The Chalice

SIX

It was like a street party, like New Year's Eve, the atmosphere weirdly electric, lights shining out of shop windows and from the windows of the flats over the shops. More people than there'd been in the bar, maybe a hundred among the wreckage on High Street, many of them wandering into the road because of the scarcity of traffic so late at night.

The colourful, otherworldly folk of Glastonbury's thriving New Age Quarter: mystics, psychics, healers and dealers in crystals and tarot cards. Under the utility streetlamps, didn't they all look so depressingly ordinary?

Juanita shook her head to dear it. Where the hell were the police? Always the same in a Glastonbury crisis: half a dozen trauma-counsellors, but nobody to redirect the traffic, Tony Dorrell-Adams sat on the bench outside the darkened veggie-bar. He was sobbing quietly. One of his arms was being held up, as though he'd won a boxing bout, by a man with a white medical bag. Blood was oozing from a limp hand. A small circle of watchers kept a half-fascinated aloofness, like mourners around a distant relative's grave.

About five shop windows had been smashed. The veggie-bar had come off worst, with a crack three feet long in its main window, a spiderwebbed hole at the end nearest the frame.

'What happened, Juanita?' Councillor Woolly came to stand next to her in the doorway of an antiques shop. Woolly's own shop (archaic string instruments) was safely tucked away in Benedict Street.

'All I know', Juanita said, 'is that when Tony left the pub he was not in an awfully good mood. And not entirely sober. What I gather is that he found a few dozen of his newly glazed picture-plates scattered in some sort of weird formation all over the pavement.'

'His plates?'

'Yep. The fair Domini disposing of them, apparently. In a fairly imaginative, if cruel, fashion. I wouldn't claim to understand. I think she's one trump short of a Major Arcana, as we mystics say.'

Making light of it, but she was shocked. Her voice was hoarse, as if there wasn't enough oxygen. There was something wrong with tonight.

'What sort of plates?' Woolly looked worried.

Juanita pulled a segment from her mac pocket. 'Here's one I rescued earlier. Sort of.'

Woolly stared at the picture of half a church on half a hill. "Tis Burrowbridge Mump.' When he looked up he was almost in tears. 'These're our plates. I been working with this guy, working out earth-mysteries themes. We done this series on the St Michael line, all the churches and Abbeys and stones and stuff. Set often, boxed. Jesus… I mean, why? Why the fuck she have to do that?'

'Possibly a statement about the aesthetic and spiritual validity of Tony's art,' Juanita said dryly. Her mouth was so parched she could hardly finish the sentence. She coughed. 'And she seems to have other ideas for the window.'

Nodding across the street to the crudely fashioned, unspeakably ugly female form, unsubtly spotlit in purple, with what looked like the entrance to a railway tunnel between its spread thighs. The window was cracked but intact.

'Sheesh, that's really gross,' said Woolly. 'No wonder the poor bastard lost his cool.'

'He didn't need to start hurling his works of art at everybody else's windows, though. Must be fifteen or twenty panes gone.'

Who would pay? The Alternative Community was already withdrawing into itself. Juanita supposed repair bills would be settled quietly. She supposed she'd have her corner pane quietly replaced without seeking recompense from either the Dorrell-Adamses or the insurance company. As would most of the other New Age shopkeepers. Covering up, because this sort of incident just did not happen in sacred Glastonbury.

No wonder Griff Daniel had looked so happy.

Woolly shook his head in sorrow. 'We had this whole range planned. My knowledge, Tony's artwork. Good team, eh? I work out the concept, he makes 'em, she dumps 'em in the street, he smashes 'em. Gotter be a philosophical message there somewhere.'

'The message', said Juanita, 'is Glastonbury buggers you up.'

'Pixhill,' Woolly said. 'Don't you go quoting Pixhill at me, Juanita. You'll have me all paranoid again.'

'How do you mean?' Juanita asked, but Woolly had spotted Tony.

'What's he done to himself?'

