The Man in the Moss

by Phil Rickman

  He tried to catch the eyes of the bitch, Therese, as she cried, 'I conjure thee, Matthew! Empowered by the Highest Strength, I conjure thee!'

  The candles guttered. The Pennine Pipes, lying like a dead cormorant in his father's rotting lap, began to throb and to squirm as though they were full of maggots.

  'I conjure thee, Matthew, under penalty of being burned and tortured in the fires for ever and ever, I conjure thee to appear before me and to answer my questions ...'

  Air farting through the Pennine Pipes until they squeaked and heaved, In their wrapping of black hair with a single white streak.

  'I conjure thee, Matthew, by the power of thine own base desires, to appear before me in a pleasant and human form and to present to me the spirit of thy father of the Moss ...'

  Slipping in and out of dream. Samhain, and they said the walls were thin as paper. He thought he saw a quiver on the yellow, peeling lips of his father's corpse.

  '… I conjure thee.'

  A man with a knife.

  Nothing ornate or ceremonial. Just a cheap craft worker's knife with a red plastic handle.

  One of the untouchables bending over Dic and huffing and panting.

  'By the Highest Power and by the Angels of the Firmament ...'

  The numbing power of the drug fell away from Dic like an old raincoat, leaving him naked, all his nerves singing, his cheeks bulging like a trumpeter's with a vast scream taped into his face for ever.

  'Mmmmmmm!' he screamed into the adhesive tape.

  '... and by the Angels of the Deep and with the blood that was thy blood and shall be again, Matthew ...'

  The knife cut through the tourniquets at his wrists and Dic closed his eyes, feeling nothing in his numb, etiolated arms, and yet feeling the blood rise in fountains.

  'I CONJURE THEE!'

  CHAPTER II

  'Hey... stop this bloody car... come on.'

  Big, shambling guy Macbeth recognized as Stan, the bartender. But Stan wasn't interested in Macbeth.

  'You're the copper, aren't you?'

  'Happen,' Ashton said warily.

  There was Stan and some of the other guys who'd been in the bar when Macbeth arrived, but not the kid who'd figured to punch him out. Also, there was Willie Wagstaff.. Macbeth leapt out, grabbed the little guy by the arm.

  'Willie, hey, listen up. The body in the car ... this was not Moira.'

  'Oh,' said Willie; his mind was clearly elsewhere; he kept glancing over his shoulder towards the church and around the street. Stan was bawling into the car window at Ashton.

  'Bloody hooligans. Fanatics. You're the police, get um out!'

  'Willie, that means she's not dead, you hear me?'

  'I'm only one policeman, sir, and I'm off duty.'

  'You knew, Willie. You knew, goddamn it.'

  'They don't know you're on your own,' Stan said. 'Supposed to be flaming Christians, should've heard the language. Just knock on t'door and tell um t'sling their hooks. What's the problem? We're getting wet.'

  Macbeth said, 'Goddamn it, you know ... Willie, where is she?

  Gary Ashton, annoyed, was out of the car, slamming the door, holding both hands up. 'All right! Quieten down. What's so important?'

  Macbeth backed out, looked around the small assembly. 'Cathy know about this?' Willie nodded urgently.

  Eight or nine of them now, almost a mob. Macbeth said, 'Gary, there's a bunch of well-meaning but seriously misguided people in there. Take it from me, these guys aren't shitting they need to be got out.'

  'And we need to get in,' Stan said soberly. 'Just don't want more trouble than we can handle.'

  Ashton stood in the rain pulling on his jaw. 'OK,' he said eventually. 'If I can clear this church out for you, maybe you can do something for me afterwards, all right?'

  Stan shrugged, causing his old-fashioned plastic raincoat to crackle. Willie said something about Mr Dawber, looking upset, his fingers compulsively chinking the coins in his pocket.

  'And another thing,' Ashton said. 'I'm not a policeman. You've never seen a policeman here tonight. You got that?'

  Moira pulled on the navy blue duffle coat. 'Jesus, haven't worn one of these in years. This makes me a Mother?'

  'Mother, maiden, hag,' Cathy said. 'It's all the same in Bridelow.'

  'Just as well,' Moira said. 'I don't qualify as any of the above. Where are we going?'

  Milly led her out into the street. 'Not far. Mind you don't drown in the gutter.'

