't you tell me? You were there. No one knows more than
you.'

      
Because you must work it
out for yourself. And decide what to do about it.

      
'Who pushed her?'

      
You know who pushed her.
You were very small. Not yet born. But you know. Your mother told you. Through
the blood.

SEVEN

Lourdes

And slowly it all began to
make a kind of incredible sense.

      
As he read page after page of primitive typescript, Powys lost
all contact with his surroundings. He was entering Pixhill's Avalon.

      
Here was the lost heart of the diaries. Insert the missing chapter,
the missing parts of existing chapters and what you had was no longer the aimless
ramblings of a man without a discernible purpose, but the record of a tense,
thirty year defence campaign by the stoical old soldier and - whether she was
aware of it or not - a little spinster who could not See.

      
First, there was the section of the introduction bridging the
void between Pixhill's vision of the Tor in a stifling tank and his arrival in
Glastonbury. It opened with the Colonel back home, in a military hospital,
where ...

         
... trying to pin down the image, I
produced drawing after drawing of the conical hill I had seen and showed it to
everyone who came through the ward. They looked at my rough efforts, to humour
me, I suppose, and shook their heads. Until, one day, a dapper man in a
good-quality brown suit came to visit me. He pulled a chair close to the bed
and took from an inside pocket one of my drawings which he said one of the
doctors had passed on to him.

         
'Glastonbury Tor,' he said. 'In
Somerset. There is no mistaking it. It is a place we ourselves have been made
aware of lately.'

         
'We?' I said suspiciously. At which he
took out his wallet and produced his papers. Quite an eye-opener. My visitor,
one Stanley Willett, turned out to be a highly placed civil servant in the War
Ministry. Intelligence, I guessed, for these fellows will never say as much.