Willie's youngest sister was in her dressing gown, making tea. 'Sleep through this weather? Not a chance. Our Benjie's messing about up there, too, with that dog. I've told him, I'll have um both in t'shed, he doesn't settle down.'
'Where's Martin?'
'Working up Bolton again. Takes what he can. Bloody Gannons.'
'Right,' Willie said. 'Well, if you can get dressed, our Sal. You've been re-co-opted onto t'Mothers.'
'Get lost, Willie. I told Ma years ago, I said I'll take a back seat from now on, if you don't mind, it's not my sort of thing.'
Aye, well, no arguing with that. Certainly wasn't her sort of thing these days. Sal's kitchen was half the downstairs now. Knocked through from the dining room and a posh conservatory at the back. Antique pine units, hi-tech cooker, extractor fan. All from when Horridges had made Martin sales manager, about a year before Gannons sacked him.
'Anyroad,' Sal said. 'Can't leave our Benjie. God knows what he'd get up to, little monkey.'
'Well, actually,' Willie said, 'I wouldn't mind getting the lad in as well. We're going to need a new Autumn Cross, a bit sharpish.'
'Be realistic. How can a child of his age go out collecting bits of twigs and stuff on a night like this?'
'Aye, I can!' Benjie shouted, bursting into the kitchen, already half-dressed, dragging on his wellies. 'I can, Uncle Willie, honest.'
'Get back to bed, you little monkey, if I've told you once tonight, I've…'
'Lay off, eh, Sal. We need everybody we can get.'
'Is this serious, Willie? I mean, really?'
Willie said nothing.
'What's in that briefcase?'
'This and that.'
'Uncle Willie,' said Benjie, 'T'Chief's been howling.'
'They're all howling tonight, Benj.'
'And t'dragon. T'dragon growed, Uncle Willie. T'dragon's growed.' When Milly caught Cathy's eye over the heads of the assembled Mothers they exchanged a look which said, this is hopeless.
Altogether there were seven of them squeezed into Ma's parlour, standing room only – although at least a couple were not too good on their pins and needed chairs.
'Susan!' Milly cried. 'Where's Susan?'
'Staying in with the little lad,' Ethel, Susan's mum, told her. 'Frank's not back. Likely on a bender. She won't leave the little lad on his own on a night like this.'
'Wonderful!' Cathy moaned. 'Hang on, what about Dee from the chippy? Needs must, Ethel.'
'She's had a shock, what with Maurice, she won't even answer the door.'
'Well, get somebody to bloody break it down. And if Susan's got to bring the kid along, do it, though I'd rather not. That'll be nine. Willie! How's it going? Any luck?'
'We found it, I think.' Willie came in clutching Mr Dawber's old briefcase. 'Here, make a bit of space on t'table.'
'How is he?'
'He's resting. Had a bit of a do wi' Shaw Horridge.' Willie was spreading out sheets of foolscap paper. 'Thank God for Mr Dawber, I say. Anything to do with Bridelow he collects. Whipped it off Ma 'fore she could put it back of t'fire.'
'Looks complicated.'
'It's not as bad as it looks. They're all numbered, see, and they join up, so we've got a complete map of t'village wi' all the key boundary points marked. Ma did um all barefoot. But that were summer. What you want is one woman at each, and each to take a new stone. Alf's got um ready for consecration, like, end of his yard.'
'How big are they, these stones?'
'Size of a brick, maybe half a brick. Some of um are bricks, come to think of it. Ma used a wheelbarrow.'
'We'll never do it,' Milly said in despair. 'Are you proposing to send old Sarah out to the top of Church Field with half a brick?'
'She could do one of the closer ones,' said Cathy. 'If you or I take the Holy Well…'
'We still haven't got enough.' Milly lowered her voice. 'And what kind of commitment we'll get out of half this lot I don't know. Ma was right. We've been hopelessly complacent. We let things slide. We haven't got a chance.'
'There's always a chance,' Cathy said, and even Willie thought her voice was starting to sound a bit frail. She was overtired, lumpy bags under her eyes, thin hair in rat's tails.
'What?' said Milly, approaching hysteria – and Willie had never seen that before. 'Against a feller who's spent half a lifetime stoking up his evil? Against that hideous girl? Against all them practising satanists?'
'They're idiots,' Cathy said. 'Any idiot can be a satanist.'
'Aye,' said Milly, 'and any idiot can make it work if they've got nowt to lose.'
'All right.' Cathy turned to Willie. 'How's Alf getting on?'
