It had changed her. She still found Freud stimulating and exciting and the logic of his methodology unassailable, as far as it went. But there were areas of experience which psychoanalysis could not unveil. And she had lifted up the hem of the curtain and seen wonders.
However, to become truly initiated into the Mysteries, one needed the guidance of human beings who had been there before. And some of them could be… well, pretty unsavoury types in other respects. The sacred quest for enlightenment, it appeared, would often bring out the very worst in people.
One had to go jolly carefully, keeping one's eyes open and, quite frankly, one's legs together.
'Go on then… hold it.'
Vapour is rising from a small candle on the block of stone between them.
'No… please… this is not right!'
'You're wrong. It's absolutely right. Now. For me. For us, Violet…'
It lies in a black cloth between his hands.
'Grasp it.'
'No!'
'Clasp it to your breast.' He extends his arms, the cloth and what lies in it.
'Please… Its black, it's evil… I don't… She's starting to sob.
'But it's what you want, my dear. It's what you've always wanted. This is 1919 and you're a free and enlightened woman… a trained psychoanalyst. Primitive superstition can't touch you now.' Standing between her and the way out, he adds lazily, 'And take off your clothes, why don't you?'
And so Violet was in a fairly hellish state when she flung her soiled body on the bed, making its springs howl. In retrospect she might have been better off rampaging through the grounds, taking it out on the last of the weeds.
The bed had a light green eiderdown, and the wallpaper was salmon pink. Colours of summer. A pleasant room on a sullen autumn afternoon. But it didn't calm her down today. The effects of such abuse did not just quietly fade.
There was an essential conflict here. One could adopt the Christian attitude, turn the other cheek and walk away: very well, I tried to help you… I counselled you, taught you how to control your nightmares from the War… and you took advantage of me. Nevertheless, not my place to be judgemental. As a psychologist.
Ha. Hardly good enough was it? Violet sighed, lay back and let her eyelids fall. The pillows were soft and cool. The back of her head felt heavy, like a bag of potatoes. She let her arms flop by her sides. The anger, still burning somewhere below her abdomen, was at odds, though not uncomfortably so, with the supine state of her body. She was, surprisingly, reaching a state of relaxation. But then, she was getting rather good at that.
Of course…
Violet smiled.
…one could simply allow oneself to go absolutely and utterly berserk.
She began a simple visualisation, letting loose her thoughts, to roam the wildest of terrain, those places of high cliffs and crashing waves, black and writhing trees against a thundery sky. As her body lay on its bed, on a sallow, sunless afternoon in the mellow, autumnal Vale of Avalon, her thoughts stalked the wintry wasteland of cruel Northern myths. In search of a suitably savage instrument of revenge. Oh yes.
She was starting to enjoy her anger and felt no guilt about this. Daylight dripped on to her eyelids like syrup. And in the cushiony hinterland of sleep, in those moments when the senses mingle and then dissolve, when fragments of whispered words are sometimes heard and strange responses sought- Violet's rage fermented pleasurably into the darkest of wines.
'Good dog.'
Its fur was harsh as a new hairbrush. It brushed her left arm, raising goose bumps
It lay there quite still, as relaxed as Violet had been, but with a kind of' coiled and eager tension about it. She could feel it's back alongside her, its spine against her cotton shift. It was lean, but it was heavy. And it was beginning to breathe.
She didn't really question its presence at first. It was simply there. She raised her left hand to pat it. Then the hand suddenly seized up.
So cold.
And Violet was aware that the room had gone dark.
Not dark as if she'd simply fallen asleep and the afternoon had slid away into evening. Dark as in a draining of the light, of the life-force vibrating behind colours. The most horribly negative kind of darkness.
She opened her eyes fully. It made no difference. The wallpaper was a deepening grey and the fogged light inside the window frame thick and stodgy, like a rubber mat. The eiderdown beneath her was as hard and ungiving as a cobbled street.
The fear had come upon her slowly and was all the worse for that. It chilled her insides like a cold-water enema. A rank odour soured the room. The air seemed noxious with evil, almost-visible specks of it above her like a cloud of black midges.
Drawing a breath made her body lurch against the creature lying motionless beside her in the gloom.
And motionless it stayed, for a moment.
Violet knew what she had to do. She lay as still as she could, gathering breath and her nerve.
Then she put out her left hand. Out and down. Until her fingers found the eiderdown, hard as worn stone. There was an almost liquid frigidity around her hand, over the wrist, almost to the elbow, like frogspawn in a half-frozen pond.
It was very hard to turn her head, as though her neck was in a vice, everything she held holy crying out to her not to look.
But look she did. She managed to turn her head just an inch, enough to focus on her left shoulder and follow her arm down and down to where the wrist… vanished.
Somewhere through the greyness she could detect a dim image of her fingers on the eiderdown, while the beast's gaseous body swirled around the flesh of her arm.
As Violet began to pant with fear, it turned its grey head, and the only white light in the room was in its long, predator's teeth and the only colour in the room was the still, cold yellow of its eyes.
I am yours.
Part One
There is such magic in the first glimpse of that strange hill that none who have the eye of vision can look upon it unmoved.
ONE
Booksellers High Street
Glastonbury Prop. Juanita Carey 14 November Danny, love, Enclosed, as promised, one copy of Colonel Pixhill's Glastonbury Diary. More about that later. After this month's marathon moan.
