The Man in the Moss

From Dawber's Secret Book of Bridelow (unpublished):

THE TRIPLE DEATH

Three was a sacred number for the ancient Celts.

I don't know why. Nobody does, obviously. But think of Christianity - the Holy Trinity. Now think of the Celtic triple goddess - maiden, matron, hag Think, if you like, of the Law of Three, as taught by the cosmologist Gurdjieff. '... One force or two forces can never produce a phenomenon,' writes his colleague, P. D. Ouspensky, going on to explain about (i) the positive force, (ii) the negative force and (iii) the neutralizing or motivating force.

I like to think of a three-pin plug, for the safe performance of which the third force, the Earth, is so essential, although I don't know if this is an adequate analogy

Whatever the explanation, the Celtic gods appeared to have demanded a sacrifice in triplicate before the necessary energy might be released.

And sometimes the cycle of death seemed to operate according to some pre-set cosmic mechanism. For instance, the eminent Celtic scholar Dr Anne Ross has described the legendary demise of the sixth-century Irish king Diarmaid, whose triple death - by weapon, drowning and burning - was foretold by seers. Diarmaid poured scorn on this until his enemies struck at the Feast of Samhain, when the hall was set ablaze and Diarmaid run through with a spear. Seeking safety from the flames, the king plunged, fatally, into a vat of ale.

The Celts have always had a great sense of comic irony.

CHAPTER II

Death. No peace in it.

You struggle towards the light and the light recedes, or maybe it's the bastard darkness has grabbed hold of your feet, hauling you back. Cloying, sweating darkness. Darkness like a black suit that's too small for you. Darkness like ... black peat ... the kind of dark you don't come out of until you're long, long dead and even then its somebody's mistake.

Anything's better than this kind of darkness. Forget about Heaven, Hell would be better.

Joke.

So, OK, this guy, he goes to Hell, right, and it's not what he was expecting, no hot coals and stuff. Just all these other guys standing around drinking cups of tea - up to their necks in liquid shit. And they pass him a cup and he's thinking, hey, you know, this could be a lot worse.

And then the Devil himself strolls in - horns, cloven hoofs, spiky tail, the whole getup, plus a big smile - and the guys' faces all drop.

And the first guy thinks, Hey, what's the problem, the Evil One seems affable enough? And then the Devil beams at them all and he says,

'OK, boys, tea break over, back to your tunnelling ...'

This could be the secret of the damned universe. Tea break over boys, back to the fucking tunnelling.

Oh, Jesus, help me. I'm cold and sweating and dead.

Timegap.

And you wake up into it again and there's the light in the middle distance, only this time the light doesn't back off, the light comes right at you, a big dazzling explosion of light and all you can think is, leave me alone, huh.

Just leave me alone, let me go back into the shit.

Into the black peat.

I'm not afraid of the dark. I'm crying, but I'm not afraid.

The minister's daughter, Cathy Gruber, pushed through the multitude of the Born Again, into the Rectory drawing room.

Mungo Macbeth following, wondering how come, she didn't throw all these jerks into the street.

A fire was blazing in the hearth, a sofa pushed close to the heat, a woman stretched across it; she had her eyes shut and she was breathing hard. Her long, dark hair hung damply over an arm of the sofa. A small group of people was clustered around. One guy was on his knees; he held an open prayer book.

It looked as still, as solemn and as phoney as a Pre-Raphaelite death scene, Macbeth thought, as Cathy knelt down next to the guy with the prayer-book.

'How is she now?'

'In and out of sleep.'

'Has she spoken about it? She has to, you know, Chris. If she keeps all the details bottled up, it's going to cause a lot of trauma.'

Chris said, 'Who is this man?'

'I believe we talked on the phone.'

'Oh. The American. I passed you on to Joel, didn't I?'

'Some asshole zealot,' said Macbeth, and Cathy frowned at him.

'I'm sorry to say poor Joel's still in there,' Chris said. 'Still in the church.'

'Best place for him,' Cathy said. 'Let him cool his heels for a while. Chantal, can you hear me?'

The woman on the couch moved, eyelids twitching like captive moths. Cathy held one of her hands. 'This really is a wonderful lady,' Chris said to Macbeth. 'I don't know what we'd have done.'

'Cathy?'

'Makes you think you underestimated the benefits of an old-fashioned Anglican upbringing. She's not at all fazed by any of this.'

'Why I'm sticking close to the kid,' said Macbeth. 'I was fazed clean outa my tree some hours back.' He nodded at the sofa. 'This lady your wife?'

'We're united in God,' Chris said as Chantal's eyes opened and then shut again.

'What happened to her?'

'She was raped,' Chris said baldly.

Chantal moaned. Macbeth focused cynically on Chris, who looked to be about his own age and still had the remains of that bland, doped look you could guarantee to find on a proportion of fundamentalist Christians, Children of God, Mormons and sundry Followers of the Sublime Light.

Cathy stood up. 'Keep her warm. Call me if she wants to talk.' Maybe sensing the tension, she led Macbeth away.

The house seemed stuffed with men and women feeding their bland, doped faces with biscuits and potato-chips, drinking coffee from paper cups. They were in small groups, many holding on to each other, and they weren't talking much, although a few were praying silently, heads bent and palms upturned against their thighs.

Macbeth decided this was probably better than mass hysteria.

'You want coffee?'

Cathy shook her head. He followed her into the hall; she brought out keys, unlocked a door, led him into an unoccupied room with book cases and an upright piano.

Macbeth said, 'Cathy, reassure me. That woman really was raped? In addition to everything, we got a rapist on the loose?'

The girl pushed the door into place, stood with her back to it. 'She thinks she was raped. Seems she'd gone back alone to the church to plead with Joel to come out. Says she was thrown across a tomb and had sensations of... violation.'

Cathy looked him in the eyes, unsmiling. 'I'm afraid that what we have on the loose is something that used to be Matt Castle.'

The room was silent, apart from the rain on the window, which, by this time, Macbeth hardly registered.

'You believe that.' Already he knew better than to make it a question.

'It's a lot for you to swallow in one night,' Cathy said, 'but Bridelow used to pride itself on having a certain spiritual equilibrium. And now somebody's turned the place into a battlefield. Opposing forces. Black magic, as I understand it, doesn't work quite so well without there being something equally extreme to ignite it.'

'Like, opposites attract.'

Cathy nodded. 'My old man is an ordinary, old-fashioned country clergyman who's learned not to ask too many questions. Joel Beard's an extremist - same background as this bunch. Somebody engineered it that Joel should come to Bridelow with a mission to wipe out the remains of some very innocuous, downbeat paganism. We thought there was an understanding in the diocese that you don't put unstable fanatics into Bridelow, but I'd guess somebody was simply blackmailing the Archdeacon.'

'This is the boss-cleric.'

'As you say, the boss-cleric. Simon. Who's gay. And who's been more than a bit indiscreet in his time.'

'And the blackmailer? Stand up, John Peveril Stanage?'

'This is the one man whose name is never mentioned in Bridelow. The one writer whose books you will never see on the paperback rack in Milly's Post Office.'

'You were outside when I told them about that stuff with the bones in Scotland?'

Cathy went on nodding. She looked very young. Still had on her damp dufflecoat and a college scarf wound under her chin. 'Mungo, I can't tell you how sorry I am about Moira. I sincerely blame myself. I should never have let her drive away in that state.'

He felt his eyes narrow. 'State?'

'I think I must have been the last person to see her alive. She was very down, I'm afraid. She'd picked up a bug of some kind. And she was upset over the burglary - someone broke in here and stole some things from her. Including this … famous comb. Which she kept in a secret pocket in her guitar case.'

'They stole the case?'

'Just the comb. Seemed silly. 'I'm afraid I didn't really believe her about that, at first.'

'Shit.' Macbeth clenched his fists. 'How would this sonofabitch know precisely where she kept the comb?'

'Mungo …' Cathy hesitated. 'She told me she'd only shown one person where she kept that comb.'

'Wasn't me.'

'No,' said Cathy. 'It was Matt Castle.'

'The ubiquitous Matt Castle. What was her relationship with this guy?'

'She was in his band. And that was all. She was always very insistent about him never touching her.'

'Yeah, but I bet he wanted to.*

'I know he wanted to. He was crazy about her. Men tend to . . . Oh, gosh, I'm sorry.'

'The irony of it,' said Macbeth, 'is I never got to touch her either.'

'But I doubt,' Cathy said, not without compassion, 'if you're of quite such an obsessive temperament.'

'Something hurts, is all. Maybe it's self-pity. I, uh, thought she was gonna change my life.'

'Maybe she has.'

'You mind if we get off this subject? Tell me about Castle.'

'Yes.' Cathy sat on the arm of what must have been her father's wing-backed fireside chair. 'Matt's son, Dic, reckons his father's lust … unrequited lust … for Moira, just got progressively worse with age. Eventually developing into almost a … perversion? About women with long, dark hair.'

Macbeth was seized, for the first time, by the reality of something more potentially soul-damaging than either grief or anger.

He said, 'That woman in the room across there …'

'Yes,' Cathy said calmly. 'I noticed that too.'

This was more like it. This was much more like Hell.

'Christ, I feel just awful.'

Pain in the head, behind the eyes. A growling pain. Put me back. Put me back into the nice, warm shit.

'You've got to come with me,' the Devil urges.

Hot coals roaring and crackling all around. The inside of a furnace, but without the pretty colours. A black furnace with one cold, flashing, piercing flame.

'Piss off, leave me alone.'

'Look, I haven't got much time.' Stabbing her through the eyes with his needle of light.

'You've got all the time there is, pal, all the time there ever was and all the time there's ever gonny be. That no' enough for you?'

'Please. For Christ's sake.'

'Listen, will you get rid of the damn light?'

'Sorry. I forgot you'd been in the pitch dark so long. I'll put it under my jacket, that any better?'

'Yeah. You're OK, Satan, you know that?'

'Try and sit up.'

'Get your fucking hands off me!'

'Listen to me, you have to get moving.'

'Who is this?'

'It's me. Dic. Dic Castle.'

Light on his face. Dark red hair, Matt's jawline, Matt's stubborn lips.

She coughed. It made her head ache. She said, all she could think of to say, 'Was it you? Was it you who took my comb?'

'No,' he said. 'No I didn't. I know who did.'

