The Chalice

NINE

It was like being on a strange planet.

Like they'd climbed up the night itself and emerged on to some other sphere, and the moon and the stars were so much nearer and so bright it was like they were swimming in and out of your head.

All this without drugs.

'Magic,' Headlice breathed, understanding at last why Mort had been handing out this strict no booze, no dope stuff.

The pilgrims, all standing up now, had gathered around the tower, which rose out of this small space on the summit of the Tor, over an ocean of lights far, far below.

The tower. So close. Like a silent rocket ship in the centre, and they were like joined to it and it was part of them. Literally. If he stretched out his legs his bare feet would touch the stone.

His feet should have been dead cold up here, in November, but this was a very special year, the summer heat clinging to Avalon, and the Tor was where the real heat was stored, all the sacred earth-energy. This was like the spiritual power station of Britain and tonight Headlice was gonna get charged up like a battery.

All the pilgrims were in a circle, holding hands. Headlice's left hand had found the clammy fingers of this raggy-haired older woman called Steve. His right hand had been grabbed, unfortunately, by Mort. Mort was holding the finger he'd bent, which still hurt, the bastard.

But – hey! – it was suddenly immaculately weird.

The mist had come up behind them, surrounding them like this chilly, fuzzy hedge, forming yet another circle. So they were kind of locked into the pattern of the old maze which had been around the Tor in prehistoric times.

And there was one more inner space: the tower was roofless, like a chimney; you could stand inside – the flags underfoot dead slippery on account of all the zillions of pilgrims over the centuries – and you could gaze up the stone shaft into the night. And the night could come down it.

Gwyn was in there now, in the centre of everything, catching the night.

He hadn't seen Gwyn arrive. The man was just suddenly among them, in a long coat, no telling what he was wearing underneath.

Gwyn the Shaman, who walked with the spirits. Headlice didn't know who Gwyn was or where he came from. There were stories about how Gwyn had been in Tibet with the Masters, or been initiated into the Wiccan coven at the age of ten then studied for the priesthood just to get both sides. All this might be total bullshit, but if you knew for a fact that Gwyn was, say, an ex-garage mechanic from Wolverhampton or just some toerag who'd found a copy of King of the Witches in the prison library, it'd like seriously detract, wouldn't it?

Gwyn had lit a candle, in a glass lantern because of the breeze, and he stood behind it in the arched doorway which led into the tower's bare interior and then out through an identical arch on the other side. His beard was gilded by the candlelight. Bran had set up this slow heartbeat on his hand-drum. Then more lanterns were lit until there was a semicircle of them around the archway, sending Gwyn's priestly shadow racing up the stone.

Shaman. Mort swore he'd once seen Gwyn conjure a fire out of dry grass from six feet away. 'Magic, eh?' Headlice said to Steve, and Steve glanced at him and smiled and said nothing.

The throb of Bran's drum made the air vibrate, like the night sky itself was one big stretched skin.

Then Headlice felt a tug, and they were moving. Round and round the tower. The only sounds the drumming and the slithering of their feet on the grass, and he felt like a cog in an ancient, sacred mechanism and was totally blissed out.

At first.

'The problem is,' Juanita said, 'I don't know where I stand any more. Whose side I'm on.'

Watching the Tor by night.

From less than half a mile away, it looked mysteriously pretty, with the lights, above a band of mist, making a faint frill around the base of the St Michael tower. They'd stopped on the edge of a small wood, unsure about this now that they were so close.

Jim's lamp had found a tree stump, and Juanita sat on it and talked.

'When Danny and I arrived it was very exciting, in an innocent way. We used to come here and watch for flying saucers. There'd been that big flap over at Warminster. Close Encounters. And books by John Michell and then J. M. Powys, and this all-pervading sense of… optimism, I suppose. Simple and naive as that.'

'I do believe there was a special optimism then,' Jim said.

Although, naturally, we were very po-faced about it at the building society. Love-ins and be-ins and squats – not many mortgages in all that nonsense. I suppose I was just annoyed because I was rather too old for it all.'

' Then the spontaneity seemed to dissipate.' Juanita lit a cigarette. 'It became institutionalised and politicised. And you ended up with what we have now – New Age cliques and elitism. Like The Cauldron.'

