Crybbe (AKA Curfew)

In Crybbe, night did not fall.
   
Night rose.
   
It welled out of the bitter brown
earth caged in brambles in the neglected wood beyond the churchyard, swarming
up the trees until they turned black and began to absorb the sky.

Collecting the shadows of graves, the night seeped out of the churchyard
and across the vicarage lawn, where Murray Beech stood, knowing he was the
wrong vicar for this parish but not knowing there couldn't be a right one.

   
Murray, with a certain
distaste, was wondering how you went about an exorcism.

In the centre of the town, patches of night gathered like damp about the
roots of timber-framed buildings. They'd been turned into shops now, and
offices and flats, but they still shambled around the square like sad old
drunks.

   
Puddles of night stained the
boots of Jack Preece, plodding across the cobbles to toll the curfew bell from
the parish church, as he did every night and would go on doing until - as,
being a farmer, he expected - arthritis got him and young Jonathon took over.

   
When Jack went to ring the old
bell, he walked alone. Nobody else on the streets, the town holding its breath,
even the sagging old buildings seeming to tense their timbers.

   
Nobody went into the Cock;
nobody came out. Same with the Lamb down the street.

   
Tradition.

There was a passageway a few yards from the steps of the Cock, the pub's
upper storey bellying out above it. This was another of the places where the
night was born, and the only place from which, in the minutes before the
curfew, you could sometimes hear distinct sounds: moans and squeals and panting.

   
Silly young buggers. To prevent
this kind of thing, there used to be an iron gate across the passageway, with a
lock. But when they turned the building at the bottom of the passage into a
radio studio, they took the gate off.

   
This was a matter of some concern
to the town council, of which Jack Preece was a member (his father, Jimmy
Preece, was the Mayor), and negotiations were in hand with Offa's Dyke Radio
and the Marches Development Board to get the gate replaced.

   
Why?

   
Same reason as old Percy Weale
had given, back in the sixteenth century, for the institution of the curfew: to
safeguard the moral welfare of the town.

   
What other reason could there
be?

Minnie Seagrove, sixty three, a widow, had no doubts at all where the
night began.

   
It began in that thing they
called the Tump.

   
She could see it from the big
front window of her bungalow on the Ludlow road. Nobody else could see it better.

   
Not that she wanted to. Ugly
great lumps like this were ten a penny in the North and the Midlands where Mrs.
Seagrove had lived. Only, in those areas, they were known as industrial spoil-heaps
and were gradually removed in landscaping and reclamation schemes.

   
However, this thing, this Tump,
wouldn't be going anywhere. It was protected. It was an Ancient Monument - supposed
to have been a prehistoric burial mound originally, and then, in the Middle
Ages, there might have been a castle on top, although there were no stones
there any more.

   
Mrs. Seagrove didn't see the point
in preserving just a big, unpleasant hump with a few trees on top. It was
obviously not natural, and if it was left to her, the council would be hiring
Gomer Parry with his bulldozers and his diggers to get rid of it.

   
Because that might also get rid
of the black thing that ran down from the mound in the twilight and scared the
life out of Minnie Seagrove.

   
All right, she'd say to herself,
I know, I know ... I could simply draw the curtains, switch on the telly and
forget all about it. After all, I never noticed it - not once - when Frank was
alive. But then, there didn't seem to be so many power cuts when Frank was
alive.

   
How it came about, she was
watching telly one night, coming up to
News
at Ten
, and the power went off, and so she automatically went across to the
window to see if the lights were on across the river, in the town.
   
And that was when she first saw it.

   
Horrible. Really horrible. It
was. . . well, it was like the night itself bounding down from the Tump and
rushing off, hungry, into the fields.

   
But why can't you just stop
looking? Why can't you stay well away from that window when it's going dark?

   
I don't know.

   
That's the really frightening
thing. I don't know.
   
Yes, I do.

   
It's because I can feel when
it's there. No matter what I'm doing, what's on telly or the radio or what I'm
reading, ever since I first dashed to the window during that power cut, I've always
known when it's on its way down from the mound. Without even going to the
window, I
know
when it's there.

   
And the reason I look - the
reason I
have
to look, even though it
scares me half to death - is that I have to know, I have to be sure
that it isn't coming this way.

Crybbe: a small one-time market town within sight of Offa's Dyke, the
earthwork raised in the Dark Ages to separate England from Wales.

   
A town like a dozen others on either
side of the border; less distinctive than most.

   
Except that here, the night
rose.

PART ONE

Some persons have
super-normal powers not of a
magitien, but of a peculiar and scientific qualitie.