'Who?' Her back hurt as she sat up. Like it mattered now.

'Bloke called Shaw Horridge. But that's not important right now.'

'No.' The name didn't seem to mean anything to her.

'Look, Dic, I don't want to seem stupid, but what are you doing here? What am I doing here? And where in Christ's name is here?'

Maybe they were both dead. Maybe he'd been sent to offer her a cup of tea.

'It's a storage building, back of the brewery.'

'Brewery?'

'Bridelow Brewery. You have to come now, Moira. Please. I'm supposed to have gone for a pee, that's all. They're going to start wondering where I've got to, and then we could be in a lot of trouble.'

She stood up. There was mist to struggle through, thick grey mist. A monster rose over her and opened its jaws.

Bridelow. Bridelow Black.

Her hands fiddled with her clothes. Sweater. Jeans. She seemed to be fully clothed. She felt naked and raw.

'Thought I was fucking dead. Dic, why am I no' dead?'

'They've had you on drugs.'

'Sure as hell wasn't speed, was it?'

'I don't know. I really don't know much about drugs.'

'Bridelow Brewery,' she said. 'Why's that scare me? Bridelow Brewery. Bridelow Black.

On her feet now, panting, leaning against something, maybe a wall, maybe a door. He'd put out his light. They were just a couple of voices. 'Bridelow Black,' she breathed. 'Ran me off the road. Ran me over a damn precipice.'

'No precipice. There was a fiat area over the wall next to the road. Then a slow drop after that. There was a lot of mist. They took you out ...'

'Fat guy with a half-grown moustache.'

'Yeah. Name's Dean-something. Calls himself Asmodeus, after some biblical demon. Looks like a dickhead, but he isn't.'

'He hit me. Also, some big bastard in a dog-collar hit me. Everybody hits me.'

'Can you walk?'

'Three of them in the lorry. They were dragging me away. Who the hell are these people?'

'They all work at the brewery. Gannons fired the local men, brought in these people. Occult-followers from Sheffield and Manchester. Small-time, no-hope urban Satanists. You can practically pick them up on street corners. Doesn't really care any more who he brings in, any low-life shit'll do.'

'Who's this?'

'Stanage.'

'Sorry, my head's, like, somewhere else. I'm not following this. Who's …'

'Can you walk!'

'Guess I can. Question is, do I want to?'

Then walk out of here. Do it now. You walk out of here in a straight line until you get to the road. No, look, I'll come with you as far as the entrance, OK, then I've got to get back or I'm dead. I'll give you the lamp, but don't use it till you're out of sight of the brewery. Go to the Rectory. You remember where the Rectory is?'

'Rectory. Yeah. Near the church.'

'You remember Cath?'

'Dic,' she said, 'what's that noise? I was thinking it was the hot coals.'

'Coals?'

'Never mind.'

'It's just the rain, Moira. The rain on the roof. It's raining heavily, been like this for hours. You're going to get wet, can't be helped. OK, I'm opening the door. You see anybody ... anybody ... run the other way. Tell Cath ... are you taking this in?'

'Doing ma best, Dic.'

'Tell her they're going to put out the light. In the church. The beacon.'

'Who's "they"?'

'Moira, listen, they've got my dad propped up in there. And his clothes. And the pipes. And me. And ... you. Please, just go!'

' What did you just say?'

A shuddering creak and he pushed her out, and it was like somebody had thrust her head down the toilet and flushed it.

She gasped.

'Come on.' He took her arm. She could make out the shapes of trees and a sprinkling of small lights among the branches.

'Not that way.'

'What's that tower?'

'Part of the brewery. Can't you go any faster? I'm sorry. They catch you, I'm telling you, they'll kill you.'

She'd stopped. She was shaking. Somebody was pouring bucketfuls of water directly into her brain. She clapped her hands to her head.

She screamed.

'Christ's sake, shut up!'

'Dic. My hair!'

Voices. Lights.

'Moira, run! Take the lamp.' Thrusting it into her hands, heavy, wet metal. 'Don't use it till you're away from here.'

Running footsteps.

'My hair's gone!'

He pushed her hard in the back and then she heard him take off in the opposite direction, shoes skidding on the saturated ground.

'Dic?'

'Run!' He was almost howling. 'Just run! Don't lose that lamp!'

'Dic. what have they done to my hair? Where have they taken my fucking hair?'

CHAPTER III

Surprising how vulnerable you felt in a tomato-coloured Japanese sports car up here on a night like this. Ashton took it steady.

He wondered: how much water can a peat bog take before it turns into something the consistency of beef broth?

Not his manor, the natural world. The unnatural world was more like it. A number of the people with whom Ashton conversed at length - usually across a little grey room with a microphone in the wall - were creatures of the unnatural world.

As for the supernatural world ...

I don't know why, Ashton told himself as he drove towards Bridelow Moss, but in a perverse sort of way this is almost invigorating. To be faced with something you can't arrest, matters which in no way can ever be taken down and used in evidence.

Completely out of your depth. He looked down at the Moss. There was an area of Manchester called Moss Side, in which the police also sometimes felt out of their depth, so choked was it with drugs and violent crime. Did the name imply that once, centuries ago, it had been on the edge of somewhere like this?

And, if so, how much had changed?

Not the kind of thing policemen tended to think about.

Gary Ashton, facing retirement in a year or two, spent an increasing amount of time trying to think about things policemen did not tend to think about. Intent on not becoming just a retired copper' working as consultant to some flash security firm and tending people who couldn't give a shit with his personal analysis of the criminal mind and endless stories about Collars I Have Felt.

Just lately, Ashton had been trying to talk to people as people, knowing that in a very short time he would be one of them.

A well-controlled tremor in her voice. 'Inspector Ashton, I'm extremely sorry to bother you at this time of night, but you did say if anything else disturbing occurred, I should let you know immediately.'

Yes, yes, Mrs Castle, but I meant in the nature of a break-in. Unless a crime has been committed or is likely to be, I'm sorry but this is not really something the police can do anything about.

Except, he hadn't said any of that.

What he'd said was, 'Yes, I'll come, but as long as you understand I won't be corning as a policeman.' Turning off the telly in his frugally furnished divorced person's apartment, reacting to a peculiar note of unhysterical desperation in a woman's voice and getting into practice for doing things not as a policeman.

Surprising how vulnerable you felt not being a policeman on a very nasty night proceeding in an easterly direction across a waterlogged peatbog in a tomato-coloured Japanese sports car to see a woman about a ghost.

'Well,' Ernie Dawber said finally. 'I think it must be obvious to all of us where they are.'

Willie said, 'Macbeth wasn't fooled, you know. He knew we was keeping summat back.'

'Let's hope Catherine keeps him out of our way. Come on, Willie, there's nobody but us going to see to this.'

Milly Gill was hugging Bob and Jim and looking, Ernie thought, a bit like his mother had looked when she'd switched off the radio after the formal declaration of World War Two.

'What are you going to do?'

'Well, I know we're only men, Millicent, but we're going to have to stop this thing. Don't know how, mind. Have to see when we get there.'

Ernie put on his hat.

'Where?'

'The Hall. The brewery. By 'eck, I wish I'd listened to my feelings. So used to them coming to nowt, see, that's the problem. I remember examining the list of Gannons directors - last summer, this was, just after the takeover was mooted.'

'I know,' Willie said. 'J. S. Lucas. Occurred to me too, just momentarily, like, but I thought I were being paranoid.'

Milly looked blank.

'Lucas were t'name of Jack's father. Not many folk'd know that.'

Ernie watched Willie struggling into his old donkey jacket with the vinyl patch across the shoulders. Not seen that for some years. Lad had put on a few pounds in the meantime.

Milly Gill slid the cats from her knee. 'Well, all I can say is you seem determined, Mr Dawber, that one way or t'other, you'll not see tomorrow's sun.'

'Time comes, Millicent, when being an observer is no longer sufficient.'

'And what about you, Willie? Feller who liked to pride himself on his cowardice.'

'True,' Willie said. 'But this is family.'

'I'm just praying,' Ernie said, 'as they've not done owt to Liz Horridge.'

Willie grinned. 'Always had a bit of a thing for Liz, dint you, Mr Dawber?'

'She could've done no better than Arthur Horridge,' Ernie said generously.

'And might've done a good deal worse, eh?' Willie was over by the window. 'Not slackening off at all, bloody rain. Moss'll be treacherous for weeks.'

'We're not going to the Moss,' said Ernie. 'We're not going anywhere near the Moss.'

He was still thinking furiously about what young Catherine had said about obsession. That he himself had been trapped just as surely as Matt Castle and Dr Hall. That there was indeed something powerfully emotionally disruptive about the bogman.

Ernie glanced at Milly Gill, who was not, he reassured himself, in Ma's league. Not yet.

Determined that one way or t'other you'll not see tomorrow's sun.

Aye, well, Ernie Dawber thought, we'll have to see about that.

The tapping on the study door was firm but polite.

Cathy opened it. They were corning out anyway, though without much direction. At some point, Macbeth had suggested they simply call the cops, but Cathy said the cops must already be looking into Moira's death; how were they supposed credibly to plant the idea that the accident was in some way unnatural?

Chris stood in the doorway. 'We've come to a decision,' he said. 'Thank you for your hospitality, but we want to go back.'

'Back?' Cathy said.

'To the church.'

'Oh,' Cathy said. 'But you can't.'

Chris smoothed his beard, 'We're deeply ashamed, Cathy. We had no faith. We watched Joel struggling with the demon, and we thought he'd gone mad.'

'He has,' Cathy said tautly.

'And now this attack on Chantal. She was the only one of us whose belief in Joel was sustained when the chips were down. She went back and she was physically and spiritually attacked. Could have been killed. We let that happen.'

'Open up, did she?'

Chris stared at her in horror.

'I mean to you,' Cathy said irritably. 'Did she tell you exactly what happened to her?'

'Come on, Chris,' a woman's voice called from behind. 'It's only half an hour to midnight.'

'I'm sorry,' Chris said. 'God protect you. God protect you both.'

Cathy flung the door wide. There was a whole crowd of them gathered behind Chris.

'Let me spell it out for you. All of you. You've all been used. Joel was used. Somebody wanted to break down the church's defences - these are defences built up over centuries.'

