There were five people in the farmhouse kitchen, in the dark of dawn: Tris Lancoffe and his wife, who was the local vet, Theo the cowman, Eval Jackson in his chair; and Demi, Bel Lancoffe's eight year old daughter. They had the tv on with the sound turned down. The room was gloomy in lamplight, warmed by the big wood-burning range. A black and white cat called Selby was curled in a tight ball on the rag rug. The other cat, Frost, was up on the kitchen table, settled plumply on a sheaf of farm accounts. The adults were drinking tea, black tea from South Asia: one of those everyday comforts that was getting very hard to find.

'There used to be a world out there,' said Tris. Insomnia was plaguing him, he'd had another bad night: it sapped his morale. 'I was part of it, even if I didn't want to be. I read the newspapers, I watched tv, I felt the tug on the heartstrings when there was a tsunami in Japan, or a girl murdered in Birmingham. There were layers and layers where hurt didn't touch anything vital. Now I've got you guys, and Demi, and chaos beating on the door.'
The windows were still dark with November gloom. Theo glanced at the clock, and nodded sympathetically. 'I know what you mean.'
'It's all that was ever real, Tris,' said Bel, gently. 'We'll be okay.'
'Count your blessings,' advised Eval, always tough on any show of weakness. 'You got the farm, we got my disability allowances. We're in clover. Hell is in London, eh?'
They'd been up late, playing cards. Tris had fetched Eval over, and he'd stayed that night: Eval didn't drive. Shortly Tris would be driving him home again, and taking Demi to school on the same trip. At this reminder they all turned to the vision of hell on the tv screen, where a few thousand people swarmed in what seemed a vast, fire and smoke-lit cavern, pogoing like jackhammers. The chief demon, monstrously tall, monstrously agile, leapt about the stage: roping girders, shooting up the ropes, winging down from on high. He wore an ochre yellow suit, his head was a skull, fresh-stripped. Arcs of sweat flew glittering from the bluiesh, flesh-sharded cranium. The skullhead wore dark glasses, as did his bandmates. The eyes of the pogoers, when the cameras caught them, had a frantic, darting glitter. They swirled like shoals of fish, fleeing from unseen predators.
The show was live, thought it was seven am in Camden Town the same as it was in Cornwall. The composition of the mosh was frightening: not just young men and a few bold babes, but middle-aged women, headscarfed Muslim girls, business suits, senior citizens, police and emergency services in dishevelled uniform, all prancing in the same pandemonium. Demi was enthralled. She was being allowed to watch it for the sake of the newstape than ran along the base of the picture: held to be the most reliable source of information on terrifying events in the capital.
'What fuckin' scares me,' said Eval. 'Is that those bastards are the good guys. Or so they'd have us believe. What's the alternative?'
Demi, wise child, didn't react. Bel recoiled. 'Don't, Eval.'
'Sorry. It slips out. I usedter be a rockstar, y'know.'
They knew. Eval's fall from fame, his bitter loss, was ever-present: a lot harder to live with than his bodily weakness. 'I don't want you to use language like that in my house,' said Bel. 'We aren't like that. We aren't uncontrolled, violent-'
'Not yet,' muttered Tris. He reached for the teapot. 'I'll put more hot water in this. Demi, have you got everything. We're off in ten-'
Then came the cry. A fierce, gutteral peremptory yowl; repeated.
The cats fled, hugging the floor, to the kitchen's darkest recesses
'What the f-!' gasped Theo, and slapped a hand over his mouth.
Another yowl, and a strange, dragging sound. Tris leapt up and grabbed his shotgun. These days it was always by the door; and loaded.

Stay here! I'll go and see.'

The farmyard was drenched in mist, its rabble of defunct machinery softened and blurred. Heaps of old tractor tyres, baled straw bulging out of the Dutch barn; and something crouching on the concrete track, outside the gates. A big animal, far bigger than a fox or a badger. Tris leveled his gun and approached cautiously, fascinated. The creature had seen him. It tugged at the slack body it had been dragging: dropped the prey between mighty paws and raised its blunt dark head. He saw a pair of yellow eyes, staring directly at him: no threat, no hostility, more like pride. See what I brought you?
The kitchen door opened. Eval came piling out in his chair, followed by the little girl, Theo and Bel. The visitor fled. Tris ran for the gates, but he was too late. There was only Bodmin Moor, houseless and grey: the track disappearing into mist, and the carcase of a full-grown wolf, flopped on the concrete like an old horse-blanket.
'Did you see that?' demanded Tris. 'Did you see it?'
Theo shook his head. 'Didn't see anything.'
'I dunno exac'ly what I saw,' said Eval. 'Couldn't make it out.'
Tris and Bel examined the wolf. It was dead, no doubt of that, though there wasn't much blood, or obvious sign of injury. 'I think it was suffocated,' said Bel. 'Brought down and held by the throat until it choked. My God. What should we do?'
'Better call the expert,' suggested Eval, malignly. 'Don't worry, I have a direct line. Should be able to get hold of him in an hour or so.'

