James Audubon,
The Birds of the Moon
New Orleans, 1926
1 Avoiding Diversions
Tommy Beck pulled the Tranny over to the side of the road and brought it to a careful stop with the engine running. He needed some sleep. Against the grey horizon and the rising sun, a milk float and a breakdown lorry had looked like a police blockade. He folded back his map and checked his route. He needed to start turning west just after Witney, following the invisible lines as best he could, taking the roads they most closely paralleled. He hoped this time he would get where he wanted to go. Every summer for twenty-three years he had retraced their journey back and forth across the country, trying to match exactly the meandering route he and Joany and the kids had taken for Glastonbury and the first festival.
Even his friends weren’t too sure of Tommy’s sanity. People thought Joany had run off. Someone had even said he’d abused his children.
Tommy knew what had really happened. He ignored the scepticism, the antagonism, the zealots who wanted to use his experience for themselves. He kept his own counsel and his own course.
Since that first Glastonbury Tommy Beck had attempted to reproduce their original route. He spent much of his spare time reading and studying for it. Every year he arrived at Glastonbury Tor and climbed to where caution had betrayed him, where he had seen the air, stinking of roses and vanilla, seal itself over an impossible view, separating him from his wife and children, dooming him to all these years of self-disgust and obsession. He knew what had happened, even if he no longer spoke of it to anyone. He had last seen Joany and the kids standing on that broad band of road, like a wide shaft of moonlight, arcing into the richly coloured darkness of the ether: he had the impression of great caravans of people and animals flowing back and forth, as if every creature that had ever existed was still alive.
Tommy Beck had always been of a practical disposition, valuable to the communes he joined. He smoked a modest amount of dope and did the odd tab of acid only if it was really good. He was widely read and could repair any small engine ever made. His attraction to Glastonbury had been entirely social. He had never been prepared for what had happened twenty-four years ago.
In their old Commer van, full of friends, looking forward to listening to some music and having a good time in the sun, they had left their Notting Dale squat and headed west. It felt wonderful, as if the millennium were just around the corner. If they hadn’t quite made it to a universal utopia, at least they seemed to be on the right road. Ultimately they might even stop the Vietnam War and see a world at peace.
Tommy woke up suddenly. A young policeman was banging on his passenger door. Tommy got ready for the familiar ritual.
The copper wasn’t about to start anything. “You all right, mate?”
“Yeah,” said Tommy. “I got a bit tired driving.”
“If you need to kip there’s a lay-by about half a mile up the road.”
“Gotcher,” said Tommy, putting the van into gear. “Thanks, mate.”
And he drove to the lay-by, wondering if pulling in at all had been a mistake. They hadn’t stopped here the first time they went to Glastonbury.
They hadn’t planned on this long a journey.
2 Alternative Routes
He moved through the fair, smiling vaguely, greeting old acquaintances, pausing at stalls to inspect anything which resembled a map. All the regulars knew him. Most welcomed him, but others were impatient with his obsession and dismissed his quietly intense questions. Some were convinced he’d murdered his family. A lot believed privately that Joany had simply got tired of living with a loony.
Tommy kept listening to the music from the stage. He was hoping to hear what he had heard that first time, as they stood on the crest of the Tor, wondering at the sudden silence, the sense of expectation. The music, they thought, had been nothing more than a penny whistle, a Celtic drum and high, melodic voices.
They had begun the climb in darkness, somehow avoiding all barriers, all witnesses, the kids scrambling up ahead while Tommy and Joany followed, hand in hand. They planned to watch the sun rise.
They had half-expected to be stopped. In the silver pre-dawn light they paused on the path to look back. There were camps down there which they didn’t recognise. Morning smoke was mingling with the thick mist. Tommy thought he heard horses. Harness.
There was no sign of the festival. They might have been the only human beings in the world. Tommy sniffed at the scented, dew-laden grass and lush foliage, looking up just as the first rays touched the chapel stones. The ruin was in better condition than he expected. He glanced around. The children were just out of sight. He heard Joany call to them, drawing their attention to the view.
