'Forget it,' he'd decreed automatically about a quarter of an hour ago. 'Nobody goes out.' Although for the life of him he couldn't remember why nobody should go out. Except that while it might be cold in here it was extremely wet out there. Frankly, Chris reckoned he could probably use a piss, a pint and a bag of chips in that order.
Stupidest thing they'd done had been to let the bloody bus go. That was Joel again, silly sod. Burn your boats, he'd instructed them. Well, it was all right for him, he'd cleared off somewhere. Least he could have done was left his mobile phone around; they could have got Reg Hattersley out of bed and bribed him to fetch his coach back.
Chris surveyed his little band, all forty-seven of them, The Angels of the New Advent. High-flown name, eh, for an assorted bunch of misfits whose sole connecting factor was the conviction that their lives were one course short of a banquet. Only one course, note, they all had their own houses and decent cars and dishwashers, etc.
Some of them were wandering around, rubbing their heads. A couple had lit cigarettes. His watch told him it had gone midnight. This was getting ridiculous.
He remembered the singing breaking up into self-parody and a few of them had torn clothes off, mostly the ones clad in propaganda clobber like this silly T-shirt. And then there'd been isolated outbursts of anger and resentment, mostly towards Joel Beard, who'd brought them to this dump and then abandoned them – but not before going berserk and assaulting Martin, who'd lost a tooth, and Declan, who was convinced he was suffering delayed concussion. And, of course, convincing Chantal she'd been raped by an evil spirit.
'I ask you…' Chris said scornfully, aloud.
When someone started banging on the door, he wandered across, suspicious.
'Whosat?'
'Who am I talking to?' An authoritative kind of voice.
'Yes?' Chris said, equally peremptory.
'This is the police,' the voice said levelly. 'I don't know who you are but I have to inform you that you have no legal right to occupy this building and I'm suggesting you vacate it immediately. If you unbolt this door and everyone comes out without any trouble, I can promise you that no further action is likely to be taken. If, however…'
'Yeah?' Chris said. This really was the police?
A distant voice berated him, his own voice within his chest. He heard it say, Get thee hence, tempter, what he might well have said out loud an hour ago. What a plonker he'd been.
I do strongly advise you, sir, not to play silly-buggers. Open this door, please.'
Chris gazed at the oak door, probably six inches thick, at the iron bolts, four inches wide.
Where is your power? the inner voice bleated pathetically at the policeman. Blow it down, why don't you, with your foul, satanic breath.
Must've been nuts, Chris thought. All of us. Mass hysteria.
'Yeah, all right,' he said resignedly and drew back the bolts.
There were cheers of relief from the brothers and sisters sprawled among the pews. Though glances were exchanged, Milly didn't ask her how she knew there was nothing in the house. There was silence, then Milly said, 'What are we going to do now?'
'Don't know about you,' Moira said. 'But I think I'm gonny cry.'
'Moira.' Willie was in the doorway, about a yard from where Ma's ghost had stood.
Milly shook her head. 'It's not here, little man.'
Willie nodded, unsurprised. 'She weren't much of a filer-away of stuff. 'Cept for foul-smelling gunge in the bottom of owd bottles.'
'Don't knock it,' Moira said. Less than half an hour after forcing down Ma's Crisis Mixture, she was, inexplicably, feeling stronger than she had in some while.
'Moira…' Willie glanced behind him to where the rain bounced off Ma's moon-white doorstep. 'Don't you think…?'
'Yeah,' Moira said. 'I know. I know.' She sighed. 'OK. Come away in, Macbeth.'
Suddenly self-conscious, she found herself mindlessly reaching for the duffel-coat hood to cover the desolate ruins of her hair. 'Ach,' she said, and let her hands fall to her sides.
When he stumbled over the threshold, this Mungo Macbeth, of the Manhattan Macbeths, he was looking no more smooth and glamorous than the average drowned-rat hiker from the moor.
Willie had told her briefly how the guy had driven all the way from Glasgow with three crucial words: John, Peveril and Stanage.
'Mungo,' she said, her voice unexpectedly husky, 'I don't know what I'm gonny do with you, and that's the truth.'
Macbeth smiled, a soft, stupid, wet-faced smile; she could tell he hadn't even noticed her hair.
'The one big thing,' he said, almost in a whisper, and made no sense.
It fact it was all crazy, Moira thought. Horrifically crazy. He shouldn't be here. He didn't know what the hell he was into. He didn't have a chance.
And did any of them?
CHAPTER III
Eventually, Benjie had persuaded his mam to let him take The Chief to his bedroom, where the German Shepherd squeezed himself into the gap between the wardrobe and the wall, sat there with his ears down and panted a lot.
'Come on, lad,' Benjie whispered, sitting up in bed in old ninja turtle pyjamas. But The Chief wouldn't move. He kept himself in this dark corner and there was pleading in his sad, brown eyes.
Above the noise of rain, Benjie could hear other village dogs howling in the distance. When he lay down and shut his eyes he realised that the way The Chief was panting meant he was really howling too, but The Chief was smart, the last thing he wanted was to have himself taken out to the shed.
When Benjie opened his eyes again, he saw light-beams flitting across the curtains, like car headlights.
Which would have been all right, only the back of the house overlooked the Moss and there were no cars on the Moss, except months ago when the lorries and JCBs had been out building up the road and they'd found the bogman.
Benjie scrambled to the end of his bed, leaned over and stuck his head through the gap in the curtains.
He gasped.
It were like Fireworks Night out there.
Lights all over the Moss, like smouldery bonfires. Lights swooshing like rockets, through the rain, from one side to another, sometimes going across each other.
But no noise except for the howling dogs and the rain.
The lights lasted no more than ten seconds and then it was all gone and Benjie couldn't see anything apart from the water rolling down the glass.
But when he lay in bed, the light showed up in the space between his eyes and his closed eyelids. He saw the Moss lit up greenish now, all green and glowing, except for the Dragon Tree.
And that was twice as big now, its branches, all gnarled and knotted and black among whirling, spinning lights, two of them spiking up into the sky… arms like giant horns with groping claws on the end. And the whole thing was breathing, dragging up big, soggy lungfuls of peat, and soon it was going to burst and its arms would gather up the whole village.
Benjie felt a scream coming on and chewed the bedclothes instead, not wanting to be put out in the shed with The Chief and get gobbled up first. Macbeth watched Chris and Chantal sink side by side into the sofa at the Rectory. They didn't seem like the same people. 'I really am tired,' Chris said. 'I'm shagged out.'
And then, clearly shocked at himself, he looked up at Cathy. 'I'm sorry. I don't know what I'm saying. Catherine, has something got inside me? Am I possessed?'
Cathy waved it away. 'Chris, you've got to tell me very quickly, no evasion. What happened in there?'
Chris tugged at his beard. 'I just don't know. First of all, it was fine, we felt… how we used to feel. Holy.
