The Chalice

Her blue coat lay on the floor by the bed. Arnold had curled up on it.

'I couldn't move.' Her loose sweater had slipped down over one shoulder. 'I didn't want to move. It was very peaceful in the road. Can't remember ever feeling as peaceful. I lay and I stared up at that torn radiator grille and I waited to die.'

He sat down next to her on the bed, looked hard into her dulled eyes. 'How do you feel now?'

'Not here. I feel like I'm not here.'

'Listen. Juanita.' He wanted to touch her. Didn't know where it was safe to. 'It was a real bus, OK? Sam talked to the driver. He's a scrap-dealer from Taunton. He was delivering the bus to a Mr Moulder, who has a farm up Wellhouse Lane.'

The eyes wavered.

'But he took the wrong turning. He doesn't know why he did that because he knows Glastonbury very well, but he took a wrong turning. He came down High Street and there you were in the middle of the road. He said he braked so hard he nearly had a heart attack and still he thought he'd killed you. And I… me too, you know?'

Joe Powys's head fell into Juanita's lap. He felt brittle and exhausted like the Holy Thorn. No sap left. He knew more than his mind could handle about Pixhill and Dion Fortune and the dark heritage of the Ffitches. And yet he knew nothing. He'd very nearly murdered a man in a rush of mindless violence He'd thought his dog had been killed.

Also the woman he really…

He felt Juanita's lips on his hair.

'You were crying,' she said. 'You thought I was dead and you were crying.'

'I shouldn't have cried.' He sat up. 'It's only a station between trains.'

'What?'

He kissed her. Her checks were wet and hot, her lips dry and cracked. He moistened them with his tongue, felt her shiver. Her face at last moved under his and her arms went round him. Just her arms.

Powys hugged Juanita and they stayed like that, dazed and weeping, for several minutes. Only in Glastonbury. Who said that?

'I'm a mess,' she said. 'It isn't possible to be a bigger mess than me. I don't even know what's real. I don't trust my eyes, I don't trust my body…'

'I'm real. I think.'

She pulled away from him.

'Listen, I'm serious. Of all the things that've happened to me tonight, I don't know which ones are real. You tell me that bus was real… an hour or two ago I saw that bus in a painting – that actual bus, with its radiator… and then I saw one of the Goddess Shop pots bloody well menstruating. And there was Ceridwen in her robes in the middle of the road. Talking to me. Instructing me that I was now officially a hag, which… which makes a lot of sense when you've had about two hundred hot flushes… I do mean two hundred very real hot flushes, which Matthew Banks will confirm. I'm a hag. A crone. Look at me.'

She wore no make-up. She was very beautiful. She was to die for.

'Look at me.' She began to cry.

He kissed her. His hands slid under her sloppy sweater.

There was nothing there but warm skin.

'Um, would you mind if…?'

'You don't want this kind of hassle, Powys.'

He could hardly breathe. He fumbled the sweater over her speckled shoulders, draping it over Arnold, who murmured but didn't move.

'OK.' Juanita was looking down at herself. 'It's a relief. I thought they were going to be around my navel.'

Powys touched a brown nipple with his tongue. It had an aureole of freckles.

'Dion Fortune would have understood.' He tossed his sweater on Arnold and wriggled out of his jeans. 'What you've been through.'

'Mmm?'

'Psychic attack, Juanita. Nobody but nobody has two hundred hot flushes out of the blue in a few hours.' He unzipped her velvet skirt. 'That woman really hates you. We're going to have to break the spell.'

Guiding her back on to the bed, this creaky Victorian four-poster. The mattress was rather too high to fall back on. He lifted her in his arms; she felt unnervingly light, a bit cold.

'Say, I am very beautiful. Say, I am a goddess.'

Sliding her into bed.

She said, 'I know what this is. You've seen that bloody picture of me, haven't you?'

'The Avalonian,' Powys said. 'Issue Six. And nothing's changed.'

'No?' She lifted the sheet with an elbow. 'This is where they took away the skin. To repair the hands. It means – this is the principal sick joke – it means I can't take any pressure on my thighs.'

Juanita closed her eyes, laughing. Her arms wide open, a hand on each pillow. It was the first time he'd ever seen her relaxed.

'Not a problem.' His lips moving down to the scars where the strips of skin had been scraped away. 'Too rough?'

'Nnnnnn.'

And slowly up to the bush. Juanita moaned, her legs opening.

'Turn on your side maybe?'

She said softly, 'This is ridiculous. This… Oh… my God.'

'My goddess,' Powys breathed.

Around midnight, he returned from Carey and Frayne with a suitcase. He also had a tray of tea from the George and Pilgrims kitchens.

Juanita was sitting up in bed. She had the sweater on. He poured tea. 'I forgot the straw.'

'Typical,' Juanita said. 'And so little to think about.'

'Um, I'm going to say this now. Ever since I saw that photograph of you in Dan's office…'

She put a discoloured finger to his lips.

'Don't say any more. It's bad luck.'

'That's an old Avalonian superstition, is it?'

'It's how I feel, OK?'

'OK.' He put the book on the bed, turned it towards her. It was a hardback copy of Psychic Self-Defence by Dion Fortune. 'Have you read this?'

'Bits of it.'

'You read the werewolf story?'

'Where she conjures the elemental beast?'

'Let's read it again.'

He opened the book under the Tiffany lamp, whose bulb no longer flickered.

'Listen to this,' Powys said.

'Chapter One

SIGNS OF PSYCHIC ATTACK

We live in the midst of invisible forces whose effects alone we perceive… Normally… we are protected by our very incapacity to perceive.'

'Verity,' Juanita said.

'Just a passing thought. OK. It's about page fifty. Ah. "I had received serious injury from someone who, at considerable cost to myself, I had disinterestedly helped, and I was sorely tempted to retaliate. Lying on my bed resting one afternoon…''

'Her resentment materialises at the bedside.' Juanita shuddered. 'As a kind of grey wolf.'

Powys sat on the bed. Held a cup of tea to her lips. 'Before we read the rest, I have to tell you where I went this evening.'

'It's like a truly horrible Grimm's fairytale,' Juanita said.

After he'd told her about Violet and Roger Ffitch and Pixhill, he told her about Archer. The blood and the fire and the pink teddy.

'No wonder the nannies were horrible,' Juanita said. 'Those weren't nannies, they were bodyguards.'

'He never knew for sure,' Powys said. 'And he still doesn't know. That's what he's had to live with. Makes you feel sorry for the old bastard, doesn't it?'

'It makes a lot of things clear. Poor kid. 'The retained placenta – I vaguely knew about that. Not being well up in midwifery, I didn't know about the amount of blood-letting it caused. Did I tell you that when she was little – and not so little – she used to go missing? And quite often she'd be found asleep in the Chalice Well garden.'

'The Blood Well.'

'A well's a kind of symbolic womb, isn't it? She was going back to what she couldn't remember. Oh, Powys…'

'I know. We've got to find her. All this gets worse.'

He picked up the book. 'Now Violet – no nonsense type, even then – is more than a bit alarmed at what she's conjured. She tries the stern approach: down boy. And to her faint surprise the wolf turns into a dog and trots off and fades away. But Violet's not daft, and she's not terribly surprised when another woman in the house gets into a flap, claiming her dreams have been disrupted by images of wolves and when she woke up there were eyes shining at her from a corner of the room. Violet's seriously disturbed by now. She goes off to see Doc Moriarty, her teacher, and he confirms her worst fears.'