'This time,' Sam Davis said, 'you won't stop me.'
He'd already dressed by the time Esther awoke.
'Lights?' she said. 'Lights again?'
Sam nodded. Cradled in his arms was his dad's old twelve-bore shotgun.
'Get that out!' Esther shouted. 'I'll not have that thing in my bedroom.'
'Fair enough,' Sam said, patting the pockets of his old combat jacket.
'I will stop you,' Esther said, sitting up in bed, rubbing her eyes, if you go out with that gun I'll've called the police before you get to the end of the yard.'
'Please yourself.' Sam broke the gun. 'Man's got to look after his own.' He pulled a handful of cartridges from his jacket pocket and shoved a couple into the breach.
Esther started to cry. 'Don't waste um, luv,' Sam said. 'We tried your way. Big wanker. "Oh, Satan, get thee gone, I'm giving thee notice to quit."' Sam snorted. 'Now I'm giving um notice to quit. Wi' this. And they'll listen.'
'You're a bloody fool, Sam Davis,' Esther wept. 'You're a fool to yourself. Where will I be wi' you in jail for manslaughter? Where will your children be?'
'Shurrup, eh?' Sam said. 'You'll wake um. I'll be back in half an hour. Or less. Don't worry.'
'Don't worry…?'
'I'll show it um. Happen I'll fire it over their heads. That's all it'll take.'
Sam Davis moved quietly out of the bedroom, and his wife followed him downstairs. 'I've warned you. I'll ring for t'police.'
'Aye.' Leaving the lights off, Sam undid the bolts on the back door. It was raining out, and cold enough for sleet.
When he'd gone, Esther, shivering in her nightie, said, 'Right,' and went to the phone.
The phone was dead. He'd ripped out the wire and pulled off the little plastic plug. Esther ran to the back door and screeched, 'Sam… Sam!' into the unresponsive night. The nights were the worst times, but in a way they were the best because they hardened Lottie's intent to get out. By day – local customers drifting in around lunchtime, nice people – she got to thinking the pub was an important local service and there weren't many of those left in Bridelow and if she didn't keep it on, who would? And Matt. Matt would be so disappointed with her.
But at night, alone in the pine-framed bed which kept reminding her of her husband's coffin, enclosed by the still strange, hard, whitewashed walls, she felt his stubborn obsessiveness in the air like a lingering, humid odour. And she knew she'd paid back all she owed to Matt, long since.
If indeed he'd ever given her anything, apart from headaches and Dic.
She lay down the middle of the bed, head on a single white pillow; for the first time entirely alone. Dic had gone off – relieved, she knew – to his bedsit in Stockport; back on Monday to the supply-teaching he was doing in lieu of a real job. Dic looking perpetually bewildered all day, saying little, mooching about rubbing his chin. Offering, in a half-hearted way, to stay here until Sunday night, but Lottie briskly waving him out – fed up with you under my feet, moping around, time I had some space for myself.
To do what, though?
Well… to try and find a buyer for the pub, for a start. That would be a picnic. Best she could hope for was to flog it to some rich Cheshire businessman with romantic yearnings, for conversion into a luxury home with an exclusive view of peat, peat, peat.
Bloody peat. In the mornings she'd draw back the bedroom curtains and the first thing she'd see would be black peat and on to the scene her mind would superimpose Matt in his wheelchair, sinking into the Moss and fighting it all the way, and every bloody marsh-bird banking overhead would be imitating the Pennine Pipes of blessed memory.
All I want is Bridelow Moss behind me. To be able to draw back the curtains on to other people's gardens, parked cars, the postman, the milkman, no hills in view over the tops of the laburnums. (In other words, the view from the bedroom window in Wilmslow which Matt had despised and which she carried in her mind like a talisman of sanity.)
With the bedside light on, she gazed unblinking at the ceiling, a single hefty black beam bisecting it diagonally so that half the ceiling was light, half shadow.
'Ma…'
'… aye, gone.'
'… agstaff… dead…you didn't know?'
'… God, no..:
If walls could record voices and mood and atmosphere, The Man's ancient stones would have been crumbling tonight under the dead weight of suppressed emotion. The death of Ma Wagstaff: the underlying theme below all the trivial tap-room chat about Manchester United and the sodding Government, and the more meaningful analyses of working conditions under Gannons.
Lottie saying nothing, playing barmaid, pulling Bridelow Black for those committed to preserving the brewery and lager and draught Bass for those who'd been made redundant.
