Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (84 page)

   
Dee never seems to have been
very wealthy. Towards the end of his life he was virtually exiled to the north,
as warden of Christ's College, Manchester. With Elizabeth dead and James on the
throne - James who was in constant fear of Satanic plots and clamped down
accordingly on all forms of occultism - the elderly Dee was forced to defend
himself and his reputation as a scholar against various accusations that he
practised witchcraft. Ill-founded accusations, no doubt, but these were
dangerous, paranoid times.

   
So what would the penurious Dee
do if contacted by old friends or relatives in Crybbe with tales of hauntings
and oppression by dark forces invoked by the late Sir Michael Wort?

   
He drove past the turning to
Court Farm and could see no lights between the trees. No lights anywhere. He
might, out there, be twenty miles from the nearest town. It was like driving
back in time, or into another dimension

   
To Percival Weale,
   
Merchant of Crybbe
   
My Dear Mr Weale,

   
It was with much sorrow that I received your letter
   
informing me that our mutual
associate, Sheriff Wort
   
continues to torment the town from a
place beyond this life.
   
It has long been apparent to me that
the ethene layer is so
   
dense upon the atmosphere along the
border of Wales and
   
England that it may not always be so
comfortable a place of
   
habitation . .
.

   
And did Dee, old, impecunious
and in constant fear of arrest, appeal to Percy Weale to make financial
provision for the curfew to be rung (so that the most dangerous hours of
darkness might remain peaceful) and to assign some long-established local
family to the task?

   
And being unable to travel to
Crybbe himself, did he vaguely suggest that if the malignant spirit were to be
controlled it was essential for the stones to be removed, the Tump walled in
and the spiritual energy level to remain low.

   
And you must warn the townspeople to continue with their
   
lives but not to expand the town to
any great extent and,
   
above all, to offer no challenge to
the spirit. And, as for the
   
hand and any other of his limbs or
organs that should come
   
to light, no purpose will be served in
their destruction. You
   
must take these and enclose them in
separate and confined
   
places - I would suggest within a
chimney or fireplace or
   
beneath a good stone floor - where
they may never be exposed
   
to the light or the air. This is far
from satisfactory, but my
   
knowledge does not extend to more.
Forgive me.

   
Powys drove between the
gateposts of Crybbe Court and felt the house before he saw it, a dark and
hungry maw.

   
He thought,
Hand? What hand? I don't know anything about
a hand.

   
Get your act together, Powys.

   
He thought about Fay and
started to worry, so he thought about Rachel instead, and he looked up towards
the house and felt bitterly angry.

Better keep to the path, I
think, my dear. Somewhat safer, in the dark.

   
Not that they take much care of this path, or indeed the church
itself, never much in the way of civic pride in Crybbe. Poor Murray's got his
hands full.

   
Ah. Now. I know where we're going.

   
We're going to your grave, aren't we?

   
Now, look, before you say anything, I'm sorry it had to be down
at this end - not exactly central, I realise that, another few yards in fact,
and you'd be in the wood. But it's surely shady on a warm day, and you never
did like too much sun, did you? I suppose you spent most of your life in the
shade, really, and . . . well, you know I always had the impression that was
how you wanted it to be.

   
I know, I know . . . the flowers. I keep forgetting, memory isn't
what it was, as you know. You bring a few flowers with the best of intentions,
and then you forget all about them and the next time you come they're all dead
and forlorn and there are stalks and seed-pods everywhere, all a terrible mess,
and I do understand the way you feel about that, of course I do.

   
Hello, who's this?

   
Oh, Grace, look, it's young Murray.
   
No, don't get up, old chap.
   
Well, er ... it's a lovely night,
isn't it?
   
Yes. Indeed.
   
What's that?
   
Cain and Abel?

   
I'm sorry . . . I'm not quite getting your drift. What you're
saying is, Abel killed Cain?

   
Well, not in my version, old son, but I suppose you modernists
have your own ideas.

   
Abel killed Cain, eh?

   
Well, if you say so, Murray, if you say so.

Arnold was not at all happy about being left in the Mini. Joe Powys had
pushed back the slide-opening driver's window several inches to give him plenty
of air, and he stood up on the seat and pressed his head through the gap and
whined frantically.

   
'I can't take you,' Powys said.
'Please, Arnold.' He'd left the dog a saucer of water on the back shelf. Poured
from a bottle he kept in the boot because the radiator had been known to boil
dry.

   
Knowing full well that he was
doing all this just in case, for some unknowable reason, he didn't get back.
   
'Good boy,' he said. 'Good boy.'

   
He locked the car and moved
quickly, uncomfortably away. He didn't want to be here. He
felt
he was in the wrong place, but he didn't trust his own
feelings. He trusted Jean Wendle's feelings because Jean was an experienced
psychic and a Wise Woman, and he was just a writer; and when it came to dealing
with real life, writers didn't know shit.

