Hungry Moon by Ramsey Campbell Page B

authority, a return to order . . . Nick tried to draw him out on the subject of his presence in Moonwell, but Mann slumped all at once, his mouth drooping. 'I'll go down now,' he said to two of his followers, who helped him toward the town.
    Two more of them buttonholed Nick and Diana on the path to ask if they'd been won over by Mann's preaching. 'I'm just a reporter,' Nick said, 'and this lady's with me.' Once out of earshot he murmured to her, 'I hope you didn't think I was presuming, saying you were with me, since you asked so many of my questions.'
    'I didn't really, did I?' She made a comically apologetic face. 'Breaking your arm and now elbowing you
    out of your interview. You should have told me to shut up.'
    'No hard feelings. You got him going where I mightn't have, made him say more than he'd have wanted to, 1 thought. Let me buy you a drink to show I don't bear grudges.'
    But the pub, the One-Armed Soldier, was still locked. Nick had meant to phone in his report about the missile base. 'You're welcome to use my phone,' Diana said.
    She lived in a small rented cottage below the town square. The white rooms smelled of the flowers she had in pots in all the windows. He phoned from the low timbered entrance hall, then joined her in the front room with its children's paintings, where she had coffee waiting. Soon the conversation veered back to Mann. 'What I don't understand,' she said, 'is why he thinks doing away with this ceremony just because it's the oldest will put a stop to all the others.'
    'I don't know if that's what he meant.'
    'Why else would it be so important to him?'
    Nick couldn't imagine. 'Listen, I've got to be going,' he said, and scribbled his phone number on a page torn from his notebook. 'If anything happens you think I should know about, give me a call, will you? And whenever you're coming to Manchester again let me know and I'll buy you lunch.'
    Most of the shops were open as he walked back to the car. He wondered which of the people on the streets were townsfolk, which Mann's followers, and how many were now both. As he drove away from Moonwell, down into the forest below the moor, Diana's question began to trouble him. He should have asked Mann what it was about the cave that had brought him all the way from California. He felt almost as if something had distracted him from asking.

    EIGHT
     
    Diana woke on Monday morning thinking about druids. She'd got onto the subject almost by accident in the Manchester library, where she'd been researching her Peak District ancestry. Her background seemed so familiar, though not the way her mother's grandfather had lived, a miner who'd carved his family a home out of the lime waste outside Buxton. But perhaps, she thought now, her sense of belonging had just been part of the peace she'd felt on the moors, the first time she'd felt peaceful since coming to England to try to adjust to the death of her parents.
    Her last sight of them at the Kennedy barrier was as vivid as ever, her father giving her a hug that smelled of the pipe tobacco he always bought near the New York Public Library, her mother's cool hands on her face as she murmured 'Don't worry,' Diana not knowing then why she felt anxious. The glimpse of the airliner dwindling into the blackening sky had wakened her hours later in a panic that had set her praying as she hadn't since her childhood, praying they were safe. When she'd given in to her panic and called the airport, the clerk at first suspected her because she seemed to know the plane had crashed. Not until the police had questioned her at length did they tell her that both her parents were dead.
    She wondered how Mann would have dealt with that-not so much that God had failed to respond to her prayers, but that if he'd wanted to take her parents he'd taken dozens of other lives just to do so. Or didn't the
    individual lives matter to God, just the number of lives, the statistic? All that could justify that kind of behaviour by a god would