The Chalice

Epilogue

Booksellers High Street

Glastonbury Prop. Juanita Carey 24 December Danny, OH GOD, Danny where do I start?

Where's it going to END? You'll have read the papers, seen the TV reports (all concentrating on the Pennard madness, nobody making the right connections) and I know Powys phoned you.

Maybe this is entirely superfluous. As usual, I don't know whether I'm writing to you or to myself. Today, I'm going to try to have a long talk with Diane. I've seen a lot of her, of course, but there's always been someone else there. Policemen. Her solicitor, Quentin Cotton.

And Sam, of course – she's moved into his flat, doesn't like to let him out of her sight. She hasn't really taken it all in, of course. Still talks about her father as if he were still alive and still the owner of Bowermead Hall. Which SHE is now, of course. I don 't think any of us have quite taken that in. 'Two hundred acres,' Powys keeps saying. 'Three vineyards. And a pack of hunting hounds.' At which he grins delightedly at Sam, and Sam looks terribly embarrassed. We're still staying, Powys and me, at The George and Pilgrims. He brought the old Amstrad across and I sit at the window and tap out this nonsense, looking down on High Street, very un-Christmas Eve, but still there, you know? Still there. Still with the candle lit in the window of the Wicked Wax Co. Even the quake didn't put that candle out. And I think I'm happy. Happier than I've been since I don't know when. There's no calm before a storm, only tension. After the storm, that's where you find calm.

I feel guilty about this. Guilty because I'm glad – have to be frank and honest here – that old Pennard killed Archer and, especially, the hateful psychopath Ceridwen. I can still see Pennard framed in the entrance of the reservoir. Where he was always grey and heavy to me, there seemed to be a pure, fresh light in him as he raised that gun. Which just has to be very wrong, doesn't it? God knows, I hate and fear guns as much as Sam Daniel. I'm sorry – ignore this bit, I'm mixed up, there's too much I don't understand. And yet aspects of it are coming clearer all the time. It was only yesterday that it occurred to me that out of all those appalling people in the reservoir – and I recognised many of them from that night on the Tor – there was one missing. It was the man who called himself Gwyn ap Nudd. The man in the hairy mask. I'm almost certain now that behind that mask was Oliver Pixhill. Diane told me how the whole attitude of the travellers' convoy began to change as they approached the start of the St Michael Line at Bury St Edmunds. What I suppose you would have to call a dark element entered. The less serious ones – the colourful, circusy types – had dropped away so that the only remaining members of the original group Diane had joined up with in Yorkshire were this boy Headlice and his so-called girlfriend. Headlice – no home, estranged from his family, very much a lost boy. They needed a sacrifice, you see. To activate the dark side of the Tor on the anniversary of the execution of Abbot Whiting. Powys, who (when pushed) will admit to knowing a little about these things, says the rootless, anonymous travelling population is regarded by working black magicians as a very accessible source of human sacrifices. Even babies, whose birth are unregistered. Doesn't bear thinking about. We know from Diane that Headlice had been 'prepared'. Made to walk backwards into every church along the St Michael Line – how more obviously Satanic can you get? But this kid, from what Diane says about him, would have done it without a qualm, equating anti-Christian with anti-Establishment. (Which is utterly wrong; when the Arimathean planted his staff on Wearyall Hill, the pagans were The Establishment and Christianity was seriously radical, man…) Who actually killed Headlice is no more clear than it ever was. Was it Gwyn or Mort? Or Rankin and his son. Or all of them, as, with hindsight, they seem to have been basically on the same side. A sacrifice? Do I believe that, really? Well, people have died on the Tor in strange circumstances. And Jim… Um. Yes. Why did Jim die? Was it a case of Gwyn/Oliver spotting an opportunity for another Abbot's Night sacrifice, feeling that this bolshy little guy had been delivered into his hands? It will remain a mystery. He always treasured Mystery.