   
The Mini was tightly parked in
a semi-concealed position behind the stable-block. Powys carried a hand-lamp
with a beam projecting a good fifty yards in front of him. It was probably a
mistake; he should be more surreptitious. What was he going to do - stand amid
the ruins of the wall, pinning Andy in the powerful beam as he cavorted naked
in the maelstrom of black energy?

   
'It all sounds,' he said aloud
into the night, 'so bloody stupid.'

   
Earth mysteries.

   
Book your seats for a magical,
mind-expanding excursion to the Old Golden Land.

   
A fun-filled New Age afternoon.
A book of half-baked pseudo-mystical musings on your knee as you picnic by a
sacred standing stone, around it a glowing aura of fascinating legend. As he
moved uncertainly across the field towards the Tump, it struck him that it was
past ten o'clock and there'd been no curfew. Well, it was late last night, too.
Took old Preece longer to make it to the belfry.

   
But he still thought, that's
where I should be. Or with Fay.

   
Not here.

   
Or am I just trying to put it
off again, the confrontation - afraid my reasoning's all to cock and this man,
with his precise, laid-back logic and his superior knowledge of the arcane, is
going to hold up another dark mirror.

   
As was usual with these things,
he didn't notice it happening until it had been happening for quite some time.

   
Climbing easily over the ruins
of the wall, where somebody had taken a bulldozer for a midnight joy-ride, the
rhythm of his breath began to change so that it was a separate thing from what
he was doing, which was labouring up the side of the mound. Normally, to do
this, he would be jerking the breath in like a fireman on a steam train
shovelling more and more coal on, breath as fuel. But he was conscious, in an
unconcerned dreamlike way, of the climb being quite effortless and the
breathing fuelling something else, some inner mechanism.

   
Each breath was a marathon
breath, long, long, long, but not at all painful. When you discovered that you,
after all, possessed a vast inner strength, it was a deeply pleasurable thing.

   
He followed what he thought was
the beam from the lamp until he realized the lamp had gone out but the beam had
not . . .as though he was throwing a shadow, a negative shadow, which made it a
shadow of light.

   
Out of the tufted grass and
into the bushes, moving with ease, watching his legs doing the work, as legs
were meant to do, tearing through the undergrowth in their eagerness to take
him to the summit of the mound.

   
The source.

   
Each breath seeming to take
minutes, breathing in not only air, but colours, all the colours of the night,
which were colours not normally visible to undeveloped human sight.

   
Moving up the side of the Tump,
between bushes and tree trunks and moving effortlessly. Effortlessly as the
last time.

         
goes round . . . thrice . . .

         
goes round . .
.

CHAPTER VII

Nobody panicked.
   
Well, they wouldn't, would they? Not
in Crybbe. They'd be quite used to this by now. Part of everyday life.
Everynight
life, anyway.

   
So there were no screams, no
scrambles for the door. Guy Morrison knew this because he was standing only
yards from the exit where the fat policeman, Wiley, was doubtless still at his
post.

   
'Only a matter of time, wasn't
it?' Col Croston called out. 'Don't worry, it often happens during council
meetings. Mrs By ford's gone to switch on the generator.'

   
It was a bloody mercy, in Guy's
opinion.

   
The woman was completely and
utterly insane.

   
For the first time, Guy was
profoundly thankful he and Fay had never had children.

   
He hoped that by the time the lights
came on she'd have had the decency to make herself scarce. The sheer
embarrassment
of it!

   
'Guy?'

   
Somebody snuggled against his
chest.

   
'Just as well it is me,' he
whispered, and she giggled and kissed his neck.

   
A worrying thought struck him.

   
'You're not wearing lipstick,
are you, Catrin?'

   
'Not any more,' Catrin Jones
said, and Guy plunged a hand into his jacket pocket, searching frantically for
a handkerchief.

   
'No, I'm not,' Catrin said.
'Honest. I'm sorry.'

   
'Shut up then,' he hissed,
conscious of the fact that nobody else appeared to be talking.

   
'Won't be long now,' Col
Croston shouted cheerfully. At least, Guy thought, it would be an opportunity
for him to pretend the five minutes before the power cut had never happened.

   
He became aware that somebody
had drawn back the curtains at the windows, and what little light remained in
the sky showed him a scene like the old black and white photographs he'd seen
of the insides of air-raid shelters in the blitz, only even more overcrowded.
All it needed was someone with rampant claustrophobia to start floundering
about and there'd be total chaos.

   
But nobody moved and nobody
spoke and it was quite uncanny. He felt Catrin's hand moving like a mouse in
one of his hip pockets. When they got back to Cardiff he'd suggest she should
be transferred. Something she couldn't very well refuse - six months'
attachment as an assistant trainee radio producer, or anything else that
sounded vaguely like promotion.

   
As his eyes adjusted, Guy was
able to make out individual faces. A fat farmer who hadn't taken off his cap.
That cocky little radio chap trying vainly to see his watch. Jocasta Newsome
and her husband - strange that she wasn't talking; perhaps they'd had a row.