Phil Rickman - The Chalice

He held on to Ceridwen's gaze, talking slowly, holding the floor. Aware of Juanita moving closer to Diane.

'John Cowper Powys. A man with a lot of personal hang-ups. A seriously flawed character. But a bit older than Violet. And smart. I can hear DF and JCP talking long into the night, working out the implications of Grail versus anti-Grail.'

'And realising,' Ceridwen said, 'as you obviously cannot grasp, that they were dealing with a very ancient duality.'

'That everything has its negative? That without evil, how could we comprehend good?'

'That without the sterility of what you naively call good,' said Ceridwen, 'we cannot appreciate the beauty of what you call evil.'

'Bloody hell, Ruth,' Powys said admiringly, 'you'll be converting me.'

'I wouldn't want you as a convert,' Ceridwen said. 'You're no more use than your grandfather or whatever he was.'

'Probably not,' Powys conceded. 'But they did manage it, didn't they? DF would have decided they needed to conduct a binding ritual. To put the Chalice itself – if not the force behind it – into cold storage. And give the Ffitches at least a chance of salvation. It would've been JCP who worked out how to do it, how to put the arm on Roger – who, by now, was back into his nightmares and vulnerable.

So they bound the Chalice. To the general benefit of mankind. But no help to the Ffitches. Their fortunes hit the skids. Since when…' He shrugged, '… the Dark Chalice has become a legendary prize for, um, certain species of spiritual pond-life.'

The tall guy with the pigtail stepped forward, holding his metal candlestick like a sword. 'You don't have to take this.'

'Let him finish.'

'I'm nearly there anyway.' Thinking of Diane in the hospital bed, Ceridwen, the nurse, an idea was forming. To liberate the Dark Chalice and whatever it represents, you had to actually corrupt the spirit of DF. Which is no small undertaking. It involved creating and developing a whole person. You were there when Diane was born, weren't you?'

'Yes.' Ceridwen looked uncertain and then her face broke into a beam, like the sun actually shining out of an arse, he thought. 'Yes. She knows that. I was her midwife.'

He imagined Juanita's eyes opening wider at that. She was no more than a couple of yards away from where Diane lay seemingly unaware of any of them through the residual haze of whatever she'd been given to sedate her.

'I don't know what you planted in that baby,' he said. 'But you obviously thought you had to kill her mother to keep it alive.'

'Archer killed their mother,' Ceridwen said sharply. 'It was quite simple. He was a child, with a child's simplistic views. She was coming between him and his dreams of restoring the family's wealth and influence.'

'I bet he didn't do it on his own, though.'

'You're fantasising, Mr J.M. Powys. But that's your profession, isn't it?'

'I bet you had a little tug on the old umbilical, didn't you, Ruth?'

Her face told him it was inspired. Thank you, God. Thank you, DF. Thank you, Uncle Jack.

Ceridwen recovered rapidly, Powys thinking how two-dimensional these people were. 'It doesn't matter now,' she said. 'Diane's beast is loose. The bind is broken. The Chalice is back in the world.'

The reservoir doors opened. Archer Ffitch stood there. He showed no surprise. He'd been here before, of course he had. He must have seen the Mini vanish in the direction of the barns and known where they were going.

'Sorry to intrude' Archer wore a dark suit, but he'd taken off his tie. He was sweating. 'But all of a sudden, one begins to feel safer down here. Tricky phase. Transition. All that. Difficult to settle. Until Oliver gets the family trophy out of the well.'

Right, Powys thought. They would have to cancel out DF before they dare uncover that well. The unbinding of the Chalice was a number of strands entwining simultaneously, something finally pulling them tight, just as Ceridwen must have sealed the fate of Lady Pennard by one wrench on the umbilicus.

He looked at Diane's face, the eyes flickering vaguely behind the twisted, narcotic glaze. It was unreal. It was insane. Diane had been brought up from birth to develop a hatred for her brother, to have that hatred fine-tuned to a pitch where it could be released as an entity in itself, dragging down the entity's original, unwitting creator.

Juanita was standing only a yard away from Diane, but it was a very long yard.

'Come down, Archer,' Ceridwen called out, almost gaily. 'We'll look after you.' She turned to Powys. 'As we always have. Ever since his schooldays. I was their matron, did you know that, at school? Archer and Oliver Pixhill. Always inseparable.'

'Let me get this right,' Juanita said. 'This would be after you were fired from the hospital in Oxfordshire for persecuting geriatrics?'

Ceridwen turned slowly and jabbed a blunt forefinger at her. 'I know what you've been doing. I know you've been leeching on DF's residue'

'Or perhaps she's been feeding me,' Juanita said softly.

'I don't care if she's been feeding you.' Ceridwen snarled. 'She's over now, Juanita. Or she's ours – she has that choice. Oblivion. Or the shadier path.'

All this time Diane had been quite silent. Sitting up in her bed like some soiled fairytale princess.

'Come on, Diane,' Juanita said.

'Yes. Go on. Do,' Ceridwen shrieked. 'Go with her, Diane. Take it out into the world.' And to Juanita, 'She'll destroy you. She was always going to destroy you. And then she'll come back. She has to.'

Powys was aware of a deepening of the atmosphere in the concrete chamber, as though it had become a hall of mirrors and went on and on until the Tor rose above it, a nightmare corruption of the Cavern Under the Hill of Dreams. A picture began to form in his head of Diane in five or ten years' time: no more the scatty but tolerable Lady Loony; instead, a fat and blackened sly-eyed whore, a parasite in high society, vampish fallen sister of the Conservative MP for Mendip South.

Fetch!

He heard it with bell-like clarity in his head. No one reacted. The silence was dull, yet charged.

And then, limping down the middle of this endless chamber, he saw – Oh, no – the familiar black and white, amiably lopsided dowser's dog.

Arnold pattered to the bed where Diane sat up. There was a ball in Arnold's mouth. A ball of pure, white light. Powys saw it and then he didn't.

Diane shrank back into the metal bars of the headboard. Powys watched, as though from far away, as though it was happening in a movie. Becoming only gradually aware that no one else was looking at the dog or the bed or Diane or him, but at the open doorway behind Archer.

Where Lord Pennard stood in heavy tweed shooting jacket and plus fours, the dawn welling wildly up behind him.

'Archer?' Pennard's voice rang like steel around the concrete chamber. 'Where are you, boy?'

'Father.' Archer didn't move. 'Go away. This is nothing to do with you. Go back to the house.'

'Who are these people. Archer?'

'Not your problem, OK? We'll talk later.'

'Is that Diane down there? I can't see.'

'Will you leave this to me?'

'I wanted very much to believe in you. Archer.' Pennard said. 'Damn it, I had to believe. To support the future For the simple sake of our continuity, I had to believe that you didn't…'

'I… didn't… kill her.' Archer ground it out through his teeth. 'What can I do to convince you? I… didn't fucking… kill my fucking mother?

'You sicken me,' Pennard said sorrowfully. 'Perhaps you always did. But now you frighten me too. And that… that is something I really can't live with.'

'Wait!' Archer moved into the pink light at the entrance, 'Listen to me! You want to know who killed her?' He turned to point into the darkness. The very heart of the darkness.