'Moaning,' Willie said. 'Reckons cement won't hang together wi' all the rain. Stan Burrows and them've fixed up a sort of a shelter for him. I told him, I says, you can do it again proper sometime, Alf, just make sure it sticks up tonight. I called in at Sal's, too, and young Benjie'll be along wi' a pile of stuff for a new cross. Reckon you can fettle it?'
'Aye,' said Milly. 'I suppose I can.'
'Don't you start losing heart, lass. Hey, our Sal's on her way too, what about that?'
'Never!' said Cathy. 'Ceramic hob on the blink, is it?'
'I'm persuasive, me, when I put me mind to it.'
'That'll make it ten, then,' Cathy said. 'Still, not enough. But we're getting there. Please, Milly, please don't go negative on me now.' Macbeth closed the door behind him, as if to prove he wasn't really a wimp and could handle this alone, and he didn't come out for a long time, maybe half a minute, and there was no sound from him either. And Moira panicked. I was wrong. They're all there. They're waiting for us.
'Moira,' he called out, more than a wee bit hoarse, just at the point when she was about to start screaming. 'I think I need some help.'
At the foot of the final stairway, the air was really sour, full of beer and vomit, blood and death. She took a breath of it, anyway. She was – face it – more scared than he was, and whenever she was really scared, she went brittle and hard, surface-cynical. A shell no thicker than a ladybird's.
She wanted a cigarette. She wanted a drink.
She wanted out of here.
'Hold your nose,' Macbeth advised, opening the door. He sounded calm. Too calm. He was going to pass out on her any second.
And of course she didn't hold her damn nose, did she, and the stench of corrupted flesh nearly drove her back down the steps.
'I covered that one over,' Macbeth said. 'Couldn't face it.'
A circle within a circle. Candles burned down to stubs, not much more than the flames left, and all the rearing shadows they were throwing.
'Watch where you're walking,' Macbeth said.
The attic light was brown and bleary with sweat, grease, blood. Several chairs inside the circle. Two of them occupied.
One was a muffled hump beneath old sacking. 'All I could find,' Macbeth said. 'I don't think you should uncover it. I don't think anybody should. Not ever.'
A yellow hand poked out of the sacking.
She stared at it, trying to imagine the yellow fingers stopping up the airholes on the Pennine Pipes.
'It's this one,' Macbeth said behind her. 'Moira? Please?'
Moira turned and took a step forward and her foot squelched in it.
Congealing blood. Bucketsful. You don't have to do anything like that,' Cathy said. 'It's not as if I'm asking you to bare your breasts or have sex with anyone under a full moon or swear eternal allegiance to the Goddess.'
'Pity,' said the blonde one, trying, and failing, to hold her cigarette steady.
'All you have to do,' Cathy said, 'is believe in it. Just for as long as you're taking part.'
'I don't, though, luv,' Lottie Castle said. 'And I can't start now.'
However, Cathy noticed, she couldn't stop herself looking over their shoulders towards what was probably the gas-mantle protruding from the side of the bar.
Cathy had heard all about the gas-mantle, from the policeman, Ashton, who was standing by the door at this moment, Observing but keeping out of it because – as he'd pointed out, there was no evidence of the breaking of laws, except for natural ones.
'Yes, you do,' Chrissie said. 'You've always believed in it. That's been half the problem.'
'And how the hell would you know that?'
'Oh, come on. The last couple of hours I've probably learned more about you than anybody in this village. And you know more about me than I'd like to have spread around.'
'Yes,' said Lottie. 'I suppose so. And how do you come into this, luv? Always struck me as an intelligent sort of girl, university education. Oxford, isn't it?'
'That's right, Mrs Castle, Oxford.'
'No polite names tonight. It's Lottie.'
'And I'm Chrissie,' said the blonde.
'You know about your husband,' Cathy said. 'You know what they've done.'
'Cathy luv, he ceased to be my husband the night he needed somebody else to close his eyes for him. Well, a fair time before that, if truth were known. I've had half a lifetime of Matt Castle, and that's more than anybody should have to put up with, and I can say that now, because I can say anything tonight, believe me.'
As soon as Cathy had walked in she'd spotted the two glasses, smelt the booze.
'All right,' she said. 'Forget your husband. Let's talk about your son.'
Lottie's face hardened immediately into something like a clay mask.
'Dic? What about Dic?' 'Just I don't think he's dead,' Macbeth said.
'Oh, Jesus. Jesus.' Moira put down her lamp in the blood, the light tilted up at Dic's face.
