Crybbe aka Curfew

He put a hand over both of hers. Sighed.

Tell me,' Fay said.

So he told her. He told her about the cottage and the magical Filofax and the art studio.

'Blood?' Fay touched her temple, winced. 'Urine? What does it mean?'

'I don't really know. But I wouldn't have one of those paintings on my wall.'

And then he told her about the girl at the stone, and the apparition.

'You saw it? You saw Black Michael's Hound?'

'I don't know what it was. Maybe the hound is something it suggests. Whatever it is, it's feeding off the energy which starts to build up in this town, probably at dusk. And it comes in a straight line, from the Tump, through the Court and on towards the church. It's evil, it's… cold as the grave.'

Fay shivered inside her robe. 'And this girl was… getting off on it?'

'Something like that. When the curfew began, she'd gone. She'd done this before, knew the score.'

'What does that tell us about the curfew?'

'That the curfew was established to ward something off. I think we're talking about Black Michael. Look…' He took from his jacket a slim black paperback, Elizabethan Magic by

Robert Turner. 'I found this in the bread-oven with the Filofax and I nicked it. There's a couple of chapters on Dee, but what I was really interested in was this. The page was marked.'

He opened the book at a chapter headed 'Simon Foreman, Physician, Astrologer and Necromancer (1552- 1611)'. There was a picture of Foreman, who had a dense beard and piercing eyes.

'The book talks of a manuscript in Foreman's handwriting, evidently something he copied out, much as Andy did in his Filofax. It's the record of an attempt to summon a spirit, and…look… this bit.'

He cast out much fire and kept up a wonderful ado; but we

could not bring him to human form; he was seen like a great

black dog and troubled the folk in the house much and feared

them.

'So what it's suggesting,' Powys said, 'is that the black dog image is some kind of intermediary state in the manifestation of an evil spirit. In this case, the spirit's furious at not being able to get any further, so he's coming on with the whole poltergeist bit. There's a famous legend in Herefordshire where a dozen vicars get together to bind this spirit and all that's appeared since is a big black dog.'

'So when we talk about Black Michael's Hound…'

'We're probably talking about the ghost of Michael himself. We know from these notes of Andy's – which I'm attributing to John Dee, for want of a more suitable candidate – that Michael Wort, while alive, appeared to have taught himself to leave his body and manifest elsewhere… travelling on the 'olde road', which is presumably a reference to ley-lines. Spirit paths. And then there's this legend about him escaping by some secret passage when the peasantry arrived to lynch him. Dee, or whoever, records that Wort's body was brought out after he hanged himself, to prove he was indeed dead. So maybe he escaped out of his body… along the 'olde road', maybe his ghost was seen – bringing a lot of black energy with it – and they managed to contain it… to reduce it to the black dog stage… by some ritual which has at its heart the curfew.'

'How does that stop it?'

'Well, making a lot of noise – banging things, bells, tin-cans, whatever – was popularly supposed to be a way of frightening spirits off. Maybe by altering the vibration rate; I'm not really qualified to say.'

'This is…' Fay held on to his hand, 'seriously eerie. I mean, you're the expert, you've been here before, but Christ, it scares the hell out of me.'

'No, I'm not,' he said. 'I'm not any kind of expert. I wrote a daft, speculative book. I'm not as qualified as most of these New Age luminaries. All I know is that Andy Boulton-Trow, with or without Goff's knowledge, is experimenting with what we have to call dark forces. He's probably been doing it for years… since… Well, never mind. Now we know why Henry Kettle was getting the bad vibes.'

'Boulton-Trow put Goff on to this place?'

'Probably. Something else occurred to me, too. I don't know how much to make of it, but… try spelling Trow backwards.'

'Tr…?' Her eyes widened. 'Jesus.'

'I mean, it could be pure coincidence.'

'There are too many coincidences in Crybbe, Fay said. She stood up. 'OK, what are we going to do about this?'

'I think… we need to get everything we can, and quickly, on Michael Wort. Any local historians you know?'

Fay smiled, in Crybbe, Joe, an historian is somebody who can remember what it said in last week's paper.'

'What about the local-authority archives? Where, for instance, would we find the transactions of the Radnorshire Society?'

'County Library, I suppose. But that's in Llandrindod Wells.'

'How far?'

'Twenty-five, thirty miles.'

'Let's get over there.' He started to get up. 'Oh God.' Sat down again. 'I can't. I have to go to Hereford Crematorium. It's Henry Kettle's funeral.'

'You can't not go to Henry's funeral,' Fay said. 'Look, I'll go to the library. Tell me what we're looking for.'

'You can't drive with that eye.'

'Of course I can. And they're only country roads. What am I looking for?'

'Anything about Wort – his experiments, his hangings, his death. And the Wort family. If they're still around, if we can get hold of any of them. And John Dee. Can we establish a connection? But, I mean, don't make a big deal of it. If we meet back here at… what? Four o'clock?'

'OK, Joe, look… is there nobody we can go to for help?'

'What about Jean Wendle?'

'Ha.' Fay put a hand up to her rainbow eye. 'Her assessment of Grace wasn't up to much, was it? Harmless, eh?'

'We're on our own, then,' Powys said.

CHAPTER IV

Crybbe town hall was in a short street of its own, behind the square. An absurdly grandiose relic of better days, Colonel Colin 'Col' Croston thought, strolling around the back to the small door through which members of the town council sneaked, as though ashamed of their democratic role.

Tonight, the huge Gothic double doors at the front would be thrown open for the first time in twenty years. Suspecting problems, Col Croston had brought with him this morning a small can of Three-in-One Penetrating Oil to apply to the lock and the hinges.

Col Croston let himself in and strode directly into the council chamber. The cleaner would not be here until this afternoon, and so Col made his way to the top of the room where the high-backed chairman's chair stood on its platform.

He sat down in the chair. There was a pristine green blotter on the table in front of him, and on the blotter lay a wooden gavel, unused – like the chair – since local government reorganisation in 1974.

Before reorganisation, the rural district authority had been based here. But 'progress' had removed the seat of power to a new headquarters in a town thirty miles away. Now there was only Crybbe town council, a cursory nod to local democracy, with ten members and no staff apart from its part-time clerk, Mrs Byford, who dealt with the correspondence and took down the minutes of its brief and largely inconsequential meetings.

The council chamber itself had even been considered too big for the old RDC, and meetings of the town council were self-conscious affairs, with eleven people hunched in a corner of the room trying to be inconspicuous. Although