The water was everywhere now. A wide, glinting marsh, from which birds rose suddenly, their wings noisy against the warming air. Tommy thought he saw a small boat moving in the reeds. There were what looked like thatched outbuildings raised on platforms above the water. He saw no roads, no real houses. Apart from the hills, nothing was familiar.
“Joany?”
There was a quick, unfamiliar pulse in his head, a chill in his bones.
“Joany?”
“It’s amazing, isn’t it,” she said. “Now I know why they said the view was worth it. Nothing’s changed!”
She was excited, thoroughly at ease with what was beginning to alarm Tommy. The mist from the water rose around the base of the Tor like a tide, creating this eery illusion. He remembered coming into Yarmouth years before, when a sea-fog filled the streets, wiping out the new concrete and emphasising the old, red brick, so that the entire town looked as it had at the height of its Edwardian success. It was odd. He couldn’t distinguish as much as a power line. Pulling himself together he turned to look up. The kids were staring at the tower and wondering if they were allowed to go in. Joany was just behind them. She turned enquiringly to Tommy.
He spread his hands. He had understood the place to be National Trust which you could only officially visit at certain times. But there were no notices, no signs or warnings, no fences.
Butch was pressing his grubby fists against an oiled oak door whose hinges, of beaten iron, glinted like new. Climbing closer to the tower, Tommy admired the restoration job. He hadn’t realised they had done so much. It was very different from the outline you saw below. It seemed much slenderer, and there was an extraordinary glow to the limestone. The oriental origins of the Gothic style were obvious. The doorway was as beautiful as anything Tommy had seen in Granada or Marrakech. The windows’ rich stained glass burned with vibrant light.
“Whoever built this place really loved it,” said Joany. “I didn’t realise it was so recent, did you?”
“I’ll have to take a guide book out when we get home,” Tommy said. “It’s an amazing building.” He was tearful with enthusiasm. “Look how that roof curves, the cut of the slate, and the stonework. Imagine the skill of the blokes who made all this!”
“It’s like a story.” Joany followed the carving around the tower, where it joined the roof. “People on quests and stuff. Some of those King Arthur nuts probably paid for it.” She knew a lot more about architecture than he did. “It’s no older than the oldest pre-Raphaelite! But it’s the work of real artists, you can tell. See, the glass has the same style—and it’s in scenes. Joseph of Arimathea, I’d guess. And Sir Percival, or someone like him. And the Grail, of course, it’s in all seven of these windows. Some romantic Birmingham ironmaster or Liverpool soap-maker commissioned this. There’s a William Morris design like it at the V&A. Blimey! That cross must be pure gold!”
The crimson sun had touched the spire. Tommy guessed there were strips of brass and copper in the roof. It seemed blood streamed down all four quadrants. The cross was unfamiliar, probably Celtic, possibly pagan, hard to see. The sun was above the horizon now, flecking the ruby water with skipping gold and silver. The pole houses were black outlines. Figures moved on the platforms, getting into little
boats. A light breeze rippled the water. The whole scene blazed, almost blinding him.
Tommy was still waiting for the mist to clear and reveal the evidence of civilisation when Butch shouted “It opens, Mum!” and slipped inside the unlatched door, Liz at his heels.
Joany dived after them, but the door was hard to push wider and she was still trying to struggle in when Tommy arrived. “Give it a shove, love, I’m stuck.”
Tommy found that the door moved easily under his hand. “You must have loosened it up, like a jar top,” he said as they entered. “Don’t touch anything, you two.”
It was a relief not to be looking at that weird landscape.
Tommy was fond of saying that he didn’t have a mystical bone in his body. He had never been interested in all that crap about Arthur and Glastonbury and ley-lines. But if that was what inspired the pre-Raphaelites to build this, it must have had something going for it.
