Phil Rickman - The Chalice

Silence. Juanita had a horrible sense of deja vu. She tensed, snatched at Diane's arm.

Somebody laughed and held up a hurricane lamp that passed from face to face, and there were beards and plaits and dreadlocks and face-paint, and Juanita didn't recognise, thank God, anyone.

'Sweetheart,' Paul Pendragon said, 'we took every case of headlice to hospital the Health Service'd grind to a bleeding standstill.'

Diane was all fuzzy and bewildered.

'They aren't the same. They're different.'

Well, they had to be. No way the last lot would return after the death, the possible murder, of one of their tribe.

Juanita was entirely relieved, if you wanted the truth. They got back into the car and she reversed about twenty yards, pulled into the side of the lane, half in the bushes, switched off the engine and the lights.

'I think what we do is we walk from here. But we let them go past first.'

Juanita leaned across Diane, pulled a torch from the glove compartment as a bunch of them came down the hill with the hurricane lamp. The army for Avalon marching to something mournful played on a tin whistle. She opened the driver's door and stood in the bushes until all she could hear was faint music and the echo of laughter.

She and Diane moved past the vehicles. Six, Juanita counted, including the bus blocking the road.

It was still raining, but they were less than half a mile from Jim's. A stupid exercise, really.

When, after nearly ten minutes' walking, a light appeared ahead of them and there was the sound of solid footsteps, Juanita was convinced it was Jim himself and started thinking of an excuse. It would have to be the Headlice issue: they wanted Jim's opinion before going to the cops. Tried to ring…

The footsteps stopped immediately in front of them, like a soldier coming to attention, and he turned the beam of his lamp on himself, lighting up a Barbour so old and worn it could have been Mr Barbour's prototype, and a face like a round of rough Cheddar.

'Is it the fire of hell, Mrs Carey? Or is it the wrath of God? Cursed, it is, this place. The devil in a black buzz and now the fire of hell.'

'Don.' Juanita wondered if she'd ever squeezed more disappointment into one syllable. 'I think we can do without the evangelism tonight.'

'She thought you were Jim Battle,' Diane said.

'Oh.' Don Moulder let his lamp arm fall to his side, the beam trailing in the road. 'Mr Battle. Aye, When I heard your voices, I did hope as he were comin' up with you. I called 'em already, look. Soon's I seen it, went back up the house, called 999. Told 'em to get their fingers out.'

Juanita felt herself go limp.

'Now don't you start worryin' nor nothin'. He couldn't be in there, no way, my love. When I seen it, I thought it were them hippies an' their paraffin again. I mighter smelt it and went down there earlier, look, but for this rain, and… and things.'

'Oh God,' Juanita howled. She pushed past Don and tore blindly down the little lane which led to Jim's track.

She could smell it herself now, sour and acrid.

'I wouldn't go there,' Don Moulder shouted out, corning after her. 'Mrs Carey, you wait for me.'

She ran down through the trees. Her skirt snagged on some brambles and she ripped it free, feeling the material tearing under the Afghan coat.

Don Moulder stumbling behind. 'You won't get no nearer than I could, Mrs Carey.'

The air grew bright around her, rosy as dawn, but no dawn ever smelt like this.

'You wait for the fire brigade. They d'have machines as'll get down that track, no trouble. You'll get trapped down there, look.'

Juanita found the track at last, ran across the turning area where she'd parked the other night. On to a grassy hump, stumbling over a root and sinking to her knees.

'…'s far enough, I tell you! Don't be s' damn stupid, woman!'

When she stood up, it was like thrusting her head into an enormous blow drier. She couldn't breathe, her mouth filled up with fumes and she fell back into the wet grass, Don Moulder screeching,'… Godzake, woman!'

She crawled on hands and knees around the grassy mound until she came to the little wooden gate leading into the tiny, square cottage garden where Jim would erect his easel on warm evenings, a high hedge protecting his privacy.

She stood up by the remains of an old trellis, where roses had once hung. Her eyes were already sore and streaming and she had to blink four, five times before she could see the whole picture.

The whole terrible bloody picture.

Jim's cottage and the garden were in a little flat-bottomed bowl with a bank rising up behind it and the enormous ash tree, one and a half times as high as the cottage.

The bowl looked like a frying pan, with a straight piece of track forming the handle, although she'd never seen it that way before.

But, then, she'd never seen it all lit up like this.

The lower windows of Jim's cottage were bright and warm, like the welcoming windows of a storybook cottage.

Especially the floor-to-ceiling studio window, the sunset window. Looking now as if it had stored up all those thousands of liquid red sunsets and was starting one of its own.

The November night was as warm as a kitchen. The air carried the breathless rise and fall of distant sirens.

Diane and Don Moulder came to stand on either side of Juanita.

'That's far enough, Mrs Carey. Brigade's here now, look.'

The fire-sirens went on and on and got no louder.

'He's surely out here somewhere.' Don Moulder was wiping his eyes with a rag. 'He's not daft, isn't Mr Battle.'

The roof timbers of Jim's cottage produced a cheerful, crackling as fierce little impish flames began to poke through like gas-jets. And still the sirens went on and on and got no louder. In a gush of panic, Diane realised.

'Oh, gosh Mr Moulder, they can't… the fire brigade won't get through! The whole lane's clogged with buses and wagons, we couldn't even get the car past!'

'Whazzat, Miss?'

'Travellers. There's a bus broken down right in the middle of the road.'

'A buzz?'

'It's blocking the road'' Diane was aware of Juanita pulling open her Afghan coat and ripping at her skirt.

'Oh my God.' Juanita said. 'Oh my God. Look!' Pointing at the ash tree, something hanging from it.

'Aye,' Don Moulder was saying. 'A buzz. Maybe you seen it. But were it a real buzz? That's the big question, Miss Diane. Were it a real… Christ, are you mad, woman?'

Beside Diane, a muffled, ragged figure, cloth-raced like a scarecrow, began to run towards the inferno.

The sunset window cracked first, like a gunshot, and then it exploded, a thousand fragments of hot glass blown out at Juanita, muffled like a Muslim woman, a torn -off length of her skirt wound around her face as she threw herself at the cottage.

Diane rushed forward, squealing like a piglet, but Don Moulder grabbed her, both arms around her waist, and held her back.

A huge gush of fire lunged out of the cottage and hit the ash tree with a lurid splash of sparks, like a welding torch in a foundry. Whatever was hanging limply from a branch was lit up very briefly before the flame pounced like a cat on rat and consumed it.

Diane screamed wildly inside Don Moulder's arms.

Juanita had disappeared.

Brittle, burning dead leaves from the ash tree danced like frenzied fireflies to the futile warbling of the trapped fire-engines.

As out of the shattered sunset window toppled a frightful thing, a monstrous shape… a fossil tree with rigid projecting branches, a twisted, blackened pylon.

Coughing and retching, with Don Moulder's leathery farmer's hands clasped over her spasming stomach, Diane saw just about everything.

She saw that the tree was something entangled and kept upright by a metal artist's easel. Or maybe two easels, or even three, entwined, fused together into a single, horrific fire-sculpture, all black and flaking.