The Chalice (85 page)

       
And I think I'm happy. Happier than I've
been since I don't know when. There's no calm before a storm, only tension.
After the storm, that's where you find calm.

       
I feel guilty about this. Guilty because
I'm glad - have to be frank and honest here - that old Pennard killed Archer
and, especially, the hateful psychopath Ceridwen. I can still see Pennard
framed in the entrance of the reservoir. Where he was always grey and heavy to
me, there seemed to be a pure, fresh light in him as he raised that gun. Which
just has to be very wrong, doesn't it? God knows, I hate and fear guns as much
as Sam Daniel. I'm sorry - ignore this bit, I'm mixed up, there's too much I
don't understand.

       
And yet aspects of it are coming clearer
all the time. It was only yesterday that it occurred to me that out of all
those appalling people in the reservoir - and I recognised many of them from
that night on the Tor - there was one missing.

       
It was the man who called himself Gwyn
ap Nudd. The man in the hairy mask.

       
I'm almost certain now that behind that
mask was Oliver Pixhill.
    
Diane told
me how the whole attitude of the travellers' convoy began to change as they
approached the start of the St Michael Line at Bury St Edmunds. What I suppose
you would have to call a dark element entered.
     
The
less serious ones - the colourful, circusy types - had dropped away so that the
only remaining members of the original group Diane had joined up with in Yorkshire
were this boy Headlice and his so-called girlfriend.

       
Headlice - no home, estranged from his
family, very much a lost boy.

       
They needed a sacrifice, you see. To
activate the dark side of the Tor on the anniversary of the execution of Abbot
Whiting. Powys, who (when pushed) will admit to knowing a little about these
things, says the rootless, anonymous travelling population is regarded by
working black magicians as a very accessible source of human sacrifices. Even
babies, whose birth are unregistered. Doesn't bear thinking about.

       
We know from Diane that Headlice had
been 'prepared'. Made to walk backwards into every church along the St Michael
Line - how more obviously Satanic can you get? But this kid, from what Diane
says about him, would have done it without a qualm, equating anti-Christian
with anti-Establishment. (Which is utterly wrong; when the Arimathean planted
his staff on Wearyall Hill, the pagans were The Establishment and Christianity
was seriously radical, man ...)

       
Who actually killed Headlice is no more
clear than it ever was. Was it Gwyn or Mort? Or Rankin and his son. Or all of
them, as, with hindsight, they seem to have been basically on the same side.

       
A sacrifice? Do I believe that, really?
Well, people have died on the Tor in strange circumstances. And Jim ...

       
Um. Yes. Why did Jim die? Was it a case
of Gwyn/Oliver spotting an opportunity for another Abbot's Night sacrifice,
feeling that this bolshy little guy had been delivered into his hands? It will
remain a mystery. He always treasured Mystery.

       
Oliver. How can we ever know what drove
that bastard? Apart, that is, from years of resentment at his father and
exposure, through Archer, to the allure of the Dark Chalice.

       
They were very close friends from an early
age, Archer and Oliver. Doubtless, Archer initially cultivated Oliver to get
close to Meadwell and the family chalice he probably believed was calling out
to him. Perhaps this is why Colonel Pixhill encouraged his poor wife to leave
with his son, sensing the evil growing in the kid.

       
By this time, Archer and Oliver were at
boarding school together - in Wiltshire or somewhere, I forget. Who should be
the matron there but one Ruth Dunn? Was this coincidence? I don't think it was.
Dunn would already have been a serious, practising occultist by then. Who knows
what she did with those two boys, what perversity they conjured between them.

       
It's my feeling that, while Archer
initially dominated Oliver Pixhill, it was soon Oliver who was controlling
Archer. I suspect he became genuinely powerful, in a Charles Manson-like way. I
can imagine him get getting a real buzz out of dumping his city suit every so
often, stopping shaving and joining up with the travellers as their revered
shaman, collecting around him a group of the kind of insane occultists this
society attracts and acquiring the kind of reputation that scares off the
routine travellers.

