And the woman glided towards her along the bus's dusty aisle. Diane began to gasp convulsively with fear; the shiny pole misted from her breath.
None of… 'onsense now…
The voice was thin and fractured like a car-radio on FM during a storm in the hills. Diane sagged against the pole.
Sorrow settled in her chest. Sorrow received from the grey-woman, sorrow shimmering in the vagueness of her, in the half formed face like a scratched old photograph. The scent of old dust and lavender.
'Nanny…'
Essence of long-ago nights, pillows damp with tears, lonely little motherless girl in a house of cold leather, guns and uncompromising maleness.
Diane's arms pulled away from the pole at last and she came to her feet and reached out for the crumbling bundle of dusty, moth-ravaged fragments, as the lights in the bus died, one by one.
'Oh, Nanny…'
And she saw, in a comer, the yellow eyes in the mist. The eyes of her own hatred, the evil in her.
Diane felt her stomach shrivel in disgust. She just wasn't that kind of person. She had no natural aggression. She was the sort who ran away and hid and never wanted to harm anyone or anything.
… allow it, then…
'What?'
… take your… edicine, girl… swallow it'.
Diane closed her eyes.
Do it now! Now!
Diane opened her mouth.
She breathed it in.
And it filled her.
Inflating her checks, swelling her throat and then her breast, bloating her abdomen and finally throwing her to her knees, her arms outstretched like a legless, rocking doll.
So cold… so cold inside her that it froze her eyes wide and stiffened her tongue. She saw then her lower body had become luminous blue, radiating icy light, and she had no control over any of it, was aware of being squeezed out, reduced to a small, helpless fragment of consciousness, a particle of floating fear, only a moment away from ceasing to exist.
She watched her radiant body tossed on to its back on the filthy floor of the bus like an old mattress, was aware of the air corning out like vomit, in a long swooooosh, as if someone was sitting on her stomach.
Diane rolled over. It seemed as if she'd been separated from her body for a long time, but it must have been no more than a couple of seconds. It felt strange to want to move an arm and for that arm to move. She began to crawl, and as the energy returned so did the panic, in a rush.
The Dark Chalice glistened palely on the kitchen table.
'That's disgusting,' Powys said. The words sounding so trite and ludicrous he almost broke out laughing.
'Its base was of old, blackened oak, like the beams of Meadwell.
The wrists emerged from the oak like the stems of yellowing fungi. Whatever kept the bones of the hands and fingers together, it still held strong and the skeletal hands still gripped the bowl of bone, the upturned cranium.
'Who is it, Verity?'
Verity said nothing.
'Is this… I mean, is this the Abbot?'
Verity pulled the Safeway bag back over the horror.
She'd said vaguely that she must have found it by the side of the well. Where he'd placed it so that he would have both hands free to pull himself out.
Powys banished for ever an image that came to him of Verity, fresh from her discovery of murdered Woolly, kicking Oliver Pixhill's groping fingers from the rim of the well, shutting out his scream.
She came down from the bus in floods of tears. She didn't know if it was over. How was she ever going to know?
She saw Juanita and Don Moulder over by the gate. On the other side of it, Joe Powys stood with little Verity and Arnold the dog, who had brought the lightball into the cold heart of it all.
And then came a strange jolt in her breast.
He was shambling slowly across the field towards the bus, his head down as if he was scared to look at her. His buccaneer's hair was matted, he'd lost his famous earring.
Diane, full of tearful longing but still uncertain, looked back along the deck of the bus.
Go, said the Third Nanny.
She had a nice smile.
Epilogue
Prophecy is a dangerous trade, but we may hazard the guess that history will look back to our English Jerusalem as the cradle of many things that have gone on to enrich the spiritual heritage of our race.
Booksellers High Street
Glastonbury Prop. Juanita Carey 24 December Danny, OH GOD, Danny where do I start?
Where's it going to END? You'll have read the papers, seen the TV reports (all concentrating on the Pennard madness, nobody making the right connections) and I know Powys phoned you.
Maybe this is entirely superfluous. As usual, I don't know whether I'm writing to you or to myself. Today, I'm going to try to have a long talk with Diane. I've seen a lot of her, of course, but there's always been someone else there. Policemen. Her solicitor, Quentin Cotton.
And Sam, of course – she's moved into his flat, doesn't like to let him out of her sight. She hasn't really taken it all in, of course. Still talks about her father as if he were still alive and still the owner of Bowermead Hall. Which SHE is now, of course. I don 't think any of us have quite taken that in. 'Two hundred acres,' Powys keeps saying. 'Three vineyards. And a pack of hunting hounds.' At which he grins delightedly at Sam, and Sam looks terribly embarrassed. We're still staying, Powys and me, at The George and Pilgrims. He brought the old Amstrad across and I sit at the window and tap out this nonsense, looking down on High Street, very un-Christmas Eve, but still there, you know? Still there. Still with the candle lit in the window of the Wicked Wax Co. Even the quake didn't put that candle out. And I think I'm happy. Happier than I've been since I don't know when. There's no calm before a storm, only tension. After the storm, that's where you find calm.
I feel guilty about this. Guilty because I'm glad – have to be frank and honest here – that old Pennard killed Archer and, especially, the hateful psychopath Ceridwen. I can still see Pennard framed in the entrance of the reservoir. Where he was always grey and heavy to me, there seemed to be a pure, fresh light in him as he raised that gun. Which just has to be very wrong, doesn't it? God knows, I hate and fear guns as much as Sam Daniel. I'm sorry – ignore this bit, I'm mixed up, there's too much I don't understand. And yet aspects of it are coming clearer all the time. It was only yesterday that it occurred to me that out of all those appalling people in the reservoir – and I recognised many of them from that night on the Tor – there was one missing. It was the man who called himself Gwyn ap Nudd. The man in the hairy mask. I'm almost certain now that behind that mask was Oliver Pixhill. Diane told me how the whole attitude of the travellers' convoy began to change as they approached the start of the St Michael Line at Bury St Edmunds. What I suppose you would have to call a dark element entered. The less serious ones – the colourful, circusy types – had dropped away so that the only remaining members of the original group
