Crybbe aka Curfew

mantelpiece, to the see-through clock with the mechanism like a pair of bails still jerking obscenely from side to side.

The fireside chair was empty, its scatter cushions plumped out. If someone had been sitting in it the cushions would have been flattened.

Unless, of course, that person had tidily shaken them out and…

Oh, come on!

She made herself cross to the mirror and look into it at her own face.

The first shock was the incredible childlike fear she saw in her eyes.

The second was the other face. She whirled around in alarm.

The Canon was standing in the doorway. He wore pyjamas. His feet were bare. His hair was standing up in spikes, his beard sprayed out in all directions, like a snowstorm. His bewildered blue eyes were wide and unfocused.

He stared at Fay as if she were an intruder. Then the eyes relaxed into recognition.

'Morning, Grace,' he said.

While Max drove, Rachel took the cassette box from shoulder bag.

'OK?'

'Go ahead,' Max said.

Rachel slipped the tape into the player and studied the plastic box. The band's name was typed in capitals across the plain label: FATAL ACCIDENT. She wrinkled her nose.

Drums and bass guitar blundered out of the speakers. Rachel lowered the volume a little. By the time the first track was over, they were parked at the back of the Court, next to the stable-block, where builders were busy.

Rain slashed the windscreen.

Max turned up the sound to compensate. He was smiling faintly. They sat in the Range Rover for two more tracks. The only words Rachel could make out on the last one were 'goin' down on me', repeated what seemed like a few dozen times. She consulted the inside of the label; the song was called 'Goin' Down on Me'.

'That's the lot,' she said neutrally. There're only three numbers.' Remembering where the Max Goff Story had begun, in the punk-rock era of the mid-seventies, she didn't add 'thankfully'.

Max began to laugh.

Rachel ejected the tape, saying nothing.

Jeez,' Max said. 'Was that shit, or was that shit?'

Rachel breathed out. For a couple of minutes there, watching him smiling, she'd thought he might actually be enjoying it.

'You want me to post it down to Tommy, get him to send it back in a fortnight with the customary slip?'

What…?' Max twisted to face her. 'You want us to give the official piss-off to Mayor Preece's flaming grandson?'

'But if you tell him it's good you'll have to do something with it, won't you?'

Max shrugged. 'So be it. One single… not on Epidemic, of course. Coupla grand written off against tax.

Then he thumped the top of the dashboard. 'No, hey, listen, I'll tell you what we do – you send this kid a letter saying we think the band has promise, we think it's a… an interesting sound, right? But we're not sure any of these three tracks is quite strong enough to release as a debut single, so can we hear a few more? That'll buy some time – maybe the band'll split before they can get the material together. How's that sound to you?'

'It sounds devious,' Rachel said.

'Of course it does, Rach. Do it tonight. I mean, shit, don't get me wrong – they're no worse than say, The Damned, in '77. But it was fresh then, iconoclastic.'

'It was shit then, too.'

'Yeah, maybe,' Max conceded. 'But it was necessary. It blew away the sterile pretensions from when the seventies went bad. But now we're picking up from the sixties and we won't make the same mistakes.'

'No,' Rachel said, in neutral again.

A heavy tipper-lorry crunched in beside them. The rain had washed a layer of thick, grey dust from the door of the cab and Rachel could make out the words '… aendy Quarry, New Radnor.'

'Hey…' Max said slowly. 'If this is what I think it is…'

He threw his door open, stepped down into the rain in his white suit and was back inside a minute, excited, raindrops twinkling in his beard.

'It is, Rach. The first stones have arrived. The Old Stones of Crybbe, Mark Two.'

'Oh,' said Rachel, pulling up the collar of her Barbour for the run to the stables. 'Good.'

But Goff, Panama hat jammed over his ears, made her watch while the stones were unloaded, pointing out things.

'Different sizes, right? Even where they'd vanished entirely, Kettle was able to figure out how tall they'd been.'

'Using his pendulum, I suppose.'

'Of course, what we're seeing here gives an exaggerated idea of what they'll look like in situ. Half of the length'll be under the soil. Maybe more than half. Like giant acupuncture needle in the earth.'

'Who's going to advise you about these things now Mr Kettle's dead?' Rachel wondered, as men in donkey jackets and orange slickers moved around, making preparations to get the grey and glistening monoliths down from the truck. One stone had to be at least fifteen feet long.

'And how do you know it's the right kind of stone?' Things were moving too fast for Rachel now. Max was an awesome phenomenon when he had the hots for something.

'Yeah, well, obviously, Kettle was good – and he knew the terrain. But Andy Boulton-Trow's been studying standing stones for nearly twenty years. Been working with a geologist these past few weeks, matching samples. They checked out maybe a dozen quarries before he was satisfied, and if he's satisfied, I'm satisfied.'

A clang came from the back of the truck, a gasp of hydraulics, somebody swore. Max called out sharply, 'Hey, listen, be careful, yeah? I want you guys to handle those stones like you're dealing with radioactive flaming isotopes.'

He said to Rachel, 'Andy's moving up here, end of the week. He's gonna supervise planting stones on our land. Then we'll bring the farmers up here, show 'em what it looks like and go into negotiations. Hey, you had a call from J. M. Powys yet?'

'He'll only have got my letter this morning. Max.'

'Give him until lunchtime then call him. I want Powys. I don't care what he costs.'

The customer was short and fat and bald. He wore denims, a shaggy beard and an ear-ring.

'You're J. M. Powys, right?'

Teacher, Powys thought. Or maybe the maverick in some local government planning department.

'You are, man. Don't deny it. I recognize you from the picture on the cover. You've gone grey, that's all.'

Powys spread his arms submissively.

'Hey listen, man, that was a hell of a book. The Old Golden Land.'

'Thanks,' Powys said.

'So what are you doing here, running a shop? Why aren't you writing more? Got to be ten years since Golden Land.'

'Even longer,' Powys said. 'More like twelve.'

You could count on at least one of these a week, more in summer. Sometimes they were women. Sometimes, in the early days of the Watkins Centre, friendships had developed from such encounters. The Old Golden Land had hit the market at the right time, the time of the great mass exodus from the cities, couples in their thirties in search of meaning and purpose.

People were very kind when they found out who he was. Usually they bought something from the shop, often a paperback of the book for him to sign. Most times he felt guilty, guilty that he hadn't followed through; guilty that he'd written the thing in the first place and misled everybody.

'I did that one that takes a new look at Watkins's original leys,' he offered, a bit pathetically.