Phil Rickman - The Chalice

The Welsh Border

It was a moody frontier town squashed between dark English hills and even darker Mid Wales hills. The stone cottage was at the end of a deep-sunk dirt track, two, three miles beyond the huddled town of Kington.

Locating the place by car had been a problem for publisher Ben Corby, who hadn't travelled much outside London for a couple of yean now, except on planes. And who had always – despite his enthusiasm for The Old Golden Land – found the countryside basically hostile.

So this place immediately gave him the creeps.

It was a low cottage, barrack-block long, the last of the light making its windows opaque and sinister, like Mafia sunglasses. No sooner had he switched off the ignition than something came rushing out at his car: a black and white dog or maybe a big cat. Something disturbing about it, the way it moved. Ben nervously wound his window down as a shadow edged around a door at one end of the long cottage.

'OK, Arnold.' Was the voice familiar? Was it him?

Ben's headlights showed that the animal was, in fact, a dog.

And that it had only three legs.

Uncanny, The disabled dog was just sitting there in the headlights, not barking, not even blinking. Ben didn't get out; a three-legged dog was probably a dog with a grudge.

'It's a friend,' the dog was told by the shadow. 'Possibly.'

Possibly. He'd come to the right place then. And the author of The Old Golden Land was evidently prepared for the worst.

Half an hour later, relieved to be out of the wild country and by a warmish wood-fire with a can of lager on the arm of his chair, Ben came, in his blunt Yorkshire fashion, to the point.

'Be suicide, mate. For all of us.'

The dog lay on his intact side, eyes open and a furry stump pointing at Ben as if it was his fault, the dog having only three legs.

'If we go with this, we might as well pulp our entire back-catalogue. Britain's premier New Age publisher does not put out a book advising people to hang up their dowsing rods and trade in their tarot cards for a pack of Happy Families.'

The dog lay on a sheepskin rug under a table with a converted paraffin lamp on it. Next to this Ben had dumped Joe's manuscript: Mythscapes: The Old Golden Land Revalued.

Joe Powys stared into the fire. Ben thought, Where's his woman? Why just him and a three-legged dog?

He'd been on at Joe to write a book about what really happened at Crybbe and Joe had said nobody would believe it. He'd agreed finally to produce a follow-up to his New Age classic, The Old Golden Land, and here it was… and the bloody thing was anti-New Age. Not to say anti meditation. Anti-fortune telling. Anti-ghost-hunting.

But only as much as Hitler had been anti-Semitic.

'So, Joe. How do you propose to live?'

Powys raised his eyebrows. Hair fully grey now (prematurely, just about). But the face on the back of the book could still help unload a few thousand copies on wispy, wistful ladies.

'You're still a young… youngish guy. And almost – you can't deny it – a cult figure, once, an icon. So, OK, you've had a change of heart, unfortunately a seriously uncommercial one. You want to talk about it?'

This was a phrase Ben Corby had learned never to use to an author whose book he'd turned down. The bastards always wanted to talk about it. At length. But this one he did want to know about. What turns a wispy mystic into a hardened sceptic?

'Don't make me feel bad,' Powys said. 'You drive all this way to bring me a customised rejection slip-'

'Because we're old mates.'

'Right. Well, I'm sorry, old mate. But how can you write a book you wouldn't have the nerve to go out and promote and say you believe in it?'

'You have got to be kidding,' Ben said. 'I can name you at least…'

Powys held up both hands to stop him. He was sitting on the arm of the overstuffed sofa, his white T-shirt merging with the white wall so it looked as if he was only semi-materialised, only half there. The wood-fire was tucked away in an inglenook, books to the ceiling either side of it. Above the fireplace, there was a framed photograph of an old man with a clerical collar and a big, white beard and another one, full length, of a slender woman with pale hair.

Something told Ben both of these people were dead.

He stared hard at Powys. 'So what is it you don't believe in? Apart from ghosts, ley-lines, mysterious forces in the landscape…'

On another wall was a framed print of an intoxicating Samuel Palmer moonlit cornfield. The kind of scene you associated with The Old Golden Land. Ben remembered when they were students and Joe Powys had discovered the enchanted world of standing stones and mysterious mounds and beacon hills. Lighting up boring old Britain for a whole bunch of them, even Ben for a while. The guy just had that gift. Poet of the Unexplained.

'… Fairies, witchcraft, UFOs..

Powys didn't reply. He went into his cupboard-size kitchen and returned with a six-pack of Heineken Export. He detached a can from the pack and passed it across to Ben, his face blank.

Ben remembered how this cottage had been left to Joe Powys by Henry Kettle, the old water diviner, whose own motto had been Nothing psychic, nothing psychic.

'This is not something you can talk about sober,' said Ben. 'Am I right?'

'Now I'm not trying to advise you, don't think that. I don't want you to do anything goes against your religion.'

Joe Powys saw that Ben was fairly pissed. Arnold watching him with some disapproval; his late master, Henry Kettle had drunk only sparingly, on the basis that you couldn't dowse under the influence. As far as Arnold was concerned, this was still Henry's house.

Powys leaned down and patted him. 'It's OK, this man is a publisher.'

Powys remembered sitting in a pub with Ben Corby, just after the Max Goff organisation, Epidemic, had bought Dolmen Rooks, and Ben had said, It's time for the New Age to grab the world by the balls. Business talk. Ben Corby had made a lot of money selling books about healing rays and ancient wisdom. Had actually made a lot of money out of Joe Powys.

'It's just you're a hero to these people,' Ben said. 'The tens of thousands of decent, well meaning if totally humourless punters who buy Dolmen books by the handful to stick on the shelf under sprigs of aromatic herbs. And if their long-time guru starts telling them about seers who need glasses, and not to trust their little bodies to spiritual healers, they're… Hang on, gotta have a slash.'

The stairs rose from the living room. When Ben had gone up, Powys kneeled down and took Arnold's black and white head between his hands and stared into the dog's eyes.

'What do we do, Arnold? He's going to dump me. No more Choice Cuts. Back to the Tex chunks, economy size.'

But you kind of knew he would, Powys, didn't you? You knew he was never going to publish a book which proves crystals rarely work and the St Michael Line is a con.

'Yes, I did, Arnold.'

He wished Fay was here. Fay had this direct, broadcaster's way of putting things. Fay would convey to Ben Corby precisely why this book was not, as expected, another dollop of New Age blancmange. Because Fay had been at Crybbe.

She was programme controller at Offa's Dyke Radio now. She hated local radio but she needed people. Ordinary people who were concerned about town planning, car-theft, more hospital beds and rail-cutbacks. Fay had a flat in Hereford. She came back most weekends. But she didn't like it out here anymore, he could tell. She'd gone right off the countryside.

Ben had said, 'Why the hell do you stay here? It's so bloody primitive. If Henry left it to you, why don't you just sell it?'

'I can't sell it.' Powys said. 'It's Arnold's house, too. He's a dowser's dog He has a feel for this place.'