Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (93 page)

   
Even tried to listen to the
music..
   
Going
up that hill . . . make a deal with God.
   
Alex was going down the hill, towards
the river.
   
He stood on the bridge and stared down
at the dark water.
   
'Rather funny, really,' he mused aloud
to the river. 'Thought I was dead. Can you believe that?'

   
Always been able to talk to rivers.
Sometimes they even burbled back. Not this one, this being a Crybbe river.

   
'Must have gone out for a
breath of air, wound up in the sodding boneyard, mooning over old Grace's plot.
Went for a Jimmy in the woods, came back and could've sworn I found my own
body. No - honest to God -I remember tripping over something, about to fall flat
on my face and it broke the fall. It wore a dog-collar. And there was blood.
Got it on my hands. Fell awfully sticky

   
'Jolly convincing, really.'

   
Alex rubbed his hands together
and they felt strangely stiff. He held them out and couldn't see them at all.

   
You're an old humbug, Alex, who
was it said that? Not Grace, not Fay, not . . .

   
Wendy!

   
How could he have forgotten
Wendy so soon. Only left her house . . . when? Was it tonight? Or was it last
night? Or was it last week?

   
She said something like, Go
back out there and you might start losing your marbles again. But you've got to
do it, Alex. Got to go back.

   
Why?
Why
had he got to go back?

   
Because Wendy knows best, Wendy
has cool hands.

   
Actually, he thought suddenly,
for the first time, they're quite
cold
hands. And they all think they know best, don't they? The doctors, your
relatives.

   
Suddenly Alex felt quite angry.

   
You start to lose your mind and
everybody wants a bit. Even if you could get it back, it wouldn't be worth
having. Shop-soiled. Messed about.

   
He said a civil goodnight to
the river and began to walk back up the hill towards the square.

   
Deal with God. Why, after sixty
years looking after His best interests, doesn't the bugger ever want to talk
business with
me
?

   
The street had been quiet when
he was walking down to the river; now he could hear people moving about, up
over the brow of the hill, around the square.

   
Alex came to a house with a
paraffin lamp burning in the window. He stopped and held up his hands.

   
They were covered with dried
blood.

   
'Oh Lord,' Alex said, and it
didn't start out as a prayer.

Frightened?

   
Well, how could you not be? But
it was no bad thing, most of the time. The worst thing was a belief that you
were in some way protected if you did what somebody else said was right. Like
walking into the Humble situation because Jean Wendle had told him he needed to
go back to the source.

   
But he always did what he was
told. Max Goff:
There's a place for you
here - think about it.

   
Andy Boulton-Trow:
I think Joe ought to present himself to the
Earth Spirit in the time-honoured fashion.

   
I mean go round the Bottle Stone. Thirteen times.

   
Even dear old Henry Kettle:
My house is to be left to you.
Consider it as a token of my confidence.

   
Sod them all. But then he
thought about Fay, with her rainbow eye.

   
'No,' he told Minnie Seagrove. 'I'm
not frightened.'
   
And it's too dark to see me shaking.

He was scared, for instance, to set foot on the Tump; even Humble had
said you couldn't always trust your reactions up there.

   
So they'd stay on the ground
and, where possible, outside the wall.

   
He'd briefly considered taking
Humble's crossbow. But he didn't know how to work it, and this was no time to
learn.

   
That was another problem: what
was he going to do about Humble? There was no way this one could be suicide or
an accident. And while the police would never suspect Minnie Seagrove, they'd
be hauling Joe Powys in within half an hour of the body being found. Minnie
would, of course, explain the circumstances, but circumstances like these would
sound more than a little suspect in court.

   
They began to walk around the
perimeter of the Tump towards the light.

   
'Quietly,' Powys said. 'And
slowly.'

   
The dog wasn't barking any
more. If Andy had done anything to Arnold, he'd kill him.

   
OK, I'm full of shit, but I'm
not going to obey instructions any more, not from you, not from Goff. And
especially not from Jean.

   
Jean, of course - it made appalling
sense - was not protecting him, she was protecting Andy, and Andy, typically,
had wanted him to know that before he died.

   
Humble had said,
I'm empowered to answer just one of your
questions . . . I'll tell you the answer, shall I? Then you can work out the
question at your leisure. The answer is - you ready? - the answer is. . . HIS
MOTHER.

   
He would trace the Wort family
tree later, if he ever got out of this. Meanwhile, it had a dispiriting logic,
and it cleared up a few questions about Jean that he'd never even thought to ask.
The idea of an experienced barrister giving it all up to act as the unpaid,
earthly intermediary for Dr Chi had never sounded too likely. Jean's professional
life had been built on ambition, power and manipulation: dark magic.

   
But she's
cured
people. That can't be dark magic. What about Fay's dad?

   
Oh, Jesus.

   
'What's wrong?' Mrs Seagrove
whispered.

Fay had started pulling at Jimmy Preece's clothing and slapping at his
face and screaming at him through the smoke. 'Please, Mr Preece, please,
you can't be
. . .'

   
Just a sign of life, anything,
a blink, a twitch. Where do you keep a pulse in a neck like an old, worn-out
concertina?
   
