Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (79 page)

   
Jean nodded.

   
'Poor old Fay. I think she thought
I'd finally slipped into alcoholism. Anyway, she sent me to the doctor's, he sent
me for tests and they discovered the artery problem. Everything explained. Poor
old buffer's going off his nut. Can't be left alone. And that was how Fay and I
got saddled with each other.'

   
'And do you feel you need her
now?'

   
'Well, I . . . No, I'm not sure
I do. Wendy, this. . . this Dr Chi business . . . Look, I don't mean to be
offensive . . .'

   
'Of course not,' said Jean
solemnly.

   
'But this renewed, er, sprightliness
of mind . . . It's just that I don't honestly feel I'm the most worthy
candidate for a miracle cure.'

   
Jean stood up, went over to the
window and drew the curtains on the premature dusk, bent over to put on the
lamp with the parchment shade, showing him her neat little gym- mistressy bum.
Came back and sat down next to him on the settee, close enough for him to
discover she was wearing perfume.

   
'There are no miracles, Alex,
surely you know that by now.'

   
She didn't move an inch, but he
felt her coming closer to him and smelled the intimacy of her perfume. He felt
old stirrings he'd expected never to feel again. And yet it was somehow
joyless.

   
'Dr Chi and I have done almost
all we can for you, Alex. You've been here more than a day. Intensive
treatment.'

   
'It seems longer.'

   
Jean nodded. 'You feel well
now?'

   
Alex cleared his throat. 'Never
better,' he said carefully.

   
'So why don't you go home?'

   
'Ah,' said Alex.

   
Jean looked steadily at him in
the lamplight, unsmiling.
   
He said, 'What time is it?'
   
'Approaching eight. She'll be there
soon, Alex.'
   
'Will she?'

   
'Only one way to find out,'
Jean said gently, 'isn't there?'
   
'Oh now, Wendy, look . . .'

   
'Perhaps . . .' She stood up
and went to lean against the mantelpiece, watching him. 'Perhaps it worries you
that once you leave this house, your mind will begin to deteriorate again. And when
you face her once more, the guilt will return.'

   
He squirmed a little.

   
'You might not be responsible
for actually bringing her spirit back.' Her eyes narrowed, 'I think we can
blame Crybbe for that. But you do seem to have made her rather more powerful in
death than she was in life. You've projected upon her not only the portion of guilt
to which she may or may not have been due, but all the guilt due to your wife
and, no doubt, many other ladies and husbands and whatnot . . . and, bearing in
mind your rather poor choice of profession, perhaps your God himself. Is that
not so, Alex?'

   
'I . . .'

   
'You've been feeding her energy,
Alex. The way I've been feeding you. A kind of psychic saline drip. So I'm
afraid it's your responsibility to deal with her.'

   
Alex began to feel small and
old and hollow.

   
'When you leave here . . .'
Jean said regretfully. 'This house, I mean. When you do leave, there's a chance
you'll lapse quite soon into the old confusion, and you'll have that to contend
with, too. I'm sorry.'

   
Alex stared at her, feeling
himself withering.

   
'No Dr Chi?'

   
Jean smiled sadly, 'I never did
like scientific terms.'
   
'I'm on my own, then.'

   
'I'm afraid you let her get out
of hand. Now she's become quite dangerous. She won't harm you - you're her
source of energy, you feed her your guilt and she lights up. But . . .' Jean
hesitated. 'She doesn't like Fay one bit, does she?'

   
'Stop it,' Alex said sharply.

   
'You've known that for quite a
while, haven't you? You would even plead with Grace not to hurt her. It didn't
work, Alex. She appeared last night to your daughter in a rather grisly fashion,
and Fay fell and cut her head and almost put out an eye.'

   
Alex jerked as though electrocuted,
opened his mouth, trying to shape a question with a quivering jaw.

   
'She's all right. No serious
damage.' Jean came back and sat next to him again and put a hand on his
shoulder. 'Don't worry, Alex, it's OK. You don't have to do anything. I won't
send you away.'

   
Alex began quietly to cry,
shoulders shaking.

   
'Come on,' said Jean, taking
her hand away. 'Let's go to bed. That's what you want, isn't it? Come along,
Alex.'

   
Jean Wendle's expressionless
face swam in his tears. She was offering him sex, the old refuge, when all he
wanted was the cool hands.

   
But the cool hands were casually
clasped in her lap and he knew he was never going to feel them again.

   
He came slowly to his feet. He
backed away from her. She didn't move. He tried to hold her eyes; she looked
down into her lap, where the cool hands lay.

   
Alex couldn't speak. Slowly he
backed out of the lamplight and, with very little hope, into the darkness.

CHAPTER III

The Crybbe dusk settled around them like sediment on the bottom of an
old medicine bottle.
   
'Thank you, Denzil,' Powys said to the
closed door of the Cock. 'That was just what we needed. Of course it's not crap.
Can't you feel it?'

   
He started to grin ruefully,
thinking of New Age ladies in ankle-length, hand-dyed, cheesecloth dresses.
Can't you feel that energy?

   
Not energy. Not life energy,
anyway.
   
