The Man in the Moss (97 page)

           
'Go!' Macbeth screamed. 'Get the fuck outa here!'

           
He heard the wafting of the copper pipe through the moist
air and he threw himself forward and met it with his body, hard into the chest,
and his skin was so cold and numb that if it cracked a rib, or maybe two, he
didn't even feel it.

           
He wrenched hard on the pipe and heard a grunt and then
Stanage was tumbling from the end of his roofspar and, breaking the surface of
the Moss with a splat, and Macbeth went under. And when he came up, the peat
felt a whole lot colder and he couldn't even cough it out of his lungs because
of the long fingers like a wire garotte around his throat.

From
Dawber's
Secret
Book of
Bridelow
(unpublished):

Mungo Macbeth having
instructed her, in his distressingly restricted New York parlance, to remove
herself, Cathy realized she had little choice but to do as he said. The girl
cannot swim - even if anyone could in liquid of this consistency and
temperature - and her only hope was to get help.

                       
You must remember that Cathy was in a state
of some bewilderment; she had not seen the bog burst, only heard the thunder
roar, and, like most of us, could have had no concept of the scale of the
devastation.

                       
But the village must have looked very
different, shockingly so, with the converted gaslamps on one side of the street
protruding no more than a few feet from the murky surface of what had now
become an extension of the Moss.
                       
And the poor girl
must have been appalled by the sight of the collapsed cottages, the telephone
box protruding from the peat like a buoy and the Post Office in ruins behind
it.

                       
She waded frantically back to the wall,
placed the grey stone on top, hauled herself up after it and sat there a while,
shattered by what she had seen and half-stunned by the blow from the pipe which
had landed on her shoulder and rebounded on to the side of her head. She knew
there was blood there, mingling with the rivulets of peatwater from her hair,
but she did not touch the wound, preferring to remain ignorant of its extent
and severity so long as she could function.

                       
Cathy tells me - rather ashamed - that her
mind at this point had simply blanked out Mungo Macbeth and what might be
happening to him at the cold hands of John Peveril Stanage. She sat on the
wall, with the grey stone on her knees. Beyond pain, beyond fear, beyond
fatigue, beyond thought... even beyond prayer.

                       
And when all feeling had gone, apart from a
sense of
failure and despair, something came to her.

                       
Now ...
                       
Problems.

                       
It is not my place to be credulous and speak of
'vision'. Nor would I wish to use the clinically dismissive term
'hallucination'.

                       
Of course, I have read the stories, the
'eyewitness testimony', from Lourdes to Fatima to Knock and Walsingham, and
occasionally I have been impressed and heartened but most times left cold and
more than a little sceptical.

                       
I have
heard
of similar eyewitness reports from the edge of bubbling streams in the Peak
District of Derbyshire and - yes - from our own Holy Well above Bridelow. And
these have not been chronicled at all, for, in the view of devout Roman
Catholics,
Our
Lady is hardly
considered to be the same figure as
Their
'lady', although both have been 'seen' to shine with a silvery aureole, as of
the moon rather than the sun.

                       
Well. Cathy's Lady - you'll laugh, or perhaps
you won't - wore a duffel coat.

                       
She appeared to be sitting next to the lass
on the wall. She was not beautiful, Cathy says, but her aura of feminine grace
was so powerfully calming that the air became still and soft and moist, and
even the rugged stones beneath her felt like cushions.

                       
She remembers hanging her head, her chin upon
her chest, and the lady stroking her hair. Or at least it was stroked.

                       
About the duffel coat.

                       
My researches tell me that the priests and
priestesses of
 
Ancient Britain - the
shaman class, if you will - would usually be attired for ceremonial purposes in
a loose, hooded garment of blue wool. Quite when the duffel coat, as we know
it, reappeared I don't know; my knowledge of social history has never extended
to fashion trends, but it has always struck me as curiously meaningful that,
while most coats are fastened with plastic buttons or zips, the duffel is
secured by pegs of wood. Or (even more interesting) of horn.

But I digress.

                       
The next thing Cathy remembers is standing at
a point halfway between the end of the pub forecourt and the first of the
ruined cottages. The peat was up to her knees.

                       
Our Lady of the Duffel Coat was gone.

                       
And so was the stone.

                       
Cathy says she felt nothing; neither relief
nor the old despair. She was an empty vessel. It was not until later that she
would recall the lady in any supernatural sense. She had been as real as the
stone, which Cathy had no memory of depositing.

                       
Now there was only the practical problem of
avoiding death on the drowning side of the village.

                       
The Beacon of the Moss was alight again,
courtesy of Alf Beckett and his floodlight. It threw a strange glimmer on the
black surface of a new river flowing between great banks of peat down the
middle of the street. From out of a mound of peat, a stiffened arm protruded,
the fingers curled and black.

                       
From behind her, Cathy heard voices. She
turned her back on the street and waded towards the sound, coming at last to
the most southerly part of the village which ran down to the Moss near the
causeway and where, she remembered, Lottie Castle was to have placed her stone.