It took the wolf expert and his teenage sidekick thirty six hours to get to Cornwall. They arrived at the scene on the second morning after the suspicious death, but by that time they were too late to examine the body. It had disappeared, overnight, from the chest freezer in the old dairy.
The farmer, the vet, and the cowman, were very apologetic, very eager to offer what evidence remained. They answered questions frankly. No, they never locked the dairy. But the freezer had been chained and padlocked: whoever had taken the wolf had used bolt cutters.
No, they hadn't heard anything.
No sound of a vehicle? No strange tyre tracks?
We'd have woken, said Bel, the vet. No one drives at night.
The thieves had left behind a plastic sheet that had been wrapped round the body. It showed few traces: mud splatters and a couple of smears that were possibly blood. But Tris had taken photos, and printed the best of them. He fetched them from the farmhouse, snaps of a dun-pelted doglike creature: lying on the ground, tongue protruding between its teeth. A close-up of the tattoo. Another of the crushed throat-
'The light wasn't good.'
Fiorinda left them to it, and drifted off to wander the yard, picking her way between puddles of redolent slime. Maybe Smallstones farm looked better in spring or summer, or tastefully draped in snow. In November it breathed no romance. But the stones: hut circles, burial circles, one or two menhirs, were thick as dragon's teeth on this part of the Moor: so in fact you could look on Smallstones as a survivor of ancient prosperity, rather than a drab modern intrusion. She looked in on some brown calves penned in a shed. They nudged her hands to lick the salt from her palms, breathed silage and gazed sorrowfully at her red cowboy boots.
Soup of the evening, beautiful soup, she thought.
She was a city girl. Meeting food that looked you in the eye got her down. 'All right, guilty as charged. But you are dairy calves.'
The unfenced track outside the gates had been washed by rain since the incident, the ground on either side was mashed to bits by sheep feet. She felt a prickling between her shoulderblades, looked back and saw the white face of the little girl, staring avidly from an upstairs window.
The Lancoffes (Theo the cowman was Tris's cousin) came out of the dairy and crossed the puddle archipelago to join her. The wolf expert had to duck to get out of the door. 'I wish we'd thought to cover the prints,' said Tris. 'They didn't come out in the photos, but when you saw them it was absolutely clear what they were-'
'Clear as print,' confirmed Theo, too firmly. 'It was a big cat.'
Bel Lancoffe nodded. She was like her daughter, very white skin, very black hair: beautiful, in a pure, naked, windswept way, some years older than her husband. She didn't seem to like the red cowboy boots, or the vivid, ragged skirts of Fiorinda's indigo taffeta. Don't judge me, Cornish person, thought Fiorinda. I dress like this as a statement. I have wellies, I know mud.
'What about Demi?' asked Sage. 'She didn't hear anything?'
'Demzel's very shy,' said Bel, stiffly. 'She was desperate to see you, er, I mean, both of you: but in the end it was just too overwhelming.'
The white face at the window seemed like a kindred spirit. The fear and distaste of the adults was palpable. Ungrateful rural people, we are not plague carriers. We're the ones keeping the monsters from your door.
Well, except for this particular Bodmin monster, that kills our totem animal, delivers it like a gangster warning, and vanishes without a trace.

They drove onto the moor in convoy, Sage and Fiorinda in the National Rail hired van, Bel and Tris in the farm Land Rover. Sage walked with Tris off piste to a dell under the slopes of Small Tor, where a stream called the Vaughan came tumbling into a muddy-shored pool. 'I found this today,' said Tris, 'after we'd discovered the body was gone-'
They squatted on their heels. Tris picked up the stones he'd used
to anchor a square of plastic tarp, and peeled it back. Sage measured the crumbling pugmark with his ruined right hand. That's a big cat.
'Remind me. Have you had other big cat sightings around here?'
'I didn't believe in them until the day before yesterday,' said Tris. 'But I've never seen a wolf before, either, and we're in their range. We hear them occasionally, that's about all. I don't know, Steve. I just know I saw her.'
It disturbed him to be called Steve. Stephen had been Sage's original name. Anyone who called him Steve had known him before the fickle finger of fate had singled out a gangling, mash-brained teen for corporate slavery and stupid wealth. He didn't like the vibes of uneasy respect, either. Tris Lancoffe should be the adult, Sage should be the crapulous junior.
When he looked up the moor was transformed by his angle of vision: the Vaughan's rocky cleft a Himalayan gorge: a sickle curlew winging over vast desert uplands. Small Tor's brown peak stood sentinel on the horizon.
'You said she on the phone, as well. How did you know it was a female?'
Tris rubbed the back of his head, displacing a battered huntin' shootin' fishin' flat cap. 'I suppose Tom cats reckon what they kill is their own. It's she-cats, generally, that leave mice on the doormat for you. She wasn't hostile. It was exactly as if she'd killed a pest, and she wanted me to know it.'
'Hm. . . Did you kill my wolf, Tris?'
The farmer faced those famous blue eyes bravely, head on. 'The Bodmin wolves are a symbol,' he said. 'If we can live with them, at peace with them, we can live through this, this-'
'Global epiphany?'
'It's not global, is it? There are places where nothing's changed.'
'Hard to say, at the moment.'
The farmer's voice shook a little, the dread latent in him fighting his composure. 'I'm saying, I grasp the iconography. It's smoke and mirrors, but it's all we have. I did not kill the wolf. We didn't kill the wolf.'
'Okay.'
Tris replaced the tarp. 'It's as if we're in the hands of a psychopath. A justified psychopath, someone who was pushed too far, driven mad. We have to be careful, that's all, do exactly what we're told, keep calm, and we'll be released. We'll be changed, but we'll have our lives back.'
'Mm. . . What was the social occasion, last night?'
'Oh.' Tris rubbed the back of his neck again. 'We play cards. We've got a little poker school going. It's something to do.'
Sage was taken aback. 'You three play poker with Eval?'
'Not for money. . . I mean not for real money. I'm sorry you and Fiorinda had your journey for nothing. You were well on your way by the time we found the body was gone. We couldn't reach you. '
'It wasn't for nothing. We're going to Eval's, see what he can tell us.'

