Phil Rickman - The Chalice

He would know, of course, that the person in Glastonbury most obsessed with leys was Councillor Woolly Woolaston, whose reputation would be seriously eroded tonight.

Diane briefly closed her eyes.

And remembered half waking in her mother's chair that Boxing Day and stroking fur. She'd wanted a dog as a pet; her father had refused; he said dogs were for working and hunting, dogs were for outside.

Archer was laughing. '… gullible and rootless people who believe that they can get 'high' on Glastonbury Tor. With or without the use of mind-altering drugs. Is this what that august body, the National Trust, exists to promote?'

This was just awful.

'Now the Tor,' Archer said, 'is, as my friend Mr Daniel pointed out a few minutes ago, a pretty place on a summer's day. A place where, doubtless, some of you would like to take your children or visiting relatives, were you not afraid of what they might see.'

'Or tread in,' Griff Daniel commented from a few yards along the stage.

'Quite. I'm also quite sure that none of you would wish to go there at night, or on some pagan solstice, or for the purpose of altering your perceptions… So let me outline to you a comprehensive plan.'

As a new slide appeared on the screed, Diane remembered sleepily stroking the fur in her lap, wondering vaguely why her skirt was wet and her hand sticky. Oh dear, perhaps the puppy had…

But it hadn't been a puppy at all. It was a fox. Or rather its head. A trophy from the Boxing Day hunt. One of its eyes was missing. Its jaws had been prised open. Its needly teeth gleamed with blood. Blood from its neck had soaked through Diane's Christmas kilt.

The old image brought tears of horror and pity to Diane's eyes. She blinked them away, tried to focus on the screen. The picture on the screen was not of Glastonbury, but it was instantly familiar.

Diane remembered Archer denying having anything to do with the fox's head, denying it with such appalled vigour and absolute sincerity that, by the end of the afternoon, Father was almost accusing Diane of having planted it to get her brother in trouble. Blooded at last, eh? Archer had whispered in her ear as they left the room.

On the screen, storm clouds glowered over the grey sentinels of the world's most famous prehistoric monument, Stonehenge.

'No…' She clapped a hand over her mouth.

He couldn't. He couldn't be suggesting…

But Archer didn't do anything he wasn't fairly sure of. Archer hated the thought of ever looking silly. Which, always the picture of sober sincerity, he never did. Diane stood up slowly, her back to the rear wall. She fell as cold as marble. Realising she'd always hated him; it just never seemed right to loathe your only brother.

Archer explained his proposal simply and concisely, connecting with the fears and prejudices of his audience. Diane felt an undercurrent of excitement in the hall, as if each person was linked to the people on either side, to the front and the rear, by a thin copper wire. With the ceiling lights out and Stonehenge still on the screen, she looked down and thought she saw a softly glowing net, a grid of pulsating energy.

She felt an utter despair. And something else that squirmed inside her, wanting to get out.

'So you see,' Archer was saying, 'there is a very clear and obvious precedent for these restrictions. All I need to know at this stage, is… do you, the people of Glastonbury, want it to happen?'

'Too bloody true,' a man shouted out. 'Soon as possible.'

And there were other cries of affirmation and support. A mindless response, the most alarming sound Diane could ever remember having heard.

She couldn't see Archer's eyes across the darkened hall, but she knew they were focused on her. As their gazes locked, triumph with dismay, an odd smell came to her: salty, earthy and fleshy. Not the fresh-blood, violent-death smell of the poor fox. More like the inside of an old- fashioned butcher's shop. There was a horrible warmth to it and a sour kind of voracious life; it pulled at her stomach; she felt disgusted, and somehow strengthened.

On her other side, in the dark canal of the aisle, she knew that a shadow-form crouched, could feel it rising with her own bruising fury.

She moved into the aisle. At once, something swirled around her denimed legs. There was a roaring in her head.

The stage seemed miles away, the screen a distant window. 'Archer!' Diane called out in a voice so loud and precise that it scared her.

Silence made a hollow in the hall. Diane felt as if she was standing in mercury.

Oh my God, what am I doing?

Her jaw fell. She felt limp and soaked with sweat.

'I…'

Heads turned. People recognising her at once.

'I…'

No…

She could feel a cool but urgent pressure. A hand on her wrist. Resist, it said. Resist.

'Nanny?'

People began to laugh as Diane turned, stumbled and ran sobbing from the hall.

Juanita called Jim, for the eighth time that day, on the cordless from the upstairs sitting room. Come on, come on, answer the damned phone, you stupid, proud, opinionated old bastard.

The phone still ringing out, she went through into her bedroom, put on the lights, flung herself on the bed, kicked off her shoes. She was still wearing her grey jacket, all dressed up for Woolly's meeting. She started to laugh, halfway to tears.

No answer. He might be in bed. He might be lost in his painting. He might simply be drunk. But with the travellers camped in Wellhouse Lane, there was no way she was going up there to find out.

Juanita lay back, suddenly fatigued, and gazed moodily at the picture on the wall opposite. The table lamps either side of the double bed were perfectly placed to bring out the subtleties of Jim's twilight masterpiece, the tight red thread over the Somerset Levels.

She lay on the bed, half closing her eyes so that there was nothing but that rosy slit and she thought, Sorry Jim. Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry…

He rumbled himself into his old khaki shirt, covering his bare chest. Stood there feeling very confused. And not too well. His throat was burning. The thick air was full of flitting shadows, so was his head, and it ached dully.

Where had he been?

His palette lay on the edge of the worktable. He saw that all the colours on it were dark. There was a smell of turps, more than a smell; he could taste it; he could taste the buggering turps.

The bottle of white spirit was on the floor at his feet, upright but empty. Jim tell to his knees beside the bottle.

He gagged, wiped the back of a hand across his lips, smelled it. Clutched at his throat. He'd finished the whisky… and drunk the buggering turps. He tried to spit; his throat was too dry. He had a sickening image of his tongue, like a flattened toad on the floor of his mouth. He covered his face with his paint-smeared hands and sank to his knees, sending the empty turps bottle skittering away.

What had he done?

As he tried to pick himself up, long-suppressed images of his old life burst like blisters. In the spouting pus of memories, he saw the wife he'd deserted: bloody Pat, poor bloody Pat, all she wanted was for him to be ordinary, pursue his pension, relegate his art to evening classes, Jim's hobby – how he'd hated that word; nobody in Glastonbury had a paltry hobby; coming to Glastonbury was a buggering quest.

For a Grail.

Jim staggered to his feet, self-disgust and revulsion fluttering frantically in his stomach, as if he'd swallowed a small bird. His insides felt raw, abraded, as if the wings of the bird were tipped with razor blades. He looked round for something to touch, either to prove he wasn't asleep or to wake him up. All he saw were the three metal easels in a Tor shape.

With a feeling of explicit foreboding, Jim advanced on the conical formation, the three canvases, which should be aglow with the holy fire of dusk.