       
And always, in the background, there was
Ceridwen. I have no explanation for her. A psychopath is a psychopath, and there
are more around than we think. Even in Glastonbury. Thank God her husband got
the kids is all I can say.

       
Ceridwen, Oliver, Archer - THIS was the
Inner Circle.

       
These were the people playing with the
volatile Glastonbury atmosphere. I don't like to even imagine what went on down
in that disused reservoir, the 'perfect temple', as Powys called it because of
its alignment - an alignment they strengthened in the hope of somehow taking
control of the Tor. They nearly did it too. With the proposed Restriction of
Access, the Tor would very soon cease to be everyman's temple. Much of poor Woolly's
paranoia seems to have been well founded and it makes you fear for Stonehenge.

       
Without Archer's influence, I suspect
the Tame the Tor Bill will fade ignominiously away. As for the road - well, for
a start, Diane's instructed Quentin Cotton to tear up any agreement for the
sale of land to the Department of Transport. She insists she'll actually invite
the eco-guerrillas on to her property if it comes to it. I suspect, in the end,
we might at least force a change of route.

       
We'll fight, anyway. We have a lot of
battles ahead. Not least to clear Woolly's name. I want to have some kind of
Woolaston memorial - this is very important to me. And I want to publish
The Avalonian
before March. One of the issues I want to
raise with Diane.

       
The earth tremor? I don 't know what
caused it. Was it a timely geological anomaly? Or was it the conflict of good
and evil forces in a psychic hothouse climate? Some are saying it was the Tor announcing
its refusal to be tamed. Others maintain it was a manifestation of God's
outrage at a bishop attempting conciliation with the pagans. It's interesting
to me that it happened when the two great spiritual forces were represented on
the top of the Tor by two distinctly weak links - Wanda and the bishop, not
enough power between them to keep a cigarette alight. If you imagine a fuse
box: when the power overloads, it's the slenderest thread that breaks. I think if
you'd had Ceridwen up there facing... well, maybe even me, the way I was
feeling that day and maybe still am ... then perhaps the tower would have come
down. I'm not kidding.

       
You may have detected that I'm feeling
so much better, more energised, much more positive about the town, about its future.
Yes, I believe we can all live together. I believe we must invoke the Grail,
which stands for tolerance and acceptance.

       
(I won 't say peace and love.)

       
And the Dark Chalice, the anti-Grail?

       
I never saw it. Thank God.

       
With Don Moulder's permission. Verity
(she wouldn't let anyone else touch it) placed the grisly item in the black
bus, exactly where the radiator grille was coming off.

       
And then we set fire to the bus.

       
Well, we didn't know what else to do. We
burned that damned bus to an absolute shell, and then we paid to have it taken
away. We figured maybe the link was broken with the end of the last male
Pennard. The speculation in the papers is that Pennard killed his son by
accident while attempting to drive out New Age travellers setting up some kind
of squat in the disused reservoir on his land. The fact that one of the people
seemed to be a well-established Glastonbury citizen was one of the puzzles
requiring further investigation. Another was the apparent murder of Councillor Edward
Woolaston by Archer Ffitch's agent, Oliver Pixhill, at his father's former house.

       
Verity is still staying with a somewhat
chastened Wanda. I am expecting the Home Temple to be dismantled. Diane says
she hopes to persuade Verity to run Bowermead until she decides what to do with
it.
 
The Rankins have gone, of course.
Just disappeared. Hardly a surprise. Sam's been going to Bowermead to feed the
hounds, convinced he can 'reform' them. When I start to get depressed about
Woolly and Jim,

the
thought of Sam as some kind of Pennard consort - and particularly what that
will do to his revered father - always brings me round. I mean, can you IMAGINE
Sam with the hunting and shooting mob at meetings of the Country Landowners'
Association? I just love it.

       
As for your Glastonbury book,
co-authored by JM Powys and myself - we may well get around to it, although
it's unlikely to contain much of the above.

       
We're taking things day by day. And night
by night.

Love,