Oliver. How can we ever know what drove that bastard? Apart, that is, from years of resentment at his father and exposure, through Archer, to the allure of the Dark Chalice. They were very close friends from an early age, Archer and Oliver. Doubtless, Archer initially cultivated Oliver to get close to Meadwell and the family chalice he probably believed was calling out to him. Perhaps this is why Colonel Pixhill encouraged his poor wife to leave with his son, sensing the evil growing in the kid. By this time, Archer and Oliver were at boarding school together – in Wiltshire or somewhere, I forget. Who should be the matron there but one Ruth Dunn? Was this coincidence? I don't think it was. Dunn would already have been a serious, practising occultist by then. Who knows what she did with those two boys, what perversity they conjured between them. It's my feeling that, while Archer initially dominated Oliver Pixhill, it was soon Oliver who was controlling Archer. I suspect he became genuinely powerful, in a Charles Manson-like way. I can imagine him get getting a real buzz out of dumping his city suit every so often, stopping shaving and joining up with the travellers as their revered shaman, collecting around him a group of the kind of insane occultists this society attracts and acquiring the kind of reputation that scares off the routine travellers. And always, in the background, there was Ceridwen. I have no explanation for her. A psychopath is a psychopath, and there are more around than we think. Even in Glastonbury. Thank God her husband got the kids is all I can say.

Ceridwen, Oliver, Archer – THIS was the Inner Circle. These were the people playing with the volatile Glastonbury atmosphere. I don't like to even imagine what went on down in that disused reservoir, the 'perfect temple', as Powys called it because of its alignment – an alignment they strengthened in the hope of somehow taking control of the Tor. They nearly did it too. With the proposed Restriction of Access, the Tor would very soon cease to be everyman's temple. Much of poor Woolly's paranoia seems to have been well founded and it makes you fear for Stonehenge. Without Archer's influence, I suspect the Tame the Tor Bill will fade ignominiously away. As for the road – well, for a start, Diane's instructed Quentin Cotton to tear up any agreement for the sale of land to the Department of Transport. She insists she'll actually invite the eco-guerrillas on to her property if it comes to it. I suspect, in the end, we might at least force a change of route. We'll fight, anyway. We have a lot of battles ahead. Not least to clear Woolly's name. I want to have some kind of Woolaston memorial – this is very important to me. And I want to publish The Avalonian before March. One of the issues I want to raise with Diane. The earth tremor? I don 't know what caused it. Was it a timely geological anomaly? Or was it the conflict of good and evil forces in a psychic hothouse climate? Some are saying it was the Tor announcing its refusal to be tamed. Others maintain it was a manifestation of God's outrage at a bishop attempting conciliation with the pagans. It's interesting to me that it happened when the two great spiritual forces were represented on the top of the Tor by two distinctly weak links – Wanda and the bishop, not enough power between them to keep a cigarette alight. If you imagine a fuse box: when the power overloads, it's the slenderest thread that breaks. I think if you'd had Ceridwen up there facing… well, maybe even me, the way I was feeling that day and maybe still am… then perhaps the tower would have come down. I'm not kidding. You may have detected that I'm feeling so much better, more energised, much more positive about the town, about its future. Yes, I believe we can all live together. I believe we must invoke the Grail, which stands for tolerance and acceptance. (I won 't say peace and love.)

And the Dark Chalice, the anti-Grail? I never saw it. Thank God. With Don Moulder's permission. Verity (she wouldn't let anyone else touch it) placed the grisly item in the black bus, exactly where the radiator grille was coming off. And then we set fire to the bus. Well, we didn't know what else to do. We burned that damned bus to an absolute shell, and then we paid to have it taken away. We figured maybe the link was broken with the end of the last male Pennard. The speculation in the papers is that Pennard killed his son by accident while attempting to drive out New Age travellers setting up some kind of squat in the disused reservoir on his land. The fact that one of the people seemed to be a well-established Glastonbury citizen was one of the puzzles requiring further investigation. Another was the apparent murder of Councillor Edward Woolaston by Archer Ffitch's agent, Oliver Pixhill, at his father's former house. Verity is still staying with a somewhat chastened Wanda. I am expecting the Home Temple to be dismantled. Diane says she hopes to persuade Verity to run Bowermead until she decides what to do with it. The Rankins have gone, of course. Just disappeared. Hardly a surprise. Sam's been going to Bowermead to feed the hounds, convinced he can 'reform' them. When I start to get depressed about Woolly and Jim, the thought of Sam as some kind of Pennard consort – and particularly what that will do to his revered father – always brings me round. I mean, can you IMAGINE Sam with the hunting and shooting mob at meetings of the Country Landowners' Association? I just love it. As for your Glastonbury book, co-authored by JM Powys and myself – we may well get around to it, although it's unlikely to contain much of the above. We're taking things day by day. And night by night. Love,