The Man in the Moss (92 page)

           
'You get … used to him,' Dic said with a dried-up
bitterness. 'You start to forget he ever looked any different.'

           
She pulled away the sacking. The smell was putrid. It was
the kind of smell that would never entirely leave you and some nights would
come back and hover over you like the flies that were clustering around Matt's
withered mouth, the lips already falling from the teeth.

           
'I was afraid to look at him in his coffin,' Dic said.
'Mum said there was no shame. No shame in that.'

           
'Dic,' Moira said. 'What's that in his lap?'

           
'The pipes.'

           
'That stuff wrapped
around
the pipes.'

           
'You know what it is.'

           
Moira reached out with distaste and snatched the bundle
from the lap of the corpse. Air erupted from the bag and the pipes groaned like
a living thing. Or a dying thing. She cried out and dropped the pipes but held
on to what had been around the pipes, black hair drifting through her fingers
in the flickering candlelight. A glimmer of white.

           
'Which of them did it?' Her voice so calm she scared
herself. 'Which of them actually cut it off?'

           
Dic said, 'The woman, I'd guess. Therese. They wanted him
strong and ... driven. You know?'

           
His eyes kept closing. Maybe he was about to pass out
from loss of blood. She didn't know what you did in these circumstances. Did
you let him rest or did you try to keep him conscious, keep him talking? He
seemed to need to talk.

           
'I gave him blood,' he said. 'Blood feeds the spirit or
something like that. Blood's very powerful in magic. And …'

           
He winced, coughed, nodded at the hair.

           
'... so's desire.'

           
'And what,' Moira said, staring into Matt Castle's
impenetrable, sightless eyes, stuffing the hair into a pocket of the duffel
coat, 'did he get from the bog body?'

           
'Wrong question.' Dic's eyes closed and didn't open for
several seconds. Moira was worried. Dic said, 'I think you should be asking ...
what it got from him.'

           
His eyes weren't focusing. 'Listen, I don't know whether
they got what they were after. All kinds of noises were coming out of... that.'

           
Moira picked up the sacking, tossed it over Matt with a
shudder.

           
'Hall was trying to talk to it. Had a few phrases in
medieval Welsh. I don't think it made any sense. In the end he was screaming at
it. Stanage was screaming at Therese. It didn't go how they hoped.'

           
'Does it ever.'

           
'I can't believe these people.'
           
'I can,' Moira said. 'What
went wrong?'
           
'Couldn't find the comb was
one thing. Stanage was furious.'

           
Moira bent over him. His eyes were slits. 'Dic, why
couldn't they find the comb?'

           
'Because I'd ... taken it. I think. Earlier on. I took it
out of the bag. Knew they were saving it for the climax.'

           
'Where is it now?'

           
He tried to shake his head. 'I'm sorry,' Moira said.
'We'll get you out of here. Listen, if I leave you now ... can you bear it?
Mungo'll be back in a minute. Only I want to get away on my own. Dic, can you
hear me?'

           
Dic's eyes were closed. He was half-lying in his chair,
hands still thrown back behind his head. There seemed to be no more blood
seeping under the tape.

           
Didn't they say that your blood stopped flowing when you
died?

           
Dic's canvas-seated wooden armchair still stood in the
pond of his blood, mostly congealed, like mud, like the surface of a peatbog.

           
'Dic?'

           
No reply. But he was still breathing, wasn't he? She
touched his fingers; they felt cold, like marble.

           
'Dic, tell Mungo … tell him not to worry. Tell him … just
tell him I've gone to meet the Man.'

CHAPTER
V

There was a strange
luminescence over the Moss, as though the rain itself was bringing down
particles of light. She could see its humps and pools, and she knew there were
people out there, could hear their voices, scattered by the rain. The Moss was
swollen up like a massive pincushion and every heavy raindrop seemed to make a
new dent.

           
She walked openly to the door of The Man I'th Moss and
hammered on it, shouted 'Lottie!' a few times. All the lights were on, lights
everywhere, in the bar, in all the rooms upstairs.

           
But nobody here.
           
OK.

           
She switched on her lamp and walked around the back to
the yard where the stable block or barn place was, Matt's music room. Its door
hung open, the hasp forced. They hadn't even bothered to disguise their visit
when they came to borrow the Pennine Pipes.

           
Switching off her lamp, Moira went quietly in. She put on
no lights. The air inside seemed to ripple with greens and browns, like sea
light.

           
Mosslight.

           
The carpets on the wall tautened the air. Dead sound. No
echoes.

           
She took off her coat, found the old settee, the one with
its insides spraying out. Sat down, with the lamp at her feet, and thought
peacefully of Matt and felt no hatred.

           
All gone.

           
Released.

It had taken her nearly ten
minutes to get here. Ten minutes in which the rain had crashed down on her
sparsely matted skull, and she'd yielded up her anger with a savagery even the
night couldn't match.

           
Screamed a lot. Cursed him for what he'd done, all those
years of lies and craving, abuse of Lottie, abuse of Dic, abuse of her from
afar, divulging to the crazy Stanage the secret of the comb, letting Stanage
set him up, set her up in Scotland.