'Cut his hand on a shard of pot. That – what's -his-name, Matthew, the herbalist guy – is sedating him the Natural way and anointing his wound with cowslip syrup or something.'

'This is a real downer,' said Woolly, the only living local councillor to specialise in understatement. A downer. Christ, it showed how basically rickety the whole community-structure was.

If Tony Dorrell-Adams, a steady, middle-class, terribly boring ex-teacher from the Home Counties, could behave like this, what did it say about some of the others?

She wondered where Jim was, turned to look for him.

It was strange: just turning around, just moving made her want to go on moving. There was something… a tingle in the air, an underlying vibration that was horribly exhilarating. The Shockwaves had broken the Blight. People's bodies were flexing as they moved about, the way they might emerging into a bright spring morning.

Something not at all right about this.

A single, undamaged plate with a glowing cup glazed upon it, rolled, as if from nowhere, on end down the pavement and fell flat at Juanita's feet. It seemed awesomely symbolic, like the most innocuous things did when you were on acid.

There was a moment of charged-up silence, the plate wobbling on the flagstones. Juanita had time to think. This is Glastonbury, buggering us up…

… before it all began again.

She heard someone shout, 'Hold him!' as Tony Dorrell-Adams struggled to his feet, scattering the herbalist's bottled preparations and screaming,

'Biiiiiiitch!'

The scream seemed to splatter the white walls above the shops opposite like a gob of spit, and Georgian windows rattled with its agony. The air was alive, fizzing like soda. The streetlamps were flickering, one crackling – as though Tony's scream had hit an electrical current and caused a short circuit or something.

Tony sank to his knees, sobs coming out of him like ghastly, amplified hiccups. 'I want to die… Just want to kill that bitch and die.'

Poor old Tony. One night he's humping his wife in the shop window, like this was Hamburg or Amsterdam, and the next… well, this was how domestic murders happened, one of the classic scenarios; you mock a man's prowess, his skills, it's like trampling his balls.

Juanita's tongue found the swelling on her lower lip, where the pilgrim had punched her and it all muscled in on her, everything that had happened in the past twenty four hours: small events in the great scheme of things – petty violence and humiliation and the unexplained death of a social reject Diane called Headlice.

Diane…

Where the hell was Diane? Who should have been padding around this bizarre streetscape, wide eyed and worried and exuding that doe-like innocence.

'Oh my God…' On a night like this, she'd forgotten about Diane. Snatching out her key, Juanita ran for the door of Carey and Frayne.

'Do it,' Wanda Carlisle urged. 'You won't get another opportunity like this.'

'I can't,' said Verity, 'I really can't.'

'He can help you.'

'It isn't my place to seek help.'

'You really are a martyr.' Wanda swept her black and white chequered cape stiffly across her shoulder. 'And you know what happens to them.'

The hall had nearly emptied Only half the usual lights were on but it seemed to Verity that most people would have been happy to grope their way out in complete darkness. They had discovered an exciting new environment. Within it, they had meditated, they had touched each other's features the way blind people did, reinventing themselves and their partners by discovering what Dr Pel Grainger had identified as their 'shadow selves'. There had been some very effective visualisation exercises and it seemed that everyone's world-view had, for tonight at least, been subtly altered.

Verity had been aware, at one stage, of someone coming in and muttering about some problem on the street, and one person – she thought it was Councillor Woolaston – had left quietly. But the interruption had been soon forgotten as Dr Grainger's audience moved towards First-stage Tenebral Symbiosis.

Now Dr Grainger was sitting on the edge of the platform talking to a couple who'd stayed behind. 'Why, sure,' he was saying nonchalantly. 'just take out the bulbs first then you won't be tempted to rush for the switches.'

'Let's go,' said Verity. Who, precisely because it had all been so seductive, was wishing she hadn't come. Dr Grainger was a very persuasive person, especially in the dark, but there was darkness and darkness, and she couldn't help feeling that Meadwell's dark was not the kind one might 'bond' with.

