The Chalice

'It's like they're holding a chalice,' he said. 'Or waiting for one.'

'They say – some people say – this is the heart chakra in the body of the earth. The higher emotional centre.'

'I know.' You could almost swear it was warmer in here than the other side of the walls. 'You warm enough?'

Juanita nodded. She was wearing the long woollen cloak he'd brought from her wardrobe.

'Somehow,' Powys said, 'I can't quite believe that when we talk of the Dark Chalice we mean the gold cup planted on Abbot Whiting by Edmund Ffitch. I still think it's a metaphor. An ancient symbol of division, intolerance.'

'If the Holy Grail is a symbol of conciliation, both a pagan and a Christian symbol…'

'The anti-Grail. It's logical to believe there's always been an anti-Grail. These things have their time. It's as if, when Henry destroyed all this, he was caught up in something that was trying to happen. They all were. Abbot Whiting – nice guy, kind to the poor. They put his head on the Abbey gates, isn't that right? The whole town must have been absolutely flattened, people terrified.'

'Not least', Juanita said, 'because this was the place where Jesus himself walked.'

'You believe that?'

Juanita looked up at the hands of stone accepting the invisible chalice. 'Sure. Why not? If his rich Uncle Joe wanted to broaden his horizons.'

'So when the Abbot was killed and the building violated and vandalised… by the King of England, they must have…' Powys hesitated.

'They must have questioned the very existence of God.' Juanita stood in front of him. 'It would have taken a long time to get back to that level of spirituality. We thought that maybe we were close to it once. Now it's gone the other way.'

Standing here, in the silence of the ruins, on the eve of midwinter, Powys could almost feel the Veil shredding like a cobweb.

'OK?'

Juanita nodded. He pulled at the ties which fastened the cloak at her neck.

She raised her arms, her crippled hands in the cup formation, like the great stone buttresses, and the cloak fell away from her shoulders and dropped to the grass.

Powys caught his breath.

Juanita shone in the moonlight.

She was wearing the dress last featured on the front The Avalonian. Issue Six.

'Sammy,' Woolly hissed. 'They're here.'

Heart in his mouth, he'd been upstairs, to the lavatory. The torch lighting up the dirty black beams and all those doorways, some of them ajar, shadows oozing out. And on his way back, glancing out the window at the top of the stairs, he'd seen the sidelights moving very slowly up the drive.

'What do we do?' Sam whispered. 'We call the cops?'

'I reckon we see who it is first. If it's Grainger I don't reckon we need bother the fuzz.'

'Christ,' said Sam. 'You still call them the fuzz after all these years?'

But Woolly had crept out into the dining room, a sliver of moonlight thin as fuse-wire on the table where Pixhill had lain.

Sam shivered. Funny, it really did go up your spine.

Any normal, earthly fear, like having the crap beaten out of you by a master of foxhounds, it never happened like that.

Woolly was standing on a chair to see out of the high window.

'Two of them. Men.'

'Grainger?'

'Don't look like it. Both tallish guys.'

'Shit,' said Sam.

'One's got a pickaxe.'

'Double shit.'

Woolly dropped to the floor. 'You wanner go for this or what?'

'Maybe not. Maybe we should play safe. You want me to ring the cops, being as how I'm slightly less well known to them at this moment in time?'

'Only, one of em's your mate, Mr Davey, said Woolly.

'Ah.' Sam rubbed his jaw. 'Well. This changes things just slightly.'

Powys wondered afterwards if perhaps he'd fallen asleep.

Which seemed, in the normal way of things, unlikely, on the eve of midwinter, sitting on a low stone wall under an icy moon.

If he hadn't fallen asleep, then it wasn't a dream.

In this dream, the one that wasn't, Juanita stood on one side of what tourists sometimes saw as a broken archway, where the stone arms reached for the chalice.

On the other side of the archway that wasn't, stood another woman.

Both white, incandescent in the moonlight.

When Powys either awoke or didn't, Juanita was alone.

Woolly came out of the garden shed. 'Ain't much useful in there, man, to be honest.'

He handed Sam a garden fork.

'It's got a wonky handle.'

'The alternative's a bent lawn rake.'

'What's yours, then?'

'I'm a man of peace, remember?' Woolly whispered.

'Come on, move it.'

They climbed over into the field. Under the moon, the Tor looked surprisingly sinister. Sam figured he was seeing it from the same angle as when…

Don't think about it.

'You know your way round here? Shit, this field's waterlogged.'

'Couple of hours it'll be ice-logged,' Woolly muttered. 'Sure, I used to do a bit of gardening for the Colonel. He had a greenhouse then. I figured maybe I could grow certain exotic plants on the side, like. Never thought he'd know what one looked like. Still, he was very nice about it.

Died the following year, poor old soul.'

Sam looked up at the Tor. Something was bothering him.

'Woolly, where I saw this road, look. There's no way they could run it through there. I was so blown away by… you know, him… that I just didn't figure it out proper. I remember thinking it looked like it was aimed straight at the centre of the Tor, under the tower. And, like, you see from here, that's where it would have to go, else Meadwell'd be right in the middle of the central reservation, and it's a double-listed building, so that's out, right?'

'What you saying? And keep your bloody voice down.'

'I don't think that excavation's anything to do with the road. Not directly.'

'So what was it?'

'Fuck knows. You're the earth-mysteries expert.'

'Think about it later,' Woolly said. 'We got to scare these bastards away before they have the top of that well off.'

By moonlight, they skirted the edge of the field, keeping to the hedge. They heard the clunk of a pickaxe on concrete, saw the muffled glow of a lamp on the ground. Sam moved quietly through the shallow drainage ditch, his shoes and the bottoms of his jeans soaked through. There was an old stile he vaguely remembered from his days with the Ramblers' Association. From way back, when there was like a little pilgrims' way to the Meadwell.

Amazingly, he found the stile, tested it with one foot, it seemed solid enough to stand on, so he stood on it. He signalled to Woolly. Then, just as the pickaxe struck metal, he bawled out,

'Avon and Somerset Police. Don't no bugger move!'

And then he was over the stile and going hard for Darryl Davey, swinging the garden fork like an axe at a tree.

Darryl had started to run, and the shaft of the fork caught him under both knees and he came down on the concrete with a smack. Sam was aware of the other guy legging it, but that didn't matter because the lamp on the ground showed him where to put the fork, like hard under Darryl's chin.

Woolly was with him now. 'You see who the other fucker was?'

'Don't give a shit. This is my man. Darryl, as I recall, it was in 1972 when you persuaded me to part with my dinner money or face a difficult nosebleed situation. I got to tell you, you got precisely five seconds to say what you done with Diane, else it's a prong up each nostril and then I start beating your lovely big teeth out with the handle, look. And after that…'

Darryl twisted his neck round and a rusting prong nudged his Adam's apple. He screamed. 'Where's them cops?'

'Four,' Sam said. 'Three. Two…'

'I don't fucking know, do I?' Darryl began to cough.