Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (18 page)

   
But the huge cat was not coming
at her.

   
When she looked again, he'd
landed solidly in a beam of pallid moonlight on the varnished mahogany arm of
the fireside chair, and he was purring.

   
In the chair Grace Legge sat rigidly,
her brittle teeth bared in a dead smile and eyes as white and cold as the moon.

PART THREE

A car's steering wheel, like a dowsing rod,
is designed to
amplify small movements of the driver's hands; so a reflex
twitch in someone who slips unconsciously into a dowsing
mode would be enough to send a car travelling at a fair
speed into an uncontrollable spin.

Tom Graves,
Needles of Stone

CHAPTER I

Memory is circling like a
silent helicopter over these soft, green fields, strung together with laces of
bright river. It's a warm day in June or July, a Friday - the day you heard they'd
sold the paperback rights to
The Old Golden Land
.

   
Directly below, throwing a shadow like a giant sundial at three clock,
is the Bottle Stone.

   
It's about five feet tall and four thousand years old. Nobody seems
to know whether erosion or some damage long ago left it shaped like a
beer-bottle, or whether it was always like that.

   
It seems now - looking down, looking back - to be as black as its
shadow. But there's an amber haze - Memory may have created this, or maybe not
- around the stone. Also around the people.

   
Six of them, mostly young, early twenties. They're sharing a very
expensive picnic. You paid for it. You led them on a raid to a posh high-street
deli, then the wine-shop. And then you all piled into a couple of cars - old
Henry Kettle too, although he says he'd rather have a cheese sandwich than all
these fancy bits and pieces and you came out here because it was the nearest
known ancient site, an obvious place to celebrate.

   
Memory hovers. It's trying to filter the conversation to find out
who started it, who raised the question of the Bottle Stone Legend.

   
No good. The voices slip and fade like a radio between nations, and
it's all too long ago. The first part you really remember is when Andy says . .
. that there's a special chant, known to all the local children.

                  
Johnny goes round the Bottle Stone.
                  
The Bottle Stone, the
Bottle Stone,
                  
Johnny goes round the
Bottle Stone,
                  
And he goes round ONCE.

And the Big Mac went round and round the toilet bowl, and Joe Powys
watched it and felt queasy.

   
He'd walked back to the Centre
in a hurry and picked up the mail box. He hadn't looked at the mail, even
though it seemed unusually profuse. Just ran into the shop and dumped it on the
counter. Then he'd gone into the lavatory and thrown up.

   
The Big Mac had been everything
they'd promised it would be. Well, big, anyway. Never having eaten - or even
seen at close hand - a Big Mac before, he'd decided on impulse this morning
that he should go out and grab one for breakfast. It would be one more
meaningful gesture that said. Listen, I am an 'ordinary' guy, OK?

   
Not a crank. Not a prophet. Not
a hippy. No closer to this earth than any of you. See - I can actually eat bits
of dead cow minced up and glued together.

   
But his stomach wasn't ready to
process the message.

   
He washed his hands, stared
gloomily at himself in the mirror. He actually looked quite cheerful, despite
the prematurely grey hair. He had a vision of himself in this same mirror in
ten years' time, when the grey would no longer be so premature. In fact, did it
look so obviously premature now?

   
He flushed the lavatory again.
Felt better. Went through to the kitchen and made himself a couple of slices of
thick toast.

   
Fifteen minutes before he had
to open the shop. He put the plate on the counter and ate, examining the mail.

   
There was a turquoise letter
from America. It might have been his US agent announcing proposals for a new
paperback reprint of
The Old Golden Land
.

   
It wasn't; maybe he was glad.

   
'Dear J.M.,' the letter began.

   
Laurel, from Connecticut, where
she was newly married to this bloke who ran a chain of roadside wholefood
diners. Laurel: his latest - and probably his last - earth-mysteries groupie,
once lured spellbound to
The Old Golden
Land
. Writing to ask for J.M. for a copy of his latest book,

   
What latest book?

   
Then there was an unsolicited
shrink-wrapped catalogue from a business-equipment firm. It dealt in computers,
copiers, fax machines. The catalogue was addressed to,

The Managing Director,
J. M Powys Ltd.,
Watkins Street, Hereford.

   
In the head office of J. M. Powys
Ltd., the managing director choked on a toast crumb. The head office was a
three-room flat in an eighteenth-century former-brewery, now shared by an alternative
health clinic and Trackways - the Alfred Watkins Centre. The business equipment
amounted to a twenty-five year-old Olivetti portable, with a backspace that
didn't.

