Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (67 page)

   
Fay began to scream.

CHAPTER XII

It was fear that drew Minnie Seagrove to the window of her lounge. Fear
that if she didn't look for it, it would come looking for her.

   
For a short while, there was a
large, early moon. It wasn't a full moon, not one of those werewolf moons by
any stretch, but it was lurid and bright yellow. It appeared from behind the
Tump. Before it became visible, rays had projected through the trees on the top
of the mound like the beams you saw seconds before the actual headlights of an
oncoming car. The trees on the Tump were waving in the breeze even though the
air all around Minnie's bungalow was quite still.

   
She'd come to associate this
breeze with an appearance of the Hound.

   
Afterwards, Mrs Seagrove sat
with her back to the window in Frank's old Parker Knoll wing chair, feeling its
arms around her and hugging a glass of whisky, the remains of Frank's last
bottle of Chivas Regal malt.

   
Oh Lord, how she wished she
hadn't looked tonight.

   
'I'm that cold, dear,' she
said, pretending she was talking to young Joe Powys or anybody who'd believe
her. 'I can't keep a limb still. I don't think I'll ever get warm again.'

Powys knew it was on its way when the naked girl at the stone began to
moan and shiver.

   
When the moon rose, he saw that
the girl was certainly no more than twenty and might even be significantly
younger, which made him uncomfortable. He wondered for a time if she was real
and not some kind of vision. What kind of a girl would come alone at night into
this appalling place and take off all her clothes?

   
Powys was not at all turned on
by this.

   
He was afraid. Afraid, he
rationalized, not only for her but
of
her.

   
Afraid because he suspected she
knew what was coming, while he could have no conception, except of ludicrous
phosphorous fur, fiery eyes and gnashing fangs, and Basil Rathbone in his
deerstalker, with his pistol.

   
He found his fingers were
tightly entwined into some creeper on the trunk of the oak tree. He squeezed it
until it hurt.

   
The silence in the neglected
wood was absolute. No night birds, no small mammals scurrying and scrabbling.
If there was any sound, any indication of movement, of change, it would be the
damp chatter of decay.

Max could not move. His eyes were wide open. He took his breath in
savage gulps.

   
He lay in awe, couldn't even
think.
   
He could smell the candles.

   
As if in anticipation of a
power failure, the room had been ringed with them - Max half-afraid they'd be black.
But no, these were ordinary yellow-white candles, of beeswax or tallow,
whatever tallow was. They didn't smell too good at first, kind of a rich, fatty
smell.

   
Now the smell was as
intoxicating as the sour red wine.

   
The mattress was laid out on
the third level of the stable block, so he could lie in the dusk, and take in
the Tump filling the window, stealing the evening light, surrounded with
candles, like a great altar.

   
Max lay under the black duvet,
feeling like a virgin, the Great Beast/Scarlet Woman sessions with Rachel a
faint and farcical memory.

   
For the first time in his adult
life, Max was terrified.

   
And then, when the dark figure
rose over him in the yellow, waxy glow, even more frightened - and shocked
rigid, at first - by the intensity of his longing.

Warren looked up into the sky, at the night billowing in, and he
loved
the night and the black clouds and
the thin wind hissing in the grass, his insides churning, his mind clotted with
a rich confusion.

   
But the curfew was coming and
the box was screaming at him to close the lid.
   
He slammed it down.

   
Then, bewildered, he started to
claw at the earth with his hands, set the box down in the hole.

   
Heard a rattling noise inside,
the hand battering the side of the box.

   
It don't wanner go back in the
ground.

   
It's done what it came for.

   
Now it wants to go back in the
chimney.

   
And, sure enough, when Warren
picked up the box the rattling stopped, and so he ran, holding it out in front
of him like a precious gift, down from field to field until he reached the
farm, where nobody else lived now, except for him and the Hand of Glory.

In the end, the curfew did come, a strained and hesitant clatter at
first, and then the bell was pounding the wood like a huge, shiny axe, slicing
up the night, and the girl was gone.

   
Joe Powys wandered blindly
through the undergrowth, repeatedly smashing a fist into an open palm.

   
The night shimmered with
images.

   
The bell pealed and Rose, in a
pure white nightdress, threw herself from a third-floor window, fluttering
hopelessly in the air like a moth with its wings stuck together, falling in
slow motion, and he was falling after her, reaching out for her.

   
In the spiny dampness of the
wood, Powys cried out, just once, and the curfew bell released, at last, his agony.

   
He staggered among the
stricken, twisted trees and wept uncontrollably. He didn't want to control it.
He wanted the tears to flow for ever. He wanted the curfew bell to peal for
ever, each clang comet-bright in the shivering night.

   
The bell pealed on, and with
that high, wild cry Rachel tumbled into the air, and then Rose and Rachel were
falling together, intertwined.

   
A needle of light, like the filament
of a low-wattage electric bulb zig-zagged across the eaves.

   
Silently, in slow-motion, the
rusty spike pierced the white nightdress and a geyser of hot blood sprayed into
his weeping eyes.

CHAPTER XIII

Max awoke to find himself alone, damp and smouldering, like a bonfire in
the rain. The cold deluge had been the curfew. When the curfew was gone, he
realized at last, the town would be free.

