The Chalice

TWELVE

Sam threw open the Bowermead gates, ran back and jumped back in the Mini.

'Wayne hangs out with Darryl Davey.' he said. 'Of the Provisional Glastonbury First Brigade. If that yellow-toothed twat…'

'Sam, he was lying. He was winding you up. I'm not even going to mention it to Juanita, the state she's in already. It could, however, be a police matter. Whatever they did.'

'You think the police got a better chance of finding her than we do?'

'They could pull this Davey in.'

'I could pull him in. Go round the pubs till I find him.'

'And get filled in by his mates.' Powys drove out of the Bowermead turning towards the lights of Glastonbury.

'Time is it?'

'Gone ten. What did you get out of Pennard?'

'Too much whisky.'

'Didn't do you much harm when it came to dealing with Rankin. If we both went round the pubs…'

'I'd rather you went to Meadwell, keep Woolly company. Because that's where they'll show up. Sooner rather than later.'

'You think?'

'I know. Sam, who else is in The Cauldron apart from Ceridwen?'

'Depends what you mean by 'in''.' Sam had Arnold on his knee, clutching the dog to his chest. 'A whole lot of women go to the meetings.'

'I mean the so-called Inner Circle.'

'There's a woman called Jenna thinks she's well in. I dunno.'

'You see, we need to find out where the Inner Circle meets. That's where she'll be. I mean Diane.'

'Wanda Carlisle's, surely?'

'It's a front. Just like her. Nothing happens there. It's somewhere else.'

'I don't get this, Powys. Surely they're all going up the Tor with the Bishop for this Solstice dawn crap. They'll be at Wanda's.'

'I think you'll find they aren't all going up. Wanda's going alone with the Bishop. That's a measure of how important they think it is. She's about as half-arsed as he is. Two lightweights representing the great traditions of paganism and Christianity- on the most powerful, hallowed site in Britain. It doesn't make sense. And yet it's got to. It's bloody got to.'

Sam said, 'Woolly's coming out with all this stuff about the biggest blow against spirituality since 1539. I mean, what kind of blow was that really? The Roman Church was pretty bloody corrupt by the Reformation. The Popes were just more bent politicians in tall hats. Something had to give.'

'It was a blow to Glastonbury. If you try not to get spirituality confused with organised religion, you find you can keep a better perspective. What about Archer Ffitch? Where might he be? He got any kind of apartment in Glastonbury? A girlfriend?'

'You're joking. Archer Ffitch… No, he's got a place in London. Or maybe he shares somewhere with Oliver Pixhill. But nowhere in Glastonbury. Anyway, Diane wouldn't be with Archer. Diane's not been having good feelings about Archer.'

Powys glanced sharply at him. 'What's that mean?'

'She said – and I was a bit cynical about this at the time – that she sometimes feels her hate for Archer has a life its own.'

'Say that again. Try and remember exactly what she said.'

Sam tried. Powys listened, transfixed, gripping the steering wheel hard, and tried not to crash the car.

He drove into Chilkwell Street, indicated left for the town centre. He needed to talk to Juanita. And he needed a copy of Dion Fortune's Psychic Self-Defence. Fast.

'I just want Diane,' Sam said. 'That's all. If those scumbags…'

Halfway down High Street, Powys braked hard behind a stationary bus. A big, obviously decrepit black bus, stopped in the middle of the road.

'It's another accident,' Sam said. 'I don't believe this.'

Powys pulled out alongside the bus, switched on his headlights. A woman in a blue coat was lying in the road.

He came out of the car so fast he lost his balance – effects of the whisky, shouldn't even be driving – and pitched over in the road, hitting his head on the kerb and rolling over, buildings of brick and stone spinning overhead, lights coming on in windows over upside-down shop signs, pale amber streetlamps, a church tower with a dusting of weak stars around its crown of stone thorns.

The bus had huge, balding tyres. Bloody thing shouldn't even be on the road. A few people were gathering. He kept hearing the words 'not again' again and again and again.

He crawled towards the wheels, pulling himself up. Saw a guy bending over the body. The body wrapped in the blue coat. She said she always wore something blue. Lucky colour. Nothing would happen to you if you wore blue.

'… can't credit it.' The driver of the bus, presumably, the guy in an anorak with a Castrol sticker. 'I mean. I know this town. I know where Wellhouse Lane is. But I didn't turn into Wellhouse Lane, did I? I come down here. If I'd got it right, she wouldn't… But, like, anyway she just comes leaping out like… Christ, I never slammed on like that before, thought I was gonner have a heart attack.'

Powys stumbled to where she lay. She was very still. The coat had come loose. Her long neck shone light brown under the headlights, faintly freckled. Her eyes were full open. Big brown eyes. One arm flung out.

The hand ungloved, a livid pink.

'Powys.' Nothing moving but her lips 'You're crying.'

Woolly's guts turned over and he threw up in the sink. He could smell smoke and diesel and burnt rubber.

He turned on the taps. Let the water, hot and cold, splatter down on his face and neck for over a minute, until the old pipes were snorting and gurgling like a bad case of dysentery.

Woolly washed his hands, wiped them on his jeans. That was it. He went and put on all the lights in the kitchen. Just for a minute. Just to get rid of the image of Juanita's face in the headlights before he trod the brakes, screaming out loud, praying to God, forcing his whole being into his feet and those brakes.