'Oh. That.'

'There you are, you're alienated.'

'I'm not alienated. I like women. The Cauldron's all right as far as I'm concerned.'

'But you're not as far as they're concerned, that's the problem, Jim.'

'Everybody's got the answer,' Jim said. They're all so certain about it. Nobody seems content with mystery any more. Except me. I love mystery for its own sake. I think a true appreciation of the quality of mystery is the most the majority of us can ever hope for.'

The glow on the Tor began to flicker in and out, as though people were moving through it.

'We never saw any saucers,' Juanita said sadly. 'I didn't, anyway. But we knew that when the star people landed they'd land here. Because this was the centre. And we knew they'd be good aliens who'd respond to our spiritual aspirations. I used to imagine them coming into the shop – you know, at night. I'd hear a noise and creep down, and there'd be a couple of benign beings in shiny suits leafing through the books. To work out how far we'd got up the spiritual ladder.'

Jim was silent for a while, looking up at the gauzy lights on the Tor. Then he said, 'That's why you've stayed, isn't it? In Glastonbury.'

'Sorry?'

'Unfinished business. The hippy dream. Peace and love. You still hope that out of all this chaos there might be the seed of harmony and this is the place to nurture it. You're still hoping the good aliens will land.'

'Don't be ridiculous.' Juanita felt herself blush. 'That would make me a very sad person, wouldn't it?'

She felt his smile. And his own hopeless longing. waken stone and darkness gather waken stone and darkness gather nahmu nahmu nahmu nah in the bowl of darkness gather nahmu nahmu nahmu nah.

The half-whispered chant was still hissing in Headlice's ears when the circle stopped turning.

When he was sure he was still, he looked up to find the whole of the sky was still revolving, going round and round and round the tower, moon and stars and wisps of cloud.

Moon and stars and wispy cloud, moon and stars and moon and stars and… and everything turning into a chant. Everything with its own rhythm. Magic.

Was it, though? Was it? He glanced at Mort, whose head was bowed into his chest, dead relaxed as usual. Headlice felt a pulse of anger.

Come on. Get real, you 're just dizzy, man. Magic? Magic's the chemicals working on the brain. Magic's what you conjure up in yourself to get your head uncluttered of all that shit about finding a job and taking your place in, like, 'society'. This pilgrimage, this is a celebration of freedom. This is our country, man, ours, not yours to put fuckin' fences around. This is where we can come and breathe the free air and light fires and tell tales about the old gods and get well pissed and stoned and shag our brains out, and when we wake up in the jingle-jangle Arabian morning we'll sit around and talk about what it was like up the Tor, all the presences we felt around us, how, like, holy it was. But it'll all be in our heads, stoned memories. On account of nothing happened, not really.

Yet this was the real place. The place. Go with it. It may never happen again like this. Like when they took you into all those St Michael churches, made you go in backwards; you didn't question that. How are you ever gonna change if you don't, like, submit, roll with it?

He let himself go limp. Rolled with it.

Gwyn was on the stones outside the tower, the light from the candles on his feet and all the objects around him, which included a metal cup – like a chalice – and a whip with a leather handle and kind of thongs, like a cat o'nine tails And a curved, ritual knife, like a little scythe with the moonlight in its blade.

A woman was handing a bowl to Gwyn. It was Rozzie, in a long, dark, loose robe twitching in the night breeze. (So when, exactly, had his woman been picked as Gwyn's handmaiden?),

Then the people either side of him, Mort and the woman called Steve, tightening their grip on Headlice's sweating hands as the cup was filled from the bowl – holy water from the Chalice Well, someone whispered – and the hands parted to receive the cup as it was passed around the circle. Holy water from the Chalice Well, cold water, metal-tasting, passed round anti-clockwise and again and again, and each time it got to him – drink deep, drink deep – the cup always full, so maybe there were two of them or maybe the sacred water was replenishing itself by… magic.

