Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (20 page)

'Oh yeah,' Barry, the osteopath, said. 'Andy's right at the centre of
things. As was old Henry Kettle. I suppose you heard about that.'

   
'Just now,' Powys said. He
hadn't planned to mention Henry. 'I had a letter from his neighbour to say he was
dead. I don't know what happened, do you?'

   
'Have to wait for the
Hereford Times
for the full story, but
apparently it said on the local radio that his car went off the road and
ploughed into a wall around Crybbe Tump. I don't know that area too well, but .
. .'

   
'Crybbe Tump? He hit the wall
around Crybbe Tump?'

   
'Killed instantly. Bloody
shame, I liked old Henry. He helped you with the book, didn't he?'

   
Powys nodded.

   
'The buzz is,' said Barry, 'that
Henry was doing some dowsing for Max Goff.'

   
'Dowsing what?'

   
Barry shrugged. 'Whatever he'd
been doing, he was on his way home when it happened. There was a power cut at
the time, don't know whether the streetlamps were off, that may have thrown
him. Bloody shame.'

   
'A power cut,' said Powys.

   
That significant?'

   
'Just a thought.' Powys shook
his head, his mind whizzing off at a peculiar tangent, like a faulty firework

CHAPTER III

Fay awoke late. She'd lain awake until dawn, eyes open to the bedroom
ceiling, Arnold a lump of solid heat alongside her on the bed.
   
It was nearly nine before she came
downstairs. Outside it was raining. The rain on the window was the only sound.
There was no mail on the mat, no sign of the Canon.

   
The door to the office was
closed, as she'd left it last night. The note to her father still pinned to it.
And don't let any CATS in there!

   
Rasputin.
   
He must still be in the office.
   
She opened the door but did not go in.
   
'Rasputin,' she called. A morning
croak in her voice - that all it was. Really.

   
But she could not bring herself
to go back into that room, not yet, though Arnold didn't seem worried. She left
the door ajar, went through to the kitchen, let the dog out in the back garden.

   
When she turned back to the
kitchen, Rasputin and Pushkin were both in the opposite corner, waiting by
their bowls. Fay opened a can of Felix. The two cats looked plump and harmless.
Perhaps it really
had
been just a
horrific dream, conditioned by her own desperation.

   
She forked out a heap of cat
food, straightened up.

   
'Right,' she said decisively
and marched out of the kitchen and into the hall, where she tore the note off
the office door and hit the door with the flat of her hand so that it was
thrown wide.

   
She walked in, eyes sweeping
the room like searchlights. She saw the Revox, two spools leaning against it.
Her desk-diary open. Her father's note, about Guy's phone call. She raised her
eyes to the H-shaped fireplace and the mantelpiece, to the see-through clock
with the mechanism like a pair of bails still jerking obscenely from side to
side.

   
The fireside chair was empty,
its scatter cushions plumped out. If someone had been sitting in it the
cushions would have been flattened.

   
Unless, of course, that person
had tidily shaken them out and . . .

   
Oh, come on!

   
She made herself cross to the
mirror and look into it at her own face.

   
The first shock was the incredible
childlike fear she saw in her eyes.

   
The second was the other face.
She whirled around in alarm.
   
The Canon was standing in the doorway.
He wore pyjamas. His feet were bare. His hair was standing up in spikes, his beard
sprayed out in all directions, like a snowstorm. His bewildered blue eyes were
wide and unfocused.

   
He stared at Fay as if she were
an intruder. Then the eyes relaxed into recognition.

   
'Morning, Grace,' he said.

While Max drove, Rachel took the cassette box from shoulder bag.
   
'OK?'

   
'Go ahead,' Max said.

   
Rachel slipped the tape into
the player and studied the plastic box. The band's name was typed in capitals
across the plain label: FATAL ACCIDENT. She wrinkled her nose.

   
Drums and bass guitar blundered
out of the speakers. Rachel lowered the volume a little. By the time the first
track was over, they were parked at the back of the Court, next to the
stable-block, where builders were busy.

   
Rain slashed the windscreen.

   
Max turned up the sound to
compensate. He was smiling faintly. They sat in the Range Rover for two more
tracks. The only words Rachel could make out on the last one were 'goin' down
on me', repeated what seemed like a few dozen times. She consulted the inside
of the label; the song was called 'Goin' Down on Me'.

   
'That's the lot,' she said
neutrally. There're only three numbers.' Remembering where the Max Goff Story
had begun, in the punk-rock era of the mid-seventies, she didn't add 'thankfully'.

   
Max began to laugh.

   
Rachel ejected the tape, saying
nothing.

   
Jeez,' Max said. 'Was that
shit, or was that shit?'

   
Rachel breathed out. For a
couple of minutes there, watching him smiling, she'd thought he might actually
be enjoying it.

   
'You want me to post it down to
Tommy, get him to send it back in a fortnight with the customary slip?'

   
What. . . ?' Max twisted to
face her. 'You want us to give the official piss-off to Mayor Preece's flaming
grandson?'

   
'But if you tell him it's good
you'll have to do something with it, won't you?'

   
Max shrugged. 'So be it. One
single ... not on Epidemic, of course. Coupla grand written off against tax .