A lesson.

Never close your eyes at Meadwell.

She sat on the bed in the lamplight.

The lamp in the stone and timber-framed bedroom had a Tiffany shade almost matching the stained glass in the apex of the Gothic windows. The bulb in the lamp flickered, perhaps it would go out soon.

'I don't like bulbs that do that.' Her arms were by her sides, held away from her body.

'I'll get them to change it,' Powys said.

They were in his ancient, mellow, timbered room at The George and Pilgrims. Juanita wouldn't go home, wouldn't go back to the shop. It's infected, she'd kept saying. She'd stood up shakily in the road. Unhurt. How can you be hurt by a phantom bus? Giggling hysterically. At least the driver was happy. Powys had handed his car keys to Sam: 'Meadwell, quickly.'

Her blue coat lay on the floor by the bed. Arnold had curled up on it.

'I couldn't move.' Her loose sweater had slipped down over one shoulder. 'I didn't want to move. It was very peaceful in the road. Can't remember ever feeling as peaceful. I lay and I stared up at that torn radiator grille and I waited to die.'

He sat down next to her on the bed, looked hard into her dulled eyes. 'How do you feel now?'

'Not here. I feel like I'm not here.'

'Listen. Juanita.' He wanted to touch her. Didn't know where it was safe to. 'It was a real bus, OK? Sam talked to the driver. He's a scrap-dealer from Taunton. He was delivering the bus to a Mr Moulder, who has a farm up Wellhouse Lane.'

The eyes wavered.

'But he took the wrong turning. He doesn't know why he did that because he knows Glastonbury very well, but he took a wrong turning. He came down High Street and there you were in the middle of the road. He said he braked so hard he nearly had a heart attack and still he thought he'd killed you. And I… me too, you know?'

Joe Powys's head fell into Juanita's lap. He felt brittle and exhausted like the Holy Thorn. No sap left. He knew more than his mind could handle about Pixhill and Dion Fortune and the dark heritage of the Ffitches. And yet he knew nothing. He'd very nearly murdered a man in a rush of mindless violence He'd thought his dog had been killed.

Also the woman he really…

He felt Juanita's lips on his hair.

'You were crying,' she said. 'You thought I was dead and you were crying.'

'I shouldn't have cried.' He sat up. 'It's only a station between trains.'

'What?'

He kissed her. Her checks were wet and hot, her lips dry and cracked. He moistened them with his tongue, felt her shiver. Her face at last moved under his and her arms went round him. Just her arms.

Powys hugged Juanita and they stayed like that, dazed and weeping, for several minutes. Only in Glastonbury. Who said that?

'I'm a mess,' she said. 'It isn't possible to be a bigger mess than me. I don't even know what's real. I don't trust my eyes, I don't trust my body…'

'I'm real. I think.'

She pulled away from him.

'Listen, I'm serious. Of all the things that've happened to me tonight, I don't know which ones are real. You tell me that bus was real… an hour or two ago I saw that bus in a painting – that actual bus, with its radiator… and then I saw one of the Goddess Shop pots bloody well menstruating. And there was Ceridwen in her robes in the middle of the road. Talking to me. Instructing me that I was now officially a hag, which… which makes a lot of sense when you've had about two hundred hot flushes… I do mean two hundred very real hot flushes, which Matthew Banks will confirm. I'm a hag. A crone. Look at me.'

She wore no make-up. She was very beautiful. She was to die for.

'Look at me.' She began to cry.

He kissed her. His hands slid under her sloppy sweater.

There was nothing there but warm skin.

'Um, would you mind if…?'

'You don't want this kind of hassle, Powys.'

He could hardly breathe. He fumbled the sweater over her speckled shoulders, draping it over Arnold, who murmured but didn't move.

'OK.' Juanita was looking down at herself. 'It's a relief. I thought they were going to be around my navel.'

Powys touched a brown nipple with his tongue. It had an aureole of freckles.

'Dion Fortune would have understood.' He tossed his sweater on Arnold and wriggled out of his jeans. 'What you've been through.'

'Mmm?'

'Psychic attack, Juanita. Nobody but nobody has two hundred hot flushes out of the blue in a few hours.' He unzipped her velvet skirt. 'That woman really hates you. We're going to have to break the spell.'

Guiding her back on to the bed, this creaky Victorian four-poster. The mattress was rather too high to fall back on. He lifted her in his arms; she felt unnervingly light, a bit cold.

'Say, I am very beautiful. Say, I am a goddess.'

Sliding her into bed.

She said, 'I know what this is. You've seen that bloody picture of me, haven't you?'

'The Avalonian,' Powys said. 'Issue Six. And nothing's changed.'

'No?' She lifted the sheet with an elbow. 'This is where they took away the skin. To repair the hands. It means – this is the principal sick joke – it means I can't take any pressure on my thighs.'

Juanita closed her eyes, laughing. Her arms wide open, a hand on each pillow. It was the first time he'd ever seen her relaxed.

'Not a problem.' His lips moving down to the scars where the strips of skin had been scraped away. 'Too rough?'

'Nnnnnn.'

And slowly up to the bush. Juanita moaned, her legs opening.

'Turn on your side maybe?'

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 making her restless, sending her images of the Tor. A very practised magician – or group of magicians – who can conjure elementals, like the wolf-thing. 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.'