Phil Rickman - The Chalice

'Hughie, this is straight up.' Sam was shouting too, now, and the words were coming very fast. 'She don't even speak to the old man. It's a dysfunctional family. Leastways, Diane's not functioning in it. I figured, what if we were to make a bit of a recce, maybe. Then we could have a meeting, draw up a ground plan, get it dead right, fuck these bastards good.'

He spotted his old man swaggering down the street with Quentin Cotton, both of them wearing big shit eating grins and enamel lapel badges with that picture of the Tor and a white no-entry sign slashed across it.

Sam wanted to leap out at the bastards, start a nice public barney, but Hughie held him back. 'What's got into you, boy?'

'What's got into me? Shit…'

'Listen!' Hughie yelled. 'The big issue right now has got to be the new road, right? The big wildlife issue. It's not just trees and fields, it's badger sets, the lot. Wholesale devastation. Word is we'll have bulldozers in by the end of January.'

'So?'

'So, naturally, we got to have the manpower ready. Like, not on bail.'

'Well, sure, I appreciate that, but this is…'

'They could start anytime, Sammy. Could be starting now, for all I know. Some civil servant, never been west of Basingstoke, gives the word, out go two damn big, nasty blokes with chainsaws. Private contractors, that's the way they work it now. Time's money. Evil buggers. Whole armies of security guards.'

'Yeah, well, Pennard's in full support of the road. Archer certainly is. We could, like, work the wider message in somehow while disrupting their hunt.'

Hughie Painter shook his head in disgust. 'This is not so much the hunt you wanner target, this is Pennard himself, right? What's this sudden thing you got about that bugger? Something to prove, maybe?'

'Bollocks.' Sam felt himself going red.

'So what's the angle here?' Hughie grinned. 'Afraid we'll all think you sold out, going into this magazine thing with Big Di?'

'Piss off.' Sam wanted to hit him, half aware of how ridiculous this was because big Hughie was a really gentle guy, nobody ever got into a row with Hughie. He walked away into a soup of swirling street noise: carol-singing, laughter, whoops and cheers. He saw traders in the doorways of their shops, some of which seemed to have reopened, lots of children of all ages.

There was a roaring in his ears. He looked up at the tree, saw coloured lights floating down like snowflakes. What?

'Bloody thing,' Woolly shouted 'Sheesh, nothing works for weeks together these days.'

And it was because he was fiddling with his stereo, worrying about the tape snapping and getting all chewed up in the mechanism that he didn't notice it until it was almost on him.

'Oh shit.'

Sweat seemed to spring out of the wheel. It was like he'd suddenly woken up, lights all around him, the big truck behind, people waiting to cross, and this bus… rumbling in a leisurely, rickety way down the wrong side of the road, the driver grinning, or maybe the bus itself was grinning, its radiator grille hanging open between the bleary headlights.

Woolly hit the brakes. Hammered his foot into the pedal, wrenching at the wheel, lurching inside his seatbelt and feeling the Renault spinning side on into the middle of the road and the bloody big lorry behind.

Gasp of airbrakes, screech and a ground-wobbling rumble like an entire block of flats collapsing.

Blur of rights, a coloured blizzard.

Woolly sat for a long, isolated moment, noticing how bone-chilling cold it was in his car and that his throat was ash-dry. Only vaguely aware of the screaming all around him, whoops of terror and pain that didn't stop, not even when he was struggling to open his door through the Christmas branches.

Diane stared up at the cross.

'Did you make it yourself?'

What a blindingly stupid question. It was an abandoned telegraph pole with a fence post crudely nailed across it.

'Come away now.' Don Moulder said. 'I don't hang around here after dark no more.'

He led her out of the bottom field, up towards the farmhouse. It was nearly dark. The cold bit through her sweater. The Tor looked remote.

'Dogs won't go down there, n'more,' Don said. 'Night or day. What d'you say to that, Miss Diane?'

Nothing. She said nothing.

'Maybe you don't believe me.' Don pushed into the farmhouse kitchen, kicked off his wellies. Wife's WI night, he'd told Diane in the Land Rover. They could talk freely. 'Thought it anyone'd believe me, it'd be you.'

'Because of my reputation as a loony.' The kitchen was unmodernised, pale green cupboards with ventilation holes in the doors and a big, bright fire in the range. Don Moulder waved her to a chair, sat down opposite.

'Did I say that?'

'Nobody ever has to.'

'I'm a frightened man, Miss Diane. Two years ago, I d'come to Jesus for protection, all the weirdies round here, the evil, heathen things I seen when I looks across at… that thing, that hill.'

'Can you tell me about it now? Exactly what you saw?'

He wouldn't talk much about it when they were down in the bottom field. He was genuinely afraid. She was remembering the night of the fire, the way he'd kept talking about the black buzz.

'I thought it was a one-off thing,' he said now. 'Somethin' they'd kind of left behind 'em, like most of 'em leaves ole rubbish, this lot leaves… well, all the drugs they takes, maybe something in the air, I don't know, I don't, 'twas just a small hope. But I makes the cross, I prays to the Lord to bless the field and I tries not to think about it. But then the dogs… the dogs won't go in there, look, not even in broad daylight. The dogs slink off. They can sense evil, dogs can. Then – where are we now? – not last night, the night before, I'm doin' the rounds, padlockin' the sheds, when it comes again.'

He leaned close to her across the scuffed, Formica top table.

'Engine noise. Lord above, it went through me like a bandsaw. I could smell it. The fumes of oil. I could no more've gone down that field than dug my own grave. So you tell me, Miss Diane. What was they at? What was those scruffy devils at on my land that night?'

What on earth could she tell him? What did she even know?

'Cause what I do know is, what I reckernise now is I seen it before. I made careful note of every one o' them hippy heaps as they come through the gate that day. Know what I remember? The ole radiator grille hangin' off like a scab. Stuck in my mind, that did. Lazy devils couldn't even be minded to screw the bloody radiator on. I remember thinkin' that. Aye, it stuck in my mind. And that's what I seen. What they done. Miss Diane, what they done in that buzz to taint my land?'

'Oh gosh.' The fire was so warm, she was so tired, all her caution dropped away. 'They… nothing happened in it while it was here. Not while I was here, anyway. But later I think it was found… Oh, look, it was the one they found at Stoke St Michael. The one with the body in it.'

Don Moulder sat up, stiff. 'By golly, I d'remember readin' 'bout that. I never thought. By the… How'd he die?'

'I don't know.'

He stood up, began rapidly to pace the kitchen. 'Why's he come here? Why's he come back here?' He went to the window, snatched the curtains across. He looked terrified.

'I don't know,' Diane said.

'I don't want 'im. I can't live with this. I don't want no dead hippy and his black buzz. Could you live with that – knowing it's out there? Black evil? I'm afeared to set foot outside that door when it's dark, case I hears it again, chunner, chunner, chunner. How'm I gonner do my lambin' now?'

'These things… it won't harm you, Mr Moulder.' But terror was contagious; Diane bit her lip.

'Won't it? Won't it, Miss? That cross don't keep it off. What kind of evil defies the Christ?'