there was any sound, any indication of movement, of change, it would be the damp chatter of decay.
Max could not move. His eyes were wide open. He took his breath in savage gulps.
He lay in awe, couldn't even think.
He could smell the candles.
As if in anticipation of a power failure, the room had been ringed with them – Max half-afraid they'd be black. But no, these were ordinary yellow-white candles, of beeswax or tallow, whatever tallow was. They didn't smell too good at first, kind of a rich, fatty smell.
Now the smell was as intoxicating as the sour red wine.
The mattress was laid out on the third level of the stable block, so he could lie in the dusk, and take in the Tump filling the window, stealing the evening light, surrounded with candles, like a great altar.
Max lay under the black duvet, feeling like a virgin, the Great Beast/Scarlet Woman sessions with Rachel a faint and farcical memory.
For the first time in his adult life, Max was terrified.
And then, when the dark figure rose over him in the yellow, waxy glow, even more frightened – and shocked rigid, at first – by the intensity of his longing.
Warren looked up into the sky, at the night billowing in, and he
But the curfew was coming and the box was screaming at him to close the lid.
He slammed it down.
Then, bewildered, he started to claw at the earth with his hands, set the box down in the hole.
Heard a rattling noise inside, the hand battering the side of the box.
It don't wanner go back in the ground.
It's done what it came for.
Now it wants to go back in the chimney.
And, sure enough, when Warren picked up the box the rattling stopped, and so he ran, holding it out in front of him like a precious gift, down from field to field until he reached the farm, where nobody else lived now, except for him and the Hand of Glory.
In the end, the curfew did come, a strained and hesitant clatter at first, and then the bell was pounding the wood like a huge, shiny axe, slicing up the night, and the girl was gone.
Joe Powys wandered blindly through the undergrowth, repeatedly smashing a fist into an open palm.
The night shimmered with images.
The bell pealed and Rose, in a pure white nightdress, threw herself from a third-floor window, fluttering hopelessly in the air like a moth with its wings stuck together, falling in slow motion, and he was falling after her, reaching out for her.
In the spiny dampness of the wood, Powys cried out, just once, and the curfew bell released, at last, his agony.
He staggered among the stricken, twisted trees and wept uncontrollably. He didn't want to control it. He wanted the tears to flow for ever. He wanted the curfew bell to peal for ever, each clang comet-bright in the shivering night.
The bell pealed on, and with that high, wild cry Rachel tumbled into the air, and then Rose and Rachel were falling together, intertwined.
A needle of light, like the filament of a low-wattage electric bulb zig-zagged across the eaves.
Silently, in slow-motion, the rusty spike pierced the white nightdress and a geyser of hot blood sprayed into his weeping eyes.
CHAPTER XIII
Max awoke to find himself alone, damp and smouldering, like a bonfire in the rain. The cold deluge had been the curfew. When the curfew was gone, he realized at last, the town would be free.
He got up and shambled to the big window, wrapped in the black duvet. It was too dark to see the Tump; it didn't matter, he could
No going back now, Max.
Feeling very nearly crazy, his face and hands slashed by boughs and bushes, Powys followed a dead straight line back into Crybbe.
As if the path was lit up for him. Which perhaps it was – the bell strokes landing at his feet like bars of light. All he did was lurch towards the belt, each stroke laid on the landscape, heavy as a gold ingot. And when he emerged from the wood into the churchyard, scratched and bleeding from many cuts, he just collapsed on the first grave he came to.
Its stone was of new black marble, with white lettering, and when he saw whose grave it was he started to laugh, slightly hysterically.
GRACE PETERS
1928-1992
Beloved wife of
Canon A. L. Peters
And that was all.
Powys scrambled to his feet; from what he knew of Grace, she would take a dim view of somebody's dirty, battered body sprawled over her nice, clean grave.
He walked stiffly through the graveyard, out of the lychgate, into the deserted square, his plodding footsteps marking sluggish time between peals of the curfew.
The power was off. Hardly a surprise. In four or five townhouse windows he could see the sallow light of paraffin lamps. Then, with a noise like a lawnmower puttering across the square, a generator cranked into action, bringing a pale-blue fluorescent flickering into the grimy windows of the old pub, the Cock.
Yes, Powys thought. I could use a drink. Quite badly.
It occurred to him he hadn't eaten since pushing down a polystyrene sandwich in this very pub before setting off to find his old mate, Andy Boulton-Trow. He didn't feel hungry, though. A drink was all he wanted, that illusory warmth in the gut. And then he'd decide where to go, whose night to spoil next, whose peace of mind to perforate.
He clambered up the steps and pushed open the single, scuffed swing-door to the public bar.
It was full. Faces swam out of the smoke haze, pallid in the stuttering fluorescence. The air was weighed down, it seemed to Powys, with leaden, dull dialogue and no merriment. He felt removed from it all, as though he'd fallen asleep when he walked in, and being here was a dream.
'Brandy, please,' he told Denzil, the Neanderthal landlord 'A single.'
Denzil didn't react at all to whatever kind of mess the wood had made of Powys's face. He didn't smile.
So where was the smile coming from? He knew somebody was smiling at him; you could feel a smile, especially when wasn't meant to be friendly.
'Thanks,' he said, and paid.
He saw the smile through the bottom of his glass. It was a small smile in a big face. It might have been chiselled neatly into the centre of a whole round cheese.
Police Sergeant Wynford Wiley had sat there wearing this same tiny smile last night and early this morning
