by Phil Rickman
The statue hefted above his head like a club. Ma cowered.
'Oh, no ...'He lowered the statue to chest-height. 'Don't cringe, Mrs Wagstaff. I wouldn't hurt you physically. I'm a servant of God. I merely remind you of the strong line the Bible takes on your particular ... sub-species.'
Joel Beard put out a contemptuous hand to help her up. She looked at the hand and its fingers became a bundle of twisted twigs bound roughly together, and the connection was made with the thing on the Moss, two opposing terminals, the black and the white, each as dangerous and Ma stranded in the middle.
'Gerraway from me!' She shrank back, feeling that if she touched his hand she'd be burned alive.
'What are you afraid of, Mrs Wagstaff?'
'I'm afraid of denseness,' Ma said. 'Kind of denseness as rips down a child's offering, smashes it on t'stones ...'
'But ... but it was evil,' he said reasonably. 'Can't you people see that? Primitive. Heathen. It insulted the true Cross.'
Ma Wagstaff shook her head. 'Tha knows nowt. Tha's big and arrogant, and tha knows nowt. Tha's not fit to wipe Hans Gruber's arse.'
Joel Beard raised the statue of the Mother far above his head. His face severe. His golden curls tight as stone.
'All right, then,' he said. 'Be your own salvation, Mrs Wagstaff.'
Ma grabbed at the air, eyes widening in horror. She began to whimper. Joel smashed the Mother down on the rocks and her head broke easily, pounded to plaster-dust
Ma Wagstaff cried out. The cry of the defeated, the gutted, the desolate.
Gone. Nowt left. Gone to dust.
Beating the plaster from his hands and his green hiking jacket, Joel Beard strode away across the dirty-yellow moorgrass. Fragments floated in the centre of the pool until the springwater scattered them, making widening circles over the Mother's headless body.
CHAPTER IV
For the first time since all this had begun, Lottie's hands began to shake, and she pressed them against the hot-plate covers on the stove so that if the policeman had seen it he'd think she was simply cold.
It was a bad dream, switching from one dreadful scene to another until the horror was spinning about her like a merry-go-round of black shadow-horses, and whichever way she turned ...
She turned back to the policeman, who, to give him his due, looked no happier about this than she felt. Steadying her voice, she said, 'You want to dig up my husband.'
'This is ...' Inspector Ashton exhaled down his nose. 'Look, Mrs Castle, if there was any other way ... It's not your husband we want to ... see. It's the grave itself. Normally when there's an exhumation it's at the request of the coroner or the pathologist, to enable further examination of a body. In this case we don't want to touch the body, we don't even want to open the coffin. We ... have reason to believe the grave may have been disturbed before your husband was placed in it.'
Lottie felt her face muscles harden. Somebody had blown the gaff on Ma Wagstaff and her primitive rituals. What the hell else had the old hag been up to?
'We have reason to believe,' Ashton said, 'that certain ... stolen goods may be buried under your husband's coffin.'
'What goods?'
'I'd rather not say at the present time, if you don't mind, Mrs Castle.'
He'd turned up in the bar not long after Moira had left. On his own. Asked if he might have a word. All very casual and quiet.
Lottie thought about the implications. 'And what if I don't agree?'
Ashton sighed, 'it'll just take longer for us to get permission.'
'But you'll get it anyway.'
Ashton nodded. 'Between ourselves, what does bother me is that the person who's made the allegations about this ... these stolen goods ... has intimated that if we don't act on them quickly, he'll make his suspicions known to the media. I don't need to tell you what that would mean in terms of invasion of privacy, unwarranted intrusion into private grief, reporters all over your doorstep ...'
'You mean,' said Lottie, 'that this man's blackmailing you?'
Ashton laughed. 'If only it was that simple. No, I was inclined to disbelieve him at first, but now I agree there's a strong basis for thinking something's down there as shouldn't be. And if we can handle our excavations discreetly, after dark, inconspicuous, no fuss ...'
'Have you spoken to anyone else in the village?'
'No, I certainly haven't, and I'd be very much obliged if you'd keep this to yourself as well. Last thing we want is an audience. 'Course, we'll have to consult with the minister, but that won't be a problem, I shouldn't think.'
