The Man in the Moss (86 page)

           
And while Joel crouched, arms full of light, John reached
up and unhooked the chain.

           
The lamp was unexpectedly heavy. Joel stumbled but held
it, pulling down several feet of electric flex which had coiled between the
beam and the wall. The lamp did not go out.

           
'Good,' John said. 'Now lower it to the floor.'
           
They both stood back. The
pointed top of the lantern was now on a level now with Joel's groin.
           
'Kick it in,' John urged.

           
Joel tried to see his face but saw only the bared blue
teeth and blue steel ripples of hair.
           
He couldn't move.

           
'This is the pagan light. This is the lure.
Very few people dared cross the Moss, Mr
Beard. except those for whom the devil lit the way. Have you heard that legend?
Have you heard it?
           
'Yes!' Joel panicking. 'I
heard it from you. You told me.'

           
'And do you believe it? Consider the evidence.'
           
'I believe,' Joel intoned,
'that this is a place of pagan worship. I have seen the signs. I have seen the
woman with the opened cunt. I have
dreamed
of her. And I have seen the dead walk.'

           
'And you know that this night is Samhain, the Feast of the
Dead, and that the light is shining out across the peat to welcome the dead to
this place.'
           
'It shall not happen.'

           
Joel lifted his foot, aware as never before of its size
and its weight, and he plunged it, with a shattering, through the glass lantern
and watched the shower of shards, blue and then white, pierce the tumbling
shadows,
           
'The bulbs, Joel. Now the
bulbs!'
.
         
Joel felt his lips stretched
tight as his foot went back again and again, lightbulbs exploding, all of them,
whorls of jagged colour, and then there was the creak of a door opening, a
rapid clumping of footsteps and his neck was wrenched back and the last thing
he saw before the last bulb blew was John's luminescent teeth as the man held
up a scimitar of white glass, nine inches long.

           
Joel bit rubber, and felt his knees buckle before he was
even aware of the single dull, heavy blow on the back of his head.

           
For a long time here was only night, and then there was a
lake and a naked woman on a hill, and the woman smiled with a sorrow deeper
than the lake and Joel wanted to scream,
I
recognise you. I recognise you now, for
what you are ...

           
But the woman was gone and there was only a void of dark
sorrow and John's voice, coming very quickly, words running together, some
 
in an archaic and alien language, and a few
that he could understand.

           
'
… that by the
laying down of the blood ...

           
Another, deeper male voice joining John's in fractured
counterpoint.

           
... and shall be
recompensed for that which we have borrowed ...'

           
Joel trying to speak, his arms pinned behind him,
confusion and humiliation turning to a savage anger as his chest swelled and
his elbows jerked and there was a grunt behind him and he spat out the rubber
and jerked his head forward and inside him he let out a great roar of rage.

           
And only a liquid gurgle came out, and he felt his very
soul was pouring out through his throat and something heavy thrust into the
small of his back and there was a shattering explosion and Joel was out into
the flooded sky and falling through the slipstream of his blood.

Part Ten

CHAPTER
I

Nobody in the house had
been able to get to sleep anyway, because of the rain, and then The Chief
started to howl, a terrified yelping sort of howl, sending Benjie hurtling down
the stairs and his mam screaming from the landing, 'He'll go in a kennel, that
dog, I'm warning you!' And The Chief carried on howling, even with Benjie's
arms light around his neck, and Benjie shouted back Up, 'It's that dragon
again, Mam!'

           
Heard his mam snort from the landing.
           
Mumbling into the dog's
fur,'... same as killed me gran.'
           
And Benjie thought he should
get dressed and take The Chief out into the street so his howling would wake up
the whole village and everybody would be able to escape before the dragon came
out of the Moss.

Moira was already dressed
when they heard Alfred Beckett shouting in the Post Office, 'Shop! Shop!'

           
Milly brought him through and Alf stood there, getting
his breath back, raindrops glittering in his moustache.

           
'They've put it out!' he gasped, holding on to the back
of the sofa. 'Bastards've put out the light.'

           
Willie pushed past him and dashed through the office to
the front door. 'He's right.'

           
'Beacon of the Moss,' Milly explained to Moira.
           
'What's that mean? That it's
out?'

           
'It's happened before, obviously, power-failures and
such, but with all the rest of it...'

           
'You're saying it's cumulative, right?'
           
'I'll go up,' Willie called
back.

           
'No,' Moira snapped. 'There's been too much rushing in,
far's I can see. Cathy, the Mothers - how many are there?'
           
'It's a ragbag,' Milly said.

           
'How d'you call a meeting?'

           
'The old days, used to be said we never needed to call
them at all.'

           
'Well, how about we try the phone, huh?'
           
'They'll all be in bed.'

           
'Jesus wept! If I had any hair I'd be tearing it.'

Dic Castle knew that a
common way of committing suicide was to cut your wrists while lying in a bath
of warm water and that it was largely painless, letting life seep away.

