Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (89 page)

   
Humble snorted, leaning on the
butt of his crossbow.

   
'There are countrymen,' he said,
'and there are hippies. I'm fit, I've got good hearing and ace eyesight. I'm
not a bad shot. I can snare rabbits and skin 'em, and I can work at night and
ain't scared. Ghosts, evil spirits, magic stones, it's all shit. If the people
who employ me wanna believe in it, that's fine, no skin off my nose."

   
Blessed are the sceptics, Powys
thought.

   
Rachel was a sceptic.

   
'And I get paid
very
well. See, I can go in that house
any time of the day or night, I don't give a shit. I can piss up the side of a
standing stone in the full moon. So what? Countrymen aren't hippies, Mr Powys.'

   
He was telling Powys indirectly
who it was who'd locked the door when Rachel was in the Court. And, maybe, who
had pushed her out.

   
He got paid very well.

   
'Andy pays you,' Powys realised.

   
Humble said, 'I'm in the employ
of the Epidemic Group - a security consultant.'

   
'And Andy's been paying you as
well.'
   
Humble lifted his crossbow. 'Let's
go.'
   
'Where's Andy?'
   
'I said, let's
move
!'
   
'No.'

   
'Fair enough,' Humble said.
'Fair enough.' He moved backwards a few paces into the field until he was almost
invisible against the night.

   
'OK, you made your decision. I
got to get this over wiv in a couple of minutes, so you got a choice. You can
run. Or you can turn around and walk away. Just keep walking, fast or slow as
you like, and you'll never know. Some people like to run.'

   
Oh Jesus, Powys thought. For
the past twelve years he hadn't really cared too much about life and how long
it would last.

   
'I thought you'd never shot
anybody.'

   
'Not wiv a crossbow. On the two
other occasions,' said Humble, 'I used a gun.'

   
Fay, he thought obliquely.
Caught an image of the elf with the rainbow eye. I'm going to lose Fay.

   
'Or, of course,' said Humble
reasonably, 'you can just stand there and watch.'

   
He brought up the crossbow.
Powys instinctively ducked and went down on his knees, his arms around his
head.

   
Through his arms, he heard a
familiar lop-sided semi-scampering.

   
'No!' he screamed. 'No, Arnold!
Get back! Get away!'

   
He saw the black and white dog
limping towards him from the darkness and, out of the corner of his eye,
watched the crossbow swivel a couple of inches to the right.

   
'Beautiful,' Humble said, and
fired.

She ran at the door and snatched at the bolts, throwing one of them back
before Mr Preece grabbed her from behind and pulled her away.

   
She struggled frantically and
vainly. He might look like a stretcher case, but his arms were like bands of
iron.

   
She felt her feet leave the
floor, and he hauled her back from the porch and set her down under the stone
font. The lambing light was in her eyes, but it didn't blind her because it was
losing strength, going dimmer.

   
'What the
fuck
are you doing, Mr Preece? What bloody use is this place as
protection?'

   
All she could hear from behind
the dying light was his dreadful breathing, something out of intensive care at
the chest clinic.

   
There's no spirituality here
any more. All there was was the bell and now you can't reach that, there's no
way you can resist . . . him . . . in this place. A church is only a church because
the stones are steeped in centuries of worship . . . human hopes and dreams,
all that stuff. All you've got here is a bloody
warehouse
'

   
'Stay quiet,' Jimmy Preece
hissed. 'Keep calm. Keep . . .'

   
'Oh, sure, keep your head down!
It's what this piss-poor place is all about. Don't make waves, don't take
sides, we don't want no
clever people
.
Oh!' She beat her head into her arms and sobbed with anger and frustration.

   
Needing the rage and the bitterness,
because, if you could keep them stoked, keep the heat high, it would burn out
the fear.

   
She looked into the light - not
white any more, but yellow, her least-favourite colour, the yellow of disease,
of embalming fluid. The yellow of Grace Legge.

   
How would he come?

   
Would he come like Grace, flailing
and writhing with white-eyed malevolence?

   
How would he come?

   
'What's going to happen, Mr
Preece?' she said. It was the small voice, and she was ashamed.

   
'I don't know, girl.' There was
a wheezing under it that she hadn't heard before. 'God help me, I don't know.'

   
She thought about her dad. At
least he'd be safe. He was with Jean, and Jean was smart. Jean knew about these
things.

   
'She can't talk to you, she can't see you, there's no brain
activity there . . . Entirely harmless.'

   
No she doesn't. She isn't smart
at all. A little knowledge and a little intuition - nothing more dangerous.
Jean only thinks she's smart.

   
And now Powys had gone to Jean,
saying, help us, 0 Wise One, get us out of this, save Crybbe, save us all.

   
Oh, Powys, whatever happened to
the Old Golden Land?

It began with a rustling up at the front of the church near the coffin,
and then the sound of something rolling on stone.
   
'What's that?'

   
But Mr Preece just breathed at
her.

   
She clutched at the side of the
font, all the hot, healthy anger and the frustration and bitterness drenched in
cold, stagnant fear. She couldn't move. She imagined Jonathon Preece stirring
in his coffin, cracking his knuckles as his hands opened out.

   
Washerwoman's hands.
   
