Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (100 page)

   
He noticed the Police Sergeant,
Wiley, near the back, in full, if disarranged, uniform. Not exactly rushing to
open an investigation into the killing of Murray Beech.

   
Col Croston, back in the
chairman's chair, next to Alex, called out. 'No need for inhibition. Consider
the issue thrown open to the floor.'

   
'Well, come on,' said Alex, in
exasperation. 'Who's the old bat in the front row trying to avoid Murray, what
about
you?
Mrs Byford, isn't it?'

   
Mrs Byford spoke with brittle
clarity, like an icicle cracking. 'Tell this rude old gentleman, Colonel, that
we have no intention of moving from yere nor of entering into any discussion
on the subject.'

   
Alex said, 'Did you have much
to do with Murray, Mrs Byford? Your granddaughter did. She sought his
assistance. As a priest. She wanted him to exorcise a ghost from your house.

   
'No!' Mrs Byford pushed her
chair back into the pair of knees behind her and stood up. Murray's hand
appeared to reach for her ankle and she gave a shrill cry. 'It's lies!'

   
'Poor old Murray was quite
thrown at first,' Alex said. 'Not every day you're recruited to cast out a
malevolent spirit. Anyhow, he came to me for advice, and I said, go along and play
it by ear, old boy. Nothing lost. So off he goes to the old Police House. Don't
suppose you were around at the time, were you?'

   
Alex could see a number of people
beginning to look worried, not least Wynford Wiley, the copper. 'And where do
you think he found the evil spirit, Mrs Byford?'

   
"E wasn't evil!' Wynford
spluttered out. "E was . . .'
   
'Where do you think he found this
malignant entity?'
   
Her back arched. 'Stop this, you go no
right to . . .'
   
'You know, don't you?'

   
'Keep calm, woman,' an old man
said from behind. 'You got to keep calm, isn't it.'

   
Alex stood up. 'He found the
evil, Mrs Byford ... He found it in her eyes. Ironic, isn't it?'

   
Mrs Byford's hands, half-clawed,
began to tremble. She stumbled into the aisle and stood there, shaking.

   
'Now . . .' Alex sat down. 'No,
please, Mrs Byford, I'm not trying to bully you. Look, sit in one of the empty
chairs on the other side. Thank you. Right, now, did that gentleman mention the
necessity of keeping calm? Keeping the low profile? Avoiding direct confrontation?
Let's discuss this - but very quickly, please, time's running out. Ah. Mr Davies.'

   
'What can we do?' The butcher.
Bill Davies, had left his post by the door and was approaching the platform, a
big man with a sparse sprinkling of grey curls. 'We got lo live yere, isn't it.'

   
'The Mayor,' said Paul Gwatkin.
'Where's the Mayor?'
   
'He's probably dead,' Col Croston said
flatly.
   
'You don't know that,' said Wynford
Wiley.
   
'And the church is on fire,' Col said.
'Don't suppose you know
that
.'

   
'Aye, we know that,' the clerk's
husband, little Billy Byford said tiredly, and sighed. His wife gave him a
glance like a harpoon.

   
'These yere hippy types,' said
Bill Davies. 'This Goff. If they 'adn't arrived, with their experimentin' and
their meddlin'. . . They think it's a wonderful game, see. They think the
countryside's a great big adventure playground. Do what you like, long as you
shuts the odd gate. They wouldn't think of strollin' across their motorways,
climbin' all over their power stations. Oh no, you 'andles all that with care
and if you' don't know nothin' about it, you stays out of it'

   
'Sit down, Mr Davies,' said Mrs
Byford. 'There's nothing to explain.'

   
'I'm gonna say this, Nettie.
City-type dangers is something they takes for granted - never questions it. But
they never thinks there might be risks in the country, too, as they don't understand.
Well, we don't understand 'em properly neither but at least...
at least we knows there's risks.'

   
'The inference being,' said
Col, 'that Crybbe is an area with a particularly high risk-factor.'

   
'You live yere,' said Bill Davies,
'you learn there's things you can do and things you can't do. Maybe some
people's more careful than others, maybe some people takes it more serious like.
But that's same as with a lot o' things, anywhere you goes, isn't it?'

   
'Mr Davies, we don't have to
explain nothing,' Mrs Byford said.

   
Bill Davies ignored her. 'And
it's not like you can get 'elp neither. Can't write to your MP about it, can
you? You 'as to live with it, just like your parents and your grandparents, and
you accepts the constraints, like.'

   
The butcher sat down two seats
away from Mrs Byford, to the left of the central aisle and crossed his legs
defiantly.

   
'Thank you,' said Col. 'I'm
very' grateful to you, Bill. Canon?'

   
'Yes, indeed. I think Mr Davies
has put his finger on it. I can understand entirely that there are certain
prevailing phenomena in this particular town which the residents have long felt
unable to discuss with outsiders. Problems which, I suspect, first, er,
materialized during the reign of James I, when anyone found displaying an
interest in matters of a . . . a shall we say, supernormal nature . . . was in
serious danger of being strung up for witchcraft.'

   
He looked down at the
blood-spattered blotter, saw that nothing at all had changed. Outside, the
church was burning and a gullible crowd was suspended in the thrall of something
even the devil-fearing James I would have been hard-pressed to envisage.

