Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (85 page)

   
The radio bloke - at least this
outfit had had the good sense not to have Fay covering the meeting - was on his
feet and moving to the door.

   
'Just a minute,' Guy heard
Wiley say officiously. 'Where do you think you're goin'?'

   
'Look, I've got an urgent news
report to go down. Gavin Ashpole, Offa's Dyke Radio.'

   
'Well, you can 'ang on yere.
Studio won't be workin' if there's no power, is it?'

   
'Then I'll do it by phone. Do
you mind?'

   
'I'm not bein' offensive, sir,
but you might 'ave lifted somebody's wallet in there and be makin' off with the
proceeds.'

   
'Oh, for . . . Look, pal, I've
got an expensive tape recorder on the floor under the chairman's table. You can
hold it to for ransom if I don't come back. Now,
please.
'

   
'Lucky I recognizes your voice,
Mr Ashpole,' Wynford Wiley said genially, and Guy heard a bolt go back.

   
'Thanks.'

   
Guy heard the door grinding
open, but he didn't hear it close again. He didn't hear anything.

   
Had he been looking through the
viewfinder of a camera, it would have seemed at first like a smear on the lens.

   
Then it took shape, like a
sculpture of smoke, and a figure was standing in the central aisle between the
two blocks of chairs. It looked lost. It moved in short steps, almost
shuffling, like a Chaplinesque tramp in an old film, but in slow-motion. There
was a yellowish tinge to its ill-defined features. It was a man.

   
His nose was large and bulbous,
his eyes were pure white and he was moving down the aisle towards Guy Morrison.

   
Even without his razor, Guy
would have known him anywhere.

   
Guy screamed.

   
'No! Get away! Get back.'

   
Catrin gasped and moved sharply
away from him.

   
But ex -
very
-ex - Police Sergeant Handel Roberts continued to shuffle
onwards as if the room were not illegally overcrowded but empty apart from Guy
Morrison and himself.

   
'Jocasta!' Guy screamed.
"Look! It's him. It's him!'

   
Closing his eyes, throwing an
arm across his face, he plunged forward like someone making a desperate dash
through flames to the door of a blazing room.

   
There was a ghastly, tingling
moment, a damp and penetrating cold, and then he was on his knee, his head in
her lap, his hands clawing at her dress, mumbling incoherently into her thighs.
He began to sob. 'Oh God, Jocasta, it's . . .'

   
Jocasta Newsome didn't move.
When he opened his eyes he saw there were lights on in the room, but different
lights, fluorescent bars high on the walls. He looked up at her face and found
it harsh and grainy in the new light and frozen into an expression of ultimate
disdain.

   
'You filthy bastard,' the thin,
bearded man next to her said.

Moving like a train through the night, the track unrolling before you, a
ribbon of light, straight as a torch beam There are deep-green hills on either
side - deep green because they are dense with trees - and the silver snaking
river, all of this quite clearly visible, for they do not depend on sunlight or
moonlight but have their own inner luminescence.

   
There are no buildings in this
landscape, no farms or cottages or barns or stables or sheep-sheds, no cars, no
tractors, no gates, no fences, no hedges. In some places, the trees give way,
diminishing themselves, become not separate, definite organic entities but a
green wash, a watercolourist's view of trees. Then they fade into fields, but
with the spirit of the old woodland still colouring their aura.

   
It is a strange land at first,
but then not so strange, for what you see is the true essence of the
countryside you know. This is a country unviolated by Man.

   
This is the spirit landscape.

   
What you once presumed to call
the Old Golden Land.

   
And the unfurling ribbon of
light is what, over half a century earlier, your mentor Alfred Watkins had
presumed to call the Old Straight Track.

   
Alf. Alf Watkins, isn't it? You
here too?

   
No answer. He isn't here.
You're alone. Lying between two tall trees on top of the Tump in the heat, and
moving like fast train in the night.

   
Until, with no warning, the
track buckles in front of you and the night shatters into a thousand shards of
black glass.

'Remember me?

   
A whisper. Tumult in the hall.
Nobody else heard the whisper, dry as ash.
   
'Who's that?'

   
'Oh . . . don't reckernize the
voice, then, is it? Yeard it before, though, you 'ave.'
   
'Huh?'
   
'Crude.'
   
'What?'

   
'Lyrically . . . mor . . .
onic'
   
'What the . . . ?'

   
'An' musically . . . musically
inept.'
   
'Jeez, you must be . . .'

   
"Can't even remember my
fuckin' name, can you?'
   
'Listen, I'll talk to you later.
Tomorrow. Make an appointment.'

   
'You're a bloody old bag of
shit, you are.'
   
'Listen, I can understand . . .'

   
'Don't let the kid give up
sheep-shearing classes. That's what you said.'
   
'Yeah, but . . .'

   
'I knows 'ow to shear sheep,
already, though, see. What you do is . . .'

Gavin Ashpole was discovering that there was virtually nowhere quite as
dark as a tiny, windowless, unattended radio studio during a power cut.