   
Then he thumped the top of the
dashboard. 'No, hey, listen, I'll tell you what we do - you send this kid a
letter saying we think the band has promise, we think it's a ... an interesting
sound, right? But we're not sure any of these three tracks is quite strong
enough to release as a debut single, so can we hear a few more? That'll buy
some time - maybe the band'll split before they can get the material together.
How's that sound to you?'

   
'It sounds devious,' Rachel
said.

   
'Of course it does, Rach. Do it
tonight. I mean, shit, don't get me wrong - they're no worse than say, The
Damned, in '77. But it was fresh then, iconoclastic.'

   
'It was shit then, too.'

   
'Yeah, maybe,' Max conceded.
'But it was necessary. It blew away the sterile pretensions from when the
seventies went bad. But now we're picking up from the sixties and we won't make
the same mistakes.'

   
'No,' Rachel said, in neutral
again.

   
A heavy tipper-lorry crunched
in beside them. The rain had washed a layer of thick, grey dust from the door
of the cab and Rachel could make out the words '. . . aendy Quarry, New Radnor.'

   
'Hey . . .' Max said slowly.
'If this is what I think it is . . .'
He threw his door open, stepped down into the rain in his white suit and was
back inside a minute, excited, raindrops twinkling in his beard.

   
'It
is
, Rach. The first stones have arrived. The Old Stones of Crybbe,
Mark Two.'

   
'Oh,' said Rachel, pulling up
the collar of her Barbour for the run to the stables. 'Good.'

   
But Goff, Panama hat jammed
over his ears, made her watch while the stones were unloaded, pointing out
things.

   
'Different sizes, right? Even where
they'd vanished entirely, Kettle was able to figure out how tall they'd been.'

   
'Using his pendulum, I
suppose.'

   
'Of course, what we're seeing
here gives an exaggerated idea of what they'll look like
in situ
. Half of the length'll be under the soil. Maybe more than
half. Like giant acupuncture needle in the earth.'

   
'Who's going to advise you
about these things now Mr Kettle's dead?' Rachel wondered, as men in donkey
jackets and orange slickers moved around, making preparations to get the grey
and glistening monoliths down from the truck. One stone had to be at least
fifteen feet long.

   
'And how do you know it's the
right kind of stone?' Things were moving too fast for Rachel now. Max was an
awesome phenomenon when he had the hots for something.

   
'Yeah, well, obviously, Kettle
was good - and he knew the terrain. But Andy Boulton-Trow's been studying
standing stones for nearly twenty years. Been working with a geologist these
past few weeks, matching samples. They checked out maybe a dozen quarries before
he was satisfied, and if he's satisfied, I'm satisfied.'

   
A clang came from the back of
the truck, a gasp of hydraulics, somebody swore. Max called out sharply, 'Hey,
listen, be careful, yeah? I want you guys to handle those stones like you're
dealing with radioactive flaming isotopes.'

   
He said to Rachel, 'Andy's
moving up here, end of the week. He's gonna supervise planting stones on our
land. Then we'll bring the farmers up here, show 'em what it looks like and go
into negotiations. Hey, you had a call from J. M. Powys yet?'

   
'He'll only have got my letter
this morning. Max.'

   
'Give him until lunchtime then
call him. I want Powys. I don't care what he costs.'

The customer was short and fat and bald. He wore denims, a shaggy beard
and an ear-ring.
   
'You're J. M. Powys, right?'

   
Teacher, Powys thought. Or
maybe the maverick in some local government planning department.

   
'You are, man. Don't deny it. I
recognize you from the picture on the cover. You've gone grey, that's all.'

   
Powys spread his arms submissively.

   
'Hey listen, man, that was a
hell of a book.
The Old Golden Land.'

   
'Thanks,' Powys said.

   
'So what are you doing here,
running a shop? Why aren't you writing more? Got to be ten years since
Golden Land.'

   
'Even longer,' Powys said.
'More like twelve.'

   
You could count on at least one
of these a week, more in summer. Sometimes they were women. Sometimes, in the
early days of the Watkins Centre, friendships had developed from such
encounters.
The Old Golden Land
had
hit the market at the right time, the time of the great mass exodus from the
cities, couples in their thirties in search of meaning and purpose.

   
People were very kind when they
found out who he was. Usually they bought something from the shop, often a
paperback of the book for him to sign. Most times he felt guilty, guilty that
he hadn't followed through; guilty that he'd written the thing in the first
place and misled everybody.

   
'I did that one that takes a
new look at Watkins's original leys,' he offered, a bit pathetically.
'Backtrack.'

   
The bald, bearded guy waved it
way. 'Disappointing, if you don't mind me saying so, J.M. No magic.'

   
'Wasn't really meant to be
magical.' Powys said. 'The idea was just to walk the leys and see if they were
as obvious now as when Watkins discovered them.'

   
'Yeah, and you found some of
them to be distinctly dodgy. That's not what we want, is it?'

   
Powys laughed.

   
'Well, it's not, is it? People
pouring scorn on the whole idea, your archaeologists and so on, and here's J.
M. Powys defecting to the Establishment viewpoint.'