   
He got up and shambled to the
big window, wrapped in the black duvet. It was too dark to see the Tump; it
didn't matter, he could
feel
the
Tump. It was like the stables and maybe even the Court itself hid been absorbed
by the mound, so that he was, in essence,
inside
it.
   
No going back now, Max.

Feeling very nearly crazy, his face and hands slashed by boughs and
bushes, Powys followed a dead straight line back into Crybbe.

   
As if the path was lit up for
him. Which perhaps it was - the bell strokes landing at his feet like bars of
light. All he did was lurch towards the belt, each stroke laid on the
landscape, heavy as a gold ingot. And when he emerged from the wood into the churchyard,
scratched and bleeding from many cuts, he just collapsed on the first grave he
came to.

   
Its stone was of new black marble,
with white lettering, and when he saw whose grave it was he started to laugh,
slightly hysterically.

GRACE PETERS
1928-1992
Beloved wife of
Canon A. L. Peters

And that was all.

   
Powys scrambled to his feet;
from what he knew of Grace, she would take a dim view of somebody's dirty,
battered body sprawled over her nice, clean grave.

   
He walked stiffly through the graveyard,
out of the lychgate, into the deserted square, his plodding footsteps marking
sluggish time between peals of the curfew.

   
The power was off. Hardly a
surprise. In four or five townhouse windows he could see the sallow light of
paraffin lamps. Then, with a noise like a lawnmower puttering across the square,
a generator cranked into action, bringing a pale-blue fluorescent flickering
into the grimy windows of the old pub, the Cock.

   
Yes, Powys thought. I could use
a drink. Quite badly.

   
It occurred to him he hadn't
eaten since pushing down a polystyrene sandwich in this very pub before setting
off to find his old mate, Andy Boulton-Trow. He didn't feel hungry, though. A
drink was all he wanted, that illusory warmth in the gut. And then he'd decide where
to go, whose night to spoil next, whose peace of mind to perforate.

   
He clambered up the steps and
pushed open the single, scuffed swing-door to the public bar.

   
It was full. Faces swam out of
the smoke haze, pallid in the stuttering fluorescence. The air was weighed
down, it seemed to Powys, with leaden, dull dialogue and no merriment. He felt removed
from it all, as though he'd fallen asleep when he walked in, and being here was
a dream.

   
'Brandy, please,' he told Denzil,
the Neanderthal landlord 'A single.'

   
Denzil didn't react at all to
whatever kind of mess the wood had made of Powys's face. He didn't smile.

   
So where was the smile coming
from? He knew somebody was smiling at him; you could feel a smile, especially
when wasn't meant to be friendly.

   
'Thanks,' he said, and paid.

   
He saw the smile through the
bottom of his glass. It was a small smile in a big face. It might have been
chiselled neatly into the centre of a whole round cheese.

   
Police Sergeant Wynford Wiley
had sat there wearing this same tiny smile last night and early this morning
while his colleagues from CID had been trying to persuade J. M. Powys to
confess to the murder of his girlfriend.

   
'Been in a fight, is it, Mr
Powys?'

   
Wiley looked more than half-drunk.
He was sitting in a group of middle-aged men in faded tweeds or sleeveless,
quilted body-warmers. Summer casual wear, Crybbe-style.

   
'You want the truth?' Powys
swallowed some brandy but still didn't feel any warmth.

   
'All I ever wants is the truth,
Mr Powys.' Wynford was wearing an old blue police shirt over what looked like
police trousers.

   
'Amateur dramatics,' Powys said
wearily. 'I've been auditioning for the Crybbe Amateur Dramatic Society. Banquo's
Ghost. What do you think of the make-up?'

   
Wynford Wiley stopped smiling.
He stood up at once, rather unsteadily. Planted himself between Powys and the
door. And came out with that famous indictment of intruders from Off, those few
words which Powys suddenly found so evocative of the quintessential Crybbe.

   
'We don't
like
clever people.' Wynford stifled a burp. 'Round yere.'

   
There was that thrilled hush
which the first spark of confrontation always brings to rural pubs.

   
Powys said, 'Maybe that's why
this town's dead on its feet.' He finished his brandy. 'Now' - placing his
glass carefully on the bar-top - 'why don't you piss off and stop bothering me,
you fat bastard.'

   
He listened to himself saying
this, as if from afar. Listened with what ought to have been a certain
horrified awe. He'd done it now. Thrown down a direct public challenge to the authority
of the senior representative for what passed for the law in this town. In order
to retain his authority and his public credibility, Sergeant Wiley would be
obliged to take prompt and decisive action.

   
And Sergeant Wiley was drunk.

   
And Powys didn't care because
tonight he'd seen the appalling thing that was known locally as Black Michael's
Hound and witnessed the dark conflagration of its union with a young woman, and
in terms of total black menace, Wynford Wiley just didn't figure.

   
'Let's slip outside, shall we,
Mr Powys?'

   
Wynford held open the door. To
get out of here, Powys would have to step under his arm, and as soon as he was
outside the door the arm would descend. He was likely to wind up in a cell. If
he resisted he would wind up hurt in a cell. If he ran away the town would soon
be teeming with coppers. Anyway, he was too knackered to run anywhere, even if there'd
been anywhere to run.