The chalice, p.48
The Chalice, page 48
She said softly, ‘This is ridiculous. This … Oh … my … God.’
‘My goddess,’ Powys breathed.
Around midnight, he returned from Carey and Frayne with a suitcase. He also had a tray of tea from the George and Pilgrims kitchens.
Juanita was sitting up in bed. She had the sweater on. He poured tea. ‘I forgot the straw.’
‘Typical,’ Juanita said. ‘And so little to think about.’
‘Um, I’m going to say this now. Ever since I saw that photograph of you in Dan’s office …’
She put a discoloured finger to his lips.
‘Don’t say any more. It’s bad luck.’
‘That’s an old Avalonian superstition, is it?’
‘It’s how I feel, OK?’
‘OK.’ He put the book on the bed, turned it towards her. It was a hardback copy of Psychic Self-Defence by Dion Fortune. ‘Have you read this?’
‘Bits of it.’
‘You read the werewolf story?’
‘Where she conjures the elemental beast?’
‘Let’s read it again.’
He opened the book under the Tiffany lamp, whose bulb no longer flickered.
‘Listen to this,’ Powys said.
‘CHAPTER ONE
SIGNS OF PSYCHIC ATTACK
We live in the midst of invisible forces whose effects alone we perceive … Normally … we are protected by our very incapacity to perceive.’
‘Verity,’ Juanita said.
‘Just a passing thought. OK. It’s about page fifty. Ah. “I had received serious injury from someone who, at considerable cost to myself, I had disinterestedly helped, and I was sorely tempted to retaliate. Lying on my bed resting one afternoon …” ’
‘Her resentment materialises at the bedside.’ Juanita shuddered. ‘As a kind of grey wolf.’
Powys sat on the bed. Held a cup of tea to her lips.
‘Before we read the rest, I have to tell you where I went this evening.’
‘It’s like a truly horrible Grimm’s fairytale,’ Juanita said.
After he’d told her about Violet and Roger Ffitch and Pixhill, he told her about Archer. The blood and the fire and the pink teddy.
‘No wonder the nannies were horrible,’ Juanita said. ‘Those weren’t nannies, they were bodyguards.’
‘He never knew for sure,’ Powys said. ‘And he still doesn’t know. That’s what he’s had to live with. Makes you feel sorry for the old bastard, doesn’t it?’
‘It makes a lot of things clear. Poor kid. The retained placenta – I vaguely knew about that. Not being well up in midwifery, I didn’t know about the amount of blood-letting it caused. Did I tell you that when she was little – and not so little – she used to go missing? And quite often she’d be found asleep in the Chalice Well garden.’
‘The Blood Well.’
‘A well’s a kind of symbolic womb, isn’t it? She was going back to what she couldn’t remember. Oh, Powys …’
‘I know. We’ve got to find her. All this gets worse.’
He picked up the book.
‘Now Violet – no-nonsense type, even then – is more than a bit alarmed at what she’s conjured. She tries the stern approach: down boy. And to her faint surprise the wolf turns into a dog and trots off and fades away. But Violet’s not daft, and she’s not terribly surprised when another woman in the house gets into a flap, claiming her dreams have been disrupted by images of wolves and when she woke up there were eyes shining at her from a corner of the room. Violet’s seriously disturbed by now. She goes off to see Doc Moriarty, her teacher, and he confirms her worst fears.’
‘That the beast is part of her. And that if she doesn’t get it back she’ll be, er …’
‘No longer a nice person,’ Powys said. ‘It’s a left-hand path situation. If she doesn’t get it back, she’ll be on the Satanic slippery slope.’
‘But she does get it back, doesn’t she?’
‘Not easily. But, yeh, in the end it all worked out because she helped Roger with his problem and she put the Dark Chalice on hold. With a little help from George Pixhill and the man I hesitate to call Uncle Jack.’
‘This is leading somewhere, isn’t it?’
Powys poured the rest of the tea. ‘According to Sam, on at least two occasions recently, Diane’s felt her rage at Archer – which probably goes back even farther than she knows – becoming almost … detached from her. Fermenting into patches of mist. Feral smells in the room.’
‘Oh my God.’
‘How much has she studied Dion Fortune? Would she know that story?’
‘Oh dear. What you have to understand about Diane is that she doesn’t have the magician mentality. Even if you believe in reincarnation the idea of her being the next life of Dion Fortune is slightly preposterous. Diane’s a romantic, a mystic, very probably more than a bit psychic …’
‘Someone who, if DF is still around in some form, she might want to protect?’
‘The Third Nanny,’ Juanita said. ‘Sits on the bed and doesn’t leave a dent in the mattress. Or something. The more you think about it, the more you realise that if anyone needs a third nanny, it’s Diane.’
‘But, look – this is important – you don’t think Diane’s capable of conjuring an elemental force?’
‘Are you kidding?’
‘In that case, someone’s sending it to her. Someone who’s been working over a long period to corrupt her.’
Juanita closed her eyes.
‘Someone,’ Powys said, ‘who wanted her back in Glastonbury at this particular time. Who was disturbing her dreams, making her restless, sending her images of the Tor. A very practised magician – or group of magicians – who can conjure elementals. Like the wolfthing. Like a black bus, in fact.’
‘Why would Moulder have a bus delivered? Jesus, Powys, none of this is making sense. I’m not up to making sense of it. Let’s just call the police.’
‘The police wouldn’t be able to find her. And even if they did, they wouldn’t know how to handle any of this. It’s down to us. Or you.’
Juanita shrank back against the oak headboard. She looked very small and frail in the four-poster.
‘You’ve got to rediscover the Goddess,’ Powys said. ‘In yourself. You’ve got to go back to the heart.’
THIRTEEN
Eve of Midwinter
In the Meadwell kitchen, Woolly and Sam were playing three-card brag by torchlight.
‘Where’d you learn to play like this?’ Sam said. ‘Old hippies, taking people’s money is not what they’re about.’
Every time he lost, it was down to Sam to go and check they were alone, which meant an ominous trek through that bloody eerie dining room.
‘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 nonbeliever in anything you can’t either spend or save from predatory upper-class 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 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 Rosé 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 of 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 it 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.’
‘So what was it?’
‘Fuck knows. You’re the earth-mysteries expert.’
‘Think about it later,’ Woolly said. ‘We got to scare these bastards away before they have the top of that well off.’
By moonlight, they skirted the edge of the field, keeping to the hedge. They heard the clunk of a pickaxe on concrete, saw the muffled glow of a lamp on the ground. Sam moved quietly through the shallow drainage ditch, his shoes and the bottoms of his jeans soaked through. There was an old stile he vaguely remembered from his days with the Ramblers’ Association. From way back, when there was like a little pilgrims’ way to the Meadwell.
