Phil Rickman - The Chalice

At the top of this twisted creation was spiked a charcoal ball, like a Hallowe'en pumpkin which had fallen into the bonfire. When the construction teetered, the ball twirled to display…

It was impolite to be sick on someone. Diane found the strength to pull away. Vomiting into the grass, she could still see it.

The grisly twinkle of teeth as the charred remains of Jim Battle toppled into Juanita's flung-open arms and the cottage roof collapsed into a gush of pumping blood-orange smoke.

Before she fainted on Don Moulder, Diane glimpsed something at the very centre of the billowing.

Obscenely like the hands of a conjuror letting loose a black dove, it was a smoking cup of shadows, a dark chalice.

The cottage was fine, just as peaceful as it had ever been. Arnold limped contentedly around, Mrs Whitney brought homemade soup and all the books stayed on the shelves. Outside, there was snow on the hilltops and a stack of logs, nicely dried and split, in the old barn.

Winter was at the door, season of rough walks and hot fires, and whatever had been happening inside Joe Powys to cause that period of upset, that blip, it was obviously in remission.

So… fine.

Well, except for the no Fay aspect, and even that was fine for Fay, who was a people-person and had been getting increasingly restless through the summer. It hadn't been love – Joe Powys kept telling himself this – so much as mutual need, the need for someone who had also experienced these things to be there when you awoke before dawn, in terror and self doubt. Would Fay still awake in terror in Brussels or Munich or Amsterdam? Perhaps not.

So, fine. OK Really.

Anyway, there was another woman now.

In hazy sepia, a cheerful, buxom lady in a hat and a long woollen skirt pushes a bicycle with a shopping basket over the handlebars. Colours slowly fading into the picture as she crackles through autumn leaves in a half-wooded lane to a steep and narrow path; at the end of this, a big shed with lace curtains at the windows, the shed built into the flank of a hill of cucumber green rising, almost sheerly it seems from here, to a church tower of grey-brown stone, a church tower without a church.

Her real name was Violet Firth, Evans when she married, She was born in 1890 in North Wales, although her family later moved to Somerset. As a young woman, during the years of World War I, she became quite a successful psychotherapist, initially attracted to the new ideas of Sigmund Freud.

Which she rapidly outgrew, realising there were phenomena of the mind and spirit which Freud could not approach.

During this period she discovered she was telepathic, psychic and a natural medium.

She also discovered Glastonbury.

Somebody gave her a redundant army hut and she put it up directly under Glastonbury Tor and it was here that she founded the mystical order which became the Society of the Inner Light.

Powys already knew a little about her. During his research for The Old Golden Land he'd learned that she was the first writer to discuss the psychic aspect of leys, those mysterious alignments of ancient sites across the countryside.

What had put him off further reading was the name under which she produced her novels and magical studies: Dion Fortune. It was developed, apparently, from her family motto Deo Non Fortuna. Not her fault that, from this end of the century, it sounded like a fifties rock and roll singer.

Anyway, this was probably one of the reasons he'd never got around to reading Avalon of the Heart.

'All hokum, well over the top,' Dan Frayne had said, presenting him with the paperback to read on the train home. 'But it left me with a kind of warm glow, you know? Made me feel, yeah, this is The Place. Dangerous stuff, in retrospect.'

Powys read it twice. It was just over a hundred pages long, a personalised guide to Glastonbury and its mysteries in a style which was kind of Helen Steiner Rice meets Enid Blyton.

Dan Frayne was right. It was wonderful.

When he came off the train, he went directly to the Hereford Bookshop (beside a famous ley-line near the cathedral) and ordered everything of Dion Fortune's still in print. Then went to the library to find out who she was, really.

The book glowed. It was concise, vivid and haunting. It was a love story, about a torrid affair between a woman and a town. It told you exactly why people did what Dan Frayne and this Juanita had done – going to Glastonbury in search of something they couldn't define.

While Uncle Jack Powys, in a book more than ten times as long, explained why they all failed.

No wonder Fortune hadn't exactly taken to A Glastonbury Romance, published just two years earlier. Do we behave like that at Glastonbury? she wrote. I must have missed a lot. We do not quite come up to Mr Powis's specifications.

Mischievously misspelling Powys.

Joe Powys decided he really liked this woman. The night he got home he made a space on the shelf next to the Romance and inserted Avalon of the Heart.

The antidote.

Powys grinned and went to bed and slept the whole night through without interruption. And another six.

But last night he'd been appalled to find himself lying awake almost wishing it would happen again. Having awoken first of all feeling cold, feeling empty, missing Fay. And then wondering. Am I slightly mad?

This was an unnatural situation. Mrs Whitney had said as much. No life, Joe, just you and that dog… walking the hills… hair going greyer… circles under your eyes getting bigger.

And Dan Frayne, before he left London: All I'm asking, Joe, is why not spend a couple of weeks in Glastonbury? Absorb the vibes. I guarantee a pivotal experience… alter your life, one way or the other. If you agree there's a book in this, I'll hare the first instalment of the advance in the post inside a week. I'm empowered to go to twenty grand, half up-front. Can't go higher for non-fiction, these are hard times.

Powys, down to his last two thousand in the bank and Golden Land royalties slipping fast, had said, 'Can I think about this?'

He could have had ten thousand pounds in his hand by now and he'd said coolly, 'Can I think about this?' Mad? Probably. And cold and lonely and his hair going greyer. Was ten grand going to change any of that? Plus, he'd have to write the book with Frayne's ex-girlfriend. Plus…

… what I'd also like from you, right up in the introduction… don't get up, don't hit me… is the Uncle Jack story. The stuff Corby told me about. The Glastonbury Romance bit. Gives us a hook for the marketing department.

Well, sod that for a start. Be like hanging a sign around your neck that said crank. And somebody with expert knowledge of the Powys family tree would be sure to come out of the woodwork screaming, CHARLATAN…IMPOSTOR.

He was all mixed up. He needed to read some more Dion Fortune. A calming influence. She'd gone to Glastonbury, another seeker after spiritual truth, but she hadn't been screwed up by it like the amateurs, like Dan Frayne.

Read more Fortune, this was the answer. Slowly. By which time it would be nearly spring. And perhaps Fay would have come back and they could go down to Glastonbury together. Maybe Fay could get a radio programme out of it

Joe Powys got up and made some tea for himself and Arnold. Who was he kidding?

Not long after nine a.m., the phone rang.

'You asked for time to think.'

'I'm still thinking,' Powys said. 'This was unusual. At this stage of the game publishers hardly ever chased you.

'What's the problem?' Dan Frayne didn't sound cool any more, didn't sound laid back, didn't sound superficial.

Powys tried to think of an answer. A strange, choked silence coming down the line.