Crybbe aka Curfew

'Can't see me goin' today,' said Warren, like they were talking about a football match. 'I'll be busy.'

Jimmy Preece began to shake. Sprawled across the settee was a hard, thin man with a head shaved close until you got right to the top when it came out like a stiff shaving brush. A sneering man with an ear-ring which had a little metal skull hanging from it. A man with flat, lizard's eyes.

Before, it had been an irritation, the way Warren was, but it didn't matter much. You looked the other way and you saw Jonathon, you saw the chairman of the Young Farmers' Club. You saw Jimmy Preece fifty years ago.

Now this… his only surviving grandson.

He tried. 'Warren, we never talked much… before.'

Warren's laughter was like spit. 'Wasn't no reason to talk was there? Not when there was Dad, and there was good old reliable old Jonathon.'

'Don't you talk like that about…'

'And now you wanner talk, is it? What a fuckin' surprise this is. Fair knocks me over with the shock, that does.'

Jimmy Preece squeezed his cap so tightly he felt the fabric start to rip.

This… this was the only surviving Preece, apart from himself, with two good legs to climb the stairs to the belfry.

'Now you listen to me, boy,' Jimmy said. 'There's things you don't know about…'

'Correction, Grandad.' Warren uncoiled from the couch, stood up. 'There's things I don't care about. Big difference there, see.'

Jimmy Preece wanted to hit him again. But this time, Warren would be ready for it, he could tell by the way he was standing, legs apart, hands dangling loose by his sides. Wouldn't worry him one bit, beating an old man.

Jimmy Preece saw the future.

He saw himself prising Mrs Preece out of her retirement cottage, dragging her back to this old place. He saw himself running the farm again, such as it was these days, and ringing the old bell every night until Jack was out of hospital, and then Mrs Preece caring for her crippled son, and what meagre profits they made going on hired help as he, Jimmy Preece, got older and feebler.

He knew, from last night's ordeal, how hard it was going to get, ringing that bell. Jack must've sensed it, but he hadn't said a word. That was Jack, though, keep on, grit your teeth, do your duty. You don't have to like it but you got to do it.

Going to be hard. Going to be a trial.

While this… this thing slinks around the place grinning and sneering.

Going to be no fall-back. A feeble old man, and no fall-back.

'Why don't you just let it go, Grandad,' Warren said, with a shocking hint of glee. 'What's it worth? Think about the winter, them cold nights when you're all stiff and the old steps is wet and slippery. Could do yourself a mischief, isn't it.'

Jimmy Preece seeing his youngest grandson for the first time as a man.

A bad man.

He wanted to take what Goff had told him this morning and hurl it in Warren's thin, snidey face.

Instead, he turned his back on his sole remaining grandson and walked out of the house, across the yard.

Warren went back into the fireplace and lifted out the old box.

He set the box on the hearth and opened the lid.

The hand of bones looked to be lying palm up this morning, the Stanley knife across it, the fingers no longer closed around the knife.

Like the hand was offering the Stanley knife to Warren.

So Warren took it.

CHAPTER III

… an did bnnge out hys bodie and shewde hym to the

crowde with the rope about hys necke…

Joe Powys lay on the floor still wearing last night's sweatshirt, flecked with mud and stuff from the woods and some blood from later. He was alone; she'd slipped quietly away a few minutes ago.

The hanged man was obviously the High Sheriff, Sir Michael Wort, displayed by his frightened servants to the angry townsfolk to prove that he really was dead. So if they'd seen his body, how did the legend arise that Wort had perhaps escaped down some secret tunnel?

Only one possible answer to that.

It had been in his head almost as soon as he woke, half-remembering copying out the material and half- thinking, it was part of some long, tortured dream. But The Ley-Hunter's Diary I993 was there, in his jacket on the floor by his pillow, and it was still throwing out answers. Not very credible answers.

The door was prodded open and Arnold peered round. Powys beckoned him, plunged his hands into the black and white fur. It felt warm and real. Not much else felt real.

Arnold licked his hand.

Powys looked around the room, at the dark-stained dressing-table, the wardrobe like an upturned coffin, the milk-chocolate wallpaper. Not the least depressing room he'd ever slept in.

'Don't blame me for the decor.'

She stood in the doorway.

She was in a red towelling bathrobe, arms by her sides, hands invisible because the sleeves were too long.

'It's certainly very Crybbe,' he said.

Fay nodded. 'And I'm never going to sleep here again, that's for sure.'

He'd awoken several times during the night on his makeshift bed of sofa cushions laid end to end.

Once it was Arnold licking his forehead. And once with an agonizing image arising in his mind: an exquisitely defined, twilit image of Rachel's broken body, both eyes wide open in a head that lolled off-centre, the perfect, pale, Pre-Raphaelite corpse, Ophelia, 'The Lady of Shalott'…

Lady cast out upon a Rubbish Heap.

He'd stood up, hearing Fay moaning in the bed. 'Oh God.' Twisting her head on the pillow, 'it hurts. It really hurts. It was just numb for a while, now it really hurts.'

'Let me take you to a hospital.'

'I'm not leaving this room.'

'And I thought Arnold looked a mess,' she said. 'What's the time? There's only one reliable clock in this house and I couldn't bear to look at it.'

Powys consulted their two watches on the bedside cupboard. 'Half nine. Ten. Mine's probably right, yours is cracked. So it's ten.'

'Even my watch has a cracked face.' Fay smiled feebly. 'I was lying there, thinking, you know, it can't be as bad as it feels, it really can't. Then I staggered to the bathroom mirror… And it was. It really bloody was.'

The cut ran from just below the hairline to the top of the left cheek. The left eye was black, blue, orange and half-closed.

'The bitch has scarred me for life.'

He remembered all the blood on the linoleum and thought she actually looked a good deal better than the quaking thing he'd found curled up on the kitchen floor, incapable, for a long time, of coherent speech.

'It's never going to heal,' Fay said bleakly.

'It will.' But she was probably right. There'd be a long-term scar. This town was good at leaving scars. He swung his legs out of bed; quite decent, still wearing his boxer shorts, but he doubted she'd have noticed if he'd