Meaning an effigy? A dummy representing the spirit they wanted to conjure?
Necromancy. The black side of spiritualism. You collect, in the appropriately drawn and consecrated circle, the most intimate possessions of the dead person, those things…
… his clothes. carrying his smell, his sweat. And those things…
… the pipes. he would most hate to leave behind. And those…
… me. Dic. people who were close to him. And…
And you. the things after which he craved.
Moira moved deliberately out from under the tree, stared up into the sky until she was blinded by the rain, and then hung her head and let the night drench her.
They took the comb.
They cut off my hair.
They have me. They have my essence.
They have used these things to summon Matt Castle from the grave.
CHAPTER IV
How Young Frank Manifold had ended up at the brewery he didn't exactly remember.
What he did remember was his anger reaching gale-force as soon as the cold rain hit it. Slung out again! Slung out like a kid from the only pub in Bridelow.
Settle down, Frank.
Cool it, eh, Frank.
Don't you think you've had a couple too many, Frank?
Int it past your bedtime, Frank?
They'd say it once too often. In fact tonight they had said it once too often.
What Frank remembered first was bunching his fists on the pub forecourt and looking around for somebody to hit and seeing only rain and smeary lights in the windows of houses folk as wouldn't come out in it merely for the pleasure of being filled in by Young Frank.
Another thing he'd thought about was hitting a wall, but he'd done that once before and his fist remembered and wouldn't go through with it.
The soft option would've been to go straight home and have a row with the wife. But if Susan didn't feel like a row she wouldn't let you have one, simple as that. Susan, who insisted that being in the Mothers' Union was just something you agreed to so as to keep the numbers up, but who could look at you through slitted eyes and take the anger out of you easy as letting tyres down.
Don't want that, he remembered thinking. Want to keep the anger.
Raging through the rain in just his jeans and his ordinary jacket, sopping wet-through in minutes.
Deciding at one stage, I know what I'll bloody do, I'll go up the church and duff over a few Born Again Christians.
Nowt against Christianity, as such. Nowt against Hans Gruber, a southerner but a straight-up bloke. Just that when it came to that big prat Joel Beard; when it came to T-shirts with JESUS SAVES on the front and grinning tossers stopping you in the street to asking how well you knew God; when it came to getting accosted by tasty women with PRAISE THE LORD across their tits…
When it came to it, truth was Frank didn't hate Born Again Christians anywhere near as much as he hated Gannons.
Which, he supposed, must be why he'd ended up pissing hard and high against the main door of the brewery, thinking maybe he could kick a couple of windows in before he sobered up.
Which was how come he saw the lights.
And how come he found the main door wasn't locked.
Well, this were a bit of a turn up. Frank stood a while getting rained on and stared upwards. Summat weird about this. Light coming out the sides of the wooden boards on the topmost windows, the owd malt store as was.
From what Frank had heard from his ex-workmates and his dad, that malt store hadn't been used in twenty years. When Gannons had the winching system repaired on the outside of the building there was no suggestion it had been for winching sacks all the way up to the top again, because the owd malt store'd been shut and boarded up. Make it look authentic for was what everybody thought.
Frank wandered around to the side of the building, and there was the platform thing… right at the top.
Summat had been winched up there tonight. Obviously.
Fucking cowboy brewers. Happen the owd malt store'd been refurbished. Happen they was having a little cocktail party up there for the directors.
Right then. See about that.
Frank went in. She knew, sure, how ill she was, soaked through and shivering, feverish, temperature racing up the thermometer, about to ring the little bell.
Knew also that she could never look into a mirror again. Not ever.
And yet her mind had never seemed so clear. A cold searchlight, ruthlessly spearing into dark and musty corners.
Felt weak as hell and sore, and she walked with difficulty through the leafless, waterlogged wood. But her mind was an athlete, leaping chasms of dark thoughts. Her mind was an engineer constructing complex bridges.
'What we're looking for,' Moira mumbled, stopping, moving closer to the stocky, blistered trunk of an oak, switching off the lamp, 'is something long-term.'
Like a long-term connection between Matt and Stanage.
This had happened before; Matt's enthusiasms were unstoppable. If Matt finds interesting echoes in a book, Matt goes in search of the author.
Take this as fact. Matt meets Stanage. Matt and Stanage find so much common ground that secrets are shared… at least on Matt's side.
Nobody other than Matt could have told Stanage about Moira Cairns and the comb. Say that by the time these two men meet, she's – stupidly – recorded 'The Comb Song' and both Matt and Stanage are scenting magic. And Stanage has stored all this away for future reference.
Moira sank down against the fat, scabby tree trunk, finding an almost sheltered spot between two huge protruding roots, enclosing her like legs. Sheets of rain on three sides; like touching in a cavern behind a waterfall.
OK.
If Stanage has learned about the comb he's learned a whole lot more of Matt's secrets, maybe passing on a few tantalizing but useless bits of information of his own about the old Celts and the Pennine Pipes in return. Worth it, because he sees such terrific potential in Matt, the most wonderful raw material for his own research.
Because Matt, maybe like Stanage, is ruled by his compulsions. Only Stanage is cleverer.
She closed her eyes and she was back in the ballroom of the Earl's Castle.
His face is an unhealthy white. He has light grey eyes and grey freckles on his expanse of forehead. There's a whiteness all about him, growing into arms like the branches of trees. Like antlers.
He is linked to the skulls on the walls. He is the horned god, the hunter of heads.
He has taken her hair.
And she sees it all with such brutal clarity, detached from her wonderful, magical comb-reared hair, her earliest, most important expression of individuality and free thought.
Hands to her head, couple of inches left, less in places. Aw, what the hell, you're alive, what d'you want, huh?
Revenge? She shivered with fever and fury.
Hands inside the guitar case. Stanage is feeling for the comb. He is feeling for your soul.
Two hundred miles away Matt Castle is lying in wait for death. Maybe Matt, in the last morphine minutes of
