Phil Rickman - The man in the moss

'He won't. If he does, you can cut another vein. Slow release is best. I mean, I was going to do this anyway; this way we get an instant connection, blood to blood.' blood to…

'Oh, yeah? And who would it have been if this one hadn't suddenly become available?'

… blood?

'Oh. Right.'

Frank's hands were sticky on the iron stair-rail. Brain couldn't handle it. Past his bedtime. Turn back, go home, sleep it off, eh? But there was a voice he recognized, the voice that said it didn't care, the voice that called the female voice a slag. The voice of the owner of the wrists which would be opened at precisely ten to twelve, but just a trickle unless it screamed.

Frank screamed. Frank was screaming now.

As all the lights went on, Frank screamed, 'Dic!' as a figure shimmered in the doorway at the top of the steps and a new smell mingled with the malted air, a smell just as warm, just as rich, just as moist, but…

The new smell went up Young Frank's nose and forced his mouth wide open like a bucket. He belched up half a gallon of beer and bile, which spouted up in a great brown arc and then slapped down on the metal steps.

'Manifold. You dirty, uncouth lout. Should have guessed.'

Frank looked up into supercilious, wrinkling nostrils.

He began dumbly to move up the steps, his shoes skidding on his own vomit, his hands trying to make fists, his chest locked tight with hatred, his drink-rubbery lips trying to shape a word which eventually came out like another gob of harsh sick.

'…Horridge…'

Gonna have you, said the rough voice in Frank's gut. This time gonna take you apart, you smarmy twat.

He slipped, and his hands splashed on the steps.

Shaw Horridge stood quite relaxed in the doorway, a shred of a smile on his lips. 'You are an absolute oaf, Manifold.'

Frank's fists turned into claws and he took what he imagined to be a great leap up the final three iron steps towards Horridge's throat.

Horridge didn't move at all until Frank's head was on a level with the top of the stairs, at which stage a foot went almost idly back. And then – momentarily – on top of mellow aroma of malt, the sour stench of vomit and the sweet-rancid essence of rotting flesh, Frank experienced the absurdly pure tang of boot-polish as Shaw's shoe smashed through his teeth and was wedged for a second in his gullet.

Choked, retching, he threw up his arms to grab the foot, but the foot was… receding, just like the rest of Shaw Horridge.

Young Frank realized he was flying slowly and almost blissfully backwards.

It seemed a long time until he thought he heard a metallic ching as his head connected with something solid (metal everywhere in a brewery) and a dull, fractured crump somewhere inside his brains, wherever they might be splattered.

There was a rustling over the tumbling water noise; this was what awoke her (how could she have slept, how could she?) And half a second later there was a light in her eyes and people moving behind it.

Two of them.

Moira reared up, back to the tree, a spitting cat. 'Come on. Come on, then…'

Hands curling into claws. Pray that one is Stanage.

Because she would die before they'd take her back. She'd die raking his face.

One of them gasped.

The other said, 'By 'eck.' He'd heard it before, so it was no big surprise. The hackneyed country and western, with chorus.

Leave your sorrow

Come and join us

Shed those sins,

Fold the joy within…

One time, Macbeth had directed this made-for-TV picture about the crooked evangelist Boyd C. Beresford the Fourth. Spent a whole ten days cruising the Bible Belt, stuff like this churning out of the car-radio, out of hotel-room TV sets, out of mission halls and marquees – until even arid atheism began to look like a safe haven.

So he was not impressed. Not even when they started singing in tongues, because he knew how easy this stuff was to fake, even while you were convincing yourself you weren't faking it. And all the healing that lasted just long enough for the relatives to throw in a two hundred dollar donation. You feeling better, sister? Or maybe your faith isn't yet strong enough for you to be healed?

'Go away. Begone, heathen!'

This real big Born Again Christian on the church door. Stained jeans and a grungy parka. Tattoos on both wrists, one involving what looked like it used to be a swastika on fire before it got reprocessed into a bulky crucifix. Fascist punk finds God. It happened. Classic demonstration of what Cathy had said earlier about one extreme igniting another.

'Listen, I don't plan to cause any trouble,' Macbeth said wisely. 'All I want is to talk to Joel Beard. I would like for you to bring him out here. That too much of a problem?'

Cathy had said, 'Mungo, you have an open, honest face. You've got to get to Jowl, talk some sense into him. Long as you go easy on the casual blasphemy, he has to listen to you – you're not from Bridelow and you're not a woman. Tell him what you like, but get him to evacuate that place. They think they're safe in there… they're just so naive, they're children…'

The big guy with the ex swastika said, 'You got five seconds to get them filthy heathen feet the other side of this sacred threshold.'

Beat up on a pagan for the Lord. Jesus.

'Listen,' Macbeth said urgently. 'Go tell Joel that Pastor Mungo Macbeth of the, uh, East Side Evangelical Mission, would like to speak to him.'

'You're lying,' Swastika said, but with audibly less conviction than a moment ago.

'God will forgive you for that,' Macbeth said. 'Maybe.'

'He's not there,' Swastika blurted out.

'He is everywhere,' said Macbeth.

'No, Joel. I mean Joel. When we got here we couldn't find him. He's vanished.'

'What do you mean, vanished?'

'He's just gone.'

'Well, where'd he go, for Chr… Where might Reverend Beard have gone?'

Flash of fear in the guy's small eyes. 'Why d'you think we're praying so hard?' 'So your friends have returned.'

John stood, bathed in blue light.

The blue was in the old glass around the enormous lantern. Round panes, set in the four exterior walls, were frosted white.

There wasn't much to it; Joel had expected more, perhaps the remains of a clock mechanism, but there was no sign of there ever having been one.

'I knew they would,' Joel said. 'I knew it was impossible for them to forsake their God for very long.'

John smiled, his teeth shining blue.

'Still,' Joel said. 'I won't say I'm not relieved. Shall I go down? Tell them what we are going to do?' He moved towards the top of the stone steps.

'Lord, no.' John's face grew solemn. 'They've fled once.'

'Yes,' Joel said. 'I'm sorry.'

The room was about nine feet square. In any other church it would be the belfry; here it was the lamphouse. The lantern hung from the pinnacle of the roof. It was perhaps five feet in diameter.

There was lead around the rims of the glass circles in the walls, but no remains of numerals; it had clearly never been a clock.

Inside the bluish milky glass set into an old iron frame, he could make out the incandescent shapes of three big electric bulbs.

John said, 'Used to be an oil lamp, you can tell. Big candles before that, probably. A lure for the spirits of the Moss.'

Joel remembered his nightmare in the cellar room, imagining the lantern laying an ice-blue beam over still water.

Channels of rain glistened like icicles on the glass. The light was quite ghastly, dehumanizing. John, with his pale, flat face, looked almost demonic. Joel glanced sharply away, afraid of the illusions this evil light could evoke. Though they'd been up here over half an hour, he became aware for the first time of a small door in the shadows to his left.