Phil Rickman - The man in the moss

They were laughing.

There was still no sign of Joel.

Joel?

Who was this Joel?

Chris saw no more, for he was attacked by one of his squealing sisters and his face clawed and he enjoyed it immensely. Mungo Macbeth had specialized for over ten years in the downmarket kind of TV-movie in which people fell wildly in love and moved heaven and earth to find fulfilment in someone's arms.

Between times he'd done cop movies, about hard-bitten, cynical cops who, underneath it all, had feelings same as anyone else.

However, apart from the ones who'd given him parking and speeding tickets, Macbeth had never before met a cop who was not being played, at unreasonable expense, by some asshole with a beach house and security gates.

Love stories did not end, before they had even begun, with the death of the love object. And cop movies were never about cops who sat in your car in an endless monsoon, which, by the way, was becoming seriously frightening, and said, 'Well, I'm buggered if I know how to handle this, mate.'

They were parked up by the church in Macbeth's car on account of the grey-haired, weary-looking cop wasn't even sure his would stand up to the conditions.

Macbeth, also pretty tired, said, 'How about you just call up the precinct house and have a bunch of uniforms directed this way?'

Ashton said, 'How about you get sensible, pal?'

'I apologise.'

'Look,' Ashton said, 'it seems very likely a crime has been committed. But what scares the living shit out of me is that the possible criminal element in all this does not seem to be the worst aspect, if you get my meaning.'

'Yeah.'

'And if I were to contact my headquarters and somebody there did actually take me seriously, their first instruction – I know this much – would be: do nothing.'

Ashton scrubbed at the misted windshield. 'I'm not in the mood for some shiny-arsed politician telling me to do nowt. There's summat nasty here. I don't know how to react, but I have to. Right?'

'I dunno, Macbeth said. 'It was different, somehow, when I thought Moira was dead.'

'How do you know she's not?' Ashton demanded, blunt as a sledgehammer.

'What are you saying?'

'Christ, I'm saying, help me. I'm saying I'm not playing this by the book because there's no book I know of covers it. I'm saying that normally, as a copper, I'd want nothing at all to do with you because I don't know you from Adam. But at least you look a bit too soft and innocent to be a villain, and if I'm not playing it as a copper I need some help and you're all I'm bloody got.'

'OK.' Macbeth said reluctantly, 'First question: you equipped with a piece?'

'Eh?'

'Are you armed?'

'Are you thick?' Ashton said. 'Or just American?'

Macbeth shrugged and started up the car. 'OK,' he said. 'Let's crash the party.'

Hoping Moira would be there but not…

… not involved.

'OK, Lottie said fifty yards from the church, make a right, so if I reverse…'

He never got to do it. The hire-car was surrounded by people; they were banging on the windows and the roof. Shortly after Shaw Horridge stopped screaming, Ernie Dawber tried to get past him to the front door, and this proved to be a bad mistake. His second bad mistake.

For a long time, Shaw had been tearing around the hall clutching at his head. He'd have been tearing his hair if there'd been enough to get a grip on.

It was a squarish hall with a high ceiling and these five mirrors, three of them full-length, put there by Liz to spread the light.

It had not been the place to break the spell.

How could the lad ever have convinced himself that his hair was growing again, when the opposite was true? Hadn't he looked in a mirror recently? And if he had, what had he seen?

Certainly not what all five mirrors had reflected tonight before Shaw's tenuous self-control had snapped and he'd picked up a chair of Victorian mahogany and swung it above his head around the walls, and his shining baldness was reflected a thousandfold in the hail of flying glass, as Ernie cowered on his knees by the hallstand, protecting his face with his hat.

When he made a dash for the door, Shaw was on him in one bound, his sharp, pale face aglitter with blood and glass bright as jewellery. 'How did you do it? How did you do it, old man?'

It was some minutes before Ernie came to understand that the poor, crazed boy was holding him responsible for the disappearance of his hair.

'Listen to me,' Ernie said gently. 'They lied to you, lad. They lied about everything. Your hair, the brewery, your poor mother. They…'

Bewitched him? Twisted his mind? Before Ernie could choose the least inflammatory words, Shaw's face convulsed.

He snatched up the chair again and smashed it down on the hallstand an inch from Ernie's ear, snapping off two legs.

'Get it back!' Shaw shrieked. 'Get my hair back!' And if this was a dream it didn't matter. There'd be no awakening anyway. Dic thought about his mother, all she'd had to put up with from the bastard. She should have married a secondary-school head or a bank manager in Wilmslow, or an airline pilot working out of Ringway. All that grit gone to waste on a two-bit musical maverick committed to a primitive instrument you could barely get a proper tune out of.

Made him want to weep.

The candles were burning low. Either this or his vision was going.

… blood to blood.

He tried to catch the eyes of the bitch, Therese, as she cried, 'I conjure thee, Matthew! Empowered by the Highest Strength, I conjure thee!'

The candles guttered. The Pennine Pipes, lying like a dead cormorant in his father's rotting lap, began to throb and to squirm as though they were full of maggots.

'I conjure thee, Matthew, under penalty of being burned and tortured in the fires for ever and ever, I conjure thee to appear before me and to answer my questions…'

Air farting through the Pennine Pipes until they squeaked and heaved, In their wrapping of black hair with a single white streak.

'I conjure thee, Matthew, by the power of thine own base desires, to appear before me in a pleasant and human form and to present to me the spirit of thy father of the Moss…'

Slipping in and out of dream. Samhain, and they said the walls were thin as paper. He thought he saw a quiver on the yellow, peeling lips of his father's corpse.

'… I conjure thee.'

A man with a knife.

Nothing ornate or ceremonial. Just a cheap craft worker's knife with a red plastic handle.

One of the untouchables bending over Dic and huffing and panting.

'By the Highest Power and by the Angels of the Firmament…'

The numbing power of the drug fell away from Dic like an old raincoat, leaving him naked, all his nerves singing, his cheeks bulging like a trumpeter's with a vast scream taped into his face for ever.

'Mmmmmmm!' he screamed into the adhesive tape.

'… and by the Angels of the Deep and with the blood that was thy blood and shall be again, Matthew…'

The knife cut through the tourniquets at his wrists and Dic closed his eyes, feeling nothing in his numb, etiolated arms, and yet feeling the blood rise in fountains.

'I CONJURE THEE!'

'Hey… stop this bloody car… come on.'

Big, shambling guy Macbeth recognized as Stan, the bartender. But Stan wasn't interested in Macbeth.

'You're the copper, aren't you?'

'Happen,' Ashton said warily.

There was Stan and some of the other guys who'd been in the bar when Macbeth arrived, but not the kid who'd figured to punch him out. Also, there was Willie Wagstaff.. Macbeth leapt out, grabbed the little guy by the arm.

'Willie, hey, listen up. The body in the car… this was not Moira.'

'Oh,' said Willie; his mind was clearly elsewhere; he kept glancing over his shoulder towards the church and around the street. Stan was bawling into the car window at Ashton.