Phil Rickman - The man in the moss

I wish to God you hadna been born.

Your hair's a mess, get it shorn.

Get it shorn…

Then the song becoming a touch obscure – one night, around the time of her adolescence, the child seems to be in this dark wood, when the moon breaks through the clouds and trees, and she finds she's holding… this curious, ancient comb. It's a wonderful magic comb and apparently is the key to the alternative reality which for all these years has been denied to her. She runs it through her hair and becomes electrified, metamorphoses into some kind of beautiful princess. Fairytale stuff.

… She sees herself in colours and

She weighs her powers in her hand…

Dead silence out there. She had them. Oh, it had its magic, this bloody song which intelligent people were supposed to think was all allegorical and the comb a metaphor for the great Celtic heritage. Most likely this was how the American saw it, and the other guy who'd demanded the song.

A bastard to write, the words wouldn't hang together – sign of a song that didn't want to be written.

The song knew from the start: some things are too personal.

Chorus:

Never let them cut your hair

Or tell you where

You've been,

Or where you're going to

From here…

Couple of twiddly bits which, after all these years, she fluffed. Then dropping down to minor key for the main reason she hadn't wanted to perform this number, the creepy stuff, the heavy stuff.

And in the chamber of the dead

Forgotten voices fill your head…

Sure, there they are… tinny little voices, high-pitched, fragmented chattering, like a cheap transistor radio with its battery dying. Tune it in, tune it in.

Who is this? Who is it?

No.

No, no, NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Oh, shit, please, don't die, Matt, don't die on me now…you have no right…

Singing on, through her wild tears, an awed silence in the room like a giant cavern, hall of ages, caged in bones. You think you know this song, these words, Mr New York Irishman…?

… for the night is growing colder and you feel it at your shoulder…

Icy-bright singing now, purged of that phoney, Guinnessy growl. One or two women out there shivering and reaching for their cardigans. The song rippling across the night sky, down the dark years, and you're watching its wavering passage from a different level, like an air traffic controller in a tower late at night. Something flying out to meet it, on a collision course.

Give up, you fool, there is no heat.

The Abyss opens up beneath your feet…

Here he is again, uncertainly into the spotlight, looking around. Hello again, Earl, something wrong is there, my lord, your grace…? Is it cold for you in here? Will you get some servant to turn up the heating, throw more peat on the fire?

And all the while, will you listen to these wee voices, chattering, chattering, chattering…

The comb is ice, it's brittle, oh.

You cannot hold it, must let go…

Yes, let it go. It's a trinket, it's worthless, it takes your energy. Let it drift. Let the night have it. Let…

These – Christ – these are not my words. These are somebody else's words.

I'm singing somebody else's goddamn words!

And the comb is being pulled away now in a deceptively soft silver haze, gently at first, just a tug. Then insistent, irritable – let it come, you bitch – and slender hands, slender like wires, scalpelling into her breast. Feeling delicately – but brutally and coldly, like a pathologist at an autopsy – for her emotional core, for the centre of her. somebody…

In a frenzy she's letting go of the song, she's groping wildly at the air, feeling her spirit straining in her body as the big lights come on, huge shimmering chandeliers.

Moira has fallen down from the stool.

She's lying twisted and squirming on the carpeted dais, both arms wrapped around the guitar. From miles away, people are screaming, or is it her screaming at them… Stop it! Catch it! Don't let it go from here! Help me! Help me!

She can hear them coming to help her, the army of her fellow-Celts. But they can't get through.

They can't get through the walls of bone.

The walls of jiggling swelling bone. Not just the skulls any more; the plaster's fallen from the walls and the walls are walls of bone, whole skeletons interlocking, creaking and twisting and the jaws of the skulls opening and closing, grisly grins and clacking laughter of teeth, right up against her face. She's trapped, like a beating, bloody heart inside a rib-cage.

She sees the comb and all it represents spinning away until it's nothing but a hairline crack of silver-blue. She watches it go like a mother who sees her baby toddling out of the garden and into the dust spurting from the wheels of an oncoming articulated lorry.

Mammy!

But you can't hear me, can you, mammy? The connection's broken.

I'm on my own. But no.

There is a man.

A tall, thin man, with a face so white it might be the face of some supernatural being.

No, this is a real man. He's wearing an evening suit, a bow-tie. He has a small voluptuous mouth and an expanse of white forehead marked with greyish freckles, and the white hair ripples back from the forehead; not receding, it has always been that way. She ought to know him; he knows her.

And where she keeps the comb.

This person, unnoticed in the hubbub by everyone but her, is lifting the black guitar case from the steps of the dais and examining it to see how it opens. He looks at her, furiously impatient, and the air between them splinters like ice and when she tries to see into his eyes, and they are not there, only the black sockets in a face as white as any of the skulls.

Their eyes meet at last. His have projected into the sockets from somewhere. They are light grey eyes. And there's a whiteness around him, growing into arms like tree-branches above his head. No, not arms, not branches.

Antlers.

Moira shrieked, flinging the guitar away from her. It made a mangled minor chord as it rolled down the steps of the dais.

She threw herself after it, headlong into the glass-spattered Guinness-sodden tartan carpet, clawing at the pair of shiny, elegant evening shoes, the air at first full of swirling, unfocused energy.

And then, for a moment, everything was still.

Most of those in the room were still seated at their tables, with drinks in front of them, the men and women in their evening wear, white shirts and black bow-ties, jewellery and silk and satin. The American half out of his seat, dark Irish hair tumbling on to his forehead. The Earl on his feet; his expression… dismay turning to disgust; was this woman having a fit? In his castle?

Everybody shimmering with movement, but nobody going anywhere.

Projector-jam. Until the first skull fell. It was possibly the smallest of them, so comparatively insignificant that Moira wondered briefly why anyone would have admitted to having shot it, let alone wanted to display it. She watched it happen, saw the antlers just lean forward, as if it was bowing its head, and then the wooden shield it was mounted on splintered and the poor bleached exhibit crashed seven or eight feet on to a table, crystal glasses flying into the air around it.

'God almighty!' a man blurted.

The white, eyeless head toppled neatly from the table into the lap of a woman in a wine-coloured evening dress, the antlers suddenly seeming to be sprouting from her ample Celtic cleavage.

For a whole second, the woman just looked at it, as though it was some kind of novelty, like a big, fluffy bunny popped onto her knees by an admirer at a party. Her glossy red lips split apart into what appeared for an instant to be an expression of pure delight.

It was this older woman next to her, whose ornate, red-brown coiffure had been speared by an antler, she was the one who screamed first.