Sorry. I'm getting hopelessly garrulous, running off at the mouth, running off at the Amstrad. Put it down to Time of Life. Put this straight in the bin, if you like, I'm just getting it all off my increasingly vertical chest. What's put me all on edge is that Diane's back. Diane
Ffitch. Funny how so many of my problems over the years have involved that kid. Hell, grown woman now – by the time I was her age, I'd been married, divorced, had three good years with you (and one bad), moved to Glastonbury, started a business… I know. A lot more than I've done since. There. Depressed myself now. It doesn't take much these days Colonel Pixhill was right: Glastonbury buggers you up. But then, you knew that, didn't you? I've been trying to think if you ever met Diane. I suspect not. She was in her teens by the time our paths finally crossed (although I'd heard the stories, of course) and you were long gone by then. Although you might remember the royal visit, was it 1972, late spring? Princess Margaret anyway – always kind of liked her, nearest thing to a rebel that family could produce As I remember you wouldn't go to watch. Uncool you said. But the next day the papers had this story about the small daughter of local nob Lord Pennard, who was to have presented the princess with a bouquet. Diane would have been about four then and already distinctly chubby. Waddles up to Margaret – I think it was at the town hall – with this sheaf of monster flowers which is more than half her size. Maggie stoops graciously to scoop up the blooms, the photographers and TV cameramen all lined up. Whereupon, Diane unceremoniously dumps the bouquet, hurls herself, in floods of tears, at the royal bosom and sobs – this was widely used in headlines next day – 'Are you my mummy?' Poignant stuff', you see, because her mother died when she was born. But obviously, a moment of ultimate embarrassment for the House of Pennard, the first public indication that the child was – how can I put this? – prone to imaginative excursions. Anyway, that was Diane's fifteen minutes of national fame. The later stuff- the disappearances, the police searches, they managed to keep out of the papers. Pity, some even better pictures there, like Diane curled up with her teddy bear under a seat in Chalice Well gardens at four in the morning. Years later she turns up at the shop looking for a holiday job. Why my shop? Because she wanted access to the sort of books her father wouldn't have in the house – although, obviously I didn't know that when I took her on. But she was a good kid, no side to her. She's twenty-seven now. Until very recently, Lord Pennard thought he'd finally unloaded her, having sent her to develop her writing skills by training as a journalist in Yorkshire. What does that bastard care about her writing skills? It was Yorkshire that counted, being way up in the top right hand corner of the country. An old family friend of the Ffitches owns a local newspaper chain up there, and of course, the eldest son, heir to the publishing empire, was not exactly discouraged from associating with the Hon. Diane. Yes, an old-fashioned, upper-crust arranged marriage: titled daughter-in-law for solid, Northern press baron and the penurious House of Pennard safely plugged into a source of unlimited wealth. But it's all off. Apparently. I don't know exactly why, and I'm afraid to ask. And Diane's back. When I say 'back', I don't mean here at the shop. Or at Bowermead Hall. Nothing as simple as a stand-up row with Daddy, and brother Archer smarming about in the background. Oh no. Diane being Diane, she's come down from the North in a convoy of New Age travellers. Well, I've nothing against them in principle. How could I, with my background? Except that when we were hippies we didn't make a political gesture out of clogging up the roads, or steal our food from shops, despoil the countryside, light fires made from people's fences or claim social security for undertaking the above. Hey, am I becoming a latent Conservative or what? Anyway, she rang. She's with these travellers – oh sorry, 'pagan pilgrims' – and do I know anywhere near their holy of holies (the Tor, of course) where they could all camp legally for a few days? Otherwise they could be arrested as an unlawful assembly under the terms of the Criminal Justice Act. Well I don't basically give a shit about the rest of them being nicked. But I'm thinking, Christ, Diane winds up behind bars, along comes Archer to discreetly (and smugly) bail her out with daddy's money… I couldn't bear that. So I thought of Don Moulder, who farms reasonably close to the Tor He's got this field he's been trying to flog as building land in some corrupt deal with Griff Daniel. Only, Mendip Council – now that Griff isn't on it, thank God – insists, quite rightly, that it's a green belt site and won't allow it. So now the aggrieved Moulder will rent out that field to anybody likely to piss the council off. I call him up. We haggle for a while and then agree on three hundred quid. Which Diane is quite happy to pay. She says they're 'really nice people' and it's been a breath of fresh air for her, travelling the country, sleeping in the back of the van, real freedom, no pressure, no cruel father, no smug brother. And at the end of the road… Glastonbury. The Holyest Erthe in All England, where, according to the late Dion Fortune, the saints continue to live their quaintly beautiful lives amid the meadows of Avalon and – Oh God – the poetry of the soul writes itself. The reason I mention DF is that, for a long time, Diane was convinced that the famed High Priestess was her previous incarnation -gets complicated, doesn't it?) God knows what the great lady would have written had she been around today. Bloody hell, this is the New Age Blackpool! Shops that even in your time here used to sell groceries and hardware are now full of plastic goddesses and aromatherapy starter-kits. Everybody who ever turned over a tarot card or flipped the I-Ching sooner or later gets beached on the Isle of Avalon. And the endless tourists. Not just Brits, but dozens of Americans, Japanese and Germans, all trooping around the Abbey ruins with their camcorders, in search of Enlightenment followed by a good dinner and a four-poster bed at The George and Pilgrims. OK, I should moan. The shop's never been more profitable. I've had to take on assistance at weekends (Jim Battle, nice man). But I'm not enjoying it any more, there's the rub. I'm feeling tense all the time (mention menopause and you're dead!!!). I see the latest freaks on the streets and I can see why the local people hated us twenty years ago, I too hate the New Age travellers blocking up Wellhouse Lane with their buses, marching up the Tor to tune into the Mystical Forces, camping up there and shitting on the grass and leaving it unburied.