Phil Rickman - The man in the moss

'I don't think that's the answer, Mr Dawber. The strength is in the tradition. New blood's easy to get. Remember that girl who showed up a couple of years ago? Heard about Bridelow – God knows how – and wanted to "tap the source"? Place of immense power, how lucky we were, could she become a… a "neophyte", was that the word?'

Ernie Dawber smiled. 'From the Daughters of Isis, Rotherham, as I remember. Nice enough girl. Well-intentioned. You sent her away.'

'Well, Mr Dawber, what would you have done? We couldn't understand a word she was saying – all this about the Great Rite and the Cone of Power.'

'Come off it, Millicent. You knew exactly what she was saying.'

'Well… maybe it seemed silly, the way she talked. Made it all seem silly. It does, you know, when you give it names, like the Cone of Power. New blood's all right, in this sort of situation, when you're strong enough to absorb it. When you're weak it can just be like a conduit for infection.'

'That, actually,' Ernie said, 'was not quite what I meant by new blood. Let's try and look at this objectively. Everything was ticking over quite nicely – not brilliant, bit wackery round the joints – but basically all right, given the times we're in. Until this bog body turns up. The Man. It all comes back to the Man.'

'You think so, Mr Dawber? The Man himself, rather than what people have made of him?'

'It's all the same,' Ernie said. 'That's the whole point of a human sacrifice.'

Milly stood up and went to the window, opaque with night and rain. 'How long's it been raining now, Mr Dawber?'

'Over a day non-stop, has to be, and corning harder still. Stream's been out over the church field since tea time, and the Moss… the Moss will rise. It does, you know. Absorbs it like a sponge. In 1794, according to the records, the Moss rose three feet in a thunderstorm.'

Ernie laughed.

'See, that's me. The chronicler, the great historian. Head full of the past, but we don't learn owt from it, really, do we? The past is our foundation, but we look back and say, nay, that was primitive, we're beyond that now, we've evolved. But we haven't, of course, not spiritually, not in a mere couple of thousand years. It's still our foundation, no matter how crude. And when the foundation's crumbled or vanished, we've got to patch it up best we can.'

Milly Gill didn't seem to be listening.

She said, 'I prayed to the Mother tonight. Sent Willy off to the church to learn what he could and then I went up to the Well with a lantern and knelt there in the rain at the poolside with the Mother's broken-off head in me hands, and I asked her what we'd done and what we could do.'

Milly fell silent. Ernie Dawber looked round the room, at the grasses and dried flowers, at Milly's paintings of flowers and gardens. At Milly herself, always so chubby and bonny. For the first time, she looked not fat but bloated, as if the rain had swelled her up like the Moss.

'And what happened?' Ernie said after a while. He thought of himself as one of the dried-out roots hanging in bundles from the cross-beam. Shrivelled, easy to snap, but possessed of certain condensed pungency. Put him in the soup and he could still restore the flavour. He looked closely at Milly and saw she was weeping silently.

'Well?' he said softly.

'If she was telling me anything,' Milly said, 'I couldn't hear it. Couldn't hear for the rain.' Shaw said, 'What have you got on under that cloak?'

'Not a thing.' Sitting at Shaw's mother's dressing table, Therese had rubbed some sort of foundation stuff into her face, to darken her complexion, and painted around her eyes. 'But it's not for you tonight. You can get excited though, if you like – make him jealous.'

Shaw touched her shoulder through the black wool.

She turned and looked at him, her eyes very dark. The look said, Get away from me.

Shaw winced.

He looked over at the bed, at his mother's well-worn dressing gown thrown across it. He was surprised she hadn't taken it with her.

'Therese,' he said, 'how was she really? When she left.'

'Your mother? Fine. She'll be enjoying the change.'

'I'm not over-happy about it. She's a dismal old cow, but…'

'Relax. Or rather, don't relax. Look, she didn't want to be here. She's really not very sociable these days, is she? Especially where the brewery's concerned.'

He watched Therese's eyes in the mirror. She could always, in any circumstances, make things happen. Yesterday, his mother had been almost hysterical when he said he'd be bringing the Gannons chairman over for drinks. This morning the old girl was missing but Therese – miraculously, shockingly – was in Shaw's bed, and Therese said, 'Oh, I popped in last night, and we had a terrific heart-to-heart, Liz and I. She's become far too insular, you know, losing all her confidence. Anyway, I persuaded her to go to the Palace in Buxton for a couple of days. Packed her case, ordered her a taxi before she could change her mind. Wasn't that clever of me?'

Yes, yes, he'd been so relieved. The old girl would have been suspicious as anything if he'd suggested it. He remembered the Malta idea. Hopeless. But trust Therese to win her confidence.

Trust Therese. Drifting around the house rearranging things; how the house had changed in just a few hours, a museum coming alive.

'What've you got there?'

She'd picked up a black cloth bag from the dressing table, tightened its drawstrings and set it down again.

'Hair.' She turned the word into a long, satisfied breath 'Beautiful, long black hair.'

'Hair?'

'With a single gorgeous strand of white. I had to use a wig for so long. But there's no substitute for the real thing.'

'Can I look?'

'Of course not. Don't you learn anything? If it's taken out now, it loses half its energy. That was why it was important to leave her as long as possible. And it's nicely matted with blood, too, now, which is a bonus.'

'It's all moving too fast for me,' said Shaw. 'That comb… does that tie in?'

'Well, the comb was a problem at first, actually. It's had to be sort of reconsecrated. We're not touching that either until the moment comes.'

She stretched. Her slim arms – leanly, tautly muscular – emerging from the folds of the black cloak. 'Then I shall uncover the hair and run the comb through it. You know how combing your hair can generate electricity? If you comb it in the dark, looking into a mirror, you can sometimes see blue sparks. Ever done that?'

'With my hair?'

Therese laughed. 'Poor Shaw. One day, perhaps.'

Shaw said, 'I'm sure it must have grown another quarter of an inch since I… you know, since Ma Wagstaff.'

'There you are, you see. First you simply felt better. Now you even look better. And after tonight…'

Shaw said, 'I'm not sure I really want to be there. I'll be so scared, I'll probably screw up or something.'

'Nonsense.' Therese lifted the hood of the cloak. 'How do I look?'

Her voice had a husky, slightly Scottish edge.

Shaw shuddered.

Mungo Macbeth figured at first, irrationally, that he must have reached the coast.

Came over the hill through rain which was almost equatorial in its intensity, and there was this sensation of bulk water below and beyond his headlights. Too wide for a river – assuming Britain didn't have anything on the scale of the Mississippi in flood.

And there was a lighthouse across the bay. The light was a radiant blue-white and sent a shallow beam over black waves he couldn't see. Only, unlike a lighthouse, it wasn't rotating, which was strange.

Macbeth stopped the car and lit a cigarette. He'd pulled in for gas near Macclesfield, looked up into the hard rain and the lightless hills and abruptly decided, after six years, to take up smoking again. Thus far it was not a decision he'd had cause to repent.