Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (71 page)

   
'It's
never
going to heal,' Fay said bleakly.

   
'It will.' But she was probably
right. There'd be a long-term scar. This town was good at leaving scars. He
swung his legs out of bed; quite decent, still wearing his boxer shorts, but he
doubted she'd have noticed if he'd been naked.

   
'She's back now, all right.
It's her house again.'

   
'Grace?'

   
'She's repossessed it.' Fay
shivered and held her robe together at the throat, it's like . . . When she was
alive, there was this thin veneer . . . of gentility, OK? Of politeness. Now she's
dead there's no need to keep up appearances, it's all stripped away, and
there's just this . . . this rotting core . . . Resentment. Hate. Just don't
let anybody tell me the dead can't feel hatred.'

   
'Maybe they can just project it.
Maybe we're not even talking about the dead, as such.'

   
Fay's right profile was all
white. She turned her head with a lurid, rainbow blur and her mouth lightened
with the pain.

   
'And don't let
anybody
tell me again that they're
harmless. Joe, she flew at me. She was hovering near the floor - everywhere
this icy stillness - and then she sprang. There was a perfumy smell, but it was
a kind of mortuary perfume, to cover up the rotting, the decay, you know?'

   
Powys said helplessly, 'I've
never seen a ghost.'

   
Then what did you see last night?
What in Christ's name was that?
The raging black horror in the
wood. He was sure the girl at the stone would be killed or die of fright, but
the bitch knew what she was doing.

   
'So I'm backing out of the office,'
Fay said. 'Thinking, She can only exist in there. Jean Wendle said I should
blink a couple of times, close my eyes and when I opened them she'd be gone, she's
only a light effect, no more real than voices on quarter-inch, fragments of magnetic
dust, and I hit the pause button and the voice cuts out in mid-sentence. So I
took the advice, closed my eyes - and I got out of the room fast because she can't
exist outside there, can she? That's
her
place, right?'

   
Fay's fingers were white and
stiff around the collar of the red robe.

   
'And I'm in the hall. I've
closed the door behind me.
 
I've slammed
the door. In its ... in Grace's face. And suddenly just as I'm . . . She's
there too. She's right up against me again
in
my face
. Grace has . . . had . . .
has
these awful little teeth like fish-bones. And, you know, the kitchen door's
opposite the office door, and so I just
threw
myself across the hall and into the kitchen, and I . . . that's all I
remember.'

   
'You hit your head on a sharp
corner of the kitchen table. She's right, he thought. She can't stay here
tonight. Any more than I can spend it with the Bottle Stone. It was too dark to
see much. I thought you were . . .'

   
'Thanks.'

   
'What would you think . . . ?'

   
'No, I mean . . . thanks. You
keep rescuing me. That's not the way it's supposed to be any more.'

   
'Arnold waylaid me at the top
of the street and dragged me down here with his teeth.'

   
The dog wagged his tail, staggered
to the edge of the bed and looked down dubiously.

   
'Good old Arnie,' said Fay. 'I'd
just virtually accused him of exacting some awful psychic revenge on the Preece
family for trying to shoot him. Come on, I'll make some breakfast. We have to
eat.'

   
Neither of them had mentioned
the Bottle Stone. He wished he could prove to her it had all happened, but he
couldn't. He couldn't prove anything - yet.

   
'I wanted to call a doctor last
night,' he told her. 'But you started screaming at me.'

   
'I hate doctors.'
   
'You ought to see one, all the same.'
   
'Sod off. Sorry, I don't mean to be
churlish, but nothing seems to be fractured. Cuts and bruises. Anyway, look at
the state of
you
.'

   
Powys picked Arnold up to carry
him downstairs.
   
Fay said, 'I wonder what he sees.'

   
He thought, I think I've seen
what he sees. He said, 'The other time you saw this Grace thing, what time was
it?'
   
'After midnight.'

   
'What was it like on that
occasion?'

   
'She didn't move. Very pale.
Very still. Like a lantern slide.'

   
At the foot of the stairs, the
office door remained closed.

   
'Figures,' Powys said. 'She
wouldn't be up to much after midnight. Or, more correctly, after ten - after
the curfew. It probably took all her energy just to manifest. But last night,
it was just minutes
before
the
curfew. That's when it's strongest. That's when the whole town's really charged
up. Before the curfew shatters it.'

   
'What are you on about?' Fay
shook her head, looked at the kitchen floor. 'God, what a mess. Who'd have
thought I had so much blood in me?'

   
'I think . . .'

   
'You mention doctors or hospitals
again, Joe, I'll never sleep with you again.'

   
Fay grinned, which was the
wrong thing to do because it pulled on the skin around her bruised eye.

She had to go back into the office to answer the phone. It looked, as it
always did in the mornings, far too boring to be haunted.

   
The call was from her father,
sounding wonderfully bright and happy. Last night, while she was sitting by the
sink, Joe trying to bathe her eye, the phone had rung and Jean's message, amplified
by the answering machine, had been relayed across
the hall.

   
'I can't believe it,' Alex said
now. 'I feel tremendous. I feel about ... oh, sixty-five. Do you think I'm too
old to become a New Age person?'

   
'You going to stay at Jean's
for awhile, Dad?'

