Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (64 page)

   
'OK, then, you can come. Need
any help?'

   
Arnold stood up very carefully,
shook himself and fell over. Stood up again, seemed to be grinning, like he
often did.

   
Before leaving the office she
forced herself, as she always did now, to look back from the doorway to the
fireplace, the mantelpiece with its testicular clock, the armchair where the
ghost of Grace Legge had materialized.

   
She tried to avoid this room
now, after dark.

   
She wished she could talk to
Joe Powys.

   
Preferably on the ground? Away
from any windows?

   
Don't be stupid.

   
She looked at the clock and saw
it was nearly nine and realized she was worried about Joe and had been for over
an hour; that was why she was sitting over the phone.

   
She'd never once worried about
Guy. Guy was always OK. In any difficult situation Guy would either find a way
out or simply walk away from it as if it had never happened to him. Whereas Joe
was vulnerable because, as anybody who'd read his book could deduce, he was a
professional believer. Present him with a crackpot theory and he'd make it
sound sensible - which was what made him so useful to Max Goff.

   
She hadn't heard from him since
he'd told her he was going to look for Andy Boulton-Trow.

   
Joe was like a child in a dark
bedroom where there's a monster in the wardrobe and a dwarf behind the
dressing-table and the lampshade is a human head on a string and every deep shadow
is alive, and he was out there now in a town full of deep, deep shadows.

         
JARRETT: 'Do you live in
a house?'

         
CATRIN: 'At the inn. We
all live at the inn. Me and my

         
         
sisters and my father. My father is the . . .'
         
JARRETT: 'The licensee? The
landlord?'
         
CATRIN (
contemptuously
): '
He'll
never be a lord.'
         
JARRETT: 'And what's the name of
the inn?'
         
CATRIN: 'The Bull. There's
another inn called the Lamb,

         
         
where Robert lived.'
         
JARRETT: 'Robert? Who is
Robert?'
         
CATRIN: 'My man. He's hanged
now. The Sheriff hanged

         
         
him.'

         
JARRETT: 'Jane, can I ask
you this? The Sheriff had
         
         
your.
. . Robert. . . hanged. And now he sleeps with
         
         
you?
Is that what you're saying?'

         
CATRIN (
laughing, tears on her face
): 'He
doesn't sleep
         
         
much!'

   
Guy was transfixed. Something
astonishing was happening
 
here. No way
had Catrin the imagination to conjure stuff like this.
   
Unless Jarrett had broken through the
inhibitions to a deeper layer of the girl . . . perhaps this was the
real
Catrin.

   
But what about all the Crybbe
references? Was it even conceivable that his production assistant was the
reincarnation of a woman who had lived in this same town in the reign of Elizabeth
I?

   
Guy didn't understand; he was
at a disadvantage; he hated that.

   
Approximately fifteen minutes
later he began to hate the situation even more. Jarrett had brought the
character, Jane, several years forward in an attempt to discover how long the Sheriff's
exploitation of her had continued, and the responses were becoming garbled.

         
CATRIN: 'But I am the
best of us all, he says, and he will
         
         
never
leave me, never . . . never. I'm stroking his
         
         
beard,
his hard, black beard. Never leave me . . .
         
         
never,
never, NEVER!'

         
JARRETT: 'Jane, please
listen . . .'

         
CATRIN: 'I'll come down .
. . I'll come down on you.'

   
Catrin began to giggle and to
roll her head again. She started to ignore Jarrett's questions. He looked vaguely
puzzled by this and left her alone to squirm about for a few minutes. Larry Ember
took the opportunity to change the tape and his camera battery.

   
Then Catrin blinked, as if
trying to focus on something, the giggling slowly drying up.

   
And her lips went into a pout.

         
CATRIN (
with a new authority
): 'Come here. I'm
cold.'

   
Her voice had changed again. It
was affected, now, and petulant. And very English.

         
CATRIN: 'Come on! For
Christ's sake, Guy!'

   
Guy froze. Larry looked up from
his viewfinder, the camera still rolling.

         
CATRIN: 'We are utterly
alone and likely to remain so for
         
         
two
whole, wonderful days. How long have you got?
         
         
Inches
and inches, if I'm any judge.'

   
A profound chill spread through
Guy.

         
CATRIN: 'There's a
bathroom directly facing you at the
         
         
end
of the passage.'

   
Catrin smiled. Guy thought he
was going to scream.

         
CATRIN: 'Don't be long,
will you?'

   
Guy Morrison strode erratically
into shot, dragging a wire, nearly bringing the light down.

   
'Fucking hell, Guy,' Larry
Ember yelled.

   
Guy ignored him, shook his shoe
out of the lamp wire, clutched at Graham Jarrett's cardigan. 'Wake her up. For Christ's
sake, man, wake her up!'

