Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (76 page)

   
'They drove Wort to suicide,
the people around here. A witch hunt by ignorant damn peasants, threatening to
burn down the Court.' Goff stood up straight, his back to his domain. 'Tell you
one thing, J.M. No fucker's gonna threaten to burn
me
out.'

   
You do have this one small
advantage. You haven't hanged anybody. Yet.'

   
Goff laughed. 'You really wanna
know about this hanging stuff, doncha? Listen, how many people get the
opportunity to study precisely what happens when life is extinguished? When the
spirit leaves the body?'

   
'Doctors do. Priests do.'

   
Goff shook his head. 'They got
other things on their minds. The doctor's trying to save the dying person, the
priest's trying to comfort him or whatever else priests do, last rites kinda
stuff.'

   
Powys saw Goff's eyes go
curiously opaque.

   
'Only the watcher at the
execution can be entirely dispassionate,' Goff said. Powys could tell he was
echoing someone else. 'Only he can truly observe.'

CHAPTER VII

In a helter-skelter hill road, a mile and a half out of Crybbe, there
was a spot where you could park near a wicket gate with a public-footpath sign.
The path, quite short, linked up with the Offa's Dyke long-distance footpath
and was itself a famous viewpoint. From just the other side of the gate, you
could look across about half the town. You could see the church tower and the
edge of the square, with one corner of the Cock. You could see the slow,
silvery river.

   
From up here, under a sporadic
sprinkling of sunlight from a deeply textured sky, Crybbe looked venerable,
self-contained and almost dignified.

   
It was nearly 5 p.m.

They'd come out here because there were secrets to exchange which
neither felt could be exchanged in Crybbe; there was always a feeling that the
town itself would eavesdrop.

   
When Powys had returned to Bell
Street, Fay had been in her car outside, with Arnold. 'Dad's not back yet.
Tried to steel myself to go in. Couldn't do it alone. Feeble woman chickens
out.'

   
'Well, if you've left anything
in there that you want me to fetch,' he said, 'forget it.'

   
'I suspect you're being
indirectly patronising there, Powys, but I'll let it go.'

   
Her eye actually looked worse,
the rainbow effect quite spectacular. Part of the healing process, no doubt. He
was surprised how glad he was to see her again.

   
Although there must be no
involvement. Not this time.

Up here the air was fresher, and a gust of wind carrying a few drops of
rain, hit them like a sneeze. It was unexpected and blew Arnold over; he got up
again, looking disgruntled.

   
'I'm beginning to feel I'm part
of Andy's game,' Joe Powys said. 'Suppose he left all that stuff in the
bread-oven for me to find, to give me a chance to figure it all out - while
knowing there was nothing I could do about it.'

   
'And
have
you figured it out?'

   
'Black Andy,' Powys said, I
mean . . . Black Andy? How can anyone called Andy possibly be evil? Andy
Hitler, Andy Capone. Andy the Hun, Andy the Ripper.'

   
'So you're convinced now. It's
Andy Wort?'

   
'Families often change their
name if something's brought it into disrepute. Why shouldn't they simply
reverse it?'

   
'I made some enquiries. That's
why I was late. There are no Worts left in Crybbe. What remained of the family
seemed to have sold up everything - well,
nearly
everything, and moved down to the West Country. As for the Bottle Stone . . .'

   
'Please,' Powys said. 'Let's
not ... I think that whole episode was Andy trying out his emergent skills,
weaving a fantasy around a stone, creating a black magic ritual, seeing what
happened.'

   
'Yes, but . . .'

   
'Look down there,' Pouts said.
'Goff's prehistoric theme park. The old stones back in place.'

   
They could see a sizeable
megalith at a point where the river curved like a sickle.

   
'On that bit of tape you played
me, Henry was puzzled by a standing stone he'd located because it didn't seem
to be an
old
stone. He recorded the
same problem in his journal. Experienced dowsers can date a stone with the
pendulum, asking it questions - too complicated to explain, but it seems to
work. Anyway, Henry noted that he couldn't date this particular stone back
beyond 1593 . . .
when it was destroyed.'

   
'After Wort's death. The
townsfolk destroyed the stones after his death.'

   
'Perhaps they were advised to
... to stop him coming back along the spirit paths. But the point is . . .
perhaps Henry couldn't date the thing earlier than 1593
because that was also when it was erected'

   
There was another gust of wind
and the blue cagoule Fay carried under her arm billowed behind her like a
wind-sock.

   
'
Wort
erected the old stones of Crybbe. They weren't prehistoric at
all. He was marking out his own spirit paths, along which he believed he could
travel outside of his body.'

   
'Are we saying here that Wort -
perhaps in collaboration with John Dee - had created his own ley-lines . . . ?'

   
'Look,' Powys said. 'There's
this growing perception of leys as ghost roads . . . paths reserved for the
spirits . . . therefore, places where you could contact spirits. Sacred
arteries linking two worlds - or two states of consciousness. New Agers say
they're energy lines - in their eternal quest for something uplifting, they're
discarding the obvious: leys tend to link up a number of burial sites - tumps,
barrows, cemeteries, this kind
of thing.'

   
'No healing rays?'

   
Powys shrugged. 'Whether this
rules out the energy-line theory I don't know - we might just be talking about
a different kind of energy. There's certainly a lot of evidence of psychic
phenomena along leys or at points where they cross. And ghosts need energy to
manifest, so we're told.'