  Not far turned out to be Ma Wagstaff's little stone terraced cottage, its step awash but still gleaming white in the beam of the lamp Dic had given to Moira.

  'Listen, I'm getting worried about Dic,' she'd said a few minutes earlier to Cathy.

  'Me too,' Cathy said. 'But they couldn't kill him, could they? For the same reason they couldn't kill you. Surely?'

  'No,' Moira had said dubiously. 'But sometimes you can do more harm to someone than killing them'd be, you know?'

  Milly unlocked the front door and put on lights. Moira took in a tiny and ancient parlour with more bottles than a pharmacy. Or maybe this was a pharmacy. There was a light of sadness over the room.

  'I don't know where to start,' Milly said.

  'Well, we don't have much time. Where'd she keep her … you know, recipes and stuff?'

  Milly smiled wryly. 'In her head.'

  'Oh, shit.' Moira began to open cupboards in the side and found more bottles. There were a few dozen books; maybe there'd be papers stuffed inside one of them. 'What's upstairs?'

  'Her bathroom. Her sewing room. Her bed.'

  'Are we sure she copied it down?'

  'I remember seeing a map, a plan, kind of. I know I did. Keeping Jack out, it wasn't something you went into lightly, you know.'

  Moira felt a light breeze on one side of her face. It smelt vaguely of sage.

  'Something that hadn't been done for centuries,' Milly said. 'And it had to be exact. I don't know what to say, maybe if …'

  Moira turned very casually around and looked back through the doorway into the hall.

  Where she saw a little woman in misty shades of grey and sepia, a little woman who might have been formed - had it been daylight, had there been sun - by the coalescence of dustmotes.

  The little woman slowly shook her head.

  And disappeared.

  Moira turned back into the room. 'It's not here,' she said softly. 'Ma Wagstaff had no map.'

  Chris picked up the pink T-shirt and held it up in front of him and started to laugh.

  Across the front of the T-shirt was inscribed, THANK GOD FOR JESUS.

  He looked at it for long seconds. It made no sense to him. No sense at all any more. It was gaudy. It was trite. It was meaningless. The girl, who was called Claudette, looked a whole lot better without it, curled up asleep under the pulpit draped in velvet curtains torn down from the vestry.

  Nice tits, Chris remembered. Paused. Wasn't that a pretty bloody sinful thing to contemplate in the House of God?

  Yeah, well...

  She'd be pretty cold, though, Claudette, when she awoke. It was getting bitter in here. Those amber-tinted lights created a completely false impression of warmth, making the pillars seem mellow.

  The communion wine had helped a bit. Gerry, the solicitor from Rotherham, had found two bottles in the vestry. Well, why not? It was a so-called pagan place, wasn't it? It wasn't a sin to drink heathen wine.

  Sin. Chris shook his head. So trite.

  Only problem was, after that wine, he wanted a pee.

  'Forget it,' he'd decreed automatically about a quarter of an hour ago. 'Nobody goes out.' Although for the life of him he couldn't remember why nobody should go out. Except that while it might be cold in here it was extremely wet out there. Frankly, Chris reckoned he could probably use a piss, a pint and a bag of chips in that order.

  Stupidest thing they'd done had been to let the bloody bus go. That was Joel again, silly sod. Burn your boats, he'd instructed them. Well, it was al
l right for him, he'd cleared off somewhere. Least he could have done was left his mobile phone around; they could have got Reg Hattersley out of bed and bribed him to fetch his coach back.

  Chris surveyed his little band, all forty-seven of them, The Angels of the New Advent. High-flown name, eh, for an assorted bunch of misfits whose sole connecting factor was the conviction that their lives were one course short of a banquet. Only one course, note, they all had their own houses and decent cars and dishwashers, etc.

  Some of them were wandering around, rubbing their heads. A couple had lit cigarettes. His watch told him it had gone midnight. This was getting ridiculous.

  He remembered the singing breaking up into self-parody and a few of them had torn clothes off, mostly the ones clad in propaganda clobber like this silly T-shirt. And then there'd been isolated outbursts of anger and resentment, mostly towards Joel Beard, who'd brought them to this dump and then abandoned them - but not before going berserk and assaulting Martin, who'd lost a tooth, and Declan, who was convinced he was suffering delayed concussion. And, of course, convincing Chantal she'd been raped by an evil spirit.