Lottie thought about Ma Wagstaff and her Old Ways and Matt's apparent acceptance of all this rubbish as part of the unique West Pennine tradition. Acknowledging, with much bitterness, Matt's part in all this.
'Right.' She pulled her hands from the stove. 'Go ahead. I'll sign whatever you want me to sign.'
'Thank you,' said Ashton ',That's very brave of you, Mrs Castle.'
'Just one thing.'
He'd begun to button his trenchcoat; he stopped.
'Keep me out of it, Inspector. I don't want to know when you do it or what you find. I don't want to be involved.'
Ashton nodded, relieved. 'And you'll keep this to yourself?'
'Oh, I wouldn't want to alert anybody who might have cause to be ... embarrassed.' Lottie smiled grimly, 'I certainly wouldn't.'
Suspicious, at first, as he came up the street. Fingers going on his thighs, nose twitching as if he had whiskers. Then he saw who it was, and she watched the sun come up in his cheeks and knew it was all right.
'Moira!'
More than ten years dissolved in the Pennine air.
'Willie, hey, I was looking for you the whole morning.'
'I were down me workshop. Doin' a bit o' bodgin' an' fettlin'.' He stepped back, put his hands on her shoulders like a dog on its hind legs. 'Eee, lass, I can't tell you ... you're looking bloody grand.' ,
She thought he was going to lick her ears, but he backed off and they stood a couple of yards apart, inspecting each other. He hadn't changed at all: small and wiry, brown hair down to his quick eyes. She didn't know what to say. So damn much to talk about, and none of it superficial.
It started to rain again. 'Once it starts,' Willie said, twitching his nose at the sky, 'it gets to be a bloody habit in Brid'lo.'
He smiled. 'Got time for a cup o' tea, lass?'
Did he think she was just passing through? 'Jesus, Willie,' Moira said, feeling close to collapse. 'I've got time for a whole damn pot.'
She would come in by the back door.
Same way he'd come in. It hadn't been locked, didn't even have a lock on it. He remembered how, as a child, he'd been dared to go in by other kids. Into the witch's den. He'd refused. He was afraid.
This time last year he'd still have been afraid. Even a couple of months ago he would.
He came to his feet and stood behind the balustrade, his hands around the wooden ball on top. It was sticky with layers of brown varnish. The paper on the walls was brown with age. There'd been flowers on it; they just looked like grease patches now.
Late afternoon dimness enclosing him. He'd have been afraid of that too, once. Afraid to open the bedroom doors, afraid of the ghosts within. Afraid of what he might disturb.
Afraid not to be afraid.
But not any more.
Willie had a teapot in a woollen tea-cosy made out of an outsize bobble hat.
'You make it yourself?'
'I have a friend,' Willie said, looking embarrassed about it, the way Willie had always looked embarrassed about women, although it never seemed to get in his way.
'You've a girlfriend here? In Bridelow?'
'More of an arrangement,' said Willie. 'Been on and off for years. What about you?'
'Oh. You know. Livin' alone, as the song says, is all I've ever done well.'
'Your song? Sorry, luv, I've not been keeping track.'
'Nana Griffith. Found an echo. Sometimes other people take the songs right out of your head.
'
'Aye,' Willie said. He took a long, assessing look at her as she sprawled in a fat easy-chair with a loud pattern of big yellow marigolds. 'You look good,' Willie said. 'But you look tired.'
'I don't know why. All I've done is wandered around and talked to people. Yeah, I'm knackered. Must be the air.'
'Air's not what it was,' said Willie. 'Fancy a biscuit? Cheese butty?'
'No, thanks.' She closed her eyes, it's nice in here. I could go to sleep in this chair.'
'Feel free:
'No.' She forced her eyes open. 'You've got trouble here, Willie. Your ma. Like, I realise it's not my business, but I think she's got some private war on, you know?'
'Oh, aye, I know that all right. I ...' He hesitated, refilling her teacup. 'How long you been here? I were looking out for you at Matt's funeral.'
'I was being low-profile,' Moira said. 'But I saw the business with the witch bottle, if that's ...'
'Oh ...' Willie sat down and crossed his legs, started up a staccato finger-rhythm on the side of a knee, 'I don't know. Sometimes I think we're living inside a bloody folk museum.'
