The Man in the Moss (80 page)

           
Stanage.

           
Of course, yeah. The Celtic expert. The writer. John
Peveril Stanage. Never read his books, too young for me, by the time I'd heard
of him.

           
But I'm going to kill that man. That man is
dead.

           
Memories.

           
On the plane to Dublin for a gig. Matt holding up a paperback,
The Bridestones. 'Should read this. Tell
you where I'm coming from.'
Moira politely looking up from Joseph Heller or
somesuch. Mmm? Sure. Get 'round to it someday.

           
And then the American, Macbeth at the Earl's Castle.
'This writer - Stanton, Stanhope? Is he
mad
…
this guy's face is white.'

           
John Peveril Stanage. The
pale predator at the castle.

           
The comb-hunter.

           
The hair-surgeon.

           
Moira clung to a tree, its mesh of leafless branches
keeping most of the rain off her. But when her head penetrated a jagged tracery
of twigs, she could actually feel them graze her scalp.

           
She screamed in despair.

           
Last one, OK? Last scream. Last curse. Then you start to
think. God, you drift through life listening to your conscience and your
instincts and premonitions. all your airy fairy feeling, and you never
think.

           
Moira, listen, they've got my dad
propped up in there.

           
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 his
life, is also reaching out for you. Those arms of sick smoke coiling out of the
baronial fireplace.

           
If Stanage gets access to your soul,
to the core of Matt's craving ...

           
... then Stanage
will have a link with Matt that extends beyond death.

           
Stanage will have a
hold on Matt's spirit.
           
With the comb and the cloak
and the ...
           
'Long-haired girls. Always The
long, dark hair.'
           
Dic.

           
'After a charity gig. She was waiting for him in the car
park. About twenty-one, twenty-two. About my age. Long, dark hair.'

           
The craving kept alive in the
darkness of shop-doorways and the backs of vans.

           
And manipulated. And moulded and twisted.

           
Stanage has recreated me as
spirit-bait for Matt. He's taken my soul and thrown away the husk.

           
But why, Moira wondered, so physically, achingly tired
now, enclosed in the roots of a malformed oak tree, an electric lamp on her
lap, why can I think so well? Why can I see all this so clearly, unless that's
to be my final torture?

           
That and a dawning, unquenchable hatred for Matt Castle.

Frank made his way, quietly
as his shoes would allow, up the narrow iron stairs, past the deep
fermenting-tanks. Up another flight, past the coppers. It were bloody dark, but
Frank had been up here that many thousand times it didn't matter. And the
smell, the lovely, familiar smell. Better than sight, that smell. Better than
women.

           
Halfway up the third flight leading to the mash tuns,
Frank choked back what he thought was going to be a hiccup but turned out to be
a sob. He stopped in a moment of despair. How was he going to live the rest of
his life without this wondrous rich, stale, sour, soggy aroma? How was he going
to survive?