The van had no clearance and its suspension was in an awful state. They took the long way round by road, rather than cross the Moor. The Cornish lanes were deep and narrow, the asphalt rugged with fissures. Sage clutched the wheel with his crippled hands, and wondered which fist he should use, should fuel hijackers leap out of the high hedges. He had lost several fingers when he was a very small child. It wasn't usually a problem, but in cold and damp the ghosts could hurt like hell.
'It's amazing,' he growled, 'the number off righteous country folk who cheered their local hippies on, when the hippies sawed the masts down, and now genuinely don't understand why their cellphones don't work no more.'
Fiorinda was curled in the far corner of the bench seat, her nose in a little book called "How Radio Really Works". She ignored him.
'Why are you reading that? You love being unavailable. The only reason you've ever owned a mobile phone is for the fun of switching it off.'
'Know thine enemy,' said Fiorinda. 'Also, I left my book on the train and this was the only item on sale at Bodmin Parkway, aside from the Daily Mail, two weeks old. Tell me about Tris Lancoffe. Who is he?'
'Someone we used to drink with. He wanted to be an architect, but he had to take over the family farm after his uncle died. They're Right Wing Greens: Bel's a churchgoer, Pagan-tendency Anglican I do b'lieve .' Sage glanced across, a reassuring bolt of blue. 'But nothing screwy. No extreme views.' He took one hand from the wheel, and attempted to flex the surviving fingers, without success. 'When he called me, I told him to put my wolf in the freezer, and he said I'll try. What d'you think he meant by that?'
'Perhaps he didn't want to chuck his stash of supermarket ice-cream. It's not your wolf, Sage. It's a wolf sprung from Whipsnade Wild Animal Park by lunatics, later adopted as a daft eco-initiative. You're not responsible.'
'Yes I am, brat. I'm the one who convinced the Lords of the Manor-'
'Heeheehee.'
'Fuck off, on Bodmin it means something. I convinced them to take the wolves on. The old-style profit gods rationale says virtual tourism, hygenic disposal of barren old ewes. Everyone knows they're a peace offering to the angry Environment, and now one of them's dead in mysterious circs-'
Thirteen wolves had been released on Bodmin. One had proved a nuisance and had been returned to captivity, another had been killed by a hit and run. Eleven of them should still be out there. Make it ten. The photos had definitely been canis lupus, and the tattoo seemed to confirm it was one of the released animals, not some other, mystery wolf.
'Virtual tourism is a futile excuse, since we've been quarantined from the dataworld. What about Bel and the little girl. I sensed a story there?'
'Hm, well, that's complicated-'
'Steamy tale of hideously dysfunctional North Cornwall folk?'
'Yes.'
'I should move here,' said Fiorinda. 'I'd fit in wonderfully.'
Sage looked at home right now. Ditched the rockstar apparel and the skull mask, just your average blond Cornish giant in a scuffed Barbour and old corduroys. But with this man you never knew which was the disguise. Chameleon, Corinthian, his masks went layers deep

The lane crested a hill and opened up at a viewpoint. Sage pulled off and stopped the van: they got out and stared at the waste, Small Tor in the distance now; like a peaty alp. The raw cold took hold of them, and plastered them together. They'd been promised another severe winter: as far as anyone could tell, since they'd been robbed of the satellites, and that was bad news. It's tough keeping the people harmlessly off their faces and pogoing, when they're afraid that soon they won't have bread to eat.
'And that's another year-without-a-summer,' grumbled Fiorinda.
'I told you about this long ago, brat. A third of the world fries, Western Europe gets sent to Siberia. . . Never thought it would really happen.'
'We never thought anything would really happen. It's a rock and roll anger fantasy come true: save the earth, punish the rich. It's just unfortunate that to get to the rich you have to go through everyone else first-'
In his arms she was resistant, steely and fragile. 'Fee, is this all right? Something wrong with this trip?'
'Nah. Trophy celeb-trash nymphette delighted to accompany you into your back pages, and get disapproved-of by your grown-up friends.'
'Stupid brat. I need to know about the wolf, and I wanted to be alone with you, just for a day or two.'
'I know, me too. . . What about Eval? Do I find out what really happened, now that I'm going to meet him?'
Eval Jackson had quit Sage's band, among rumours of appalling debauchery, several years before; and returned to Cornwall in permanent ill health. His bandmates had consistently refused to comment on the lurid stories he told of his dismissal. Whatever the man says.
We know nothing.
Far as we're concerned Ev' popped out for a fag a few years ago,
and never came back.
Sage heaved a sigh. 'I suppose. Tho' George will kill me. It's only different in the details. We were in Kampala, on that hateful Africa tour-'
'Mba Kayere.'
'Yeah. Some rich kid had invited us to a party, nobody wanted to go except Eval, so he went on his own. He was driving round leafy suburbs in the middle of the night, looking for the address. Of course he was hammered. He bust through a roadblock, they shot out his tyres and he totalled the jeep. I was so drunk all the time then, I don't remember a thing: but George had him in a top Cairo hospital in hours. He lived, he now has one kidney, previously owned, no spleen, and a mashed spine.'
George was the sensible one: the crazed blond giant's grand vizier.
'No hostage shoot-out, no lies about who was driving? No brutal sacking, no AIDS-related prank with infected hos planted in his bed; no horrific blood-parasite disease due you cancelling his insurance and forcing him to rely on shanty town healthcare?'
'There had been talk of sacking. None of the rest, not s'far as I know.'
But you were captain of that ship, she thought. That's bound to smart.
'I suppose he knows about me and Rufus?'
'Er, yeah. Don't worry, he won't say anything. He better not.'
'I don't mind. I'm used to it.' She dug his hands from under her rainjacket and held them to the warmth of her throat. 'Let's get on. And I'm driving, imbecile.'
He hung his head. 'Not arguing. . . Listen, d'you hear an engine?'
'Nah,' said Fiorinda. 'It's the baying of an enormous hound.'
'That was Dartmoor.'

