The Man in the Moss

by Phil Rickman

  'It shall not happen.'

  Joel lifted his foot, aware as never before of its size and its weight, and he plunged it, with a shattering, through the glass lantern and watched the shower of shards, blue and then white, pierce the tumbling shadows,

  'The bulbs, Joel. Now the bulbs!'

  . Joel felt his lips stretched tight as his foot went back again and again, lightbulbs exploding, all of them, whorls of jagged colour, and then there was the creak of a door opening, a rapid clumping of footsteps and his neck was wrenched back and the last thing he saw before the last bulb blew was John's luminescent teeth as the man held up a scimitar of white glass, nine inches long.

  Joel bit rubber, and felt his knees buckle before he was even aware of the single dull, heavy blow on the back of his head.

  For a long time here was only night, and then there was a lake and a naked woman on a hill, and the woman smiled with a sorrow deeper than the lake and Joel wanted to scream, I

  recognise you. I recognise you now, for what you are ...

  But the woman was gone and there was only a void of dark sorrow and John's voice, coming very quickly, words running together, some in an archaic and alien language, and a few that he could understand.

  '… that by the laying down of the blood ...

  Another, deeper male voice joining John's in fractured counterpoint.

  ... and shall be recompensed for that which we have borrowed ...'

  Joel trying to speak, his arms pinned behind him, confusion and humiliation turning to a savage anger as his chest swelled and his elbows jerked and there was a grunt behind him and he spat out the rubber and jerked his head forward and inside him he let out a great roar of rage.

  And only a liquid gurgle came out, and he felt his very soul was pouring out through his throat and something heavy thrust into the small of his back and there was a shattering explosion and Joel was out into the flooded sky and falling through the slipstream of his blood.

  Part Ten

  moss

  CHAPTER I

  Nobody in the house had been able to get to sleep anyway, because of the rain, and then The Chief started to howl, a terrified yelping sort of howl, sending Benjie hurtling down the stairs and his mam screaming from the landing, 'He'll go in a kennel, that dog, I'm warning you!' And The Chief carried on howling, even with Benjie's arms light around his neck, and Benjie shouted back Up, 'It's that dragon again, Mam!'

  Heard his mam snort from the landing.

  Mumbling into the dog's fur,'... same as killed me gran.'

  And Benjie thought he should get dressed and take The Chief out into the street so his howling would wake up the whole village and everybody would be able to escape before the dragon came out of the Moss.

  Moira was already dressed when they heard Alfred Beckett shouting in the Post Office, 'Shop! Shop!'

  Milly brought him through and Alf stood there, getting his breath back, raindrops glittering in his moustache.

  'They've put it out!' he gasped, holding on to the back of the sofa. 'Bastards've put out the light.'

  Willie pushed past him and dashed through the office to the front door. 'He's right.'

  'Beacon of the Moss,' Milly explained to Moira.

  'What's that mean? That it's out?'

  'It's happened before, obviously, power-failures and such, but with all the rest of it...'

  'You're saying it's cumulative, right?'

  'I'll go up,' Willie called back.

  'No,' Moira snapped. 'There's been too much rushing in, far's I can see. Cathy, the Mothers - how many are there?'

  'It's a ragbag,' Milly said.

  'How d'you call a meeting?'

  'The old days, used to be said we never needed to call them at all.'

  'Well, how about we try the phone, huh?'

  'They'll all be in bed.'

  'Jesus wept! If I had any hair I'd be tearing it.'

  Dic Castle knew that a common way of committing suicide was to cut your wrists while lying in a bath of warm water and that it was largely painless, letting life seep away.

  He was not in a bath of warm water, but he supposed sedation had the same effect in that he was aware of not trying to scream through the sweating adhesive tape across his mouth but just sitting there, bound by string and wire to his chair wondering how long before it was over.

  His hands were painlessly numb, cloth tourniquets around both wrists so that the blood flow was regulated, like an egg-timer.

