'Not here. I feel like I'm not here.'
'Listen. Juanita.' He wanted to touch her. Didn't know where
it was safe to. 'It was a real bus, OK? Sam talked to the driver. He's a scrap-dealer
from Taunton. He was delivering the bus to a Mr Moulder, who has a farm up Wellhouse
Lane.'
The eyes wavered.
'But he took the wrong turning. He doesn't know why he did
that because he knows Glastonbury very well, but he took a wrong turning. He
came down High Street and there you were in the middle of the road. He said he
braked so hard he nearly had a heart attack and still he thought he'd killed
you. And I... me too, you know?'
Joe Powys's head fell into
Juanita's lap. He felt brittle and exhausted like the Holy Thorn. No sap left.
He knew more than his mind could handle about Pixhill and Dion Fortune and the
dark heritage of the Ffitches. And yet he knew nothing. He'd very nearly
murdered a man in a rush of mindless violence He'd thought his dog had been
killed.
Also the woman he really ...
He felt Juanita's lips on his hair.
'You were crying,' she said. 'You thought I was dead and you
were crying.'
'I shouldn't have cried.' He sat up. 'It's only a station between
trains.'
'What?'
He kissed her. Her checks were wet and hot, her lips dry and
cracked. He moistened them with his tongue, felt her shiver. Her face at last
moved under his and her arms went round him. Just her arms.
Powys hugged Juanita and they stayed like that, dazed and
weeping, for several minutes. Only in Glastonbury. Who said that?
'I'm a mess,' she said. 'It isn't possible to be a bigger mess
than me. I don't even know what's real. I don't trust my eyes, I don't trust my
body...'
'I'm real. I think.'
She pulled away from him.
'Listen, I'm serious. Of all the things that've happened to me
tonight, I don't know which ones are real. You tell me that bus was real ... an
hour or two ago I saw that bus in a painting - that actual bus, with its
radiator ... and then I saw one of the Goddess Shop pots bloody well menstruating.
And there was Ceridwen in her robes in the middle of the road. Talking to me. Instructing
me that I was now officially a hag, which ... which makes a lot of sense when
you've had about two hundred hot flushes ... I do mean two hundred very real
hot flushes, which Matthew Banks will confirm. I'm a hag. A crone. Look at me.'
She wore no make-up. She was very beautiful. She was to die
for.
'Look at me.' She began to cry.
He kissed her. His hands slid under her sloppy sweater.
There was nothing there but warm skin.
'Um, would you mind if... ?'
'You don't want this kind of hassle, Powys.'
He could hardly breathe. He fumbled the sweater over her
speckled shoulders, draping it over Arnold, who murmured but didn't move.
'OK.' Juanita was looking down at herself. 'It's a relief. I
thought they were going to be around my navel.'
Powys touched a brown nipple with his tongue. It had an
aureole of freckles.
'Dion Fortune would have understood.' He tossed his sweater on
Arnold and wriggled out of his jeans. 'What you've been through.'
'Mmm?'
'Psychic attack, Juanita. Nobody but nobody has two hundred
hot flushes out of the blue in a few hours.' He unzipped her velvet skirt. 'That
woman really hates you. We're going to have to break the spell.'
Guiding her back on to the bed, this creaky Victorian
four-poster. The mattress was rather too high to fall back on. He lifted her in
his arms; she felt unnervingly light, a bit cold.
'Say,
I am very
beautiful
. Say,
I am a goddess.
'
Sliding her into bed.
She said, 'I know what this is. You've seen that bloody
picture of me, haven't you?'
'The
Avalonian
,' Powys said. 'Issue Six. And nothing's changed.'
'No?' She lifted the sheet with an elbow. 'This is where they took
away the skin. To repair the hands. It means - this is the principal sick joke
- it means I can't take any pressure on my thighs.'
Juanita closed her eyes, laughing. Her arms wide open, a hand
on each pillow. It was the first time he'd ever seen her relaxed.
'Not a problem.' His lips moving down to the scars where the
strips of skin had been scraped away. 'Too rough?'
'Nnnnnn.'
And slowly up to the bush. Juanita moaned, her legs opening.
'Turn on your side maybe?'
She said softly, 'This is ridiculous. This ... Oh ... my God.'
'My
goddess
,' Powys
breathed.
Around midnight, he
returned from Carey and Frayne with a suitcase. He also had a tray of tea from
the George and Pilgrims kitchens.
Juanita was sitting up in bed. She had the sweater on. He
poured tea. 'I forgot the straw.'
'Typical,' Juanita said. 'And so little to think about.'
'Um, I'm going to say this now. Ever since I saw that
photograph of you in Dan's office...'
She put a discoloured finger to his lips.
'Don't say any more. It's bad luck.'
'That's an old Avalonian
superstition, is it?'
'It's how I feel, OK?'
'OK.' He put the book on the bed, turned it towards her. It
was a hardback copy of
Psychic
Self-Defence
by Dion Fortune. 'Have you read this?'
'Bits of it.'
'You read the werewolf story?'
