The Man in the Moss (94 page)

           
What she hadn't expected was to find someone sitting on
it.

           
Normally, this time of night, she'd have been scared to
death of getting mugged. Somehow, holding this daft stone, that didn't seem a
possibility.

           
She found herself sitting next to him on the wooden bench
in the pouring rain. Someone had lent her a long, dark blue cagoule and she
knew very little of her face would be visible.

           
It was like a dream. 'Hello, Roger,' she said.

           
He turned his head. His hair was flat and shiny, like
tin. His beard dripped into the neck of his blackened Barbour.

           
He peered at her. He didn't seem to recognise her nose.
'Is it Chrissie?'

           
'It is indeed. Not a very nice night, Roger. One way and
another.'

           
He was silent a long time. Then he said, 'I spoke to
him.'
           
'Him?'
           
'
Him.'

           
'That must have been nice for you both.'
           
'So it was worth it,' Roger
said. 'In the end.'

           
'Was it? Was it really?'

           
'Oh, yes. I mean, it's knowledge, isn't it? Nothing is
more valuable than knowledge.'

           
'What about love?' said Chrissie.
           
'I don't understand,' Roger
said.

           
'No. I don't suppose you do. So what did he have to say
to you?'

           
'Who?'
           
'Him.'

           
'Oh.' Roger stood up, drenched and shiny, and rubbed his knees
as if they were stiff. 'Do you know, I can't really remember. I expect it'll
come back to me'

           
He didn't look at her and began, seeming oblivious to the
rain, to stroll away along the path which led back from the plateau's edge and
wound down towards the Moss.

           
Chrissie waited until he'd gone from sight and then
gently placed her stone beneath the seat and stood very quietly and said the
words they'd told her to say.

A curious thing.

           
Soon as Ernie Dawber admitted he too could see the balls
of light, then they became clearer.

           
'It's a bit like ball-lightning,' Ernie said. 'There's
been quite a lot of research, although the scientific establishment hasn't
formally acknowledged it.'

           
Talking in his schoolmaster's voice, Macbeth thought,
because it puts him on top of a situation he doesn't understand any more than
the rest of us.

           
They do seem to be a manifestation of energy anomalies
within the earth's magnetic field. Often occur, I'm told, on fault-lines.'

           
'What's that mean?'

           
'And there's also a theory that they can interact with
human consciousness. So that when we perceive them we actually bring them into
existence, if that isn't back-to-front logic.
What do you say, Willie?'

           
I'm more worried about that tree-thing, Mr Dawber. Young
Benjie calls it a dragon. Bog oak, I thought it were. Come up out of t'Moss,
all of a sudden like. Got a wicked kind of...'

           
Macbeth said, 'There are people out there, around the
tree.'
           
'Daft buggers.' Ernie squinted
through the rain.
           
Macbeth was watching a haze of
light rising from the tree, as if someone had set fire to it. But the flames,
instead of eating the wood, had risen through it, like one of those phoney log-
effect gasfires.

           
The light had risen above the tree and its boughs looked
to be clawing at it, as though to prevent it escaping, and the Moss itself
seemed to rise in protest. Macbeth felt a thickening tension in his gut.

           
Mouth dry, he watched the haze of light spread out like a
curtain and then hover over the Moss, maybe six or ten feet from its surface.

           
'This is ... unearthly.'

           
The light was drifting towards the edge of the Moss,
towards the hulk of a building near the peat's edge.

           
'All things are natural,' Ernie Dawber said with a
tight-jawed determination. 'If some are ... beyond our understanding.'

           
'What's that place?' Thought he was hearing distant
screams.

           
'Back of the pub,' Willie said. 'That's th'owd barn back
of the pub, where we used to rehearse wi' Matt.'

           
'The light's over it. The light's hanging over the roof.'
           
Ernie Dawber said, 'I don't
think I can see it any more.'

Moira Cairns put down the
guitar and turned towards the door.
           
Two of them.

           
The mosslight on the two tombstone speaker cabinets
either side of the door.

           
Both of them standing in the entrance with the cabinets
either side of them.

           
John Peveril Stanage and the girl, Therese.
           
'So kill me,' Moira said
simply.

           
'You know we can't,' Therese said. 'Not until you give
him back.'

           
Moira reached to the table and turned the lamp on to
them. Not much energy left in it now but enough to show her neither of these
people was wet. Had they been inside the inn all the time? Had they been
expecting her? Or was this merely the nearest vantage point for the Moss?

           
'Who are those people out on the Moss, then?' Moira
asked. 'With the devil tree.'

           
'Do you know, m'dear,' he said, 'I can't actually recall
any of their names.'

           
She remembered him so well now. The dapper figure, the
white hair rushing back from his grey-freckled forehead like breakers on an
outgoing tide. The cherub's lips. A man as
white as the bones tumbling from the walls.