  He wasn't even resentful any more. He'd got Moira out. He'd led them away from her and they didn't know she'd gone with the sound of the rain muffling her hysteria. Him? They thought he'd just chickened out and run away, and now they'd caught him, and maybe this was what they'd intended for him all along.

  Blood to blood.

  He watched their faces: Philip, the glum satanist; Owen the ex-nurse who'd given him valium through a vein; Andrea the care-in-the-community mental patient who'd killed but not exactly murdered two small boys many years ago; Therese, who thought she was already halfway to being a goddess; Dr Roger Hall, who just wanted to meet the Man in the Moss.

  Real evil, Dic realized, was a bit bloody pathetic.

  Outside, the apprentice at the gate, was feeble Shaw Horridge, probably more inadequate than any of them because he had had money and privileges on a scale incomprehensible to most of the others.

  Over in the loft at the church, Dean - also known as Asmodeus - had been hiding for hours with Terence, the hulking occult bookseller from Salford, awaiting their mentor the revered John. Slaveringly eager for whatever grotesque experience he'd prepared for them, the more perverse the more sensuously exciting.

  Dic had ceased some while ago to be shocked. He'd already seen in his father the damage caused by the perversion of a Utopian dream. He was twenty-four. He'd seen Matt Castle's jolly, infectious pioneering spirit shrivel to a sour fanaticism. And then he'd died.

  And now, because of his father. Dic would die too. Taped into a wooden chair with the blood draining slowly from his wrists.

  Blood to blood.

  Dic was staring across the circle, with a vaguely surprising sense of pity, into his father's eyes, when a movement made him turn his head. Therese had shuddered.

  Therese was sitting cross-legged, although her legs were hidden in cloak and shadow. There were candles, ordinary white candles, in glass jars because of the draught, seven of them arranged around the circle, which had been painted on the wooden floor in white and was actually two concentric circles a yard apart. In the space between the circles they all sat, like shadowy party goers gathered for charades.

  Dregs.

  But Therese had shuddered.

  'Yes,' she breathed. 'He's done it. Can't you feel it?'

  And as if she'd signalled to them, the inadequates started mumbling, some far back in their throats, making unintelligible noises as though trying to disengage their dentures.

  Revolting bastards.

  In time, the mumbling became more intense and seemed to encompass the figure sprawled, rotting and stinking, in the wooden armchair.

  Dic could look at it now with little sense of shock and no sense of relationship. At the withering lips drawn back, the yellow of teeth, the stiff, spouting hair above eyes wide open but glazed like a cod's eyes on the slab.

  His father.

  Of course, if you'd suggested to Chris that it was a game, a recreation like golf or squash or amateur theatricals, Chris would have been most resentful and his reply would probably have been - as he would now admit - somewhat pompous and self-righteous.

  Born in Hemel Hempstead, Chris was an accountant in Sheffield. He was thirty-seven, had had his own house, on what was now a minimal mortgage, since the age of nineteen. So that when he married Chantal four years ago life had not exactly been an uphill struggle, with foreign holidays and two cars from the beginning. And the fact that God had not yet seen fit to bestow upon them a child, well, perhaps that indicated God had other work for them.


  Chris had always been a churchgoer. However, as he'd intimated in passing to the American, Macbeth, the Anglican faith had long since ceased to satisfy his intense need for a more dynamic relationship with his deity.

  Baptism into the Church of the Angels of the New Advent, with its full-throated, high-octane worship and its promise of real religious experience, was the fulfilment of what Chris had been anticipating all his thinking life.

  Within eighteen months, he'd become an elder of the Church, dealing with its finances, investing its reserves, getting the best deal for God.

  It filled his life. God, therefore, filled his life.

  And God was not a hobby.

  The validity of the Church of the Angels of the New Advent had been confirmed by the acceptance at theological college of one of its founders. Brother Beard, who had been called by God to go out into the 'straight' Church and reform it from within.

  God's reasoning had become all too clear to Chris when Joel had been called to Bridelow.