Eval's place was a designer pad: probably with stunning views if you arrived by daylight. Outside in the landscaped grounds there were exotic trees that must have been planted full grown in the band's filthy rich phase; and a marble pillared portico. Inside, a slaughter of tropical hardwoods, a massacre of beautiful stone, native and foreign. Fiorinda thought of Sage's treasured, unreconstructed hovel of a cottage, not too many miles from here. Eval must have drawn the short straw: Band Member Who Does The Taste Free Spinal Tap Thing. . . She pretended to read her Wireless pamphlet, while Sage and Eval surfed the Wolfwatch cams. The invalid was a hobbyist voyeur. He had a fly-eye bank of screens covering a wall, and a wifimixing desk.
Eval wore a soft, brown hippie beard, a guernsey sweater and painfully box-fresh dark blue jeans. His feet were bare, soft and pale like his hands: his eyes were restless. Sage questioned the witness gently. He knew that the dead wolf had disappeared, but he had no explanation. He had not seen Tris's big cat. It had been dark, he'd seen nothing, really.
'D'you often watch the wolves?'
'There's not much else, is there? I'm sick of reruns, I hate movies an' I don't give a fuck for the bloody revolution. I very rarely see them, though. '
The living room was scarred by the traces of wheelchair adaption, which Eval had not troubled to have erased. A white Steinway Concert Grand, piled with old food cartons. A heap of keyboards and a steel guitar, legless on a dais. Stuffed bin-bags oozed from the showpiece Serpentine hearth. A plasma wallscreen idled around an underground garage full of mangled sports cars. Was that art, or the CCTV from Eval's basement?
Out on the Moor, in false-coloured, papery infra-red, nothing stirred except reeds in the wind; the glint of moving water.
'They know where all the cams are,' murmured Eval, his restless eyes quieted by admiration, or affection. 'They're wise to us, they don't get caught unless they like-'
'What about the big cat?,' asked Sage, equally quiet, as if the secretive wildlife could hear them. 'Did you ever have a glimpse of her?'
'There are no big cats on Bodmin,' said Eval, levelly, staring at the fly-eye. 'If there'd've been a whisker of another charismatic predator, you'd never have got the wolves released, would yer? Forget it. '
'Then what killed my wolf, Ev?'
'Hit and run. It's obvious. The culprit dumped it at Smallstones gates,
and made a few stupid howling noises, for a laugh.
'So you did hear something. Where d'you think the wolf is now?'
The invalid glanced across at Fiorinda, delicate skin reddening above the beard. 'Is this a fucking court of law? I'll tell you what happened: Tris has kept it. A wolf pelt, that'd be a cool thing. He called you 'cos he was scared he'd be blamed, then he changed his mind an' decided to keep it. Made Bel an' Theo lie for him. I'm not surprised. He's in a state, you know. He's been behaving erratically before this-'
'Tris speaks well of you too,' said Sage. 'He told me about the poker.'
Eval glared: apparently this opened an old wound. He spun his wheels and turned on Fiorinda. 'You're Rufus O'Niall's daughter, aren't you? How old are you now, kiddiewink? Still jailbait or just over?'
'If you don't know,' she said, coolly, 'you can easily find out.'
Sage laughed. 'Don't bother, Ev'. You're not up to her weight.'
'I just wondered, because it's not like the boss here to take another man's leavings, even if it was her own dad broke her in.'
'You don't know that,' said Fiorinda. 'It's just jealous gossip, because my dad's been a megastar and I'm incredibly talented.'
Sage grinned at her, and silently gave her the thumbs up.
'I'll make tea,' said Eval, rancorous, dark flushed to his brow. 'Sorry, I don't keep alcohol. An' I don't need any help, thanks.'

