The Chalice

THREE

With her hair around her shoulders, no make-up and the pristine white shift, she looked very young, Diane thought.

Like a recumbent version of the sylph on the front of the old Avalonian.

But awfully vulnerable, with her hands inside those enormous bandages.

'They're taking them off tomorrow,' Juanita said.

'That's super.'

'Least it means I can get out of here.'

'When?'

'I'm thinking about it.'

'You mean you'll discharge yourself,' Diane said disapprovingly. She really didn't think Juanita was ready to face Glastonbury. She never spoke of the fire or Jim.

Juanita said, 'You know, you're looking distinctly washed-out. You've lost weight. Are you eating?'

'Sure. It's just been a bit sort of frenzied, what with people placing orders for Christmas, and… look, I wanted to get your opinion on this.'

She pulled her folder on to her knees.

The artwork had The Avalonian across the top in lettering which was only modestly Celtic. The rest of the front cover was a black and white photograph of the Tor, surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence with two searchlight towers.

'We got the fence from one of those postwar pictures of Belsen or somewhere. Paul put it all together on his computer.'

With a practised elbow, Juanita prodded a pillow into the small of her back and studied the mock-up.

'I'm impressed But it doesn't make any secret of where we stand on the issue, does it? I mean, Belsen?'

'I've also written to Quentin Cotton, asking if he'd like to write a piece expressing his views.'

'Not Archer? Not Griff?'

'This way neither Sam nor I have to deal with estranged relatives.'

'You and Archer are officially estranged?'

'I don't know, I haven't spoken to him. Oh. Gosh. I meant to say. You know who his new constituency agent is?'

'Domini Dorrell-Adams?'

'Oliver Pixhill.'

Juanita's eyes widened.

'It's true. Woolly rang to tell me just before I came out. Apparently, the constituency party isn't awfully well off at the moment so Archer offered to bring his own agent. Free of charge, as it were.'

Juanita's eyes narrowed. 'What's the scam?'

'He just wants somebody he can trust, I suppose.'

'Oliver's a shit,' said Juanita. 'Even as a kid he was a shit, so I'm told.'

Diane shrugged. 'Archer's a shit. Do you think we should run the contents along the bottom or down one side?'

'You could start off a column aligned with the The in the masthead. If you see what I mean. Actually, as an example of a first issue I suspect there ought to be something less hard line contentious up-front, less in-your-face.'

'Oh.' Diane was crestfallen. 'I just had the idea, and…'

'And it's a really great idea, Diane, and it looks terrific, but for the dummy maybe we need to be a little pragmatic.

'Hey, is Pixhill married or anything? Girlfriend?'

'Oh, really.' Diane felt herself blush.

'Public schoolboys together.' Juanita raised an eyebrow. 'Both late thirties, unattached.'

'It's an appealing thought,' Diane concluded, 'but I don't think Archer is actually gay. Just doesn't have regular girlfriends.'

'Never mind, Tory Central Office'll find him a nice fiancee before the election. Then they'll part amicably when he wins. You watch.'

'I don't want to watch.'

'No.' Juanita lay back on the pillows. 'I can't help thinking we might have stopped it. And shafted the Glastonbury First movement along the way.'

Obviously meaning the Headlice thing. But as it had turned out, it was just as well they hadn't been to the police.

Wearing her Avalonian hat, Diane had made a legitimate call to Street and learned from a detective sergeant that it was no longer a murder investigation. A post mortem had revealed that the young man, now formally identified as Alan Carl Gallagher, aged twenty, missing from his home since last summer, had had a weak heart and had taken a large quantity of drugs. It was very borderline now, the sergeant said, off the record.

'I still think somebody's been got at,' Juanita said. 'You can't just dismiss head injuries.'

'They virtually have.'

The sergeant had said the injuries were not sufficiently serious to have caused Alan's death. He might have been in a fight; he could just as easily have been stumbling around stoned out of his head and been superficially struck by a car.

Or walked into a tree and then staggered back into his bus. Driven it into the woods because he couldn't see where the hell he was going. None of the travellers they'd spoken to had admitted knowing him, but then they wouldn't, would they? As for the false number plates on the bus, well, it was hard to find any of these hippy wrecks with genuine plates.

'Was it his own bus?'

'I don't know,' Diane said. 'I haven't seen it.'

It would be easy to tell. If, for instance, there were yellow stripes under some of the black. She'd been thinking a lot about the bizarre episode with the girl, Hecate, and the children with their spray cans. Somebody had told them to spray the bus black. To make it less conspicuous, less identifiable?

'I think the travellers killed him,' she said.

There'd been bad magic on the Tor that night. Colonel Pixhill would have understood, would have recognised what she'd seen in the sky. And again in the fire.

Powys was waiting for Diane in reception, a styrofoam cup in his hand. In a baggy sweater and jeans, he still looked a lot like his picture on the back of The Old Golden Land, although he must have been ever so young when that came out. At school, other girls had photos of Tom Cruise in their lockers; she dreamed about dishy J. M. Powys, earth-mysteries writer. How could she not trust him now?