'Yes,' said Chris. 'We were the last line of defence.' Not understanding, unlikely to be capable of understanding. 'And we were afraid. We lost faith in our brother, Joel. We deserted him when he most needed us, and it took the violation of our sister ...'

'Sister?' Macbeth said. 'She's your goddamn wife!'

'And Joel was right too ...' Chris backed away, 'about this man. Turn him out, Cathy. Turn him out and come with us.'

'Of course I'm not going to bloody turn him out! He's got good reason to be angry; a friend of his died tonight.'

Chris didn't blink.

'Come on, Chris. In God's name,' the woman behind him cried.

'I'm coming.'

Cathy grabbed his arm. 'What I'm saying to you, Chris, is that it's not safe for you to go back in that church. Any of you. You won't do yourselves any good and you'll probably do us all a lot of harm.'

Chris said pityingly, 'Our trust is in Almighty God. In whom, to our shame, we temporarily lost our faith. And for that we have much to make up. Whatever happens in there will be His will.'

'He gave you a brain, Chris. To think with, you know? Have you given up thinking for yourselves? Letting Him do all your thinking now, is it?'

Chris pulled his arm away, eyes full of drifting cloud. 'Pray for us, Cathy.'

'Yes,' said Cathy when they'd gone. 'But who am I supposed to pray to?'

Because he was used to making a recce before venturing in, Ashton drove once up the village street, turned around on the parking area by the church and drove slowly back towards the pub.

Just as well he was driving slowly. Twice, people hurried across the street, two men together and two women individually, flapping like chickens in the blinding rain.

There were lights in most front rooms, lights in the chip shop but a 'closed' sign on the door. Water gushed down the sides of the road, down the hill. Where did it all go? Into the Moss?

Ashton followed the water as far as the pub, where the only light was the hanging lantern over the front porch, illuminating the sign, The Man I'th Moss. No picture. What would it have shown? Why had they given the pub that name, possibly a couple of hundred years ago, when nobody could have guessed there was an ancient body in the bog?

Or could they?

Ashton pulled on to the forecourt and dashed for the door. Lottie Castle. He could spot a liar in seconds. He could also tell when people were deluded. And he could, of course, spot people who were daft or innocent enough to be led up the garden path.

But this Lottie Castle.

Now, here's a cool, intelligent woman who is definitely not lying; a woman you could, with confidence, put in a witness box in front of George bloody Carman QC.

And here's a woman claiming to be haunted. You know why I half believe this? Ashton still quizzing himself as he huddled on the doorstep in his trench coat, ill-fitting slates in the porch letting water trickle down his collar.

Because this is s woman who sincerely doesn't want to believe it.

And it also, yes, an attractive widow. Well, what's wrong with that?

The woman who answered the door, however, was not Lottie Castle. But if Ashton the human being was disappointed, Ashton the copper was back on duty the second he identified her.

'Miss … er …White.'

'Chrissie.'

'Aye,' he said. 'Chrissie. And is Dr hall here too?'

'Not exactly here, Gary … is it Gary tonight?'

'Hard to say,' Ashton said, stepping inside. 'Hard to say, now.'

Her won smooth, smoky voice taunting her as she struggled through the dripping wood, booming out from the old, disused recording studio in her head, the voice sneering,

Never let them cut your hair

Or tell you where

You've been, or where

You're going to

from here …

Everything leaking out now from that slashed and razored head, raw thoughts exposed at birth to the cold and spitting night.

For a bad long time she'd stood alone among some trees and wept and sobbed and cursed and refused to believe it. They can put it back, can't they? Christ's sake, they can sew people's arms back these days.

First the horror, then the anguish. And the horror and anguish and the rage, all shaken up, this wild, combustible cocktail.

'Who? she screamed to the invisible sky. 'Who?'

Them.

Dic had headed them off. They'd gone after Dic and she was alone in the filthy night, everything rushing back with nerve-searing intensity, the savage rain smashing it into her naked head along with the insistent bump, bump, bump of the taunting mental Walkman.

And the things Dic said.

Stanage.

Of course, yeah. The Celtic expert. The writer. John Peveril Stanage. Never read his books, too young for me, by the time I'd heard of him.

But I'm going to kill that man. That man is dead.

Memories.

On the plane to Dublin for a gig. Matt holding up a paperback, The Bridestones. 'Should read this. Tell you where I'm coming from.' Moira politely looking up from Joseph Heller or somesuch. Mmm? Sure. Get 'round to it someday.

And then the American, Macbeth at the Earl's Castle. 'This writer - Stanton, Stanhope? Is he mad … this guy's face is white.'

John Peveril Stanage. The pale predator at the castle.

The comb-hunter.

The hair-surgeon.

Moira clung to a tree, its mesh of leafless branches keeping most of the rain off her. But when her head penetrated a jagged tracery of twigs, she could actually feel them graze her scalp.

She screamed in despair.

Last one, OK? Last scream. Last curse. Then you start to think. God, you drift through life listening to your conscience and your instincts and premonitions. all your airy fairy feeling, and you never think.

Moira, listen, they've got my dad propped up in there.

Meaning an effigy? A dummy representing the spirit they wanted to conjure?

Necromancy. The black side of spiritualism. You collect, in the appropriately drawn and consecrated circle, the most intimate possessions of the dead person, those things ...

... his clothes.

carrying his smell, his sweat. And those things ...

... the pipes.

he would most hate to leave behind. And those ...

... me. Dic.

people who were close to him. And ...

And you.

the things after which he craved.

Moira moved deliberately out from under the tree, stared up into the sky until she was blinded by the rain, and then hung her head and let the night drench her.

They took the comb.

They cut off my hair.

They have me. They have my essence.

They have used these things to summon Matt Castle from the grave.

CHAPTER IV

How Young Frank Manifold had ended up at the brewery he didn't exactly remember.

What he did remember was his anger reaching gale-force as soon as the cold rain hit it. Slung out again! Slung out like a kid from the only pub in Bridelow.

Settle down, Frank.

Cool it, eh, Frank.

Don't you think you've had a couple too many, Frank?

Int it past your bedtime, Frank?

They'd say it once too often. In fact tonight they had said it once too often.

What Frank remembered first was bunching his fists on the pub forecourt and looking around for somebody to hit and seeing only rain and smeary lights in the windows of houses folk as wouldn't come out in it merely for the pleasure of being filled in by Young Frank.

Another thing he'd thought about was hitting a wall, but he'd done that once before and his fist remembered and wouldn't go through with it.

The soft option would've been to go straight home and have a row with the wife. But if Susan didn't feel like a row she wouldn't let you have one, simple as that. Susan, who insisted that being in the Mothers' Union was just something you agreed to so as to keep the numbers up, but who could look at you through slitted eyes and take the anger out of you easy as letting tyres down.

Don't want that, he remembered thinking. Want to keep the anger.

Raging through the rain in just his jeans and his ordinary jacket, sopping wet-through in minutes.

Deciding at one stage, I know what I'll bloody do, I'll go up the church and duff over a few Born Again Christians.

Nowt against Christianity, as such. Nowt against Hans Gruber, a southerner but a straight-up bloke. Just that when it came to that big prat Joel Beard; when it came to T-shirts with JESUS SAVES on the front and grinning tossers stopping you in the street to asking how well you knew God; when it came to getting accosted by tasty women with PRAISE THE LORD across their tits ...

When it came to it, truth was Frank didn't hate Born Again Christians anywhere near as much as he hated Gannons.

Which, he supposed, must be why he'd ended up pissing hard and high against the main door of the brewery, thinking maybe he could kick a couple of windows in before he sobered

up.

Which was how come he saw the lights.

And how come he found the main door wasn't locked.

Well, this were a bit of a turn up. Frank stood a while getting rained on and stared upwards. Summat weird about this. Light coming out the sides of the wooden boards on the

topmost windows, the owd malt store as was.

From what Frank had heard from his ex-workmates and his dad, that malt store hadn't been used in twenty years. When Gannons had the winching system repaired on the outside of the building there was no suggestion it had been for winching sacks all the way up to the top again, because the owd malt store'd been shut and boarded up. Make it look authentic for was what everybody thought.

Frank wandered around to the side of the building, and there was the platform thing ... right at the top.

Summat had been winched up there tonight. Obviously.

Fucking cowboy brewers. Happen the owd malt store'd been refurbished. Happen they was having a little cocktail party up there for the directors.

Right then. See about that.

Frank went in.

She knew, sure, how ill she was, soaked through and shivering, feverish, temperature racing up the thermometer, about to ring the little bell.

Knew also that she could never look into a mirror again. Not ever.

And yet her mind had never seemed so clear. A cold searchlight, ruthlessly spearing into dark and musty corners.

Felt weak as hell and sore, and she walked with difficulty through the leafless, waterlogged wood. But her mind was an athlete, leaping chasms of dark thoughts. Her mind was an engineer constructing complex bridges.

'What we're looking for,' Moira mumbled, stopping, moving closer to the stocky, blistered trunk of an oak, switching off the lamp, 'is something long-term.'

Like a long-term connection between Matt and Stanage.

This had happened before; Matt's enthusiasms were unstoppable. If Matt finds interesting echoes in a book, Matt goes in search of the author.

Take this as fact. Matt meets Stanage. Matt and Stanage find so much common ground that secrets are shared ... at least on Matt's side.

Nobody other than Matt could have told Stanage about Moira Cairns and the comb. Say that by the time these two men meet, she's - stupidly - recorded 'The Comb Song' and both Matt and Stanage are scenting magic. And Stanage has stored all this away for future reference.

Moira sank down against the fat, scabby tree trunk, finding an almost sheltered spot between two huge protruding roots, enclosing her like legs. Sheets of rain on three sides; like touching in a cavern behind a waterfall.

OK.

If Stanage has learned about the comb he's learned a whole lot more of Matt's secrets, maybe passing on a few tantalizing but useless bits of information of his own about the old Celts and the Pennine Pipes in return. Worth it, because he sees such terrific potential in Matt, the most wonderful raw material for his own research.

Because Matt, maybe like Stanage, is ruled by his compulsions. Only Stanage is cleverer.

She closed her eyes and she was back in the ballroom of the Earl's Castle.

His face is an unhealthy white. He has light grey eyes and grey freckles on his expanse of forehead. There's a whiteness all about him, growing into arms like the branches of trees. Like antlers.

He is linked to the skulls on the walls. He is the horned god, the hunter of heads.

He has taken her hair.

