Free The Chalice by Phil Rickman Page B

modern pilgrims with Gucci luggage slept in
rooms with four-postered beds and sloping walls. Sometimes she drank at the
Pilgrims with Jim and the others, amusing themselves by embellishing the
Glastonbury legends for earnest German tourists, telling them a clear UFO sighting
over the Tor was virtually guaranteed at just before four a.m. on every second
Sunday, especially in winter.
       As it happened, Juanita had never
actually seen a UFO, which was a pretty shameful admission in Glastonbury.
           Diane of course, claimed she'd always seen balls of light in
the sky over the Tor. Didn't everybody see them?
           And the gossips said. It's
in the genes, isn't it? Always a danger with the upper classes. Interbreeding. You'll
always get one like that, every couple of generations . And they watched her
padding down the street. Lord Pennard's strange daughter, and they called her Lady
Loony.
           It was, admittedly, at the Carey and Frayne bookshop that
Diane had discovered the works of Dion Fortune, the Greatest Woman Magician of
All Time. Oh, Juanita, I'm so excited.
Dion Fortune - Diane Ffitch. Same initials! Diane's nose in a book,
munching healthy snacks. Nobody should get fat, for God's sake, on quorn and
tofu and carob covered cereal bars.
           She'd have found those books anyway, sooner or later. In Glastonbury,
the nutter's Mecca, where gateways to altered states seemed as close as the
nearest bus stop. Where on nights like this, you could almost see the subtle
merging of the layers, the way you could in Jim's paintings.
           Further up the street, only one shop was fully lit: Holy Thorn
Ceramics, owned by thirtyish newcomers Anthony and Domini Dorrell-Adams. The
lights were on because the Dorrell-Adamses were reorganising their window, and
...
           'Jesus,' Juanita said.
           Tony and Domini were together in the window. In fact it was
hard to imagine how they could be more together while fully clothed and standing up - Domini arching backwards and you
could almost hear the moans.
           Only in Glastonbury.
           Juanita tried to smile, accelerated away to the top of the High
Street. It could be a hell of an aphrodisiac, this town. Well, at first,
anyway. Turning into Lambrook Street, she was ambushed by misty moments from
twenty-odd years ago, when she'd left Nigel Carey (sad junkie; dead now) and
she and Danny Frayne had opened the shop with about two hundred books, mostly
secondhand, and a lot of posters. Danny was in publishing now, back in London.
And while it still said Carey and Frayne over the shop, and they still
occasionally exchanged daringly intimate letters on business notepaper, and now
and then had dinner and
whatnot in London, Danny - once bitten - never came back to Glastonbury.
           Headlights on full-beam, Juanita drove the Volvo off left into
secretive, tree-hung Wellhouse Lane, official gateway to the Tor.
           Impressionable. That was Diane. Curiously innocent, perhaps
deluded. That's all. But if he found
she was with the New Age travellers, her father would . .. what? Have her
committed? Juanita was convinced he'd tried something like that once. Jim was
right. Lord Pennard was not a terribly nice man.
     
    It was very dark. Juanita
drove carefully up the narrowing road, scene of many a near-collision, and took
a narrow right, scraping the hedge.
           Where the Tor should be visible, there was a night mist like a
wall. The lane swooped steeply into a tunnel of trees, and at the end of it
Juanita swung sharp left into a mud-packed track until the car could go no
farther.
           The great ash tree leapt up indignantly, as if rudely awoken
by the Volvo's headlights.
           She got out. 'Jim?'
           A little chillier than of late, and it'd be quite cold on the
Tor. Pulling on her coat, Juanita very nearly screamed when hand patted her
shoulder.
       'My, my.' Jim