So Ma Wagstaff had gone.
Well, she was old, she was half-baked, she'd clung to her own loopy ideas of religion; let them be buried with her.
Not that anything stayed buried round here. The bogman rising again after who could say how many centuries, to cause torment and to haunt Matt's latter days. And now poor Matt himself rising again to help the police with their inquiries.
Which – jaw tightened, both hands clenching on the sheet for a moment – was none of her business, and none of Ma Wagstaff's any more. Just let it be all over. Just let them have found what they wanted and put Matt back m his grave and stamped down the soil.
What they wanted. She knew, of course, that it had to be the bogman. How honoured Matt would have been to know he'd be sharing his grave with his illustrious ancestor.
Most likely, she conceded, he did know. Matt always could keep a secret. Even from his wife.
Especially from his wife.
And that does it, Lottie thought. I'll talk to estate agents first thing Monday morning.
She put out the lamp and shut her eyes.
She was not lonely.
She was relieved at last of the horror and the pity of Matt and his illness and his all-consuming passions.
And relieved, too – now that Moira had been here, now that she'd received his taped begging letter – of the responsibility of overseeing the completion of Matt's magnum opus, his Bogman Suite. Moira's responsibility now. Poetic justice: one obsession taking care of another.
Not that Moira, presumably, had ever wanted to be Matt's obsession.
Lottie opened her eyes and stared searchingly into the darkness.
Or perhaps, obscurely, perversely, Moira had. She kept her ego under wraps, but it was there; it existed.
Maybe it is poetic justice.
You've been relieved. You're free to go. The lino was as cold as flagstones under Ernie's bare feet, and although his bedroom slippers were under the bed, he didn't fetch them out; the cold was better.
I don't want comfort. I want the truth. An answer. What must I do? What is there left I can do?
Through the window, he could see the churchyard, gravestones wet with rain and blue under the Beacon of the Moss. Be one for me, happen, this time next year.
He couldn't, from here, see Matt Castle's grave, but he'd heard about all that from Alfred Beckett, who'd come pounding on his door while the dregs of the Mothers' Union sat dispiritedly drinking tea in his study. What can we do, Mr Dawber? Who's going to explain?
Me, he'd stated firmly. I'll explain, if necessary.
He'd never seen the Mothers in such a state and never imagined he would. Old Sarah Winstanley, with no teeth, just about said it all. No Ma. No teeth. No hope.
Not for me now, neither, with Ma gone.
'Everything's changing,' Millicent had said. 'Hardening. And now we've lost the Man, for good and all. They'll take him back to London this time, no question about that. Bad luck on this scale, Mr Dawber – it's not natural. Mary Lane died, did you hear? Pneumonia. Fifty-three, God forbid.'
Shades, Ma had said. Them's what's kept this place the way it is. They started talking about shades again, and it was not really his province. He'd promised Ma Wagstaff that he'd get the Man back, and now it was all falling through, and it was his responsibility. What was there left, in the time he had?
And then Milly had told them about Liz Horridge.
'I forgot all about it, wi' Ma being found not long after. I found her up Ma's front path. First time she's been seen in t'village for months. Well… she were in a shocking state, banging her fists on Ma's door – "please, please", like this, whimpering, you know? I put me hand on her shoulder and she nearly had hysterics. "I want Ma, I want Ma." I says, "Ma's not here, luv. Come and have a cuppa tea," I says. She just looks at me like she doesn't know who I am, and then she pushes me aside and she's off like a rabbit. I rang the Hall to tell somebody, but Shaw's never there, is he?'
And Moira Cairns staying with young Cathy, in the Rectory, at the very heart of the village.
He looked down at the graves. Why had she come so secretively? And why hadn't she gone away again? He'd seen her walking down from the church this morning. Strikingly good-looking lass. Probably in her late thirties, looking it, because of that white strand in her hair, like the light through a crack in the door of a darkened room.
But what did they know about her?
'Nowt,' Ernie said aloud to the silent graves.
Should he say owt to the Mothers? He wasn't a stirrer, he wasn't a gossip, he'd always known more than he passed on, just as Dawber's Book of Bridelow was only ever a fraction of what the Dawbers knew about Bridelow.
Who'd take over the Book from him? No more Dawbers left in Bridelow. Happen it really was the end of an era. Happen the Bridelow to come wouldn't have the distinction that warranted a book of its own. Ernest Dawber, last of the village scribes. Chronicler of the Fall.