Dr John Dee,
Letter to Lord Burghley
, 1574

CHAPTER I

Sometime - and please, God, make it soon - they were going to have to
sell this place. And on evenings like this, when the sky sagged and the bricks
of the houses across the street were the colour of dried blood, Fay would
consider how they'd have to bait the trap.

   
On a fresh page of the
spiral-bound notepad, she wrote:

FOR SALE

Bijou cottage in small, historic town amid spectacular
Welsh border scenery. Close to all amenities, yet with
lovely open views to rear, across pastoral countryside
towards Offa's Dyke. Reasonably priced at……………….

. . . what? You couldn't make it too cheap or they'd be suspicious - and
with good reason.

   
She'd suggest to her dad that
they place the ad in the
Sunday
Times
or the
Observer
, under 'rural property'. These were the columns guaranteed
to penetrate the London suburbs, where the dreamers lived.

   
They probably wouldn't have
heard of Crybbe. But it did sound appealing, didn't it? Cosy and tucked away.
Or, alternatively, rather mysterious, if that was what you were looking for.

   
Fay found herself glancing at
the bookshelves. Full of illusions. She saw the misty green spine of
Walking the Welsh
Marches
. The enigmatic
Old
Straight Track
by Alfred Watkins. And the worst offender: J. M. Powys's
The Old Golden Land,
which suggested
that the border country was full of 'secret doorways', through which you could
penetrate 'ancient mysteries'. And lots of pictures taken through lenses coated
with Vaseline and wishful thinking.

   
She would really hate doing
this to somebody, selling the house and perpetuating the myth. But not as much
as she'd hate having to stay here. And you couldn't let your conscience run
away with your life, could you?

   
Anyway, there were some people
- like, say, the Newsomes - who rather deserved what this town was doing to
them.

   
'Off to the pub,' the Canon
called merrily from the hall. 'Fay, can you hear me? I said, I'm off to the
boozer.'

   
'OK, Dad.'

   
'Spot of social intercourse.'

   
'You'll be lucky.' Fay watched
him stride past the window towards the town square. The old devil still looked deceptively
fit for someone who, ever so slowly, was going mad.

   
He would put on a wonderful
performance for the prospective purchasers, always assuming they caught him on
one of his better days. That Santa Claus beard and the matching twinkle. They'd
love him. More importantly, they'd trust him, the poor sods.

   
But before she could unleash
this ample bundle of ecclesiastical charm on the punters, there was just one
minor difficulty to overcome.

   
The Canon didn't appear to want
to leave Crybbe. Ever.

   
This was the central problem in
Fay's life. This was what kept her awake at night.

   
Christ, how
could
he? He didn't tramp the hills,
wasn't much interested in peregrine falcons or otters or bog-orchids. How, for
God's sake, could he bear to go on living in this no-hope town now that the
woman who'd brought him here had been dead for nearly a year?

   
Other recent settlers kept
saying what a little haven it was. Convincing themselves. A handful of retired
people - most of them rather younger than the Canon - drifted into the town
every year. The kind who told themselves they needed to be closer to nature.
But nature, for them, amounted to a nice view. They came here not to die, but
to fade out. To sit amid soft greenery until they grew frail and lighter than
air and the wind blew them away like dandelion seeds.

   
What happened in reality was
that an ambulance eventually took them off, rattling along the narrow lanes to
Hereford General, twenty-five miles away. Taking too long to get there because
all the roads were B roads, clogged with tractors and trailer-loads of sheep,
whose milky eyes showed that
they
had
no illusions at all about fading into a green heaven.

   
'Don't do it, Dad,' Fay said,
just to create a new sound - three minutes' walk from the so-called town centre
and all you could hear was the clock on the mantelpiece and the wheezing of the
fridge. 'Don't leave your mind in bloody Crybbe.'

   
The Canon seemed, perversely,
to revel in the misery of the town, to relish the shifty, suspicious stares he
encountered in the post office and all the drinks the locals didn't buy him in the
pub.

   
His mind was congealing, like a
fried egg on a cold morning. The specialists had confirmed it, and at first Fay
had refused to believe them. Although once you knew, the signs were pretty obvious.

   
Decay was infectious. It spread
like yellow fungus in a tree stump. Fay realized she herself had somehow passed
that age when you could no longer fool yourself that you were looking younger
than you felt.

   
Especially here. The city - well,
that was like part of your make-up, it hid all the signs. Whereas the country
spelled it out for you. Every year it withered. Only the country came up green
again, and you didn't.