‘Didn’t know I was coming back to die . . . I mean, that’s what people do, isn’t it, and animals, go back home to die? But I wouldn’t have. If I’d known. Last thing they need here’s any deadwood.’
The voice frail, but determined. Going to get this out, if it . . .
Killed him. Yeah.
‘Just as well, really. That I didn’t know.’
All Moira could see through the windscreen was the Moss. The vast peatbog unrolling into the mist like the rotting lino in the hall of her old college lodgings in Manchester, half a life away.
The BMW was parked in the spot at the edge of the causeway where yesterday she’d sat and listened to the pipes on cassette. Now it was another cassette, the one from the brown envelope inscribed MOIRA.
‘Funny thing, lass . . . this is the first time I’ve found it easy to talk to you. Maybe ’cause you’re not there. In the flesh. Heh. Did you realize that, how hard it was for me? Lottie knew. No hiding it from a woman like Lottie. Shit, I don’t care who knows. I’m dead now.’
Matt laughed. The cawing.
She’d followed Lottie into a yard untidy with beer kegs and crates. Beyond it was a solid, stone building the size of a two-car garage. It looked as old as the pub, had probably once been stables or a barn.
‘Matt’s music room,’ Lottie said.
She’d been almost scared to peer over Lottie’s shoulder, into the dimness, into the barnlike space with high-level slit windows and huge, rough beams. Dust floating like the beginnings of snow.
Lottie silent. Moira, hesitant. ‘May I?’ Lottie nodding.
Moira slipping past her, expecting echoes, but there was carpet and rugs underfoot and more carpet on the walls to flatten the acoustics. She saw a table, papers and stuff strewn across it.
Shelves supported by cement-spattered bricks held books, vinyl records and tapes. Heavy old speaker cabinets squatted like tombstones and there was a big Teac reel-to-reel tape machine. Matt’s scarred Martin guitar lay supine on an old settee with its stuffing thrusting out between the cushions.
Hanging over the sides of a stool was something which, from across the room, resembled a torn and gutted, old, black umbrella.
She’d walked hesitantly over and stared down at the Pennine Pipes in pity and horror, like you might contemplate a bird with smashed wings. It was as if he’d simply tossed the pipes on the stool and walked out, for ever, and the bag had maybe throbbed and pulsed a little, letting out the last of Matt’s breath, and then the pipes had died.
Moira’s throat was very dry. She was thinking about Matt’s obsessions: the Pennine Pipes, the bogman and . . .
‘Can’t help your feelings, can you? Like, if you’re a married man, with a kid, and you meet somebody and you . . . and she takes over your life and you can’t stop thinking about her. But that’s not a sin, is it? Not if you don’t . . . Anyway, I never realized that you . . . I never realized.’
Matt’s voice all around her now. Car stereos, so damned intimate.
Lottie had turned away, calling back over her shoulder, ‘I’ll be in the kitchen. Stay as long as you like. Lock up behind you and bring me the key. The parcel’s on the table.’
And she was gone, leaving Moira alone in the barn that was like a chapel, with the pipes left to die.
On the table, a thick, brown envelope which had once held a junk-mail catalogue for Honda cars. It had been resealed with Sellotape and
MOIRA
was scrawled across it.
Inside: the tapes, four of them, three of music. And this one, a BASF chrome, marked personal.
‘Not a sin . . . if you don’t do owt about it. But I always found it hard to talk to you. I mean . . . just to talk to you. Till it came time to tell you to get out of the band. That was easy. That was a fucking pushover, kid. I’m sorry the way that worked out, with The Philosopher’s Stone. Sounded like a big opportunity. Like, for me too – chance to make the supreme sacrifice. But we can’t tell, can we? We never can bloody tell, till it’s too late.’
Rambling. He’d have been on some kind of medication, wouldn’t he? Drugs.
‘But when they told me I’d had me chips, I did regret it. Regretted it like hell. I thought most likely you’d just have told me to piss off, but there might have been a . . . Anyway, I’d have given anything for just one . . . just one time with you. Just one. Anything.’
Christ. Moira stared out of the side window to where half a tree had erupted from the Moss, like bone burst through skin.
‘When you wrote back and you said you were too busy, I was shattered. I’d convinced meself you’d come. I just wanted to at least see you. Just one more time.’
Moira bit down on her lower lip.