                       
It was here that Cathy became the last person
to see Shaw Horridge and Therese Beaufort - later formally identified as one
Tessa Byford - alive.

                       
The effects of the Burst at this southern
point were somewhat less marked. Although the Moss had overflowed the causeway
in places (which was to cause serious delays for the rescue service vehicles)
it had not reached a life-threatening depth for an adult.

                       
The man and woman were thigh-deep at the edge
of the causeway, and Cathy was about to call out to them when she realized who
they were. Lady Strychnine, as she'd referred to Therese, was hissing at Shaw
to get back and leave her and attempting to disengage his hand from around her
wrist. Shaw, it appeared, was trying to drag her back towards the village and
laughing in a voice which Cathy has described to me as surprisingly coarse and
cruel.

                       
'Come on,' Shaw was shouting, almost
gleefully. 'Come back. You can do it. You'll feel
so much better.'

                       
He kept repeating this phrase, hitting her
with it, Cathy says, and pulling at her arm, and Therese was screaming shrilly
and at one stage actually vomiting with fear.

                       
'Lottie's stone, you see,' Cathy is telling
me. 'Therese couldn't go past the stone.' And it was then that I realized' -
Cathy shakes her head in incomprehension - 'that it had worked. That we'd done
it. That the Bridelow Mothers' Union was able to function.'

                       
And knowing what she knew about the woman
(not half of what we now know) Cathy felt no great pity when Shaw Horridge
quickly let go of Therese's wrists and suddenly delivered an enormous blow to
her face with his fist.

                       
All this time Cathy had been backing away up
the street towards the village centre, and she turned around just once to see
Shaw Horridge walking very slowly and deliberately up the street with Therese's
slender body hanging limply from his arms.

As I recorded earlier, it
was two days before the corpses were found. This happened when an executive of
Gannons accompanied the company's insurance assessor into the brewery to see
what minor damage had occurred.

                       
They would hardly have bothered to go into
the malt loft even it had not been firmly locked and no keys apparent. As it
was, they progressed no further than the second level where the 'coppers'
stand.

                       
These are the huge tanks in which the 'wort',
as the initial preparation is known, is mixed with the hops (or bog myrtle in
old Bridelow Brewery days) which preserve the beer and give it that
all-important bitter quality.

                       
It appeared that Shaw, quite methodically,
had lit the oil- boiler and gone about the beer-making process on his own,
something which, to my own knowledge, he had been able to do since the age of
twelve under the paternal eye of Arthur Horridge.

                       
The operation must have taken Shaw several
hours, by which time the village was teeming with urgent life: fire and
ambulance personnel, moorland rescue teams, television crews; at least two
helicopters overhead. I wonder, what state was Therese in during this period?
Was she conscious? Did she know what was to happen? Was she - already forcibly
conveyed beyond a boundary which she had been psychologically incapable of
crossing unassisted - in any state to object?

                       
The copper, by the way, is also known as the
'brew kettle' because in it the hops are boiled into the wort preparatory to
the addition of yeast.

                       
They say the insurance assessor passed out
after finding the bodies of Shaw and Therese, which must have boiled for nearly
two hours before the boiler, reaching danger-level, had automatically cut out.

                       
Was this, I wonder, another example -
drowning, boiling and perhaps, in Therese's case, simultaneous strangulation -
of that ancient mystery, the Celtic Triple Death?

                       
What was Shaw's state of mind? Was he angry?
Embittered? Remorseful? Or a dangerous brew of all three?

                       
Tell me,' I ask Cathy. 'When you heard them
on the edge of the Moss, was Shaw stuttering, as he used to do? You know ...
You'll fer-fer-feel ber-ber-better?'

                       
'No,' she says. 'I'm pretty sure he wasn't.'

                       
'I'm glad,' I say.

Poor Mungo.

                       
His larynx full of peat, his eyes staring up
in terminal terror into the eyes of the madman Stanage, his mouth no doubt full
of flip New York obscenities which he now knew he would never utter.

                       
Poor lad.

                       
The stranger in a strange land. Thrown upon
the Scottish shore with the instruction, I am told, to discover his 'roots'.

                       
By 'eck. How gullible some of these Americans
are apt to be.

                       
And the winds of fate ... nay, the
typhoons
of fate, can sometimes pick
you up and put you down precisely where you wanted to be. Only when you look
around, do you realise it's the very
last
place you wanted to be.

                       
He found his Celtic roots, all right. We
might not wear kilts or speak a different language or owt like that, but I
reckon we've been closer in Bridelow to the true Celtic way -
Shades of things
, Ernest! (Aye, thank
you, Ma) - than you'll find in any lonely hamlet in Sutherland or Connemara.

And I think it will survive. I think the Mothers will watch over the
rebuilding of a stronger Bridelow, I doubt they'll ever again 'let things
slide'.
                       
Cathy won't let
them.

                       
Did you know, Hans, by the way, that your
daughter was coming to the end of her second and final year at a very reputable
theological college outside Oxford? I bet you didn't. I bet she just kept
telling you she was doing 'post-graduate research' or something of that order.