Crybbe aka Curfew

There was a bright light, a widening carpet of light, and something rolling along it, towards him.

This was the first thing he was really aware of after he stepped into space and the noose tightened above his Adam's apple.

There was no pain, only darkness and then the carpet of night and the thing that was rolling.

Rolling very slowly at first, but its momentum was increasing. And then he was staring into the face of Michael Wort.

The eyes had gone. The lips had gone. There was some hair, but not much; most of the beard had disappeared. There were gaps in the ghastly brown and yellow grin; few people in Michael's day had kept their teeth beyond middle age.

'Michael,' he said eventually.

The noose was still around his neck but it was slack. There was no pain in speech.

Behind the lamp, he saw a pair of sneakers and legs in muddy jeans.

'He came with me,' Joe Powys said. 'He couldn't manage the steps on his own.'

Andy had smashed through the floor, spinning and twisting. He'd screamed once, but it had sounded more like triumph than terror, suggesting he was unaware of anything having gone wrong.

Well, you wouldn't be, if this was the first time you'd hanged yourself.

The way he was lying in the centre of the windowless, stone chamber was bent, unnatural. Powys said, with little concern, 'Can you move?'

'I don't know,' Andy said, his feelings sheathed. 'What did you do?'

'I saved your life.'

'Thanks,' Andy said. 'You fucker.'

Powys said nothing. He was shaking.

'Humble,' Andy said, after a while. 'He was supposed to have killed you.'

'Yeah?'

'He will.'

'Can't see it,' Powys said, 'somehow.'

He had the feeling both of them were in shock. He put a hand out to the wall; it was dry again, and dusty. The Court was a dead place again. The room was narrow enough for there to be an enforced intimacy, and yet there was a distance, too, because the Court was dead.

'I nearly killed myself, though,' he said, still appalled enough at what might have happened to want to hear himself talk about it. 'Seems absolutely bloody insane when I look back, but I had this idea that the only way I could straighten this out was to take the head up to the prospect chamber and hurl us both out. I couldn't have been thinking straight. Well, obviously. But you don't, do you, in these situations?'

'And what stopped you,' Andy asked him, 'from killing yourself?'

Powys smiled weakly. 'Couldn't get in. The door in the alcove was locked, and there was a sign that said: Danger. Keep Out.'

The final bitter irony. Rachel had saved his life. He'd stood outside the door, on the greasy stairs, and felt her there again, cool and silvery. You really can do better than this, J.M.

'So then I saw the light in the attic. Thought maybe you were up there, but there was only one rope. Hate nooses. Went back outside and broke into the stable-block, through window, with a brick. I pinched a bread knife. Brought it up to the attic and sawed through most of the rope until it was just hanging together by a few threads. Where I'd cut it, I covered it up with the coils of the noose.'

He saw that Andy was thinking very hard, the muscles in his face working.

'I figured it out,' Powys said. 'It came clear. When I saw the noose. You were going to do' – he pointed a foot at the head – 'what he did. On the four-hundredth anniversary of his death. I couldn't believe it at first. I can't understand that level of obsession.'

'Of course you can't.' Andy glanced up at him, eyes heavy with contempt. 'You puny little cunt.'

'We're talking sex magic, aren't we? I was once at a signing session for Golden Land. Some regional book fair, and one of the other writers there was this retired pathologist. He said, apropos of something, that a remarkable number of hangings which look like suicide are actually accidents. Blokes – or teenage kids in a lot of cases – trying for this uniquely mind-blowing sexual buzz you're supposed to get from hanging by the neck.

Like, when the rope jerks, you jerk off down there, too. That it?'

Andy said nothing. Powys could see him trying surreptitiously to move different muscles.

'And with sex magic, you use the build up of sexual tension to harden and focus your will. And then, at the moment of orgasm… whoosh. Max Goff used to play about with it. Who taught him? You?'

Andy was stretching his neck, easing it from side to side.

'Sex and death. Hell of a powerful combination. This was how Black Michael pro…'

'Don't call him that,' Andy snapped.

'This was how Sir Michael Wort…' Bloody hell, Joe Powys always does what he's told… 'This was how Black fucking Michael projected himself into Crybbe, fused his spirit with the spirit of the town so that the town is the man is the town is the…'

Andy stopped trying to flex muscles and stared at Powys in the electric lamplight, and his eyes were so strange that Powys wasn't sure any more which of them he was talking to, Andy or Michael. But, clearly, the stage Andy had been striving to reach was something that went beyond personalities.

'What did it really mean, though?' Powys said. 'Was it simply a quest for eternal power? Some kind of semi- physical immortally?'

You have to fracture the cool, he remembered telling himself. To damage this guy, you have to tip his balance, dislodge him from his mental lotus position. Even lying there, with unknown injuries, he can, maybe, still take you unawares.

'Or is it,' Powys said casually, 'just the ultimate ego-trip? Getting your end away from beyond the grave?'

He had to look away. The blackness from Andy's eyes came out like iron spikes.

Iron spikes. Images of Rose cruelly speared his own cool and he stared back into the eyes of the thing that had dispassionately manipulated their fate.

'I can't move,' Andy said suddenly, the first sign of human panic, 'I can't fucking move, Joe. I can't move my arms or legs. I'm fucking paralysed.'

'What I think…' Powys remembered conversations with Barry the osteopath, his neighbour in the Trackways building '… is your back was broken in the fall. You can obviously move your neck. What about your shoulders? Try shrugging your shoulders.'

Andy's shoulders convulsed. There was a sudden sheen of sweat on his body.

'How's your breathing?'

'I can breathe.'

'In that case,' Powys said slowly and callously, 'you'll probably be what's known as a tetraplegic. It won't be much fun, but no doubt a lot of innocent people'll be saved a lot of grief by your confinement in Stoke Mandeville or wherever you wind up.'

'You're a worthless piece of shit, Joe.'

'Me? I'm shit?'

'You couldn't even kill me.'

'You're safer like this. Dead, you could be a problem.'

Andy turned his head and looked into the eye-sockets of Black Michael. As an exercise in mummification, Powys thought, Michael had turned out to be rather less impressive than Tiddles.

He said, 'Where are the other bits buried?'

'Why should I tell you that?'

'The head, naturally, was in the Tump. Did you ever go into the Tump? Physically, I mean.'

'No.'

'And the genitals are under the Cock. Walled up somewhere in the cellars, I'd guess, somewhere directly beneath that passageway leading to the studio. The heart under the church – is there a crypt?'

Andy didn't reply.