   
Belonging as it did to Offa's
Dyke Radio, the Crybbe Unattended, unlike the town hall, did not have a
generator, the emergency lighting amounted to an old bicycle lamp which Fay
Morrison left on the table in the outer office. It took several minutes and a
lot of explicit cursing for Gavin Ashpole to find it.

   
He knew time must be getting on
as he sat down at the desk to transcribe his notes and scramble together a
voice-piece. A phone call confirmed it.

   
'Gavin! Where've you been, man?
You're on air in two minutes!'

   
'Huh?' Gavin aimed the bicycle
lamp at his watch. It said 9.28. Shit, shit, shit.

   
'Much of a story, is it, Gav?
We've left you a full two minutes, as instructed.'

   
'Sod all,' he said tersely.
'And you're getting it down the phone - the fucking power's off. Listen, James,
cut me back to one and shove it back down the bulletin. Bring me in around
10.35, OK?'

   
'Not sure we've got . . .'

   
'Just do it, eh? Take down the
link now, I'll keep it tight. OK, ready? There's been a hostile reception
tonight for billionaire businessman Max Goff at a packed public meeting to
discuss his plans for a so-called New Age mystical healing centre in the border
town of Crybbe . . . from where Gavin Ashpole now reports. Got that?'

   
Gavin hung up.

   
He had enough for one minute
with what he'd already written. He pulled off his tie, stretched out his legs,
switched off the lamp and waited for the studio to ring.

   
Sodding power cut. Maybe he
should have brought the radio car after all. He could have done an exclusive
interview with the famous Fay Morrison.

   
Stupid slag. She deserved
everything she was going to get. Everybody knew Max Goff was pretty
well-established in shirt lifting circles, but, unless you were seriously
suicidal, you didn't bring up this issue before about three hundred witnesses
including a couple of suits who looked like outriders from the Epidemic legal
department.

   
He should sue the pants off the
bitch.

   
pants off the bitch.

   
Aaaah!

   
Went through him like a red-hot
wire. He nearly took off.
   
Ssssstrewth!

   
He wanted her.

   
In truth, he wanted anybody,
but superbitch Fay Morrison was the one whose image was projected naked into
his lap with its legs wrapped around him in the dark.

   
Hot.

   
Stifling in here, warm air
jetting at him like a fan-heater.
   
Too fucking hot.

   
And who was there to notice,
anyway, if he took off his trousers?

   
The phone rang. 'Gavin, news
studio, can you hear this OK?'

   
Plugged into the news. . .
Major row erupted in the Commons tonight
when Welsh Nationalist MP Guto Evans challenged the Government's. . .'
Then
faded down, and James Barlow's voice in the earpiece. 'Gavin, we'll be coming
to you in about a minute and a half, and you've got fifty seconds, OK?'

   
'Yeah,' Gavin croaked. 'Yeah.'

The fluorescent bars were only secondary lighting, linked to what must
have been a small generator. The room was still only half-lit and the light
from the walls was blue and frigid.

   
Fay, unmoving at the rear of
the hall, knew that something had changed and the light was part of it; it
altered the whole ambience of the room and better reflected the feeling of the
night.

   
In that it was a cold,
unnatural light.

   
She couldn't understand, for a
moment, why so few people were taking in the ludicrous spectacle of her
ex-husband, the sometimes almost-famous TV personality, making such a prat of
himself over the appalling Jocasta Newsome.

   
Then she heard the silence.
Silence spreading like a stain down the hall, from the people at the front
who'd seen it first.

   
Fay looked and didn't believe,
her eyes hurrying back to stupid Guy - standing in the aisle now, dusting off
his trousers, mumbling, 'Sorry, sorry, must have tripped.'

   
Col Croston, up on the platform
next to Max Goff, didn't see it either, at first; Goff's back was turned to
him. 'Ah,' Col Croston was saying. 'Here we are. Lights. We can continue.
Splendid. Well, I think, if there are no more questions, we'll . . . Sorry?'

   
Max Goff's hand on his arm.

   
'You want to say something?
Sure. Fine. Go ahead.'

   
Fay was not aware that Goff had
actually asked the Colonel anything, but now the bulky man was coming slowly,
quite lazily, to his feel and opening his mouth as if to say something
monumentally significant. But there was no sign of the large, even, white teeth
which normally shone out when the smooth mat of red beard divided. A black hole
in the beard, Goff trying to shape a word, but managing only:

   
'Aw . . .'

   
And then out it all came.

   
He's being sick, said the
sensible part of Fay's mind. He's been eating tomato chutney and thick, rich
strawberry jam full of whole, ripe strawberries.

   
'Awk . . .'

   
A gob of it landed -
thopp -
on the blotter in front of Max
Goff.

   
In the front row, Hilary Ivory
exploded into hysterics and struggled to get out of her seat, something crimson
and warm having landed in her soft, white hair.

   
Fay saw that Max Goff had two
mouths, and one was in his neck.

   
He threw back his head with an
eruption of spouting blood, raised both white-suited arms far above his head -
like a last, proud act of worship. And then, overturning the table, he plunged
massively into the well of screams.

chapter viii

His own light was in his eyes.

   
'You know, Mr Powys,' Humble
said, 'Mr Trow was dead right about you.'