'Nice friends you have,' she said, when Eval's chair had zipped out of the huge living room. 'Is that normal?'
'Er, yeah. . . On the stressed-out end of his range.'
'What d'you think's wrong? Guilty conscience?'
'I'm not sure. Could be just he's having a painful day.'
Eval returned calmer, the mugs of tea on a tray attached to his chair, mineral water with a straw for himself. They sat like a misfit family on a sitcom sofa, awkwardly silent until another screen in the bank woke. A dot moved through the dusk, pushing light ahead of it: someone was coming up the lane on a moped. 'Ah,' said Eval. 'That's one of my care-givers. She'd like to meet you, Fiorinda, she's a big fan: hope you don't mind. She's bringing our supper.' He grinned at Sage. 'Don't worry. I ordered fingerfood, Mr Handsfree: you won't have to embarrass yerself with a knife and fork.'
The care-giver wore clerical black under a homely red anorak; a dog collar and a crucifix. The figure on the cross was the Green Man. She greeted Sage as a fellow-soldier on this difficult battlefield, smiled shyly at Fiorinda; and gave Eval a cautious, mood-checking glance, as she stripped the hotbag from three pizza boxes.
'I'm truly honoured to meet you Ms Slater. I'm Moira. I hope you don't mind me inviting myself: Sage and I are old comrades. How are you Eval?' She added a two litre plastic bottle to the spread, purporting to hold Coca-Cola. 'It always cheers him up when one of the band comes down-'
'They're not here to see me,' said Eval. 'They're pyschic investigators.'
'Oh?' The vicar's smile grew wary. 'What are you investigating?'
Eval bared his teeth, rancour suddenly breaking into irrational fury. 'It's the big cat. Tris told them a big cat killed that wolf, an' now the wolf's body has disappeared. So this makes them think, don't ask me why, that we're getting into ritual magic, like the human sacrifice raves in the Midlands. Better come clean, Reverend, or they'll have the army down here- '
'Oh dear. Eval, don't get into a state, it does you harm-'
Eval reared up, arms braced and trembling, spittle around his mouth. 'Do I look as if I've been dancing round any bonfires lately! Tell me that!'
'Siddown, Eval. I don't know where this is coming from. I'm here because a wolf was killed. Nobody said anything about bonfires.'
'Don't you fucking lie to me. I know why you came rushing down. I know what a WITCHHUNT is! Your shitting prejudice, the ruling junta, you, and His Holy Cocksucking Self Mr Dictator Ax Preston. All you want is to destroy the real revolution, the real radicals. Things you can't control, they're not allowed to exist, well you'll get yours, you'll be fucking sorry-'
'EVAL!' bawled Reverend Moira. 'There is NO EXCUSE for that language! SIT DOWN!'
And the storm passed as abruptly as it had exploded. Eval subsided, hiding his eyes. 'I'm sorry, vicar. . . I'm very tired.' He was trembling.

The pizza wasn't bad, though the 'mozzarella' had an unpleasant, gagging texture. Sage stayed with Eval while Reverend Moira and Fiorinda cleared out. 'I am a Christian Pagan, ' said the vicar, with dignity. 'There is nothing incompatible in Christ's message and our older forms of worship. Paganism has nothing to do with black magic.' She closed her hand protectively over the Green Man at her breast. 'What happened in the Midlands was not my religion, it was pure human evil, the hideous consequence of, of our breakdown, our loss of control-
'You're right,' said Fiorinda. 'There was nothing supernatural going on, just street kids killed by slow torture as a spectacle. We can agree on that.'
Eval's kitchen was a well-tended temple of shiny gadgets, spotless surfaces, but the invalid's despair was fighting back. A heap of microwave popcorn bags tumbled from behind the Expresso machine, giving off a smell of rancid butter. The vicar nodded, still clinging to her talisman.
'I believe your grandmother is a practising Wiccan witch, Ms Slater?'
'Fiorinda,' said Fiorinda. 'She doesn't practise while I'm around.'
'No, I suppose not. . . Ms Slater, er Fiorinda, Eval has his outbursts. He tires easily, he's often in a lot of pain. Sage understands, I hope you do too. But there are many, reasonable people who feel the Rock and Roll Reich is prejudiced against Pagans-'
'Not at all. Just a little suspicious of the extreme right wing.'
'I can't blame you for that.' The priest, or priestess, seemed to reach a decision. 'I'll see what I can find out about the wolf. If it would help.'
'To make us go away?'
'To. . . to clear up a misunderstanding. Now, if we could move some of the rubbish bags out to the bins while Sage distracts Eval, I'd be grateful. It's difficult to get them past him. He keeps ordering takeaways that he can't eat. I sometimes think the poor man wants to commit suicide by drowning in a midden of food packaging and junk mail.'

'What the fuck's going to become of me?'
In the master bedroom Eval propped his head in his hands and wept. 'What's gonna become of people like me when the medicine drugs run out, and the shit really hits the fan? I'll be crawling, a legless beggar.'
'You're just tired. Let's get you into bed.'
Sage and Eval Jackson had been heroin addicts together once: along with Mary, the Welshwoman, Sage's first girlfriend. Sage had been free of the drug before they set out on Mba Kayere, he'd decided to kill himself with alcohol instead. Eval had not escaped, and it looked as if he never would, although plain morphine was his poison these days. You won't be a legless beggar, Ev. You need health and strength for that life, you poor bastard. It's incredible that you've clung on, and for what? To hate yourself some more? Is that the last, most potent addiction? He laid out the bedtime dose, without which Eval would have no rest, and stooped over the pathetic figure, using his height and bulk with menace.
'Say another word to her about her dad, and I will kill you.'
'I can put meself to bed,' mumbled Eval, ignoring the threat. 'How d'you think I manage when my beloved bandmates aren't around? I don't need you.'
But he did. They had never really liked each other, yet the memories remain: the needle applied like a benediction to the soft, slack blue-veined flesh in the crook of Eval's arm. Goodnight, me old hellraiser.
Now to disable the spycam in the guest room, just in case

