Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (81 page)

   
'You see, what I don't want is
any of you people just sitting there thinking, "Who is this lunatic? Why
are we listening to this garbage? Who's he think he's kidding?" because .
. .'

   
Bringing his gaze down very
slowly from the back rows to the front rows, taking in everybody.

   
'. . . Because I'm
not
kidding. I never kid.'

'I look at this town,' Fay said, 'and I don't see streets and buildings
any more, I only see shadows.'

   
Powys didn't say anything. He'd
been seeing shadows everywhere, for years.

   
'When there's a gust of wind,'
Fay said, 'I look over my shoulder.'

   
Maybe it's me, he thought.
Maybe I've contaminated her
   
'And when the lights go out . . .'

   
'Look.' Powys said quickly, 'he's
always been there. Bits of him.' He kept snatching breath, trying to keep his
mind afloat. 'Just like, behind us, along the passage there's a pool of sexual energy
that builds up in the hours approaching the curfew. Accumulates in the place where
the studio is. No doubt other forms of energy gather elsewhere. But it all
dissipates when the curfew bell starts to ring. Each night, the ringing of the
curfew frustrates the spirit's attempts to collect enough energy to activate
all the power centres simultaneously.'

   
'All right,' Fay said. 'So, one
hundred strong, evenly spaced tolls of the bell sends the black energy back to
the Tump with its tail between its legs. Why do real dogs howl?'

   
She looked down at Arnold,
lying on the bottom step front of the Cock, panting slightly.

   
'I'm guessing,' Powys said.
'OK?'
   
'It's all guesswork, isn't it? Go on.
This is the big one, Joe. Why - precisely - do dogs howl at the curfew?"

   
'Right.' He sat down on the
second step, and Arnold laid his chin on his shoe. 'I've been thinking about
this a lot. The curfew's a very powerful thing. It's like - an act of violence,
hits the half-formed spirit like a truck. And the spirit wants to scream out in
rage and frustration. Now. There are two possibilities. Either, because it's at
this black dog stage, it communicates its agony to anything else in the town on
the canine wavelength. Or it simply emits some kind of ultrasonic scream, like
one of those dog whistles people can't hear. How's that?'

   
'Well,' Fay conceded, 'it does
have a certain arcane logic.'
   
She looked up at the church tower.

   
Powys pushed at his forehead
with the tips of his fingers 'Somebody - let's continue to call him John Dee -
saw what was happening, what Michael Wort had left behind - in essence an opening
for him to return to . . . possess Crybbe, literally, from beyond the grave.
And he recommended certain steps -get rid of the stones, build a wall around
the Tump, ring the curfew every night, one hundred times. Avoid any kind of psychic
or spiritual activity which will be amplified in an area like this anyway and
could open up another doorway. And so the rituals are absorbed into the fabric
of local life and Crybbe becomes what it is today.'

   
'Morose,' Fay said. 'Apathetic.
Resistant to any kind of change. Every night the curfew leaves the place
literally limp.'

Guy Morrison was clenching his fists in frustration. This would have
been terrific television. He looked around for the Mayor of Crybbe - the man
who, more than anybody else in the entire world, he now wanted to strangle.

   
Jimmy Preece was, in fact, not
six yards away, on the end of a row close to the back - presumably so that he
could slip, away to ring his precious curfew. Guy moved forward a little to see
how the Mayor was taking this and discovered that, for a change, Mr Preece's face
was not without expression.

   
He looked very nervous. His
Adam's apple bobbed in his chicken's neck and his eyes kept blinking as though
the lids were attached by strings to his forehead, where new wrinkles were
forming like worm-casts in sand.

   
The poor old reactionary's
worried Max is going to win them over, Guy thought. He's afraid that, by the
end of the night, this will be Max Goff's town and not his any more.

   
And why not?

   
For Goff, indirectly, was
promising them the earth. But somebody had told him about the way business was
done in this locality and about the border mentality, and he was handling it accordingly.
What he was telling them, in an oblique kind of way, was, I can help you - I
can recreate this town, make it soar - if you co-operate with me. But I don't
need you. I don't need anybody.

   
Goff was talking now about his
dreams of expanding the sum of human knowledge and enlightenment. Speaking of
the great shrines of the world, subtly mentioning Lourdes and all the thousands
of good, hopeful, faithful people it attracted all year round.

   
Mentioning - in passing - the
amount: of money it made out of the good, hopeful, faithful thousands.

   
'But tourism's not what I'm
about,' Goff said. 'What I'm concerned with is promoting serious research into
subjects rejected by universities in Britain as . . . well, let's say as . . . insufficiently
intellectual. The growth of basic human happiness, for instance, has never been
something which has tended to absorb our more distinguished scholars. Far too
simple. Life and death? The afterlife? The
before
life
The human soul? Why should university scientists and philosophers waste time
pondering the imponderable? Why not simply study the psychology of the foolish
people who believe in all this nonsense?

   
Goff paused, with another
disarming smile. 'You shoulda stopped me. Tourism is an option this town can
explore at its leisure. You want tourists, they can be here - tens of thousands
of them. You don't want tourists, you say to
me, "Max, this is a quiet town and that's the way we like it." And I
retire behind the walls of Crybbe Court and I become so low profile everyone
soon forgets I was ever here.'

