'I do believe there was a special optimism then,' Jim said.
Although, naturally, we were very po-faced about it at the building society. Love-ins and be-ins and squats – not many mortgages in all that nonsense. I suppose I was just annoyed because I was rather too old for it all.'
' Then the spontaneity seemed to dissipate.' Juanita lit a cigarette. 'It became institutionalised and politicised. And you ended up with what we have now – New Age cliques and elitism. Like The Cauldron.'
'Oh. That.'
'There you are, you're alienated.'
'I'm not alienated. I like women. The Cauldron's all right as far as I'm concerned.'
'But you're not as far as they're concerned, that's the problem, Jim.'
'Everybody's got the answer,' Jim said. They're all so certain about it. Nobody seems content with mystery any more. Except me. I love mystery for its own sake. I think a true appreciation of the quality of mystery is the most the majority of us can ever hope for.'
The glow on the Tor began to flicker in and out, as though people were moving through it.
'We never saw any saucers,' Juanita said sadly. 'I didn't, anyway. But we knew that when the star people landed they'd land here. Because this was the centre. And we knew they'd be good aliens who'd respond to our spiritual aspirations. I used to imagine them coming into the shop – you know, at night. I'd hear a noise and creep down, and there'd be a couple of benign beings in shiny suits leafing through the books. To work out how far we'd got up the spiritual ladder.'
Jim was silent for a while, looking up at the gauzy lights on the Tor. Then he said, 'That's why you've stayed, isn't it? In Glastonbury.'
'Sorry?'
'Unfinished business. The hippy dream. Peace and love. You still hope that out of all this chaos there might be the seed of harmony and this is the place to nurture it. You're still hoping the good aliens will land.'
'Don't be ridiculous.' Juanita felt herself blush. 'That would make me a very sad person, wouldn't it?'
She felt his smile. And his own hopeless longing. waken stone and darkness gather waken stone and darkness gather nahmu nahmu nahmu nah in the bowl of darkness gather nahmu nahmu nahmu nah.
The half-whispered chant was still hissing in Headlice's ears when the circle stopped turning.
When he was sure he was still, he looked up to find the whole of the sky was still revolving, going round and round and round the tower, moon and stars and wisps of cloud.
Moon and stars and wispy cloud, moon and stars and moon and stars and… and everything turning into a chant. Everything with its own rhythm. Magic.
Was it, though? Was it? He glanced at Mort, whose head was bowed into his chest, dead relaxed as usual. Headlice felt a pulse of anger.
Come on. Get real, you 're just dizzy, man. Magic? Magic's the chemicals working on the brain. Magic's what you conjure up in yourself to get your head uncluttered of all that shit about finding a job and taking your place in, like, 'society'. This pilgrimage, this is a celebration of freedom. This is our country, man, ours, not yours to put fuckin' fences around. This is where we can come and breathe the free air and light fires and tell tales about the old gods and get well pissed and stoned and shag our brains out, and when we wake up in the jingle-jangle Arabian morning we'll sit around and talk about what it was like up the Tor, all the presences we felt around us, how, like, holy it was. But it'll all be in our heads, stoned memories. On account of nothing happened, not really.
Yet this was the real place. The place. Go with it. It may never happen again like this. Like when they took you into all those St Michael churches, made you go in backwards; you didn't question that. How are you ever gonna change if you don't, like, submit, roll with it?
He let himself go limp. Rolled with it.
Gwyn was on the stones outside the tower, the light from the candles on his feet and all the objects around him, which included a metal cup – like a chalice – and a whip with a leather handle and kind of thongs, like a cat o'nine tails And a curved, ritual knife, like a little scythe with the moonlight in its blade.
A woman was handing a bowl to Gwyn. It was Rozzie, in a long, dark, loose robe twitching in the night breeze. (So when, exactly, had his woman been picked as Gwyn's handmaiden?),
Then the people either side of him, Mort and the woman called Steve, tightening their grip on Headlice's sweating hands as the cup was filled from the bowl – holy water from the Chalice Well, someone whispered – and the hands parted to receive the cup as it was passed around the circle. Holy water from the Chalice Well, cold water, metal-tasting, passed round anti-clockwise and again and again, and each time it got to him – drink deep, drink deep – the cup always full, so maybe there were two of them or maybe the sacred water was replenishing itself by… magic.
The hands joining again, like clasps in some kind of bracelet, and the movement re-starting, the cog in the machine, round and round and round and the drum drumming deep down in his gut and the chant, nahmu, nahmu, and the sudden weight of the sky, and when he looked up the sky was turning around the tower and… and…
He couldn't feel his feet anymore; he was starting to float. Aware of Gwyn speaking, hearing the words but like making no sense of it; like it was coming from way off, and some of it was in Latin, which figured, if Gwyn had trained as a priest to get both sides.
Gwyn's mellowed out voice was soaring.
'Emitte tenebrae tua et medacia tua. Ipsa me deduxerunt et adduxetunt…'
Headlice suddenly felt very emotional, felt like crying.
… in montem, sanctum tuum…'
Hands. The skin on the hands gripping his seemed to be putting up like foam rubber and then Headlice felt something streak through him, hand to hand to hand…
… like an electric current, and he…
… was well off the ground, the air sizzling coldly around him, all lit up, an ice cascade. Perspective somersaulting; St Michael's tower groaning at his feet; he was up there. In the darkness.
… montem sanctum tuum…
Gwyn's voice rising and sliding and the responses from the others, a drone, enfolding him like soft curtains. The drum so loud, like it was inside his head, like he was inside the drum. It was brilliant. He was truly alive, man.
And the priest said,
'… oh, Gwyn ap Nudd, lord of the hollow, guardian of the dark gates, we call upon thee and offer to thee this…'
'Jim,' Juanita said. 'Jim, look, I think I'm changing my mind about this.'
She crouched, panting, in the grass which was slick with night dew.
They were almost halfway up the Tor. She looked over her shoulder, in the dark it was like being on a cliff-face; vertigo seized her and she grabbed at the hillside for support, her hand closing around something she realised was a hard lump of sheep shit. She ran her fingers convulsively through the damp grass.
'I mean, are we going to make fools of ourselves? When you think about it, what are we supposed to be preventing? After all, come on, nobody ever got murdered or anything on the Tor, did they?'
'Depends what you call murder,' Jim said. 'Don't imagine Abbot Whiting saw much justice in what they did to him. Anyway…' He suddenly expelled an angry sigh. 'I'm curious now. It's a free country. National Trust property. We've got as much right…'
'Jim, why don't we just get the police? I was stupid. They won't arrest Diane, and even if they did…'
'They won't want to know. What's in it for them? Couple of cannabis arrests? They haven't got the manpower anymore.'
'It's just…'
Jim turned towards her. 'Too old to look after myself?'
'No, I… Oh God'
What it came down to was, whatever these neo-hippies were doing she didn't want to see it. Because she'd been there and it was beautiful once and she didn't want to watch a sweaty parody of her youth, didn't want to feel old, didn't want to have to feel disgust.