Mba Kayere

He was in Africa, on stage in a sweltering arena: the crowd a surging mass out in the dark. He was chanting "Lukundoo", a song about a wicked man, wickedly punished: words filched and filleted from a revered Horror story. Reference to certain treasured texts was part of their Ideology. Mba Kayere, I am passed over. We are the survivors, living on after the death of the living world. We are worse than dead. They had hecatombs of fans in the sub-Sahel, hordes who passionately welcomed the message of despair: hordes more just delirious on the special effects. He was Aoxomoxoa, the skull-head demon, razoring swollen, gibber-headed lesions from the bruised inner skin of his arms. But however deep he cut the root was further, and he was terrified: not of cutting through bone, not of bleeding to death, but that this would never stop, never stop. A bone-rattling horror of the void inside him-
SHE WILL NEVR FORGIVE. It was the horror of knowing that nothing can make the world better. The razor cuts deeper, finding no end to the rot; the void inside expanding, expanding. No earthly medicine, no cure-
Matomipa, angunzi, lukundoo, lukundoo-
He sat up, sweat bursting.
The skin of his arms was unblemished. The room was vivid with African moonlight, and there was someone in the bed with him. He stared, appalled at the young woman, her flower face, pointed chin resting on her hand, her grave eyes, the red storm of her hair-
'That looked like a mighty struggle. Was it worth it?'
'What?'
'Remembering my name,' said Fiorinda.
'Oh, fuck. I was dreaming.'
'I know,' she said, dryly. 'Was it about Mary?'
He shook his head. 'I've given that up, sweetheart. It was about me. I was onstage, razoring ulcers from my arms, singing "Lukundoo". God, I've just remembered what it means.'
The bones of his face, stark and beautiful, stood out as if he was wearing the skull mask, a white skull with staring blue eyes
'What does it mean? I know what Mba Kayere means, it comes from Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow": which I read when I was eleven thanks to you, and it nearly killed me. . . I can't remember all your crypto-intellectual footnotes.'
Fiorinda had been a preteen fan, long before she met her idol.
'It's supposed to be African,' he said. 'Don't ask me what language, maybe Edward Lucas White, guy who wrote the story, made it up. It's supposed to mean a leopard man. Leopard men are witches. Shit,' He stared harder. ' I was fusing with it, I was turning into a leopard! '
'Makes a change from Gravity's Rainbow,' said Fiorinda. 'Where the horrific fusion was between profit gods and hard science. Sage, why didn't you tell me Eval had a Pagan vicar for a health visitor?'
He noticed that the light was not moonlight, it was the electric bedside lamp. Eval had a turbine, and unrestricted use of the power he generated.
'Why would I mention it? Half the Anglican priests in the South West are Pagans by now. What are you saying, Fee? D'you think we've blundered, stumbled onto another human sacrifice ring?'
She wrapped her arms around her knees, and thought about it.
'No, I don't. But there's something going on.'
'There's something,' he agreed: and wiped the cooling sweat of Africa, the past invading the present. 'I was so angry in those days. It wasn't an act, it was unstoppable: anger and hatred and despair flooding out of me, all over the stage. And now, in the middle of the disaster I knew we had coming, that I was screaming for, I do the same show and it's just a job. Isn't that weird?'
'Crowd control,' said Fiorinda. 'Bread and circuses, and fear of the guillotine. Us being the circus. It works, but how long can we keep it up?'
'Long enough.' He put his arm around her shoulders and drew her closer, Fiorinda in her slip of a green silk nightdress. How often had they seen her naked? Not very often. The abused child fears exposure.
'We'll hold the pass,' he said. 'The quarantine will be lifted. We'll come out of this with an improved, sustainable version of modern civilisation. I just wish I knew what had happened to that wolf. . . Ah, let's fuck on it.'
'Like sleep on it, only better. Good idea.'
They'd been thrilled at the thought of being alone, but it was sweet the way sex seemed incomplete without their lover. Think of him, fall asleep.

Something was being dragged, laboriously, over uneven ground. It was dragging itself, it was not a dead wolf but the torso of a man: severed below the waist but still living. His head lolled, the face a mask of blood. Was that Eval, crawling to the place of sacrifice? Bog bodies, stone circles, the heroes tortured to death, the unfit kept, tended until they were needed for the great appeasement. Rituals not ancient but newborn. Fiorinda stirred from her doze, very frightened: Sage gone out of her reach, a breathing rock. It was impossible to wake him when he was really asleep. But living with fear was an art she had mastered. Needs must.