Fay felt a pain in her chest.

   
'Oh, God.' The nearest she
could produce to a prayer. Not too wonderful, for a clergyman's daughter.

   
And then came the smell of burning
and little flames, a row of little, yellow, smoky flames, burning in the air,
four or five feet from the floor.

   
Fay watched, transfixed, still
sitting under the font, as though both her legs were broken.

   
'Heeeeeeee!' she heard.
High-pitched - a yellow noise flecked with insanity.

   
Jimmy Preece moved. He picked
up the light and walked into the nave and shone what remained of the light up
the aisle.

   
'Aye,' he said, and his breathing
was so loud and his voice so hoarse that they were inseparable now.

   
Down the aisle, into the
lambing light, a feeble beam, a figure walked.

   
Fay saw cadaverous arms hanging
from sawn-off sleeves, eyes that were as yellow-white as the eyes of a ghost,
but still - just - human eyes.

   
The arms hanging loosely.
Something in one hand, something stubby, blue-white metal still gleaming
through the red-brown stains.

   
Behind him the yellow flames
rose higher.

   
A foot kicked idly at something
on the stone floor and it rolled towards Fay. It was a small tin tube with a
red nozzle, lighter fuel.

   
Warren had opened up the Bible
on its lectern and set light to the pages.
   
'Ow're you, Grandad,' Warren said.

CHAPTER XI

There were too many people in here.
   
'Don't touch him, please,' Col said.
There was quite a wide semi-circle around Goff's body into which nobody, apart
from this girl, had been inclined to intrude, there'd be sufficient explanations
to make after tonight as it was, and Col was determined nobody was going to
disturb or cover up the evidence, however unpleasant it became, whatever obnoxious
substances it happened to discharge.
   
The girl peered down, trying to see
Goff's face.
   
'I paint,' she explained casually, 'I
like to remember these things.'

   
'Oh. It's Tessa, isn't it.
Tessa Byford.'

   
Col watched her with a kind of
appalled admiration. So cool, so controlled. How young women had changed. He
couldn't remember seeing her earlier. But then there were a few hundred people
here tonight - and right now, he rather wished there hadn't been such a commendable
turn-out.

   
He was angry with himself. That
he should allow someone to creep in under cover of darkness and slash the
throat of the guest of honour. Obviously - OK - the last thing one would expect
in a place like Crybbe. And yet rural areas were no longer immune from sudden
explosions of savage violence - think of the Hungerford massacre. He should - knowing
of underlying trepidation about Goff's plans - have been ready to react to the
kind of situation for which he'd been training half his life. He remembered,
not too happily, telling Guy Morrison how the Crybbe audience would ask Goff a
couple of polite questions before drifting quietly away.

   
And then, just as quietly, they'll shaft the blighter.

   
Shafted him all right.

   
Whoever it was had come and
gone through the small, back door, the one the town councillors used. It had
been unlocked throughout. That had been a mistake, too.

   
Couldn't get away from it -
he'd been bloody lax. And now he was blindly following the orders of a possibly
crazy old man who'd decreed that nobody was permitted to depart - which, if the
police were on their way, would have been perfectly sensible, but under the
circumstances . . .
   
He didn't even
know
the circumstances.
   
All he knew was that Jimmy Preece had
the blind support of an appreciable number of large, uncompromising, tough looking
men and, if anybody made an attempt to leave, the situation was likely to turn
ugly.

   
Not - looking at Max Goff
sprawled in his own blood - that it was particularly attractive as things
stood.

   
Every so often, people would
wander over to Col, some angry, others quite sheepish.

   
'It doesn't make a lot of
sense, now does it, Colonel?', Graham Jarrett argued, sweat-patches appearing
under the arms of his safari suit. 'A man's been murdered, and all we're doing is
giving his murderer time to get clean away.'

   
'Not if he's in this room we
aren't,' said Col very quickly.
   
Jarrett's eyes widened. 'That's not
likely, is it?'
   
'Who knows, Mr Jarrett, who knows?'
   
Graham Jarrett looked around
nervously, as if wondering which of the two or three hundred people it might be
safest to stand close to. The main exit was still guarded by large uncommunicative
farmers.

   
'Can't be long now, anyway,'
Col said. 'I'd guess the Mayor's already been in touch with the police.'
   
No chance. This is a
Crybbe matter.

   
Madness. It didn't even have the
logic of a street riot. And Col Croston, who'd served six terms in Belfast, was
beginning to detect signs of something worryingly akin to sectarianism.

   
New Age versus Old Crybbe.

   
The Crybbe people scarcely
moved. If they went to the toilets they went silently and returned to their
seats. They did not converse among themselves. They seemed to know what this
was about. Or, at least, they appeared satisfied that Jimmy Preece knew what it
was about and there seemed to be this unspoken understanding that they should
remain calm, restrain their emotions.

   
Bloody eerie. Just as they
behaved in church. Admirable self-control or mindless apathy? Beggared belief,
either way, and Col Croston knew he couldn't allow the situation to continue
much longer. He was under pressure from the New Age delegates who, while in a minority
of about twenty to one, were making virtually all the noise. So much for
relaxation techniques and meditative calm. Struck him there was a lot they
might learn from the indigenous population.