'How is she?' Powys asked.

'A little overwrought, I think. I didn't tell her you were here. You don't mind, do you?'

He shook his head.

'There's a lot she isn't telling me,' Diane said. 'She keeps talking about coming home, but I think she needs to get as much as possible out of her system before she comes home.'

'You're a bit of a psychologist then, Diane?'

'I've been to enough,' she said.

He tossed his cup into a bin. 'I, um, meant in the Dion Fortune sense.'

'Oh,' she said. 'Yes. I know what you're asking. The answer's no. I've never had what you might call a practical involvement with the occult. Never even been to a seance. Tried to take up meditation once, but I was hopeless. I… things just sort of happen to me.'

When they were back in the car, because he was J.M. Powys, who dismissed nothing, she told him about the lightballs. About the Tor. And about the Third Nanny.

'You saw her?'

'I didn't exactly see her. I was… aware of her. Sitting on the edge of the bed.'

'And, um, what made you think this was Dion Fortune?'

'You're not going to put this in your book, are you?'

'Not if you don't want me to.'

And he wouldn't. Of course he wouldn't. He liked to think he'd gone way past the stage where books mattered more than people.

All the same, she proved difficult to pin down on this one. At first, she told him, she used to think she was a reincarnation of DF. But the basis for this seemed to be little more than a teenage crush on the novels and those initials.

(Powys didn't imagine Dan Frayne had any illusions about his initials.)

She wasn't quite sure when she'd first made a connection between DF and the Third Nanny, who, to Powys, sounded suspiciously like a fantasy figure to help her cope with life under the authority of the real ones.

'What happened to your mother?'

'She died when I was born. That is, I was born in rather a hurry after she fell down the stairs at Bowermead.'

'I'm sorry.'

'My father's rather held it against me ever since. I don't think he's ever been able to look at me without feeling a certain resentment.'

Powys thought this, and being brought up by starchy nannies, was enough to disarrange any kid's psychology.

Several miles further on, somewhere down the M5, she said, 'It isn't a coincidence.'

'No?'

'We were called back. You for John Cowper Powys, me for Dion Fortune'

'Dion Fortune didn't have much time for JCP,' Powys pointed out. 'She even misspelt his name.'

'That was deliberate A sort of smokescreen. If she didn't know him well enough to spell his name right, she could hardly be involved with him in a secret operation.'

'What secret operation was this exactly?'

'I don't know. But I think we have to find out. Why else have we been brought back?'

'I haven't exactly been brought back. I've never been here before. Also…'

'You're a Powys.'

'I've been commissioned to write a book, Diane. That's all.

But it isn't all, is it? Is her Third Nanny on the edge of the bed any more crazy than having your living room repeatedly rearranged by a kinetic copy of A Glastonbury Romance?

Diane said, 'Do you believe in evil?'

'Probably. I mean, yes.'

'In Glastonbury?'

'Good as anywhere. Or as bad.'

'Colonel Pixhill believed in it very strongly at the end.'

'That's one very depressing book,' said Powys.

'People hate it in Glastonbury.'

'I can imagine they would. Doesn't fit the ethos.'

Diane said, 'There's an American called Dr Pelham Grainger, who lives locally and apparently maintains that we don't let enough darkness into our lives. I've taken over thirty orders for his book in the past fortnight.'

'I think somebody mentioned him a week or two ago. Sounds like a very sick man.'

She nodded and stroked Arnold and didn't say anything else until they were well past the Isle of Avalon sign.

'I've seen the Dark Chalice.'

Her voice seemed to reverberate, which didn't happen in Minis. Powys slowed down drastically, the lights of Glastonbury all around them now. There was a sort of shelter in the centre of the car park, under which Diane had left the van.

Powys turned the Mini so that the headlights lit up the side of the van.

He was waiting. This could mean almost anything; the Dark Chalice seemed to be Pixhill's all purpose metaphor for bad shit.

'Oh no,' said Diane.

Although it wasn't yet nine p.m., the car park seemed completely deserted It was another bright, sharp night, the moon not long past full, the tower of St John's sticking up like a candlestick on the edge of a table.

Diane said. 'Oh, please…'

He followed her eyes.

'Oh.' He got out.

The back window of Diane's van had been smashed, so had the driver's side window; glass all over the seat. Across the side panels, where Diane had painted friendly pink spots there was uneven, black, spray paint lettering, six inches high.

Diane stared at the van in numbed silence. Powys squeezed her right hand with both of his. He saw the black paint was glistening, still damp.

'It was in the fire,' Diane said tonelessly. 'When Jim died. That was the second time, the first time was over the Tor. Like shadow hands holding up a shadow cup. That was when I felt the evil. I've never felt anything like it.'

'I'll call the police,' Powys said.

'No.'

'You can't just let them…'

'The police are never going to catch them. 'There's a garage I used to go to. I'll get them to take it away first thing tomorrow.'

'Bastards.' Powys said. 'Have you any idea who might…?'

'It doesn't matter,' Diane cried. She turned away from the van. 'It doesn't matter,' she whispered.