He didn’t know what kind of welcome to expect. He imagined that by now Ardwyn would have long since taken up with her rich young man, Gus, but for all these years he’d deliberately avoided trying to find out. It was easy enough; her social circle was unlikely to overlap with his, and he wasn’t much for reading the society papers or the financial news.
The rutted cart track through the outlying woods of Swinley was a gravel road now, with electricity and telephone lines strung on poles alongside. Presumably they had motor vehicles and lightbulbs. The Farrow could perform their blood-soaked rituals and then settle down nice and cosy to listen to the Light Programme on the wireless.
And all of a sudden the deserter knew he couldn’t do this. It was all too big. He had no place amongst such people and he’d been a fool to ever think so. He turned to leave.
He heard Gar bellowing and crashing through the trees a moment before the huge man exploded onto the path, grabbed his shoulders and slammed him up against a tree. Gar roared in his face, spittle flying, his breath rank.
‘It’s me… you idiot…’ Everett gasped.
‘Yes!’ Gar’s mouth was split in a grin like a boulder-filled crevasse. ‘YES!’
‘Pleased to see you too, chum, but would you mind putting me down?’
Gar dropped him, and while Everett brushed himself down and picked up his kit bag, demonstrated his glee at seeing his old friend again by whacking a nearby tree-trunk with a log and whooping. ‘Drink!’ he shouted.
‘Sorry, chum, but I don’t actually have—’
Gar shook his head and stabbed a thick forefinger at his own chest. ‘Drink! My drink!’ He tugged at Everett’s arm.
‘Your drink? You have drink? You’re offering it to me? Well, that’s very generous but I really can’t stay. I’ve just remembered that—’
But Gar was insistent, a twenty-stone toddler. It seemed that desertion was no longer an option. Gar dragged Everett along the narrow lanes of Swinley – away from Mother’s cottage and towards the half-derelict barn where he lived, except that it too had changed with the years. The window holes had proper shutters and there were tubs of flowers by the door, which was decorated with animal skulls. The deserter didn’t have time to remark on Gar’s house-husbandry or his carpentry skills, because the big man led him inside to proudly display the thing that he’d built inside. Everett saw a copper vat, rubber tubes, and a glass demijohn, and smelled a familiar sweet reek.
‘Is that…’ he breathed. ‘My God, Gar, is that a still?’
Gar nodded wildly, and even jumped up and down a little. He picked up the demijohn in one hand as easily as if it were a hip flask and poured a little clear liquid into a tin cup and passed it to Everett. ‘Drink! I make!’
‘Well, you certainly are a clever old stick and no mistake.’ But then he supposed twenty-six years was a long time for someone even like Gar to learn a few new things. He took the cup of moonshine, sniffed the contents, and tried a wary sip.
When he’d finished coughing and his eyes had stopped watering enough to be able to see again, he handed the cup back. ‘That is brutal,’ he gasped. ‘You’re an evil man and you must be stopped.’
Gar topped up his cup and handed it back. ‘Drink!’ he insisted, and swigged from the bottle to demonstrate. He shuddered, and howled.
‘Oh, all right, just a quick one, then,’ Everett replied, swallowed a mouthful and howled right back at him.
* * *
The hangover that followed was almost as brutal as the moonshine itself, but the equinox still wasn’t for a few more days so he had time to pull himself together and make a proper approach to Mother. She interrogated him long and hard about his adventures over the years before she was satisfied that his spirit was strong enough to cope with sacrificing Moccus.
‘He is an ancient thing,’ Mother told him. ‘One of the very last of an elder race who shaped the world when humanity was hunting aurochs with flint spears. But that which shapes creation is inevitably shaped by that creation. The begetter is begotten. We take Moccus into our bodies and souls, and something of us is taken into him. With each replenishment sacrifice it is not just the life of the vessel which goes into him but something of the man wielding the knife, the way that a great work of art will carry some flavour of the artist’s soul. And with each rebirth, Moccus’ spirit is shaped by that man’s character.’
‘In that case I think you’ve made a huge mistake,’ he replied, ‘because my “character”, as you call it, is atrocious.’
‘But that’s exactly what makes you perfect! Not the fiddling details