           
Letting Stanage into his weaknesses. So that the
long-haired girls appeared on cue. This Therese playing the part with an icy
precision, drawing out of Man the thin wire of desire by which they could
anchor him.

           
I used to think she
was ... a substitute. Me own creation. Like, creating you out of her ...

           
While he was no longer sure that this was not, in
essence, Moira.

           
...
I should've
known. Should've known you wouldn't leave me to die alone. I'm drawing strength
from the both of you. The bogman and you ...

           
Had Stanage known that Matt was dying? Was Man chosen
because
he was dying? So that his
spirit, chained to Stanage and Therese, chained willingly to Bridelow by the
old Celtic magic, could be controlled after his death?

           
So it could be used as a conduit.

           
To reach the Man, the spirit of the Moss, the guardian of
the ancient Celtic community at the end of the causeway.

           
Moira walking quickly down from the brewery, finding her
way quite easily this time back into the village. Avoiding the car racing with
full headlights up the brewery road, probably in answer to Macbeth's summons.
Avoiding any people she happened to see on the street - especially women.

           
This, God help me, is my task.

           
Go over it again. Get it right.

           
Here's what happened.

           
The villagers steal the Man to do with him what's been
done so many times with bits of bodies found in the Moss: give him a good
Christo-pagan burial at the next public funeral.

           
But this isn't just another bit of body. This is the
complete perfectly preserved remains of the original sacrifice, laid down with
due ceremony after undergoing the Triple Death.

           
This is powerful, this will reverberate.

           
And wise old Ma Wagstaff - realizing, presumably, just
how
powerful - mixes up her witch bottle
with a view to protecting Matt's soul from any dark, peaty emanations.

           
Not realizing that it's the
Man in the Moss
who needs protection - against the tortured,
corrupted,
manipulated
spirit of Matt
Castle.

           
Got to get him back. Got to get him out of their control.
           
Got to lose all the hatred
because that's
their
medium. Hatred.
And lust. And obsession.

When Stan the bartender and
Gary the cop came for Dic, Macbeth was pacing the room, trampling in the blood.
Where is she, where the fuck is she? Almost ready to shake the poor guy, get
some sense out of him.

           
'God almighty!' he heard from the bottom of the steps.
'It's Young Frank!'

           
'Don't touch him. You can't help him now.'
           
'He were three-parts drunk.
Fighting drunk. Drunk most nights since he lost his job.'

           
'Maybe he fell, maybe he didn't. Either way, I'm having
this place sealed off, so watch where you're treading, Stan.'

           
'Hey, come on willya,' Macbeth shouted. 'There's a guy up
here
isn't
dead. Yet.'

           
'We're coming,' Gary the cop said. 'And I don't like that
smell one bit.'

           
Thirty seconds later, he's pulling the sacking from the
stiff - 'Fucking
Nora
! - while
Macbeth's demanding, 'Moira. You seen
Moira
?
Lady with very, very short hair ... Chrissakes!' And Stan's staring at all the
blood, looking sick, and Dic's shifting very feebly in his chair.

           
'Right!' said Gary the cop. 'Who is
this?
'
           
Macbeth slumped against the
wall. 'It's Matt Castle.'
           
'Thank you,' said Gary. 'At
least we know
he's
not been murdered.
Let's get an ambulance to this lad. And a statement later. I think...'

           
At which Dic came round sufficiently to start yelling,
hoarsely
, 'No!
I'm not going to
hospital! I won't!'

           
'Hey, hey ... All right, we'll not take you to hospital,
but you can't stop here.'

           
'Take me to Cath,' Dic said, and Ashton looked at
Macbeth. Macbeth nodded, and Stan got his arm behind Dic and helped him to his
feet.

           
'Keep his arms over his head,' Macbeth said, 'else he's
gonna start bleeding again.'

In back of Stan's ancient
station wagon, Macbeth said quietly to Dic, 'Moira. Where's Moira go? Come on,
kid, talk to me, I saved your goddamn life.'

           
'Said to tell you,' Dic mumbled, 'that ... she'd gone to
meet the Man.'

           
'Holy ...
shit!
Macbeth
slammed his fist into the back of the seat.

           
'Yeah,' Dic said. 'I didn't like the sound of it either,
but there wasn't much I could do.'

Drifting on an airbed of
memories.

           
Hey, Matt, you remember the night the van broke down on
the M1 and we put on a thank-you gig for the AA guys at three in the morning at
the Newport Pagnell Services?

           
Blurry light coming off the Moss through the rain.
They're out there, OK. And it's cold and it's wet and the Moss is filthy and
swollen. No place to be, Matt. No place to commit yourself for all eternity.

           
Or until you might be summoned by those to whom you
mortgaged your soul.

           
Hey, remember when you left the pipes in the hotel room
in Penzance and Willie ran all the way back from the hall and I went on stage
alone? And I only knew four solo numbers, and I'm into an encore of the first
one before Willie dashes in with the pipes?