Phil Rickman - The man in the moss

Joel was jolted and, for a moment, could not turn round.

The face was a woman's. It had long, dark hair, steady, hard eyes and black whore's lips. The lips were stretched in a tight, shining grin which the eyes did not reflect.

Cold derision.

Remembered pain speared Joel's spine as he turned, half-hypnotized by the horror of it, turning as he would turn to stare full into the face of the Gorgon knowing it would turn him into stone, like the angels frozen to the graves.

He saw the still figure of a woman on the other side of the church wall, the village street below her. Her back was turned to him. Slowly, she began to walk away, and because the wall blocked her lower half she seemed at first to be floating. Her long, black hair swayed as she moved, and in the hair he saw a single thin, ice-white strand.

Joel felt a twisted revulsion. Twisted because there was inside it a slender wafer of cold desire, like the seam of white in the hair of the woman who walked away.

He watched her, not aware of breathing. She was wearing something long and black. He watched her until she was no more, and not once did she turn round.

Joel sobbed once, felt the savage strength of rage. He bunched a fist and drove it through the shed window. Ernie Dawber had heard about the bogman on the morning news. So he wasn't exactly surprised when,' round about 10.30, he heard a car pulling up irritably in the schoolhouse drive.

Hadn't given much thought to how he was going to handle this one. Too busy making notes for a daft book that would never get published.

The page he was writing, an introduction, began:

Bridelow might be said to operate on two levels. It has what you might call an underlife, sometimes discernible at dusk when all's still and the beacon is about to light up…

He looked up from the paper and the room went rapidly in and out of focus and swayed. Bugger. Not again. Damn.

He pushed his chair back, swept all the papers from his desk into an open boxfile and went to let the man in.

'A raw day, Dr Hall.'

A word, Mr Dawber, if you're not… too busy.'

Innuendo. It was going to be all innuendo this time, he could tell.

'I'm a retired man. I'm not supposed to be busy. Come in. Sit down. Cup of tea? Or something a little…'

'No, thank you. Nothing.' Oh, very starchy. 'It's interesting that you don't seem at all surprised to see me, Mr Dawber.'

'I'm not daft,' Ernie said. 'That's how I got to be a headmaster.'

Underneath Hall's open Barbour jacket was a suit and tie. An official visit.

'Well, at least shut the door,' Ernie said. 'It's the worst kind of cold out there.'

The archaeologist consented at last to come into the study. Ernie closed the boxfile and placed it carefully under his chair. 'Look around,' he said. 'You don't need a search warrant.'

'I haven't said anything to the police,' Hall said. 'Not yet. I'm giving you a chance either to bring it back or tell me where it is.'

Ernie didn't insult him by asking what he was talking about. 'Dr Hall, this is a very serious allegation.'

'Don't worry, I know enough about the libel laws not to make it in public. That's why I've come to see you. If we can keep it between the two of us and the, er… if it comes back undamaged, that'll probably be as far as it goes.'

'Now look, you don't really trunk…?'

'Oh, I don't for one minute think you were personally involved. Besides, you were at the funeral, I saw you. Wouldn't have been time.'

'So I'm just the mastermind. The brains behind the heist. That it?'

'Something like that.'

'All right,' said Ernie Dawber. 'I'll be straight with you. Yes, I did come to you on behalf of the village and urge you to put that thing back in the bog. That was me, and I meant it. But – and I'll say this very slowly, Dr Hall – I do not know who stole the bogman from the Field Centre. I'll say it to you and I'll say it again before a court of law.'

And he truly didn't know. Nobody ever knew these things apart from those concerned.

Had his suspicions, who wouldn't have?

But nothing black and white. Ma Wagstaff was right. There was never anything in black and white in Bridelow, which was how it was that balance and harmony could always be gently adjusted, like the tone and contrast on a television set.

Shades of things.

Oh, aye, naturally, he had his suspicions. Nowt wrong with suspicions. Suspicions never hanged anyone.

Roger Hall had changed colour. His beard-rimmed lips gone tight and white. Dr Hall's tonal balance was way out.

'It's here, Dawber. I know it's here.'

'You're welcome to search…'

'I don't mean this house. I mean in Bridelow. Somebody has it…'

'Don't be daft.'

'That's if it hasn't already been put back in the bog. And if it has, we'll find it. I can have two coach loads of students down here before lunch. We'll comb that moss, inch by inch, and when we find the area that's been disturbed…'

'I wish I could help you, Dr Hall.'

'No, you don't.'

Ernie Dawber nodded. That was true enough. No, he didn't. Joel lugged the ladder through the graveyard and into the church, dragging it along the nave, putting it up finally against a stone pillar next to the rood screen. He shook the ladder to steady it, then began, with a cold determination, to climb.

In his ankle-length black cassock, this was not easy. Close to the top, he hung on with one aching, bruised and bloodstained hand, the big, gilded cross swinging out from his chest, while he rummaged under the cassock for his Swiss Army knife, using his teeth to extract its longest, sharpest blade.

The topmost branches of the Autumn Cross were almost in his face. It was about six feet long, crudely woven of oak and ash with, mashed up inside for stuffing, thousands of dead leaves and twigs, part of a bird's nest, shrivelled berries and hard, brown acorns.

Disgusting thing.

Fashioned in public, he'd been told, on the field behind The Man I'th Moss, with great ceremony, and the children gathering foliage for its innards.

'Oh, Lord,' Joel roared into the rafters, 'help me rid your house for ever of this primeval slime!'

He leaned out from the ladder, one foot hanging in space, tiny shards of glass still gleaming amidst the still-bright blood on the hand gripping a rung. His fatigue fell away; he felt fit and supple and had the intoxicating sensation of grace in his movements.

Deliverance.

Orange baling-twine bound the frame of the cross to a rusted hook sunk into a cross-beam. He swung his knife-arm in a great arc and slashed it through.

'Filth!' he screamed.

The Autumn Cross fell at once, and Joel watched it tumble and was glad.

A beginning.

The sapless, weightless artefact fell with a dry, slithering hiss. Like a serpent in the grass, he thought, satisfaction setting firm in the muscles of his stomach, his head filled with a wild light.

He did recoil slightly, throwing the lightweight ladder into a tilt, as the so-called cross burst apart on the stone flags, fragments of leaves and powdery dust rising all around until the belly of the church was filled up with a dry and brackish-smelling sepia mist.

Joel coughed and watched the filthy pagan detritus as it settled. A bigger job than usual for the women on the Mothers' Union cleaning rota.

He hoped the foul bitches would choke on the dust.

With a nod to Our Sheila, Moira slipped quietly into St Bride's church just before 10 a.m.

To be alone. To confront the spirit of Bridelow. Maybe find something of Matt Castle here.

Special place. Matt had said, a long, long time ago on a snowy night in Manchester. It's got… part of what I've been trying to find in the music. That's where it is… where it was all along.