CHAPTER X

It was cold in the wood.
   
Still, he waited.
   
The words in his pocket, scribbled in
the pages of a pocket diary, kept appearing in his mind, as though the lines were
rippling across a computer screen.

                  
'Alle the nyte came strange noyses and lytes and
the dogges

         
howled in the yarde and when he vysyted me in myne chamber
he

         
apered lyke a clowde and a
         
yellow
cullor in the aire.'

   
By nine-thirty, the air was
singing with tension, as if great pylons were carrying buzzing, sizzling power
cables across the darkening sky.

   
Joe Powys was standing by the
new stone in the clearing, around the centre of the wood, a hundred yards or so
from Keeper's Cottage.

   
This stone, narrow, like a sharpened
bone, would be on the line from the Tump, through the Court to the church.

   
At either end of the clearing,
undergrowth had been hacked away to form the beginning of a track. Or to
reinstate an old one. He knew all about this track now. This was the legendary secret
passage between the Court and Crybbe church, along which Sir Michael Wort was
said to have escaped.

   
Like most legends, it was a literal
interpretation of something more complex.

   
Something suggested by the
notes he'd found in Keeper's Cottage, which had turned out to be a primitive
kind of schoolhouse.

   
Primitive in that there was no
electricity, only candles, and it was not very clean. It smelled of candles and
mould . . . and paint.

   
There was a mattress and a
duvet. Andy (or someone) had slept here. Like a monk might sleep in a little
whitewashed cell with no worldly possessions. Or a rich philanthropist might
feed the need to live like a squatter for a while to restructure his consciousness.

   
Or a modern man might have a
need, somehow, to shed centuries . . .

                  
'. . .
tolde me he would come at nyte in hys
spyryte, by the olde roade.'

   
These were Andy's own notes,
hand-written; Powys had discovered them in the only modern luxury item to be
found in Keeper's Cottage - absurdly, a black leather Filofax.

   
The Filofax had been kept in
what once might have been a bread-oven inside the stone open fireplace, which
suggested this hovel was rather older than it appeared from the outside.

   
Upstairs, Powys had found a
single room with a skylight, which appeared to be used as an artist's studio.
There was a table with brushes and palettes on it and coloured inks and a large
assortment of paints, oil and acrylic.

   
There was turpentine and linseed
oil and other dilutants in tightly corked medicine bottles. He uncorked one and
sniffed incautiously.

   
It was urine.

   
Another one looked like blood.
   
Eye of newt, he thought, toe of frog.
   
Christ.

   
This room, with its skylight,
was the only well-lit area of the house; all the windows in the sides of the
building were screened by dense conifers.

   
There was a work in progress on
an easel - a canvas under-painted in black and yellow-ochre. Shapes of
buildings and a figure.

   
He decided not to sniff the
painting.

   
There were two chairs up here,
just as there were two downstairs. Andy and a lover.
   
Or a pupil.

   
He didn't know quite why he
thought that. Maybe it was because someone else had been doing what he himself
was doing - copying out pages of material from the Filofax. In the bread-oven
had been a small pile of loose-leaf pages with writing on them in a different hand
- bold, big letters. A schoolboy hand. Or a schoolgirl. There was also a
paperback book on Elizabethan magic, with pages marked. He'd read one - and
immediately put the book into his pocket, to study later.

   
The Filofax had contained about
thirty loose-leaf pages of closely written notes, together with hand-drawn
plans and maps. Powys had sat down at the table with the artist's materials on
it, a rough-hewn item of rustic garden furniture. He'd copied everything out as
carefully as he could, including the maps and plans, some of which made sense,
some of which didn't.

   
He could have stolen the Filofax;
that would have been simpler.

   
But he suspected that what he
held here was something like what the old magicians called a
grimoire
, a book of magical secrets, a
Book of Shadows. It belonged only to one person. To anyone else - if you
believed in all this, which he was rather afraid he did - it could be as insidiously
dangerous as a radioactive isotope.

   
So what you did, you copied it
out.

   
He stopped copying at one
stage, his wrist aching, a distant siren sounding in his head like the
beginning of a migraine.
   
What the hell am I doing?
   
I mean, am I out of my mind?

   
He'd crossed again into the Old
Golden Land, where everything answered to its own peculiar and archaic logic.

   
So, by candlelight, he'd gone
on copying material from the Filofax into the blank pages of a slim blue book
of his own with photographs of stones and mounds in it and maps of Britain
networked with irregular thin black lines. Indented gold letters on the cover
spelled out.
The Ley-Hunter's Diary 1993
.
They sent him one every year; he carried it around, the way you did, but this
was the first time he'd ever actually written in one.