Eval's daily care-givers arrived in a constant procession. The nurse who got him up in the morning; the housekeeper, the cook, the cleaners; the masseur. The aquatherapist (there was a spa in the basement: no dead sports cars). The local geek who ran the voyeur network, the noble volunteers who came just to spend time with a fretful invalid. It was heartening, the other face of that wild rumpus over which they presided: but alarming to see how much care and commitment one sick man could absorb.
Sage decided to overhaul the keyboards' programming, and coaxed Eval into taking an interest. In the afternoon, when the rain stopped, Fiorinda went for a walk in the grounds. She was lurking among the Japanese maples by the drive when a 4X4 minibus arrived. As it went past she glimpsed the Pagan vicar in the driver's seat.
When she reached the house, Eval was out on the marble forecourt, at the top of the wheelchair ramp that had been crudely slashed through the steps: arguing with the Reverend Moira. Sage was letting them get on with it.
'You couldn't get up the path, Eval, and Sage is here, but you won't stand for anyone carrying you. We'd have to leave you in the bus.'
'You take me, or I'll tell them!' Eval's voice cracked with fury, and desolate defiance. 'I'll tell them everything, an' you'll be f- '
'Eval, I won't be blackmailed.'
'What will you tell us?' asked Fiorinda.
The invalid stared at the vicar, narrow-eyed. 'Stuff I know.'
'Ev's got his all-terrain chair,' said Sage. 'Why can't he come along?'
'There's nothing to tell,' sighed the Reverend Moira, shaking her head, hanging onto her dignity. 'Eval's being silly. But if he really must-'
'I'm getting my other chair: it's charged. Don't you go without me.' Eval belted into the house, radiant as a toddler after a successful tantrum.
'If there's nothing to tell,' wondered Fiorinda, 'where are we going?'
'It's the other side of Small Tor,' Reverend Moira looked at Sage. 'Sage will know the place, it's the old Methodist Chapel.'

They took the lanes, long way round again. Reverend Moira was a cautious driver, barely breaking into twenty miles an hour on the straight. Sage travelled up front, Fiorinda and Eval in the back, seats folded away and Eval's chair installed. Eval fell asleep: lulled by the gentle motion.
'This is one of those new Pagan Holy Places, I take it?' remarked the native son. 'How do the Methodists feel? I thought you people of the leafy cross didn't get on with they?'
'Not new,' Moira corrected him. 'The sacred places were always there. We find them more easily now -or again- because we have changed.'
She drew up in a gravelled parking lot on the eastern slopes of the Tor. The chapel was out of sight: a green turf track led up the hill, dividing rusty sheaves of bracken, bluegreen mats of juniper. Moira closed her eyes and opened her hands, palms upward.
'Let us be quiet for a moment, before we approach. There is nothing evil here. Let the peace of the earth rise up in your hearts.'
'Why didn't you want poor old Eval to come along?' inquired Sage, in a church-going undertone. 'Don't he need the peace an' all that?'
'Hope is not good for some people,' explained the vicar, seriously, opening her eyes. 'Some kinds of hope are not good for any of us.'
Eval woke when the vicar came around and opened the side door. His mood had changed: he was subdued, uneasy. They followed him up the green track, around a bracken shoulder and saw the chapel pressed close against the hillside. It was surrounded by a walled grave plot, where a yew hunched and a clump of sycamores held onto their last, tattered, yellow leaves. Not another building in sight.
Fiorinda thought of rabid Pagans in ambush.
'Is the chapel in use?'
'Occasionally. The grave plot is kept up, and someone comes to clean every month. No services are disturbed by our worship.'
'So what happens, ex'ackly?' Sage grinned. 'If this is where we get rapturised up to heaven, with the Methody elect, you can count me out. I've got a gig on Saturday, I'd hate to disappoint the fans-'
'Same here,' said Fiorinda, mugging teenage sidekick attitude. 'Me, done the end of the world. Boring.'
Moira was didn't let their levity get to her.
'Nothing like that. Nothing at all like that.'
Eval was waiting for them at the grave-plot wall. The vicar drew herself up, and came clean. 'Well, here we are. I don't know how the wolf was killed. . . Perhaps I can persuade you not to pursue that question. All I can tell you is that after Tris had spoken with you, other parishoners of mine took a hand: they tried to make amends. I'll wait for you here. Go into the enclosure, see what you came to see.'
The chapel stood pale and foursquare, in the last light of day. Sage felt no threat. But his skin pricked, the inner surfaces of his arms suddenly tender, as if the nightmare was lodged in him and finding its way to the surface. Sage looked at Fiorinda: she shook her head and shrugged-
'Go under the trees,' urged Moira. 'They will do you no harm.'
They?
'Eval? You coming? Need a lift up the steps?''
The stones looked over the wall, marking the ranks of the dead. Eval's face worked with hunger and grief, his soft hands balled into trembling fists.
'Nah. No fucking thanks, cock-sucker. This is close enough.'
'I'll wait with Eval,' said the vicar.
Sage and Fiorinda went into the plot alone, and picked their way between gravestones. Under the wind-sown sycamores they found the wolf: not buried, but laid on top of a table tomb. It was significantly deader than it had been in Tris Lancoffe's snapshots: eyes sunken in the skull, the soft lips and tongue shrunken back from its formidable teeth. Whoever had laid it there had made a bed of grasses on the stone, and arranged the body as if it were sleeping. There were mourning flowers, a pot of autumn cyclamen, but also a dog's waterbowl and a plate of raw meat (beginning to fester a little); in case the sleeper awoke.
'Oh dear,' breathed Fiorinda. 'We are put to shame, Sage. I believe they were hoping it would come back to life.'
'Yeah. . . Prob'ly the same lads that knocked him over, I think that's what the vicar was saying.' He parted the fur of the dead animal's ruff, found the tattoo and stood back from the smell of decay. 'Looks like sometimes the Goddess says no.'
'Pagans, not Goddess worshippers. It's not the same.'

