Crybbe aka Curfew

'I saw it again, Mrs Morrison. Last night. When the power was off.'

'Oh,' Fay said, as kindly as she could manage. 'Did you?'

'I can't bear it any more, Mrs Morrison.'

Fay didn't bother to ask her how she could see a huge coal-black beast when all the lights were out; she'd say she just could. She was one of the aforementioned lonely old Midland immigrant widows in a pretty cottage on the edge of town. One of the people who rang local reporters because they needed someone to make a cup of tea for.

'I'm at the end of my tether, Mrs Morrison. I'm going out of my mind. You wouldn't think anything as black as that could glow, would you? I'm shivering now, just remembering it.'

In other places they rang the police for help. But in Crybbe the police was Sergeant Wynford Wiley and nobody wanted to make a cup of tea for him.

'I've tried to explain, Mrs Seagrove. It's a fascinating…'

'It's not fascinating, my love, it's terrifying. It's no joke. It's frightening me out of my mind. I can't sleep.'

'But there's nothing I can do unless you're prepared to talk about it on tape. I only work for the radio, and unless we can hear your voice…'

'Why can't you just say someone's seen it without saying who I am or where I live?'

'Because… because that's not the way radio works. We have to hear a voice. Look,' Fay said, 'I really would like to do the story. Perhaps you could find someone else who's seen it and would be prepared to talk about it and have it recorded.'

Mrs Seagrove said bitterly, They all know about it. Mrs Francis at the post office, Mr Preece. They won't admit it. They won't talk about it. I've tried telling the vicar, he just listens and he smiles, I don't think he even believes in God, that vicar. Perhaps if you came round this afternoon, we could…'

'I'm sorry,' Fay said, 'I've got several jobs on the go at the moment.'

'Ho, ho,' said the Guardian.

'Look,' Fay said. 'Think about it. It's quite easy and informal, you know. Just me and a portable recorder, and if you make any fluffs we can keep doing it again until you've got it right.'

'Well, perhaps if you came round we could…'

'Not unless you're prepared to talk about it on tape,' Fay said firmly.

'I'll think about it,' Mrs Seagrove said.

Fay put the phone down. Of course she felt sorry for the lady. And ghost stories always went down well with producers, even if the eye-witnesses were dismissed as loonies. Local radio needed loonies; how else, for instance, could you sustain phone-in programmes in an area like this?

But ghost stories where nobody would go on the record as having seen the apparition were non-starters. On that same basis, Fay thought ruefully, a lot of stories had been non-starters in Crybbe.

CHAPTER II

The windscreen was in splinters. There was blood on some of them, dried now. And there were other bits, pink and glistening like mince on a butcher's tray, which Max Goff didn't want to know about.

'What are you saying here?' he demanded irritably. 'You're saying it's a fucking omen?'

He looked up at the hills shouldering their way out of the morning mist, the sun still offstage, just.

He turned and gazed at the Tump. A prosaic, lumpen word for the mystic mound, the branches of the trees on its summit still entwined with tendrils of mist.

A thing so ancient, so haunted, yet so benign. Yeah, well, he believed in omens, but…

There was some kind of awful creaking, tearing sound as the breakdown truck hauled the car out of the wall. A heavy crump and a rattle as the VW's shattered front end came down on the turf, its radiator ripped off, car- intestines hanging out.

Max Goff winced. Beside him, Rachel Wade, his personal assistant, was saying in her deep voice, 'Don't be silly.' Spreading out her hands in that superior, pained, half-pitying way she had. 'All I'm saying is it's not exactly an auspicious start, is it?'

Goff stared coldly at Rachel in her shiny, new Barbour coat and a silk scarf. Knowing how much he'd depended on her judgement in the past, but knowing equally that this was an area where she was well out of her depth. A situation where the smooth bitch couldn't be relied upon to get it right. No way.

She didn't, of course, want him to go through with it. Nobody whose opinion was worth more than shit had been exactly encouraging, but Rachel was subtler than most of them. She hadn't said a word about the nylon sheets in their room at the Cock. Had made no comment about the coffee at breakfast being instant, just sat there, languid and elegant and at ease, refusing everything they offered her with a professional smile. Yeah, OK, under normal circumstances Goff himself would have insisted on different sheets and ground coffee and some kind of muesli instead of Rice Krispies. But he might need the

Cock again.

Actually, he might need to buy it.

He'd been pondering this possibility, deciding not to discuss it with Ms Wade just yet, when the local Plod had turned up, waiting respectfully in the lobby until he'd finished his Nescafe, then asking, 'Are you Mr Goff, sir? Mr Max Goff?' as if they didn't recognize him.

The body had been taken away by the time they got to the scene. Max Goff only hoped the poor old bastard had at least one surviving relative. He didn't really feel like identifying the Kettle corpse in some seedy white-tiled mortuary where the atmosphere was heavy with obnoxious smells and bodily gases.

If it came to that, Rachel could do it. She'd hired Kettle originally. And nothing ever fazed Rachel, just as nothing ever blew her mind – there was even something suspiciously nonchalant about her orgasms.

'Right, Tom,' somebody shouted, and the breakdown truck started across the field, the broken car on its back, a smashed coffin on an open hearse.

Then the truck stopped for some reason.

And, in that moment, the sun came out of the mist and the land was suddenly aglow and throbbing with life force.

And Goff remembered what day this was.

He turned towards the light, head back, eyes closing and the palms of his hands opening outwards to receive the burgeoning energy.

I am here. At the zenith of the year. I am in a state of total submission.

'It's the solstice,' he whispered. 'I'd forgotten.'

'Oh,' said the uncommitted Rachel Wade. 'Super.'

As if guided. Max Goff turned back to the open field, opened his eyes and saw…

… reflected, quite perfectly, in the rear window of Henry Kettle's smashed-up old Volkswagen on the back of the truck, he saw the venerable mound, the Tump at Crybbe Court, and the sun above it like a holy lamp.

And the connection was formed.

Revelation.

The truck started up again, moved off towards the road.

Goff pointed urgently at the mound, talking rapidly, forefinger stabbing at the air between him and Rachel. 'Listen, when they built these things, the old Bronze Age guys, they'd, you know, consecrate them, according to their religion, right?'

Rachel Wade looked at him, expressionless.

'What they'd do is, they'd sacrifice somebody. I mean, the remains have been found, sacrifices, not burials – they have ways of telling the difference, right?'

Rachel freed a few strands of pale hair from the collar of her Barbour, flicked them back.

'And sometimes, right,' Goff surged on, 'at very important sites, the high priest himself would be sacrificed. Without resistance. Willingly, yeah?'