Phil Rickman - The man in the moss

'Of course I'm not going to bloody turn him out! He's got good reason to be angry; a friend of his died tonight.'

Chris didn't blink.

'Come on, Chris. In God's name,' the woman behind him cried.

'I'm coming.'

Cathy grabbed his arm. 'What I'm saying to you, Chris, is that it's not safe for you to go back in that church. Any of you. You won't do yourselves any good and you'll probably do us all a lot of harm.'

Chris said pityingly, 'Our trust is in Almighty God. In whom, to our shame, we temporarily lost our faith. And for that we have much to make up. Whatever happens in there will be His will.'

'He gave you a brain, Chris. To think with, you know? Have you given up thinking for yourselves? Letting Him do all your thinking now, is it?'

Chris pulled his arm away, eyes full of drifting cloud. 'Pray for us, Cathy.'

'Yes,' said Cathy when they'd gone. 'But who am I supposed to pray to?' Because he was used to making a recce before venturing in, Ashton drove once up the village street, turned around on the parking area by the church and drove slowly back towards the pub.

Just as well he was driving slowly. Twice, people hurried across the street, two men together and two women individually, flapping like chickens in the blinding rain.

There were lights in most front rooms, lights in the chip shop but a 'closed' sign on the door. Water gushed down the sides of the road, down the hill. Where did it all go? Into the Moss?

Ashton followed the water as far as the pub, where the only light was the hanging lantern over the front porch, illuminating the sign, The Man I'th Moss. No picture. What would it have shown? Why had they given the pub that name, possibly a couple of hundred years ago, when nobody could have guessed there was an ancient body in the bog?

Or could they?

Ashton pulled on to the forecourt and dashed for the door. Lottie Castle. He could spot a liar in seconds. He could also tell when people were deluded. And he could, of course, spot people who were daft or innocent enough to be led up the garden path.

But this Lottie Castle.

Now, here's a cool, intelligent woman who is definitely not lying; a woman you could, with confidence, put in a witness box in front of George bloody Carman QC.

And here's a woman claiming to be haunted. You know why I half believe this? Ashton still quizzing himself as he huddled on the doorstep in his trench coat, ill-fitting slates in the porch letting water trickle down his collar.

Because this is s woman who sincerely doesn't want to believe it.

And it also, yes, an attractive widow. Well, what's wrong with that?

The woman who answered the door, however, was not Lottie Castle. But if Ashton the human being was disappointed, Ashton the copper was back on duty the second he identified her.

'Miss… er…White.'

'Chrissie.'

'Aye,' he said. 'Chrissie. And is Dr hall here too?'

'Not exactly here, Gary… is it Gary tonight?'

'Hard to say,' Ashton said, stepping inside. 'Hard to say, now.' Her won smooth, smoky voice taunting her as she struggled through the dripping wood, booming out from the old, disused recording studio in her head, the voice sneering,

Never let them cut your hair

Or tell you where

You've been, or where

You're going to from here…

Everything leaking out now from that slashed and razored head, raw thoughts exposed at birth to the cold and spitting night.

For a bad long time she'd stood alone among some trees and wept and sobbed and cursed and refused to believe it. They can put it back, can't they? Christ's sake, they can sew people's arms back these days.

First the horror, then the anguish. And the horror and anguish and the rage, all shaken up, this wild, combustible cocktail.

'Who? she screamed to the invisible sky. 'Who?'

Them.

Dic had headed them off. They'd gone after Dic and she was alone in the filthy night, everything rushing back with nerve-searing intensity, the savage rain smashing it into her naked head along with the insistent bump, bump, bump of the taunting mental Walkman.

And the things Dic said.

Stanage.

Of course, yeah. The Celtic expert. The writer. John Peveril Stanage. Never read his books, too young for me, by the time I'd heard of him.

But I'm going to kill that man. That man is dead.

Memories.

On the plane to Dublin for a gig. Matt holding up a paperback, The Bridestones. 'Should read this. Tell you where I'm coming from.' Moira politely looking up from Joseph Heller or somesuch. Mmm? Sure. Get 'round to it someday.

And then the American, Macbeth at the Earl's Castle. 'This writer – Stanton, Stanhope? Is he mad… this guy's face is white.'

John Peveril Stanage. The pale predator at the castle.

The comb-hunter.

The hair-surgeon.

Moira clung to a tree, its mesh of leafless branches keeping most of the rain off her. But when her head penetrated a jagged tracery of twigs, she could actually feel them graze her scalp.

She screamed in despair.

Last one, OK? Last scream. Last curse. Then you start to think. God, you drift through life listening to your conscience and your instincts and premonitions. all your airy fairy feeling, and you never think.

Moira, listen, they've got my dad propped up in there.

Meaning an effigy? A dummy representing the spirit they wanted to conjure?

Necromancy. The black side of spiritualism. You collect, in the appropriately drawn and consecrated circle, the most intimate possessions of the dead person, those things…

… his clothes. carrying his smell, his sweat. And those things…

… the pipes. he would most hate to leave behind. And those…

… me. Dic. people who were close to him. And…

And you. the things after which he craved.

Moira moved deliberately out from under the tree, stared up into the sky until she was blinded by the rain, and then hung her head and let the night drench her.

They took the comb.

They cut off my hair.

They have me. They have my essence.

They have used these things to summon Matt Castle from the grave.

How Young Frank Manifold had ended up at the brewery he didn't exactly remember.

What he did remember was his anger reaching gale-force as soon as the cold rain hit it. Slung out again! Slung out like a kid from the only pub in Bridelow.

Settle down, Frank.

Cool it, eh, Frank.

Don't you think you've had a couple too many, Frank?

Int it past your bedtime, Frank?

They'd say it once too often. In fact tonight they had said it once too often.

What Frank remembered first was bunching his fists on the pub forecourt and looking around for somebody to hit and seeing only rain and smeary lights in the windows of houses folk as wouldn't come out in it merely for the pleasure of being filled in by Young Frank.

Another thing he'd thought about was hitting a wall, but he'd done that once before and his fist remembered and wouldn't go through with it.

The soft option would've been to go straight home and have a row with the wife. But if Susan didn't feel like a row she wouldn't let you have one, simple as that. Susan, who insisted that being in the Mothers' Union was just something you agreed to so as to keep the numbers up, but who could look at you through slitted eyes and take the anger out of you easy as letting tyres down.

Don't want that, he remembered thinking. Want to keep the anger.

Raging through the rain in just his jeans and his ordinary jacket, sopping wet-through in minutes.

Deciding at one stage, I know what I'll bloody do, I'll go up the church and duff over a few Born Again Christians.

Nowt against Christianity, as such. Nowt against Hans Gruber, a southerner but a straight-up bloke. Just that when it came to that big prat Joel Beard; when it came to T-shirts with JESUS SAVES on the front and grinning tossers stopping you in the street to asking how well you knew God; when it came to getting accosted by tasty women with PRAISE THE LORD across their tits…