As they got used to the jewelled gloom of the chapel, the kids fell silent with delight. Rustling silk banners, embroidered in extraordinary colours, hung from a central brass bracket suspended over a small altar of carved granite worked with silver, gold, iron and copper. The blazing windows, the richest glass Tommy had ever seen, were even more impressive from within, showing what he took to be various aspects of the Grail legend. With their intricate detail and accuracy of observation, the postures of the stylised figures displaying enormous meaning, they were the work of a master artist, with a powerful, indefinable spiritual content Tommy had never noticed in ordinary church art.
In Brookgate, where Tommy came from, near the Old Sweden Street market, most pre-War churches had been bombed and the new ones had never interested him. After his first tab of acid, at fourteen, he’d never needed an old building for a buzz.
Tommy noticed a goblet standing on the altar. By the style of the designs around the rim, it was probably Jewish, though there were also Romano-Celtic motifs, now that he looked, and even Anglo-Saxon, and what might be Sanskrit and Chinese. The whole design was surprisingly coherent. He couldn’t believe the Trust allowed something so valuable to be unprotected. The workmanship made it priceless, but the precious metals and gems alone were worth a million in cold cash.
The precision achieved with simple tools always amazed him. “It must be a fake,” he said.
“What?” Joany was irritated by his interruption of the silence.
“The cup—the goblet there.”
She turned, frowning. “What bloody cup?”
And then Butch had run up to the altar and was reaching for it.
Tommy controlled his impulse to shout. “Better not, Butchy,” he said evenly. “It would take a lot of pocket money to repair that!” But Liz, younger and less responsive, was now also grabbing up at the cup.
“What are you talking about?” said Joany. “There’s nothing there.”
“You’re barmy,” said Tommy. “It’s not exactly an Ovaltine mug. I bet this place is normally locked. We’re probably trespassing.”
“You’re suddenly very respectful of private property.” But she was grave. “It is beautiful. It would be horrible if somebody vandalised it.”
Tommy crossed to the altar and picked up a protesting Lizzy as she struggled to put her tiny hands on the cup.
“What on Earth’s got into you?” said Joany. “Don’t spoil it, Tom. We’re not doing any harm.”
“Maybe it’s a fake,” said Tommy. “In which case it’s still amazing. I’m just worried they’ll think we were trying to pinch it.”
She snatched Liz from him. “What have you been smoking?”
Liz was quiet. Her eyes over Joan’s shoulder were fixed on the goblet. Butch had a similar expression. He was smiling.
Tommy Beck sighed and turned to look up at the windows, the intricate stone, the delicately carved wood worked with precious metals. “If all churches were like this,” he said, “you couldn’t keep me out of them. We’ll have to come back here, Joan.”
“As long as you don’t start having visions,” she said. She shifted Liz onto her other side and took his arm. “Are you really nervous someone’ll do us for trespass? It’s a church. They’re supposed to be open to everybody.”
“I don’t want to spoil the holiday. We came for the music, remember.”
Then Tommy screwed up his face at a sound, like a human voice’s highest, loudest vibrato. “Christ! Some sort of alarm system. Come on everyone!” He got to the door and pulled it back. Joany and Liz went first, but Butch was slow. Tommy could hardly see. Security shutters were probably coming down. “Hurry up, lad.”
They were outside, with the door slammed behind them, before Tommy realised Butch had pinched the cup.
He tried the latch. He pushed at the heavy oak. It had locked.
“I suppose we might as well just sit here now and wait for the police.” Tommy was bitter.
When he looked, he hoped that at least the water would be gone.
The water was still there. Only the village had vanished.
3 Heavy Traffic
Tommy had no problem getting onto the Tor. He knew the whole area intimately, by night, by day, by the seasons. He could tell if a particular stone had been disturbed or a patch of wild-flowers failed to reseed. He was protective of the Tor. The Tor was his way back to Joany and the kids, to that moment when they had heard a soft humming sound, like a bee-swarm, and had gone round to the eastern side of the tower, Butch in the lead with his treasure held to his chest, and had seen the tall figure, thin as a Masai, her brooding eyes on the goblet, smiling at them, beckoning them forward. The humming now sounded human, and there was a pipe again, and a drum. A long way off . . . This woman was probably with a band . . .