‘I’d tried to write a song. Couldn’t do it. It was just a tune without words. Nothing. Best bloody tune I ever wrote, which isn’t saying much – play it for you in a minute. Won’t be much good, the playing, what d’you expect? Be the last tune I ever play. Gonna play it over and over again until I get it perfect, and then I’m gonna get Lottie to take me out and I’ll play it to the fucking Moss. The Man in the Moss. That’s what it’s about. The Man in the Moss. That’ll be me, too. Want to die with this tune in me head. This tune . . . and you.’
She felt a chill, like a low, whistling wind.
‘It’s called Lament for the Man. I want the Moss to take it. A gift. Lament for the Bridelow Bogman. Soon as I read about him, months ago, before it came out about the sacrifice element, I was inspired by him. Direct link with me own past. The Celts. The English Celts. Like he’d come out the Moss to make a statement about the English Celts. And I was the only one could interpret it – sounds arrogant, eh? But I believe it. Like this is what me whole life’s been leading up to.’
Matt starting to cough. On and on, distorting because the recording level couldn’t handle it. The car-speakers rattling, like there was phlegm inside.
‘Fuck it,’ Matt said. ‘If I go back and scrub this I’ll forget what I was gonna say. Sorry. Can you handle it? See, this was before they’d completed the tests on the bogman, before it was known about the sacrifice. Even then I was pretty much obsessed. I didn’t care if we spent every penny we’d got. Lottie – she’s a bloody good woman, Moira, I never deserved Lottie – she went along with it, although she loved that chintzy house in Wilmslow and she hated The Man I’th Moss, soon as she clapped eyes on it. But she went along with it. Sometimes I think, did she know? Did she know before me, that I was gonna snuff it? She says not. I believe her.’
Across the Moss she could see the pub, a huge grey boathouse on the edge of a dark sea, its backyard a landing stage.
‘And then, soon after we came, the report came out about the bogman. About what he was. A sacrifice. To appease the gods so they’d keep the enemy at bay, make this community inviolate. Protect these Celts, these refugees from the fertile flatlands, the Cheshire Plain, Lancashire, the Welsh border. Invaders snatching their land, Romans, Saxons. And this, the old high place above the Moss – maybe it was a lake then. Bridelow.’
Matt’s voice cracked.
‘Bridelow. The last refuge. I cried. When I heard, I cried. He went willingly. Almost definitely that was what happened. Almost certain he was the son of the chief, everything to live for – had to be, see, to make a worthwhile sacrifice.’
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 realized 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 to me . . .’
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, but 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 flapped 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.
‘Mrs Wagstaff, back off!’
What was the old biddy doing here alone? Where were the
Mothers’ Union, when she needed back-up?
‘Mrs Wag . . . Don’t . . . don’t look . . .’ Moira stumbled.
‘Don’t look at it,’ she said miserably, for Bridelow Moss had got her left foot. Swallowed it whole, closing around her ankle, like soft lips.
White eyes.
Black-horned head, white eyes.
‘It’s thee. It were always thee.’
Ma Wagstaff growled, stabbed at it one last time with her stick – the wood was so hard that the metal tip of the stick snapped off.
‘Mrs Wag—’
Woman’s voice screaming in the distance.
Nowt to do wi’ her. Ma’s job, this.
She moved away, like an old, experienced cat. Bait it. ‘Come on, show thiself.’ A dry, old rasp, not much to it, but she got it out. ‘What’s a tree? What’s a bit of owd wood to me, eh? Show thi face. ’Cause this is as near as tha’s ever going to get to Bridlo’. We seen to thee once . . . and it’ll stick.’
Backing away from it, and all the muck coming off it in clouds. She was going to need some help, some strength. It’d take everything she’d got – and some more.
And not long. Not long for it.
All-Hallows soon. The dark curtain thin as muslin.
Dead tree out of the Moss, and made to live, made to thresh its boughs.
Him. Taunt it.
‘You’re nowt.’ Words coming out like a sick cough. ‘You’re nowt, Jack. You never was owt!’
Dead tree writhing and slashing itself at her, and, though she was well out of range by now, she felt every poisoned sting.
Get it mad.
‘Ah . . .’ Ma turned away. ‘Not worth it. Not worth me time. Bit of owd wood.’
But her heart was slamming and rocking like an old washing machine.
Black horned head, white eyes.
Dead, but living in him.
White eyes.