Phil Rickman - The man in the moss

Blood to blood.

He watched their faces: Philip, the glum satanist; Owen the ex-nurse who'd given him valium through a vein; Andrea the care-in-the-community mental patient who'd killed but not exactly murdered two small boys many years ago; Therese, who thought she was already halfway to being a goddess; Dr Roger Hall, who just wanted to meet the Man in the Moss.

Real evil, Dic realized, was a bit bloody pathetic.

Outside, the apprentice at the gate, was feeble Shaw Horridge, probably more inadequate than any of them because he had had money and privileges on a scale incomprehensible to most of the others.

Over in the loft at the church, Dean – also known as Asmodeus – had been hiding for hours with Terence, the hulking occult bookseller from Salford, awaiting their mentor the revered John. Slaveringly eager for whatever grotesque experience he'd prepared for them, the more perverse the more sensuously exciting.

Dic had ceased some while ago to be shocked. He'd already seen in his father the damage caused by the perversion of a Utopian dream. He was twenty-four. He'd seen Matt Castle's jolly, infectious pioneering spirit shrivel to a sour fanaticism. And then he'd died.

And now, because of his father. Dic would die too. Taped into a wooden chair with the blood draining slowly from his wrists.

Blood to blood.

Dic was staring across the circle, with a vaguely surprising sense of pity, into his father's eyes, when a movement made him turn his head. Therese had shuddered.

Therese was sitting cross-legged, although her legs were hidden in cloak and shadow. There were candles, ordinary white candles, in glass jars because of the draught, seven of them arranged around the circle, which had been painted on the wooden floor in white and was actually two concentric circles a yard apart. In the space between the circles they all sat, like shadowy party goers gathered for charades.

Dregs.

But Therese had shuddered.

'Yes,' she breathed. 'He's done it. Can't you feel it?'

And as if she'd signalled to them, the inadequates started mumbling, some far back in their throats, making unintelligible noises as though trying to disengage their dentures.

Revolting bastards.

In time, the mumbling became more intense and seemed to encompass the figure sprawled, rotting and stinking, in the wooden armchair.

Dic could look at it now with little sense of shock and no sense of relationship. At the withering lips drawn back, the yellow of teeth, the stiff, spouting hair above eyes wide open but glazed like a cod's eyes on the slab.

His father. Of course, if you'd suggested to Chris that it was a game, a recreation like golf or squash or amateur theatricals, Chris would have been most resentful and his reply would probably have been – as he would now admit – somewhat pompous and self-righteous.

Born in Hemel Hempstead, Chris was an accountant in Sheffield. He was thirty-seven, had had his own house, on what was now a minimal mortgage, since the age of nineteen. So that when he married Chantal four years ago life had not exactly been an uphill struggle, with foreign holidays and two cars from the beginning. And the fact that God had not yet seen fit to bestow upon them a child, well, perhaps that indicated God had other work for them.

Chris had always been a churchgoer. However, as he'd intimated in passing to the American, Macbeth, the Anglican faith had long since ceased to satisfy his intense need for a more dynamic relationship with his deity.

Baptism into the Church of the Angels of the New Advent, with its full-throated, high-octane worship and its promise of real religious experience, was the fulfilment of what Chris had been anticipating all his thinking life.

Within eighteen months, he'd become an elder of the Church, dealing with its finances, investing its reserves, getting the best deal for God.

It filled his life. God, therefore, filled his life.

And God was not a hobby.

The validity of the Church of the Angels of the New Advent had been confirmed by the acceptance at theological college of one of its founders. Brother Beard, who had been called by God to go out into the 'straight' Church and reform it from within.

God's reasoning had become all too clear to Chris when Joel had been called to Bridelow.

His appearance at their house last night in search of sanctuary had made Chris – and he was sure he could also speak for Chantal – feel very honoured and (he would have admitted this now) very excited.

When Joel had spoken of his discovery of the symbols of pagan devil-worship in the Lord's house, Chris had been, on the surface, appalled, and underneath (he might not yet have admitted this) thrilled.

And when Joel had telephoned them this morning with a dramatic plea which said, more or less, Bring in the troops, the war has begun, Chris's blood had begun to race.

It was not a recreation. It was not a hobby. It was not just an unusual and stimulating way of spending Sunday, hiring a coach and everyone piling in, prepared to fast through the night (bar the odd cup of coffee) to bring light where once was darkness

It was a war.

When the initial joyous element had been rather dispelled of mental stress by, first, Joel and then (perhaps influenced by Joel's rather overheated display) Chantal, Chris, the Lord's accountant, had decided that a more precise and ordered approach was required if they were to avoid further humiliation.

When they'd returned, a little shamefaced, he'd taken it upon himself to bar the church doors and state that there was to be no more wandering in and out for coffee and anyone experiencing anything irregular should simply clasp the hand of his or her brother or sister and pray for it to pass.

And there had been hymns and prayers (without hand-clapping, since they had learned that some faiths considered there to be a demonic element in this), and the familiar flow of exultation had once more been attained.

Until Chris himself had heard a distant crash from somewhere above and foolishly disregarded it until the reality of their struggle became distressingly (at first) evident. He heard and felt it begin.

It began with a cooling of the air and a creeping change in the vibe of the chant.

Hoooolyamallaaagloriagloriamalalaglorytogodglorytogod

The girl next to him had been singing melodiously, her voice high and pure and sweet.

And then too sweet.

Cloying in fact, with an acrid saccharine aftertaste, which he was actually beginning to taste in his own throat. And then becoming simpering and childish. Peevish and playground- rhythmical. holygod holygod holyholyholygod goldyhod goldyhod golyhold holygold godlyhole godlyhole godlyhole…

And then it happened very quickly… sort of whooooosh, like a small hurricane of bad breath. There was a wafting sugary smell which soon became sweetly putrid, like the bad orange at the bottom of the bowl, as the chant, the pure song of Tongues, suddenly was sounding raucous and guttural, women cackling hideously (enticingly) and men making grunting, retching, foul pig noises.

We're doing it, Chris thought, in a kind of euphoric dismay, as a slimy earth taste arose in his throat. We are exorcizing the Evil.

Just that nobody had told him it would be quite so unpleasant (and stimulating).

When Paul, their musician – who had, admittedly, never been all that proficient – began to force a vicious, grinding discordance through the organ pipes, Chris stepped out into the aisle and ran up the steps of the pulpit from where he observed that at least five Angels of the New Advent had begun hurriedly to divest themselves of their apparel.

He also saw three men, one a kind of albino with a cherub's mouth, emerge from the vestry and calmly let themselves of the church by the main door.