'Where she conjures the elemental beast?'
'Let's read it again.'
He opened the book under the Tiffany lamp, whose bulb no
longer flickered.
'Listen to this,' Powys said.
'Chapter One
SIGNS OF PSYCHIC ATTACK
We live in the midst of
invisible forces whose effects alone we perceive ... Normally ... we are
protected by our very incapacity to perceive.'
'Verity,' Juanita said.
'Just a passing thought. OK. It's about page fifty. Ah. "I
had received serious injury from someone who, at considerable cost to myself, I
had disinterestedly helped, and I was sorely tempted to retaliate. Lying on my
bed resting one afternoon...''
'Her resentment materialises at the bedside.' Juanita shuddered.
'As a kind of grey wolf.'
Powys sat on the bed. Held a cup of tea to her lips. 'Before
we read the rest, I have to tell you where I went this evening.'
'It's like a truly horrible
Grimm's fairytale,' Juanita said.
After he'd told her about Violet and Roger Ffitch and Pixhill,
he told her about Archer. The blood and the fire and the pink teddy.
'No wonder the nannies were horrible,' Juanita said. 'Those
weren't nannies, they were bodyguards.'
'He never knew for sure,' Powys said. 'And he still doesn't
know. That's what he's had to live with. Makes you feel sorry for the old
bastard, doesn't it?'
'It makes a lot of things clear. Poor kid. 'The retained placenta
- I vaguely knew about that. Not being well up in midwifery, I didn't know
about the amount of blood-letting it caused. Did I tell you that when she was
little - and not so little - she used to go missing? And quite often she'd be
found asleep in the Chalice Well garden.'
'The Blood Well.'
'A well's a kind of symbolic womb, isn't it? She was going
back to what she couldn't remember. Oh, Powys...'
'I know. We've got to find her. All
this gets worse.'
He picked up the book. 'Now Violet
- no nonsense type, even then - is more than a bit alarmed at what she's
conjured. She tries the stern approach:
down
boy.
And to her faint surprise the wolf turns into a dog and trots off and
fades away. But Violet's not daft, and she's not terribly surprised when
another woman in the house gets into a flap, claiming her dreams have been
disrupted by images of wolves and when she woke up there were eyes shining at
her from a corner of the room. Violet's seriously disturbed by now. She goes
off to see Doc Moriarty, her teacher, and he confirms her worst fears.'
'That the beast is part of her. And that if she doesn't get it
back she'll be, er… '
'No longer a nice person,' Powys said. 'It's a left-hand path
situation. If she doesn't get it back, she'll be on the Satanic slippery
slope.'
'But she does get it back, doesn't she?'
'Not easily. But, yeh, in the end
it all worked out because she helped Roger with his problem and she put the
Dark Chalice on hold. With a little help from George Pixhill and the man I
hesitate to call Uncle Jack.'
'This is leading somewhere, isn't
it?'
Powys poured the rest of the tea,
'According to Sam, on at least two occasions recently, Diane's felt her rage at
Archer - which probably goes back even farther than she knows - becoming almost
... detached from her, fermenting into patches of mist. Feral smells in the room.'
'Oh my God.'
'How much has she studied Dion Fortune? Would she know that
story?'
'Oh dear. What you have to understand about Diane is that she
doesn't have the magician mentality. Even if you believe in reincarnation the
idea of her being the next life of Dion Fortune is slightly preposterous.
Diane's a romantic, a mystic, very probably more than a bit psychic ...'
'Someone who, if DF is still around in some form, she might
want to protect?'
'The Third Nanny,' Juanita said. 'Sits on the bed and doesn't
leave a dent in the mattress. Or something. The more you think about it, the more
you realise that if anyone needs a third nanny, it's Diane.'
'But, look - this is important - you don't think Diane's capable
of conjuring an elemental force?'
'Are you kidding?'
'In that case, someone's sending it to her. Someone who's been
working over a long period to corrupt her.'
Juanita closed her eyes.
'Someone,' Powys said, 'who wanted
her back in Glastonbury at this particular time. Who was disturbing her making
her restless, sending her images of the Tor. A very practised magician - or
group of magicians - who can conjure elementals, like the wolf-thing. Like a
black bus in fact.'
'Why would Moulder have a bus delivered? Jesus, Powys, none of
this is making sense. I'm not up to making sense of it. Let's just call the
police.'
'The police wouldn't be able to find her. And even if they did,
they wouldn't know how to handle any of this. It's down to us. Or you.'
Juanita shrank back against the oak headboard. She looked very
small and frail in the four-poster.
'You've got to rediscover the Goddess,' Powys said. 'In
yourself. You've got to go back to the heart.'
THIRTEEN
Eve of Midwinter
In the Meadwell kitchen.
Woolly and Sam were playing three-card brag by torchlight.
'Where'd you learn to play like this?' Sam said. 'Old hippies,
taking people's money is not what they're about.'
Every time he lost, it was down to Sam to go and check they
were alone, which meant an ominous trek through that bloody eerie dining room.