And she sees it all with such brutal clarity, detached from her wonderful, magical comb-reared hair, her earliest, most important expression of individuality and free thought.

Hands to her head, couple of inches left, less in places. Aw, what the hell, you're alive, what d'you want, huh?

Revenge? She shivered with fever and fury.

Hands inside the guitar case. Stanage is feeling for the comb. He is feeling for your soul.

Two hundred miles away Matt Castle is lying in wait for death. Maybe Matt, in the last morphine minutes of his life, is also reaching out for you. Those arms of sick smoke coiling out of the baronial fireplace.

If Stanage gets access to your soul, to the core of Matt's craving ...

... then Stanage will have a link with Matt that extends beyond death.

Stanage will have a hold on Matt's spirit.

With the comb and the cloak and the ...

'Long-haired girls. Always The long, dark hair.'

Dic.

'After a charity gig. She was waiting for him in the car park. About twenty-one, twenty-two. About my age. Long, dark hair.'

The craving kept alive in the darkness of shop-doorways and the backs of vans.

And manipulated. And moulded and twisted.

Stanage has recreated me as spirit-bait for Matt. He's taken my soul and thrown away the husk.

But why, Moira wondered, so physically, achingly tired now, enclosed in the roots of a malformed oak tree, an electric lamp on her lap, why can I think so well? Why can I see all this so clearly, unless that's to be my final torture?

That and a dawning, unquenchable hatred for Matt Castle.

Frank made his way, quietly as his shoes would allow, up the narrow iron stairs, past the deep fermenting-tanks. Up another flight, past the coppers. It were bloody dark, but Frank had been up here that many thousand times it didn't matter. And the smell, the lovely, familiar smell. Better than sight, that smell. Better than women.

Halfway up the third flight leading to the mash tuns, Frank choked back what he thought was going to be a hiccup but turned out to be a sob. He stopped in a moment of despair. How was he going to live the rest of his life without this wondrous rich, stale, sour, soggy aroma? How was he going to survive?

He clambered to the top, staggered out on to the deck clutching for support at the thick copper pipe connecting the malt mill to the mash, the big Luna around him, his old mates. Get um out, a voice was rasping in his gut. Gannons. Get the bastards out. Get the brewery back for Bridelow.

He leaned, panting, over the side of one of the tuns and his breath echoed in its empty vastness.

One more flight. He went three-quarters way up to a door that'd always been kept locked for safety's sake for as long as he'd worked there.

Voices behind it.

'... not terribly subtle. What time is it?'

'Coming up to eleven-fifteen.'

'No time for that, then. Really, I' - a light laugh, half-exasperated - 'just can't get over what you've done. I really didn't think you were that clever. Now, look. You know, presumably, that we mustn't actually kill you. Not yet, anyway.'

'Don't care. Do what you want. You're just a slag. Couldn't have a ...'

A crash. A moan. A rolling on floorboards.

All right, come on, pick him up. Sit him next to his dear daddy. Let him have a good whiff. Bind his arms very firmly, palms up, OK? And at approximately ten minutes to twelve … are you listening? At ten minutes to twelve, you can open his wrists.'

Frank was in a fog. He heard it all but couldn't make sense of the words and some kept repeating on him.

Kill... whiff... palms up ... open his wrists.

It was a woman's voice, not a local accent. More words rambled down the steps, Frank's brain tripping over them, sometimes he seemed to hear the key words before they joined actual sentences.

Trickle.

'Don't go mad. Just want a trickle at first. Steady plop, plop, plop. We'll be well into it by then. Once you get the trickle going, you come back and join us. Very quietly. You say nothing.'

Blood to blood.

'What if he screams?'

'He won't. If he does, you can cut another vein. Slow release is best. I mean, I was going to do this anyway; this way we get an instant connection, blood to blood.'

blood to ...

'Oh, yeah? And who would it have been if this one hadn't suddenly become available?'

. . . blood?

'Oh. Right.'

Frank's hands were sticky on the iron stair-rail. Brain couldn't handle it. Past his bedtime. Turn back, go home, sleep it off, eh? But there was a voice he recognized, the voice that said it didn't care, the voice that called the female voice a slag. The voice of the owner of the wrists which would be opened at precisely ten to twelve, but just a trickle unless it screamed.

Frank screamed. Frank was screaming now.

As all the lights went on, Frank screamed, 'Dic!' as a figure shimmered in the doorway at the top of the steps and a new smell mingled with the malted air, a smell just as warm, just as rich, just as moist, but ...

The new smell went up Young Frank's nose and forced his mouth wide open like a bucket. He belched up half a gallon of beer and bile, which spouted up in a great brown arc and then slapped down on the metal steps.

'Manifold. You dirty, uncouth lout. Should have guessed.'

Frank looked up into supercilious, wrinkling nostrils.

He began dumbly to move up the steps, his shoes skidding on his own vomit, his hands trying to make fists, his chest locked tight with hatred, his drink-rubbery lips trying to shape a word which eventually came out like another gob of harsh sick.

'...Horridge...'

Gonna have you, said the rough voice in Frank's gut. This time gonna take you apart, you smarmy twat.

He slipped, and his hands splashed on the steps.

Shaw Horridge stood quite relaxed in the doorway, a shred of a smile on his lips. 'You are an absolute oaf, Manifold.'

Frank's fists turned into claws and he took what he imagined to be a great leap up the final three iron steps towards Horridge's throat.

Horridge didn't move at all until Frank's head was on a level with the top of the stairs, at which stage a foot went almost idly back. And then - momentarily - on top of mellow aroma of malt, the sour stench of vomit and the sweet-rancid essence of rotting flesh, Frank experienced the absurdly pure tang of boot-polish as Shaw's shoe smashed through his teeth and was wedged for a second in his gullet.

Choked, retching, he threw up his arms to grab the foot, but the foot was ... receding, just like the rest of Shaw Horridge.

Young Frank realized he was flying slowly and almost blissfully backwards.

It seemed a long time until he thought he heard a metallic ching as his head connected with something solid (metal everywhere in a brewery) and a dull, fractured crump somewhere inside his brains, wherever they might be splattered.

CHAPTER V

There was a rustling over the tumbling water noise; this was what awoke her (how could she have slept, how could she?) And half a second later there was a light in her eyes and people moving behind it.

Two of them.

Moira reared up, back to the tree, a spitting cat. 'Come on. Come on, then ...'

Hands curling into claws. Pray that one is Stanage.

Because she would die before they'd take her back. She'd die raking his face.

One of them gasped.

The other said, 'By 'eck.'

He'd heard it before, so it was no big surprise. The hackneyed country and western, with chorus.

Leave your sorrow

Come and join us

Shed those sins,

Fold the joy within …

One time, Macbeth had directed this made-for-TV picture about the crooked evangelist Boyd C. Beresford the Fourth. Spent a whole ten days cruising the Bible Belt, stuff like this churning out of the car-radio, out of hotel-room TV sets, out of mission halls and marquees - until even arid atheism began to look like a safe haven.

So he was not impressed. Not even when they started singing in tongues, because he knew how easy this stuff was to fake, even while you were convincing yourself you weren't faking it. And all the healing that lasted just long enough for the relatives to throw in a two hundred dollar donation. You feeling better, sister? Or maybe your faith isn't yet strong enough for you to be healed?

'Go away. Begone, heathen!'

This real big Born Again Christian on the church door. Stained jeans and a grungy parka. Tattoos on both wrists, one involving what looked like it used to be a swastika on fire before it got reprocessed into a bulky crucifix. Fascist punk finds God. It happened. Classic demonstration of what Cathy had said earlier about one extreme igniting another.

'Listen, I don't plan to cause any trouble,' Macbeth said wisely. 'All I want is to talk to Joel Beard. I would like for you to bring him out here. That too much of a problem?'

Cathy had said, 'Mungo, you have an open, honest face. You've got to get to Jowl, talk some sense into him. Long as you go easy on the casual blasphemy, he has to listen to you - you're not from Bridelow and you're not a woman. Tell him what you like, but get him to evacuate that place. They think they're safe in there … they're just so naïve, they're children …'

The big guy with the ex swastika said, 'You got five seconds to get them filthy heathen feet the other side of this sacred threshold.'

Beat up on a pagan for the Lord. Jesus.

'Listen,' Macbeth said urgently. 'Go tell Joel that Pastor Mungo Macbeth of the, uh, East Side Evangelical Mission, would like to speak to him.'

'You're lying,' Swastika said, but with audibly less conviction than a moment ago.

'God will forgive you for that,' Macbeth said. 'Maybe.'

'He's not there,' Swastika blurted out.

'He is everywhere,' said Macbeth.

'No, Joel. I mean Joel. When we got here we couldn't find him. He's vanished.'

'What do you mean, vanished?'

'He's just gone.'

'Well, where'd he go, for Chr … Where might Reverend Beard have gone?'

Flash of fear in the guy's small eyes. 'Why d'you think we're praying so hard?'

'So your friends have returned.'

John stood, bathed in blue light.

The blue was in the old glass around the enormous lantern. Round panes, set in the four exterior walls, were frosted white.

There wasn't much to it; Joel had expected more, perhaps the remains of a clock mechanism, but there was no sign of there ever having been one.

'I knew they would,' Joel said. 'I knew it was impossible for them to forsake their God for very long.'

John smiled, his teeth shining blue.

'Still,' Joel said. 'I won't say I'm not relieved. Shall I go down? Tell them what we are going to do?' He moved towards the top of the stone steps.

'Lord, no.' John's face grew solemn. 'They've fled once.'

'Yes,' Joel said. 'I'm sorry.'

The room was about nine feet square. In any other church it would be the belfry; here it was the lamphouse. The lantern hung from the pinnacle of the roof. It was perhaps five feet in diameter.

There was lead around the rims of the glass circles in the walls, but no remains of numerals; it had clearly never been a clock.

Inside the bluish milky glass set into an old iron frame, he could make out the incandescent shapes of three big electric bulbs.

John said, 'Used to be an oil lamp, you can tell. Big candles before that, probably. A lure for the spirits of the Moss.'

Joel remembered his nightmare in the cellar room, imagining the lantern laying an ice-blue beam over still water.

Channels of rain glistened like icicles on the glass. The light was quite ghastly, dehumanizing. John, with his pale, flat face, looked almost demonic. Joel glanced sharply away, afraid of the illusions this evil light could evoke. Though they'd been up here over half an hour, he became aware for the first time of a small door in the shadows to his left.

