Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (92 page)

   
When she didn't move he suddenly
lurched at her, the knife creating whingeing sounds as he made criss-cross
slashes in the yellow, smoky air. 'Hey, it's you . . .'

   
Fay began to back away, coughing,
in the opposite direction, up the nave until she could feel the heat from the
petrol-soaked Bible on her back.

   
Warren produced a high-pitched
trumpeting noise. 'This is Offa's Dyke Radio!'

   
He slashed the air again,
twice.

   
'Voice of the Marches!' he
said. 'Yeah!'

   
'That's right,' Fay said,
cheerfully hysterical. 'Voice of the Marches. That's me.'

   
Warren stopped. Reflected a
moment. 'We done a good job on your ole tape recorder, didn't we?'

   
Oh my . . .
God
.

   
'Yes,' she said weakly. 'Very
impressive.'

   
His face went cold. Should have
kept her mouth shut.

   
He opened the hand which held
the Stanley knife, looked down at it, the hand and the knife's long, metal
handle both splattered with criss-cross layers of blood, bright fresh blood on
brown dried blood.

   
'Hand of Glory,' Warren said.
And the fingers clenched again.

   
As he advanced on her, up the
aisle, she saw - almost hypnotized - that his eyes were altering.

   
She'd never seen Warren Preece
close-up before (only - Oh my God - his spidery shape scurrying across a field
at sunset) and she was sure that she wasn't seeing him now.

   
Something in the eyes. The eyes
were no longer vacant. Someone in residence.

   
'Aaah.' The heat at her back
was acutely painful. She couldn't go any further: fire behind her, the knife
coming at her. She went rigid, looked back towards the door, saw Jimmy Preece
had slipped to the floor by the font.

   
'Black Michael,' she said, as
the savage heat at her back became too much to bear and she was sure her
clothing was about to catch fire. 'You're Black Michael.'

   
Warren Preece obviously took
this as a huge compliment. He grinned lavishly, and the bloodstained Stanley
knife trembled in his hand as he closed in.

   
'Say hello,' he said, 'to the
Hand of Glory.' And lunged.

   
Fay threw herself sideways,
landing hard on the stone. Crawled, coughing wretchedly, to the top of the
altar step where the firelight was reflected in Jonathon Preece's closed
coffin. A storm of shrivelled scraps of burning paper wafted from the Bible;
she saw an orange core of fire eating through to the spine and the varnish
bubbling on the wooden lectern as she rolled over, drew back her foot and
stabbed out once sharply.

   
The lectern shook. It was made
of carved oak, caked in layer upon layer of badly applied varnish, which
dripped an blistered and popped. It moved when she hit it with her foot, but
not enough, and she fell on her back beside the coffin, her face stinging from
the heat and sparks, as Warren Preece sprang up the steps and the short,
reddened blade of the Stanley knife came down at her, clasped in a fist gloved
in smoke.

   
She curled up, and the bells
clanged like wild, drunken laughter.

The bells, he thought, the bells of hell. Ringing to welcome old Alex.

   
He stood in the graveyard,
looked up at the church tower and saw the window-slits outlined in light,
glowing a feeble yellow at first and then intensifying to pure white as the
clangour grew louder until it seemed the walls would crumble and there would
only be these bright bells hanging in the night.

   
Welcome to hell.

   
No one more welcome in hell
than a unfrocked priest except . . .
except...
a priest who ought to have been unfrocked and escaped the dishonour through
devious means.

   
Oh Lord, yes. No one more
welcome in hell.

   
The bells rang randomly, as one
might expect, a mocking parody of the joyful Sunday peal.

   
The bells of hell hurt his ears
as they were meant to do and would continue to do, he assumed, forever and ever.

He brushed against the Bible and it set light to the black vest he was
wearing; little flames swarmed up his chest.

   
He seemed absolutely delighted.
Looking proudly down at himself, dropping down a couple of steps, grinning
hugely, as the petrol-soaked spine of the heavy old Bible collapsed into
red-hot ash and the two halves toppled from the lectern.

   
Fay rammed both feet into the
wooden stem.

   
Very slowly it began to fall
towards him, and Warren didn't move.

   
He opened his arms wide, as the
lectern fell like a tree, and he embraced it, hugging the blistering stem to
his chest.
   
'Yeah!'

   
Roaring and blazing.

   
Fay didn't move, watched in
hypnotized awe until she felt and smelt something burning, very, very close,
and found a single charring page wrapped around her arm.

   
Book of David, she read, the
page curling sepia, reminding her of the opening credits of some dreadful old
American Civil War movie, and she found that her lungs were full of smoke.

CHAPTER XIII

His body jerked in the grass, a convulsion. The crashing bells he
accepted as the death vibrations of a brain cleaved by a steel bolt.
   
'Mr Powys.'

   
Oh Christ, he thought at once,
it wasn't me, it was Arnold; he wants me to see what he's done to Arnold before
he puts one into me.

   
He'd flung himself at the dog,
just as Fay had done in the field by the river when Jonathon Preece had been
strolling nonchalantly across with his gun. But Powys had missed and Arnold had
kept on running, towards Humble and his crossbow, leaving Powys sprawled helplessly,
arms spread, waiting for the end. The way you did.

   
'Mr Powys.'