Alf Beckett's arrival had saved him. If Alf hadn't turned up, one of them, or all of them, would surely have sensed he had worries and sorrows of his own.
By 'eck, he'd been scared, had Alf Beckett. So scared, as he'd told them, that he could hardly keep his spade level when the time came to shovel the soil back on Matt Castle's coffin.
After finding no trace of the bogman.
'They didn't find it?' Milly Gill up on her feet in a flash, for all her weight. Alf shaking his head dumbly.
'What's it mean, Milly?' Frank's wife, Ethel, dazed.
'I don't know.' Milly's voice hoarse, 'I don't understand.'
'But it's good, isn't it?' the youngest of them, Susan, said. 'We dint want um to find it.'
'Of course it's not good,' Milly said. 'You don't suddenly get a miracle like that in the middle of a lot of bad. It's not the way of things. What frightens me: if he's not there, where in God's name is he?'
She broke off for a sip of tea. 'I'm sorry, Mr Dawber. I should've told you earlier. It were finding Ma. Knocked me back. Strange, though, isn't it? Everything's so terribly strange all of a sudden.'
When they'd gone, Ernie had telephoned the Hall himself. No answer. He'd go up there tomorrow, a visit long overdue.
'It must be deliberate, you know, all this,' Milly had said. 'An attack. Village is under attack.'
'Eh?'
'Like I said, things go in waves, Mr Dawber. Good times, bad times. We're used to that.'
'Aye…'
Ma had said, What this is… it's a balancing act.
'But this is an attack,' Milly said.
Ernie had been flummoxed for a minute. 'You mean the curate? Joel Beard?'
'Well, he's part of it. We let them disturb the Man in the Moss. We didn't do right by him. Now we've no protection. All sorts are coming in. Unsuitable people. Aye – people like him.'
'All my sources tell me,' Ernie said, 'that Joel's ambitions are being fuelled by the new Archdeacon, who fancies him summat rotten.'
'Joel Beard's gay?'
'Not as I know of, but the Archdeacon certainly is.' Ernie noticed old Sarah looking mystified. 'No, Joel Beard's incorruptible, I'm afraid. Whatever he's doing, he thinks he's doing it for the good of mankind.'
'They'll all be coming in soon,' Milly said despondently. 'Look at all them strangers at the brewery. Three of ours sacked, one of theirs brought in. Rationalization, they call it. We don't see it till it's happened. Sometimes I think all we see is…'
'Shades of things. Aye.' Then Ernie had fallen silent, thinking of a woman in a black cloak at Matt's funeral. Moira Cairns, former singer with Matt Castle's Band.
Alf said, 'That bloke, Hall, he wouldn't accept it at first. Said he were convinced it were theer and if he had to dig all night he'd get it out.'
'Aye,' Milly said grimly. 'Happen somebody told him. Somebody wanted that grave dug up so we'd know there was nowt down there, apart from Matt. Oh, Christ. Oh, Mother, I don't like this.'
Alf sat down on the footstool Ernie would rest his feet on while thinking. 'This Hall, he even wanted to open Matt's coffin. Thought happen bogman were in theer.'
'God in heaven,' said Ernie.
'Joel Beard – he started kickin' up then. Wouldn't let um go near. Said they 'ad no permission except for t'take coffin out, like.'
'Quite right too,' Ernie said.
'Alf,' Milly said anxiously. 'The bottle. You did get the bottle in?'
'No.'
Milly Gill closed her eyes and clasped her hands together in anguish.
'Couldn't do it,' Alf said. 'Seemed no point.'
Milly said angrily, 'Did you even try?'
'Oh, aye.' Alf's hands had been dangling between his legs as he squatted on the stool. Ernie saw that both hands were shaking. 'I got lid off, no problem. Nobody were watching, thank Christ.'
They were all looking at him now. Alf Beckett, soaked to the skin, moustache gone limp, eyes so far back in his head that they weren't catching any light from Ernie's green-shaded desk lamp.
'Weren't theer!' Alf suddenly squealed. 'Matt weren't theer! Nowt in t'coffin but bloody soil!'
There'd been a silence you could've shovelled into buckets.
Ernie could still hear it now, as he stood looking over the graveyard, glittering with rain and the blue light of the Beacon of the Moss.
'And worms,' Alf had said finally, shaking on the little wooden footstool, staring at the floor. 'Handfuls of big, long worms.'
At the window, Ernie Dawber sighed very deeply. Moira awoke with this awful sense of doom set around her like a block of ice.
