The Chalice (77 page)

      
'You're just not concentrating,' Woolly said. 'I can understand
that. But you got to keep playing, man. You let go of your mind in this house,
it ... You just don't, OK.'

      
'Something happen to you?'

      
'I don't know,' Woolly growled. 'That's the other thing, you
never quite know.'

      
'Some things you know,' Sam said, not thinking of the house.

      
Woolly picked up on it. He grinned. 'She's a wonderful girl, Sammy.
Surprised me, though, I got to say. You coming round to it. After that
Charlotte.'

      
'Mmm, well,' Sam said. 'Something happened.'

      
'Like?'

      
'Like why a confirmed atheist and non-believer in anything you
can't either spend or save from predatory upperclass gits with hunting horns is
suddenly scared to go in that room next door.'

      
'Oh,' said Woolly. 'Like that.'

      
'I've seen… bloody Pixhill,' Sam said. 'I've seen Pixhill, OK?
Old bloke in a deerstalker hat. Though I like to think he wouldn't ever have
stalked a deer. And don't ask me - don't anybody
ever
ask me - about his eyes.'

      
'Sheesh,' Woolly said. 'When was this?'

      
And so Sam told him. And because it was cards-on the-table
night, he told Woolly about the devastation of the trees. The road.

      
Woolly threw his newly dealt hand on the table.

      
'You're not winding me up?'

      
'Tonight I'm not winding anybody up, Woolly. Tonight, winding
up is on hold.'

      
'I don't know what to do.' Woolly said.
      
'Don't do anything. Juanita said to
hang on.'
      
'Until when?'

      
'I don't know. Until we got Diane back.'
      
'You know what I think?' Woolly
said.
      
'I don't even like to ask.'

      
'I think we got a battle on two levels here. On the material level,
the Glastonbury First bit, the road, Bowkett's Bill. And all the side effects
that lot's having on the invisible layers. Or maybe it's the other way around,
and G-1 and the bypass, the whole thing's a manifestation of something going down
on the Inner Planes.'
      
'Oh shit,' said Sam. 'I'm not
that
much of a sodding convert.'

      
'So what
I
think… I
just think it's time we threw everything we got at this situation.'

      
'You're just saying that 'cause you reckon you've got nothing
to lose.'

      
'Maybe,' Woolly said. 'Does it matter? Where's Verity keep the
phone?'

      
'Never was any good at keeping my trap shut.' Sam stared at
his cards. 'Aw, for fuck's sake, Woolly, you dealt me a bloody king-flush and
threw your cards in.'

      
'Yeah, well,' Woolly said, 'it was about time I took a stroll.
After I use the phone.'

They entered the cradle.

      
Henry VIII could steal the gold, pull down the walls, Powys thought,
but the fat bastard couldn't take away the atmosphere.

      
Sometimes, when I am
alone in the Abbey grounds,
Colonel Pixhill had written,
I become afraid of my own reverie, afraid
that my soul will rise before its time.

      
Even at night it was not eerie. Merely awesome.

      
Juanita knew how to get in. She said most locals did. You just
had to be quiet as you climbed over a certain garden wall in a backstreet. In
the old days, Juanita said, many a bottle of Mateus Rose had been consumed
under a full moon on the holyest erthe in all England.

      
They'd gone back to the main entrance. Near the dying Thorn.
This was the way to approach it, Juanita said.

      
Beyond the wooden cross, uneven stone walls had evolved into a
kind of organic life, could almost have been close-cut, layered hedges. Other
walls, other buildings, heaps of hallowed rubble, were all features in what, even
without the lawns and the manicuring, was a garden.

      
Powys laid down the suitcase on the dark grass. It was cold
and wet, but the snow had gone.

      
This, in the beginning and at the end, was the heart. This was
where it all came together. Thirty six secret, walled acres in what was still
the centre of the town. Glastonbury's streets guarding their Abbey like ...
      
Like the Holy Grail.

      
His gaze was raised to the focal point, the summit of the
ruins. He'd seen pictures of it many times: the light flowing like a river
between twin towers.

      
Except they weren't towers. And your second concept - an arch
with the top part missing - they weren't that either. They were the ends of two
high, buttressed walls, a flawed mirror image of each other, but they rose like
forearms from elbows resting on the green turf. Ending in compliant, cupped
hands ... hands which could almost be supporting an invisible bowl.

      
Powys felt Juanita's tentative arm against his and realised he'd
been standing here staring, for several minutes, at the moon through the space
between the stone hands.

      
'It's like they're holding a chalice,' he said. 'Or waiting for
one.'

      
'They say - some people say - this is the heart chakra in the
body of the earth. The higher emotional centre.'

      
'I know.' You could almost swear it was warmer in here than
the other side of the walls. 'You warm enough?'

      
Juanita nodded. She was wearing the long woollen cloak he'd
brought from her wardrobe.

      
'Somehow,' Powys said, 'I can't quite believe that when we
talk of the Dark Chalice we mean the gold cup planted on Abbot Whiting by
Edmund Ffitch. I still think it's a metaphor. An ancient symbol of division,
intolerance.'