'What's in there, do you know?'

'Let's see, shall we?' John moved lightly across the boarded floor, pushed and twisted at a handle. 'No ... 'fraid it's locked.'

Joel closed his eyes and listened to the singing. The hymn was trailing into a drone of tongues, male and female voices flowing into a bright river of praise. He tried to let it flow into him.

On all sides of them, up here in the tower, the night sky was roaring with rain.

'How long?'

'Little under ten minutes. Impatient, are we, Joel? Excited?'

'Why can't we just switch it off and go?'

'You see a switch anywhere, m' boy? Be on a circuit. Time switch. Anyway, what good would that do? No. Have to smash it. Violence, I'm afraid. Strength. What you're about, isn't it Joel? Strength. Might. No room for namby-pamby, nancy-boy clerics on the Front Line, mmmm?'

'Yes,' Joel said. 'You're right. I'm ready for that. Midnight, then.'

Back at the Rectory, Macbeth said, 'What could happen to those people? Spell this thing out.'

Reaching the front door, he'd heard Cathy, on the hall phone extension, saying, 'I don't know, I'll call you back ' Putting down the phone to let him in.

Now, in the study, sitting on the edge of the piano stool, she said, 'How can I say what could happen? You're nowhere in this game until you accept that nobody can ever say for certain what's going to happen and anyone who thinks he can, or that he can manipulate it, is due for a hell of a shock one day.'

Macbeth said, 'What game?'

'Game?'

'You just said "in this game".'

Cathy shrugged. 'Life, I suppose.'

But he wasn't aiming to back off. 'OK, so what's the bottom line? What's the worst thing could happen? Before you answer, bear in mind what I saw in Scotland and that Moira is dead and that I don't believe I have a great deal I care about left to lose.'

Cathy said calmly, 'I've lived in Bridelow all my life. I've acquired knowledge of certain things, OK? And most of today I've been talking very seriously to my father who's had to deal with things most clergymen don't even read about.'

'Sure,' Macbeth said impatiently. 'What's your point?'

'Put it this way, if it was Pop in there, I'd be less worried.'

'So what you're saying is, in the great metaphysical ballpark, these guys are strictly little-league.'

'Let's say they're hardly ready for what they're up against. They create their own universe, you see, these people. In this little universe everything is down to the Will of God and all evil can be defeated fast as a prayer. When real evil shows its hand, it can be so traumatic they'll ...'

'Flip?'

'Flip is right,' Cathy said. 'Flip is the least of it.'

'Real evil?'

'Stanage is the man no one here ever talks about. Stanage is evil beyond what ordinary people care to envisage.'

'OK,' Macbeth said. 'First thing, you can't stay here alone, in case these people come back with some even more screwball ideas than they had when they left.'

She looked kind of suspicious. 'What's the alternative?'

'I reserved a room at the inn. You take that. I'll stay here.'

'Oh,' said Cathy. 'I see. The big macho bit. Mungo, how can I say this? You're the one who shouldn't be here on his own.'

'What you want me to do, drive outa here? Things didn't work out with Moira, let's draw a line under all of this? OK, we'll both stay here. I'll take the sofa. I'll call Mrs Castle.'

'Mungo, I'm not going to stay here. I'm going to Milly's. We have things to discuss and it's women only, I'm afraid. My advice is, take your room at The Man, get some sleep. You look all-in. If there's anything you can do, we'll ring you.'

'Oh,' Macbeth said.

'I promise.'

'Sure.'

This was Moira all over again. Macbeth, just go away, huh?

'I dint recognize you.' Willie was almost in tears. 'God help me, I didn't know who you were.'

'I think there was a similar problem,' Mr Dawber said drily, 'in the Garden of Gethsemane, on the Third Day.'

Willie could tell Mr Dawber was almost as pleased as he was, but there was a shadow across it.

Mr Dawber said, 'Seeing somebody you thought was dead, there's bound to be an element of shock. Take her home, Willie. Take her to Millicent.'

'Cathy,' Moira said, unsteadily on her feet, Willie's donkey jacket around her shoulders. Willie reckoned she also was in shock. 'Whatever you like,' he said. 'I can't believe this. I just can't believe it. It's a miracle. It were on t'news. They found your car, bottom of a bank.'

'I'll tell you about it,' Moira said.

'It was your car?'

'Oh, aye.'

Willie said, his voice rising, 'There were a body in it. Police found a woman's body!' He stared hard at her in the torchlight.

He wondered if she knew where she was. He wondered if she knew what had happened to her beautiful hair.

He was glad that when he'd touched her, putting his jacket around her, she'd been stone-cold and damp, but solid.

Mr Dawber was silent. If he had any curiosity about the body in the BMW he was keeping it to himself.

'Let's not hang about,' Willie said. 'Mr Dawber?'

'You go,' the old man said quietly. 'I'll carry on.'

'You're never going up there on your own, Mr Dawber, no way.'

'I'll go if I want to,' Mr Dawber said, and there was a distance in his voice. 'Nobody tells the headmaster what to do. Remember?'

'Aye, and if I arrive back there without you, Milly'll kill me, you know that much, Mr Headmaster, sir.'

Mr Dawber said mildly, 'This lass'll be catching her death if you don't be on your way.'

'Please, Mr Dawber.'

'Dic' Moira's body pulsed. 'Either of you seen Dic Castle?'

'Not since the funeral,' Willie said. 'Gone off teaching, Lottie said, in Stockport or somewhere. You seen him, Mr Dawber?'

There was no reply. Willie swung his torch round.

'Mr Dawber!'

Mr Dawber had gone.

Roger Hall asked, 'Is he mad?' The effects were wearing off; he didn't feel so elated, he did feel quite relaxed. He did not feel there was anything bizarre about this, why on earth should he?

Therese arched an eyebrow. She was not beautiful, but she was compelling. He wouldn't kick her out of bed.

'Well, of course he's mad,' she said. 'Didn't that occur to you?'

'He knows so much. How can you know so much, be so learned, and be insane?'

The candles around the circle were half burned down. The other people squatting cross-legged - the people Therese was 'helping', the people who did what they were told - gazed dull-eyed into the candle flames and never spoke.

'Look at it this way, Roger,' Therese said. 'You're quite a learned man yourself. Would you say you were insane?'

Matt Castle slumped in his chair. He wore a white T-shirt and was quite obviously and horribly dead, but he didn't offend Roger Hall any more.

Roger laughed, 'But Stanage ... I mean, he does know what he's doing?'

Dic Castle, something as primitive as chloroform administered to him on a rag, was bound and taped into a metal-framed chair with his wrists upturned. This did not offend Roger either. Nor did the hypodermic on the table.

'He's done it before,' Therese said. 'Many years ago he dug up a corpse, dead no more than a week, to tap her knowledge. It is, as you've gathered yourself, all about knowledge. I

thought that was just wonderful - he went into Bridelow churchyard at night and dug the old girl up with the sexton's spade. He was about nineteen at the time. He just, you know, has absolutely no fear. That's half the battle, when you think about it.'

'Yes.' She was right. Conquering fear was the vital first step. Fear of being caught out. Fear of the law. Fear of humiliation.

'Look at Shaw,' Therese said. 'Shaw was a fantastically good subject because he was so utterly screwed up, so socially backward to begin with. Six months ago, Shaw was scared to walk into a pub by himself; now he's killed two people and he's never been happier. He's out there now, and if anybody tries to disturb us, he'll ... you know ... without a second thought.'

'And you're telling me all this.' He wanted to pinch himself; he wanted to find the smell of Matt Castle nauseating. And he couldn't.

'You're one of us,' Therese said generously. 'You've been one of us for months. We'd never have got the Man out of the British Museum without your help, and you'd never have had the balls to get him out without ours. Come on, it's time. Have another drink.'

'I mustn't,' Roger said coyly, accepting a glass. 'One final question. Therese ... what would have happened to Chrissie if she'd come to the house with me?'

'Who ... ? Oh, the secretary. The divorced secretary with no immediate family in the area. That Chrissie. Don't ask, Roger. Don't ask and you won't be told the truth.'

Therese poured them all a drink from an unlabelled brown wine bottle. 'Cheers,' said a dull, empty-looking woman called Andrea. Therese moved to a bench in the corner of the room opposite Matt and slipped a cassette into a black ghetto-blaster.

From the largest of several black bags, she withdrew the Pennine Pipes and laid them at Matt's feet.

From the portable ghetto-blaster seeped the weeping, far-away, opening notes of 'Lament for the Man'.

Dic squirmed.

From one of the bags, Therese took a pencil-slim plastic- handled craftsman's knife, which she handed to Owen, a weedy, expressionless man.

'I'll give you the signal,' Therese said. 'If it disturbs you, you may tape his mouth.'

CHAPTER VI

Refusing a whisky, Gary Ashton said, 'I'm not saying I don't believe this, ladies. I've seen too many weird things, put away too many weird people, we all do. Sometimes, you're face-to-face with real evil, and you're laughing it off. You laugh off criminals - blaggers, toe-rags. You don't think too hard about it, you're a copper. Not a shrink. Not a priest. You nick the buggers, put them away, that's where it ends.'

'Meaning you can't help us,' Lottie said.

'Far as the law's concerned, Mrs Castle, there's one crime been committed here. Somebody's pinched an archaeological relic.'

He'd sat there and he'd drunk coffee and he'd sympathized. He'd trusted them, too, both of them. They were frightened, more than if they'd been robbed. Although he knew bugger-all about wiring and such, he'd been and examined the electrified gas-mantle and fitted a new bulb, and, sure enough, it didn't come on. Fuse probably, he'd said. Where's the fuse-box?

And Lottie had said, never mind.

Truth was, the bloody thing had fused at the wrong time and put the shits up two women who were already mentally stressed.

Ghost in the mirror? Pipes in the night?

Strange atmosphere? Aye, there was. There was a strange atmosphere all over this whole village tonight, it hit you soon as you crossed the Moss. Too much rain, for a start, as if it was nature's attempt to cool something down, to put out a fire somebody was busy stoking under this place.

Put that in a bloody police report. Show that to the Superintendent. Strange atmosphere. 'There was a very strange atmosphere, boss.'