The hands joining again, like clasps in some kind of bracelet, and the movement re-starting, the cog in the machine, round and round and round and the drum drumming deep down in his gut and the chant, nahmu, nahmu, and the sudden weight of the sky, and when he looked up the sky was turning around the tower and… and…

He couldn't feel his feet anymore; he was starting to float. Aware of Gwyn speaking, hearing the words but like making no sense of it; like it was coming from way off, and some of it was in Latin, which figured, if Gwyn had trained as a priest to get both sides.

Gwyn's mellowed out voice was soaring.

'Emitte tenebrae tua et medacia tua. Ipsa me deduxerunt et adduxetunt…'

Headlice suddenly felt very emotional, felt like crying.

… in montem, sanctum tuum…'

Hands. The skin on the hands gripping his seemed to be putting up like foam rubber and then Headlice felt something streak through him, hand to hand to hand…

… like an electric current, and he…

… was well off the ground, the air sizzling coldly around him, all lit up, an ice cascade. Perspective somersaulting; St Michael's tower groaning at his feet; he was up there. In the darkness.

… montem sanctum tuum…

Gwyn's voice rising and sliding and the responses from the others, a drone, enfolding him like soft curtains. The drum so loud, like it was inside his head, like he was inside the drum. It was brilliant. He was truly alive, man.

And the priest said,

'… oh, Gwyn ap Nudd, lord of the hollow, guardian of the dark gates, we call upon thee and offer to thee this…'

'Jim,' Juanita said. 'Jim, look, I think I'm changing my mind about this.'

She crouched, panting, in the grass which was slick with night dew.

They were almost halfway up the Tor. She looked over her shoulder, in the dark it was like being on a cliff-face; vertigo seized her and she grabbed at the hillside for support, her hand closing around something she realised was a hard lump of sheep shit. She ran her fingers convulsively through the damp grass.

'I mean, are we going to make fools of ourselves? When you think about it, what are we supposed to be preventing? After all, come on, nobody ever got murdered or anything on the Tor, did they?'

'Depends what you call murder,' Jim said. 'Don't imagine Abbot Whiting saw much justice in what they did to him. Anyway…' He suddenly expelled an angry sigh. 'I'm curious now. It's a free country. National Trust property. We've got as much right…'

'Jim, why don't we just get the police? I was stupid. They won't arrest Diane, and even if they did…'

'They won't want to know. What's in it for them? Couple of cannabis arrests? They haven't got the manpower anymore.'

'It's just…'

Jim turned towards her. 'Too old to look after myself?'

'No, I… Oh God'

What it came down to was, whatever these neo-hippies were doing she didn't want to see it. Because she'd been there and it was beautiful once and she didn't want to watch a sweaty parody of her youth, didn't want to feel old, didn't want to have to feel disgust.

'Why don't we get the car and drive down to Don Moulder's field and wait for them to come back to their camp? We'll see where Diane goes and we'll try and snatch her.'

'No.' Jim's voice was pitched almost at conversational level. 'I'm tired of being timid. Too old to be a hippy. Missed the boat. Missed too many boats.'

'Jim…'

'Why don't you stay here with the lamp and I'll go up alone.'

Juanita looked down at the lights of Glastonbury, thinking, God, one minute I'm worrying about his heart and his liver and the next…

'Jim!'

He'd pushed the lamp into her hands and when she looked up he'd vanished into a wall of mist.

Bloody hell. He was going up there to make a scene. At some point tonight he'd got this image of himself as a bumbling, ineffectual little man considered too old to kick ass, and now he had something to prove.

No way.

Juanita went after him, stumbled, her Afghan falling open. She was aware of a fringe of lights, and a man's hollow voice lifted up into the night, rhythmic and ecclesiastical, and that didn't sound like what they used to do in the seventies, not at all.

It started to go wrong very quickly, all in a rush, and it was so strong Headlice was just dragged down, like he'd lost the use of his feet, like they'd rotted into mush.

Because he was no longer above the Tor, he was inside it.

In this giant cave, full of mist.

It didn't matter too much at first that he had no control

… got to roll with it, man. I'm a shaman now, me. This is where they go, inside the earth, inside themselves… Until he realised that without feet you couldn't run away.

At some stage, he saw what seemed at first like only a darker part of the mist. It writhed. It became like a tree, with fuzzy outstretched branches and little knotty twigs, the kind of wintry tree you see through fog from a train.

