Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (103 page)

         
Hell also was what Fay
felt
like.

         
Her lips were like parchment and when
she tried to wet them she found her tongue was a lump of asbestos.

         
Michael, she wanted to say. It's
Michael Wort.

         
But she couldn't even make it to a
croak

         
Her eyes found the centre of the
square, where the Being of Light was formed, pulsing with vibrant, liquid life
energy, platinum-white.

         
Pulsing with energy, all right - their
energy - but it was the very darkest thing she had ever seen in all of her
life.

         
Andy Boulton-Trow, a tall, bearded
man, just an ordinary man -
once
-
had been fitted for a black halo; it shimmered around him like the sun in a
monochrome photo negative.

         
The halo was the shadow of Black
Michael. There were pinpoints of it in Trow's eyes which had flicked open and
were looking steadily, curiously into hers.

         
She put all the strength she had into
squeezing her dad's hand. It felt as cold as her own.

         
Trow did not move, his gaze like black
velvet. Playing with her.

         
Who are you? the eyes were asking.
Have we met?

         
The complete, charismatic, black
evangelist.

         
Somehow, Fay had milked a little
strength from her poor father, enough to observe and to make simple deductions.

         
You've
had us all going around your Bottle Stone, haven't you? Children of the New
Age. Follow anybody, won't they? Look at them now. Look at the Jopson woman,
led by the ring in her nose and then - gentle tweak - you tear through her
flesh, and she doesn't know or care. Look at bloody Guy - show him his own
reflection in a mirror shaped like a TV screen and watch him slash his wrists.
Look at Graham Jarrett, away in the ultimate hypnotic trance, lost his toupee
and his nose needs wiping. Look at them. Look at what you've
done.

Arteriosclerotic
dementia.

         
You have good days. Sometimes you have
two or three good days together and you realize what a hopeless old bugger you
were the other day when the lift failed to make it to the penthouse.

         
And then, one night, along comes a
very cunning lady with an amorphous Chinese blob on a lead (which, as you
thought, does not exist, but why else would she be trailing a lead?) And all
the time you're with her, you're fine, you're wonderful, you're on top of the
situation.

         
Until it becomes apparent that the
lady is a prominent member of the Opposition, planning a startling little
coup
in this dead-end backwater where
surely nothing that happens can be of any significance in the Great Scheme of
Things.

         
But old habits die hard. Once a priest
. . .

         
Yes, all right, Guv, I confess, I've
never exactly been up there with Mother Theresa and Pope John the Twenty-third.
I've cut a few corners. I've coveted my neighbour's wife. OK, several wives of
several neighbours, and it wouldn't be half so bad if it had only stopped at
the coveting stage. I was weak. I used to think it was OK, as long as you left
the choirboys alone, but I was never attracted to choirboys, anyway, obnoxious
little sods.

         
Here, Boss, scrap of prayer for you,
this'll bring back a few memories.

         
Oh
God, merciful Father, that despisest not the sighing of a contrite heart . . .

         
Got the message? I'm
sorry . . .
I really am sorry.

         
Listen, I know about the Sins of the
Fathers. I know all about that.

         
But not Fay, please - look at her;
what has she ever done to you?

         
Thing is - look, don't take this the
wrong way, but no God of mine ever took it out on the kids. That's more
his
god's style. Can you see him there?
He represents everything you're supposed to abhor. And he's winning, damn it,
the bastard's winning!

         
OK, here's another bit, how much do
you want, for Christ's sake? Listen, this . . . this is the essence of it.

         
Lighten
our darkness, we beseech Thee, O Lord, and by Thy great mercy defend us from
all perils and dangers of this night . . .

         
Lighten our darkness, geddit?

         
Come on, Guv'nor . . . we had a
deal . . .

The stone
actually broke. Cracked in two.

         
Split off a couple of feet from the
base just as Gomer was getting underneath. Raised the shovel to ground level to
have another go and gave it a bit of a clonk, accidental-like, and off it came
like a thumb in a bacon-slicer. Gomer backed up, smartish, but luckily the big
bugger fell the other way, straight flat across the road. Whump!

         
'Teach me to rush ihe job, Minnie.
'Ang on to your, er . . .hat.'

         
Slipping down to low gear he drove
right over the thing. Bit of a bump, but not much worse than one of them ramps
they call a sleeping policeman.

         
'A big fat sleeping policeman.' Gomer
burst out laughing. 'Call it Wynford Wiley.'

         
There were big, fat tyre-marks across
the middle of the stone. Gomer accelerated past Keeper's Cottage with a
disparaging sideways glance. That could do with knocking down, too.

There was
the merest tremor in Trow's gaze; enough for her to pull her eyes away. Turned
to her father and found that Hilary Ivory on the other side, had also turned
her face, with faint confusion, towards the old man in the Kate Bush T-shirt.

         
Alex tried to smile. He couldn't
speak.

         
Hilary looked at Fay, her eyes
troubled. She didn't understand. The first step to recovery - the moment when,
quite suddenly, you don't understand.