And then Chrissie White said what he'd been faintly hoping she might.

'What if I knew who'd stolen the bogman?'

'Ah. Then I'd have a lot more leverage, wouldn't I, Chrissie?'

Chrissie said, 'Have you heard of a writer called John Peveril Stanage?'

'My kids used to read him avidly.' He glanced at Lottie. 'One grown up, now. The other still lives with his mother and her new feller. Aye, John Peveril Stanage. What about him?'

'He's got plans to fund a permanent museum for the bogman. As you know, Roger would run it. Stanage would have permanent access to the bogman.'

'So why would he nick it? I presume you are saying he nicked it. Or had it nicked.'

'I don't know,' Chrissie said. 'I just think he has.'

'Why?' Ashton began to feel less hopeful.

'Cause he's invited Roger to some sort of gathering at Bridelow Hall and he's told him he might be able to find out where it is.'

'That's not the same thing, Chrissie. Also, it's presumably only what Dr Hall's told you.'

'Well, that's right. I suspect there's a lot more to it than that. Can't you get some of your blokes and, raid it or something?'

'Oh, aye,' Ashton said. 'The police are always raiding private parties at the homes of the rich and influential. Matter of course, Mrs White. Normal procedure. Happen the Chief Constable'll be one of the guests. Or the MP?'

'What if they're doing -I don't know what to call it - black magic, or something?'

'Well, it's not basically against the law, luv. Matter of religious preference, in the eyes of the British legal system. Unless it involves children or animals, of course. You think it does?'

Chrissie said, 'Roger's been messing about with the bogman.'

Ashton tried not to laugh. 'I really don't think that'd have them cancelling leave at the Vice Squad. Mrs White ... Chrissie. And Mrs Castle ... I sympathize, you know I do, or I wouldn't be here. If you want me to do anything as a policeman, I've got to have something hard, solid and preferably nothing at all to do with the supernatural.'

Lottie said angrily, 'You think I ...'

Ashton held up a hand. 'No, I don't. That's why I came. You're a nice woman, and things are happening to you that you don't understand and don't particularly want to understand. I admire you, Mrs Castle.'

'But I'm wasting your time. All right, I'm sorry. You'd better get off home to your ...'

'Flat,' said Ashton. 'What I said was, there was nothing I could do as a copper. As things stand. However, I also attempt be a bit of a human being, on the side. Anything I can do in that capacity, I'll be happy to do it, just as long as it's not illegal and doesn't mean saying ta-ra to me pension. How's that?'

'Thanks,' Chrissie said despondently. 'But we're all of us semi-qualified human ...' Breaking off at a hammering on the door. Lottie looked up sharply. Initial alarm, Ashton noted, soon subsiding into weariness.

'Oh, hell, I'd forgotten about him. I've not even made up his bed.'

'Who's this?'

'An American chap. Moira's boyfriend. Better let him in before he sets soaked.

'I'll go,' Ashton said. Never know what else it might be this time of night, do you? Moira's your daughter, is she?'

Milly had given up on security. The Post Office door was on the latch. Cathy burst through it, throwing off her coat.

'Where is she?'

'I'm here. Just don't look at me.'

Milly had built up the fire with great cobs of coal. Moira was hunched over it, feet on the red-tiled hearth, a glass of Guinness between them. Her jeans and sweater hung from a wire line under the wooden mantelpiece. She wore a dressing gown of Milly's with a design of giant daisies. There was a pink towel around her head.

Cathy grinned helplessly.

Moira said, 'Take more than death to kill me, huh?'

Is that it? Ernie Dawber wondered. Determined not to see tomorrow's sun? And will anyone? Will we ever even see the sky again?

Getting a bit whimsy, Ernest?

Aye, I am that, Ma. Been whimsy all night. Offered meself as a sacrifice, Ma. Wanted to go out on the Moss and not come back. Bit pathetic, eh?

He walked with a measured pace towards Bridelow Hall, shining his torch, making no attempt to conceal his approach.

Well, what would you have done, Ma? Doctor tells you it could be two years, could be six months. Or less. You start to think, where am I going to be when it happens? Where would I like to be more than Bridelow? Bridelow as it is now. With the shades of things and the balance. Where else could I go and actually be any bloody use?

His saturated hat was moulded to his head, the sodden brim as heavy as a loaded tea tray.

Little problem in the brain, Ma. That's why I was thrown a bit when your Willie lost his rag and raised the issue of my mental state.

Ernie chuckled. I suppose you'd have seen the black glow on me too, eh, owd lass? And said nowt.

But did you see it around yourself?

Happen not.

Ernie became thoughtful.

He didn't need his torch lit when the Hall came into view. For the Hall was all lights, upstairs and down, and brought back with a momentary thrill, a picture of the old days when Arthur and Liz held open house for the brewery workers and their relatives and friends. Which amounted to the whole village in those days. Liz in a glittery gown, Arthur permitting his stern eyes a twinkle behind those forbidding horn-rims.

And Shaw.

Shaw was never there on such occasions. Shaw, they said, was shy. Shaw could never say the headmaster's name. Mr Der-der . . .

'Mr Dawber,' Shaw said easily.

He stepped out from the brewery entrance gate, the stem of a stylish golf umbrella propped elegantly across his left shoulder. His dark suit was perfectly dry.

'Good evening, lad,' Ernie said heavily. 'I've come to see your mother.'

'Small problem there, Mr D. Mother's spending the weekend at a hotel in Buxton. Autumn break.'

'Brave of her, lad. Conquered the agoraphobia, then, has she?'

'She hasn't got agoraphobia, Mr Dawber. She's simply rather a retiring person. Shy, even.'

'As you were yourself, Shaw. Perhaps it's an hereditary problem. Dealt with yours, though, didn't you , lad?'

'One alters. As one gets older.'

Shaw Horridge, sheltered from the downpour, was smirking. It brought out the headmaster in Ernie.

'Perhaps heredity says it all.' Standing his ground, dripping. 'I'd like a chat, Shaw Horridge, and I'd like it now.'

He'd almost said, 'My office. At once.'

For a second, Shaw looked disconcerted.

Ernie pocketed his torch. 'I won't go away.'

'Won't you?' Shaw's smirk vanished and was replaced by an expression Ernie didn't recognize but which he found surprisingly menacing.

'Come up to the house, then,' Shaw said.

Two phone calls was all it took. One to Headquarters, one to the doctor's house. At least this was something Ashton could do - they'd given him a name in connection with an incident under investigation; he could check it out.

'Thanks very much, Doc,' Ashton said. 'Owe you one.'

Lottie was over by the stove again, deep lines in her face, the permanent frown. Years of Matt Castle in the making, Ashton reckoned, but not irreversible.

The American, Macbeth, was sitting at the kitchen table, watching him in silence, black hair stuck to his forehead, tension coming off him like vapour. Chrissie White was watching the American; what was coming off her wasn't quite seemly under the circumstances.

'Well, then,' Ashton said, putting down the phone. They were all staring at him now. 'Your Miss Cairns. I suppose I'm right in assuming she was nowhere near her middle-fifties?'

Macbeth breathed out in a rush. 'God damn.'

'Grey hair?' said Ashton. 'Somewhat overweight?'

'But ...' Macbeth sat down next to Chrissie. 'But it was her car?'

'Clearly. With another woman's body in it. What's that say to you? Mrs Castle? Any other women missing?'

'God!' Macbeth had his head in his hands. His body sagged.

Relief. No way you could fake that.

Chrissie smiled thinly. 'Well,' she said, 'that's all right, then.'

Lottie said, 'What did she look like?'

'She was badly burned, apparently. As I say, mid-to-late fifties. Plumpish. Grey hair, quite short. So who is she? And what was she doing in Miss Cairns's car?'

Macbeth looked up. There were tears in his eyes.

Ashton let his gaze rest on the American. 'There is, of course, another question. Two, perhaps. Where is Miss Cairns? And what does she know about this woman's death?'

'Hey,' Macbeth said. 'Come on ...'

'Has to be asked, sir.' And other questions. Like, what's brought this American all the way from Glasgow in the worst driving conditions of the year so far, and what's he doing in this country anyway?

Macbeth said, 'How official is this?'

'Well, now,' Ashton said, 'that depends, doesn't it?'

Macbeth said nothing for nearly half a minute, then he spread his hands. 'OK. How much you know about a guy name of John Peveril Stanage?'

Chrissie gasped, and Ashton allowed himself a sigh of manifest satisfaction.

Moira was choking.

'Jesus, what the hell is this stuff?'

'Shurrup and get it down,' Milly said.

'Yeah, but what….?'

'Ma Wagstaff's Crisis Mixture,' said Milly. 'Last bottle.'

'Tastes like something scraped off the floor at a foot clinic.'

Cathy said seriously, 'Drink it, Moira. We need you.'

She drank it. She drank it all, every last nauseating mushroom-coloured drop. All the time watching Cathy over the glass, the girl's narrow face taut with concentration.

'Dic.' Moira let Milly take the glass away. 'Thank you. Cathy, what are we going to do about Dic?'

'I told you, didn't I?' Cathy said. 'I said it wasn't Dic who took the comb.'

'Aye, you did. I'm sorry. But why's he with Stanage? How'd he get into this? And the girl. The woman.'

'Therese. Pure poison. Lady Strychnine.'

'But Dic was helping them.'

'Dic was helping us,' Cathy snapped.

'Us?'

'The Mothers.'

'You told me ... Hang on, I'm confused, you said you weren't one. You said your father wouldn't...'

'I didn't know you well enough. I lied. It's OK to lie sometimes. Except to yourself.'

'Sure.' Moira sighed.

'Dic lied to himself a lot. He lied about his father. He lied about not hating his father.'

'I know. Maybe we all lied to ourselves about Matt.'

'Aye.' Willie Wagstaff was sitting on the arm of the sofa. I never wanted him to come back to Bridelow, me. He were too ... disruptive, you know?' He paused. 'Like our Jack.'

'How it happened,' Cathy said, 'Dic read Stanage as a kid. His dad was all for it. Imaginative stuff, full of Celtic reverberations. ' She looked up at Willie in appeal. 'They didn't know, you see. Matt had been away too long. He didn't know Stanage was Jack Lucas. Not at first.'

'Makes sense,' Willie said. 'It were a long time before any of us found out. Peveril. Stanage. Derbyshire place-names. Peveril of the Peak. Nothing too local. How should we know? He were never on telly, never give interviews to t'papers.'

