Crybbe aka Curfew

beneath a good stone floor – where they may never be exposed

to the light or the air. This is far from satisfactory, but my

knowledge does not extend to more. Forgive me.

Powys drove between the gateposts of Crybbe Court and felt the house before he saw it, a dark and hungry maw.

He thought, Hand? What hand? I don't know anything about a hand.

Get your act together, Powys.

He thought about Fay and started to worry, so he thought about Rachel instead, and he looked up towards the house and felt bitterly angry.

Better keep to the path, I think, my dear. Somewhat safer, in the dark.

Not that they take much care of this path, or indeed the church itself, never much in the way of civic pride in Crybbe. Poor Murray's got his hands full.

Ah. Now. I know where we're going.

We're going to your grave, aren't we?

Now, look, before you say anything, I'm sorry it had to be down at this end – not exactly central, I realise that, another few yards in fact, and you'd be in the wood. But it's surely shady on a warm day, and you never did like too much sun, did you? I suppose you spent most of your life in the shade, really, and… well, you know I always had the impression that was how you wanted it to be.

I know, I know… the flowers. I keep forgetting, memory isn't what it was, as you know. You bring a few flowers with the best of intentions, and then you forget all about them and the next time you come they're all dead and forlorn and there are stalks and seed-pods everywhere, all a terrible mess, and I do understand the way you feel about that, of course I do.

Hello, who's this?

Oh, Grace, look, it's young Murray.

No, don't get up, old chap.

Well, er… it's a lovely night, isn't it?

Yes. Indeed.

What's that?

Cain and Abel?

I'm sorry… I'm not quite getting your drift. What you're saying is, Abel killed Cain?

Well, not in my version, old son, but I suppose you modernists have your own ideas.

Abel killed Cain, eh?

Well, if you say so, Murray, if you say so.

Arnold was not at all happy about being left in the Mini. Joe Powys had pushed back the slide-opening driver's window several inches to give him plenty of air, and he stood up on the seat and pressed his head through the gap and whined frantically.

'I can't take you,' Powys said. 'Please, Arnold.' He'd left the dog a saucer of water on the back shelf. Poured from a bottle he kept in the boot because the radiator had been known to boil dry.

Knowing full well that he was doing all this just in case, for some unknowable reason, he didn't get back.

'Good boy,' he said. 'Good boy.'

He locked the car and moved quickly, uncomfortably away. He didn't want to be here. He felt he was in the wrong place, but he didn't trust his own feelings. He trusted Jean Wendle's feelings because Jean was an experienced psychic and a Wise Woman, and he was just a writer; and when it came to dealing with real life, writers didn't know shit.

The Mini was tightly parked in a semi-concealed position behind the stable-block. Powys carried a hand-lamp with a beam projecting a good fifty yards in front of him. It was probably a mistake; he should be more surreptitious. What was he going to do – stand amid the ruins of the wall, pinning Andy in the powerful beam as he cavorted naked in the maelstrom of black energy?

'It all sounds,' he said aloud into the night, 'so bloody stupid.'

Earth mysteries.

Book your seats for a magical, mind-expanding excursion to the Old Golden Land.

A fun-filled New Age afternoon. A book of half-baked pseudo-mystical musings on your knee as you picnic by a sacred standing stone, around it a glowing aura of fascinating legend. As he moved uncertainly across the field towards the Tump, it struck him that it was past ten o'clock and there'd been no curfew. Well, it was late last night, too. Took old Preece longer to make it to the belfry.

But he still thought, that's where I should be. Or with Fay.

Not here.

Or am I just trying to put it off again, the confrontation – afraid my reasoning's all to cock and this man, with his precise, laid-back logic and his superior knowledge of the arcane, is going to hold up another dark mirror.

As was usual with these things, he didn't notice it happening until it had been happening for quite some time.

Climbing easily over the ruins of the wall, where somebody had taken a bulldozer for a midnight joy-ride, the rhythm of his breath began to change so that it was a separate thing from what he was doing, which was labouring up the side of the mound. Normally, to do this, he would be jerking the breath in like a fireman on a steam train shovelling more and more coal on, breath as fuel. But he was conscious, in an unconcerned dreamlike way, of the climb being quite effortless and the breathing fuelling something else, some inner mechanism.

Each breath was a marathon breath, long, long, long, but not at all painful. When you discovered that you, after all, possessed a vast inner strength, it was a deeply pleasurable thing.

He followed what he thought was the beam from the lamp until he realized the lamp had gone out but the beam had not…as though he was throwing a shadow, a negative shadow, which made it a shadow of light.

Out of the tufted grass and into the bushes, moving with ease, watching his legs doing the work, as legs were meant to do, tearing through the undergrowth in their eagerness to take him to the summit of the mound.

The source.

Each breath seeming to take minutes, breathing in not only air, but colours, all the colours of the night, which were colours not normally visible to undeveloped human sight.

Moving up the side of the Tump, between bushes and tree trunks and moving effortlessly. Effortlessly as the last time.

goes round… thrice…

goes round...

CHAPTER VII

Nobody panicked.

Well, they wouldn't, would they? Not in Crybbe. They'd be quite used to this by now. Part of everyday life. Everynight life, anyway.

So there were no screams, no scrambles for the door. Guy Morrison knew this because he was standing only yards from the exit where the fat policeman, Wiley, was doubtless still at his post.

'Only a matter of time, wasn't it?' Col Croston called out. 'Don't worry, it often happens during council meetings. Mrs By ford's gone to switch on the generator.'

It was a bloody mercy, in Guy's opinion.

The woman was completely and utterly insane.

For the first time, Guy was profoundly thankful he and Fay had never had children.