Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (107 page)

Joe Powys
froze.

         
Jean Wendle was leaning against the
cottage wall. She was wearing a pink velour tracksuit, She looked elegant and
relaxed.

         
Two police cars went rapidly past,
followed by a fire-engine.

         
Joe froze, and Fay sensed it wasn't
because of the police cars, not this time.

         
'But quite wrong,' said Jean. 'And you
know it.'
         
He didn't say anything.

         
'Michael Wort,' said Jean, 'had one of
the finest of the Renaissance minds. Scientist, philosopher . . . these terms
simply cannot encompass Michael's abilities. We no longer like to use words
like magus, but that's what he was, and the reason he isn't as famous as
Francis Bacon and Giordano Bruno and even - God forbid - John Dee . . . is that
he realized the futility of books and so never wrote any. And also, of course,
he lived not in Florence or Rome, or even London. But in Crybbe.'

         
Fay could see Joe trying to say
something, trying to frame words.

         
'If he never wrote anything,' he said,
'how do you know he was so great?'

         
'Because,' said Jean, 'like all great
teachers, he passed on his knowledge through training and through experience.'

         
Another police car went past, followed
by another fire-engine.

         
'There's a Michael Wort tradition,'
Jean said. 'It began with his own family, and then was passed to selected
scholars.'
         
'What kind of tradition?'

         
'Fascinating stuff,' Jean said. 'All
to do with the spirit landscape, and the interpenetration of planes. Knowledge
we are only now beginning to approach.'

         
'They called him Black Michael,' Fay
said.

         
'As they would. In Crybbe.'

         
'He hanged people.'

         
'He studied death, and he utilized his
period as high sheriff to pursue that study. That was all.'

         
How bizarre. Fay thought. All hell
breaking loose up in the town and here we are, three uncommitted observers from
Off, calmly discussing the background as if it's a piece of theatre.

         
'Knowledge,' said Jean, 'isn't evil.'

         
'And what about what happened on the
square? What about the killing of Max Goff? What about . . . ?'

         
'You know, as I do, my dear, that
there are some very misguided and unbalanced people in Crybbe, and there always
have been. People Michael was trying to help.'

         
'I didn't know,' Fay said, 'that you
knew so much about Michael Wort.'

         
'You didn't ask,' said Jean. Her short
grey hair shone like a helmet in the street light.

         
'Fay . . .' Joe said.

         
'Joe's trying to tell you to come
away,' Jean said. 'He doesn't want to end what he began.'
         
'Which is?'

         
'The Bottle Stone,' Jean said gently.
'Come and see the Bottle Stone.'

         
'No!' Joe backed away.

         
'He blames it for everything,' Jean
said. 'For all his problems, all his failed relationships. The deaths of his
women.'

         
'Fay.' Joe sounded suddenly alarmed.
'I don't know what she's doing, but don't fall for it. I meant to tell you.
Jean and Andy are in this together. She sent me up to the Tump tonight, she set
me up for Humble . . .'

         
'Did he tell you,' said Jean, 'how the
Bottle Stone followed him here?'

         
'Yes,' Fay said, her throat suddenly
quite dry. 'He told me that.'

         
'Come and see the Bottle Stone, Fay.
Come on.'
         
'Fay.'

         
'Come along,' said Jean.

         
She rose from the wall and picked her
way carefully to the gate of the cottage. 'Come on.'

         
Fay glanced at Joe. 'Don't,' he said
quietly. 'Please.'
         
I
meant
to tell you.

         
She turned and followed Jean Wendle.

         
They went around the side of the
cottage and across the damp lawn to the piece of land at the rear. Jean had
produced a small torch and they followed its thin beam. Fay could hear the
river idly fumbling at its banks.
         
Jean
stopped. She directed the beam a short way across the grass until it found the
thick, grey base of a standing stone. Then Jean casually flipped the torch up
so that they could see the top of the stone.

         
'It doesnae look awfully like a bottle,
does it?' Jean said.

         
The stone appeared no more than three
and half feet tall. It was fairly wide, but slim, like a blade.

         
Fay said, 'It doesn't look
anything
like a bottle.'

Andy
Boulton-Trow lay on his back, holding the head above him with both hands. The
hands didn't ache now.

         
'Michael,' he said, 'forgive me. It
was a shambles. I was using weak, stupid people. I failed you.'

         
In the doorway, the candle was burning
very low. He'd thought he could hear sirens a while back. He couldn't hear
anything now.

         
Joe Powys hadn't rung for an
ambulance.

         
Joe Powys had lied.

CHAPTER V

'One
more, I make it,' Gomer said, a short trail of recumbent stones in his
destructive wake. 'Then that's the lot.'

         
'You know, Gomer,' Minnie Seagrove
said, sitting quite placidly next to him in the cab, the three-legged dog on
her lap. 'You've surprised me tonight.'

         
'Surprised myself,' Gomer said
gruffly. 'I'll be very surprised if I collect a penny for all this.'

