Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (96 page)

   
'And now you come here, and you
want Crybbe to give up its secrets to you. To lay open its soul to you. You
want to feel its spirit inside you. Isn't that right?'

   
'We want to help it rediscover
its own spirit,' someone said 'Surely that's what this is about, this
experiment.'

   
'This experiment.' Andy
laughed. 'And who's the subject of this experiment? Is it Crybbe? Or is it us?
Maybe we're here to let the town experiment on us. It's an interesting idea,
isn't it? Maybe Crybbe can work its own alchemy if you're prepared to put
yourselves into the crucible. Perhaps what you're experiencing now is a taster.
Can you handle this? Are you strong enough?'

   
Talk about a captive audience.
Fay thought. It was an uneasy thought. She was a captive, too. Would she not
also go along with anything this man suggested if he could lead her out of
here, back into where there were lights.

   
'Sense of place,' Andy said. 'You
want to feel that sense of place that finds an echo in your own hearts. You
want to belong. You want to lay yourself down in a field on a summer's evening and
you want the mysteries to come to you, whispered in your ears, drifting on the
air and smelling of honeysuckle.'

   
'Yes,' a woman said faintly.
'Yes.'

   
Andy paused and the night held
its breath.

   
Thai's not how it works,' he
said. 'You know that really, don't you?
This
is how it works.
This
is Sense of
Place. Feel it. Smell it. Secrets come out like babies, writhing and covered in
blood and slime. And all of us genteel New Age people, we turn up our noses and
we start to scream. Let me out of here! I can't bear it! Give me my picturesque
half-timbered cottage and my chintzy sofa and my books. Give me my incense and
my crystals and my immersion tank. Give me my illusions back. Yeah?'

   
Nobody spoke.

   
'I can't give you your
illusions back,' Andy said gently.
   
The silence was total.

   
Radio, Fay thought desperately.
It's only radio. You know the techniques, you know the tricks. He's standing
there at the mixing desk, the Presenter and also the Engineer, playing with the
effects, adjusting the atmos.

   
'But if you trust me,' Andy
said, 'I can give you the true secrets of Crybbe. Think about this. I'll be back.'

   
And the voice was gone.

   
'Andy!' Jarrett shouted into
the pungent night. 'Don't go!'
   
'He can't go,' Oona Jopson said. 'Can
he?'

'Stop!' Powys shouted.

   
The mechanical digger groaned.

   
Arnold barked.

   
'Take it slowly, OK. We could
be coming to something.
   
Gomer's customized digger had an extra
spotlight, mounted on the cab. It wasn't as strong as the single headlight, but
least you could focus it on the target.

   
Powys had been worried the wall
would be a problem, but Gomer had done some skilled manoeuvring, putting on a
show, riding the digger like a trick-cyclist, plant-hire choreographer, tapping
the wall with the edge of the shovel in exactly the right places, until the
stones crumbled apart like breezeblocks. Powys asking him, 'Out of interest,
how long would it have taken you to take this wall apart with the bulldozer?'

   
Gomer had leaned out of his
cab, his cigarette pointing upwards from his mouth so the red end was reflected
in his glasses. 'You what, Joe? This ole wall? Gimme hour or so you'd never
know there'd been a wall yere. Tell you what, it bloody hurt me, that did,
havin' to say I couldn't 'andle 'it without a bigger 'dozer.'

   
Afterwards, it had just been a
question of removing enough rubble to get the digger to the Tump. And after that
. . .'
   
'Piece o' piss,' Gomer said. 'Sorry,
Minnie.'
   
Mrs Seagrove sat on a broken section
of the wall, dust all over her kilt, Arnold lying across her knees, watchful,
both of them watching the action.

   
'Isn't he good, though, Joe?'
she said as Gomer went into the Tump like a surgeon. 'Isn't he a marvel?'

   
Powys smiled. She was loving
it. He wondered if she remembered killing Edgar Humble, or if she still
half-thought that was all a dream, no more real now than Frank, her dead husband.
   
'Hold it a minute, Gomer, we've got .
. .'
   
Gomer backed up, raised the shovel.
Powys slid under it, lumps of earth falling on him from its great metal teeth.
   
'Minnie, can you pass me the
hand-lamp?'
   
It looked like an opening. No more
than five feet in, and they could be into some kind of tunnel. He shone the
light inside and he could see a roof of solid stone, like the capstone of a
dolmen.

   
'Gomer, we've cracked it.'

   
'Course we 'ave, boy. Want me
to widen the 'ole?'
   
'OK.'

   
He stepped back and the shovel adjusted
itself then went in again.

   
He couldn't believe this. They'd
gone in at precisely the spot where Arnold had been sitting (
sitting
- a leg short and he was sitting)
and after no more than twenty minutes they were into the heart of this thing.

   
Powys looked up towards the
sky, black and starless.

   
'Henry?' he said, 'is this you,
you old bugger?'

Fay moved among them, listening, but speaking to no one.

   
It was obvious by now that Col
Croston was not coming back to her. Perhaps, like Hereward, he'd gone to try
and find a way out of the square.

   
'We're not in a different time
zone,' Graham Jarrett was saying. 'It's not as simplistic as that. We're in
what you might call a timeless zone. A place where the past and present exist in
the same continuum.'