'So, like a lot of kids,' Cathy said, 'Dic wrote him a fan letter, but unlike a lot of kids, he got a reply inviting him to visit the great man. Beginning of a beautiful friendship. It was Stanage who persuaded Dic to learn the Pennine Pipes. Matt was delighted, as you'd imagine. Dic having always rejected traditional stuff.'

'Why would Stanage be so interested in Dic?' Moira asked.

'He wasn't. He was interested in Matt. They'd known each other as kids, obviously, and Stanage was looking for ways into Bridelow. That was his ruling obsession, to get back at them.'

'At... ?'

'At Bridelow. Specifically at the Mothers. The Bridelow establishment. The keepers of the Bridelow tradition. The keepers of... I don't know.'

'The balance,' Milly said. 'The keepers of the balance.'

'God knows,' said Willie, 'they tried to sort him out. They tried everything. He were just ... just bloody bad, what can you say? And when he like ... finally overstepped the mark, he had to go. He were halfway gone by then, anyroad, gone off to university, smartest lad ever come out of Bridelow. Can say that again.'

Moira said slowly, 'How do you mean, overstepped the mark?'

Willie looked at the others. Milly nodded. Willie said bitterly, 'He desecrated a grave.'

'Spell it out, little man,' Milly said softly.

'He dug up Owd Ma. That were me granny. Ma's ma. Been dead a week.'

'He had it all timed,' Milly said. 'The right day, the right hour. the right position of the moon, all this. He had to know, you see. He had to know what was being denied to him because he was a man.'

A gout of rain came down the chimney. On the fire, a red coal cracked in two with a chip-pan hiss.

Moira said, 'He did this? Necromancy? He tried to get information out of a dead woman?'

Willie reached for Milly's hand. She said, 'I was only a youngster. I only know what I was told later, by Ma. She said there were things he knew, things he threw in her face ... that he couldn't possibly have learned from anyone else. So either Old Ma told him stuff on her deathbed, which is so unlikely as to be ...'

Moira started to feel sick, and it wasn't Ma Wagstaff's crisis Mixture. 'Willie, sooner or later Matt would know about this guy. What he was.'

'We never talked about it, lass. But, aye, sooner or later. but he'd be too far in, maybe, by then. To be charitable. In the end, though, it's two of a kind. Exiles wanting in.'

'Men,' said Milly. 'Men wanting knowledge.'

'And now he's doing it to Matt. What he did to your gran. Dic told me, he said, "He's got my dad." How can ... ?'

'We know,' Milly said. 'Matt's coffin's full of soil.'

Cathy said, 'Listen, the night Dic brought you to the rectory, afterwards he had a few drinks, got a bit ... mixed up? He was approached. There was a sexual approach. He thought it was you.'

'What a compliment.'

Cathy frowned. 'Next day he told me about it He's always told me things. He was in a hell of a state. He needed ... calming down. You can tell how easily they get people.'

Moira nodded. She knew well enough.

'I said you were with me the whole time,' Cathy said, 'so it couldn't have been you.'

'Thank you.'

'And then we talked about it for ages. It was our only way in. For Dic to go along with it, see what happened. I think he saw it as a way of getting out of the influence of his dad and Stanage and the whole thing.'

Moira started shaking her head. Lamb to the slaughter.

'He's been through hell.' Cathy's eyes looking hot with sorrow. 'Yes, they've got Matt's body. Yes, they've been … arousing him.'

Moira covered her face with her hands.

'There's Stanage and this Therese. Calls herself Therese Beaufort. He claims, apparently, that she's his niece. That's crap. All kinds of people've been attracted to him over the years. He's, you know, he's ... magnetic'

'I know.' Moira rubbed her eyes. 'I know his kind. Who else?'

'Detritus. There's a Satanic-type cult based in Sheffield that's been holding rituals on the moors, in the old Bronze Age circles. Been going on for years. They move as close as they can to Bridelow - it's got a reputation in the occult world, you can imagine. Place of power.'

Moira felt herself back in the churchyard, deformed stone across the moor, hopping like a toad, a quick splash of blood ...

'Therese,' Cathy said. 'Tess - she's Tessa-something, Dic says, she came up from the Welsh border - Tess brings them along. They're revolting. That farmer - there was a farmer killed on the moor, Sam Davis - he came to see Pop last week. Lights in the night, rams killed. His wife reckoned they were even sacrificing babies.'

'It's not unknown,' Moira said. 'I believe some of these cults are actually breeding babies for sacrifice. How did that guy die?'

'Fell down a quarry at night. How do you know that, about the babies?'

'Read it in the News of the World,' Moira said quickly.

'Look, you say they get as close as they can to Bridelow. But they can't get in, right!' You told me the other night there were defences. The kind you can't see.'

Milly said, 'Jack could let them in. Down in Cambridge, Jack was mixing with all kinds of people. Jack was learning all the time. We had to do something or else Bridelow'd be ... just like everywhere else. Soiled. Only more so, because ...'

'… because it was a place of power. Right?'

'We had to do something,' Milly said. 'Or Ma did. Ma was the only one could do it.'

'Why?' Moira hunched forward, hands clasped. 'I mean, what? What could Ma do?'

Milly looked down into her lap where Willie's hand lay.

'Come on, Milly,' Moira said almost angrily. 'What is it you're not telling me? Cathy, do you know?'

Yes,' Cathy said. 'I think so.'

CHAPTER VII

Ernie had taken off his hat, placed it on the hallstand, where it was still dripping five minutes later when Shaw Horridge shouted, 'Get out. Get out, Mr Dawber. Get out before I kill you!'

Six months ago Ernie would have had a regretful laugh at that. Six months ago, Shaw wouldn't have been able to say it without a hell of a struggle. Now it was quite apparent that Shaw would indeed like to kill him and certainly could. And it wouldn't be his first time.

Feelings. Ernie had ignored his feelings, his whimsy. They

were never specific enough, never quite accurate. He was a man and also a scholar in his own small way, and feelings, in Bridelow, were what women had.

And now, when it was probably too late, he was finding out what feelings were for.

He stood by the hallstand. Over his head hung a leaded lantern in a wrought-iron frame. Tasteful; one of Liz's earliest purchases.

'Your mother's no more in Buxton, lad, than we are now.'

'She is!' Shaw seemed about to stamp his foot. With his folded umbrella he prodded the air an inch or two from Ernie's eyes.

Ernie didn't move. 'Nearest she got to Buxton is a BMW motorcar at the bottom of a bank. She's in a police mortuary lad. That's where your mother is.'

Known it as soon as he and Willie had found the Cairns lass. Known it, really, for most of the day. That she was dead..

'You're off your head, Mr Dawber.'

'Not yet, lad. Soon, happen. But not yet.'

'I've told you once to get out. I won't tell you again.' Shaw's eyes glittered like broken glass.

'Kill me, eh?'

'You think I won't?'

'No, I know you would.' Ernie picked up his wet hat, held it in front of his chest like a breast plate. Took a big, long breath. Saw before him the little lad in Class I of the infants. Fair-haired, fair-complexioned, tall but slightly built. Brought to school that first morning by stocky, swarthy Arthur Horridge, Arthur's dark brown hair already greying at the temples.

Ernie looked into Shaw's pale, malevolent eyes. 'Just like you killed your granny, eh, lad?'

Shaw drew back across the hall. His mouth twisted up and opened on one side, his face alternating between a sneer and a stare of more than slightly crazed, vacant incomprehension.

'What's this? What's this nonsense? What are you babbling about? You're an old fool, Mr Dawber.'

'Haven't they told you, Shaw? Hasn't your father told you?'

'My father's dead.'

'I only wish he were, lad.'

'I... You…'

'Your father's Jack Lucas. John Peveril Stanage.'

'That's ... that's absolute crap.'

'You want to hear about this, Shaw?'

Shaw had backed up against the flock-papered far wall, his mouth twisting noiselessly from side to side, both hands over his head, hovering half an inch above his baldness.

'When I was a little lad' Ernie leaned his back against the hallstand, relaxed - 'there was a bit of a kerfuffle in Bridelow. Minor scandal, soon hushed up, years before I learned the details. Anyroad ... Ma Wagstaff ... Iris Morris in those days, young lass, bit of all right, too. But wild. Nowt anybody could tell her. Wasn't going to stay in little Bridelow, was she? Off to the city, our Iris, most weekends. Met a feller, as you'd expect. Educated smooth-talker, name of Lucas.'

Shaw Horridge was standing with his legs apart, panting a little.

'Came back pregnant. Wouldn't be the first one. Prospective father buggered off soon as he found out. The old story, and folks in Bridelow's always been liberal enough about that sort of thing. Except Iris was a bit special. Direct line, see. Presented to the Mother same week she was christened, expected, somehow, to have a daughter.'

'This is nonsense,' Shaw said. 'I'm going to kill you.'

'Hear me out first, eh?'

. 'I killed someone else tonight. I killed Manifold. Young Frank. I killed him ... just moments ago.'

'I don't think so,' Ernie said uncertainly. The idea of Shaw Horridge coping with Young Frank with a few drinks inside him was still a bit laughable. Wasn't it?

'I did- I'll show you.'

'Let me finish, lad, eh? Where was I? A daughter, yes. They expected she'd have a daughter first, that's the way it is usually. But no, it was a boy, and a most peculiar child. White. All over.'

'No!'

'Yes! Folks said, it's retribution. She sinned. Sinned not so much against God but against her heritage. And the child? A changeling, they said. Know what that is, Shaw? Child of another ... species, shall we say. A cuckoo. That was the word they used, changeling's my word, as a folklorist - all nonsense, of course, happen just a genetic throwback. But "cuckoo" was what they said. Not out loud, of course. Whispered it, though, when Iris wasn't about. But then she got married to Len Wagstaff and had three more, and the family closed ranks a bit and the things John did later were covered up. At first. Until it wasn't possible to cover them up any more.'

'What things?'

Pranks, at first. Not the worst you say about them, but if you were being charitable you'd call them pranks. Cruel pranks.'

'Perhaps they made him feel better,' Shaw said.

'Eh?'

'You do something brave, you push yourself. And you start to feel better.'

'Do you?'

'Yes. You can do anything if you push yourself into places you wouldn't normally go.'

