Oh no.
Juanita shrank into the Holy Thorn doorway, both hands around the umbrella stem. Holding the thing in front of her like a riot-shield, as they rumbled past and clattered past and groaned past, under the diffident, crane-necked gaze of the seen-it-all Glastonbury streetlamps.
The convoy from hell.
The umbrella shook rigidly in Juanita's hands. A sick ritual on the Tor, followed by a death. And they had the nerve, the arrogance, to come back.
Maybe they'd returned for the meeting – that was all poor old Woolly needed.
But no. She watched them proceed like a ramshackle funeral cortege, along High Street. For Chilkwell Street. For Wellhouse Lane. And the Tor.
The house lights dipped dramatically and Archer Ffitch became a powerful silhouette against a pure white rectangle.
He was suddenly so much like their father. Because all you could see was his shape, thicker but no hint of fat. Because you couldn't see their mother's moist lips and their mother's grey eyes. Because, like Father, he seemed at his most relaxed standing up, or erect on a hunter. And he was awfully relaxed at the moment.
'I want to show you some pictures,' he said. 'I want to show you a possible solution. But I want, first of all, to make it clear that I am acting here not as a politician but as a concerned resident of this area. What I am about to outline is a preliminary proposal, to be tossed around the democratic arena, adjusted, refined and perhaps, at the end of the day – who can tell? – rejected. I hope this will not be the case, because I believe it is the only way to correct an unhealthy imbalance in this fine old town.'
The hall was hushed.
'I believe,' said Archer, 'that the only solution to the problem must lie in restricting the activities of hippies, travellers and undesirables, without in any way diminishing the rights of local people.'
Archer lifted a hand and a picture appeared on the screen behind him: the top of Glastonbury Tor, the St Michael tower ruling the screen from top to bottom.
'The Tor,' said Archer, 'is the property of the National Trust, a body responsible for making our nation's heritage accessible to the general public, and none of us would wish that to be otherwise.'
The next picture was an aerial photograph, looking down on the St Michael tower and the discoloured grass around it.
'I have been unable to establish,' said Archer, 'precisely how many tons of earth have been replaced here in recent years because of erosion caused by human feet. Or how many sheep have been killed by uncontrolled dogs. I would hate to estimate how many tons of human excreta have remained unburied by people flouting the fairly unenforceable laws about camping out on the Tor. And there are no records of how many innocent people – and children – have been disturbed or disgusted by the most shameless and perverse sexual shenanigans taking place in full public view. Is this – I ask you now – what we expect of a National Trust site?'
The response was immediate and deafening.
Diane didn't reply; she was struggling with a terrible sensation of foreboding. Oh, Archer would be canonised, all right. Archer was very good at sincerity.
The slide changed to a less dramatic picture: a close-up of an Ordnance Survey map intersected by hand drawn black lines. Archer tapped the map on the screen with a pen.
'Let us first of all ask ourselves why these members of what they like to describe as an Alternative society flock like lemmings to this tiny hill. It is because of an unfortunate legacy.'
Archer paused.
A memory came to Diane of a Christmas when she was seven or eight, a Boxing Day afternoon spent hiding in her bedroom, trying to read her book and blank out the sound of the hunting horn. She'd fallen asleep in her mother's old rocking chair and awoken to find…
'… a legacy of nonsense from that most unstable of decades, the nineteen-sixties, when a so-called culture founded upon psychedelic drugs and led, I imagine, by bearded gurus from Tibet decided that the Tor was A Place of Power… where many so-called ley-lines intersect. The fact that no archaeologist or anyone with even basic common sense gives any credence whatever to this famous rubbish…'
He would know, of course, that the person in Glastonbury most obsessed with leys was Councillor Woolly Woolaston, whose reputation would be seriously eroded tonight.
Diane briefly closed her eyes.
And remembered half waking in her mother's chair that Boxing Day and stroking fur. She'd wanted a dog as a pet; her father had refused; he said dogs were for working and hunting, dogs were for outside.
Archer was laughing. '… gullible and rootless people who believe that they can get 'high' on Glastonbury Tor. With or without the use of mind-altering drugs. Is this what that august body, the National Trust, exists to promote?'
This was just awful.
'Now the Tor,' Archer said, 'is, as my friend Mr Daniel pointed out a few minutes ago, a pretty place on a summer's day. A place where, doubtless, some of you would like to take your children or visiting relatives, were you not afraid of what they might see.'
'Or tread in,' Griff Daniel commented from a few yards along the stage.
'Quite. I'm also quite sure that none of you would wish to go there at night, or on some pagan solstice, or for the purpose of altering your perceptions… So let me outline to you a comprehensive plan.'
As a new slide appeared on the screed, Diane remembered sleepily stroking the fur in her lap, wondering vaguely why her skirt was wet and her hand sticky. Oh dear, perhaps the puppy had…
But it hadn't been a puppy at all. It was a fox. Or rather its head. A trophy from the Boxing Day hunt. One of its eyes was missing. Its jaws had been prised open. Its needly teeth gleamed with blood. Blood from its neck had soaked through Diane's Christmas kilt.
The old image brought tears of horror and pity to Diane's eyes. She blinked them away, tried to focus on the screen. The picture on the screen was not of Glastonbury, but it was instantly familiar.
Diane remembered Archer denying having anything to do with the fox's head, denying it with such appalled vigour and absolute sincerity that, by the end of the afternoon, Father was almost accusing Diane of having planted it to get her brother in trouble. Blooded at last, eh? Archer had whispered in her ear as they left the room.
On the screen, storm clouds glowered over the grey sentinels of the world's most famous prehistoric monument, Stonehenge.
'No…' She clapped a hand over her mouth.
He couldn't. He couldn't be suggesting…
But Archer didn't do anything he wasn't fairly sure of. Archer hated the thought of ever looking silly. Which, always the picture of sober sincerity, he never did. Diane stood up slowly, her back to the rear wall. She fell as cold as marble. Realising she'd always hated him; it just never seemed right to loathe your only brother.
Archer explained his proposal simply and concisely, connecting with the fears and prejudices of his audience. Diane felt an undercurrent of excitement in the hall, as if each person was linked to the people on either side, to the front and the rear, by a thin copper wire. With the ceiling lights out and Stonehenge still on the screen, she looked down and thought she saw a softly glowing net, a grid of pulsating energy.
She felt an utter despair. And something else that squirmed inside her, wanting to get out.
'So you see,' Archer was saying, 'there is a very clear and obvious precedent for these restrictions. All I need to know at this stage, is… do you, the people of Glastonbury, want it to happen?'
'Too bloody true,' a man shouted out. 'Soon as possible.'
And there were other cries of affirmation and support. A mindless response, the most alarming sound Diane could ever remember having heard.
She couldn't see Archer's eyes across the darkened hall, but she knew they were focused on her. As their gazes locked, triumph with dismay, an odd smell came to her: salty, earthy and fleshy. Not the fresh-blood, violent-death smell of the poor fox. More like the inside of an old- fashioned butcher's shop. There was a horrible warmth to it and a sour kind of voracious life; it pulled at her stomach; she felt disgusted, and somehow strengthened.