      
'If the Holy Grail is a symbol of conciliation, both a pagan
and a Christian symbol ...'

      
'The anti-Grail. It's logical to believe there's always been
an anti-Grail. These things have their time. It's as if, when Henry destroyed
all this, he was caught up in something that was
trying
to happen. They all were. Abbot Whiting - nice guy, kind to
the poor. They put his head on the Abbey gates, isn't that right? The whole
town must have been absolutely flattened, people terrified.'

      
'Not least', Juanita said, 'because this was the place where Jesus
himself walked.'

      
'You believe that?'

      
Juanita looked up at the hands of stone accepting the invisible
chalice. 'Sure. Why not? If his rich Uncle Joe wanted to broaden his horizons.'

      
'So when the Abbot was killed and the building violated and
vandalised ... by the King of England, they must have ...' Powys hesitated.

      
'They must have questioned the very existence of God.' Juanita
stood in front of him. 'It would have taken a long time to get back to that
level of spirituality. We thought that maybe we were close to it once. Now it's
gone the other way.'

      
Standing here, in the silence of the ruins, on the eve of midwinter,
Powys could almost feel the Veil shredding like a cobweb.

      
'OK?'

      
Juanita nodded. He pulled at the ties which fastened the cloak
at her neck.

      
She raised her arms, her crippled hands in the cup formation, like
the great stone buttresses, and the cloak fell away from her shoulders and
dropped to the grass.

      
Powys caught his breath.

      
Juanita shone in the moonlight.
      
She was wearing the dress last
featured on the front
The Avalonian
.
Issue Six.

'Sammy,' Woolly hissed.
'They're here.'

      
Heart in his mouth, he'd been upstairs, to the lavatory. The
torch lighting up the dirty black beams and all those doorways, some of them
ajar, shadows oozing out. And on his way back, glancing out the window at the
top of the stairs, he'd seen the sidelights moving very slowly up the drive.

      
'What do we do?' Sam whispered. 'We call the cops?'
      
'I reckon we see who it is first.
If it's Grainger I don't reckon we need bother the fuzz.'

      
'Christ,' said Sam. 'You still call them the fuzz after all these
years?'

      
But Woolly had crept out into the dining room, a sliver of
moonlight thin as fuse-wire on the table where Pixhill had lain.

      
Sam shivered. Funny, it really did go up your spine.
      
Any normal, earthly fear, like
having the crap beaten out of you by a master of foxhounds, it never happened
like that.

      
Woolly was standing on a chair to see out of the high window.

      
'Two of them. Men.'
      
'Grainger?'

      
'Don't look like it. Both tallish guys.'
      
'Shit,' said Sam.
      
'One's got a pickaxe.'
      
'Double shit.'

      
Woolly dropped to the floor. 'You wanner go for this or what?'

      
'Maybe not. Maybe we should play safe. You want me to ring the
cops, being as how I'm slightly less well known to them at this moment in
time?'

      
'Only, one of em's your mate, Mr Davey, said Woolly.

      
'Ah.' Sam rubbed his jaw. 'Well. This changes things just slightly.'

Powys wondered afterwards
if perhaps he'd fallen asleep.
      
Which seemed, in the normal way of
things, unlikely, on the eve of midwinter, sitting on a low stone wall under an
icy moon.

      
If he hadn't fallen asleep, then it wasn't a dream.

      
In this dream, the one that wasn't, Juanita stood on one side
of what tourists sometimes saw as a broken archway, where the stone arms
reached for the chalice.

      
On the other side of the archway that wasn't, stood another
woman.

      
Both white, incandescent in the moonlight.

      
When Powys either awoke or didn't, Juanita was alone.

Woolly came out of the garden
shed. 'Ain't much useful in there, man, to be honest.'

      
He handed Sam a garden fork.

      
'It's got a wonky handle.'

      
'The alternative's a bent lawn rake.'

      
'What's yours, then?'

      
'I'm a man of peace, remember?' Woolly whispered.
      
'Come on, move it.'

      
They climbed over into the field. Under the moon, the Tor
looked surprisingly sinister. Sam figured he was seeing it from the same angle
as when ...

      
Don't think about it.

      
'You know your way round here? Shit, this field's waterlogged.'

      
'Couple of hours it'll be ice-logged,' Woolly muttered. 'Sure,
I used to do a bit of gardening for the Colonel. He had a greenhouse then. I
figured maybe I could grow certain exotic plants on the side, like. Never
thought he'd know what one looked like. Still, he was very nice about it.
Died the following year, poor old soul.'

      
Sam looked up at the Tor. Something was bothering him.

      
'Woolly, where I saw this road, look. There's no way they could
run it through there. I was so blown away by ... you know,
him…
that I just didn't figure it out proper. I remember thinking
it looked like it was aimed straight at the centre of the Tor, under the tower.
And, like, you see from here, that's where it would have to go, else Meadwell'd
be right in the middle of the central reservation, and it's a double-listed building,
so that's out, right?'

      
'What you saying? And keep your bloody voice down.'
      
'I don't think that excavation's
anything to do with the road. Not directly.'