Phil Rickman - The Chalice

Jim stepped away from the canvas. The tangled garden, by now, was all blues and greys and dark browns. As there were no lights on in the cottage, Jim could barely see the canvas. Time to stop. Time to wind up the Great Quest for another day.

Still, for once, time was playing on his side, staying the dead hand of winter, letting him go on painting outdoors into the early evening, using the very last of the light. For this was when things happened. Often, when he looked at the picture next morning, he'd find that the absence of direct light had wrought some marvellous effects, textures he'd never have found if he'd been able to see properly. All a matter of surrendering to the dusk.

And beyond the dusk… lay the Grail.

Of course, everyone came to Avalon in search of the Grail. And it was different for all of them. There was always the possibility of an actual holy relic somewhere. But for most people the Grail was simply the golden core of whatever you dreamed you might achieve. The vanishing point on life's horizon. Glastonbury being one of those spots on the Earth's surface where the phantasmal became almost tangible, where you might actually reach the vanishing point before you, er, vanished.

Jim's personal Grail – the mystical formula which would (he hoped) come to define a Battle painting – was to be round at the very end of dusk, the cusp of the day, the moment between evening and night when the world stopped.

It should happen at dawn too, but it didn't for Jim. He'd walked out in the drizzle and the dew, to wait. In vain. The moment never came, or he could not feel it. Time of life again: at his age perhaps you were just not meant to feel the stopping of the world at dawn.

Not that he greatly wished for youth – only to have come to Avalon as a younger man. Wasn't as if he hadn't known, then, what he wanted to do. Plenty of time for painting, bloody Pat had bleated, when you've got your pension.

God. Why do we listen to them? If he'd left his wife and met Juanita twenty years ago, when she was a very young woman and he didn't seem so much of an older man…

Well, he hadn't. It was enough of a privilege that she was his friend, that he could bathe in her aura. Jim left the canvas wedged into the easel and manhandled the whole painting to the house. He propped it against the open door and turned to accept the night.

The cottage was tiny but satisfyingly isolated, reached by a track too narrow for a car. Ten years ago, although his worldly goods were few, the removal men had been less than euphoric.

But Jim still was, much of the time. Especially when the sun had gone, leaving its ghost to haunt the lush, sloping grass in the foothills of Glastonbury Tor.

Behind the cottage was a wooded hillside which was always immediately activated by the dying sun. He could almost feel it starting to tremble with the stirring and scufflings and rustlings of badgers and rabbits and foxes and owls.

Before him, the dark brown fields rolled away into the tide of mist on the slopes of the Tor and the cottage snuggled into the huge ash tree which overhung it, as if its only protection against the night was to become part of this great organism.

The way that Jim himself wanted to go into the final night. To be absorbed, become part of the greater organism, even if it was only as fertiliser.

He grunted, startled.

Two extra shadows were creeping along the hedgerow.

Headlice saw the little tubby guy in his garden, with his red face and his tweed hat. What a waste, eh? People like that could go and live in nice suburban cul-de-sacs and leave the power places for them that could still feel the electricity.

He dragged Rozzie into the shadow of the hedge. 'Ow!' she screeched. 'Friggin' thorns.'

'Thorns round here are sacred,' Headlice told her. 'That Joseph of whatsit, when he landed and planted his stick, it turned into a thorn tree, right?'

'That's Christian. '

'It's still earth magic' Headlice gazed up towards the Tor, very big now, almost scary in the flatlands. One side of the tower sucking the very last red bit out of the sky, the other side, the one closest to them, sooty-black.

He was glad they'd been sent first, to find their own way through the tangled undergrowth to the Tor. This was how a pilgrimage ought to end. Except he wished it wasn't Rozzie.

A fragile half moon had risen in a thin mist above the holy hill's eastern flank.

'Fuckin' magic, in't it?

'You ain't seen nuffin yet.' Rozzie smiled secretively. 'Stop a minute, willya? I've done me friggin' ankle.'

Headlice gritted his teeth. 'Been better off bringing Molly. Least she knows the country.'

'Yeah,' Rozzie said. 'And you could shag her afterwards right?'

Headlice said nothing.

'What you had in mind, ain't it?' Rozzie said. 'You're a transparent little sod.'

OK, so maybe he did wish it was Mol he was with. Sure; she was fat. Fatish. But she was nice-looking. Open, when Rozzie was closed-up. Despite – and he'd always known this – her not being what she made out. Plus she smelled nice.

When they crossed the lane, only a hedge between them and where the ground started to rise, Headlice wanted to climb over and scramble up, but Rozzie said they'd better find the gate Mort had told them to use. When they reached it they could see a glowing path of concrete: chippings and stuff had been put in, with steps. All the way to the top, it looked like. For the tourists. Sacrilege.

There was a collecting box inviting visitors to contribute towards Tor maintenance. Oh yeah, like patching up the concrete path? Balls to that.

And then there was a National Trust notice board for the thicko tourists. Headlice started to read it anyway, striking a match and holding it close to the print.

Tor is a West Country word of Celtic origin meaning a hill. Glastonbury Tor is a natural formation composed of layers of clay and blue limestone, capped by a mass of hard, erosion-resistant sandstone.

'How do they know that, anyway?' It was almost too dark to make out the print. 'How do they know it's a natural formation?'

'What's it matter?' Rozzie said.

Because it could've been built here, you daft bat. By the ancient shamans. Like the pyramids. According to the lines of force and the position of the heavens.'

The Tor is and has been to many people a place of magic, the focus of legend and superstition. One local story is that there is a hollow space inside; another, perhaps very ancient, that the hill has a secret entrance to the Underworld.

Headlice felt sick to his gut to see it spelled out like this, baby talk, for every ice-lolly sucking day-tripper. He wanted to rip down the board, smash the collecting box, hack up the concrete path. Then the Tor would be a secret place again. A place for pilgrims. He turned away, needing to put this tourist shit behind him.

'Come on.' Pulling at Rozzie.

'Get your mits off. Wanna read this last bit.'

The Tor was the scene of the hanging, drawing and quartering of Richard Whiting, the last Abbot of Glastonbury, when Henry VIII dissolved the Abbey in 1539.

'Heavy,' Rozzie said.

'Yeah. Shit.' Headlice dropped the match as it burned down to his fingers. 'I didn't know about that.'

He looked up to where night had fused the hill and the tower into a single dark lump.

'Still.' He walked off along the shining path. 'Maybe the old git had it coming.'

Alone for the first time since she'd joined the convoy, Diane sat in Headlice's bus, a woollen shawl around her shoulders, and unwrapped a peppermint flavoured carob bar.

She was sitting on one of the original vinyl-covered bus seats still bolted to the floor. The bus windows were purpled by a November night as soft and luminous as June.

So this was it. Breathing space over. She was back.