   
'What he was saying, about the
town centre,' Adam Ivory said. 'I think that's literally central to this
experience. The town centre's this kind of energy vortex . . .'

   
Fay moved on. They were creating
a dream within a dream, the way New Age people tended to do, moving around
scattering meaningless jargon, making themselves comfortable inside the
experience.

   
But Jean Wendle, the most
experienced of them all, was not here.

   
Or was she?

   
Fay moved around in the
darkness, almost floating, coming to sense the nearness of other bodies and the
emotions emanating from them: fear and exhilaration in equal quantities now. But
she doubled there was one of them who would not prefer this experience in
retrospect, returning to the square by daylight:

   
Yes, this was where it happened, just about here, yes, you can still
feel the essence of it, yes, it'll never be the same again for me, this place,
always be special, yes, it was like an initiation, becoming a part of this
town. And now I feel I can tap into it whenever I want to, and I can really work
here effectively now because I belong, because I've felt the Spirit of Crybbe.
   
Fay moved on. Through the radio world.

And now he was inside the Tump.

   
He'd been inside them before -
burial chambers, passage graves. It was suggested that many of the stone
dolmens cromlechs around the country had once been covered over, like
this, with earth.

   
The passageway was perhaps
three and a half feet wide, and was low, and he had to walk painfully bent
over. He directed the beam at the walls and the ceiling; the structure appeared
to be a series of cromlechs joined up, like vertebrae, wide slabs of grey-brown
stone overhead, a floor of close-packed earth.

   
He turned around, with
difficulty, and he couldn't see the entrance any more. He wasn't naturally
claustrophobic, but he shuddered briefly at the thought of the opening being
sealed behind him, great bucket-loads of earth dumped back and rubble from the
wall heaped across so that nobody would ever know there was a passageway, so
that he slowly suffocated in here and became one more well-preserved pile of
bones in forgotten Bronze Age burial chamber.

   
He stopped.

   
His chest tightened.

   
Gomer. Could he really trust
Gomer Parry?

   
So many old allegiances, never
spoken of, in Crybbe. And new ones, too. Could you ever know exactly who
belonged to whom?

   
Maybe he should have asked
Gomer to come with him, but he couldn't leave Mrs Seagrove outside on her own.

   
Look, don't think about it, OK.
Too much at stake to go back now. Concentrate on where you are, what it can
tell you.

   
Keep going . . .

   
It would probably be an actual
Bronze Age grave, although he doubted he was the first person since then to
enter this mound. You couldn't excavate a prehistoric burial chamber in under
an hour.

   
But was he the first to get
inside since Michael Wort?

   
Abruptly it ended.

   
Out of the passage and into the
chamber itself, wider, maybe eight feet in diameter, but not quite circular any
more. It was cold in here; the air smelled old and rank.

   
In the centre of the chamber
was a single flat stone.

   
On the stone was a wooden box.

   
Powys stopped at the entrance
to the chamber, put the lamp on the ground, stood blocking the entrance, head
bowed.

   
They didn't have boxes in the
Bronze Age, not carved oak boxes anyway, with iron bands
 
and locks.

   
He stood staring at the box in
the lamp's beam, and his breathing tightened. The box was about twelve inches
deep and eighteen inches square. It sang to him, and it sang of ancient evil.

   
Oh, come
on
. . .

   
He walked across the chamber to
the box, and found he couldn't touch it.

   
There is no evil, only degrees
of negativity.

   
Powys started to laugh, and then,
quite deliberately, he bent down and switched off the lamp.

   
What is this about?

   
Well, he couldn't see the box
any more, or the inside of the stone chamber; he could be anywhere, no visual
images, no impressions coming in now.

   
Just me. And it. This is a
real
fairy hill, and I'm in the middle
of it, and I've come here of my own free will and there's no Andy and no Jean
and I'm scared. I've put out the light to induce a state of fear, and the
nerve-ends are bristling with it and I'm ready.

   
I'm ready.

'Hereward?'
   
'Yes.'

   
'Thank God.'

   
'Why? Why are you thanking
God?'

   
'Because I thought ... I
thought you weren't going to come back. Hereward, I'm so desperately sorry. I
was only trying to get away. All I've ever wanted is to get away from here.'

   
'And you thought Guy Morrison
would take you away?'

   
'No . . . yes . . . Oh God, I
don't know what I thought, I was just so lonely and messed up. He - Guy - was
passing through, he wasn't part of Crybbe, he was going somewhere and I was
stuck fast. I was like someone just dashing outside and thumbing a lift. And he
stopped. I'm sorry, that's all mixed up, I'm not very clear tonight, not very
articulate.'

   
'Don't cry.'

   
'I'm sorry. I'm sorry about the
picture, too, but you don't know what pictures can do.'
   
'Oh, I do.'

   
'I'm not talking about
aesthetics.'
   
'I know.'
   
'Do you?'

   
'Pictures are doorways.'
   
'Yes.'

   
'Artists put elements of
themselves into pictures, and also elements of other things. The man in that
picture of Tessa's, he's her teacher, you know. He has a studio in the woods,
and she's been going down there and he's been teaching her how to paint. And
what to paint. How to make a picture into doorway.'