The tall woman had a slender spear in her hand. She turned the spear and it seemed to expand, grow wider, until it formed a narrow doorway which opened onto teeming colour, swiftly changing shapes, an impression of myri-ad order, through which wound, like a moonbeam, a great silver road. Far away ahead on the road, tiny figures came and went as casually as if they strolled in Old Sweden Street on a Saturday afternoon. And there were other moonbeams, other roads, winding through that tapestry of restless colour. It was as if, suddenly, he was permitted a glimpse of actuality, a vision of wholeness.
The air reeked of roses and vanilla.
Tommy had felt a painful yearning, as if recollecting a forgotten loss. Even as Butch ran past the woman and through the gateway, brandishing the cup like a passport, Tommy was overcome with euphoria, a feeling of intense optimism as he realised the implications of what he had seen through that opening in the fabric of his own, small sphere of reality.
“No, Liz!” Joany went after the little girl. Now all three were through, staring ahead. The tall woman smiled and beckoned to Tommy. It was as if she could only keep the gate open for a little while.
Tommy looked into the teeming possibilities of suprareality and he suddenly hesitated. “Better not,” he had said as the woman stepped through her own gateway, drew the spear back to her body and vanished.
Tommy closed his eyes, as if to dismiss a bad dream. When he opened them the water had gone. The landscape was familiar and modern. Everything was perfectly normal. He was alone.
Tommy’s shout of agony had been heard across Glastonbury.
Twenty-four years later, Tommy Beck stood with his back against the cold stones of the ruined chapel and prayed to stare down through the mist and see wide water glinting. Far away, someone was tapping a drum to the thin sound of a penny whistle.
Standing where they had emerged from the door, Tommy began to retrace their steps round to the eastern side, where the sun was crimson against the pale blue horizon, where the woman with the spear had opened a gateway which Tommy had been too slow to enter.
For twenty-three years Tommy Beck had stood here at exactly the same time, trying to reproduce exactly the same movements, in exactly the same conditions which had granted them their original vision of the moonbeam road and
then separated them.
“There’s only one problem, old dear,” said a voice from the other side of the wall. “You haven’t got the Grail any more, have you? I’ve had the devil of a job tracking you down. I thought you lived in Brookgate.”
“I haven’t lived in Brookgate for nearly thirty years.” Tommy controlled his fear. He hated mind-games. This bloke sounded like a weirdo, a sadist, maybe.
“I frequently fall down on the fine tuning.” The speaker stepped from around the wall. “Well, you know, it’s not exactly time travel we do, but that comes into it. I get confused. I have a message. Are you interested in resuming your relationship with your wife Joan and your kids Benjamin and Elizabeth?”
Tommy could only nod. He realised he had given up hope. This could be some foul practical joke.
The pale-haired messenger was dressed in a ’60s-revival long, tight-waisted jacket, flared trousers and a frilly shirt. All the dandified aspects of the period. Tommy hated everything the style stood for.
“You look like an old crack dealer,” he said. “I don’t do that stuff. I didn’t ask for any help in this.”
“I was looking for you,” declared the dandy, “but I went a bit off my route. I had no intention of getting up your nose. In any way.”
“I think you’d better bugger off.” Tommy was wild with despair.
“Don’t worry about them,” said the dandy, looking down at the stilt village. “Their superstitions tend to work in our favour.”
From somewhere under his coat, the stranger produced a sword of dark, glowing iron. “Eternity awaits you.”
He added: “You’ll need the cup. It’s in that black plastic bag at your feet. Go on, open it. You’ll see it, if I can’t. It’s in your blood.”
As Tommy Beck bent to pick up the Grail, the dandy lifted the heavy sword high above his head.
“Excalibur,” he explained.
4 Abandoned Vehicle
The festival had been over a week before the police had time to trace the ownership of the abandoned Transit van.
The Best of Michael Moorcock Page 37