'I don't know. Until we got Diane back.'
'You know what I think?' Woolly said.
'I don't even like to ask.'
'I think we got a battle on two levels here. On the material level, the Glastonbury First bit, the road, Bowkett's Bill. And all the side effects that lot's having on the invisible layers. Or maybe it's the other way around, and G-1 and the bypass, the whole thing's a manifestation of something going down on the Inner Planes.'
'Oh shit,' said Sam. 'I'm not that much of a sodding convert.'
'So what I think… I just think it's time we threw everything we got at this situation.'
'You're just saying that 'cause you reckon you've got nothing to lose.'
'Maybe,' Woolly said. 'Does it matter? Where's Verity keep the phone?'
'Never was any good at keeping my trap shut.' Sam stared at his cards. 'Aw, for fuck's sake, Woolly, you dealt me a bloody king-flush and threw your cards in.'
'Yeah, well,' Woolly said, 'it was about time I took a stroll. After I use the phone.'
They entered the cradle.
Henry VIII could steal the gold, pull down the walls, Powys thought, but the fat bastard couldn't take away the atmosphere.
Sometimes, when I am alone in the Abbey grounds, Colonel Pixhill had written, I become afraid of my own reverie, afraid that my soul will rise before its time.
Even at night it was not eerie. Merely awesome.
Juanita knew how to get in. She said most locals did. You just had to be quiet as you climbed over a certain garden wall in a backstreet. In the old days, Juanita said, many a bottle of Mateus Rose had been consumed under a full moon on the holyest erthe in all England.
They'd gone back to the main entrance. Near the dying Thorn. This was the way to approach it, Juanita said.
Beyond the wooden cross, uneven stone walls had evolved into a kind of organic life, could almost have been close-cut, layered hedges. Other walls, other buildings, heaps of hallowed rubble, were all features in what, even without the lawns and the manicuring, was a garden.
Powys laid down the suitcase on the dark grass. It was cold and wet, but the snow had gone.
This, in the beginning and at the end, was the heart. This was where it all came together. Thirty six secret, walled acres in what was still the centre of the town. Glastonbury's streets guarding their Abbey like…
Like the Holy Grail.
His gaze was raised to the focal point, the summit of the ruins. He'd seen pictures of it many times: the light flowing like a river between twin towers.
Except they weren't towers. And your second concept – an arch with the top part missing – they weren't that either. They were the ends of two high, buttressed walls, a flawed mirror image of each other, but they rose like forearms from elbows resting on the green turf. Ending in compliant, cupped hands… hands which could almost be supporting an invisible bowl.
Powys felt Juanita's tentative arm against his and realised he'd been standing here staring, for several minutes, at the moon through the space between the stone hands.
'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.