   
'I'll probably drift back in
the course of the day. Don't want to lose touch with old Doc Chi at this
stage.'

   
'Dad's shed a quarter of a
century overnight,' Fay told Powys. 'No woman is safe.'

   
'Well, keep him away from the
Cock.'

   
'Why?'

   
'It seems to have aphrodisiac
properties. It turns people on.'
   
'I don't follow you.'

   
He told her, at last, about
getting beaten up by Humble, and Rachel taking him to hers and Goff's room.
What had happened then, the sudden inevitability of it. It was the right time,
coming up to curfew time. I mean, Rachel was not. . . promiscuous. Nor me, come
to that. I mean, lonely, sex-starved, but not . . . Anyway, I just don't think
we'd ever have
got together . . . if it hadn't been for the time. And the place.'

   
'I don't understand.'

   
'All right, think about the
condoms. All those used condoms in the alley, up by the studio. In a town
surrounded by open fields, doesn't it strike you as odd that so many couples
should want to do it standing up in an alley?'

   
'I never really thought about
it. Not that way.'

   
'And last night again at the
Cock, again in the hour before the curfew, your ex-husband was suddenly overwhelmed
with, lust for his production assistant and whisked her upstairs.'

   
'Catrin? Guy and
Catrin
?'

   
Powys nodded. 'Why do they call
it the Cock?' He was buttering more toast; it was, she reckoned, his fifth
slice. How long since he last ate? 'Is that what it's really called?'

   
'It certainly hasn't got a sign
to that effect,' Fay said.

   
'What do you know about Denzil
the landlord? Got many kids, for instance?'

   
'I don't know. He isn't married,
I don't think. Somebody once told me he put it about a bit, but I mean . . .
You're getting carried away, Joe.'

   
'I'm a loony. I'm allowed.' He
spread the toast with about half a pot of thick-cut marmalade. 'Sorry, look, I
haven't got this worked out yet. Whatever I say's going to make you think I'm
even more of a loony.'

   
'No - hang on - Joe, I . . .'
Fay clasped her hands together tightly, squeezing them. 'I'm sorry about
yesterday. I had no right to dispute your story. Town full of ghosts, no dogs .
. . I mean, Christ . . . I'm sorry.'

   
He put a hand over both of
hers. Sighed.

   
Tell me,' Fay said.

   
So he told her. He told her
about the cottage and the magical Filofax and the art studio.

   
'Blood?' Fay touched her
temple, winced. 'Urine? What does it mean?'

   
'I don't really know. But I
wouldn't have one of those paintings on
my
wall.'

   
And then he told her about the
girl at the stone, and the apparition.

   
'You saw it? You saw Black
Michael's Hound?'

   
'I don't know what it was.
Maybe the hound is something it suggests. Whatever it is, it's feeding off the
energy which starts to build up in this town, probably at dusk. And it comes in
a straight line, from the Tump, through the Court and on towards the church.
It's evil, it's . . . cold as the grave.'

   
Fay shivered inside her robe. 'And
this girl was . . . getting off on it?'

   
'Something like that. When the
curfew began, she'd gone. She'd done this before, knew the score.'

   
'What does that tell us about
the curfew?'

   
'That the curfew was established
to ward something off. I think we're talking about Black Michael. Look . . .'
He took from his jacket a slim black paperback,
Elizabethan Magic
by
Robert Turner. 'I found this in the bread-oven with the Filofax and I nicked
it. There's a couple of chapters on Dee, but what I was really interested in
was this. The page was marked.'

   
He opened the book at a chapter
headed 'Simon Foreman, Physician, Astrologer and Necromancer (1552-1611)'.
There was a picture of Foreman, who had a dense beard and piercing eyes.

   
'The book talks of a manuscript
in Foreman's handwriting, evidently something he copied out, much as Andy did
in his Filofax. It's the record of an attempt to summon a spirit, and . . .look
. . . this bit.'

         
         
He cast out much fire
and kept up a wonderful ado; but we
         
could not bring him to human
form; he was seen like a great
         
black dog and troubled the folk
in the house much and feared
         
them.

   
'So what it's suggesting,'
Powys said, 'is that the black dog image is some kind of intermediary state in
the manifestation of an evil spirit. In this case, the spirit's furious at not
being able to get any further, so he's coming on with the whole poltergeist
bit. There's a famous legend in Herefordshire where a dozen vicars get together
to bind this spirit and all that's appeared since is a big black dog.'

   
'So when we talk about Black
Michael's Hound . . .'

   
'We're probably talking about
the ghost of Michael himself. We know from these notes of Andy's - which I'm
attributing to John Dee, for want of a more suitable candidate - that Michael
Wort, while alive, appeared to have taught himself to leave his body and
manifest elsewhere . . . travelling on the "olde road", which is
presumably a reference to ley-lines. Spirit paths. And then there's this legend
about him escaping by some secret passage when the peasantry arrived to lynch
him. Dee, or whoever, records that Wort's body was brought out after he hanged
himself, to prove he was indeed dead. So maybe he escaped
out of his body
.. . along the "olde road", maybe his ghost
was seen - bringing a lot of black energy with it - and they managed to contain
it ... to reduce it to the black dog stage ... by some ritual which has at its
heart the curfew.'

   
'How does that stop it?'