Voice gone to a whisper.
'Gave himself up. Willingly. That's the point. Can you grasp that, Moira? He let them take him on the Moss and they smashed his head, strangled him and cut his throat, and he knew ... he fucking knew what was gonna happen.'
She stared through the windscreen at the Moss. Thick, low cloud lay tight to the peat, like a bandage on its putrefying, suppurating skin.
'Hard to credit, isn't it? I mean, when you really think about it. When you try and picture it. He let the buggers do it to him. Young guy, fit, full of life and energy and he gives himself up in the most complete sense. Can you understand that? Maybe it affects me more because I've got no youth, no energy, and what life there's left is dribbling away by the minute. But by God ... I realised I wanted a bit of that.'
She thought about the bogman. The sacrifice. She thought about Matt, inspired. Always so contagious, Matt's inspiration. She thought, I can't bear this ...
'Can you get what I'm saying? Like, they took him away, these fucking scientists, with never a second thought about what he meant to Bridelow and what Bridelow, whatever it was called back then, meant to him. So I wanted ... I wanted in. To be part of that. To go in the Moss, too. Lottie tell you that? Lottie thinks it's shit, but it isn't ... '
'No,' Moira whispered. 'It wouldn't be.'
... want some of me out there. With him. He's my hero, that lad ... I'm fifty-seven and I'm on me last legs - nay, not even that any more, me legs won't carry me - and I've found a fucking hero at last.'
Matt starting to laugh and the laughter going into a choke and the choking turning to weeping.
'Me and Ma Wagstaff met one day. One Stormy day. Ma understands, the old bitch. Willie's Ma, you know? Says to me, "We can help you help him. But you must purify yourself."'
Out on the Moss, the dead tree like bone was moving. It had a tangle of thin branches, as if it were still alive, and the branches were waving, whipping against the tree.
'She says. "You have to purify yourself".'
The tree was a bad tree, was about to take its place alongside the encroaching stone toad on the moor, the eruption of guts on an ancient, rough-hewn altar. Bad things forcing themselves into Bridelow.
'And then you came home ...'
Moira's eyes widened.
'I used to think she was ... a substitute. Me own creation. Like, creating you out of her, you know what I mean? An obsession imposes itself on what's available. But I should've known. Should've known you wouldn't leave me to die alone.'
Her senses froze.
'So, as I go into the final round, as they say, I'm drawing strength from the both of you. The bogman ... and you, Moira, Tomorrow's Sunday. I'll be going out on the Moss, to play. Last time, I reckon. I'll need Lottie and Dic, poor lad, to get me there, I'll send them away, then there'll just be the three of us.'
'No,' she said 'What is this?'
'Me and thee and him.'
Matt chuckled eerily.
Hard rain hit the Moss.
'No,' she said.
'Thanks, lass. Thanks for getting me through this. Thanks for your spirit. And your body. It was your body, wasn't it?'
She wrapped her arms around herself, began to shake, feeling soiled.
'Ma said. You've got to purify yourself. But there's a kind of purity in intensity of feeling, isn't that right? Pure black light.'
'I'll play now,' Matt said, and she heard him lifting his pipes onto his knees.
'If you're listening to this, it means you're here in Bridelow. So find Willie, find Eric. And then find me. You'll do that, won't you? Find me.'
The old familiar routine, the wheeze, the treble notes.
'I won't be far away,' Matt said.
And the lament began. At first hoarse and fragmented, but resolving into a thing of piercing beauty and an awful, knowing anticipation.
Out on the black Moss, as if hit by a fierce wind, the dead tree lashed impatiently at its bones with its own sinuous branches, like cords of gut.
Moira thought, There's no wind. No wind to speak of. The Moss in the rain was dull and opaque, like a blotter. She didn't want to look at the tree but a movement drew her eyes. Human movement.
An old woman was hobbling across the peat; she had a stick. A stringy shawl wrapped around her head. She was approaching the tree very deliberately, slow but surefooted.
She seemed to be wearing ordinary shoes, not boots or Wellingtons; she knew the peat, where to walk.
Cathy had said. You're going to have to talk to Ma. If she'll talk to you.
It is her, isn't it?
The dead tree was about a hundred yards away. The old woman was walking around it now, poking experimentally at it with her stick and then backing away like a terrier.
A wavy branch lashed out, wrapped itself around the walking stick. Moira drew breath.
Another movement, quick and sudden, and the shawl was torn away from the woman's shoulders, thrown triumphantly up into the air on the tip of a wavy branch, like a captured enemy flag.
'Holy Christ!' Moira was out of the car, leaving the driver's door hanging open, stepping down from the causeway, hurrying into the Moss.
Where the sinewy, whipcord branches of the old, dead tree were writhing and striking individually at the old woman, Ma Wagstaff, pulsing like vipers. Moira running across the peat, through the rain, desperately trying to keep her footsteps light because she didn't know this Moss. There was no wind. The rain fell vertically. Behind her Matt's music on the car stereo was a dwindling whine.
'Mrs Wagstaff!' she screamed. 'Mrs Wagstaff, get away from it ...!'
In the distance, over the far hills, behind the rain, the sun was a bulge in the white bandage of cloud and the flailing tree of guts and bones was rearing up against it; she was maybe sixty yards away now and the tree was tossing its head.
It had a head.
And its eyes were white; they were only holes in the wood, letting the sky through, but they burned white, and it was not a case of what you knew it to be, old and twisted wood, shrivelled, wind-blasted, contorted by nature into demonic, nightmare shapes this was the old mistake, to waste time and energy rationalizing the irrational.