  'I ask you …' Chris said scornfully, aloud.

  When someone started banging on the door, he wandered across, suspicious.

  'Whosat?'

  'Who am I talking to?' An authoritative kind of voice.

  'Yes?' Chris said, equally peremptory.

  'This is the police,' the voice said levelly. 'I don't know who you are but I have to inform you that you have no legal right to occupy this building and I'm suggesting you vacate it immediately. If you unbolt this door and everyone comes out without any trouble, I can promise you that no further action is likely to be taken. If, however ...'

  'Yeah?' Chris said. This really was the police?

  A distant voice berated him, his own voice within his chest. He heard it say, Get thee hence, tempter, what he might well have said out loud an hour ago. What a plonker he'd been.

  I do strongly advise you, sir, not to play silly-buggers. Open this door, please.'

  Chris gazed at the oak door, probably six inches thick, at the iron bolts, four inches wide.

  Where is your power? the inner voice bleated pathetically at the policeman. Blow it down, why don't you, with your foul, satanic breath.

  Must've been nuts, Chris thought. All of us. Mass hysteria.

  'Yeah, all right,' he said resignedly and drew back the bolts.

  There were cheers of relief from the brothers and sisters sprawled among the pews.

  Though glances were exchanged, Milly didn't ask her how she knew there was nothing in the house. There was silence, then Milly said, 'What are we going to do now?'

  'Don't know about you,' Moira said. 'But I think I'm gonny cry.'

  'Moira.' Willie was in the doorway, about a yard from where Ma's ghost had stood.

  Milly shook her head. 'It's not here, little man.'

  Willie nodded, unsurprised. 'She weren't much of a filer-away of stuff. 'Cept for foul-smelling gunge in the bottom of owd bottles.'

  'Don't knock it,' Moira said. Less than half an hour after forcing down Ma's Crisis Mixture, she was, inexplicably, feeling stronger than she had in some while.

  'Moira ...' Willie glanced behind him to where the rain bounced off Ma's moon-white doorstep. 'Don't you think ... ?'

  'Yeah,' Moira said. 'I know. I know.' She sighed. 'OK. Come away in, Macbeth.'

  Suddenly self-conscious, she found herself mindlessly reaching for the duffel-coat hood to cover the desolate ruins of her hair. 'Ach,' she said, and let her hands fall to her sides.

  When he stumbled over the threshold, this Mungo Macbeth, of the Manhattan Macbeths, he was looking no more smooth and glamorous than the average drowned-rat hiker from the moor.

  Willie had told her briefly how the guy had driven all the way from Glasgow with three crucial words: John, Peveril and Stanage.

  'Mungo,' she said, her voice unexpectedly husky, 'I don't know what I'm gonny do with you, and that's the truth.'

  Macbeth smiled, a soft, stupid, wet-faced smile; she could tell he hadn't even noticed her hair.

  'The one big thing,' he said, almost in a whisper, and made no sense.

  It fact it was all crazy, Moira thought. Horrifically crazy. He shouldn't be here. He didn't know what the hell he was into. He didn't have a chance.

  And did any of them?

  CHAPTER III

  Eventually, Benjie had persuaded his mam to let him take The Chief to his bedroom, where the German Shepherd squeezed himself into the gap between the wardrobe and the wall, sat there with his ears down and panted a lot.

  'Come on, lad,' Benjie whispered, sitting up in bed in old ninja turtle pyjamas. But The Chief wouldn't move. He kept himself in this dark corner and there was pleading in his sad, brown eyes.

  Above the noise of rain, Benjie could hear other village dogs howling in the distance. When he lay down and shut his eyes he realised that the way The Chief was panting meant he was really howling too, but The Chief was smart, the last thing he wanted was to have himself taken out to the shed.

  When Benjie opened his eyes again, he saw light-beams flitting across the curtains, like car headlights.

  Which would have been all right, only the back of the house overlooked the Moss and there were no cars on the Moss, except months ago when the lorries and JCBs had been out building up the road and they'd found the bogman.

  Benjie scrambled to the end of his bed, leaned over and stuck his head through the gap in the curtains.

  He gasped.

  It were like Fireworks Night out there.

