Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (50 page)

   
Her voice seemed to go nowhere,
as if she was shouting into a wind-tunnel.

   
The Court was so full of noise.
Ceiling-shaking bangs and crashes, as if the entire building was being torn
apart. Yet no one had come out of here in at least a couple of hours and the rubbish
pile was no higher than it had been when she'd found the cat's wooden chest.

   
'HELLO!'

   
She looked around. Half-light
floated feebly through the nigh-level slits and barely reached the stone floor.

   
Rachel followed the sounds and
stormed up the spiral stone stair case.

   
'Excuse me.' Calling out as she
neared the first floor. 'I need to lock this place up for the night, so if you
could give me some idea how long you're going to be . . .'

   
She stepped out into the main
chamber, where families had lived and where the Hanging Sheriff, Sir Michael
Wort, had held out against the rebel hordes.

   
'Oh,' Rachel said.

   
She was alone.

   
The weak evening light washed
through two mullioned windows, but the shadows were taking over now.

   
Well, she certainly wasn't going
to play hide-and-seek with a bunch of silly buggers getting paid well over the
odds to clean the place out before morning. She had half a mind to lock them in.
Except the keys were in her bag, in the stables.

   
There was a double crash from
above and the sound of glass shattering.

   
'What the hell . . . ?'

   
Rachel bounded angrily up the
next spiral. Didn't they know how easily they could kill themselves up there,
or bring half the ceiling down? Had nobody warned them about the state of the
floor?

   
The heavy door to the attics
was ajar. They'd been given keys, then. That bastard Max must have had another
set made without even telling her. She thrust through the arched doorway, past
the alcove concealing the entrance to the prospect chamber. Up towards the
attics.

   
It was only when she was
halfway up the steps that it occurred to her that among the bangs and the
crashes there'd been no laughter, none of the usual banter of men working together,
no shouted directions, no oaths, no . . .

   
No voices at all.

   
And now she was standing here,
on the last stairway, far above her blades of light through broken slates, and
it was absolutely silent.

   
'What,' Rachel demanded, 'is
going on?'

   
What was more disquieting than
this sudden inexplicable cessation of bangs and crashes was the hairline crack
she detected in her own voice. She cleared her throat and gave it more
vehemence.

   
'Come on, I haven't got all
night. Where are you?'

   
Rachel did not remember ever
being superstitious. She did not believe in good luck, bad luck, heaven, hell,
psychic forces or the secret power of ley-lines. She found the whole New Age concept
not only essentially unsound but, for the most part, very tedious indeed.

   
Yet - and for the first time -
she found the place not just gloomy in a sad, uncared-for kind of way, but in
the sense of being oppressive. And yes, OK, eerie. She admitted to herself that
she didn't want to go so far into the attic that she might see the rope hanging
from the ceiling, even though she knew it could not be a very old rope.

   
But this was a side issue.
Something to be acknowledged and perhaps examined later with a raising of eyebrows
and glass of whisky beside the Jotul stove in J.M. Powys's riverside retreat.

   
For here and for now, there was
only one serious, legitimate fear: a fear of the kind of men who, on hearing a
woman calling out to them and coming up the stairs, would stop what they were
doing, slide into the shadows and keep very, very quiet.

   
Until this woman appeared at
the top of the steps, with nothing to defend her except a dead cat in a
shoe-box.

   
So no way was she going all the
way to the top.

   
Rachel steadied her breathing,
set her lips in a firm line, tossed back her hair and began to descend the
spiral stairway. If the men in the attic were unaware of the instability of the
floor and the danger to themselves, that was their business. They were
presumably well-insured.

   
If they fell, they fell. She hadn't
been hired as caretaker of Britain's least-stately home, and she wasn't
prepared to tolerate being pissed around any longer. Tomorrow - perhaps even tonight
- she would phone Max in London and inform him that she had quit. As of now.

   
As she descended the twisted
stairway it began to grow darker. When she reached the bottom, she found out
why. The door sealing off the prospect chamber and the attics must have swung
closed behind her, cutting off the light from the first-floor living-hall.

   
She pushed it with the flat of
her hand.
   
It didn't move.

   
She put the shoe-box on the
stairs and pushed hard with both hands.

   
It was an oak door, four inches
thick and it did not move.
   
Well, it might have jammed.

   
'Look, would somebody mind
helping me with this door?'
   
No response.

   
Or - oh, God, can I really
credit this? - the bastards might have locked her in.

   
It was important to hold on to
her anger.

   
'When I get out of here,' Rachel
said suddenly, icily, without thinking, 'you can consider yourselves officially
fired.'

   
Which, on reflection, was a pretty
stupid thing to say. They'd never let her out. She tried again.

   
'Now look, don't be stupid.
It's very dangerous up here. The floor's full of holes, you know that. And I
haven't got a torch.'

   
She threw her weight against the
door, half-expecting somebody to have quietly unlocked it so that it opened
suddenly and she went tumbling down the stairs. Such was the mentality people
like this.