   
Guy conceded to himself that,
had he been the kind of person who admired others, he might at this moment have
admired Goff. This was very smart - Goff saying. Of course nobody's
forcing
this town to be exceedingly
wealthy.

   
Laying it on the line for them:
I have nothing to lose, you have everything to gain.

   
Not even the faintest hint of
threat.
   
How could they resist him?

   
They'll listen very patiently to what Goff has to say, then they'll ask
one or two very polite questions before drifting quietly away into the night.
And then, just as quietly, they'll do their best to shaft the blighter . . .'

   
But why should Col Croston
think they'd want to? The man was offering them the earth.

'Limp. Stagnant.' Powys lowered his voice, although they were alone in
the square. Afraid perhaps, Fay thought, that the town itself would take
offence, as if that mattered now.

   
Over the roofs of shops, she
could see the Victorian-Italianate pinnacle of the town-hall roof, the
stonework blooming for the first time in the glow from its windows. There were
probably more people in there tonight than at any other time since it was
built. All the people who might be on the streets, in the pub, scattered around
town.

   
'And then Goff arrives,' Powys
said. 'Unwitting front man for Andy Trow, last of the Worts, a practising
magician. The heir. Crybbe is his legacy from Michael.'

   
Fay sat next to him on the
step, Arnold between them. Apart from them, the town might have been evacuated.
Nobody emerged from the street leading to the town hall, nobody went in.

   
'OK,' she said. 'He's put the
stones back - as many as he can. He's knocked a hole in the wall around the
Tump, so that whatever it is can get into the Court - the next point on the
line, right?'

   
'I saw its light in the eaves.
I watched it spit . . . Rachel out. Along with the cat. Not much of a guardian
any more, but it was there, it had to go. The next point on the line is the
church, supposedly the spiritual and emotional heart of the town, from where
the curfew's rung. Jack Preece rings the curfew, Jonathon, his son, was to
inherit the job. Something's weeding out Preeces.'

   
'No wonder old Jimmy was so
desperate to get to the church after Jack had his accident.'

   
'He's a bit doddery, isn't he,
the old chap?'
   
'Stronger than he looks, I'd guess.
But, sure, at that age he could go anytime. Joe, can nobody else ring it? What
about you? What about me? What about - what's his name - Warren?'

   
'I don't see why not. But it
was a task allotted to the Preeces and perhaps only they know how vital it is.
The big family secret. The Mayor's probably training this Warren to take over.
He's got to, hasn't he?'

   
Fay was still trying to imagine
taciturn, wizened old Jimmy Preece in the role of Guardian of the Gate to Hell.
No more bizarre, she supposed, than the idea of Crybbe Court being looked after
by a mummified cat.

   
'What happens,' she said, 'if
the curfew doesn't get rung?'
   
Powys stood up. 'Then it comes roaring
and spitting out of the Tump, through the Court, through the new stone in the
wood and straight into the church - through the church, gathering enormous
energy . . . until it reaches . . .'

   
He began to walk across the
cobbles, his footsteps hollow in the dark and the silence. '. . . here.'

   
He stood in the centre of the
square. The centre of Crybbe.

   
'My guess is there used to be a
stone or a cross on this spot, but it was taken down with all the stones. I bet
if you examine Goff's plans, you'll find proposals for some kind of monument.
Wouldn't matter what it was. Could be a statue of Jimmy Preece.'

   
'The Preece Memorial,' Fay
said.
   
'Wouldn't
that
be appropriate?'

   
Fay was silent, aware of the
seconds ticking away towards ten o'clock. Sure she could feel something swelling
in the air and a rumbling in the cobbles where Arnold lay quietly, no panting
now.

   
'So what do we do?'

   
'If we've got any sense,' Powys
said, 'we pile into one of the cars and drive like hell across the border to
the nearest place with lots of lights. Then we get drunk.'

   
'And forget.'

   
'Yeah. Forget.'

   
Fay said, 'My father's here.
And Jean.'

   
'And Mrs Seagrove. And a few
hundred other innocent people.'

   
The rumbling grew louder. Fay
was sure she could feel the cobbles quaking.

   
'We can't leave.'

   
Powys said, 'And Andy's here
somewhere, Andy Wort. I don't even like to imagine what he's doing.'
   
'It's too quiet.'
   
'Much too quiet.'

   
Except for the rumbling, and
two big, white, blazing eyes on the edge of the square.

   
Powys said, 'What the hell's that?'

   
The eyes went out, and now the
thing was almost luminous in the dimness. A large yellow tractor with a
mechanical digger on the front.

   
'I'm gonner park 'im yere.'
They saw the glow of a cigarette and two tiny points of light from small, round
spectacles. 'Nobody gonner mind for a few minutes.'

   
'It's Gomer Parry,' Fay said.

   
'Ah . . . Miss Morris, is it?'

   
'Hello, Gomer. Where are you
off to?'

   
'Gonner grab me a swift pint,
Miss. Just finished off down the Colonel's, got a throat like a clogged-up toilet.
Flush 'im out, see?'

   
They watched Gomer ascending
the steps to the Cock, a jaunty figure, entirely oblivious of whatever was
accumulating.

   
The commotion of the digger's
arrival had, for just a short time, pushed back the dark.

   
Powys said, 'Fay, look, we've
got to start making our own waves. It'll be feeble, it probably won't do
anything, but we can't drive away and we can't just stand here and watch.'