Crybbe aka Curfew

Goff, looking down at first, saying, not too loudly, 'I want you to forget everything you ever heard or read about the New Age movement. I'm gonna give you the Crybbe version. I'm gonna tell you how it might relate to this town. I'm gonna make it simple, no bull.'

Then slowly raising his eyes. 'And the moment I cease to make sense to any one of you, I wanna know about it.'

Smiling a little now, an accessible kind of smile, if not exactly warm. 'I want you to stand up and stop me. Say, 'Hey, we aren't following this, Max.' Or 'Max, we don't believe you.

We think you're trying to pull the wool.' '

It could have sounded patronizing. It didn't. Guy could see only the backs of the heads of the two distinct factions – New Age, Old Crybbe. No heads moved on either side. They'd been expecting a showman in a white suit, but Goff had changed. Even his small eyes were compelling. Not a showman but a shaman.

'You see, what I don't want is any of you people just sitting there thinking, 'Who is this lunatic? Why are we listening to this garbage? Who's he think he's kidding?' because…'

Bringing his gaze down very slowly from the back rows to the front rows, taking in everybody.

'… Because I'm not kidding. I never kid.'

'I look at this town,' Fay said, 'and I don't see streets and buildings any more, I only see shadows.'

Powys didn't say anything. He'd been seeing shadows everywhere, for years.

'When there's a gust of wind,' Fay said, 'I look over my shoulder.'

Maybe it's me, he thought. Maybe I've contaminated her

'And when the lights go out…'

'Look.' Powys said quickly, 'he's always been there. Bits of him.' He kept snatching breath, trying to keep his mind afloat. 'Just like, behind us, along the passage there's a pool of sexual energy that builds up in the hours approaching the curfew. Accumulates in the place where the studio is. No doubt other forms of energy gather elsewhere. But it all dissipates when the curfew bell starts to ring. Each night, the ringing of the curfew frustrates the spirit's attempts to collect enough energy to activate all the power centres simultaneously.'

'All right,' Fay said. 'So, one hundred strong, evenly spaced tolls of the bell sends the black energy back to the Tump with its tail between its legs. Why do real dogs howl?'

She looked down at Arnold, lying on the bottom step front of the Cock, panting slightly.

'I'm guessing,' Powys said. 'OK?'

'It's all guesswork, isn't it? Go on. This is the big one, Joe. Why – precisely – do dogs howl at the curfew?'

'Right.' He sat down on the second step, and Arnold laid his chin on his shoe. 'I've been thinking about this a lot. The curfew's a very powerful thing. It's like – an act of violence, hits the half-formed spirit like a truck. And the spirit wants to scream out in rage and frustration. Now. There are two possibilities. Either, because it's at this black dog stage, it communicates its agony to anything else in the town on the canine wavelength. Or it simply emits some kind of ultrasonic scream, like one of those dog whistles people can't hear. How's that?'

'Well,' Fay conceded, 'it does have a certain arcane logic.'

She looked up at the church tower.

Powys pushed at his forehead with the tips of his fingers 'Somebody – let's continue to call him John Dee – saw what was happening, what Michael Wort had left behind – in essence an opening for him to return to… possess Crybbe, literally, from beyond the grave. And he recommended certain steps -get rid of the stones, build a wall around the Tump, ring the curfew every night, one hundred times. Avoid any kind of psychic or spiritual activity which will be amplified in an area like this anyway and could open up another doorway. And so the rituals are absorbed into the fabric of local life and Crybbe becomes what it is today.'

'Morose,' Fay said. 'Apathetic. Resistant to any kind of change. Every night the curfew leaves the place literally limp.'

Guy Morrison was clenching his fists in frustration. This would have been terrific television. He looked around for the Mayor of Crybbe – the man who, more than anybody else in the entire world, he now wanted to strangle.

Jimmy Preece was, in fact, not six yards away, on the end of a row close to the back – presumably so that he could slip, away to ring his precious curfew. Guy moved forward a little to see how the Mayor was taking this and discovered that, for a change, Mr Preece's face was not without expression.

He looked very nervous. His Adam's apple bobbed in his chicken's neck and his eyes kept blinking as though the lids were attached by strings to his forehead, where new wrinkles were forming like worm-casts in sand.

The poor old reactionary's worried Max is going to win them over, Guy thought. He's afraid that, by the end of the night, this will be Max Goff's town and not his any more.

And why not?

For Goff, indirectly, was promising them the earth. But somebody had told him about the way business was done in this locality and about the border mentality, and he was handling it accordingly. What he was telling them, in an oblique kind of way, was, I can help you – I can recreate this town, make it soar – if you co-operate with me. But I don't need you. I don't need anybody.

Goff was talking now about his dreams of expanding the sum of human knowledge and enlightenment. Speaking of the great shrines of the world, subtly mentioning Lourdes and all the thousands of good, hopeful, faithful people it attracted all year round.

Mentioning – in passing – the amount: of money it made out of the good, hopeful, faithful thousands.

'But tourism's not what I'm about,' Goff said. 'What I'm concerned with is promoting serious research into subjects rejected by universities in Britain as… well, let's say as… insufficiently intellectual. The growth of basic human happiness, for instance, has never been something which has tended to absorb our more distinguished scholars. Far too simple. Life and death? The afterlife? The beforelife The human soul? Why should university scientists and philosophers waste time pondering the imponderable? Why not simply study the psychology of the foolish people who believe in all this nonsense?

Goff paused, with another disarming smile. 'You shoulda stopped me. Tourism is an option this town can explore at its leisure. You want tourists, they can be here – tens of thousands of them. You don't want tourists, you say to me, 'Max, this is a quiet town and that's the way we like it.' And I retire behind the walls of Crybbe Court and I become so low profile everyone soon forgets I was ever here.'

Guy conceded to himself that, had he been the kind of person who admired others, he might at this moment have admired Goff. This was very smart – Goff saying. Of course nobody's forcing this town to be exceedingly wealthy.

Laying it on the line for them: I have nothing to lose, you have everything to gain.

Not even the faintest hint of threat.

How could they resist him?

They'll listen very patiently to what Goff has to say, then they'll ask one or two very polite questions before drifting quietly away into the night. And then, just as quietly, they'll do their best to shaft the blighter…'

But why should Col Croston think they'd want to? The man was offering them the earth.

'Limp. Stagnant.' Powys lowered his voice, although they were alone in the square. Afraid perhaps, Fay thought, that the town itself would take offence, as if that mattered now.

Over the roofs of shops, she could see the Victorian-Italianate pinnacle of the town-hall roof, the stonework blooming for the first time in the glow from its windows. There were probably more people in there tonight than at any other time since it was built. All the people who might be on the streets, in the pub, scattered around town.

'And then Goff arrives,' Powys said. 'Unwitting front man for Andy Trow, last of the Worts, a practising magician. The heir. Crybbe is his legacy from Michael.'

Fay sat next to him on the step, Arnold between them. Apart from them, the town might have been evacuated. Nobody emerged from the street leading to the town hall, nobody went in.

'OK,' she said. 'He's put the stones back – as many as he can. He's knocked a hole in the wall around the Tump, so that whatever it is can get into the Court – the next point on the line, right?'