   
But all that happened was she
hurt her shoulder.

   
'Look, would you mind letting
me out?'

   
She stopped suddenly and leaned
back against a wall, breathing hard, an awful thought occurring to her.

   
What if Humble was behind this?

   
Suppose, as she would normally
have expected, the workmen had actually cleared off hours ago. Who, after all,
really worked until 8 p.m. on a Sunday evening? Certainly not the kind of
unskilled vandals who'd been let loose in here.

   
What, then, if it had been
Humble who had come up here and made a lot of noise to lure her inside? He'd
never liked her, and he knew she didn't like him. He might think she was putting
the knife in for him with Max. Maybe Max had found out what Humble had done to
J.M. that night. Maybe Humble's job was on the line, and he thought she was
responsible.

   
But if Humble was behind this
he would have needed an accomplice. One of them up here to make all the racket,
one to lock the door after she'd gone through.

   
Which still meant that someone
was up here with her now, on this side of the locked door. Keeping very, very
quiet.

   
Rachel spun round.

   
It was so dark with the door
closed that she could hardly see as far as the twist in the staircase which
took it to the attic. Anything could be around that bend, not six feet away.

   
'Humble!'

   
Not much authority left in her
voice, nor much anger. She was a woman alone in the darkness of a decaying old
house, with a man who intended her harm.

   
Humble, listen . . . whichever
side of the door you are . . . I don't know why you're doing this. I wish you'd
tell me, so we can have it out. But if it's anything to do with what happened
the other night with J. M. Powys, I want you to know that I haven't said anything
to Max and I don't intend to. A mistake is a mistake. Humble, can you hear me?'

   
The door didn't have a handle,
only a lock. She bent down and tried to look into the keyhole, to see if there
was a key in the other side.

   
She couldn't tell one way or the
other; it was too dark. Her own keys were in her bag, on the kitchen table.

   
'Humble, look, if you've heard
what I said, just unlock the door and I'll give you time to get out of the
building. I don't want any unpleasantness because . . .'

   
Oh, what the hell did it matter
now?

   
'. . . because I'm handing in
my notice tomorrow. I've got another job. In London. You won't have to deal
with me again. Did you hear that? Do you understand what I'm saying? Humble!'

   
Rachel beat her fists on the oak
door until she felt the skin break.

   
She had grown cold. She wrapped
her Barbour around her and sat down on a stone stair next to the cardboard
coffin and listened hard.

   
Nothing. She couldn't even hear
the birds singing outside, where there was light.

   
But from the attic, clearly not
far beyond the top of the spiral stairway came a single, sharp, triumphant
bump.

CHAPTER IX

He remembered... TWELVE . . . spiralling down out of the sky, seeing the
stone thickening and quivering and throbbing, the haze around it like a dense,
toxic cloud. At which point Memory went into negative, the fields turned
purple, the river black. Everything went black.

   
He didn't remember the scramble
of feet, all four of them rushing the new author, J.M. Powys, picking him up,
carrying him to the so-called fairy mound and dumping him face-down on its
grassy funk with shrieks of laughter.

   
He was only able to construct
this scene from what Ben Corby had told him years later.

   
From Ben's story, he'd tried to
form an image of Rose, but he couldn't be sure whether she was laughing too or
whether she'd stopped short, her face clouding, feeling premonition like a
small tap on the shoulder from a cold, stiff hand.

   
Every time he pushed himself
into replaying the scene in his head, he forced Rose to be laughing when they
dumped him on the mound. He always put the laugh on freeze frame and then
pulled the plug. So that he could climb out of it without breaking down.

   
Powys stood in the neutrality
of a sunless summer evening and put both hands on the Bottle Stone - at its
shoulders, when it began to taper into the neck - and pushed hard.

   
It was solid. A proper job, as
Henry Kettle would have said. Probably several feet of the thing underground,
the earth compressed around it, a few rocks in there maybe. Tufts of long grass
embedded at the base. It might have been here for four thousand years. You
could dig for three hours and it would still be erect.

   
It needed a JCB to get it out.

   
But first he had to force
himself to touch it, to walk around it (only not widdershins, never
widdershins). The stone, a cunningly hewn replica of something which had
speared his dreams for twelve years.

   
He also reserves the right, Rachel had said, to install standing stones
or other ritual artefacts on your lawn.

   
All down to Andy Boulton-Trow.
He could imagine Andy's unholy delight at finding, among Goff's collection of
newly quarried megaliths, one roughly (not roughly, exactly) the size and shape
of the Bottle Stone.

   
Or maybe, knowing that Powys
was coming to Crybbe, he'd actually had one cut to shape and then planted it in
a spot that would emphasize the correlation of the stone and the river, recreating
the fateful scene of twelve years ago.

   
Rough therapy? Or another of
Andy's little experiments.

   
Fifty yards away, the brown river
churned like a turbulence of worms towards the bridge.

The Canon was angry.