The Man in the Moss

            Willie was stunned. This was insane. This was Bridelow he was on about.

            'And of course,' Joel said, 'we shall eat nothing until the morning.'

            'PRAISE GOD!'

            Willie slumped back into his pew next to a girl with big boobs under a pink sweatshirt with white and gold lettering spelling out, THANK GOD FOR JESUS!

'Have we been taken over, though?' Milly said. 'Have we lost our village? Gone? Under our noses?'

            'Bit strong, that,' Ernie Dawber said with what he was very much afraid was a nervous laugh. 'Yet.'

            They were in Milly Gill's flowery sitting room.

            He'd set out for evensong, as was his custom; if there was a boycott it was nowt to do with him, damn silly way to react, anyroad.

            She had caught up with him, suddenly appearing under his umbrella, telling him about the Angels of the New Advent. Time to talk about things, Milly said, steering him home, sitting him down with a mug of tea.

            'You're the chronicler, Mr Dawber. You know it's not an exaggeration. You've watched the brewery go. You've seen people fall ill and just die like they never did before. You know as well as I do Ma didn't just fall downstairs and die of shock.'

            'It's common enough,' Ernie said damply, 'among very old people.'

            'But Ma Wagstaff?' Milly folded her arms, trying for a bit of Presence. 'All right? Who's taken the Man? Who's taken Matt Castle from his grave? Come off the fence, Mr Dawber. What do you really think?'

            'You're asking me? You're in charge now, Millicent. I'm just an observer. With failing eyesight.'

            'There you go again. Please, Mr Dawber, you've seen the state of us. We're just a not-very-picturesque tradition. What did I ever do except pick flowers and dress the well? And we meet for a bit of a healing - this is how it's been - and Susan says she can't stop long because of the child and it's Frank's darts night.'

            'Young Frank needs a good talking to,' said Ernie.

            'That's the least of it. They're all just going through the motions, and nothing seems to work out. It's like, we're going into the Quiet time - this is last midsummer - and Jessie Marsden has to use her inhaler twice. We can't even beat our own hay fever any more. It'd be almost funny if it wasn't so tragic.'

            The image speared Ernie again. Ma showing him the Shades of Things and making him promise to get the bog body back. And him failing her, in the end. But need this be the end?

            'Happen you need some new blood,' he said finally.

            'I don't think that's the answer, Mr Dawber. The strength is in the tradition. New blood's easy to get. Remember that girl who showed up a couple of years ago? Heard about Bridelow - God knows how - and wanted to "tap the source"? Place of immense power, how lucky we were, could she become a ... a "neophyte", was that the word?'

            Ernie Dawber smiled. 'From the Daughters of Isis, Rotherham, as I remember. Nice enough girl. Well-intentioned. You sent her away.'

            'Well, Mr Dawber, what would you have done? We couldn't understand a word she was saying - all this about the Great Rite and the Cone of Power.'

            'Come off it, Millicent. You knew exactly what she was saying.'

            'Well... maybe it seemed silly, the way she talked. Made it all seem silly. It does, you know, when you give it names, like the Cone of Power. New blood's all right, in this sort of situation, when you're strong enough to absorb it. When you're weak it can just be like a conduit for infection.'

            'That, actually,' Ernie said, 'was not quite what I meant by new blood. Let's try and look at this objectively. Everything was ticking over quite nicely - not brilliant, bit wackery round the joints - but basically all right, given the times we're in. Until this bog body turns up. The Man. It all comes back to the Man.'

            'You think so, Mr Dawber? The Man himself, rather than what people have made of him?'

            'It's all the same,' Ernie said. 'That's the whole point of a human sacrifice.'

            Milly stood up and went to the window, opaque with night and rain. 'How long's it been raining now, Mr Dawber?'

            'Over a day non-stop, has to be, and corning harder still. Stream's been out over the church field since tea time, and the Moss ... the Moss will rise. It does, you know. Absorbs it like a sponge. In 1794, according to the records, the Moss rose three feet in a thunderstorm.'

            Ernie laughed.

            'See, that's me. The chronicler, the great historian. Head full of the past, but we don't learn owt from it, really, do we? The past is our foundation, but we look back and say, nay, that was primitive, we're beyond that now, we've evolved. But we haven't, of course, not spiritually, not in a mere couple of thousand years. It's still our foundation, no matter how crude. And when the foundation's crumbled or vanished, we've got to patch it up best we can.'

            Milly Gill didn't seem to be listening.

            She said, 'I prayed to the Mother tonight. Sent Willy off to the church to learn what he could and then I went up to the Well with a lantern and knelt there in the rain at the poolside with the Mother's broken-off head in me hands, and I asked her what we'd done and what we could do.'

            Milly fell silent. Ernie Dawber looked round the room, at the grasses and dried flowers, at Milly's paintings of flowers and gardens. At Milly herself, always so chubby and bonny. For the first time, she looked not fat but bloated, as if the rain had swelled her up like the Moss.

            'And what happened?' Ernie said after a while. He thought of himself as one of the dried-out roots hanging in bundles from the cross-beam. Shrivelled, easy to snap, but possessed of certain condensed pungency. Put him in the soup and he could still restore the flavour. He looked closely at Milly and saw she was weeping silently.

            'Well?' he said softly.

            'If she was telling me anything,' Milly said, 'I couldn't hear it. Couldn't hear for the rain.'

Shaw said, 'What have you got on under that cloak?'

            'Not a thing.' Sitting at Shaw's mother's dressing table, Therese had rubbed some sort of foundation stuff into her face, to darken her complexion, and painted around her eyes. 'But it's not for you tonight. You can get excited though, if you like - make him jealous.'

            Shaw touched her shoulder through the black wool.

            She turned and looked at him, her eyes very dark. The look said, Get away from me.

            Shaw winced.

            He looked over at the bed, at his mother's well-worn dressing gown thrown across it. He was surprised she hadn't taken it with her.

            'Therese,' he said, 'how was she really? When she left.'

            'Your mother? Fine. She'll be enjoying the change.'