  His appearance at their house last night in search of sanctuary had made Chris - and he was sure he could also speak for Chantal - feel very honoured and (he would have admitted this now) very excited.

  When Joel had spoken of his discovery of the symbols of pagan devil-worship in the Lord's house, Chris had been, on the surface, appalled, and underneath (he might not yet have admitted this) thrilled.

  And when Joel had telephoned them this morning with a dramatic plea which said, more or less, Bring in the troops, the war has begun, Chris's blood had begun to race.

  It was not a recreation. It was not a hobby. It was not just an unusual and stimulating way of spending Sunday, hiring a coach and everyone piling in, prepared to fast through the night (bar the odd cup of coffee) to bring light where once was darkness

  It was a war.

  When the initial joyous element had been rather dispelled of mental stress by, first, Joel and then (perhaps influenced by Joel's rather overheated display) Chantal, Chris, the Lord's accountant, had decided that a more precise and ordered approach was required if they were to avoid further humiliation.

  When they'd returned, a little shamefaced, he'd taken it upon himself to bar the church doors and state that there was to be no more wandering in and out for coffee and anyone experiencing anything irregular should simply clasp the hand of his or her brother or sister and pray for it to pass.

  And there had been hymns and prayers (without hand-clapping, since they had learned that some faiths considered there to be a demonic element in this), and the familiar flow of exultation had once more been attained.

  Until Chris himself had heard a distant crash from somewhere above and foolishly disregarded it until the reality of their struggle became distressingly (at first) evident.

  He heard and felt it begin.

  It began with a cooling of the air and a creeping change in the vibe of the chant.

  Hoooolyamallaaagloriagloriamalalaglorytogodglorytogod

  The girl next to him had been singing melodiously, her voice high and pure and sweet.

  And then too sweet.

  Cloying in fact, with an acrid saccharine aftertaste, which he was actually beginning to taste in his own throat. And then becoming simpering and childish. Peevish and playground- rhythmical.

  holygod holygod holyholyholygod

  goldyhod goldyhod golyhold holygold

  godlyhole godlyhole godlyhole...

  And then it happened very quickly ... sort of whooooosh, like a small hurricane of bad breath. There was a wafting sugary smell which soon became sweetly putrid, like the bad orange at the bottom of the bowl, as the chant, the pure song of Tongues, suddenly was sounding raucous and guttural, women cackling hideously (enticingly) and men making grunting, retching, foul pig noises.

  We're doing it, Chris thought, in a kind of euphoric dismay, as a slimy earth taste arose in his throat. We are exorcizing the Evil.

  Just that nobody had told him it would be quite so unpleasant (and stimulating).

  When Paul, their musician - who had, admittedly, never been all that proficient - began to force a vicious, grinding discordance through the organ pipes, Chris stepped out into the aisle and ran up the steps of the pulpit from where he observed that at least five Angels of the New Advent had begun hurriedly to divest themselves of their apparel.

  He also saw three men, one a kind of albino with a cherub's mouth, emerge from the vestry and calmly let themselves of the church by the main door.

  They were laughing.

  There was still no sign of Joel.

  Joel?

  Who was this Joel?

  Chris saw no more, for he was attacked by one of his squealing sisters and his face clawed and he enjoyed it immensely.

  Mungo Macbeth had specialized for over ten years in the downmarket kind of TV-movie in which people fell wildly in love and moved heaven and earth to find fulfilment in someone's arms.

  Between times he'd done cop movies, about hard-bitten, cynical cops who, underneath it all, had feelings same as anyone else.

  However, apart from the ones who'd given him parking and speeding tickets, Macbeth had never before met a cop who was not being played, at unreasonable expense, by some asshole with a beach house and security gates.

  Love stories did not end, before they had even begun, with the death of the love object. And cop movies were never about cops who sat in your car in an endless monsoon, which, by the way, was becoming seriously frightening, and said, 'Well, I'm buggered if I know how to handle this, mate.'

