Phil Rickman - The Chalice

She couldn't stand it, turned away and walked blindly back up Benedict Street, determined to beat furiously on the first door with a light behind it.

It was no use pretending everything would return to shambolic normality because it wouldn't, Colonel Pixhill was right, there was a growing darkness and an evil in this town which fed on division and extremism and prejudice. The road scheme, the Glastonbury First which polarised people and led to tragedy and accusations and a really despicable, meaningless kind of violence, and…

And like a vision of the Grail, it came to Diane then what she must do. Here in Benedict Street, named after the little church, which may or may not be the resting place of the bones of St Benignus the hermit, she saw her direction.

She had to write about it. Like Pixhill had, but in a far more immediate way. She had to find the courage to throw journalistic balance to the winds and document it all and name names. Tell everyone about Headlice and Rankin's involvement, about the Glastonbury First movement and how it existed to split the town in two.

The Avalonian. They would bring out the first edition for Christmas, late on Christmas Eve when there'd be no other papers until after the holiday.

Even if everyone rejected it and scorned it as Lady Loony's ravings. Even if Sam refused to get it printed because it wasn't up to his professional standards. Even if Juanita was frightfully angry and never spoke to her again because she'd gone down the same sad, dead-end road as Colonel Pixhill.

She had no choice.

Diane felt, for a moment, quite awesomely calm.

And then, in the shadows between streetlamps, she walked into a pair of open arms. 'Hey, now.' The long arms closed lovingly around her.

She thought, Sam?

She smelled beer. The arms manoeuvred her under a streetlamp.

'Who we got here then?'

The light splattered like egg yolk on a great shambling grin built around the kind of large, yellow teeth which, according to Sam, looked appealing on donkeys but rather less so on Darryl Davey.

Sam had had a lot to say, over the weeks, about Darryl: thick as shit but king of the third form on account of being overdeveloped for his age, like a shark in a goldfish tank.

'Lovely Lady Loony,' Darryl Davey said, holding her tightly to his body.

'Please excuse me.'

'I don't think so.'

She felt his hands through her sweater, clasped between her shoulder-blades.

'You're quite a handful, you are, my lover,' Darryl Davey said.

He began to move jerkily down the street, pushing her before him, his wiry red hair springing as he pressed himself against her.

'Stop it. How dare you?' He'd bulldozed her back to Woolly's alley.

'I do what I like, Lady Loony. Go on, struggle. Push them big titties out.'

'Get off me! You disgusting…'

'All right.' Darryl's hands parted and he stepped back.

'Thank you.' Relief streamed through her.

Darryl grinned.

As arms in a thick check workshirt came around her from behind. Diane shrieked.

Darryl bellowed with laughter. Diane struggled and tried to turn her head to see the face, although she knew it must be the wide shouldered man who'd smashed Woolly's guitar.

On the edge of her vision she saw Wayne Rankin slip back into the alley. He wouldn't want her to see him. She couldn't see the face of the man holding her; whenever she tried to twist away from him, he danced her around from behind. He was quite a bit shorter than Darryl. He pulled her to him and she felt something hard press into the base of her spine.

Darryl said conversationally, 'They d'say Sammy Daniel's been shaggin' you.'

'Leave me alone!'

'Ah, you can do better than him, my lover.'

Diane kicked back hard with her trainer. There was a grunt. 'Fuckin' fat slag.' A hand plunged into her coat and squeezed her left breast hard. She screamed out.

'Woolly! Call the p-'

Then she was choking on a mouthful of thick, leathery fingers and was hauled into the alley, the heels of her trainers bouncing on the cobbles.

In the little square, the tin-hatted bulb hung like a shower-spray over the smashed window and the broken string instruments.

She was absolutely terrified now. It was already a sexual assault, and they knew she'd be able to identify them. This was more than drunken bravado, it was madness. Division, extremism, prejudice… violence.

'Take your dirty, common fingers out of her mouth, Leonard,' Darryl said. 'She's a lady. Deserves better than that.'

She was lowered to the cobbles, her head against the remains of the window.

'And she's gonner get better.' Darryl giggled. Fragments of broken glass fell into Diane's hair. 'And bigger.'

And then, fiddling with the zip of his jeans, Darryl Davey burned their boats.

'What you doin' hidin' in there, Wayne? She can't have you flogged now, boy.'

To her horror, Wayne Rankin emerged from Woolly's doorway and went to stand by Darryl so that she could clearly see his face. He stood like a man in an identification parade, expressionless, a wiry youth with close cut hair like his father's.

Then the heavy man, Leonard, joined them, all three of them blocking the alley.

Wayne smiled slyly, 'All right there. Miss Diane?'

Lanky, shambling Darryl Davey started running his zip noisily up and down.

'If… if you go away now,' Diane said, her voice high and breathless, the taste of Leonard's fingers in her mouth, 'I won't say anything about this.'

There was dead silence. The three men looked at each other and then back at Diane.

'Ho fucking ho,' Darryl Davey said.

'Go on then!' Mrs Moulder yelled, back from the WI. 'Don't bugger about. Been a sight too many fires hereabouts.'

'You can't be sure,' Don protested feebly. 'Coulder been a glow from a torch, headlamps.'

'Well, seeing where it come from, that's not much better. You should never've let them hippies down there, I told you at the time.'

Halfway through the door, Don turned back. 'Let's call the police, then.'

'Don't be stupid. Farmer for near forty years and scared to go out on his own land. They've all heard about that cross, too. Lizzie Strode said is it true he's holding open-air services now?'

'They can mock! Tis a pit of sin, this place. A pit of sin!'

Don Moulder snatched his lamp from the big hook behind the door and walked into the dark. Protect me, lord, protect thy servant, yea though I walks into the valley of the shadow.

Verity was in a stiff-backed kitchen chair, her back to the Aga, re-reading John Cowper Powys's Maiden Castle.

The novel bad been bought for her many, many years ago by her fiance, Captain Hope, and she'd never been able to open it without picturing him: a strong, stocky man with a faintly practical Errol Flynn air and a wide, white smile which would simply erupt across his face when she opened the door of her mother's house on a Sunday afternoon.

Captain Hope had been ten years older than Verity, who was twenty-five when they became engaged. He liked to call her 'the child bride' although this was more a reference to her stature than her years.

His sudden death from peritonitis, barely a month before the scheduled wedding day, had been followed a week later by her widowed mother's first stroke and then fifteen years of caring for her, increasingly querulous, before her death dispatched Verity, all alone into the world. Two unhappy housekeeping jobs had followed before she and Colonel Pixhill had found each other, recognising the qualities that each required for the quiet, untroubled life that never quite came about.

Colonel Pixhill was not at all like Bernard Hope, being more refined, less vigorous in his manner. But then, when they met, he was so much older. Verity had often wondered what might have developed had she met the Colonel twenty or thirty years earlier. Before the unfortunate Mrs Pixhill.