   
Powys didn't even open three
catalogues from firms with names like Crucible Crafts and Saturnalia Supplies,
no doubt offering special deals on bulk orders of joss-sticks, talismans, tarot
packs and cassette tapes of boring New Age music simulating the birth of the
universe on two synthesizers and a drum machine.

   
The New Age at the door again.
Once, he'd had a letter duplicated, a copy sent off to every loony New Age
rip-off supplier soliciting Trackways' patronage.

   
It said,

         
This centre is dedicated
to the memory and ideas of Alfred
         
Watkins, of Hereford, who
discovered the ley system -
         
the way ancient people in Britain
aligned their sacred
         
places to fit into the
landscape.

         
Alfred Watkins was an
archaeologist, antiquarian,
         
photographer, inventor, miller
and brewer. He doesn't
         
appear, however, to have shown
any marked interest in
         
ritual magic, Zen, yoga, reincarnation,
rebirthing, primal
         
therapy, Shiatsu or t'ai chi.

         
So piss off.

   
He'd realized when he sent it that
Alfred Watkins's work, had he lived another fifty years, might have touched on
several of these subjects. Perhaps the old guy would have been at the heart of
the New Age movement and a member of the Green Party.

   
The recipients of the circular
obviously realized this too and kept on sending catalogues, knowing that sooner
or later Joe Powys was going to give in and fill up Trackways with New Age
giftware to join the solitary box of 'healing crystals' under the counter.

   
Because if he didn't, the way
business was going, Trackways would be closing down within the year.

   
There were only two envelopes
left now. One was made from what looked like high quality vellum which he'd
never lave recognized as recycled paper if it hadn't said so on the back,
prominently.

   
A single word was indented in
the top left-hand corner of the envelope.

                  
EPIDEMIC

   
Powys finished his toast, went
to wash his hands, came back and turned the envelope over a couple of times
before he opened it. It contained a letter which didn't mess around.

   
     
Dear J. M. Powys,

         
         
As you may
have learned, Dolmen Books, publishers of
   
     
The
Old Golden Land, have now been acquired by the
   
     
Epidemic
Group.

   
Shit, Powys thought, I didn't
know that.

   
     
I am writing to you on
behalf of the Group Chairman,

   
Max Goff, Powys thought,
aghast. I've been acquired by Max bloody Goff.

   
     
Mr Max Goff, who has
long been an admirer of your
   
work and would like to meet you to
discuss a proposition.

   
.. . And from what I've heard
of Max Goff s propositions to personable young blokes such as myself . . .

   
     
We should therefore like
to invite you to a small reception at
   
     
the
Cock Inn, Crybbe,

   
. . . I may have to invent a
prior engagement . . .

   
     
on Friday, 29 June at
12.30 p.m. I'm sorry it's such short
   
     
notice,
but the acquisition of Dolmen was only confirmed this
   
     
week
and I obtained your address only this morning.

         
         
Please
contact me if you have any queries.

         
         
Please
contact me anyway.

                  
         
Yours
sincerely,

                            
         
Rachel
Wade,
                            
         
PA to Max Goff

   
Powys sat and looked around the
shop for a while, thinking about this.

   
He could see on the shelves,
among the dozens of earth-mysteries books by Alfred Watkins and his successors,
the spine of the deluxe hardback edition of
The
Old Golden Land
and about half a dozen paperback copies, including the
garish American edition with the Day-Glo Stonehenge.

   
On the counter in front of Powys
was a token display stand: dowsing rods and pendula. Mr Watkins might have been
able to dowse, but he didn't have anything to say in his books about 'energy
dowsing'. Or indeed about earth energies of any kind.

   
But all that was academic; the
dowsing kits were selling well. Soon wouldn't be able to visit a stone circle
without finding some studious duo slowly circumnavigating the site, dangling their
pendulum and saying 'Wow' every so often.

   
Under the counter, because
Powys hadn't had the nerve to put them on sale, was the box of 'healing'
crystals which Annie - his new assistant with the Egyptian amulet - had
persuaded him to buy. 'Got to embrace the New Age, Joe, and let the New Age
embrace you. Mr Watkins wants you to let the New Age in, I can feel it.
Sometimes I even think I can see him standing over there by the door. He's
holding his hat and he's smiling.'

   
Wow!

   
Powys reached into the crystals
box and helped himself to a handful of Sodalite (for emotional stability and
the treatment of stress-related conditions).

   
Max Goff, he thought.
   
Max Goff!

Clutching the crystals, he discovered he was holding in his other hand a
small, creased, white envelope, the last item of mail.