  They were parked up by the church in Macbeth's car on account of the grey-haired, weary-looking cop wasn't even sure his would stand up to the conditions.

  Macbeth, also pretty tired, said, 'How about you just call up the precinct house and have a bunch of uniforms directed this way?'

  Ashton said, 'How about you get sensible, pal?'

  'I apologise.'

  'Look,' Ashton said, 'it seems very likely a crime has been committed. But what scares the living shit out of me is that the possible criminal element in all this does not seem to be the worst aspect, if you get my meaning.'

  'Yeah.'

  'And if I were to contact my headquarters and somebody there did actually take me seriously, their first instruction - I know this much - would be: do nothing.'

  Ashton scrubbed at the misted windshield. 'I'm not in the mood for some shiny-arsed politician telling me to do nowt. There's summat nasty here. I don't know how to react, but I

  have to. Right?'

  'I dunno, Macbeth said. 'It was different, somehow, when I thought Moira was dead.'

  'How do you know she's not?' Ashton demanded, blunt as a sledgehammer.

  'What are you saying?'

  'Christ, I'm saying, help me. I'm saying I'm not playing this by the book because there's no book I know of covers it. I'm saying that normally, as a copper, I'd want nothing at all to do with you because I don't know you from Adam. But at least you look a bit too soft and innocent to be a villain, and if I'm not playing it as a copper I need some help and you're all I'm bloody got.'

  'OK.' Macbeth said reluctantly, 'First question: you equipped with a piece?'

  'Eh?'

  'Are you armed?'

  'Are you thick?' Ashton said. 'Or just American?'

  Macbeth shrugged and started up the car. 'OK,' he said. 'Let's crash the party.'

  Hoping Moira would be there but not...

  ... not involved.

  'OK, Lottie said fifty yards from the church, make a right, so if I reverse ...'

  He never got to do it. The hire-car was surrounded by people; they were banging on the windows and the roof.

  Shortly after Shaw Horridge stopped screaming, Ernie Dawber tried to get past him to the front door, and this proved to be a bad mistake. His second bad mistake.

  For a long time, Shaw had been tearing around the hall clutching at his head. He'd have been tearing his hair if there'd been enough to get a grip on.

/>   It was a squarish hall with a high ceiling and these five mirrors, three of them full-length, put there by Liz to spread the light.

  It had not been the place to break the spell.

  How could the lad ever have convinced himself that his hair was growing again, when the opposite was true? Hadn't he looked in a mirror recently? And if he had, what had he seen?

  Certainly not what all five mirrors had reflected tonight before Shaw's tenuous self-control had snapped and he'd picked up a chair of Victorian mahogany and swung it above his head around the walls, and his shining baldness was reflected a thousandfold in the hail of flying glass, as Ernie cowered on his knees by the hallstand, protecting his face with his hat.

  When he made a dash for the door, Shaw was on him in one bound, his sharp, pale face aglitter with blood and glass bright as jewellery. 'How did you do it? How did you do it, old

  man?'

  It was some minutes before Ernie came to understand that the poor, crazed boy was holding him responsible for the disappearance of his hair.

  'Listen to me,' Ernie said gently. 'They lied to you, lad. They lied about everything. Your hair, the brewery, your poor mother. They ...'

  Bewitched him? Twisted his mind? Before Ernie could choose the least inflammatory words, Shaw's face convulsed.

  He snatched up the chair again and smashed it down on the hallstand an inch from Ernie's ear, snapping off two legs.

  'Get it back!' Shaw shrieked. 'Get my hair back!'

  And if this was a dream it didn't matter. There'd be no awakening anyway. Dic thought about his mother, all she'd had to put up with from the bastard. She should have married a secondary-school head or a bank manager in Wilmslow, or an airline pilot working out of Ringway. All that grit gone to waste on a two-bit musical maverick committed to a primitive instrument you could barely get a proper tune out of.

  Made him want to weep.

  The candles were burning low. Either this or his vision was going.

  ... blood to blood.