Phil Rickman - The Chalice

The Dark Chalice glistened palely on the kitchen table.

'That's disgusting,' Powys said. The words sounding so trite and ludicrous he almost broke out laughing.

'Its base was of old, blackened oak, like the beams of Meadwell.

The wrists emerged from the oak like the stems of yellowing fungi. Whatever kept the bones of the hands and fingers together, it still held strong and the skeletal hands still gripped the bowl of bone, the upturned cranium.

'Who is it, Verity?'

Verity said nothing.

'Is this… I mean, is this the Abbot?'

Verity pulled the Safeway bag back over the horror.

She'd said vaguely that she must have found it by the side of the well. Where he'd placed it so that he would have both hands free to pull himself out.

Powys banished for ever an image that came to him of Verity, fresh from her discovery of murdered Woolly, kicking Oliver Pixhill's groping fingers from the rim of the well, shutting out his scream.

She came down from the bus in floods of tears. She didn't know if it was over. How was she ever going to know?

She saw Juanita and Don Moulder over by the gate. On the other side of it, Joe Powys stood with little Verity and Arnold the dog, who had brought the lightball into the cold heart of it all.

And then came a strange jolt in her breast.

He was shambling slowly across the field towards the bus, his head down as if he was scared to look at her. His buccaneer's hair was matted, he'd lost his famous earring.

Diane, full of tearful longing but still uncertain, looked back along the deck of the bus.

Go, said the Third Nanny.

She had a nice smile.

Booksellers High Street

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

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

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

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

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

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