Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (104 page)

         
A trapdoor had been constructed in the
attic floor, originally to dispose of bodies after execution by dropping them
into a narrow, windowless, well-like chamber directly underneath.

         
In later years, more squeamish owners
of the house had boarded over the trapdoor space, but the floor remained weak
at this point, the boards had rotted, there were cracks. When Andy Boulton-Trow
stood on the beam, nearly two feet thick, from which the executees - and Sir
Michael himself - had taken a final step, he could see a few jagged black holes
below his feet.

         
First, he had taken off his shoes and
his trousers, so that he stood naked now in the candlelight with the noose
loosely around his neck.

         
For the purposes of magical projection,
a modification of the short-drop method was the most appropriate. That it had
worked, to a significant extent, for Michael had been amply demonstrated to
Andy tonight. Andy, who had spent twice as many years as Michael in study and
preparation, was warm after his sprint through the wood, still angry at the
damage to the stone and the debacle in the square. But the night was churning
with chaos, and out of chaos . . .

         
There was little time to waste. He was
hot inside, with excitement and anticipation.

         
To make sure everything was still in
working order, he and Humble had once hanged a fisherman Humble had chanced
upon, casting alone into the upper reaches of the river. It had not really been
necessary, but Humble had enjoyed it.

         
Just as Humble would enjoy watching
Andy hang. So why wasn't he here?

         
Perhaps he was. Humble could be quite
discreet.

         
Andy put both hands behind his head
and tightened and adjusted the noose under his chin. It was so easy to make a
mistake.

         
He stood on the floor-joist in the candlelight
and began to visualize, to bring himself to the necessary state of arousal.

         
He visualized the woman who'd looked
at him across the square, telling him with her eyes that she was slipping out
of the enchantment. Andy smiled; he would return for her one night, quite soon
perhaps.

         
A small wind drifted through the holes
in the slates; there was no wind tonight.

         
'Good evening, Michael,' Andy said.
'Again.'

         
He closed his eyes, and Michael was
within him once more - a now familiar sensation. In his solar plexus he felt a
stillness which was also a stirring, and there was the familiar small tug at
the base of his spine.

         
In time, the walls of the Court
evaporated, and he saw the town at his feet. He held back, and the vapours rose
within him. He felt the blazing chaos that was Crybbe, the dissolution of
barriers, the merging of the layers, one with another, the lower levels open to
the higher levels, the atmosphere awash with spirit.

         
He felt his destination.

         
And when the time was right, he
stepped lightly from the beam.

There was
a bright light, a widening carpet of light, and something rolling along it,
towards him.

         
This was the first thing he was really
aware of after he stepped into space and the noose tightened above his Adam's
apple.

         
There was no pain, only darkness and
then the carpet of night and the thing that was rolling.

         
Rolling very slowly at first, but its
momentum was increasing. And then he was staring into the face of Michael Wort.

         
The eyes had gone. The lips had gone.
There was some hair, but not much; most of the beard had disappeared. There
were gaps in the ghastly brown and yellow grin; few people in Michael's day had
kept their teeth beyond middle age.

         
'Michael,' he said eventually.

         
The noose was still around his neck
but it was slack. There was no pain in speech.

         
Behind the lamp, he saw a pair of
sneakers and legs in muddy jeans.

         
'He came with me,' Joe Powys said. 'He
couldn't manage the steps on his own.'

Andy had
smashed through the floor, spinning and twisting. He'd screamed once, but it
had sounded more like triumph than terror, suggesting he was unaware of
anything having gone wrong.

         
Well, you wouldn't be, if this was the
first time you'd hanged yourself.

         
The way he was lying in the centre of
the windowless, stone chamber was bent, unnatural. Powys said, with little
concern, 'Can you move?'

         
'I don't know,' Andy said, his
feelings sheathed. 'What did you do?'

         
'I saved your life.'

         
'Thanks,' Andy said. 'You fucker.'

         
Powys said nothing. He was shaking.

         
'Humble,' Andy said, after a while.
'He was supposed to have killed you.'
         
'Yeah?'
         
'He will.'

         
'Can't see it,' Powys said, 'somehow.'

         
He had the feeling both of them were
in shock. He put a hand out to the wall; it was dry again, and dusty. The Court
was a dead place again. The room was narrow enough for there to be an enforced
intimacy, and yet there was a distance, too, because the Court was dead.

         
'I nearly killed myself, though,' he
said, still appalled enough at what might have happened to want to hear himself
talk about it. 'Seems absolutely bloody insane when I look back, but I had this
idea that the only way I could straighten this out was to take the head up to
the prospect chamber and hurl us both out. I couldn't have been thinking
straight. Well, obviously. But you don't, do you, in these situations?'

         
'And what stopped you,' Andy asked
him, 'from killing yourself?'

         
Powys smiled weakly. 'Couldn't get in.
The door in the alcove was locked, and there was a sign that said: Danger. Keep
Out.'

