'Archer killed their mother,' Ceridwen said sharply. 'It was quite simple. He was a child, with a child's simplistic views. She was coming between him and his dreams of restoring the family's wealth and influence.'
'I bet he didn't do it on his own, though.'
'You're fantasising, Mr J.M. Powys. But that's your profession, isn't it?'
'I bet you had a little tug on the old umbilical, didn't you, Ruth?'
Her face told him it was inspired. Thank you, God. Thank you, DF. Thank you, Uncle Jack.
Ceridwen recovered rapidly, Powys thinking how two-dimensional these people were. 'It doesn't matter now,' she said. 'Diane's beast is loose. The bind is broken. The Chalice is back in the world.'
The reservoir doors opened. Archer Ffitch stood there. He showed no surprise. He'd been here before, of course he had. He must have seen the Mini vanish in the direction of the barns and known where they were going.
'Sorry to intrude' Archer wore a dark suit, but he'd taken off his tie. He was sweating. 'But all of a sudden, one begins to feel safer down here. Tricky phase. Transition. All that. Difficult to settle. Until Oliver gets the family trophy out of the well.'
Right, Powys thought. They would have to cancel out DF before they dare uncover that well. The unbinding of the Chalice was a number of strands entwining simultaneously, something finally pulling them tight, just as Ceridwen must have sealed the fate of Lady Pennard by one wrench on the umbilicus.
He looked at Diane's face, the eyes flickering vaguely behind the twisted, narcotic glaze. It was unreal. It was insane. Diane had been brought up from birth to develop a hatred for her brother, to have that hatred fine-tuned to a pitch where it could be released as an entity in itself, dragging down the entity's original, unwitting creator.
Juanita was standing only a yard away from Diane, but it was a very long yard.
'Come down, Archer,' Ceridwen called out, almost gaily. 'We'll look after you.' She turned to Powys. 'As we always have. Ever since his schooldays. I was their matron, did you know that, at school? Archer and Oliver Pixhill. Always inseparable.'
'Let me get this right,' Juanita said. 'This would be after you were fired from the hospital in Oxfordshire for persecuting geriatrics?'
Ceridwen turned slowly and jabbed a blunt forefinger at her. 'I know what you've been doing. I know you've been leeching on DF's residue'
'Or perhaps she's been feeding me,' Juanita said softly.
'I don't care if she's been feeding you.' Ceridwen snarled. 'She's over now, Juanita. Or she's ours – she has that choice. Oblivion. Or the shadier path.'
All this time Diane had been quite silent. Sitting up in her bed like some soiled fairytale princess.
'Come on, Diane,' Juanita said.
'Yes. Go on. Do,' Ceridwen shrieked. 'Go with her, Diane. Take it out into the world.' And to Juanita, 'She'll destroy you. She was always going to destroy you. And then she'll come back. She has to.'
Powys was aware of a deepening of the atmosphere in the concrete chamber, as though it had become a hall of mirrors and went on and on until the Tor rose above it, a nightmare corruption of the Cavern Under the Hill of Dreams. A picture began to form in his head of Diane in five or ten years' time: no more the scatty but tolerable Lady Loony; instead, a fat and blackened sly-eyed whore, a parasite in high society, vampish fallen sister of the Conservative MP for Mendip South.
Fetch!
He heard it with bell-like clarity in his head. No one reacted. The silence was dull, yet charged.
And then, limping down the middle of this endless chamber, he saw – Oh, no – the familiar black and white, amiably lopsided dowser's dog.
Arnold pattered to the bed where Diane sat up. There was a ball in Arnold's mouth. A ball of pure, white light. Powys saw it and then he didn't.
Diane shrank back into the metal bars of the headboard. Powys watched, as though from far away, as though it was happening in a movie. Becoming only gradually aware that no one else was looking at the dog or the bed or Diane or him, but at the open doorway behind Archer.
Where Lord Pennard stood in heavy tweed shooting jacket and plus fours, the dawn welling wildly up behind him.
'Archer?' Pennard's voice rang like steel around the concrete chamber. 'Where are you, boy?'
'Father.' Archer didn't move. 'Go away. This is nothing to do with you. Go back to the house.'
'Who are these people. Archer?'
'Not your problem, OK? We'll talk later.'
'Is that Diane down there? I can't see.'
'Will you leave this to me?'
'I wanted very much to believe in you. Archer.' Pennard said. 'Damn it, I had to believe. To support the future For the simple sake of our continuity, I had to believe that you didn't…'
'I… didn't… kill her.' Archer ground it out through his teeth. 'What can I do to convince you? I… didn't fucking… kill my fucking mother?
'You sicken me,' Pennard said sorrowfully. 'Perhaps you always did. But now you frighten me too. And that… that is something I really can't live with.'
'Wait!' Archer moved into the pink light at the entrance, 'Listen to me! You want to know who killed her?' He turned to point into the darkness. The very heart of the darkness.
'She did. You see her? You recognise her? That's your midwife, Father. From the Belvedere clinic. Ask her. Ask her!'
The moment seemed to last forever. Archer's finger frozen in the dawn.
The finger still hanging there as Powys saw Archer's head burst like a bud into flower. A free form flower of red and pink and grey.
And by the time his brain had registered the explosion, seen the smoke from the twelve-bore, heard the shouting and the screams, Pennard was raising the gun again and the shot from the second barrel took Ceridwen in the throat and she seemed to float to her knees, astonishment in the deep brown eyes and blood pumping down the robe, splashing on the concrete as her head fell off into her lap.
There was an instant of hollow nothingness.
At first, Powys thought he was trembling. But it was the ground. The ground was trembling.
Still it didn't occur to him what was happening.
At least, not until he saw the cracks appear in the grey concrete pillars of the old storage reservoir and he thought idly what a hell of a flood there would be if it was still in use.
Then, amid the incomprehension which preceded the stampede, he saw Juanita dragging Diane from the hospital bed, and when his legs would move again he ran to help her and they pulled her, kicking and squealing out of the reservoir and into the bleak beginnings of the shortest day and the stubbly wasteland from where Sam Daniel's trio of petrol-fired beacons sent signals, too late, to Glastonbury Tor.
EIGHTEEN
At first, Powys thought it must be a frenzied, knee-jerk reaction to Sam's beacon fires and then he saw that the three of them were running against a tide of panic. Breaking on the Tor, flowing across the fields. So many frightened people, so much smoke, so many abandoned protest- placards. He couldn't see Sam anywhere.
He thought he heard another shot. Or maybe he knew that, for what remained of the honour of that family, there was, sooner or later, going to be another shot.
A big-eyed girl in an orange waterproof collided with him. He helped her up. 'What's happening? What's exploded?',
'Earthquake. Tremor. The tower's collapsing. Jesus. Stones and stuff crashing down like the Middle Ages all over again.'
'What?' Powys looked up at the Tor. The shell Of the St Michael tower looked full and firm as ever against the pink-streaked Solstice dawn.
'The rest of the church came down in the Middle Ages.' A guy with a beard dragging the girl away. 'Leaving just the tower. Doomsday, man. Doomsday.'