'Mr Preece!'

   
She pulled him down from the
font and he collapsed onto her, dead-weight, and she had to let him slide to
the floor, managing to get both hands under his head before it hit the stone.
But she could do no more because the appallingly blackened, smoke-shrouded scarecrow
thing was dancing down the aisle, its clothes smouldering and its eyes, all too
alight. Her own eyes weeping with the smoke, with pity for Jimmy Preece and
with fear for herself, she ran through the porch and began now to wrestle with
the bolts, throwing herself, coughing and sobbing against the doors.

   
When she was out, she didn't
look back, but she carried inside her head the image of the blackened monster
and the scorched smell of him, knowing that if she stopped to breathe, he would
be on her.

   
She ran gasping through the
churchyard and out of the lychgate, her lungs feeling like burst balloons, the
bells crashing around her like bombs. She could hear voices in the square and she
ran towards them, eyes straining, looking for lights.

   
But the nearer she got to the
square and the louder the voices became, the darker it got, as if there was not
only night to contend with, but fog. She thought at first it was her eyes, damaged
by the smoke, but quite soon the bells stopped and Fay began to realize there was
something about the square that was unaccountably wrong.

CHAPTER XIV

First off, anybody got a torch? Yes? No?'
   
The bells had stopped, and the silence
ought to have glistened, Col Croston thought, but it didn't. The silence after
the bells was the ominous silence you could hear when the phone rang and you
picked it up and there was apparently nobody on the other end but you knew there
was.
   
It was too dark to see who was with
him on the square, but he could guess. Or rather, he could guess who was not on
the square i.e. anybody born and bred within the precincts of the ancient town
of Crybbe.

   
Graham Jarrett said, 'A torch
is not normally considered essential for a public meeting, even in Crybbe.
Besides, even when the power's off it's not usually as dark as this.'
   
'No. Quite.'

   
The town-hall doors had been
slammed and barred behind the last of them and then, minutes later, Col had
watched as they were opened again, just briefly, and a bloated figure had emerged,
stood grotesquely silhouetted between two men and then tumbled without a word down
the six steps to the pavement.

   
The late Max Goff had rejoined
his New Age community, we'll let him lie where he fell; somebody would have to
explain this to the police and he didn't see why it had to be him.

   
Around the square, tiny jewels
of light appeared, people striking matches. But almost as soon as a match was
struck it seemed to go out, as if there was a fierce wind. Which there wasn't.
Not any kind of wind.

   
There weren't even any lamps
alight in the windows of the town houses tonight.

   
'OK, listen,' Col shouted. 'We
need some lights. Anybody with a house near here, would they please go home and
bring whatever torches or lamps or even candles they can find. I also need a
telephone. Who lives closest?'

   
'We have a flat,' Hilary Ivory
said. 'Over the Crybbe Pottery.'

   
Hereward Newsome said, 'There's
a phone in the gallery, that'd probably be quickest.'

   
Good. I'll come with you. Stay
where you are and keep talking, so I can find you. Mrs Ivory, if you could find
your way to your flat and bring out any torches et cetera.'

   
'I don't think we have torches,
as such. When the electricity goes out we use this rather interesting
reproduction Etruscan oil lamp. Would that do?'

   
I'm sure it looks most attractive,
but one of those heavy duty motoring lanterns with a light each end might be a little
more practical.'

   
We haven't got a car.'

   
Col whistled tunelessly through
his teeth.
   
'Colin, I'm over here.'

   
'Yes, OK, got you, Hereward.
Now listen everybody. I don't know any more than you do what the hell's going
on tonight. What I do know is that none of us should attempt to leave the scene
until after the police arrive. I'm going with Hereward to his gallery to ring headquarters
and acquaint them fully with the situation. Any questions?'

   
'Oh lots,' Graham Jarrett said
dreamily. 'And I may spend the rest of my life trying to find the answers.'

   
'Just hurry it up,' a woman
said. 'There's an awful smell.'

   
'I can't smell anything.'

   
Actually he could, but didn't
want to draw attention to it. It rather smelled as if a couple of people had
lost control their bowels, and, frankly, that wouldn't be too surprising under
the circumstances.

   
'God, yes. It's vile.' Sounded
like the woman who ran the craft shop. Magenta something.

   
'Well, obnoxious as it might
be, try not to move too far away. Lead on, Hereward. Keep talking.'

   
'Strange,' Hereward said, 'how
when anyone asks you to keep talking you can never think of anything to say . .
.
 
Good grief, Colin, she was right about
that smell. It's dreadful.'

   
In certain periods of his SAS
career, Col had been exposed long hours to various deeply unpleasant bodily
odours, but he had to admit - if only to himself - this was the most sickening.
It was more than simply faeces, though there was certainly that. There was also
a dustbin kind of pungency and all manner of meaty smells - newly killed to
faintly putrid.

   
'No power, and now the drains
are blocked. You'll probably turn on the tap, when you get home, Hereward, and
find the bloody water's off, too. I really do think it's about time I put a bomb
under my esteemed colleagues on the council. Not that they can actually
do
anything except talk about it.'