'Fine,' said Dr Grainger. 'Good luck.' He raised a hand to the departing couple, slipped down from the platform, and then – to Verity's horror – Dame Wanda was upon him. She didn't bother to introduce herself, assuming, as she assumed with everyone, that he would recognise her and be flattered by her attention.

'Dr Grainger, I should like you to meet a friend of mine who is, desperately, desperately in need of your help.'

The man in black smiled patiently.

Verity backed away. 'Oh no, really…'

'Verity, do not dare move.' Wanda turned again to Dr Pel Grainger and said apologetically, 'I am afraid my friend needs saving from herself.'

From where Jim stood, leaning on his bike, the lights of Glastonbury were too bright tonight, harsh with instability.

At the tree-hung entrance to Wellhouse Lane, he paused, feeling cold without his overcoat. Without his hat.

Go on. It'll be all right after the first few hundred yards, there's nothing to be afraid of. They've gone. The travellers have all gone.

Never thought this would happen to him. Never thought he could feel fear in this place of ancient spirit. But there was nothing to be brave for now. Not anymore.

He kept thinking back to yesterday – only yesterday, it seemed like another life, another incarnation – when he was sitting in Juanita's parlour, looking through his Laphroaig (the colour of dusk) at the woman whose skin was like the warmest, softest dusk you could imagine.

There was so much hope then. Well, not really, but you could kid yourself. You could believe in miracles.

And now there was no hope, and he had only himself to blame, doing what he'd always sworn to himself he would never do (stick to the banter, keep it light, never, never let her know for sure).

His hands felt clammy on the rubber of the handlebars. He'd seen what had happened in High Street, briefly assessed the situation – wouldn't have raised an eyebrow- in Bristol – and edged quietly out of the picture. Hated rubberneckers and voyeurs and all this counselling nonsense.

You should never interfere in people's private tragedies.

Private tragedy.

His own had come in the very second that Griff Daniel had burst back into the bar to spread the good news about the man smashing the windows of the hippy shops.

He hadn't meant this to happen. Hadn't come out tonight with the least intention of making a suicide flight.

But something had got to him. Something – whatever had made Griff Daniel so manic – set Jim off.

He'd been watching Juanita's eyes so closely. He knew precisely what he was doing, feeling strangely detached – in reality, probably as unstable as young Tony. And he knew that she knew where it was leading: Jim Battle burning all his boats, with a ninety-nine to one chance of total annihilation.

But that one per cent. The intoxication of running a wild, death-or-glory bet, the odds almost too high, for she was so beautiful and he was nearly twenty years older, twenty buggering years, and never bad been what you'd call much of a catch, as bloody Pat would point out every other week.

Juanita, Juanita.

If he'd been a knight he'd have swum the moat for her, scaled the buggering tower. If he'd been a young man he'd have simply swung her on to the back of his bike and pedalled for the border. If he'd been a dog, he'd have lain down at her feet, rolled over and wagged his tail.

Better to be a dog than poor, buggering Jim Battle. Better a dog and get the occasional tickle, have his fur brushed.

He pushed his bike past the last house in Wellhouse Lane. The Tor was on his right. Somewhere. He couldn't see the bastard thing. Maybe – God forgive him for even considering this – maybe Griff Daniel was right about the weird little hill, the hill of dreams, the hill of obsession. Maybe they'd all be better off without it.

And he would rather…

Jim swallowed this thought and went on pushing, feeling cold sweat in the small of his back, as though he was leaking like an old and rusting sump, listening to the tick, tick of his bike chain, following the bleary beam of his battery-powered bike lamp.

Only the mystery. Only the mystery could save him now.

And yet mystery could betray you. He remembered the heat of bodies around him, the strength of the hands holding him down, exposing his throat. And he would rather…

Jim squeezed his eyes shut, trying so hard to summon the dusk, bring the old mellow warmth into his chilled, sagging body. No good. It wouldn't come.

He would rather…

…rather have had that moon-bright sickle slice slowly through the skin and the sinew and the bones in his neck than to have seen the quick flickering of relief in Juanita's eyes when Griff Daniel burst into the bar.