Blissful, blissful, blissful.
'I want to touch him,' the woman next to her cried. 'I want to bathe in him.'
Michael, Michael, MICHAEL, MICHAEL!
The Being of Light lifted his head and spread his arms to embrace his town. Bright people were gathering around him, both sexes, shimmering, all shapes and sizes, from the large, smiling man in the incandescent white suit to the tiny little lady, mouth opening in delight to reveal small, sharp white teeth, like a fish's, like… like…
Couldn't remember.
But she didn't want to remember. She'd never fell so warm and yet so free. She saw herself soaring above Crybbe, and the town was decked out in ribbons of soft, coloured light anchored by ice-bright, luminescent standing stones. Floating over square, she saw the old buildings in a lambent Christmas-card glow. But some of them were not so old, their timbers looked sturdy and neatly dovetailed, especially the inn, which had a simple strength and a sign with a large, rough beast upon it, and indeed, there were farm animals in the square around a cart with wooden wheels and sacks of grain on it. There was a cow, three horses, a pig. And a dog! Black and white like… like. ..
Couldn't remember.
'Fay.'
Who was Fay?
'Listen to me.'
'Yes,' she sang. 'Yes, yes, yes, I'm listening.'
But she had no intention of listening; this was the wrong voice. It didn't sound like a cello, it sounded old and frail, an ancient banjo, cracked and out of tune.
She laughed.
Everyone was laughing.
New Age Heaven.
'Fay,' Alex said into her ear. 'Listen to me, please.'
'Yes, yes, yes,' she sang. 'But you'll have to come with me. Can you float? Can you float like me?'
She wasn't floating. She was part of a group of thirty or forty people, hands linked, slowly and gloomily moving around in an untidy, irregular circle.
Alex could see most of them now, in the spluttering amber of the blazing church.
In the centre of the square, where, in many towns, there was a cross, a man stood. A tall man, stripped to the waist. He had dark, close-shaven hair and a black beard. His eyes were closed. He was sweating. His arms hung by his side but slightly apart from his body, the palms of his hands upturned. The ragged circle of people moved around him, anticlockwise.
The old buildings seemed to be leaning out of their foundations and into the firelight, like starved tramps at a brazier. The buildings had never looked more decrepit or as close to collapse.
Similarly, the people. Alex followed Fay around, walking behind her, peering into the faces of the men and women in the circle, horrified at how weak and drained they looked, some of them obviously ill. On one side of his daughter was a stocky man with a sagging belly and one eye badly bloodshot. He was moaning faintly and saliva dribbled down his chin. Fay's other hand lay limply in a flabby hand full of rings, obviously not very expensive ones, for they looked tarnished now and the joints of the fingers were swollen around them. The woman's hair was in wild, white corkscrews; her lips were drawn back into a frozen rictus; she was breathing in spurts through clenched teeth.
Diametrically opposite this woman, Alex saw Fay's ex-husband Guy Morrison, his blond hair matt-flat, exposing a large, white bald patch; his mouth down-turned, forming pouches of slack skin from his cheek to his once-proud jawline. Next to him a fat girl was sobbing inconsolably to herself as she moved sluggishly over the cobbles. On the other side of this girl, a thin woman with shorn hair was breathing with difficulty, in snorts, blood sparkling on her upper lip and around her nose, from which a small ring hung messily from a torn flap of skin, and every time she took a breath part of the ring disappeared into a nostril. She didn't seem aware of her physical distress; nor did any of the others.
'Fay,' Alex whispered.
Fay's skin was taut and pallid, her green eyes frozen open, her lips stretched in anguish, which made the words issuing from them all the more pathetic.
'Flying away, high, into the light. Can't keep up with me, can you?'
He didn't even try. He stood in the shadows and watched her drift away.
He'd had to stop himself from pulling her out of the circle. He had the awful feeling that he would simply detach her body, that her mind would remain in the ring and she would never get it back, would be a vegetable.
Which was the very worst thing of all; Alex knew this.
He stood and watched her for two more circuits of the square. A lurid flaring of amber from the dying church picked out that woman from The Gallery, ugly blue bruises around her throat, dried vomit on her chin, coughing weakly; couldn't see her husband.
Very gently he separated Fay's fingers from those of the woman next to her and slipped her small, cold right hand into his left. With his right hand he found the damp, fleshy finger of the white-haired woman.
And so Alex slipped into the circle and began to move slowly round.
He realized at once that he'd made a terrible, terrible mistake.
His legs began to feel heavy and cumbersome. At first he felt as if he'd stepped into a pair of Wellingtons several sizes too big and was wading in them through thick, muddy water, and then the weight spread up to his thighs – he was in the middle of a river in cumbersome waders – and finally it was as though both legs had been set in concrete; how he managed to move he didn't know, but he kept on, at funereal pace, his arms feeling limp as though the blood were draining away into the other hands, his life energy passed along the chain.
Progressive torpor. This was how it happened. Initiation ceremony. They were always saying, the newcomers, how much they wanted to fit in, become part of the community.
Now here they were, all these bright, clever, New Age folk, achieving overnight what some people waited years to attain.
All moving at last to the rhythm of Crybbe.
PART NINE
In actuality, of course, dowsing as an activity is no more spiritual than riding a bicycle: spirituality is in the person… Compared to this rich matrix of mystery the
New Age 'energy' ideas are conceptually bankrupt.
Earth Memory – the Holistic
Earth Mysteries Approach to
Decoding Ancient Sacred Sites
CHAPTER 1
THE digger was crunching through the wood like a rhino on heat, Gomer Parry at the wheel, grinning like a maniac, dead cigarette, burned to the filter, clenched between his teeth. Minnie Seagrove holding on to the makeshift passenger seat, which didn't have a working safety-belt, a three-legged black and white dog balancing, just about, on her knee and glaring out of the window, barking away.
This had all come about after they arrived back at Minnie's bungalow and Gomer, spotting the flames coming out of the town, reckoning it had to be the church, raced to Minnie's phone to summon the fire brigade and found the bloody old phone lines were down or something.
Anyway, the phone was off and so was the one in the kiosk by the layby.
'Something bloody funny yere.'
They'd climbed back into the digger, Gomer heading back towards the town, foot down, headlight blasting at the night and then – 'Oh my God, Gomer, look out!'
Bloody great wall of metal, Minnie's hands over her eyes, the dog going berserk and Gomer flattening the brakes and damn near wrenching the ole wheel out of its socket.
Flaming great articulated lorry had jack-knifed across the road at – precisely – the spot Gomer himself went adrift earlier on. Was this a coincidence? Like hell it was.
No sign of the driver, no blood in the cab, couldn't have been hurt, must've buggered off for help. So Gomer did this dynamite three-point turn and they were thundering off again.