But they couldn't kill him, could they? For the same reason they couldn't kill you. Surely.
'Willie was right, Mungo. We should've been up here, mob-handed. Thought I was being clever. Being stupid. Stupid!'
But sometimes you can do more harm to someone than killing them'd be, you know?
'Tights,' Macbeth snapped. 'You wearing tights under there?'
'Huh…? No. What's…? Oh, Jesus… Dic… please don't be dead.'
'Shit,' said Macbeth. 'Handkerchief?'
'I dunno what's in these pockets, it's no' my coat… yeah, is this a handkerchief?'
'How big is it? OK, tear it in half. Fold 'em up. Make two tight wads.' Macbeth was peeling off the thick adhesive tape binding Dic's arms to the chair-arms. Both arms were upturned, palms of the hands exposed. Veins exposed. There was a welling pool of rich, dark blood at each wrist and it was dripping to the floor each side of the chair. There was a widening pond of blood, congealed around its blackened banks. Late-autumnal flies from the roofspace crawled around, drunk on blood.
'OK, now you hold his arm above his head. You're gonna get a lot of blood on you.'
'I got more blood on me than I can handle,' Moira muttered. 'You sure you know what you're doing, Mungo?'
'I never did it for real before, but… Ah, you don't need to hear this shit, just hold his arms. Right. Gimme one of the pads. See, we got to hold the… this is a pressure pad, right? So you push it up against the wound with both thumbs. Like hard. Idea is, we stop the blood with the pad, then I wind this goddamn tape round just about as… tight… as I can make it,'
'Is he breathing?'
'How the fuck should I know? Now the other arm. Hold it up, over his head… And, shit, get the tape off his mouth. Chrissakes, Moira, didn't we do that?'
The tape across Dic's mouth stretched from ear to ear. Moira tore it away, and Dic mumbled, 'Do you… have to be so rough?'
Moira jumped away in shock. Macbeth yelled, 'Keep hold of that fucking arm, willya?'
'Aw, Christ. You're no' dead.'
'I'm no' dead,' said Dic feebly, and be giggled.
'Don't talk,' said Moira. 'You're gonny be OK. Mungo?'
'He's lost a lot of blood.'
'Don't I know it. I'm paddling in it.'
'He needs to go to a hospital. This is strictly amateur hour. Can't say how long it's gonna hold. Far's I can see, they cut the vein. If they'd cut the artery this guy'd be long gone. They cut the vein, each wrist, taped his arms down. The blood goes on dripping, takes maybe a couple hours to drain the body. How long they had you like this, pal?'
'Not the faintest,' Dic said. 'I was on valium, I think. Intravenous. So I'd know what was happening but wouldn't care.'
'That's good. See, the dope slows down the metabolism and that goes for the blood flow too. This is weird stuff, Moira, this left me way behind a long time back.'
Moira said, 'Do you know why, Dic?'
Dic nodded at the hump under the sacks.
'Do me one favour,' Macbeth said. 'I saved your life, least you can do is let me keep that fucking thing under wraps.'
'That's Matt, isn't it, Dic?'
Dic nodded. He was lying back in his chair, both arms still flung over his head and black with dried and drying blood.
Moira didn't recall ever seeing courage on this scale. Maybe the valium had helped, but it was more than that.
'Suppose you know,' Dic said, 'where they've gone.'
'We have to get you to a hospital.'
'When you're on valium and you're still terrified, you know it must be pretty awesome.'
'Looks pretty cruddy to me,' Macbeth said.
'We'll get you down the steps, OK? We'll get you out of here.'
'He's not sane, you know. I don't reckon he was all there to begin with, lived in his own fantasy world. Like Dad. And that guy Hall.' He closed his eyes. 'Bloody Cathy. The things you do for love, eh?'
'Mungo,' Moira said. 'How about you go downstairs to one of the offices, find a phone? Get us some transport for Dic'
'You'll be OK?' Macbeth looked like he couldn't get out fast enough.
'Sure. Get hold of Cathy. You got the number?'
'Called it enough times from the phone-booth.' He hesitated in the doorway, Dic's blood on one cheek.
'Go,' Moira said.
When they were alone, she said, 'Dic, I need to ask you… Matt…'
'I gave him blood,' Dic said. 'And you…' He nodded at the thing in the other chair.
Moira sighed. Sooner or later she had to face this.
She hooked a finger under a corner of the sacking.
The dead couldn't harm you.
'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.'