Phil Rickman - The Chalice

The irony of it did not escape Don Moulder.

He laid the ten-pound notes one by one in the scrap dealer's outstretched hand.

'… three-thirty, three-forty, three-fifty.'

Fat grey snowflakes came down on the yard like sheep at feeding time.

'What you gonner do with it, then?' the scrap dealer asked.

'None o' your business.' Don Moulder wound the rubber band round the remains of his wad.

Three hundred and fifty. Exactly what he'd been paid for letting the parasites in. A terrible rip-off, but it could be bad luck to haggle.

'You wanner start 'im up, have a gander at the engine?'

The dealer trying it on now.

'No, thank you.'

'Bloody morbid, you ask me,' said the dealer, bold bugger now he'd got his money.

'Well, no bugger is askin' you. So you keep your trap shut, mister.'

The scrap-dealer grinned, pocketed the money. The extra fifty for the time of delivery.

Don Moulder drew him a little map. 'After dark. Well after dark, all right? No need to knock on the door, I don't want the wife to know. You just leave it there, got that?'

Don walked out to his old Subaru. He didn't want anyone to see it till the Bishop arrived at dawn.

Verity put the letter down,

'Such a kind man,' she said.

'Is that all you can say?' Powys drank half his disgusting camomile tea without blinking. 'This guy thinks you're in mortal danger, standing – he picked up the letter – ''in the path of – and, God help me, I do not exaggerate – an old and utterly merciless evil," What Does he mean? Do you know? Do you have any idea?'

Verity went prim. 'I really don't consider myself qualified to attempt a definition.'

Powys tried another one. 'What does Grainger think is inside that well?'

'Energy. That is what he said. Energy which has been stifled…'

'I heard that, Verity. I didn't believe it. I don't think you believed it.'

They had taken the parcel into the kitchen. Even with all its lights on, the dining room was not the most suitable place in which to read for long.

Verity poured him, to his dismay, more camomile tea.

'Joe, I'm sorry. You will have to excuse my apparent unwillingness to cooperate. I'm unsure. Unsure of what I know and what I only think I know. More than that, I'm unsure of how much the Colonel would wish me to say.'

'He's dead, Verity.'

'He remains, through his Trust, my employer.'

'Who runs the Trust now then?'

'Faceless people,' Verity said. 'Solicitors, accountants. And Oliver. I don't know how Oliver worked his way in. As an employee, I am not party to such administrative details.'

'But they didn't get on.'

'I fear that's something of an understatement. After Mrs Pixhill had her breakdown, she and the boy went to live in a rented flat in the town. Neither of them would have understood why the Colonel could not sell Meadwell.'

'Meadwell was the reason for her breakdown?'

'It couldn't have been easy,' Verity said, 'for any of them.'

'And Oliver was resentful?'

'Oliver hated his father, Joe. The thought that the work of the Trust might now be influenced by a man who would do anything to besmirch the Colonel's memory fills me with horror.'

'And what is the work of the Trust? What's its actual purpose?'

'Officially,' Verity said, 'to further the cause of peace and harmony in a troubled world. Rather inexact, I'm afraid.'

'But unofficially?'

'Unofficially…' Verity hesitated. 'Unofficially, to prevent Meadwell falling once more into the hands of the Ffitch family.'

'How did my mother die?'

I wondered when you would ask that.

'They told me what she died of. They never told me how she…'

Go on.

'I don't know what I'm asking.'

I think you do.

Sometimes she awoke thinking it was morning. Thinking she'd slept a very long time. Sometimes it was as if she'd only minutes before closed her eyes. Sometimes she felt relaxed, sometimes frightfully agitated. Always this question at the back of her mind.

'Someone… someone said she was pushed downstairs.'

Well, there you are. You do know, don't you? Do you need the bedpan again? Nurse, fetch a bedpan, please.

'Why won't you tell me? You were there. No one knows more than you.'

Because you must work it out for yourself. And decide what to do about it.

'Who pushed her?'

You know who pushed her. You were very small. Not yet born. But you know. Your mother told you. Through the blood.

And slowly it all began to make a kind of incredible sense.

As he read page after page of primitive typescript, Powys lost all contact with his surroundings. He was entering Pixhill's Avalon.

Here was the lost heart of the diaries. Insert the missing chapter, the missing parts of existing chapters and what you had was no longer the aimless ramblings of a man without a discernible purpose, but the record of a tense, thirty year defence campaign by the stoical old soldier and – whether she was aware of it or not – a little spinster who could not See.

First, there was the section of the introduction bridging the void between Pixhill's vision of the Tor in a stifling tank and his arrival in Glastonbury. It opened with the Colonel back home, in a military hospital, where…

… trying to pin down the image, I produced drawing after drawing of the conical hill I had seen and showed it to everyone who came through the ward. They looked at my rough efforts, to humour me, I suppose, and shook their heads. Until, one day, a dapper man in a good-quality brown suit came to visit me. He pulled a chair close to the bed and took from an inside pocket one of my drawings which he said one of the doctors had passed on to him. 'Glastonbury Tor,' he said. 'In Somerset. There is no mistaking it. It is a place we ourselves have been made aware of lately.' 'We?' I said suspiciously. At which he took out his wallet and produced his papers. Quite an eye-opener. My visitor, one Stanley Willett, turned out to be a highly placed civil servant in the War Ministry. Intelligence, I guessed, for these fellows will never say as much. He then began to question me closely about my apparent obsession with Glastonbury Tor. He started to throw names at me, one in particular. Had I had any contact, he demanded, with a certain Violet Mary Firth, known to her readers as Dion Fortune? Well, of course, the name meant nothing at the time and it seemed to me that whatever line of research he was pursuing, I could be of no great assistance. But this was wartime. No time for secrets between fellows on the same side. I therefore, feeling somewhat embarrassed, related to Willett the circumstances of my vision in the desert. To my surprise, he neither laughed at me nor attempted to belittle the experience. My life, I suppose, would have been happier if he had. 'Do you think the doctors would mind if I were to smoke?' he asked. 'Hardly,' I said. 'All the doctors smoke. Keeps this place going, tobacco.' We both smoked in silence for some time and then he sat back and observed me shrewdly through his rimless spectacles. 'We've been studying your record, Pixhill. You're a man of intellect rather than action who nevertheless adapted to his circumstances with courage and resourcefulness. We could send you back to the front when you 're fit to leave here.'

'As I fully expect you will,' I said. 'Or we could send you to Glastonbury.' He held up my drawing. 'To the Hill of Visions. A very significant spot. Did you know that? Think carefully before you answer.' My immediate notion was that the Tor concealed some clandestine bomb-proof HQ. It would explain the Secret Service's concern, if some shell shocked patient at a military hospital was turning out crude drawings of a secret subterranean refuge for Mr Churchill's War Cabinet. But it was nothing so orthodox. For Mr Stanley Willett was to be my first introduction to Miss Dion Fortune and The Watchers of Avalon.