She was hot and she was cold. She was sweating.
And she was whimpering, 'Mammy. Oh, mammy, please… don't let them.'
She'd dreamed a version of the truth. She was a little girl again, living with her daddy and her gran in the almost posh Glasgow suburb, catching the bus to school. Gran's warning shrilling in her ears, '… and you just be sure and keep away from the old railway, you hear?'
On account of the gypsies were back. The gypsies who still came every autumn to the old railway, caravans in a circle like covered wagons in a Western when the Indians were hostile.
Corning home from school, getting off the bus, the two dark skinned gypsy boys hanging round. 'Hey, you… Moira, is it? The Duchess wants tae see ye…'
'You leave me alone… Get lost, huh.'
'We're no gonny hurt ye..
'You deaf? I said get lost.'
'Ye gonny come quietly, ye wee besom, or…'
Dissolve to interior. A treasure cave, with china and brass and gold. And the most beautiful, exotic woman you ever saw.
'My, you're quite a pretty child… Now, I have something… Think of it as a family heirloom… Tell no one until you're grown… Guard it with your life now!' This rich, glowing thing (which would be dull and grey to most people) heavy in your hand.
'You must remember this day, always. You will remember it, for you'll never be a wee girl again.'
And that night she had her first period.
Guard it with your life.
Moira sprang from her bed, snapped on the light. The guitar case stood where she'd left it, propped between a mahogany wardrobe and the wall. She dragged it out, lay it flat on the worn carpet, the strings making wild discordant protest as she threw back the lid, feeling for the felt-lined pocket, where might be stored such things as spare strings, plectrums, harmonicas.
And combs.
The door was tentatively opened, and Cathy appeared in rumpled pyjamas. 'What's wrong?'
Moira was shivering in a long T-shirt with Sylvester the Cat down the front.
'Moira, what's wrong?'
Moira's voice low and catarrhal, growly-rough, 'The broken window. Wasny just vandals.'
'You're cold.'
'Damn right I'm cold.'
'Come downstairs. I'll make some tea.'
Thrusting her hand again and again into the harmonica pocket. Nothing. She pulled out the guitar, laid it on the bed.
Turned the case upside down. Picked up the guitar and shook it violently, and listened to nothing rattling inside.
When, slowly, she straightened up, her back was hurting.
She felt arid, derelict. She felt old but inexperienced, incompetent. She felt like an old child.
Numbly, she reached behind the bedroom door for her cloak, to cover her thin, goosebumpy arms.
The cloak was not there. They'd taken that too. Sam stumbled no more than twice. He knew his ground. Didn't need no fight, although he had the powerful police torch wedged in his jacket pocket, case he needed to blind anybody.
It was pissing down. Sam wore his old fishing hat, pulled down, head into the rain.
Never been raining when these buggers'd been up here before. They wouldn't like that. Be an advantage for him, two years windblasted, rained on, snowed on.
There was a moon up there, somewhere buried in clouds, so the sky wasn't all that black. When his eyes had adjusted he could see the outline of the hill, and when he got halfway up it he could make out a couple of faint lights down on the edge of Bridelow.
But no lights above him now.
Moving round so he'd come to the circle from the bit of a hump behind it, he climbed higher, a lone blue-white disc floating into view, vague through the rain and mist. Beacon of the Moss.
Bloody church. Bugger all use they'd been, pair of um.
When he came to the bracken, Sam stopped, stayed very still, listening. Thought by now he'd have seen their lights, heard some of the chanting, whatever they did.
Sam went down on his haunches, the rain spattering the bracken. Quietly as he could, he snapped shut the breech of the gun, jammed the butt under his elbow and crouched there, waiting.
The rain corning down hard and cold, muffling the moor, seeping through his jacket. Might've brought his waterproof, except the thing would have squeaked when he moved. Have a hot bath when he got in, slug or two of whisky.
Sam hefted the twelve-bore. His mouth felt dry.
They were here. He could feel it. They were close.
Bastards. Stay aggressive. Aggression generated heat and aggression was better than fear.
Right. Sam moved in closer. He reckoned he was no more than twenty yards from the circle; couldn't see it yet. Just over this rise.
They were there; no question. But were they lying low, expecting him? Had they somehow heard him coming?
Sam pulled in a deep breath, drawing in rainwater and nearly choking. He stuck his finger under the trigger guard and went over the rise like a commando, stopping just the other side, legs splayed.
'All right, you fuckers!' he bawled. 'Nobody move!'