'Fay, where can we go? Quickly?'

   
He was aware of a picture forming
in his head. Glowing oil colours on top of the drab turpentine strokes of rough
sketching and underpainting. Everything starting to fit together. Coming together
by design - someone else's design.

   
'Studio,' Fay said, opening her
bag, searching for the keys.

   
'Right.'

He didn't need the gavel. Didn't need even to call for silence, in fact,
he rather wished he could call for noise - few murmurs, coughs, bit of shifting
about in seats.

   
Nothing. Not a shuffle, not
even a passing 'Ow're you' between neighbours. Put him in mind of a remembrance
service for the dead, the only difference being that when you cast an eye over
this lot you could believe the dead themselves had been brought out for the
occasion.

   
Been like this since Goff and
his people had come in and the cameraman had left: bloody quiet. Sergeant
Wynford Wiley, in uniform, on guard by the door as if he was expecting trouble.

   
No such luck, Col Croston
thought. Not the Crybbe way. No wonder the cunning old devil had stuck this one
on him.
   
Thanks a lot, Mr Mayor.

Gavin Ashpole's Uher tape recorder and its microphone lay at the front
of the room, half under the chairman's table and a good sixty feet from where
Gavin himself sat at the rear of the hall. The stupid, paranoid yokels had
refused to accept that if he kept the machine at his feet he would not
surreptitiously switch it on and record their meeting.
   
He saw a man from the
Hereford Times
and that snooty bastard
Guy Morrison. Nobody else he recognized, and Gavin knew all the national paper
reporters who covered this area.
   
There was no sign of Fay Morrison.
   
Bitch.

The Newsomes sat side by side, but there might have been a brick wall
between them, with broken glass along the top.

   
Hereward had planned to come
alone to the meeting, but Jocasta had got into the car with him without a word.
The inference was that she did not want to remain alone in the house after this
alleged experience (about which Hereward was more than slightly dubious). But
he suspected the real reason she'd come was that she hoped to see her lover.

   
With this in mind, Hereward had
subjected each man entering the hall to unobtrusive scrutiny and was also
watching for reactions from his wife. The appalling thought occurred to him that
he might be the only person in the hall who did not know the identity of the
Other Man.

   
He could be a laughing stock.
Or she a liar.

Col looked at the wall-clock which the caretaker had obligingly plugged
in for the occasion. Five minutes past eight. Off we go then.

   
'Well,' he said. 'Thank you all
for coming. I, er . . . I don't think . . . that we can underestimate the
importance of tonight.'

   
Why did he say that? Wasn't
what he'd
meant
to say. The idea was
to be essentially informal, take any heat out of the situation.

   
'Let me say, straight off, that
no decisions will be made tonight. That's not what this meeting's about. It's
simply an attempt to remove some of the mystery and some of the myths, about
developments here in Crybbe. Developments which are transpiring with what might
seem to some of us to be rather, er, rather bewildering speed.'

   
Bloody
bewildering speed, by
Crybbe standards.

   
'And let me say, first of all,
that, apart from minor planning matters, the changes, the developments,
introduced to Crybbe by Mr Max Goff, are, for the most part, outside the remit
of local government and require no special permission whatsoever.'

   
'What we doin' yere, then?' a
lone voice demanded. A man's voice, but so high-pitched that it was like a
sudden owl hoot in silent barn.

   
Nobody turned to look whose it
was. Obviously the voice spoke for all of Crybbe.

   
Col looked up and saw Hereward
New-some staring at him. He smiled. Hereward did not.

   
'Can I say, from the outset,'
Col said, 'that from here on in, only questions directed through the chair will
be dealt with, however - what are we doing here? This - as it happens - was the
point I was about to move on to. What
are
we doing here?'

   
Col tried to look at everyone in
the room; only those in the New Age quarter, to his right, looked back.

   
'We're here tonight ... at the
instigation of Mr Max Goff himself. We're here because Mr Goff is aware that
aspects of his project may appear somewhat curious - even disturbing - to a
number of people. What's he
doing
erecting
large stones in fields, even if they do happen to be his own fields? Why is he keen
to purchase property for sale in the locality?'
   
Col paused.
   
'What is this New Age business really
all about?'

On a single page of
The
Ley-Hunter's Diary 1993
, with a fibre-tipped pen and a none-too-steady hand,
Powys had drawn the rough outline of a man with his arms spread.

   
Fay thought it looked like one
of those chalk-marks homicide cops drew around corpses in American films.

   
'The Cock,' Powys said breathlessly.
'Why do they call it the Cock? It's self-explanatory.'

   
'This is going to be rather
tasteless, isn't it?'

   
'Look.' Powys turned the diary
around on the studio desk to face her. He marked a cross on the head of the
man. 'This is the Tump.'

   
He made another cross in the
centre of the man's throat. Crybbe Court.'

   
He traced a straight line downwards
and put in a third cross. The Church.' It was in the middle of the chest.

   
'And finally . . .'

   
Where the man's legs joined he
drew in a final cross.

   
'The Cock,' he said. 'Or more
precisely, I'd
guess
, the alleyway
and perhaps this studio.'