   
'And Crybbe, for some reason,
has all these curious pockets of energy, fluctuations causing power cuts, all
this . . .'

   
I'd be interested to know how
many people in Crybbe have seen a ghost or experienced something unnatural.
Hundreds I'd guess. Especially along the main line, which comes down from the
Tump, through the Court, the church, the square . . . and along the passage
leading to your studio. I'm surprised nothing strange has happened to you in
there, with this kind of hermetically sealed broadcasting area.'

   
'Maybe it has.'

   
'Oh?'

   
'I don't think I want to talk
about it,' Fay said, tasting the Electrovoice microphone. 'Look . . .' She
spread out the cagoule on the damp grass at the edge of a small escarpment
overlooking the town. She patted it. They both sat down.

   
'Let's not mess about any
more,' Fay said. 'We're not kids. We've both had some distinctly unpleasant
experiences in this town. Let's not be clever, or pseudo-scientific about this.
Let's not talk about light effects or atmospheric anomalies. I've had it with
all that bullshit. So. In simple, colloquial English, what's actually happening
here?'

   
She looked down on Crybbe. The
sky had run out of sunlight, and it was once again a mean, cramped little town
surrounded by pleasant, rolling countryside, to which the inhabitants seemed
entirely oblivious. Almost as if they were deliberately turning their backs on
it all, living simple, functional lives on the lowest practical level, without
joy, without beauty, without humour, without any particular faith, without. . .

   
'I've had a thought about the
Crybbe mentality,' Fay said. 'But you're the expert, you go first.'

   
'OK,' Powys said. 'This is what
I think. I reckon Andy's got hold of a collection of family papers - may have
had them years for all I know - relating to Wort's experiments. Some of them
seem to have been written by an outsider, perhaps John Dee, relating how Wort
came to visit him -
in spirit
- using
what he calls the "olde road".'

   
'Wort was haunting him?'

   
'No, I think Wort was alive
then. I'd guess he'd found a way . . . You said you wanted this straight . . .
?'
   
'Yes, yes, go on.'

   
'OK. A way to project his
spirit - that's his astral body - along the leys, in much the same way as it's
suggested the old shamans used to do it, or at least
believed
they could do it.'

   
'The psychic departure lounge.'
said Fay.

   
'Glib, but it wasn't far out.
And I've seen a transcript of the so-called regression of Catrin Jones. The
character assumed by Catrin seems to be suggesting that not only was the
sheriff bonking her - and quite a few other women - on a fairly regular basis
in his physical body, but that he was also able to observe them while not
actually there in the flesh.'

   
'Quite a bastard.'

   
Powys nodded. 'And in
conclusion she says something on the lines of, "He swears he'll never
leave me . . . never." Which suggests to me that Wort believed he would
still be able to use these spirit paths, these astral thoroughfares,
after his death.
Except there's
something stopping him, so he can only actually manifest as a . . . black dog
or whatever.'

   
'The curfew.'

   
'Every night at ten o'clock
somebody goes up the church tower and rings the curfew bell one hundred times,
and when the bell sounds, the energy which has been gathering along the leys is
released and dissipated. We know this happens, we've both experienced it.'

   
Fay stood up, held out a hand.
'Come on. I'll tell you my theory about the Crybbe mentality.'

   
She led him a few paces along
the footpath, Arnold hobbling along between them, until the town square came
into view, the buildings so firmly defined under the mouldering sky that she
felt she could reach out and pinch slates from the roofs. They stood on the
ridge and watched a school bus stop in the square. A Land Rover pulling a
trailer carrying two sheep had to wait behind the bus. Traffic chaos hits
Crybbe.

   
Fay extended an arm, like a
music-hall compere on the edge of a stage.

   
'Miserable little closed-in
town, right? Sad, decrepit, morose.'

   
'Right,' said Powys,
cautiously.

   
'The border mentality,' Fay
shouted into the wind. 'Play your cards close to your chest. Don't take sides
until you know who's going to win. Here in Crybbe the whole attitude
intensified, and it operates on every level. Particularly spiritual.'

   
A big crow landed on the wicket
gate and watched them.

   
Powys said, thoughtfully, 'But
there isn't any noticeable spirituality in Crybbe.'

   
'
Precisely
. You've seen them in church, sitting there like dummies.
Drives Murray mad. But they're just keeping their heads down.
Never take sides until you know who's
winning.
Doesn't matter who the sides are. The Welsh or the English. Good
or evil.'

   
Fay's cagoule rose up from the
ground in the wind, and the crow flew off the gate, cawing. Fay went back and
scooped up the cagoule.

   
Powys said, 'Strength in
apathy?'

   
'Joe, look . . . being a vicar's
daughter isn't all about keeping your frock clean and not pinching the cream
cakes at the fete. You learn a few things. Confrontation between good and evil
is high-octane stuff. The risks are high, so most people stay on the sidelines.
Even vicars . . . What am I saying? . . .
Especially
vicars. But maybe it's harder to do that in Crybbe because the psychic pressure
is so much greater, so they have to keep their heads even lower down.'

   
'Neither good nor evil can
thrive in a place without a soul. Who was it said that?'

   
'Probably you. More to the
point, "We don't like clever people round yere." Who said
that?'
   
'Wynford Wiley. The copper.'