'It's no' a museum,' Moira said, 'I just watched her out on the Moss. There's kind of a dead tree out there.'
'Bog oak,' Willie said. 'That's what it is.'
'Then why're your fingers drumming up a storm?'
'Shit,' Willie said. 'Shit, shit, shit.'
'Come on.' Moira dragged herself out of the chair. 'Let's go and talk to her.'
Moira's left foot was feeling cold and wet. She stamped it on the cobbles. 'Went out on the Moss with no wellies. Stupid, huh?'
Rainy afternoon in a small village, nobody else about, no distractions, and they were both on edge. The hush before the thunder.
It's in the air. A damp tension.
So quiet.
'Catch my death.' Moira smiled feebly.
Both of Willie's hands drumming. It happened to Willie through his fingers. People said it was nerves. But what were nerves for if not to respond to things you couldn't see?
'Hey, come on,' Moira said softly, 'what's wrong here, Willie?'
'I don't know.' He sounded confused. 'Nowt I can put me finger on.'
They'd hammered on Ma's door. Waited and waited. All dark inside.
Willie started blinking. The only noise in the street was the rapid rhythmic chinking of his fingers on the coins in one hip pocket and something else, maybe keys, in the other. It echoed from the cobbles and the stone walls of the cottages. Willie's fingers knew something that Willie didn't.
'Willie, quick, come on, think, where would she be? Where would she go if she was scared?'
He looked swiftly from side to side, up and down the street.
'Willie ... ?'
Hands wet with the once-holy spring water, white with powdered plaster. Wind blowing through her head. Mind a-crackle with shredded leaves and lashing boughs. No thoughts, only shifting sensations, everything shaken up like medicine gone sour in the bottle. Air full of evil sediment.
Sky white, trees black, church tower black.
Twisted legs and malformed feet crabbing it through the bracken and the headier.
Broken owd woman going back to her useless bottles.
'Let me help you, Mrs Wagstaff, for God's sake.' Long, striding legs, head in the clouds. Wanted to help for appearances' sake; wouldn't look good if he buggered off and owd Ma fell and broke a leg.
'Gerroff me!' she shrieked.
'You've got to turn away from all this! Make your peace with Almighty God. It's not too late ...'
Screeching through the gale in her brain, 'What would you know? It's long too late!'
Wretched gargoyles screaming along with her from the church's blackened walls.
At the churchyard gate, relief for both of them, him going one way, to his church, not looking back; Ma the other, down towards the street. Sky like lead crushing her into the brown ground.
Top of the street, Ma stopped and squinted. Two people. Willie and a woman. The woman from the funeral, the woman from the Moss, the woman with the Gift.
Bugger!
Couldn't be doing with it. Questions. Concern. Sit down, Ma. have a cuppa, put thi' feet up, tell us all about it. Tell me how I can help.
Pah!
Ma turned back up the street, waited at the opening to the brewery road till they'd gone past then took the path round the back of the cottages so nobody else would see the state of her.
'This?'
Water trickled dispiritedly from under the rock and plopped into the pool.
'Used to be a torrent,' Willie remembered.
'This is the holy well?'
The pool looked flat and sullen in the rain.
'There should be a statue,' Willie said.
'Of whom?'
'The ... Mother. On that ledge. She had her hands out, blessing the spring. There's a ceremony, every May Day. Flowers everywhere. You can see it for miles. Then the lads'd come up from t'brewery, fill up a few dozen barrels, roll um down the hill. At one time, all the beer'd be made wi' this water, now it's shared out, so there's a few drops in each cask.'
Willie kicked a pebble into the pool. 'I'm saying 'now'. Gannons'll've stopped it.'
'Aye,' Moira said, 'there's no life here.' She bent down, dipped her hands in the pool. It felt stagnant. If Ma Wagstaff had come up here hoping for some kind of spiritual sustenance, she'd have gone away pretty damn depressed.
'Used to take it all wi' a pinch of salt,' Willie said, 'I mean ... bit of nonsense, really. But we come up here. Every May Day we'd come up here, whole village at one time, all them as could walk. Then back to The Man, couple o' pints ... bite to eat...'