  Lights all over the Moss, like smouldery bonfires. Lights swooshing like rockets, through the rain, from one side to another, sometimes going across each other.

  But no noise except for the howling dogs and the rain.

  The lights lasted no more than ten seconds and then it was all gone and Benjie couldn't see anything apart from the water rolling down the glass.

  But when he lay in bed, the light showed up in the space between his eyes and his closed eyelids. He saw the Moss lit up greenish now, all green and glowing, except for the Dragon Tree.

  And that was twice as big now, its branches, all gnarled and knotted and black among whirling, spinning lights, two of them spiking up into the sky ... arms like giant horns with groping claws on the end. And the whole thing was breathing, dragging up big, soggy lungfuls of peat, and soon it was going to burst and its arms would gather up the whole village.

  Benjie felt a scream coming on and chewed the bedclothes instead, not wanting to be put out in the shed with The Chief and get gobbled up first.

  Macbeth watched Chris and Chantal sink side by side into the sofa at the Rectory. They didn't seem like the same people. 'I really am tired,' Chris said. 'I'm shagged out.'

  And then, clearly shocked at himself, he looked up at Cathy. 'I'm sorry. I don't know what I'm saying. Catherine, has something got inside me? Am I possessed?'

  Cathy waved it away. 'Chris, you've got to tell me very quickly, no evasion. What happened in there?'

  Chris tugged at his beard. 'I just don't know. First of all, it was fine, we felt... how we used to feel. Holy. Special. And then it all went wrong ... really quickly. It went... dirty.'

  'It was like baptism,' Chantal said, hugging herself with goosebumpy arms. 'Only in reverse. In our baptism ... our re-baptism, we throw off some of our outer clothes - symbolically - and we're submerged in water. It could be a river, or we'll hire a public pool for an afternoon, and you come up cleansed and purified.'

  'That's it,' Chris said, eyes full of agony. 'That's right. Only this was like being submerged and some of us threw off our Christian clothes and we came up not so much dirty ... well, yes, dirty - but worse, really. Like it was before.'

  'People smoking,' Chantal recalled. 'In church. But it didn't feel like church, it didn't feel like anywhere.'

  'Yeah, and blaspheming in an everyday sort of throwaway fashion. And we d
rank ... God forgive us, we drank the Communion wine, like it was any old pop. It didn't matter. We were like the mass of godless people out there, we didn't need religion any more, we had no use for it. Catherine, I'm confused. We'll burn in hell for this, I think we've started to burn.'

  'It's OK,' Cathy said soothingly. 'The fire's out, now.' She turned to Moira and Macbeth. 'It's obvious, isn't it? It was the final sterilization.'

  'Well ...' Moira said. 'You can't just drain the power of centuries out of stone, you can only take it out of people, you let them absorb it through their mindless, passive ritual and then you snuff out the light, blow their shaky faith up their faces and leave them empty and when they walk out totally knackered like this guy here, they've drained out everything that was left in the church.'

  'Forgive me,' Macbeth said, 'Why'd they wanna do that?'

  'Because the church is the sacred centre of the village,' Cathy said. 'It's got to be neutralized before you can ...' She stopped for breath and couldn't go on.

  'Replace it with something black and horrible,' Moira said.

  'What ... what can we do to help?' Chris asked, rather feebly..

  Cathy rounded on him. 'You can keep your bums on that settee, call in all your friends and don't move until your coach comes for you. And then you can go away for ever."

  'Steady, Cathy.' Moira took her arm.

  'Wants to know if he's possessed?' Cathy said with a sharp laugh. 'Well, of course he's possessed. Possessed of a very slow brain. Moira, look, there's a copper out there who wants to go up the Hall with Stan Burrows and a bunch of his mates and do some sorting out, as they put it.'

  'So stop him,' Moira said.

  'You try and stop him!'

  'Look, they go up there mob-handed, God knows what could happen. It's pretty damned obvious - and we're looking at something planned months ago - that Stanage has shut down the church to deflect a lot of energy towards the second natural focus, the second-highest building in Bridelow. The brewery, right? And what's at the very top of the brewery building?'

  'Th'owd malt-store,' Willie Wagstaff said impatiently. Disused. Moira, happen this is over me head, but why don't we go up there mob-handed and flush the buggers out?'