For many years their vernal love, reborn in a smudge-earthen East Anglian marsh had been driven out by the diurnal tedium of the marriage contract. The relentless storming of the years had begun to crease his face, and fatigue his muscles and the erstwhile bloom of Margaret’s features; despite her excellent bone structure finally succumbed to the fiend of time. Those flights into the blue skies of unlimited lovemaking seemed so far away now that it appeared to him that they had barely existed.
So when Albert joined the local Reformed Primitive Druid chapter at the suggestion of his Prescelly Mountains Works Manager Margaret was especially pleased for him, and for her. A bit of the antique Celtic mysticism might sink through his balding pate, do them both some good and inject sorely-required passion into their drooping sex lives. She had read quite a few books about earth-goddesses and stone circles and felt that pre-Christian fertility rites might do the trick.
When the evening came they both prepared themselves and hastened to the Festival on Woolthorpe Common organised by the chapter’s high priest, Aneurin.
This was the big one. Samain, the Celtic festival for the end of summer, one of the most important and sinister calendar festivals of the Celtic year was held when the world of the gods was believed to be made visible to mankind. The gods played many tricks on their mortal worshippers; it was a time fraught with danger, charged with fear, and full of supernatural episodes. Albert thought of the impending letter from his bank manager. His thoughts then mazed through the MonteCarlesque financial venture he had been impelled to go on through the receipt of an email Spam. The “free” loan he’d been persuaded to sign subsequently intervened together with the dismal failure to fix his friend’s erratic hard disc. These ruminations were followed by the sudden aerosol of religious enthusiasm experienced in insomniac nights, the strange vision of a still-flowering tree when leaves were falling everywhere, the sounds of exotic cockatoos among the rock pigeons of the nearby municipal woods.
The full moon boded well for the festivities as they gathered under the diseased oak in the centre of the rugby pitch. An argentine aura bathed the participants in ethereal light. Bankers and car mechanics, checkout mothers and legal secretaries were all rendered equal under the all-seeing eyes of the goddess. The oak forgot its diseased branches and polluted bark while the carcinogenic fumes of the town behind them bathed the weak wattage of the condemned street-lamp in iridescent colours.
From an aquamarine plastic raincoat the treasurer withdrew a grimy black plastic object on which he pressed a button. The tape recorder exhumed tinny midi synthesis ambient sounds, permeating the cold, dewing grass and the flabby whisky-liveried flesh of the more superannuated members while the cassette hiccuped on its patches of bald ferric oxide.
Sacrifices and propitiation of every kind were thought to be vital, for without them the Celts believed they could not prevail over the perils of the season or counteract the activities of the deities. From Town Hall and Government office, from executive suite and gaffer’s hut the written oracles of memos and reports, the sudden sealed envelope and the evening call launched spasm of uncertainty in Albert’s varicose veins. Drops of congealing sweat drooled down his ill-designed stubble.
The wicker basket the secretary of the local choral society had brought along relieved his, and their, anxiety. Within it a pallid, plume-less battery chicken ineffectively mildly squawked strangled chords through the suburban dusk mingling its hopeless calls with the rumbling sounds of a lone monoplane scouring the skies above. Edith hoped that the despondent fowl’s cries would not attract the attention of the occupants of the handful of neighbouring houses
The selenic dance began and increased in its well-meaning fervour. Slapping of superfluous flesh penetrated the dank night, almost blotting out the tweeting sounds of two little owls and the Mozartean roulades of a nightingale. Breasts and beer bellies heaved up and down in a Saxon imitation of a shuhlplatter choreography.
While the unrobed acolytes balleted like Disneyan ostriches in a frantic effort to keep warm, Albert cast his eyes on Elaine, a still nubile brunette with pert petite breasts who was executing a Poussinesque dance of grace and delicacy. For some months he had dedicated his time at the earth-scriptural meetings to uncovering the archaeology of her taut and appealing body curves hidden beneath an unfashionable dress. To the measure of foursquare rhythms the high priest intoned the first line of Taliesin’s bardic ode.
Albert stepped slowly but deliberately towards Elaine: his heart burned with a faintly recollected fervour, reminiscent of his Caftan days. Did she wear such ugly clothes just to provoke his confined desires even more? Why did her placid beauty seem even more appealing when cloaked in such undesirability? Just as he began to stroke the ionic curves of her perfectly formed posterior he felt a pressure at his back.
The moon was now full in her preternatural chaise longue eiderdowned by cloudy trails in midnight’s hemisphere.
Turning round Albert saw the face of Margaret, not as he had been used to seeing her these forty years, but as the young fresh dryad of the trees he had first seen. Her face smoothed of its lines, refreshed in its bloom, entwined him within the laser-beams of her eyes. His heart pounded more deeply, aflame with a long-suppressed passion as he felt his heart injected with a burning and ardent pain that filled his arteries, his whole body, and his supernal mind. Attempting to grasp the newly shaped languor of her thighs he collapsed into an immobile heap, falling upon her newly painted crimson toenails. A small ivory-handled kitchen knife loosened from her hand and tinkled past his numbed fingers, its blade entrenching the sodden turf.
* * *
The calls of astonishment mingled with the police car sirens, the ambulance and the humbler gyrations of the clapped-out straining diesel of the local RSPCA as the alien vehicles approached the gasping heath gathering through the narrow streets of the huddled, decaying terraces below.
Meanwhile, the bleached chicken had pecked its way out of Mrs Rampton’s basket and was attempting to find its way to freedom across the starry heath.