   
He rolled very slowly on to his
back, pain prodding whatever was between his shoulder-blades, the place where
Humble had hit him with the butt of the crossbow.

   
'It is you, isn't it? Joe?'

   
He focused on a face in the
middle of a pale-coloured head scarf. He saw a woolly jumper. Below that some
kind of kilt. Campbell tartan. Memory told him ridiculously.
   
'Mmmm . . .' Couldn't get the name
out.
   
'It's Minnie Seagrove,' she said
clearly. 'I want you to speak to me, please. Say something. I'm ever so
confused tonight. I've been seeing Frank, and now it's bells. Bells everywhere.'
   
Powys came slowly to his feet. He
didn't know about seeing Frank, but they couldn't both be hallucinating bells.

   
Mrs Seagrove gazed anxiously up
at him, although she looked rather calmer than he felt. Behind her the Tump
swelled like a tumour that grew by night. From out of the town can the wild
pealing.

   
Powys was disoriented. He looked
rapidly from side to side and then behind him. 'Where's . . . ?'

   
'That's another thing, I'm
afraid,' Minnie Seagrove said. 'I think I've killed the man with the . . . what
do you call it?'

   
'What . . . ?'

   
"Thank God. It's your
voice. Here . . .' She pushed something into his hand - his lamp. 'I can't
switch it on, it's got a funny switch on it.'

   
Powys switched it on, and the
first thing it showed him on the ground was the crossbow. And then an
outstretched, naked arm.

   
'Now just don't ask me how I
got here,' Mrs Seagrove said 'because I don't know. It's been a very funny
night, all told. But there you were, on the ground and this man with the thingy
- crossbow - pointing it down at you - he had the lamp on - taking aim, like. I
thought, Oh God, what can I do? And I came up behind him when the bells
started, and it put him off, sort of thing, the bells starting up like that, so
sudden. Put him off - just for a second. And I still wasn't sure any of it was
really happening, do you understand? I thought, well, if it's a dream, no harm
done, sort of thing, so I hit him. Is he dead, Joe? Can you tell?'

   
'I shouldn't think so, Minnie.'
Powys kicked the crossbow out of the way and bent over Humble with the lamp,
nervous of getting too close, ready to smash the lamp down in Humble's face if
he moved.

   
He stood up, finally. 'Er . . .
what exactly was it you hit him with?'

   
'He's dead, isn't he, Joe? Come
on now, I don't want any flim-flam.'

   
'Well, yes. He is actually.'

   
The back of Humble's head was
like soft Turkish Delight.

   
'Bring the light over here, please,
Joe. It was like an iron bar. Only hollow. Like a pipe. I threw it down
somewhere . . . Here . . .'

   
Powys crouched down. It was
indeed a piece of pipe, with jagged rust at one end and blood at the other. He
didn't touch it. It seemed likely that Humble, for all his strength and his spectacular
night vision, was one of those people with a particularly thin skull.

   
'It isn't a dream, is it, Joe?'

   
'Well, not in the accepted sense,
no. But really, I mean . . . don't worry about it.' He put his hands on her
shoulders. 'You did save my life. He wasn't exactly what anybody would call a nice
man. In fact, offhand, I can only think of one person who's actually nastier.
No, maybe two, now.'

   
He thought of something else
and played the beam over the weapon again. Experienced a moment of pure, liquid
euphoria; wanted to laugh aloud.

   
It looked like the tip of Henry
Kettle's exhaust pipe.

   
He kept quiet about it, all the
same. Don't tie this thing down too hard to reality. She's keeping herself
together because she isn't yet fully convinced it's not part of the dream,
like Frank. 'Look, Minnie, you didn't see a dog, did you? He he might have been
hit, I don't know.'

   
'He ran off,' said Mrs Seagrove.
'He was off like the clappers, over that way.'

   
She pointed at the gap where
the stone wall had been broken down.

   
'The one I mean is a black and
white dog,' Powys said gently. 'Escaped from my car. Left the window open too
wide. But he couldn't have been going like the clappers, he's only got three
legs now. You remember, he was shot.'

   
'Yes, it was the same dog. Fay
Morrison's dog. Joe, what going on? What's up with the bells?'

   
'God knows. Be nice to think it
was a few of the townsfolk up in the tower, ringing every bell they've got as a
sign they've finally woken up to something after a few centuries.'

   
He looked over his shoulder
towards Crybbe Court, remembered the sparking under the eaves, like flints.
Could see nothing now.

   
Which didn't mean a thing.
   
'Joe.'
   
'Mmm?'
   
'What's that?'

   
There was a ray of light
playing among the trees on the Tump, flickering erratically.

   
And then a dog began to bark.
   
'Stay here,' Powys said.
   
'With him? Not likely.'
   
The dog was barking fiercely.
   
Powys watched the light moving among
the trees
   
'Who is it, Joe?'

   
'I think it's one of those other
people I mentioned who are even nastier than Humble.'

   
Mrs Seagrove said, 'You're
frightened, aren't you, Joe?'

Alex had remembered who Kate Bush was now.

   
Dark hair and sort of slinky.
Seen her on the box once, a few years ago, at young Fay's flat. Made the usual
comments - if I was forty years younger, etc. - and the next day Fay had presented
him with this T-shirt as a bit of a joke, and he'd become quite attached to the
garment, made him feel youthful, having Kate Bush next to the skin.