Phil Rickman - The Chalice

Dotty. Confused. Mixed-up. That's all.

That's all?

She edged past the rear entrance of The George and Pilgrims and round into High Street. Followed all the way by Lord Pennard's voice down a telephone nearly ten years ago. A cold voice, a voice honed by Gillette.

You, Mrs Carey. I hold you entirely responsible.

No. She wasn't having that. This town was a positive bazaar of the mystical. If it hadn't been Carey and Frayne it would have been some other bookshop.

Diane had looked so utterly forlorn, shuffling in that first day, another teenage waif appealing for a holiday job. If you could have fat waifs. What was she supposed to say? Be gone with you, you overprivileged hussy?

You didn't know she was maladjusted? Don't tell me you close your ears to the local gossip, Mrs Carey.

Juanita drove past the venerable facade of The George and Pilgrims, where modern pilgrims with Gucci luggage slept in rooms with four-postered beds and sloping walls. Sometimes she drank at the Pilgrims with Jim and the others, amusing themselves by embellishing the Glastonbury legends for earnest German tourists, telling them a clear UFO sighting over the Tor was virtually guaranteed at just before four a.m. on every second Sunday, especially in winter.

As it happened, Juanita had never actually seen a UFO, which was a pretty shameful admission in Glastonbury.

Diane of course, claimed she'd always seen balls of light in the sky over the Tor. Didn't everybody see them?

And the gossips said. It's in the genes, isn't it? Always a danger with the upper classes. Interbreeding. You'll always get one like that, every couple of generations. And they watched her padding down the street. Lord Pennard's strange daughter, and they called her Lady Loony.

It was, admittedly, at the Carey and Frayne bookshop that Diane had discovered the works of Dion Fortune, the Greatest Woman Magician of All Time. Oh, Juanita, I'm so excited. Dion Fortune – Diane Ffitch. Same initials! Diane's nose in a book, munching healthy snacks. Nobody should get fat, for God's sake, on quorn and tofu and carob covered cereal bars.

She'd have found those books anyway, sooner or later. In Glastonbury, the nutter's Mecca, where gateways to altered states seemed as close as the nearest bus stop. Where on nights like this, you could almost see the subtle merging of the layers, the way you could in Jim's paintings.

Further up the street, only one shop was fully lit: Holy Thorn Ceramics, owned by thirtyish newcomers Anthony and Domini Dorrell-Adams. The lights were on because the Dorrell-Adamses were reorganising their window, and…

'Jesus,' Juanita said.

Tony and Domini were together in the window. In fact it was hard to imagine how they could be more together while fully clothed and standing up – Domini arching backwards and you could almost hear the moans.

Only in Glastonbury.

Juanita tried to smile, accelerated away to the top of the High Street. It could be a hell of an aphrodisiac, this town. Well, at first, anyway. Turning into Lambrook Street, she was ambushed by misty moments from twenty-odd years ago, when she'd left Nigel Carey (sad junkie; dead now) and she and Danny Frayne had opened the shop with about two hundred books, mostly secondhand, and a lot of posters. Danny was in publishing now, back in London. And while it still said Carey and Frayne over the shop, and they still occasionally exchanged daringly intimate letters on business notepaper, and now and then had dinner and whatnot in London, Danny – once bitten – never came back to Glastonbury.

Headlights on full-beam, Juanita drove the Volvo off left into secretive, tree-hung Wellhouse Lane, official gateway to the Tor.

Impressionable. That was Diane. Curiously innocent, perhaps deluded. That's all. But if he found she was with the New Age travellers, her father would… what? Have her committed? Juanita was convinced he'd tried something like that once. Jim was right. Lord Pennard was not a terribly nice man.

It was very dark. Juanita drove carefully up the narrowing road, scene of many a near-collision, and took a narrow right, scraping the hedge.

Where the Tor should be visible, there was a night mist like a wall. The lane swooped steeply into a tunnel of trees, and at the end of it Juanita swung sharp left into a mud-packed track until the car could go no farther.

The great ash tree leapt up indignantly, as if rudely awoken by the Volvo's headlights.

She got out. 'Jim?'

A little chillier than of late, and it'd be quite cold on the Tor. Pulling on her coat, Juanita very nearly screamed when hand patted her shoulder.

'My, my.' Jim grinned like a Hallowe'en pumpkin behind his lamp. 'We are being traditional tonight.'

'Say what you like about the Afghan.' Juanita pushed her hair inside the sheepskin. 'But it's damned warm. Help me reverse?'

Jim, also, was dressed for action. In his hat and scarf and overcoat he looked like something from The Wind in the Willows, Mole or Ratty. With Toad's physique, however and probably just as hopeless. But without Jim Battle there'd be nobody quite sane enough to turn to in this kind of crisis.

'Leave the car here, Juanita. Better off walking. Take us about twenty minutes. The old feet can virtually find their own way after all this time.'

'You sound a good deal more cheerful than you did on the phone.'

That's because I haven't been out with you at night for a good while.' She felt his smile.

'Yes. Well. Unfortunately, we won't have time for a candlelit dinner.'

'I've got a bar of chocolate.'

'We'll have it to celebrate, afterwards. How are we going to handle this, Jim?'

'Bloody hell, I thought you were supposed to be in charge. Suppose there's some sort of orgy going on up there? Wouldn't be the first time.'

'In which case, Diane'll be somewhere on the edge looking terribly embarrassed and a bit lost.'

'People do change, Juanita. Erm… before we go any further…'

'That's a myth. People don't really change at all. Sorry, Jim.'

'I was going to say, on the question of heroics…'

Juanita squeezed a bulky, overcoated arm. 'I'm not suggesting you barge into the middle of a bunch of naked squirming travellers and sling her over your shoulder.'

'No, I…'

'I mean, I know you'd do it. If I asked you.'

'Actually, I was thinking more about you. What I'm getting at is, the Tor's a funny place.'

'Tell me about it.'

'Sometimes you can get carried away. You know what I mean?'

'No.' Juanita rammed her fists into the pockets of the afghan. 'Not any more. Carried away is what I don't get.'

It was like being on a strange planet.

Like they'd climbed up the night itself and emerged on to some other sphere, and the moon and the stars were so much nearer and so bright it was like they were swimming in and out of your head.

All this without drugs.

'Magic,' Headlice breathed, understanding at last why Mort had been handing out this strict no booze, no dope stuff.

The pilgrims, all standing up now, had gathered around the tower, which rose out of this small space on the summit of the Tor, over an ocean of lights far, far below.

The tower. So close. Like a silent rocket ship in the centre, and they were like joined to it and it was part of them. Literally. If he stretched out his legs his bare feet would touch the stone.

His feet should have been dead cold up here, in November, but this was a very special year, the summer heat clinging to Avalon, and the Tor was where the real heat was stored, all the sacred earth-energy. This was like the spiritual power station of Britain and tonight Headlice was gonna get charged up like a battery.

All the pilgrims were in a circle, holding hands. Headlice's left hand had found the clammy fingers of this raggy-haired older woman called Steve. His right hand had been grabbed, unfortunately, by Mort. Mort was holding the finger he'd bent, which still hurt, the bastard.