           
'I can't believe,' she said, 'all the trouble you've gone
to. Getting to know Matt inside out, all his little compulsions. What are we
looking at here? Years?'

           
'We don't have time for a discussion,' Stanage said. 'We
want you to release him. You can't hold him for much longer, you simply don't
have the energy.'

           
Moira said, 'Where's the Man? Made a big mistake, there,
you know, John. You stole him away, you took responsibility for him. You took
responsibility for the vacuum. The Moss'll no' wear that. Was an old guy in the
village tonight, he'd figured out the way to square things with the Moss was
another sacrifice. Maybe that was right.'

           
'It was
absolutely
right,
m'dear,' Stanage said with a sudden smile. 'Saw to that on the very stroke, I
believe, of midnight. When the Beacon of the Moss was extinguished, so was
someone's life. A young, fit, active life ... a jolly good replacement for the
Man, if I say so myself.'

           
'Who?' Moira felt her face-muscles tightening, also her
stomach.

           
'Why ... just like the original sacrifice ... a priest.
The Triple Death - a blow, a slash - and a fall. And then gathered up and
offered to the spirit of the Moss -
our
spirit. All square, m'dear. All square.'

           
'The Reverend Joel Beard? You killed the Reverend Joel
Beard?'

           
'And consigned him to the Moss. Well,
hell,
sweetheart, don't sound so
appalled. No friend of yours, was he? He struck you, word has it.'

           
'I suspect he mistook me for your friend,' Moira said.
She let her gaze settle on Therese. Worryingly young. Black hair, perhaps dyed,
sullen mouth. And the cloak. Her cloak.

           
'This is the wee slag, then, is it, John? Doesny look a
lot like me. Did she wear a wig before she got hold of the real thing?'

           
'She's angry
enough
,
Moira,' Stanage said less cordially. 'Don't make it worse.'

           
'
She'
s angry?
With
me
? Aw, Jesus, the poor wee
thing, ma heart goes out. She's no' satisfied with ma hair now? Would she like
to cut off ma leg? Would that make her happy, you think, John?'

           
Therese hissed and uncoiled like a snake and took a step
towards Moira. Stanage laid a cautionary hand on her arm. Emerging from his
dark sleeve the hand looked as white as an evening glove.

           
'This is futile,' Stanage said abruptly. 'Leave us, Tess.
Would you mind awfully?'

           
'I can take her,' Therese spat. 'She's old. Her
sexuality's waning. She can't hold him. I can take him from her. Watch me.'

           
'Tess,
darling,
no one is questioning your lubricious charms, but I suspect this is not about
sex. Leave us.' Steel thread in his voice. 'Please?'

           
Therese gathered up her cloak and left without another
word. Stanage closed the door and barred it. Moira instinctively moved into a
corner of the ruptured settee, clutching the electric lamp to her breast.

           
'Right. Bitch.' Obviously a man who could shed his charm
like an overcoat that'd become too heavy. She became aware of a scar about an
inch long under his right eye, a souvenir from Scotland.

           
And he was aware she was looking at it.

           
The barn seemed to shift on its foundations, and there
was a crunch and a series of flat bangs. She didn't let her eyes leave him; she
knew what it was: books falling over as a shelf collapsed. The shelves were all
makeshift, held up by bricks.

           
Neither of them had moved.

           
'Don't make
me
angry,'
Stanage said.

           
'We seem to be a little short of bones in here,' Moira
said. 'That affect your performance, does it? Books just don't respond so
effectively. Maybe you just don't have that same affinity. I borrowed one of
yours from ma wee nephew one time. Thought it was really crap, John. Lacked
authenticity, you know?'

           
John Peveril Stanage was tightening up inside, she could
tell that, could feel the contractions in the air. Mammy, help me. Mammy,
wherever you are, I'm in really heavy shit here, you know?

           
'You want me to sing to you, John? Would that help your
concentration?'

           
She began to sing, very softly.

                                   
...for the night is growing older
                                   
and
you feel it at your shoulder ...

           
She could feel Matt Castle at her shoulder, a wedge of cold
energy.

           
And more.

           
'Shut up
,'
Stanage said.

           
Could smell the peat in him now.

           
Pulling the blue plastic lamp between her breasts until
it hurt. Feeling the shadow behind her, huge and dense and pungent with black
peat.
Don't turn around. Don't look at
him.

           
But John Peveril Stanage was looking. Stanage was
transfixed.

           
All at once there was complete quiet.

The rain,' Macbeth said.
'The rain stopped.'

           
Damn futile observation; everybody here could tell the
rain had stopped.

           
He found he was in the middle of a crowd under the
smiling snatch people called Our Sheila; been so busy watching the weird lights
on the Moss he hadn't noticed the Mothers returning. Without their stones.

           
One of them standing next to him, shaking out her hair.
'Where's Moira?' It was Milly.

           
'She's not with you?' Cold panic grabbed his gut. 'You're
telling me you haven't
seen
her?'