           
He was not in a bath of warm water, but he supposed
sedation had the same effect in that he was aware of
not
trying to scream through the sweating adhesive tape across his
mouth but just sitting there, bound by string and wire to his chair wondering
how long before it was over.

           
His hands were painlessly numb, cloth tourniquets around
both wrists so that the blood flow was regulated, like an egg-timer.

           
He wasn't even resentful any more. He'd got Moira out.
He'd led them away from her and they didn't know she'd gone with the sound of
the rain muffling her hysteria. Him? They thought he'd just chickened out and
run away, and now they'd caught him, and maybe this was what they'd intended
for him all along.

           
Blood to blood.

           
He watched their faces: Philip, the glum satanist; Owen
the ex-nurse who'd given him valium through a vein; Andrea the
care-in-the-community mental patient who'd killed but not exactly
murdered
two small boys many years ago;
Therese, who thought she was already halfway to being a goddess; Dr Roger Hall,
who just wanted to meet the Man in the Moss.

           
Real evil, Dic realized, was a bit bloody pathetic.

           
Outside, the apprentice at the gate, was feeble Shaw
Horridge, probably more inadequate than any of them because he had had money
and privileges on a scale incomprehensible to most of the others.

           
Over in the loft at the church, Dean - also known as
Asmodeus - had been hiding for hours with Terence, the hulking occult
bookseller from Salford, awaiting their mentor the revered John. Slaveringly
eager for whatever grotesque experience he'd prepared for them, the more
perverse the more sensuously exciting.

           
Dic had ceased some while ago to be shocked. He'd already
seen in his father the damage caused by the perversion of a Utopian dream. He
was twenty-four. He'd seen Matt Castle's jolly, infectious pioneering spirit shrivel
to a sour fanaticism. And then he'd died.

           
And now, because of his father. Dic would die too. Taped
into a wooden chair with the blood draining slowly from his wrists.

           
Blood to blood.

           
Dic was staring across the circle, with a vaguely
surprising sense of pity, into his father's eyes, when a movement made him turn
his head. Therese had shuddered.

           
Therese was sitting cross-legged, although her legs were
hidden in cloak and shadow. There were candles, ordinary white candles, in
glass jars because of the draught, seven of them arranged around the circle,
which had been painted on the wooden floor in white and was actually two
concentric circles a yard apart. In the space between the circles they all sat,
like shadowy party goers gathered for charades.
           
Dregs.

           
But Therese had shuddered.

           
'Yes,' she breathed. 'He's done it. Can't you feel it?'
           
And as if she'd signalled to
them, the inadequates started mumbling, some far back in their throats, making
unintelligible noises as though trying to disengage their dentures.

           
Revolting bastards.

           
In time, the mumbling became more intense and seemed to
encompass the figure sprawled, rotting and stinking, in the wooden armchair.

           
Dic could look at it now with little sense of shock and
no sense of relationship. At the withering lips drawn back, the yellow of
teeth, the stiff, spouting hair above eyes wide open but glazed like a cod's
eyes on the slab.

           
His father.

Of course, if you'd
suggested to Chris that it was a game, a recreation like golf or squash or
amateur theatricals, Chris would have been most resentful and his reply would
probably have been - as he would now admit - somewhat pompous and
self-righteous.

           
Born in Hemel Hempstead, Chris was an accountant in
Sheffield. He was thirty-seven, had had his own house, on what was now a
minimal mortgage, since the age of nineteen. So that when he married Chantal
four years ago life had not exactly been an uphill struggle, with foreign
holidays and two cars from the beginning. And the fact that God had not yet seen
fit to bestow upon them a child, well, perhaps that indicated God had other
work for them.

           
Chris had always been a churchgoer. However, as he'd
intimated in passing to the American, Macbeth, the Anglican faith had long
since ceased to satisfy his intense need for a more dynamic relationship with
his deity.

           
Baptism into the Church of the Angels of the New Advent,
with its full-throated, high-octane worship and its promise of
real religious experience,
was the
fulfilment of what Chris had been anticipating all his thinking life.

           
Within eighteen months, he'd become an elder of the
Church, dealing with its finances, investing its reserves, getting the best
deal for God.

           
It filled his life.
God
,
therefore, filled his life.

           
And God was not a hobby.

           
The validity of the Church of the Angels of the New
Advent had been confirmed by the acceptance at theological college of one of
its founders. Brother Beard, who had been called by God to go out into the
'straight' Church and reform it from within.

           
God's reasoning had become all too clear to Chris when
Joel had been called to Bridelow.

           
His appearance at their house last night in search of
sanctuary had made Chris - and he was sure he could also speak for Chantal -
feel very honoured and (he would have admitted this now) very excited.

           
When Joel had spoken of his discovery of the symbols of
pagan devil-worship in the Lord's house, Chris had been, on the surface,
appalled, and underneath (he might not yet have admitted this) thrilled.