Phil Rickman - The man in the moss

There were cheers of relief from the brothers and sisters sprawled among the pews. Though glances were exchanged, Milly didn't ask her how she knew there was nothing in the house. There was silence, then Milly said, 'What are we going to do now?'

'Don't know about you,' Moira said. 'But I think I'm gonny cry.'

'Moira.' Willie was in the doorway, about a yard from where Ma's ghost had stood.

Milly shook her head. 'It's not here, little man.'

Willie nodded, unsurprised. 'She weren't much of a filer-away of stuff. 'Cept for foul-smelling gunge in the bottom of owd bottles.'

'Don't knock it,' Moira said. Less than half an hour after forcing down Ma's Crisis Mixture, she was, inexplicably, feeling stronger than she had in some while.

'Moira…' Willie glanced behind him to where the rain bounced off Ma's moon-white doorstep. 'Don't you think…?'

'Yeah,' Moira said. 'I know. I know.' She sighed. 'OK. Come away in, Macbeth.'

Suddenly self-conscious, she found herself mindlessly reaching for the duffel-coat hood to cover the desolate ruins of her hair. 'Ach,' she said, and let her hands fall to her sides.

When he stumbled over the threshold, this Mungo Macbeth, of the Manhattan Macbeths, he was looking no more smooth and glamorous than the average drowned-rat hiker from the moor.

Willie had told her briefly how the guy had driven all the way from Glasgow with three crucial words: John, Peveril and Stanage.

'Mungo,' she said, her voice unexpectedly husky, 'I don't know what I'm gonny do with you, and that's the truth.'

Macbeth smiled, a soft, stupid, wet-faced smile; she could tell he hadn't even noticed her hair.

'The one big thing,' he said, almost in a whisper, and made no sense.

It fact it was all crazy, Moira thought. Horrifically crazy. He shouldn't be here. He didn't know what the hell he was into. He didn't have a chance.

And did any of them?

Eventually, Benjie had persuaded his mam to let him take The Chief to his bedroom, where the German Shepherd squeezed himself into the gap between the wardrobe and the wall, sat there with his ears down and panted a lot.

'Come on, lad,' Benjie whispered, sitting up in bed in old ninja turtle pyjamas. But The Chief wouldn't move. He kept himself in this dark corner and there was pleading in his sad, brown eyes.

Above the noise of rain, Benjie could hear other village dogs howling in the distance. When he lay down and shut his eyes he realised that the way The Chief was panting meant he was really howling too, but The Chief was smart, the last thing he wanted was to have himself taken out to the shed.

When Benjie opened his eyes again, he saw light-beams flitting across the curtains, like car headlights.

Which would have been all right, only the back of the house overlooked the Moss and there were no cars on the Moss, except months ago when the lorries and JCBs had been out building up the road and they'd found the bogman.

Benjie scrambled to the end of his bed, leaned over and stuck his head through the gap in the curtains.

He gasped.

It were like Fireworks Night out there.

Lights all over the Moss, like smouldery bonfires. Lights swooshing like rockets, through the rain, from one side to another, sometimes going across each other.

But no noise except for the howling dogs and the rain.

The lights lasted no more than ten seconds and then it was all gone and Benjie couldn't see anything apart from the water rolling down the glass.

But when he lay in bed, the light showed up in the space between his eyes and his closed eyelids. He saw the Moss lit up greenish now, all green and glowing, except for the Dragon Tree.

And that was twice as big now, its branches, all gnarled and knotted and black among whirling, spinning lights, two of them spiking up into the sky… arms like giant horns with groping claws on the end. And the whole thing was breathing, dragging up big, soggy lungfuls of peat, and soon it was going to burst and its arms would gather up the whole village.

Benjie felt a scream coming on and chewed the bedclothes instead, not wanting to be put out in the shed with The Chief and get gobbled up first. Macbeth watched Chris and Chantal sink side by side into the sofa at the Rectory. They didn't seem like the same people. 'I really am tired,' Chris said. 'I'm shagged out.'

And then, clearly shocked at himself, he looked up at Cathy. 'I'm sorry. I don't know what I'm saying. Catherine, has something got inside me? Am I possessed?'

Cathy waved it away. 'Chris, you've got to tell me very quickly, no evasion. What happened in there?'

Chris tugged at his beard. 'I just don't know. First of all, it was fine, we felt… how we used to feel. Holy. Special. And then it all went wrong… really quickly. It went… dirty.'

'It was like baptism,' Chantal said, hugging herself with goosebumpy arms. 'Only in reverse. In our baptism… our re-baptism, we throw off some of our outer clothes – symbolically – and we're submerged in water. It could be a river, or we'll hire a public pool for an afternoon, and you come up cleansed and purified.'

'That's it,' Chris said, eyes full of agony. 'That's right. Only this was like being submerged and some of us threw off our Christian clothes and we came up not so much dirty… well, yes, dirty – but worse, really. Like it was before.'

'People smoking,' Chantal recalled. 'In church. But it didn't feel like church, it didn't feel like anywhere.'

'Yeah, and blaspheming in an everyday sort of throwaway fashion. And we drank… God forgive us, we drank the Communion wine, like it was any old pop. It didn't matter. We were like the mass of godless people out there, we didn't need religion any more, we had no use for it. Catherine, I'm confused. We'll burn in hell for this, I think we've started to burn.'

'It's OK,' Cathy said soothingly. 'The fire's out, now.' She turned to Moira and Macbeth. 'It's obvious, isn't it? It was the final sterilization.'

'Well…' Moira said. 'You can't just drain the power of centuries out of stone, you can only take it out of people, you let them absorb it through their mindless, passive ritual and then you snuff out the light, blow their shaky faith up their faces and leave them empty and when they walk out totally knackered like this guy here, they've drained out everything that was left in the church.'

'Forgive me,' Macbeth said, 'Why'd they wanna do that?'

'Because the church is the sacred centre of the village,' Cathy said. 'It's got to be neutralized before you can…' She stopped for breath and couldn't go on.

'Replace it with something black and horrible,' Moira said.

'What… what can we do to help?' Chris asked, rather feebly..

Cathy rounded on him. 'You can keep your bums on that settee, call in all your friends and don't move until your coach comes for you. And then you can go away for ever."

'Steady, Cathy.' Moira took her arm.

'Wants to know if he's possessed?' Cathy said with a sharp laugh. 'Well, of course he's possessed. Possessed of a very slow brain. Moira, look, there's a copper out there who wants to go up the Hall with Stan Burrows and a bunch of his mates and do some sorting out, as they put it.'

'So stop him,' Moira said.

'You try and stop him!'

'Look, they go up there mob-handed, God knows what could happen. It's pretty damned obvious – and we're looking at something planned months ago – that Stanage has shut down the church to deflect a lot of energy towards the second natural focus, the second-highest building in Bridelow. The brewery, right? And what's at the very top of the brewery building?'

'Th'owd malt-store,' Willie Wagstaff said impatiently. Disused. Moira, happen this is over me head, but why don't we go up there mob-handed and flush the buggers out?'