The Man in the Moss (29 page)

           
'Look ...'

           
Joel spat out, 'It's the Devil's lair!'

           
'It's ...' Hans tried to get out of his chair, felt
suddenly dizzy.

           
'That's what the talk's about.' Joel's eyes burning in
the afternoon gloom. 'Satan walking openly in the street. Satan walking, bold
as brass, to the very door of this church, where that filthy whore parades her
... her parts.'

           
'No.' Hans felt old and ineffectual. 'It's not true.'

           
'Yes! There's a cult of Satan, making blood sacrifices on
the moors, and this is where it's emanating from. God only knows how long it's
flourished here.'

Cathy breathed in, hard.

           
Half an hour ago, Joel had caught her spying. Stood and
watched her coming up the steps from the cellar, smiling at her from the vestry
doorway. Cathy, red-faced, mumbling, 'Just seeing if there was anything I could
do. To, er, to make you a bit more comfortable down there.'

           
Could have bitten her tongue off. She supposed lots of
women would find him awfully attractive, with the tight golden curls, the wide
smile - and that physique. Perhaps she really
was
gay.

           
Certainly she hated the man now. How could he say these
things?

           
... that filthy
whore parades her parts ...
           
Our Sheila?

           
You're insane!
She wanted to fling open the study door and scream it at him.

Joel said reasonably,
'We're not asking you to do anything yourself. Obviously, you've had to live
with these people for a very long time. Big part of your life. And we all
realise you're not well ...'

           
'And who?' Hans asked wearily, as if he didn't know, 'are
we
?'

           
Joel, for once, was silent.

           
'The Bishop? Our newly appointed archdeacon? Perhaps he
fancies you, Joel, have you thought about that?'

           
Joel Beard turned away in distaste. 'Christ says ...'
           
'But... but
you're
not Christ, Joel,' Hans said,
horrified at the hollow weakness of his own voice. He slumped back into the
chair, into the endless cavern of his pain, his eyes closed.
     
The Rev. Joel Beard laughed agreeably.
'We'll crack this thing together, Rector. You and me and God.'

           
Hans heard him rubbing his hands. 'Well. Time's getting
on. Funeral to conduct. Though I can't think
why
you left it until so late in the day.'

           
'Family request,' Hans mumbled, lying. 'Some relatives
had ... long way to travel.'

           
'Hmm. I see. Well, come on, old chap.' Joel's strong
Christian hand on his shoulder. 'Soon be over.'

           
From behind the door, Cathy scurried away, pulling on her
coat. He'd caught her once today. He'd never catch her again.

The two of them stood at
the bottom end of the churchyard, not far from the lych-gate. There was a
monument here on its own, stark and pointed, like an obelisk, one word indented
on a dressed-stone plaque.

HORRIDGE

           
'It was always pretty scary, Shaw said, 'to think that
one day I'd be under that too.'

           
Therese, in her ancient fox-fur coat, walked all round
the monument. 'Is it a vault?'

           
'Something like that. I didn't take too much notice when
they stuck my father in there. I'm sure that one of the reasons I was
determined to unload the brewery was to avoid being buried here. I mean, I
didn't think about it at the time, but it must have been at the back of my
mind. To break the family ties with Bridelow, get the hell out of here. For
good. I mean ... not have to come to people's funerals who you hardly knew,
because you're a Horridge. I reckon the old man would have sold out himself if
he'd had half a chance.'

           
'Where would you
like
to be buried?'

           
'Somewhere warm. If it has to be in this country I'd
prefer to be cremated.'
           
'I wouldn't mind.'
           
'Being cremated?'

           
'Being buried here,' Therese said. 'I like vaults.' She
smiled, her eyes glinted. 'You can get out of them.'

           
Shaw shuddered, a feeling he was growing to enjoy. She
looked very edible today, as ever. However, for the first time, he rather hoped
she was
not
naked under that coat. It
was so cold, though, that he didn't really imagine she could be. She'd attached
a scarf-thing to it today, with the fox's head on the end. Shaw, who'd ridden
to hounds two or three times whilst staying with friends, didn't find this
offensive but suspected there were people in Bridelow who would; they appeared
to have strong views about killing animals for pleasure.
           
She said, 'Have you ever seen
him, your father?'
           
He knew her well enough by now
to know exactly what she meant by that, but he pretended he didn't. 'Of course
I've seen him. He didn't die until I was twenty-five. Come on, let's get a
drink before the show starts.'

           
'It's your family vault, after all,' Therese said.
'You've got rights of access. Why don't we pop in and visit him one ...'

           
'For God's
sake
,
Tess ...' Not his bloody father, the sanctimonious old sod.

           
'I've told you before,' she said coldly. 'I don't like to
be called Tess.' Then she turned her head and looked up into his face, and the
fox's glass eyes were looking at him too. 'We could ask him, you see.'

           
He felt the chill wind raising his hairline even more,
wished he'd worn his stylish new Homburg. She was playing with his mind again.
Sometimes it was difficult to sleep.