And nobody moved. Nothing. Not even a rabbit in the grass. Only the sound of the rain battering the bracken.
Holding the gun under his right arm, Sam fumbled for his torch, clicked it on, swirled the beam around, finding one, two, three, four, five stubby stones, a circle of thumbs jabbing out of the moor.
'Where are you? Fucking come out! I'll give you your bloody Satan!'
Not frightened now. Bloody mad. 'Come on!'
He thought about firing a shot into the bracken, case they were flattened out in there. But it wasn't likely, was it?
No, they'd gone. He switched off the torch, pushed it back in his pocket and did a 180-degree crouching turn, with the gun levelled.
Behind him, up on the moor, he glimpsed a fleeting white light. Didn't pause to think. Right. They're on the run. Move it.
Half-aware that he was departing from his own useless piece of moorland, Sam set off under a thickly clouded night sky with little light in it but an endless supply of black water; his jacket heavy with it and his faithful fishing hat, which once had been waterproof, now dripping round his ears like a mop rag.
He thought of his bed, and he thought of his kids and his wife, who he supposed he loved really, and he thought this was the stupidest bloody thing he'd do this year and maybe next, but…
… but them bastards were not going to get away with it, and that was that.
He tracked the light. Just one light, hazy, so probably a fair distance away. Heather under his boots now, waterlogged but better than the bracken, and the light was getting bigger; he was closing in, definitely, no question.
Two, three hundred yards distant, hard to be sure at night but the way the rain was coming down, crackling in the heather, there was no need to creep.
Sam strode vengefully onward.
Maybe it was due to forging on with his head down and his eyes slitted to keep the water out… maybe this was why Sam didn't realise for a few seconds that the light was actually coming, much more quickly, towards him.
A shapeless light. Bleary and steaming and coming at him through the rain… faster than a man could run.
'Hey…!' Sam stopped, gasping, then backed away, bewildered. His index finger tightened involuntarily and the gun went off, both barrels, and Sam stumbled, dropping it.
Something squelched and snagged around his ankle like a trap. He went down, caught hold of it – curved and hard – and realised, sickened, that he must have put his foot through the ribcage of a dead sheep.
Pulling at the foot, dragging the bones up with it, he saw the light was rising from the moor in front of him, misty and shimmering in the downpour.
And it seemed to him – soaked through, foot stuck in a sheep – that the light had a face, features forming and pulsing, a face veiled by a thin muslin curtain, the fabric sucked into a gaping mouth.
Sam's mouth was open too, now; he was screaming furiously into the rain, wrenching the torch from his pocket, thumbing numbly at its switch, until it spurted light, a brilliantly harsh directional beam making a white tunnel in the rain and mist, straight up into the face.
Where the tunnel of light ended suddenly. A beam designed to light up an object eighty yards away, and it shone as far as the rearing figure of light, a matter of four, five feet away. Where it died. In the beam, the figure of light turned into a shadow, a figure of darkness and cold.
'No…' Sam Davis wanted chanting townies in robes and masks. He wanted sick, stupid people. Wanted to see them dancing, getting pissed wet through. Wanted to hear them praying to the fucking Devil, with their fire hissing and smouldering in the rain. Didn't want this. Didn't want it. No.
When the shadow stretched and the torch beam began to shrivel, as if all the light had been sucked out, leaving only a thinly shining disc at the end of the torch, Sam felt his bowels give way.
All the rage and aggression slithered out of him like the guts of a slaughtered pig, and the void they left behind was filled with a cold, immobilizing fear. Lottie Castle came awake in swirling darkness.
Awakened by the cold air on her own body, exposed to the night, the sheets and blankets thrust away, her nightdress shed.
Her body was rolling about on the bed, drenched in sweat, arms and legs and stomach jerking and twitching with electricity, nipples rigid and hurting.
What's happening, what's happening?
She was ill. Her nervous system had finally rebelled against the months of agony and tension. She was sick, she was stricken. She needed help, she needed care. She should be taken away and cared for. She should not be alone like this, not here in this great shambling mausoleum.
Lottie began to pant with panic, feeling the twisted pillow sweat-soaked under her neck as it arched and swayed. She couldn't see anything, not her body, not the walls, nor even the outline of the window behind the thin curtains.
It couldn't be darker. But it wasn't silent.
And fright formed a layer of frost around Lottie's heart as she became aware that every muscle in her body was throbbing to the shrill, sick whinny of the Pennine Pipes, high on the night.