         
'No, what I mean is . . . Well, I'd
come to the conclusion - and I'm sorry if this sounds insulting - I'd come to
the conclusion that there weren't any really decent men in Crybbe. Like, men we
used to say would do anything for you. Nothing too much trouble, sort of thing
. . . if it was the right thing.'

         
'Done a few bloody wrong things
tonight, Minnie, my love,'
         
Gomer said, plunging the digger
halfway down the riverbank. 'That's for certain.'

         
'No they weren't. They weren't wrong
things at all. You've saved me from being arrested for murder, you're working
overtime at a minute's notice to help that poor old chap who looks like he's on
his last legs. And you've been no end of help to
young Joe . . .'

         
Gomer ploughed through an
unstable-looking fence and up into the field that served as a narrow
flood-plain for the river.

         
'I got no regrets about gettin' you
out of a bit o' bother,' he said. 'An' I'd stand up in court an' say so. But
that Joe - well, I'd like to think that young feller'll keep 'is mouth shut,
see, that's all. You know much about 'im?'

         
'Not a lot,' said Minnie. 'But I'm
sure he's all right.'

'It's
rather sad, really,' Jean said. 'They're all bottle stones to Joe.'

         
Fay started to feel faint. To pull
herself together, she said - screamed it out inside her head, like biting on
something hard, to fight extreme pain,
         
MY FATHER IS DEAD.

         
And wondered if Jean knew about that
yet. Jean who'd given him a new lease of life. Which he'd expended in whst
appeared at this moment to be a distressingly futile way.

         
Fay felt sick.

         
'I don't know precisely what
happened,' Jean was saying. 'Over this girl of Joe's, Rose, I mean. Whether it
was an accident or suicide or . . .'

         
'Murder,' Fay said.

         
Jean put a hand on Fay's arm. Look, my
dear, it's over. It's all in the past. Whatever happened, there's nothing we
can change now. Nobody we can bring back to life.'

         
'No,' Fay said numbly.

         
Something white in places caught her
eye, over to the right of the Bottle Stone. Joe Powys's muddy T-shirt. He was
standing on the other side if the perimeter wall, watching them silently, like
an abandoned scarecrow.

         
'About Andy,' Jean said. 'Andy's not a
bad boy. A little wild, perhaps, in his younger days, a little headstrong. His
lineage is not a direct one to Michael, but he developed a very strong interest
in the Tradition from his early teens. And, give him his due. he didn't deviate
in his resolve to discover things for himself.'

         
'And the Bottle Stone ritual?'

         
'Exists not at all,' said Jean sadly,
'outside the head of J. M. Powys."

         
'He showed me the field," Fay
said. 'Where it happened.'
         
'And was there a Bottle Stone
there? And a fairy mound? With a fairy on it?'

         
'What about Henry Kettle? He was there
too. There was nothing wrong with Henry Kettle.'

         
'Oh? Henry told you, did he? He said
he was there?'
         
A police car howled a long way
away.
         
'No,' Fay said bleakly.
         
'Oh, my dear . . .'

         
Fay was bent over, gripping her thighs
with both hands. She felt a stabbing stomach-cramp coming on.
         
'Oh God,' she breathed. 'Oh
God.'

And as
Andy's breathing, shallow as it was, began to regulate, he looked into the dark
sockets and saw within them pinpricks of distant light.

         
He watched the lights as they came
closer - or, rather, as he moved closer to
them
,
his consciousness was focused and drawn into the sockets, now as wide as
caverns.

         
He felt the familiar tug at the base
of his spine, and never before had it felt so good, so strong, so positive, so
indicative of freedom. For, while imprisoned within his twisted body, Andy
could no longer feel anything at all at the base of his spine.

         
When it happened - and he'd been far
from certain that it would under such conditions - there was an enormous burst
of raw energy (O Michael! O Mother!) and he was out of his body and soaring
towards the lights.

'It's a
shame about Crybbe,' Jean said. 'But it's no different in any of these places.
You ask the ordinary man in the street in Glastonbury how he feels about the
Holy Grail. How many miracles he's seen. They're not the least bit interested
and indeed often quite antagonistic'

         
Looking beyond the stone. Fay could no
longer see Joe. Perhaps he'd crept away.

         
'So you can imagine how they reacted
in Crybbe,' Jean went on. 'A place so remote and yet so conducive to psychic
activity. Can one blame the peasantry? I don't know. The knowledge has always
been for the Few. Not everyone has the spiritual metabolism to absorb it. Not
everyone has the will to see through the dark barriers to the light.'

         
All at once, as if to illustrate
Jean's point, the stone which bore no resemblance at all to a bottle was lit up
from its grassy base to its sharp, fanglike tip.

         
'Goodness,' Jean said. 'Whatever's
that?'
         
Beyond the stone, there was a
kind of parapet overlooking the river and to one side, dropping down to the
flood-plain, a narrow, muddy track, its entire width now taken up by a
crawling, grunting monster with it single bright eye focused on the stone.

         
Fay saw a wiry figure leap from the
creature and advance upon the stone. Jean flashed her torch at it and the light
was reflected in a pair of old-fashioned wire-rimmed National Health glasses.