         
But Alex's hands were warm.

         
Dad?

         
A deep warmth seeped into Fay's right
hand and rippled up her arm and into her breast. She could feel her heart
drumming.
         
Alex's eyes were vibrantly blue.
They made the fire in the sky look cheap and lurid. He turned his head towards
Hilary lvory and she started to smile, like people smile when they're coming
out of anaesthetic.

         
Alex's hand tightened around Fay's.
         
Fay grinned.

         
'You old bugger,' she said, quite
easily.

         
On the other side, Larry Ember,
recipient of the warmth from her own left hand, demanded gruffly, 'What the
bleedin' hell's this?'

         
Alex's lips were white. Almost as
white as the beard around them. First they tried to smile, then they were
trying to shape a word.

         
'C . . .'

         
His hands hot now, but his lips were
white.
         
'Dad?'

         
Fay squeezed his hand, almost too hot
to hold.

         
She felt strong enough to risk a
glance to the centre of the square where Trow was no longer still, but moving
within his own darkness. Squirming.

         
Trow screamed once,

         
'Michael!'

         
The cello grotesquely off-key.
         
Alex found his word.

         
'Colonel?' he said mildly, and the
piercing blue faded from his eyes; clouds were in them now. He dropped Hilary's
hand, held on to Fay's for an extra moment and then let that go too.

         
There was a gap now between Fay and
her dad, a clear gap in the circle, and the backcloth, the screen of false
reality, was torn away and the flames in the sky were no longer phantasmal but
a source of savage heat and acrid fumes.

         
'Now.' Col Croston's crisp voice, and
the Crybbe hordes poured through the gap, bearing their flaming torches,
farmers in tweed trousers and sleeveless body-warmers over their vests, Bill
Davies, incongruously clad in his butcher's apron, Wynford Wiley ludicrously
wielding his truncheon. Faces she'd seen on the streets -
 
'Ow're you, 'ow're you' - now hard with
determination below the blazing brands. The circle in disarray.
         
Lights appearing in windows.
From somewhere in the innards of the Cock, the sound of a generator starting
up.

         
Col Croston, bringing up the rear,
scanning the square.

         
'Over there! That's the man. The
Sheriff! Don't let him . . .'

         
The Sheriff?

         
'Right!' Fav was screaming. 'The
Sheriff! He's in the cen . . .'

         
But she couldn't, in fact, see the man
they were looking for. Andy Boulton-Trow had gone from the square.
         
He's taken his darkness back
into the night.
         
'Larry! Camera!'

         
Guy was in a mess. He'd lost his
jacket, lost his cool, lost his hair. 'Larry, we have to get this . . .'

         
'Piss off, Guy,' Larry Ember shouted happily,
from somewhere.

         
Fay found she was giggling. Hysterics.
Absurd.
         
'Dad?'

         
Alex managed a smile.

         
'Dad . . . We did it!
You
did it.'

         
Alex touched her arm, stumbled. Sat
down quietly on the cobbles. Fay went down beside him, taking his hand.

         
Which was not so hot any more, not
very hot at all. The blue in his eyes had drifted away. Far away. Gently and
discreetly, Alex slid over on to his side. He was breading. Just. Hilary Ivory
crouched down next to Fay. 'Is he OK? I used be a . . . a nurse . . . Well,
sort of alternative nurse, really.'

         
Fay didn't reply. She pulled off her
cotton top, rolled it into a ball, slid it between Alex's head and the cobbles.
         
'Dad?' Softly.

         
Fairly sure he couldn't hear her.

         
She picked up his hand; very little
warmth remained. Alex's lips moved and she put an ear to his mouth. One word
came out intact.

         
'Deal,' he said.

         
Alex's breathing ended almost
imperceptibly.
         
Fay sat for a long time on the
cobbles holding her father's cooling hand under the hot red sky.

CHAPTER II

A single
candle burned in the attic at Crybbe Court. It was two inches thick and sat in
a blackened pewter candle-holder with a tray, laid on the topmost stone step.
It was a tallow candle and it stank; it filled the roofspace with a pungent
organic stench; it reeked, somehow, of death.
         
Or perhaps this was because of
the wan and waxy aura it gave to the rope.

         
The old, frayed rope which had hung
from the central joist in the attic was gone. Its replacement was probably just
as old, but was oily and strong. An inch thick, it dangled four feet from the
apex of the roof, and at the end was a noose, a very traditional hangman's
noose secured with ten rings of rope. It was into this noose that Andy
Boulton-Trow fitted his head.

         
He had, it would emerge, studied
hanging.

         
The original short-drop method, with
the rope only a few feet long and the condemned person's feet almost touching
the ground, resulted in a rather prolonged death by slow strangulation. Whereas
the long-drop system, introduced in Britain in the late nineteenth century, by
which the subject fell about ten feet, perhaps through a trapdoor, brought
about a swifter and more merciful death by fracturing neck vertebrae. In the
sixteenth century, it appeared. Sir Michael Wort had experimented with both
techniques and others besides.