And then it wasn't a tree because trees don't move like this: the branches were dark arms and the twigs were fingers, thin fingers, bony, wiggling like they were underwater and the currents were doing it, and he saw arms inside sleeves, torn sleeves, hanging like sodden leaves gone black.

He tried to clench his own fingers on Mort's hand and Steve's. Only nothing happened. He couldn't work the muscles. Clenched his fingers, but nothing clenched.

A ring. A ring on one of the wiggling fingers, a big one, size of a curtain ring. Headlice heard,… let me go… let me go unto my lord.

A figure in black with stains down the chest, this rough cloth around it, ripped in places, and stains, stains everywhere and a hard, powerful smell of dirty sweat, fear-sweat, and wet, rusty iron, like when you pull an old pram out of a pond, all black, the fabric rotted and dripping and the frame poking through.

No, I'm not going for this. This is dope in the fuckin' water. You get me out of this, you bastards, hear me?

The body was coming towards him in this kind of lopsided crippled way; it couldn't stand up straight, couldn't lift up its head. He tried to scream, feeling his throat working at it, pushing, but nothing coming out.

And the reason this ragged thing couldn't lift its head was because it hadn't got one, only stains around the neck of its robe.

Help me. Help me to my Lord Its hands groping out for Headlice. fingers waving like seaweed in shallow water. Headlice shrinking away. Fuck off… fuck off, old man. Leave me alone.

Dom, dom. dom. Heart banging away in his chest. Blood throbbing in his head. Drum going dom, dom, dom, and he could see the old man was offering him something. Something that had formed between his hands, a bowl, and Headlice reeled back; this was all he could do, throw his body' back from the waist, because his legs had gone now, gone into soup.

And the old man pushed the bowl towards him, but it was still joined to his hands, this bowl, this chalice, his fingers throbbing like veins in the curved metal. The old man was giving off long sobs, ragged as his rotting clothes, because he was as helpless as Headlice, this old man, didn't know what he was at.

Holding out the bowl, the old man said, Alan.

Which was Headline's real name.

The entity said, Alan. Real sick and sorrowful, and Headlice looked down and saw, briefly, a wavering shadow of himself in the mist, and he knew that he'd become part of it, another wiggling thing. Part of the darkness. He started to cry too, because there'd soon be nothing left of him but tears and snot evaporating in the dark.

Alan, however, Alan started to feel dispassionate about this, about his body floating away from his consciousness, or maybe the other way round, who gives a shit, roll with it.

And this was when the air thinned into a paler darkness, and he became aware that he was out of it, up in the night sky- again, over the Tor and looking down, and he could see everything very clearly. He was up here in the sky – thank you, thank you, thank you, gods – and looking down on…

… some miserable little sod scrabbling on its knees in blind circles, right under the church tower, surrounded by candle lanterns, it's stupid fingers dipping into the flames, but showing no pain. Just twitching and scuffling like a lost thing, helpless and pathetic.

They were lifting it up from behind, two people, an arm each and the drum was going dom, dom, dom, like one of them execution drums, dom, dom, dom, and he was looking straight down now, like looking down a chute, on to the very top of its head, where a swastika

…

Oh shit! Oh shit, man, it 's me That's me!

Being propped up like a scarecrow.

Rozzie was there too, watching, white-faced, but the bitch was avoiding touching him, and there was… it was Gwyn, but it wasn't. His face was long and black and pointed. His coat was off, his skin shone – he was naked – and so did his sickle raised, with the moon in it.

It was a hell of a shock at first, Mort and Steve holding the pathetic thing's head back, exposing its throat to the blade, but the next instant he'd realised this was only Headlice, a naive little tosser, so it didn't matter he was going to die. Anyway, it had begun ages ago, the death thing; the cut was like a formality.

Alan was above it all, directly above, exalted. Directly above the swastika, the sun symbol on Headlice's head, the head chakra, the opening he'd like projected out of – he could see the cord now, a thin strand of silver, like a wire.

All he could see of Headlice was a pair of hands waiting to receive the chalice, the Holy Grail, and then Alan dissolved into laughter because the Holy Grail was black and slimy and smelt of piss.