Phil Rickman - The Chalice

Sneaky. Well, two could play that ole game.

Don undid the wire, gave the gate a prod, moved silently through and pushed it shut behind him. He crept out into the field, to the edge of where it sloped down towards the road, laid the unlit lamp at his feet and hefted his twelve-bore.

Stand by.

Don stood there a moment in the soggy grass, then he took a deep breath and stamped down with his right boot on the button of his lamp.

'Right then!' he roared. 'What's all this? Who give you per-'

His voice cut out like a wireless in a power failure. The bloody ole lamp hadn't come on. He snatched it up and shook it and still it didn't light up. He dropped the useless bloody thing in the grass and thought about firing a shot into the air.

Maybe not.

He looked up into the sky. A haze of light was wreathed around the moon and you could make out a bit of nightmist below the Tor.

You testin' me, Lord?

It wasn't cold, but it was damp, and Don shivered, wanting to be in his bed with his old woman. Whoever they were, they'd probably been scared off. He picked up his lamp, shoved his gun under his arm and turned away, tramping grumpily back towards the gate.

At least, he thought he was going back to the gate. But when he put out his hand to unloop the wire, he shouted in pain.

'Uuurgh!'

Bloody hedge. Fistful of damn thorns.

Angry with himself now. He must be in a wonky state if he'd got lost in his own bloody field. He kicked out with his left boot at where he figured the gate must be and it got snagged in the hedge and he was left limping about, in a right old mess, trying to drag his foot out and still keep the boot on.

While behind him, in the silence of the bottom field, came the hollow gasp-and-growl of an old engine starting up.

Don Moulder dropped his gun and lamp with the shock of it. He wrenched his foot out of the hedge, leaving the boot still ensnared there.

'All right, come outer there. Show yourselves. I… I can see you!'

And he could. Under the moon, in front of an old oak tree the Green beggars had got officially protected so he wasn't allowed to chop it down.

It sat there under the tree: a big, black hippy bus, engine throbbing.

'Come on then. I'm a-waitin' for you.'

Don standing on one leg, his bootless foot feeling cold. The Blight was over now all right, it was winter in that field. He could see the steam from his own breath rising, and he realised he was afeared. Lights were coming on in front of the bus: feeble, greasy, headlights that didn't light up anything, not the grass, nor the hedge, nor the gate. The lights hung either side of a radiator grille that was peeling off like a scab on a child's knee.

The bus lurched with a cackle of rusty-sounding gears and he thought. Oh Christ, they're gonner run me over, crouching and feeling for his twelve bore but finding only the lamp.

This time, when he pressed the switch, it lit up at once. He shone it directly- at the bus and it lit up the grass and the hedge and the old oak tree he wasn't allowed to chop down.

His mind spun. He blinked, lost his balance and fell to his hands. The bus was still making its rattling cough, but all he could see when, frantically, he shone his light at it, were the hedge and the oak tree.

The noise of the bus cranked up like catarrhal laughter and filled the night and his head, and all he could see in the lamplight was the grass and the hedge and the old oak tree he wasn't allowed to chop down.

Oh no. Oh Lord. Oh no.

His thumb found the limp's switch. He had to do this.

He had to. Oh Lord, please let…

Breath coming raster now, Don snapped off the light. The grass and the hedge and the oak tree vanished, and there was a moment of calm. Before the vibration began. The earth shaking under him. An acrid smell beginning to filter through, diesel and hot rubber.

Gears meshed in the air.

And there, in the roaring darkness, was the bus right in front of him, a halo of dirty smoke around it and wisps of grey steam dribbling out of its loose, grinning radiator and only smog and shadow where its wheels should have been.

Ceridwen wasn't her real name. It was the name of the formidable Celtic Goddess of Rebirth and Transformation and thus was often brazenly assumed by seers and psychics with professional ambitions.

Her real name was Ruth Dunn and she used to be a nurse.

She also claimed to have been a witch since childhood, trained in 'the robed, Gardnerian tradition'. Now she worked part-time at a New-Age nursing home on the Pilton Road and had an apartment near the Glastonbury Experience arcade where she forecast the future by scrying with a mirror and a bowl of rusty spring water from the Chalice Well.

Ceridwen, the Goddess's representative in Glastonbury. Usually seen on the street dressed in a man's greatcoat or, as tonight, in a district nurse's gabardine mac, her dense grey hair clamped under a cloth cap.

'Thank you,' she said to Juanita. 'Thank you for looking after her. I've come to take her home.'

'Yessss,' Domini breathed. She looked radiant. 'I'm to be apprenticed to the Inner Circle. A neophyte.'

'Wow,' Juanita said. 'Somebody open a bottle of champagne.'

She was furious. Bloody Ceridwen She'd come back to Glastonbury after her divorce – after losing custody of the children when her husband played the witchcraft card in front of a Methodist judge. Raging with malice and greedily gathering the wretched wives of Avalon to her embittered bosom.

Now, to Juanita's horror, Diane was presenting Ceridwen with a cup of tea.

'Thank you, my dear.' Ceridwen turned her large face on Juanita. 'You must be glad to have her back.'

'Yes,' Juanita said non-committally.

'She's grown up.'

'Yes. Big girl now, Ruth.'

'Ceridwen.'

'Oh, sorry.' Juanita smiled.

There was a silence. Ceridwen lowered herself into the armchair, sipped her tea. 'Diane, do you remember coming to see me some years ago?'

'Yes.' Diane glanced apologetically at Juanita

'Used to like to call yourself Diane Fortune, do you remember?'

'When she was a little girl,' Juanita said. 'People tend to grow out of giving themselves silly names.'

Ceridwen didn't look at her, only at Diane. 'When she was in adolescence. When the psychic portals were opening to her.'

'When she was having problems at home,' Juanita said. 'When she was scrabbling for an identity in a family where women don't count for much, especially if they aren't slim and beautiful.'

Ceridwen smiled, still looking at Diane. 'I had heard you were going through a denial phase. Can't be good for business, Juanita, if you no longer believe in the books you're selling. Indeed, hard to see…'

She turned to face Juanita at last. Her industrial-strength Alice band had slipped and thick, grey hair obscured one glittering, ebony eye.

'… how can you go on living in Avalon. While contriving to block it all out.'

'Maybe I'm growing old and faded and bitter and cynical.'

'You're beautiful, woman.' A sharp rebuke. 'But you lack wisdom.'

'Thank you, Ruth.'

'And yet', Ceridwen shrugged. 'You may still have… untapped potential.'

Domini said, 'Ceridwen could help you to find it. If you showed some humility.'

'Right.' Juanita nodded seriously. 'You mean, I could learn how to scatter my books down the street and turn over my shop window to a plaster goddess with big tits and a cunt like a culvert.'

Diane gasped. Domini scowled. Ceridwen sipped her tea and smiled to herself. Go on, Juanita thought. Turn me into a hamster.

Ceridwen's eyes didn't move. She said, 'That's not what we do any more.'

Something cold and needle thin penetrated Juanita's spine from within. Ceridwen sat in the stoveside chair like a big Whistler's Mother, face still and hard and varnished. She began to speak, slowly.