and wagons, we couldn't even get the car past!'
'Whazzat, Miss?'
'Travellers. There's a bus broken down right in the middle of the road.'
'A buzz?'
'It's blocking the road'' Diane was aware of Juanita pulling open her Afghan coat and ripping at her skirt.
'Oh my God.' Juanita said. 'Oh my God. Look!' Pointing at the ash tree, something hanging from it.
'Aye,' Don Moulder was saying. 'A buzz. Maybe you seen it. But were it a real buzz? That's the big question, Miss Diane. Were it a real… Christ, are you mad, woman?'
Beside Diane, a muffled, ragged figure, cloth-raced like a scarecrow, began to run towards the inferno.
The sunset window cracked first, like a gunshot, and then it exploded, a thousand fragments of hot glass blown out at Juanita, muffled like a Muslim woman, a torn -off length of her skirt wound around her face as she threw herself at the cottage.
Diane rushed forward, squealing like a piglet, but Don Moulder grabbed her, both arms around her waist, and held her back.
A huge gush of fire lunged out of the cottage and hit the ash tree with a lurid splash of sparks, like a welding torch in a foundry. Whatever was hanging limply from a branch was lit up very briefly before the flame pounced like a cat on rat and consumed it.
Diane screamed wildly inside Don Moulder's arms.
Juanita had disappeared.
Brittle, burning dead leaves from the ash tree danced like frenzied fireflies to the futile warbling of the trapped fire-engines.
As out of the shattered sunset window toppled a frightful thing, a monstrous shape… a fossil tree with rigid projecting branches, a twisted, blackened pylon.
Coughing and retching, with Don Moulder's leathery farmer's hands clasped over her spasming stomach, Diane saw just about everything.
She saw that the tree was something entangled and kept upright by a metal artist's easel. Or maybe two easels, or even three, entwined, fused together into a single, horrific fire-sculpture, all black and flaking.
At the top of this twisted creation was spiked a charcoal ball, like a Hallowe'en pumpkin which had fallen into the bonfire. When the construction teetered, the ball twirled to display…
It was impolite to be sick on someone. Diane found the strength to pull away. Vomiting into the grass, she could still see it.
The grisly twinkle of teeth as the charred remains of Jim Battle toppled into Juanita's flung-open arms and the cottage roof collapsed into a gush of pumping blood-orange smoke.
Before she fainted on Don Moulder, Diane glimpsed something at the very centre of the billowing.
Obscenely like the hands of a conjuror letting loose a black dove, it was a smoking cup of shadows, a dark chalice.
SEVENTEEN
The cottage was fine, just as peaceful as it had ever been. Arnold limped contentedly around, Mrs Whitney brought homemade soup and all the books stayed on the shelves. Outside, there was snow on the hilltops and a stack of logs, nicely dried and split, in the old barn.
Winter was at the door, season of rough walks and hot fires, and whatever had been happening inside Joe Powys to cause that period of upset, that blip, it was obviously in remission.
So… fine.
Well, except for the no Fay aspect, and even that was fine for Fay, who was a people-person and had been getting increasingly restless through the summer. It hadn't been love – Joe Powys kept telling himself this – so much as mutual need, the need for someone who had also experienced these things to be there when you awoke before dawn, in terror and self doubt. Would Fay still awake in terror in Brussels or Munich or Amsterdam? Perhaps not.
So, fine. OK Really.
Anyway, there was another woman now.
In hazy sepia, a cheerful, buxom lady in a hat and a long woollen skirt pushes a bicycle with a shopping basket over the handlebars. Colours slowly fading into the picture as she crackles through autumn leaves in a half- wooded lane to a steep and narrow path; at the end of this, a big shed with lace curtains at the windows, the shed built into the flank of a hill of cucumber green rising, almost sheerly it seems from here, to a church tower of grey- brown stone, a church tower without a church.
Her real name was Violet Firth, Evans when she married, She was born in 1890 in North Wales, although her family later moved to Somerset. As a young woman, during the years of World War I, she became quite a successful psychotherapist, initially attracted to the new ideas of Sigmund Freud.
Which she rapidly outgrew, realising there were phenomena of the mind and spirit which Freud could not approach.
During this period she discovered she was telepathic, psychic and a natural medium.
She also discovered Glastonbury.
Somebody gave her a redundant army hut and she put it up directly under Glastonbury Tor and it was here that she founded the mystical order which became the Society of the Inner Light.
Powys already knew a little about her. During his research for The Old Golden Land he'd learned that she was the first writer to discuss the psychic aspect of leys, those mysterious alignments of ancient sites across the countryside.
What had put him off further reading was the name under which she produced her novels and magical studies: Dion Fortune. It was developed, apparently, from her family motto Deo Non Fortuna. Not her fault that, from this end of the century, it sounded like a fifties rock and roll singer.
Anyway, this was probably one of the reasons he'd never got around to reading Avalon of the Heart.
'All hokum, well over the top,' Dan Frayne had said, presenting him with the paperback to read on the train home. 'But it left me with a kind of warm glow, you know? Made me feel, yeah, this is The Place. Dangerous stuff, in retrospect.'
Powys read it twice. It was just over a hundred pages long, a personalised guide to Glastonbury and its mysteries in a style which was kind of Helen Steiner Rice meets Enid Blyton.
Dan Frayne was right. It was wonderful.
When he came off the train, he went directly to the Hereford Bookshop (beside a famous ley-line near the cathedral) and ordered everything of Dion Fortune's still in print. Then went to the library to find out who she was, really.
The book glowed. It was concise, vivid and haunting. It was a love story, about a torrid affair between a woman and a town. It told you exactly why people did what Dan Frayne and this Juanita had done – going to Glastonbury in search of something they couldn't define.
While Uncle Jack Powys, in a book more than ten times as long, explained why they all failed.
No wonder Fortune hadn't exactly taken to A Glastonbury Romance, published just two years earlier. Do we behave like that at Glastonbury? she wrote. I must have missed a lot. We do not quite come up to Mr Powis's specifications.
Mischievously misspelling Powys.
Joe Powys decided he really liked this woman. The night he got home he made a space on the shelf next to the Romance and inserted Avalon of the Heart.
The antidote.
Powys grinned and went to bed and slept the whole night through without interruption. And another six.