         
The final bitter irony. Rachel had
saved his life. He'd stood outside the door, on the greasy stairs, and felt her
there again, cool and silvery.
You really
can do better than this, J.M.

         
'So then I saw the light in the attic.
Thought maybe you were up there, but there was only one rope. Hate nooses. Went
back outside and broke into the stable-block, through window, with a brick. I
pinched a bread knife. Brought it up to the attic and sawed through most of the
rope until it was just hanging together by a few threads. Where I'd cut it, I
covered it up with the coils of the noose.'

         
He saw that Andy was thinking very
hard, the muscles in his face working.

         
'I figured it out,' Powys said. 'It
came clear. When I saw the noose. You were going to do' - he pointed a foot at
the head - 'what he did. On the four-hundredth anniversary of his death. I
couldn't believe it at first. I can't understand that level of obsession.'

         
'Of course you can't.' Andy glanced up
at him, eyes heavy with contempt. 'You puny little cunt.'

         
'We're talking sex magic, aren't we? I
was once at a signing session for
Golden
Land
. Some regional book fair, and one of the other writers there was this
retired pathologist. He said, apropos of something, that a remarkable number of
hangings which look like suicide are actually accidents. Blokes - or teenage
kids in a lot of cases - trying for this uniquely mind-blowing sexual buzz
you're supposed to get from hanging by the neck.
         
Like, when the rope jerks, you
jerk off down there, too. That it?'

         
Andy said nothing. Powys could see him
trying surreptitiously to move different muscles.

         
'And with sex magic, you use the build
up of sexual tension to harden and focus your will. And then, at the moment of
orgasm . . . whoosh. Max Goff used to play about with it. Who taught him? You?'

         
Andy was stretching his neck, easing
it from side to side.

         
'Sex and death. Hell of a powerful
combination. This was how Black Michael pro . . .'

         
'Don't call him that,' Andy snapped.

         
'This was how Sir Michael Wort . .
.'
 
Bloody hell, Joe Powys always does
what he's told . . . 'This was
how Black
fucking Michael
projected himself into Crybbe, fused his spirit with the
spirit of the town so that the town is the man is the town is the . . .'

         
Andy stopped trying to flex muscles
and stared at Powys in the electric lamplight, and his eyes were so strange
that Powys wasn't sure any more which of them he was talking to, Andy or
Michael. But, clearly, the stage Andy had been striving to reach was something
that went beyond personalities.

         
'What did it really mean, though?'
Powys said. 'Was it simply a quest for eternal power? Some kind of
semi-physical immortally?'

         
You have to fracture the cool, he
remembered telling himself. To damage this guy, you have to tip his balance,
dislodge him from his mental lotus position. Even lying there, with unknown
injuries, he can, maybe, still take you unawares.

         
'Or is it,' Powys said casually, 'just
the ultimate ego-trip? Getting your end away from beyond the grave?'

         
He had to look away. The blackness
from Andy's eyes came out like iron spikes.

         
Iron spikes. Images of Rose cruelly
speared his own cool and he stared back into the eyes of the thing that had
dispassionately manipulated their fate.

         
'I can't move,' Andy said suddenly,
the first sign of human panic, 'I can't fucking move, Joe. I can't move my arms
or legs. I'm fucking paralysed.'

         
'What I think . . .' Powys remembered
conversations with Barry the osteopath, his neighbour in the Trackways building
' . . . is your back was broken in the fall. You can obviously move your neck.
What about your shoulders? Try shrugging your shoulders.'

         
Andy's shoulders convulsed. There was
a sudden sheen of sweat on his body.

         
'How's your breathing?'

         
'I can breathe.'

         
'In that case,' Powys said slowly and
callously, 'you'll probably be what's known as a tetraplegic. It won't be much
fun, but no doubt a lot of innocent people'll be saved a lot of grief by your
confinement in Stoke Mandeville or wherever you wind up.'

         
'You're a worthless piece of shit,
Joe.'

         
'Me?
I'm
shit?'

         
'You couldn't even kill me.'

         
'You're safer like this. Dead, you
could be a problem.'

         
Andy turned his head and looked into
the eye-sockets of Black Michael. As an exercise in mummification, Powys
thought, Michael had turned out to be rather less impressive than Tiddles.

         
He said, 'Where are the other bits
buried?'

         
'Why should I tell you that?'

         
'The head, naturally, was in the Tump.
Did you ever go into the Tump? Physically, I mean.'
         
'No.'

         
'And the genitals are under the Cock.
Walled up somewhere in the cellars, I'd guess, somewhere directly beneath that
passageway leading to the studio. The heart under the church - is there a
crypt?'

         
Andy didn't reply.

         
'And who would have buried your bits,
Andy, after the hanging? Humble?'

         
'Where is Humble? Occurring to Andy,
perhaps, that there might be more wrong than he knew.

         
Powys said, 'What's happening down in
the town? What's on fire?'

         
'Not my problem,' Andy said.