Phil Rickman - The Chalice

The hands joining again, like clasps in some kind of bracelet, and the movement re-starting, the cog in the machine, round and round and round and the drum drumming deep down in his gut and the chant, nahmu, nahmu, and the sudden weight of the sky, and when he looked up the sky was turning around the tower and… and…

He couldn't feel his feet anymore; he was starting to float. Aware of Gwyn speaking, hearing the words but like making no sense of it; like it was coming from way off, and some of it was in Latin, which figured, if Gwyn had trained as a priest to get both sides.

Gwyn's mellowed out voice was soaring.

'Emitte tenebrae tua et medacia tua. Ipsa me deduxerunt et adduxetunt…'

Headlice suddenly felt very emotional, felt like crying.

… in montem, sanctum tuum…'

Hands. The skin on the hands gripping his seemed to be putting up like foam rubber and then Headlice felt something streak through him, hand to hand to hand…

… like an electric current, and he…

… was well off the ground, the air sizzling coldly around him, all lit up, an ice cascade. Perspective somersaulting; St Michael's tower groaning at his feet; he was up there. In the darkness.

… montem sanctum tuum…

Gwyn's voice rising and sliding and the responses from the others, a drone, enfolding him like soft curtains. The drum so loud, like it was inside his head, like he was inside the drum. It was brilliant. He was truly alive, man.

And the priest said,

'… oh, Gwyn ap Nudd, lord of the hollow, guardian of the dark gates, we call upon thee and offer to thee this…'

'Jim,' Juanita said. 'Jim, look, I think I'm changing my mind about this.'

She crouched, panting, in the grass which was slick with night dew.

They were almost halfway up the Tor. She looked over her shoulder, in the dark it was like being on a cliff-face; vertigo seized her and she grabbed at the hillside for support, her hand closing around something she realised was a hard lump of sheep shit. She ran her fingers convulsively through the damp grass.

'I mean, are we going to make fools of ourselves? When you think about it, what are we supposed to be preventing? After all, come on, nobody ever got murdered or anything on the Tor, did they?'

'Depends what you call murder,' Jim said. 'Don't imagine Abbot Whiting saw much justice in what they did to him. Anyway…' He suddenly expelled an angry sigh. 'I'm curious now. It's a free country. National Trust property. We've got as much right…'

'Jim, why don't we just get the police? I was stupid. They won't arrest Diane, and even if they did…'

'They won't want to know. What's in it for them? Couple of cannabis arrests? They haven't got the manpower anymore.'

'It's just…'

Jim turned towards her. 'Too old to look after myself?'

'No, I… Oh God'

What it came down to was, whatever these neo-hippies were doing she didn't want to see it. Because she'd been there and it was beautiful once and she didn't want to watch a sweaty parody of her youth, didn't want to feel old, didn't want to have to feel disgust.

'Why don't we get the car and drive down to Don Moulder's field and wait for them to come back to their camp? We'll see where Diane goes and we'll try and snatch her.'

'No.' Jim's voice was pitched almost at conversational level. 'I'm tired of being timid. Too old to be a hippy. Missed the boat. Missed too many boats.'

'Jim…'

'Why don't you stay here with the lamp and I'll go up alone.'

Juanita looked down at the lights of Glastonbury, thinking, God, one minute I'm worrying about his heart and his liver and the next…

'Jim!'

He'd pushed the lamp into her hands and when she looked up he'd vanished into a wall of mist.

Bloody hell. He was going up there to make a scene. At some point tonight he'd got this image of himself as a bumbling, ineffectual little man considered too old to kick ass, and now he had something to prove.

No way.

Juanita went after him, stumbled, her Afghan falling open. She was aware of a fringe of lights, and a man's hollow voice lifted up into the night, rhythmic and ecclesiastical, and that didn't sound like what they used to do in the seventies, not at all.

It started to go wrong very quickly, all in a rush, and it was so strong Headlice was just dragged down, like he'd lost the use of his feet, like they'd rotted into mush.

Because he was no longer above the Tor, he was inside it.

In this giant cave, full of mist.

It didn't matter too much at first that he had no control

… got to roll with it, man. I'm a shaman now, me. This is where they go, inside the earth, inside themselves… Until he realised that without feet you couldn't run away.

At some stage, he saw what seemed at first like only a darker part of the mist. It writhed. It became like a tree, with fuzzy outstretched branches and little knotty twigs, the kind of wintry tree you see through fog from a train.

And then it wasn't a tree because trees don't move like this: the branches were dark arms and the twigs were fingers, thin fingers, bony, wiggling like they were underwater and the currents were doing it, and he saw arms inside sleeves, torn sleeves, hanging like sodden leaves gone black.

He tried to clench his own fingers on Mort's hand and Steve's. Only nothing happened. He couldn't work the muscles. Clenched his fingers, but nothing clenched.

A ring. A ring on one of the wiggling fingers, a big one, size of a curtain ring. Headlice heard,… let me go… let me go unto my lord.

A figure in black with stains down the chest, this rough cloth around it, ripped in places, and stains, stains everywhere and a hard, powerful smell of dirty sweat, fear-sweat, and wet, rusty iron, like when you pull an old pram out of a pond, all black, the fabric rotted and dripping and the frame poking through.

No, I'm not going for this. This is dope in the fuckin' water. You get me out of this, you bastards, hear me?

The body was coming towards him in this kind of lopsided crippled way; it couldn't stand up straight, couldn't lift up its head. He tried to scream, feeling his throat working at it, pushing, but nothing coming out.

And the reason this ragged thing couldn't lift its head was because it hadn't got one, only stains around the neck of its robe.

Help me. Help me to my Lord Its hands groping out for Headlice. fingers waving like seaweed in shallow water. Headlice shrinking away. Fuck off… fuck off, old man. Leave me alone.

Dom, dom. dom. Heart banging away in his chest. Blood throbbing in his head. Drum going dom, dom, dom, and he could see the old man was offering him something. Something that had formed between his hands, a bowl, and Headlice reeled back; this was all he could do, throw his body' back from the waist, because his legs had gone now, gone into soup.

And the old man pushed the bowl towards him, but it was still joined to his hands, this bowl, this chalice, his fingers throbbing like veins in the curved metal. The old man was giving off long sobs, ragged as his rotting clothes, because he was as helpless as Headlice, this old man, didn't know what he was at.

Holding out the bowl, the old man said, Alan.

Which was Headline's real name.

The entity said, Alan. Real sick and sorrowful, and Headlice looked down and saw, briefly, a wavering shadow of himself in the mist, and he knew that he'd become part of it, another wiggling thing. Part of the darkness. He started to cry too, because there'd soon be nothing left of him but tears and snot evaporating in the dark.

Alan, however, Alan started to feel dispassionate about this, about his body floating away from his consciousness, or maybe the other way round, who gives a shit, roll with it.

And this was when the air thinned into a paler darkness, and he became aware that he was out of it, up in the night sky- again, over the Tor and looking down, and he could see everything very clearly. He was up here in the sky – thank you, thank you, thank you, gods – and looking down on…