Crybbe aka Curfew

been naked.

'She's back now, all right. It's her house again.'

'Grace?'

'She's repossessed it.' Fay shivered and held her robe together at the throat, it's like… When she was alive, there was this thin veneer… of gentility, OK? Of politeness. Now she's dead there's no need to keep up appearances, it's all stripped away, and there's just this… this rotting core… Resentment. Hate. Just don't let anybody tell me the dead can't feel hatred.'

'Maybe they can just project it. Maybe we're not even talking about the dead, as such.'

Fay's right profile was all white. She turned her head with a lurid, rainbow blur and her mouth lightened with the pain.

'And don't let anybody tell me again that they're harmless. Joe, she flew at me. She was hovering near the floor – everywhere this icy stillness – and then she sprang. There was a perfumy smell, but it was a kind of mortuary perfume, to cover up the rotting, the decay, you know?'

Powys said helplessly, 'I've never seen a ghost.'

Then what did you see last night? What in Christ's name was that? The raging black horror in the wood. He was sure the girl at the stone would be killed or die of fright, but the bitch knew what she was doing.

'So I'm backing out of the office,' Fay said. 'Thinking, She can only exist in there. Jean Wendle said I should blink a couple of times, close my eyes and when I opened them she'd be gone, she's only a light effect, no more real than voices on quarter-inch, fragments of magnetic dust, and I hit the pause button and the voice cuts out in mid-sentence. So I took the advice, closed my eyes – and I got out of the room fast because she can't exist outside there, can she? That's her place, right?'

Fay's fingers were white and stiff around the collar of the red robe.

'And I'm in the hall. I've closed the door behind me. I've slammed the door. In its… in Grace's face. And suddenly just as I'm… She's there too. She's right up against me again in my face. Grace has… had… has these awful little teeth like fish-bones. And, you know, the kitchen door's opposite the office door, and so I just threw myself across the hall and into the kitchen, and I… that's all I remember.'

'You hit your head on a sharp corner of the kitchen table. She's right, he thought. She can't stay here tonight. Any more than I can spend it with the Bottle Stone. It was too dark to see much. I thought you were…'

'Thanks.'

'What would you think…?'

'No, I mean… thanks. You keep rescuing me. That's not the way it's supposed to be any more.'

'Arnold waylaid me at the top of the street and dragged me down here with his teeth.'

The dog wagged his tail, staggered to the edge of the bed and looked down dubiously.

'Good old Arnie,' said Fay. 'I'd just virtually accused him of exacting some awful psychic revenge on the Preece family for trying to shoot him. Come on, I'll make some breakfast. We have to eat.'

Neither of them had mentioned the Bottle Stone. He wished he could prove to her it had all happened, but he couldn't. He couldn't prove anything – yet.

'I wanted to call a doctor last night,' he told her. 'But you started screaming at me.'

'I hate doctors.'

'You ought to see one, all the same.'

'Sod off. Sorry, I don't mean to be churlish, but nothing seems to be fractured. Cuts and bruises. Anyway, look at the state of you.'

Powys picked Arnold up to carry him downstairs.

Fay said, 'I wonder what he sees.'

He thought, I think I've seen what he sees. He said, 'The other time you saw this Grace thing, what time was it?'

'After midnight.'

'What was it like on that occasion?'

'She didn't move. Very pale. Very still. Like a lantern slide.'

At the foot of the stairs, the office door remained closed.

'Figures,' Powys said. 'She wouldn't be up to much after midnight. Or, more correctly, after ten – after the curfew. It probably took all her energy just to manifest. But last night, it was just minutes before the curfew. That's when it's strongest. That's when the whole town's really charged up. Before the curfew shatters it.'

'What are you on about?' Fay shook her head, looked at the kitchen floor. 'God, what a mess. Who'd have thought I had so much blood in me?'

'I think…'

'You mention doctors or hospitals again, Joe, I'll never sleep with you again.'

Fay grinned, which was the wrong thing to do because it pulled on the skin around her bruised eye.

She had to go back into the office to answer the phone. It looked, as it always did in the mornings, far too boring to be haunted.

The call was from her father, sounding wonderfully bright and happy. Last night, while she was sitting by the sink, Joe trying to bathe her eye, the phone had rung and Jean's message, amplified by the answering machine, had been relayed across

the hall.

'I can't believe it,' Alex said now. 'I feel tremendous. I feel about… oh, sixty-five. Do you think I'm too old to become a New Age person?'

'You going to stay at Jean's for awhile, Dad?'

'I'll probably drift back in the course of the day. Don't want to lose touch with old Doc Chi at this stage.'

'Dad's shed a quarter of a century overnight,' Fay told Powys. 'No woman is safe.'

'Well, keep him away from the Cock.'

'Why?'

'It seems to have aphrodisiac properties. It turns people on.'

'I don't follow you.'

He told her, at last, about getting beaten up by Humble, and Rachel taking him to hers and Goff's room. What had happened then, the sudden inevitability of it. It was the right time, coming up to curfew time. I mean, Rachel was not… promiscuous. Nor me, come to that. I mean, lonely, sex-starved, but not… Anyway, I just don't think we'd ever have

got together… if it hadn't been for the time. And the place.'

'I don't understand.'

'All right, think about the condoms. All those used condoms in the alley, up by the studio. In a town surrounded by open fields, doesn't it strike you as odd that so many couples should want to do it standing up in an alley?'

'I never really thought about it. Not that way.'

'And last night again at the Cock, again in the hour before the curfew, your ex-husband was suddenly overwhelmed with, lust for his production assistant and whisked her upstairs.'

'Catrin? Guy and Catrin?'

Powys nodded. 'Why do they call it the Cock?' He was buttering more toast; it was, she reckoned, his fifth slice. How long since he last ate? 'Is that what it's really called?'

'It certainly hasn't got a sign to that effect,' Fay said.

'What do you know about Denzil the landlord? Got many kids, for instance?'

'I don't know. He isn't married, I don't think. Somebody once told me he put it about a bit, but I mean… You're getting carried away, Joe.'

'I'm a loony. I'm allowed.' He spread the toast with about half a pot of thick-cut marmalade. 'Sorry, look, I haven't got this worked out yet. Whatever I say's going to make you think I'm even more of a loony.'

'No – hang on – Joe, I…' Fay clasped her hands together tightly, squeezing them. 'I'm sorry about yesterday. I had no right to dispute your story. Town full of ghosts, no dogs… I mean, Christ… I'm sorry.'