   
'And one can see,' said Alex,
'how this quite-understandable reticence would, given the comparative remoteness
of the town become, in tune, more or less endemic. Yes, I can understand why
it's been allowed to fester.

   
'But, by God,' Alex stood up,
his hands either side of the bloodstained blotter, summoning the flames, 'if
you don't take some action tonight you'll regret it for the rest of your small
little lives.'

CHAPTER XX

The box was making a strange noise, a rolling, creaking sound,
suggesting that the item inside had been dislodged from whatever secured it.
   
OPEN IT!

   
'Not a chance,' Joe Powys said
aloud, attempting to sound confident, in control. But for whose benefit?

   
The box lay in the centre of
the courtyard, the lamp on topo f it, its beam directed at the Court, no more
the derelict warehouse, the disused factory without echoes of laughter or the
residue of sorrow.

   
Periodically, Powys would look
up towards the eaves, but there were no flickerings any more, no ignition
sparks. The Court was fully alive now and crackling and hissing at him.

   
OPEN IT!

   
The appalling temptation, of
course, was to break open the box to confirm that it did in fact contain what
he suspected, which was the mummified head of Sir Michael Wort, or at least
a
head.

   
But Powys was scared to look into
the eyes of Black Michael, even if only the sockets remained. There was too
much heavy magic here; Andy, the shaman, the heir, was projecting himself at
will along the spirit path, able to manifest a disembodied presence in the Tump
and probably elsewhere, while his physical body was . . .
where
?

   
The old ley-line, which progressed
from the Tump to the square and beyond had been reopened, a dark artery to the
heart of Crybbe. Reopened for the ancestor, Black Michael.

   
Whose head now lay in an oak
box at Powys's feet. The head was a crucial part of the process and as long as
he had the head he was part of it, too, until the pressure
became unbearable.

   
So what am I going to do with
it?

   
He thought, as he'd thought so
many times, I could out of this situation, I could leave the box lying on the
ground, leap into the car and accelerate back into what passes for the Real
World. I could simply stop believing in all of this. Because if you don't
invite it into your life it simply doesn't occur. |

   
Blessed are the sceptics.

   
For they shall . . .

   
they shall . . .

   
die with a broken neck on a convenient rubbish heap.

   
Powys closed his eyes to ambush
renegade tears. You daft bastard, this is Crybbe, where normal rules don't
apply. Where once you're in the game, you have to go on playing.

   
Because Fay is down there in
that sick little town with Jean Wendle and probably Andy Trow, and the twisted
essence of something four centuries old at the door, and Fay could go
snap! - like Rachel, like Rose. But you wouldn't die, Powys - you'd go on
living with the knowledge of what you failed prevent - even though you were
fully aware, at last, of what was happening - because you were scared and
because you thought it expedient, at this stage of the game, to take the sceptic's
way out.

   
All right,
all right
. I'll play. Deal me in.

   
He tried to envisage the
layout. The Tump was the head, the church was the centre of the breast, the
town square was the solar plexus and the Cock was the genitalia.

   
He realized he must be standing
on Black Michael's throat, (the throat chakra, influencing the nervous system,
controlling stress, anxiety).

   
There came another noise from
the box, like the head rolling from side to side, and his eyes were wrenched
open, the breath catching in his chest like a stone.

   
I've got to get rid of it.

   
He snatched the lamp, bent down
and examined the box. It was bound not with iron as he'd imagined but with
strips of lead. It occurred to him that it was probably not locked at all and
all he had to do was raise the lid and . . .

   
No . . .

   
He sprang to his feet and
backed away.
   
God
help me . . . I've got the four-hundred-odd-year-old head of Michael Wort in a
box, and I don't know what the hell to do with it.

   
The Court wanted it, he could tell
that. The Court squatted in its hollow with the vengeful, violated Tump bunched
over it, glowering. The Court throbbed with an ancient need, and Powys knew
that it wanted him inside it so that it could digest his spirit and spit him out
like poor Rachel, like Tiddles the mummified cat which had been stuck for centuries,
a tiny, constricting hairball in its throat.

   
The throat had been blocked.
The Court had coughed and the blockage had come out of the mouth.

   
The open mouth was the prospect
chamber.

   
What he had to do - the clear,
bright certainty of it - went through him like a fork of cold and jagged
lightning.

   
'I can't,' he told the night, 'I
don't have the strength. I don't have the courage.'

   
'I can't.'

   
It still made no sense, of
course, according to what was accepted as normal, but it answered to the logic
of the place, it extended the rules of the game to put him in with a chance.

   
What he had to do was enter the
Court and carry the box up the stone stairs to the prospect chamber. And then
he had to stand in the opening, lift the box above his head and cast it out
into the night so that it fell on to the rubbish heap and smashed,
symbolically, to pieces.

   
A ritualistic, shamanistic act
which would sever the connection between Black Michael and the Court, leave a
meaningful crater, a great pothole in the middle of the spirit path.

   
And, well ... he knew that the
ritual would be more perfect, more complete, if
he
went out of the prospect chamber, too, his arms wrapped around
the box.

   
Sacrifice. Always more energy with
a sacrifice. Perhaps also, because he was hijacking Andy's ritual, he'd be
releasing and recycling the energy created by Rose's fall and Rachel's.

   
He stood with one foot on the
box and thought about this.

   
It was a complete load of New
Age crap.