'Oh, aye?'

'Look at this, for instance. How do you think I got this?'

He was doing it again, letting his hands hover half an inch from the bald part of his head.

'I don't understand,' Ernie said.

'Can't you see?' Shaw leapt about flinging switches until the hall was blazing with lights. Wall lights, ceiling lights, lights over five mirrors reflecting his bounding figure. 'Look. Look! I was completely bald at the front. Even two weeks ago, I was bald.'

'Aye?'

'Well?' Shaw bent his head towards Ernie. It threw off light like a steel helmet. 'Well?'

'Well, what?'

Shaw straightened up. 'Know when it began to grow again? When I agreed to get rid of the old lady.'

'Your grandmother.'

'That's crap. You come here, you give me all this bullshit. How stupid do you really think I am, Mr Dawber?'

Ernie thought very carefully before he spoke.

'Stupid enough,' he said, stepping away from the hallstand, bracing himself, 'to think your hair is growing again.

The fire hissed again. There was a visible bubbling among the coals.

'Have to get Alf Beckett to fit you a cowl on t'chimney,' Willie Wagstaff said prosaically to Milly.

Moira moved her legs closer to the fire, feeling she might never be truly warm again.

'Your brother? He's your brother?'

'Half-brother,' said Willie. 'But it counted for nowt. Once he'd gone he were never spoke of again. And after that, Ma never looked back.'

'And there was a new respect for Ma,' Milly Gill said. That she was able to do it.'

'Do what? What did she do?'

'Personal banishing rite,' Milly said. 'She walked around the village boundary three times within a day and a night. She walked barefoot, placing stones. Calling on … elements not usually invoked. But he was a strong presence, even then.'

'Be July of that year when he come back,' Willie recalled. 'End of his second year at Cambridge. Arrived in a fancy sports car.'

'Wherever he went,' Milly said, 'he could make money or get people to give him things.'

'There's an owd tree,' Willie said, 'just this side of t'Moss, 'fore you get to t'pub. Jack piled his car into that. Broke both arms. Elsie Ball, as were landlady of The Man in them days, she dint recognize Jack at first. Went out to help him, but he wouldn't come out of his car, couldn't come out. Just sat there until the ambulance come. Ma were standing at top of street, she knew who it were. Too far apart to see each other's faces, but I remember Elsie saying clouds were hanging down, hanging low, like a thunderstorm were about to burst.'

'And then Jack went away,' Milly said, 'and we never saw him again. He knew he'd never get back in, long as Ma were …'

'Alive,' said Willie, and Moira saw the fingers of his left hand beginning to crawl up the side of his knee.

'So,' Moira said, 'if he wanted to get back …'

'Why should he? He were rich. He were becoming famous. He had everything he could wish for.'

'Except his heritage,' Moira said.

'He tried to destroy his heritage,' Milly insisted.

'No. He tried to restructure it, surely. He tried to rebuild it around himself. It was a placid, earth-related, female religion, and he wanted to harden it into something he could use.'

Milly looked at her with suspicion.

'I've encountered it before,' Moira said. 'No. He was never going to walk away from that. All the time he'd be building up his armoury of contacts inside Bridelow. Matt and Dic we know about. There are probably others.'

'Shaw Horridge.' Willie's fingers were drumming hard. 'The brewery. He'd bought into Gannons. He must've done that purely to get hold of Bridelow Brewery.'

Who took the comb?

... bloke coiled Shaw Horridge, but that's not important right now...

'Yes,' Moira said.

Willie's fingers going like hell, both hands now. 'The bloody scale of the thing! Too big for us to see. Maybe we never wanted to see it. He'd gone. Right, Ma says, that's it. Never mention him again and you'll never see him again. And we never have.'

'Except,' said Milly, 'in Shaw.'

Willie looked at her. Moira watched his eyes widen.

'It was a Mothers' thing,' Milly said. 'Never talked about. I think Mr Dawber knew, but that's all. Probably not many people remember now, and I was just a child, but when Eliza McCarthy first arrived in Bridelow it was as Jack's girlfriend. All Jack's girlfriends were from wealthy backgrounds. Liz didn't last long, I don't suppose she was beautiful enough. It was probably just the family link with the Duke of Westminster that interested him.'

Milly pulled one of the cats on to her lap, began to stroke it from neck to tail. 'What happened, I believe, is that they had a row and Jack just drove away and left her in tears in the street. Which was where Ma found her. This was before the banishing.'

'Aye,' Willie said, something dawning. 'She spent the night with us. It were the year before me Dad died. He'd gone to The Man, he were in t'darts team, and I remember lying in bed and hearing Ma and this lass talking for hours.'

'Probably what you heard was Ma warning her off Jack. Next day, when Jack didn't come back, Ma introduced Liz to Arthur Horridge and two months later they were engaged. Well ... four days before the wedding, Liz is hammering on Ma's door in a terrible state. She's pregnant.'

Milly hauled the second cat on to her lap as if she needed reinforcement. 'Jack. Jack on the outside. He can't get into Bridelow but he can still get to his ex-fiancée.'

'Bastard.' Both of Willie's hands fell away from his knees.

Cathy shook her head in distaste. 'How could she?'

'You didn't know him,' Milly said. 'When I was nine years old he took me and two other little girls for a walk on ... Oh, you don't want to hear, it was nothing by comparison with what else he's done. But he could walk in and even if you didn't really like him he'd get what he came for. Liz - it wasn't rape- as such, you could learn to live with that. Anyway ... Ma had a long chat with Arthur Horridge and Shaw was born, and he was Arthur's son and nothing more was ever said.'

'I can't believe all this,' Willie said. 'Can't believe we never thought. We didn't think of the bugger any more - better not to. Wrote his books under the name John Peveril Stanage, we knew that, so it was as if the Jack Lucas we knew had gone for good.'

'Pouring all his worst fantasies into his books, huh?' Moira said.

'Something like that. Takes that American lad to come in here and drop Jack's name in our laps before we put two and together.'

'Oh,' said Cathy. 'Mungo! He still thinks ...'

Moira spun so fast the towel unwound from her hair. Cathy's hand went to her mouth but failed to stifle a cry.

'They did that to you? They cut off all your ... ?'

Moira let the towel fall.

'Oh, Moira!' Tears sprang into Cathy's eyes.

Deliberately calm, Moira said, 'They needed my hair to entangle Matt's spirit. They locked me in an outhouse in the dark. They couldn't kill me because that would have released

my spirit, defeating the object. So they kept me in this sensory vacuum, sedated with mogadon or some shit that turns you into a comatose non-person so that your energy, your personality, your essence can be ... stolen.'

Moira stood up, reached under the mantelpiece for her stiffening jeans. 'Cathy, I ... You invoked the awful word "Mungo".' Disgusted to feel a tiny smile pulling on the muscles at the corners of her mouth.

'He still thinks you're dead,' Cathy said. 'He's over at the Man. I'd better call him.'

'Uh huh.' Moira shook her head. 'I don't know how Macbeth got here or why, and I don't have time to find out. I'm starting to see everything. Clear as hell.'

Her mind burning up with it.

They stood either side of the Beacon of the Moss, heads bowed.

Joel had asked, 'Shouldn't we pray?'

'We should meditate,' John had said.

Joel stood in the blueness of it and tried to concentrate his mind, to absorb the rise and fall of Tongues from beneath, to achieve a holy stillness. But his thoughts lumbered ape-like around the shadowed walls of the chamber. He could not see John's face, could only sense the man's awesome containment.

'It's time,' John said very quietly, raising his head.

Reaching up, beyond the top of the great lantern, examined the chain by which it hung from the thick, long smoke-blackened beam. 'Come beneath it, Joel. Catch it as I release it.'

And while Joel crouched, arms full of light, John reached up and unhooked the chain.

The lamp was unexpectedly heavy. Joel stumbled but held it, pulling down several feet of electric flex which had coiled between the beam and the wall. The lamp did not go out.

'Good,' John said. 'Now lower it to the floor.'

They both stood back. The pointed top of the lantern was now on a level now with Joel's groin.

'Kick it in,' John urged.

Joel tried to see his face but saw only the bared blue teeth and blue steel ripples of hair.

He couldn't move.

'This is the pagan light. This is the lure. Very few people dared cross the Moss, Mr Beard. except those for whom the devil lit the way. Have you heard that legend? Have you heard it?

'Yes!' Joel panicking. 'I heard it from you. You told me.'

'And do you believe it? Consider the evidence.'

'I believe,' Joel intoned, 'that this is a place of pagan worship. I have seen the signs. I have seen the woman with the opened cunt. I have dreamed of her. And I have seen the dead walk.'

'And you know that this night is Samhain, the Feast of the Dead, and that the light is shining out across the peat to welcome the dead to this place.'

'It shall not happen.'

Joel lifted his foot, aware as never before of its size and its weight, and he plunged it, with a shattering, through the glass lantern and watched the shower of shards, blue and then white, pierce the tumbling shadows,

'The bulbs, Joel. Now the bulbs!'

. Joel felt his lips stretched tight as his foot went back again and again, lightbulbs exploding, all of them, whorls of jagged colour, and then there was the creak of a door opening, a rapid clumping of footsteps and his neck was wrenched back and the last thing he saw before the last bulb blew was John's luminescent teeth as the man held up a scimitar of white glass, nine inches long.

Joel bit rubber, and felt his knees buckle before he was even aware of the single dull, heavy blow on the back of his head.

For a long time here was only night, and then there was a lake and a naked woman on a hill, and the woman smiled with a sorrow deeper than the lake and Joel wanted to scream, I

recognise you. I recognise you now, for what you are ...

But the woman was gone and there was only a void of dark sorrow and John's voice, coming very quickly, words running together, some in an archaic and alien language, and a few that he could understand.

'… that by the laying down of the blood ...

Another, deeper male voice joining John's in fractured counterpoint.

... and shall be recompensed for that which we have borrowed ...'

Joel trying to speak, his arms pinned behind him, confusion and humiliation turning to a savage anger as his chest swelled and his elbows jerked and there was a grunt behind him and he spat out the rubber and jerked his head forward and inside him he let out a great roar of rage.

And only a liquid gurgle came out, and he felt his very soul was pouring out through his throat and something heavy thrust into the small of his back and there was a shattering explosion and Joel was out into the flooded sky and falling through the slipstream of his blood.