           
'We could ask him if you were right. That he really did
want to get out of Bridelow. That he would've had no objections at all to
Gannons taking over the brewery. Give your mother something to think about.'

           
'I'd rather not, if you don't mind,' Shaw said. He was
thinking about last summer, a warm day in August, when he'd found out about
another side of Therese.

Over dinner one night in
Manchester, he'd giggled nervously and said to her, 'You know, I'm beginning to
think you must be some sort of vampire, only ever corning out at night.'

           
'Would you like that - if I was a vampire?'

           
'I don't know. What would it mean?'

           
'I could make you undead, couldn't I?'

           
'Er ... haven't you got to be dead before you can be
undead?'

           
She'd put down her glass and looked at him, red wine
glistening on her lips, face still and golden in the moving candlelight, like a
mask from some Egyptian tomb.

           
'And what,' she said, 'makes you think you aren't?' And
he began to shake with desire, a new kind of desire which began at the bottom
of his spine.

           
But he'd kept on at her in the car - it was a Range Rover
this time, belonging, she said, to a friend - as she whizzed them down
Deansgate around 1 a.m. What did she do at weekends, in the daytime? Social
work, she said.

           
'Social work?'

           
And it was true; two days later they were out on the
moors. He was following Therese in gloriously tight jeans and there were two
friends called Rhona and Rob and a bunch of
people Therese described loosely as 'offenders'.

           
Rhona, who was quite attractive, despite having a sort of
crewcut, was apparently a professional social worker with the local authority.
Rob, a lean, hard-looking man, was - amazingly - a policeman, a detective
sergeant. You had to admire her cheek, being friends with a copper after all the
cars and things she'd stolen.

           
They'd parked their vehicles in a long lay-by off the
Sheffield road and after two hours of hard walking, Shaw's legs were starting
to ache.

           
'Where are we going exactly?'

           
'Not far now,' Therese assured him. The six 'offenders',
who were of both sexes and ranged in age from teens to about sixty, were fairly
silent the whole way.

           
After a further few minutes, Therese stopped. They were
on a kind of plateau, offering a magnificent view of miles of sunlit moorland
and, more distantly, a huge expanse of darkness which he assumed was the Moss,
with the hills behind it reaching up to Kinder Scout.

           
'Gosh, look,' Shaw said, 'there's the Bridelow road.
We've come a hell of a long way round. If we'd just gone through the churchyard
and carried on up the moor we'd have been up here in about half an hour.'

           
'It was better to come this way,' Therese said. 'Don't
whinge, Shaw.'

           
There were stubby stones around where she was standing,
arranged in a rough sort of circle, or maybe an egg-shape; it was hard to tell,
they were so overgrown.

           
One of the older offenders was on his knees. He was
probably exhausted. He had his arms around one of the bigger stones, a thing
about two and a half feet high, and he seemed
to be kissing it.

           
'What sort of offenders are they?' Shaw whispered.

           
'Just people who society considers maladjusted,' Therese
said. 'It's stupid. They all have special qualities nobody seems to want to
recognize.'

           
Rob said, 'We're helping to rehabilitate them.'

           
Therese had taken a few objects from her backpack - odd
things, photographs in frames, a small pair of trainers, a large penknife - and
arranged them around the circle, up against the stones.

           
They had a rough sort of picnic outside the circle of
stones, with a whole cooked chicken, which everybody pulled bits off, and red
wine. Afterwards, they all sat around in the springy yellow grass, not talking,
the sun going down, Shaw starting to feel a little drunk, a little sleepy.

           
He was aware that Rob and Rhona had entered the circle
and were murmuring to themselves in low voices. They seemed to have taken all
their clothes off. They began to touch each other and then to have sex. Shaw
was deeply shocked but kept quiet about it. It went on for some time. Until
suddenly, dreamily, a plump, spotty, middle-aged woman called Andrea stood up
and joined Rob and Rhona in the circle and began to behave as though there were
some other people in there too.

           
'Hello, David,' she said joyfully, the first time she'd
spoken all afternoon. 'All right, Kevin?'

           
She giggled. 'Yes,' she said. 'Me too. Do you like it
here? It's nice, isn't it?'

           
At that stage Rhona and Rob left her and came out and sat
with Therese and Shaw. Flies and midges buzzed around Andrea in the dusk. Shaw
seemed to fall asleep. When he awoke he saw Andrea on her knees in the circle
with her arms around what looked like two dusty shadows.

           
'Isn't it heart-warming?' Therese was whispering, as if
they were watching a weepy from the back stalls. 'She's becoming reconciled to
the loss of her brothers.'
           
'What happened to them?'

           
'They died,' Therese said. 'A long time ago. She killed
them. With a penknife. They were only little. 'Course she was only a child
herself. It was such a shame, they put her away for a long time.'

           
He didn't remember how they got back to the cars except
that it was dark by then and it didn't seem to take nearly as long as it had
taken them to get to the circle.

In the churchyard, Therese
said, 'Is
she
here - your mother?'

           
'No, she ... she thinks she's got that Taiwanese flu.
I've tendered her apologies.'

           
'Funny, isn't it, the way she won't come into Bridelow?