Phil Rickman - The Chalice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The hand ungloved, a livid pink.

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

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

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

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

A lesson.

Never close your eyes at Meadwell.

She sat on the bed in the lamplight.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The eyes wavered.

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

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

Also the woman he really…

He felt Juanita's lips on his hair.

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

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

'What?'

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

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

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

'I'm real. I think.'

She pulled away from him.

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

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

'Look at me.' She began to cry.

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

There was nothing there but warm skin.

'Um, would you mind if…?'

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

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

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

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

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

'Mmm?'

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

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

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

Sliding her into bed.

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

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

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

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

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