The Man in the Moss (75 page)

           
Would have continued until it smashed to pieces in his
hand, had he not recognised the voice.
           
'Mr
Beard, can you hear me?'
           
'Yes.'

           
'Are you all right, Mr Beard?'
           
'They've all gone.'
           
'Who?'

           
'The Angels.' He giggled. The Angels have flown.'
           
'As
angels are apt to do. You won't run away from this, will you?'

           
'Never!'

           
'Mr Beard, I told you once - do you
remember? - about the Devil's light. How no one could cross the Moss at night
except for those for whom the Devil lit the way.'

           
'Yes. I remember. Isn't it time you told me who you
were?'

           
'I'll do better than that, Mr Beard.
I'll meet you '

           
'When? Where?'

           
'Tonight. Stay in the church. Be
alone.'
           
'No choice, have I? And
yet I know ...'

           
'You could always run away from it.
' Teasing.

           
'I'll never do that. I'm not afraid, you know. I ...
tonight I've embraced evil and I know ... I know that I am never totally
alone.'

           
'Well said, m'boy. Together we'll
put out the Devil's light.'
           
'Thank you,' Joel said.
'Nobody else believes in me. Thank you. Thank you for everything.'

           
He started to weep with the joy of the sure knowledge
that he was not alone.

Part Nine

From
Dawber's
Secret
Book of
Bridelow
(unpublished)

SAMHAIN. (i)

In Bridelow, New Year is
celebrated twice. Once in late February, at Candlemas, the feast of Brigid (and
St Bride), when we look forward to the first signs of Spring. And also, of
course, at Samhain - now sadly discredited as 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.
           
'Who are you?'

           
They stood opposite each other at the porch door, Joel
thought he was the taller, but only just. He couldn't see the man's face under
his black umbrella.

           
The man stepped inside the porch and lowered the
umbrella. 'You don't know me?'

           
'I've never seen you before,' Joel said, water cascading
down his face. Sweet, refreshing rain? Rain out of darkness was not so sweet.

           
The man waited, languid, in the doorway under the porch
lantern. He wore a loose, double-breasted suit of black or charcoal grey.

           
'It's many years since I was here, Mr Beard. It's
changed, thankfully. Otherwise I simply wouldn't have been able to come in.'

           
Joel said, 'I took it upon myself to remove certain
offensive artefacts.'

           
'Well done, m'boy.' The man's face split into a sudden
grin, revealing large teeth, unexpectedly yellow in his candle-white face.