It was twilight now, a witching time, a crossing time. The wolf's resting place definitely had an atmosphere, and now they saw other votives: tucked between stones, into clefts in the sycamore roots. The pathos of human longing filled them: let the bad thing not have happened, make my baby well; let us have our peacemaker the Bodmin Wolf back-
But what's dead stays dead.
Yellow leaves reached to touch their shoulders, as they left. Sage stooped to get from under the branches, Fiorinda pushed clinging twigs aside. The hunched yew tree by the corner of the chapel seemed to have changed perspective: surely it was closer, and at a different angle? A trick of the light, obviously. They crossed one terrace, and Sage heard a very deep, murmuring and rending sound behind him. Fiorinda turned, uncertainly, as if someone had called her name.
Oh, what's this?
The yew and the sycamores were walking.
like tall women wading in the earth, reaching out their arms.
The walking trees, the stones, the grass, the darkened sky, a veil grown thin, a rent that briefly opened, and behind it NOTHING.
NO THING. ANNIHILATION
Fiorinda stared, her grey eyes wildly dilated.
'No,' she said. 'Stop it.'

And all was as before.
Eval watched them approach, ground his chair in a snarling turn and bounded down the track. Moira stayed, paper-white. The Green Man, arms outstretched, leaves in his mouth and tangled in his hair, shone on her breast.
Her lips moved, stiffly. 'Did you see. . .?' she breathed
'We saw that you folks have laid the wolf in a holy place,' said Sage. 'Fine by us. Thanks for bringing us here. Case is closed, shall we go?'
The minibus purred at the chastened pace of motor-powered transport after the fall. Its headlamps sought and found detail in the dusk: a tendril of red-berried bryony, a darting bird between the high banks. Small Tor dominated them through every twist and turn, cutting off the last of the light. They reached the designer pad, and Eval's marble sweep, in unbroken silence. Moira lowered the floor of the bus: the invalid, defeated, zoomed up the ramp and into the house.
'He thought he would be healed there,' said the vicar, regretfully. 'That's why I didn't want to take him. I knew he would be disappointed. There have been healings at that spot: but Eval must heal himself, before divine power can touch him. . . Will you understand me if I say that we have visited one of those places where the veil is thin?'
They smiled and nodded: polite sceptics.
'I won't ask what you both saw.' The Reverend Moira had recovered her colour and her self-command. She looked carefully at Fiorinda, in the bright lights of Eval's threshold. 'I'm not sure what I saw myself. . . But I'm not impressed by strange phenomena. The truth is deeper, and different for every soul. It lives in the silence of our hearts. '
'You're absolutely right. Nice meeting you. Goodnight.'
The witch's grand-daughter went quickly indoors.
Reverend Moira got back into the 4x4, and leaned from the window. 'Goodnight, Sage. I hope you found what you were looking for.'

So this is what we will do, thought Fiorinda, as they headed for Bodmin Parkway, the designer rockstar pad and the mystery of the Methodist Chapel safely behind them. Sage and I will ride shotgun, keeping things worse than mere anarchy at bay. We'll hear of incidents and travel around investigating. Sometimes it will be horrors, the way it was in the Midlands; sometimes it will be something else. But we will mend the rents, scrub out the stains. It sounded doable. She hoped it was true-
'Fee, d'you mind if we stop?'
They'd reached the viewpoint. She pulled up, and faced him.
'What's the matter?'
She could trust Sage to keep her secrets, she knew that.
'Nothing at all, sweetheart. I'd just like to walk on the moor. Don't know when I'm going to be here again, as thank God it won't be my turn to visit Eval for about a year. Or two.'
(Will he still be alive? Where will we be? Who knows. . .)
'D'you want me to come?'
'No, thanks. Commune with beloved homeland alone, me.'
'Okay. I'm still trying to find out how wireless works. Take your time.'
'Perfect girl.'

He skirted around Smallstones, keeping below the horizon, a British Army balaclava covering his bright hair; a dun shadow in the colourless daylight. The square of tarp was still weighted down, by the pool. Stepping lightly from dry grass to dry stones he crouched and peeled it back. He'd noticed something wrong when Tris had brought him here, but hadn't put it together. Yep, this pugmark is old. Not a day or two, but a week or two old, it's been wet and dry, it's had time to crumble. The inexplicable took him by the back of the neck: making the hairs rise, sending chills down his spine.
Oops, and now it's gone.
Having destroyed the evidence he replaced the tarp, and climbed beside the Vaughan. Up the gulley, across a steep stretch of open moor, and up again, vertically: keeping close to the stream, treading and gripping only where the rock was water-washed, using his crippled hands like paws. What told him when to stop? A musk, a band of signal hanging in the air. Overhead, near the top of the scarp, he saw a dark slot under a precarious-looking boulder. He turned his back and leaned there, tucking his fists away.
'I know you're up there,' he said, conversationally. 'I know you took the wolf, an' I think I know why. I won't tell on you. I don't know what you want with me but. . . Try to live with my wolves. Please. Is it a deal?'
No answer. A leaf fell with a tiny sigh. A pair of peregrines, far off and high in the pale sky, mewed at each other. He stood for a while, for minutes, forever: thinking of the void inside, and the moment in his dream when fear had turned to longing. Hiraeth: a word that Mary had taught him. Then he returned, same way as he'd come, to the rust-bucket van: to his brat, her courage and her secrets. Back to London, where Mr Preston was waiting, with all his faithful love, all his stubborn belief that the world could be saved.

The big cat, up above in her den, stretched and yawned, well content. Her eyes were fathomless light, her throat a fanged abyss. She curled the black length of her body around the cub and set about him, licking with her coarse tongue, and purring, soft and deep.
Tough love, rough love, shaping a dark destiny.