Phil Rickman - The Chalice

'You bastard, Ffitch,' he murmured. 'Why must you murder the Mystery?'

The woman with hair the colour of old gold was drifting around the shop with her hands out – palms down, like a priest vaguely searching for children to bless.

'I don't quite know,' she said. 'I don't quite know what I'm looking for.'

Diane thought that went for an awful lot of people in this town.

The woman was frightfully beautiful, in an ethereal sort of way. Must be wonderful to be ethereal. Being slim and elegant would, of course, be a start.

'Juanita would know.' The woman had a long, slender nose; she looked down it at Diane. 'Juanita would know at once.'

'Well, she'll be back in a short while,' Diane said.

Juanita had tramped wearily off to see her reflexologist, leaving Diane in charge of the shop. Just like old times, really. Except that Juanita's weariness used to be feigned and after a glass of wine she'd be fine again, full of ideas and energy. Last night she and Jim had seemed bowed and burdened and today Jim hadn't been round. Juanita had glossed over how they just happened to be walking up Wellhouse Lane when the Range Rover went past. She said that awful split lip had been caused by a flying log chip when she was chopping wood for the stove.

Whatever really happened, Diane thought, it's all my fault.

She gestured hopelessly at the shelves of books; the arrangements had changed a lot since she was last here.

'Perhaps if you gave me an idea.'

The woman whirled on her. She was about thirty, with a lean, peremptory Home Counties accent that didn't go with her appearance at all.

'Celtic manuscripts.'

'What, sort of Book of Kells?'

The woman looked horrified. 'That's Christian, isn't it? No, no, no no, no… what I need, urgently, are the very earliest images I can find of the Goddess. You haven't been here long, have you?'

What a nerve, Diane thought. You live here all your life and someone who moved in maybe six months ago…

'I'm helping out,' she said tightly.

Which goddess? she wanted to ask. A decision seemed to have been taken that all the goddesses, from Artemis to Kali to Isis, should be combined into a single symbol of woman power. For this woman, perhaps, it wasn't so much about spirituality, as a kind of politics. Just like the Pilgrims, really, wherever they were now.

The woman pirouetted again, hands exploring the air, as if she could somehow divine the book she wanted. Her rich golden hair was a tangle of abandoned styles, rippling waves and ringlets. Did she always behave like this, Diane wondered, or was she on something?

As though she'd picked up Diane's thoughts from the ether, the golden woman leaned across the counter and smiled widely. Her eyes were somewhere else.

'I'm the artist,' she declared.

And then stepped back. As though this was some sort of epiphany, a moment of wondrous self-discovery.

'And you are?'

'I'm Diane.'

'Do you acknowledge the Goddess? You should, you know. She can help you.'

With what? With her weight problem? As though spiritual development was just another aspect of health and beauty

'What are you doing tonight?' the woman demanded, homing in on promising raw material. 'Come with me. I'm in Holy Thorn Ceramics across the street. Domini Dorrell- Adams. Come with me and meet the Goddess.'

Gosh, was this an order? The woman leaned sinuously across the counter again. 'I'll call for you, shall I? At seven?'

'Oh, well,' Diane said. 'I've a sort of, you know, commitment tonight.'

'You should make a commitment to the Goddess. The very landscape of Avalon is shaped in her image, did you know that? There's just no place better in the world to learn how to be a woman.'

She drifted to the door. 'Remember The Cauldron,' she sang carelessly, as though she was dropping a pamphlet behind her.

'Right,' Diane whispered, as the door got into the mood and glided shut. She actually did remember The Cauldron. Formed, not long before she'd been dispatched to Yorkshire, by a rather dominant woman calling herself Ceridwen, who used to be a witch and had a Divination Consultancy (fortune-telling booth) somewhere at the rear of the Glastonbury Experience arcade.

Juanita, never the sisterly type, didn't like her at all.

Diane wished Juanita would come back. She felt exposed and nervous when anyone came into the shop, and yet she didn't want to leave it, imagining Gwyn and his sickle among the freaks outside St John's, imagining a cream Range Rover screeching into the High Street kerb, a gloved hand over her face.

She'd slept last night in Juanita's spare bedroom – it had been rather blissy, actually, being in a soft bed again after that sleeping bag in the van. Juanita had said she could stay as long as she liked. Awfully kind, but…

… There were questions to be asked, and pretty urgent ones. Like, what was she going to do, with no money, no job and the kind of family that was probably worse than having no family?

Why had she been called back? What were they trying to tell her, the lights and symbols in the sky, the pungent scent of old Avalon and, most disturbing of all, last night's dark and horrific exhibition in the night sky while the Pilgrims performed what sounded horribly like a Satanic ritual?

Where had the Pilgrims gone? And, most worrying of all, what had happened to Headlice?

She'd half thought of going to the police. Which would immediately implicate Rankin and her father and cause the most awful fuss, possibly for nothing. Hippies and gypsies are like dogs. Give one a good kicking and it'll simply limp off into the undergrowth until it's recovered.

Worse than having no family at all.

Back home. And a stranger – the golden-haired woman had thought she was a stranger. The town seemed different: Juanita's weariness appeared to be general; there was that atmosphere of torpor you found during the Blight, the period towards the end of summer when stagnant heat seemed to stick like toffee to the Somerset Levels. Except this was November and it wasn't heat so much as a lack of cold. No breeze, no vigour. The people she recognised as they walked past the window seemed conspicuously older.

The shop door pinged open then, and Diane looked up in alarm, half' expecting to see Gerry Rankin with a chloroform pad.

'Diane!' the customer yelled. 'Sheesh! Wow! It's true! You are back.'

He was wearing this awful, home-knitted, baggy scarlet sweater that stopped just above his knees – which you could see through the splits in his jeans. His beard was a little more grey, a little more wispy. His hair had all but vanished from the front, making his pony-tail look pretty silly. But his smile was still as wide as his face.

'Oh gosh, Woolly, it's so good…'

'Please…' Woolly drew himself up to his full five-foot-five, assumed a dignified expression. 'Councillor Woolaston, if you don't mind.'

Diane gasped. A hand went to her mouth 'Oh no! Gosh! Really?'

'You didn't hear? Last May, my love. Old Hippy Shakes the Establishment. Electoral Shock Rocks Glastonbury As Longest-Serving Councillor Bites Dust. Pretty wild, huh? I'm on three committees: Planning, Environmental Health and… er, I forget the other, but it's really heavy and influential.'

Diane hugged him. She could quite easily get her arms all the way round, 'I can't believe it!'

'Yeah, well,' said Woolly. 'Neither can Griff Daniel. If one of his lorries is tipping out a load of bricks these days, I stand well clear.'

Diane was thrilled. Over the years, three candidates from the Alternative Sector had stood against their old enemy and been heavily beaten by the local votes. Whoever had thought of putting Woolly up, it had been truly inspired. He might be an old hippy, but he was a local hippy. The natives sometimes despaired of him, but they couldn't help liking him, and they knew he was ever so honest.