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Death to Diane once;
she'd gone all flustered but didn't want to seem uncool and said it was her
period.
           Mort climbed out. He wore a black leather jacket. He punched
the air.
       'Yo, Headlice!'
           'OK, man?'
       'Tonight, yeah?'
       'Yeah,' said Headlice. 'Right.'
           Mort wandered off down the field and began to urinate casually
into a gorse bush to show off the size of his willy.
       Diane turned away. Despite the
unseasonal warmth, it had been a blustery day and the darkening sky bore
obvious marks of violence, the red sun like a blood-bubble in an open wound and
the clouds either runny like pus or fluffy in a nasty way, like the white stuff
that grew on mould.
       Diane said, 'Tonight?'
           'Up there.' Headlice nodded reverently at the Tor where a low,
knife-edge cloud had taken the top off St Michael's tower, making it look,
Diane thought - trying to be prosaic, trying not to succumb - like nothing so
much as a well-used lipstick sampler in Boots.
           But this was the terminus. They'd travelled down from
Yorkshire, collecting pilgrims en route, until they hit the St Michael Line,
which focused and concentrated energy across the widest part of England. They
might have carried on to St Michael's Mount at the tip of Cornwall; but, for Pagans,
the Tor was the holy of holies.
           'What are you - we - going to do?' Diane pulled awkwardly at
her flouncy skirt from the Oxfam shop, washed-out midnight blue with silver
half-moons on it.
           'Shit, Mol, we're pagans, right? We do what pagans do.'
           'Which means he don't know.' Rozzie cackled. Her face was
round but prematurely lined, like a monkey's. Ropes of black beads hung down to
her waist.
           'And you do, yeah?' Headlice said.
           Rozzie shrugged. Diane waited; she didn't really know what
pagans did either, apart from revering the Old Gods and supporting the Green
Party. They would claim that Christianity was an imported religion which was
irrelevant to Britain.
           But what would they actually do ?
           'I wouldn't wanna frighten you.' Rozzie smirked and swung
herself on to the bus.
           From across the field came the hollow sound of Bran, the drummer,
doing what he did at every new campsite, what he'd done at every St Michael
Church and prehistoric shrine along the Line: awakening the earth.
           Diane looked away from the Tor, feeling a trickle of trepidation.
She supposed there'd be lights up there tonight. Whether it was just the bijou
flickerings of torches and lanterns, the oily glow of bonfires and campfires …
           ... or the other kind. The kind some people called UFOs and
some said were earth-lights, caused by geological conditions.
           But Diane thought these particular lights were too sort of personal to be either alien spacecraft
or natural phenomena allied to seismic disturbance. It was all a matter of
afterglow. Not in the sky; in your head. In the very top of your head at first,
and then it would break up into airy fragments and some would lodge for a breathtaking
moment in your throat before sprinkling through your body like a fine shiver.
           Bowermead Hall, you see, was only three and a half miles from
the town and, when she was little, the pointed hill crowned by the St Michael tower
- the whole thing like a wine-funnel or a witch's hat - seemed to be part of
every horizon, always there beyond the vineyards. Diane's very earliest
sequential memory was looking out of her bedroom window from the arms of Nanny
One and seeing a small, globular light popping out of the distant tower, like a
coloured ball from a Roman candle. Ever so pretty, but Nanny One, of course,
had pretended she couldn't see a thing. She'd felt Diane's forehead and
grumbled about a temperature. What had happened next wasn't too clear now, but
it probably involved a spoonful