Phil Rickman - The Chalice

'I don't know, I don't know.'

The cold blue flashing lights. The hysteria of ambulances. The stolid red hulk of a fire engine. Steam rising.

Figures were in motion in the half-light, fluorescent paramedics with stretchers and oxygen equipment. And out of the murky stew of noise – moans and yells, a baby crying and the escalating whirring, whining, keening of a saw attacking metal – there was a woman wailing.

'Const… ance…'

The name caught in Sam's head. He heard it again in the squealing of the saw reaching a frenzy and the rending of metal before two firemen backed into view with most of a lorry door held between them, trampling sawn-off Christmas tree branches into the tarmac.

' Naaaaaaaaaaaaw!!!'

Echoing across the market-place like some old street-trader's cry, a woman's shredded shriek. Close to Sam, a man was being eased out of a metal cave like a snail from its shell, squirming into vicious life when his boots touched the ground.

'…was that little tosser!' Jabbing a finger. 'Slams on and just fucking…'

A pool of newly spilled oil shimmering like smoked glass with beacon blue light. A police boot slapping into the pool.

'Get back. Get back, please.' A stretcher shape coming through: red blankets, paramedics.

As the policeman pushed him back, Sam saw the lorry skewed across the road, the new Christmas tree snapped like a matchstick, the lorry's crushed-in cab garlanded with branches and little coloured lights, red and yellow and green and white.

The cab was crushed because behind the tree had been the great rigid finger of the market cross. They'd had to cut away the side of the cab to get the driver out, and he was snarling in self-defence, '… didn't have no choice, mate, that fucking lunatic

…'

'Come on, now, back,' a policeman snapped. 'It's not a flaming funfair. Everybody back!' The first ambulance squealing away, revealing a small, muddied, maroon car in the centre of the road. A sticker on its rear side window.

RESIST ROAD RAPE.

The car was a Renault Six. Sam stared at it in horror and disbelief.

'Ask him. Ask that little bastard!' the lorry driver yelled.

And there was Woolly standing in the middle of the road, blood on his fingers, one sleeve torn away and bloody skin peeling from his wrist like curled shavings from planed wood, and he was weeping. 'Oh, Jesus.' His face ragged. 'It… shit. It's… I'm going outer my fucking head, man.'

'You hear that, officer?' Ronnie Wilton, the butcher, normally a jovial bugger amid the blood and offal, his face bulging and twisting now. 'He's admitted it. You take that down. I'll be a witness, look.'

Another one who hadn't voted for Woolly.

'Yes, thank you, sir, now if you'd just…' One of the policemen wore glasses, twin ice blue beacons strobing in the lenses, concealing expressions, feelings. 'Mr Woolaston, you better go in the ambulance.'

'No, I'm not taking up ambulance space.'

Woolly's agonised face was frozen by a flashgun, some Press photographer dodging in front. And then there was an awful sound – all the worse because in other circumstances you might have thought it was a howl of glee – as a ball of crashed and bloodied metal was handed through the despoiled jungle of the great, festive tree

'Oh, Chrrrrrist!' Woolly's hands covered his face.

Sam saw that the metal ball handed from fireman to fireman was the crushed remains of a baby's pushchair.

Iridescent. Mesmeric.

With rage, it looked like.

Bad move, he thought. Wrong night. He would have turned round and left quietly, but she'd seen him.

Powys had started having second thoughts about this as soon as he was inside the hospital. If she wouldn't have visitors except for Diane, wouldn't even talk to Dan Frayne on the phone…

It you're another one come to talk me out of it, you can sod off now,' said Mrs Juanita Carey, acid in her voice.

Powys said nothing. Just gave her a smile.

The session with the Rt Rev. Liam Kelly had left him disturbed. And dismayed that anyone who thought Glastonbury Tor was 'just a hill' could get to be Bishop of Bath and Wells. Wonderful material, obviously, for a book. He'd be there at dawn on Thursday, no question. Fascinating stuff.

Fascinating for an author. Fascinating if you were outside looking in. If you didn't let your viewpoint become cluttered by something plump and vulnerable.

All the stuff Diane had told him, about Dion Fortune, Pixhill and the Dark Chalice was still washing restlessly around his head. He'd wound up in Bristol because, to get a handle on whatever was happening, or whatever Diane imagined was happening, he needed to talk to someone who wasn't Diane. Someone who knew the score but was temporarily apart from the game.

Also – face it – he was very curious to meet Juanita Carey and, after what had happened to her van, there was a fairly good chance Diane would not be here tonight.

'You a friend of hers?' the nurse in the burns unit had asked him. Not waiting for an answer. 'Do you think it might be possible to talk a bit of sense into her?'

Oh.

Mrs Carey glared at him. She was fully dressed, which was a slight surprise. Long skirt full of exotic colours. Low cut, sunny lemon top. Bright orange moccasins. Copious, dark hair down below her shoulders. Skin aglow,

Iridescent.

The bed between them, her eyes like distant warning lanterns.

He became aware of the way her arms were hanging unnaturally away from her like the arms of a dress shop mannequin plugged in at the shoulders the wrong way round. The hands frozen like a mannequin's but not with that fashioned abandon; they were both curled arthritically and as colourful in their way as the skirt

'Um, Joe Powys,' he said. 'Dan Frayne sent me.'

The awful energy something like this generated. The town would be alive with it all night.

The sick mythology was already taking shape. Sam had heard one teenage girl telling another that the baby had been taken away in two shoeboxes.

'I can't believe it,' Hughie Painter said. Not the most original remark tonight. 'It's just… Could've been one of mine, you know?'

Not very original either. Sam watched two coppers taking measurements and photos. The container lorry – car parts for Swindon – had been pulled out of the market cross monument. Council blokes checking out the stonework in case it was in danger of collapse.

'Think he'll be charged?'

'Woolly? I dunno.' Hughie was still looking quite white. 'Can you be done for slamming on your brakes without warning? Maybe.'

'If half these people had their way, the poor little bugger'd be hanged.'

'He didn't help himself,' Hughie said severely. 'You heard what he said when he got out of his car.'

'I didn't hear it. I was told. Every bugger's probably been told by now. So with Woolly's past, everybody naturally assumes he was doped up to the eyeballs. This'll finish him, Hughie. Who's gonner vote for him now?'

'Good news for your old man.'

'Yeah. Good news for Glastonbury First all round, once the weeping's over.'

'Aye. Well.' Hughie sniffed. 'I'm off home now, Sammy. Going to count my kids.'

Sam nodded and walked into the road, single-lane traffic going through sluggishly now. Counting his kids. A lot of mums and dads would be doing that tonight. Even Alternative mums and dads with a shelf full of meditation tapes and a cannabis plant in the greenhouse. Why did he think that even Hughie Painter, father of three, might well think twice about voting for Woolly again?

The fucking irony of it, though. The great anti-traffic evangelist. Slamming on in the middle of the rush hour for a bus that nobody else managed to see. Just swerving out into the centre of the road. The driver of the lorry behind him pulling the other way to avoid smashing into the back of Woolly, and the lorry going out of control and crunching through the Christmas tree, the people and the pram, smack into the side of the market cross.