Hallowe'en – the Feast of the Dead.
This remains the most mysterious of Celtic festivals, a time when we remember the departed and the tradition bequeathed to us. A time, also, when the dead may be consulted, although such practices have been actively discouraged because of the inherent danger to the health and sanity of the living.
CHAPTER I
It was bad, what he learned about John Peveril Stanage. So bad it made Macbeth wonder how the hell the creep had ever gotten published as a writer for children without some kind of public outcry. And yet he felt there was something crucial they weren't telling him, something they were edging around.
'It was, I believe, an incident with the cats that was the first indication,' Ernie Dawber was saying. 'Because that was the first direct attack on Ma… not your ma, Willie, the old Ma.'
'Bob and Jim,' Willie said sadly. 'They was always called Bob and Jim.'
Very slowly Macbeth had been building up an image of this village as somewhere arguably more Celtic, in the ethnic and religious sense, than any known area of Scotland, Wales, Ireland or even upstate California.
And because he'd never seen the place, except at night and through equatorial rain, this image was clearer and more credible than it ought to have been.
He'd learned that Ma Wagstaff, some kind of matriarchal figure, had died under what the people of Bridelow, if not the medics, considered questionable circumstances.
He'd learned the significance of the Man in the Moss, about which he recollected reading a down page item in the New York Times some months back.
Altogether, he'd learned more than it might normally have been considered wise for them to tell him, and he guessed they'd opened up to him for two basic reasons – A: because they saw what Moira's death had done to him. And B: because they and most other sentient beings in Bridelow had good reason to believe they were in some deep shit.
'What'd he do to the cats?' Macbeth asked, not sure he really wanted to know.
'More a question of what he would have done,' Willie said, 'if Old Ma hadn't caught him with his magical paraphernalia and his knife and the poor cat tied to a bread board. He'd be about twelve at the time.'
'Little swine,' Milly said. There were two cats on her knee, one black, one white.
'I can just about remember it,' Willie said. 'I were only a little kid. I remember Old Ma shut herself away for a long time – most of a day. Just her and the cats – one had white bandages on its front paws, thanks to Jack, but it was better than no head. And none of us was allowed to go near, except them as was summoned.'
'Always the practice at a time of crisis,' said Ernie Dawber. 'I remember, not long after I became a teacher at the school, Walter Boston, who was vicar then, he shuffled in one fine morning and called me out of class. I was to go and present myself to Old Ma at once. Well, I wasn't entirely sure in those days of Old Ma's role in the community, but I knew enough not to argue, so it was 'class dismissed' and-off I went.'
Ernie Dawber was sitting in a stiff-backed chair, his hat on his knees and a cup and saucer balanced on the crown of it.
'So, in I go, and there's Old Ma, sitting like you, Milly, cats on knees. And our Ma was there, too, still known as Iris in those days, although not for much longer. Anyroad, they said I was to go back and talk to each of the children in turn and find out if any of them had had… dealings… with Jack.'
Macbeth said, 'We talking about what I think we're talking about?'
'Depends,' Milly Gill said. 'Nowadays what they call ritual child-abuse is mostly just a cover for paedophile stuff. For Jack, the abuse was incidental, the ritual was the important bit.'
'Let's put this in context,' Ernie Dawber said. 'The Bridelow tradition is very much on the distaff side, and most of us accept this. It's a gentler, softer kind of, of…'
'Witchcraft?' Macbeth said.
Milly said, 'We don't like that word, Mungo. It implies you want to use it to do something. All we wanted was to keep a balance. It's more like, you know, conservation. That's why women have been best at it; not got that same kind of aggression, not so arrogant as men.'
'In general.' Ernie Dawber sniffed once. 'But what I wanted to say was that you don't get a tradition carried on this long unless there's a certain…'
'Power,' Milly said. 'Immense power.'
'… concentrated here,' said Mr Dawber.
'Power?' Macbeth was still sitting at the gateleg table. There was a small amount of whisky left in his glass. 'What kind of power we talking about?'
Milly rearranged the cats. 'Let's just say that if you wanted to do something you'd do it a lot better in Bridelow than you might elsewhere.'
Willie said, 'For most of the lads here it's no big deal. We used to say it were women's stuff – back in the days when you were allowed to talk like that. So it were a while before anybody realized that Jack… Stanage, I'll call him that, though that's just an invented name he writes under… that Jack Stanage had been, like… studying.'
'He always had a girl,' Ernie said. 'Any girl. Any girl – or woman – he wanted. This'd be from the age of about thirteen. Bit more precocious in those days than it might seem now.'
'Yes,' Milly said, and they all looked at her. Milly looked down at the cats and said no more.
'I didn't notice that so much,' said Willie hurriedly, 'him being a few years older than me. What I noticed was the money. He always had lots of money. He was generous with it too, if you went along with what he wanted you to do. He could show you a good time, could Jack.'
Milly didn't look up. 'Not when you're ten years old,' she said.
'Uh… yeah.' Macbeth reached over to his slicker, pulled out the paperback, Blue John's Way. Ernie Dawber picked it up with a thin smile.
'You read it?'
'Leafed through it. In light of what I just heard, I wondered if maybe…'
'Not so much an allegory, Mr Macbeth, as…'
'Mungo.'
'When I know you better, Mr Macbeth. Not so much allegory as a case of 'only the names have been changed'.'
'So let me get this right…' Macbeth was cautious. 'This is a guy who gravitates towards the, uh, arcane. A guy who might like to try and harness other people's powers, maybe.'
Willie looked up. 'What are you thinking about?'
Macbeth finished up his whisky. It made him feel no better. 'I'm thinking about Moira Cairns,' he said soberly. 'And I'm thinking about a comb.' To Joel Beard, former teacher of physical education, the issue had always seemed such a simple one. If good was to triumph over evil then good required strength. Good needed to work out regularly and get into condition. Indeed, he found a direct correlation between the heavy pectoral cross and the powerful pectoral muscles needed to support it.
But he couldn't find the pectoral cross.
He'd found the wooden lectern, one of the owl's wooden legs missing, smashed up against the Horridge family tomb.
Now he was down on his hands and knees in the sodden grass, the rain pummelling his back.
Not that he felt powerless without the cross, not that he felt like a warrior without his sword; he could stand naked and know that his spiritual strength came from within, but…
'Mr Beard… are you here?'
Joel stopped scrabbling in the grass, felt his back stiffen. The fluid, tenor voice had curled with ease around the tumult of the night. It was, he realized suddenly, the voice of a man who might have been a priest.
It's all around you, Mr Beard… you'll see the signs everywhere… in the church…
Joel stood and was drawn towards the voice and the question which had tormented him for so many months.
