Crybbe aka Curfew

'Yeah, OK, you can play it that way, if you want,' he told the house. 'You can spit me out, like Rachel and Tiddles the cat.'

'But when I go… he goes.'

He picked up the box, put the lamp on top and followed the beam towards the main door. It would, he knew, open.

Alex simply walked out of the town hall, down the steps and the few yards to the end of the street leading to the square. He glanced behind him once at the blue light from a high window, listened to the noise of the generator from the basement, looked above the buildings to the orange glow in the sky from the church. Reality, or as much of it as a bumbling old cleric might perceive.

He thought about the Deal.

If he walked into the square, he doubted he'd get out of it so easily, if at all.

This would be it.

It was like one of those experiments you did at school in your very first physics lesson. Fay couldn't recall the technicalities of it, but it was all to do with making your own electricity and you did something like turning a handle – really couldn't remember the details, never any good at science – and this little bulb lit up, just faintly at first, but the faster you did whatever it was you did, the brighter the bulb became, the more sustained was the light.

There they all were, moving round in the circle – backwards, anti clockwise – the thin golden ring (or not gold, it was yellow, the yellow of… of…).

And there it was, in the centre of the circle. New Age schoolchildren dancing around a lamppost and making the lamp light up, like the bulb in the physics lesson, through the power they were helping to generate.

'Faster, please,' the Teacher saying in that wonderfully smooth voice, like an old cello, and they were able, without much effort, to move faster. Fay beginning to tingle with the

excitement of what they were doing – making light.

An incandescent blob in the air, yellow and fuzzed at the edges, but filaments of hard white light forming at the centre, extending out like branches or veins, blood-vessels – light vessels – the whole thing pulsing with it. Hilary Ivory beginning to quiver and moan, as if reaching orgasm. Larry Ember, on the other side, giggling wildly. Never heard a cameraman giggle before, dour bastards in general, this must really be something coming.

'All my life!' she heard a woman (probably that loopy Jopson woman) cry in ecstasy. 'All my life I've waited for you…!'

'Michael,' a man – the Teacher – said. Simply that, nothing more.

And a woman said, 'Yes, Michael. The Archangel Michael, slayer of dragons.'

No, Fay thought, confused, not him… that's wrong…

But what did it matter?

Couldn't very well contradict them, could she, not all of them, everybody shouting in unison now, a great chant.

'Michael… Michael... MICHAEL… MICHAEL!'

The Being of Light was responding to the summons, the filaments forming into a complexity of vibrating muscles, pipes and organs, rippling into arms and legs, and between the legs – bloody hell. Fay thought…

Realizing she was chanting, too.

'Michael… Michael...'

The bells erupted again, a huge joyful clangour, cracking the night into splinters. The sound of bells in a blazing church.

The rational explanation. Col Croston thought, was that the flames had been funnelled into the tower, creating a huge jet which exploded into the belfry.

He stood in the town-hall doorway and peered into the street. Above him the night sky was frying. If Jimmy Preece was indeed dead, this made him the First Citizen of Crybbe. An auspicious start to his year of office; at this rate he'd be mayor of a burned-out ghost-town before morning.

He looked for Alex, but the end of the street still dropped off the edge of the world, and Alex was gone and Col's sorrowful feeling was that he would never see the old man again.

CHAPTER XXI

Before, the last and only time he'd been inside Crybbe Court, it had been very much Henry's dead place; now it was repellently alive.

It had been cold and dry; now it was warm and moist, and going into it was disturbingly, perversely sexual. The Court was a very old woman, grotesquely aroused, and she wanted him.

The main door had not been locked. He ventured quietly in, the box under his arm. Stone floor, low ceiling and slits of windows set high in the walls. And the walls leaked.

Joe Powys ran a cautious finger along the stone and found it warm and slimy. Under the light, he saw dead insects on the walls, all of them quite recently dead, not husks. Moths, flies and bluebottles trapped in a layer of… fat, it smelled like fat.

Or tallow maybe, grease from candles made of animal fat.

Crybbe Court was alive and sweating.

He moved towards the stone stairs, thinking, inevitably, of Rachel. What had it taken to make her so hot and feverish and desperate to get out of here that…?

But you don't know what happened, you don't know.

Though you'll soon find out, as you retrace her steps up these stone steps, butcher's shop slippery now, like the walls.

Coming to the first floor – the big family living-room and the bedchambers off. In one of these, Fay had told him, Tiddles the mummified cat had slept, most recently, in a chest that was not very old. Tiddles had come down from the rafters, but had never left the house, presumably, until she and Rachel had been hurled out of the prospect chamber.

Fay.

Picturing her standing in the field overlooking Crybbe, the blue cagoule streaming from under her arm, her rainbow eye watering in the wind.

It made him so sad, this image, that he had a wild urge to dump the box and race out of the Court – filthy, clammy, raddled old hag – and run back to Crybbe to find Fay and hold her, even if they only had a few minutes before…

Before whatever was to happen, happened.

He wore his sense of foreboding like the black bag over a condemned man's head. Yet he was still half-amazed at what he was planning to do: black comedy, a bizarre piece of alternative theatre. Verdict: took his own life while the balance of mind was disturbed.

The voice of the police inspector, Hughes, landed in his head. Are you sure he didn't say anything to you, Mrs Morrison, by way of suicide note, so to speak? Or did he assume, do you think, that his method of taking his own life would be self-explanatory?

Well, he was a crank, wasn't he? You only had to read his book.

He wondered if the day would ever come when an inquest would concede that the balance of mind might be affected by prevailing psychic conditions.

Bloody New Age crap.

There was a stench of rancid fat. He felt sick.

It would be good, in a way, to be out in the fresh air.

As Col turned the corner of the back street linking the town hall with the churchyard, there was an enormous splintering roar and a belch that shook the ground. And then – as if massive furnace doors had been flung wide –