Willie smiled. 'Good days, them, Moira. When you think back on it.'
'Hang on,' Moira said. 'There's something here.'
With both hands, she lifted it out, the spring water dripping from her palms. Dripping like tears from the eyes of the battered plaster head of the Mother of God.
'Oh, hell,' Willie said sorrowfully.
'The Mother?'
Willie nodded. 'There's three of um. Three statues. The young one, the Virgin, she's brought up on Candlemas - St Bride's day, beginning of February. Then the Mother - this one - at Lammas. Then, at All-Hallows, they bring the winter one.'
'The Hag,' Moira said.
Willie nodded.
'The Threefold Goddess,' Moira said. 'Virgin, Mother, Hag.'
'Summat like that. Like I say ... pinch of salt. Women s stuff.'
'Your ma ... she'd never be taking it with a pinch of salt.
'No,' said Willie.
'What about Matt?'
'He were different,' Willie said, 'when he come back. When we was lads it were just the way things were, you know? One of us'd be picked to collect stuff for t'seasonal crosses, collate it like, sort out what were what. We didn't reckon much on it. Bit of fun, like.'
'As it should be,' Moira said, pushing her sodden hair back to stop it dripping down her jacket. 'How else d'you get kids into it if it's no' fun?'
'Matt come back ... wi' a mission. Know what 1 mean? Horridges had sold off brewery to Gannon's and Gannon's didn't want t'pub - it were doing nowt, were it? Local trade and a few ramblers of a Sunday. Perked up a bit when t'bogman were found, but not for long - nine day wonder sorta thing.'
'So Matt returns to buy the pub. Local hero.'
'Exactly. Spot on. Local hero, I tell thi, Moira ... honest to God, he were me mate, but I wish he'd not come. You know what I mean?'
'I do now,' Moira said, hearing the tape in her head. 'He was an emotional man. An impressionable man. An obsessive man.'
Willie snorted. 'Can say that again.'
'But not a bad man,' Moira said.
'Oh no. I don't think so.'
'So somebody - or something was using him. He was a vessel. Willie, this bogman ... ?'
'Oh, bugger.' Willie looked up into the sky, now putting down water with a good bit more enthusiasm than the Holy Spring. The c
oins in his pocket chinked damply, 'I'm saying nowt. You've gorra talk to Ma.'
He heard her creaking into the hall below. 'Gerrout from under me feet, Bobbie.'
The cat.
Heard her feet on the bottom stairs and slid himself into a room which, as he'd ascertained earlier, was a box room full of rubbish, tea-chests, heaps of old curtaining, a treadle sewing-machine shrouded in dust.
Took her a long time and a lot of laboured breathing to reach the top of the stairs. Heard her in the bathroom, the dribble and the flush and the old metal cistern filling up behind her with a series of coughs and gasps.
He brought a hand to the crown of his head, felt his emergent, urgent bristles one last time, for luck. Luck? You made your own. He put his glove back on. For a moment, a while back, someone hammering on the front door had flung him back to that night last summer in the stolen car. The police! But then he'd concentrated - go away - and the knocking had stopped.
Flexing and clenching his powerful, leathered hands, he moved out onto the landing as the old woman sighed and braced herself to go downstairs.
Not much left of her. Old bones in a frayed cardigan. Hair as dry and neglected as tufts of last summer's sheep wool caught in a wire fence.
Some witch, he thought, rising up behind her.
Quite slowly - although he knew he'd made no sound - she turned around and looked up at him, at his fingers poised above her bony, brittle shoulders. Then at his face.
And he looked at hers.
They'd always said, in the village, how fierce her eyes were. How she could freeze you where you stood with those eyes, turn you to stone, pin you to the wall.
Shaw Horridge grinned. Come on, then.
Wanting her to do that to him. Focus her eyes like lasers. Wanting the challenge, the friction. Wanting something he could smash, like hurling someone else's Saab Turbo into a bus
shelter.
Wanted to do it and feel better.
But her eyes surprised him. They were as soft and harmless as a puppy's.
For a moment, this froze him.
'Come on,' he said, suddenly agitated. 'Come on, witch.'
She stared calmly at him, heels on the very edge of the top stair. Wouldn't take much of a push. That was no good.
