Crybbe aka Curfew

'All right, calm down. Please.'

'And when I picked it up, the mirror, there was blood in the crack.'

'Your blood?'

'No!'

'Whose, then?'

'The old man's.'

'Your grandfather?'

'No, the old man! He used to live here. I saw him. I could see him in the mirror.'

'You're saying he's dead, this old man?'

'What do you think?' Tessa said, losing patience with him. Tension rising. The girl was disturbed. This was not what the Church should be doing. This was psychiatric country.

'And you think you saw his face in the mirror.'

'And other mirrors.' She sighed. 'Always in mirrors.'

'Tessa, listen to me. When you first told me all about this you said you thought it was a poltergeist and you thought it was happening because you were at that age when… when… But you're eighteen. You're not an adolescent any more.'

'No.'

He saw something moving in her dark eyes, and there was a little dab of perspiration above her top lip. Murray began to feel soiled and sordid. She said softly – and almost euphorically, he thought later – 'His throat was cut. When I saw him in the mirror, he'd cut his throat. Put his razor through the artery. That was where the blood…'

Murray swallowed. There was an overpowering smell of bleach.

'Would you mind,' he said, 'if we went back downstairs?'

When the studio phone rang it was Gavin Ashpole being soft-spoken and understanding. They all knew these days that if a woman dared up uncharacteristically it had to be a spot of premenstrual tension. Tact and consideration called for.

'So, when you're ready, love,' Ashpole said amiably, 'just give us the fifty-second voice-piece. And then you can play it by ear with Goff. I mean, don't worry about it – long as nobody gets him first, I'll be happy. Must go, the other phone, thanks Fay.'

She shouldn't have exploded like that. Most unprofessional

Fay put on the cans, adjusted the mike on its stand.

'Ow!'

Bloody thing was hot.

Surely that wasn't possible with a microphone, even if there was an electrical fault. She didn't touch it again but looked round the back, following the flex to where it plugged into the console. Nothing amiss.

There was nothing to come unscrewed on this mike. It was a standard American-made Electro Voice, about six and a half inches long, gunmetal grey with a bulb bit enlarging the end, like…

Well, like a penis, actually.

Fay put out a finger, touched the tip, giggled.

Sex-starved cow. Pull yourself together.

'You ready now, Fay?'

'Oh yes. I'm ready, Elton. I really am.'

'Bit for level, then…'

She picked up the script, which would take up the story from the newsreader's link.

'It's widely known,' Fay enunciated clearly into the microphone, 'that Max Goff has been involved in setting up a charitable trust to…'

'Yeah, fine. Go in five.'

Fay composed herself. Not easy in this heat. The T-shirt was sticking to her again. Have to put in a complaint. Four, three, two…

'It's widely known that Max Goff has been involved in setting up a charitable trust to finance so-called 'New Age' ventures – such as alternative healing techniques and the promotion of 'Green' awareness.

'He's also interested in fringe science and the investigation of ley-lines, which are supposed to link standing stones, Bronze Age burial mounds and other ancient sites across the landscape…'

Most times, when you were putting in a voice-piece – especially if, like this, it wasn't live – you weren't really aware of the sense of it any more. Only the pattern of the words, the balance, the cadence and the flow. It was conversational and yet completely artificial. Automatic-pilot stuff after a while. Easy to see how some radio continuity announcers simply fell in love with their own voices.

'The project will be based at sixteenth-century Crybbe Court, for which Mr Goff is believed to have paid in excess of half a million pounds. It's expected to be a major boost to the local economy, with…'

'Whoah, whoah,' Elton shouted in the cans. 'What are you doing, Fay?'

'What?'

'You're distorting.'

'Huh?'

'How close are you to the mike?'

'I…'

Fay tasted metal.

'Oh…!'

Her eyes widened, a movement went through her, like an earth tremor along a fault line. Her hands thrust the microphone away, revolted.

The mike fell out of its stand and over the end of the table where it dangled on its flex. Fay sat there wiping the back of a hand over her lips.

'What the hell…?' said the voice in the cans. 'Fay? Fay, are you there?'

'Oh Lord, we humbly beseech you, look down upon us with compassion…'

Eyes tensely closed, Murray was trying to concentrate. He could still smell bleach from the bathroom, although they were downstairs again now, in the sitting-room that was full of repressed emotions, deep-frozen. In the shadow of the pulpit-sideboard.

Churchlike. More churchlike, anyway, than a bathroom.

But the Church was not a building. He, in this dark little parlour, at this moment, was the Church.

Two feet away… an eighteen-year-old girl in holed jeans and a straining tank top. A girl he didn't think he liked very much any more. A girl with a glistening dab of sweat over her upper lip.)

And, because there was nothing to help him in The Book of Common Prayer, he must improvise.

'… look down with compassion, Lord, on our foolish fancies and fantasies. Lift from this house the burden of primitive superstition. Hold up your holy light and guide us away from the darkened recesses of our unconscious minds.,.'

His voice came back at him in a way he'd never experienced before in prayer. Not like in church, the words spinning away, over the congregation and up into the rafters. Or muted, behind bedside screens, against the chatter and rattle and bustle of a hospital ward.

Here, in a room too crowded with still, silent things for an echo, it all sounded as slick and as shallow as he rather suspected it was. He was stricken with isolation – feeling exposed and raw, as if his veneer of priestly strength was bubbling and melting like thin paint under a blowlamp.

Murray ran a damp finger around the inside of his clerical collar. He realized in horror that the only ghost under exorcism in this house was his own undefined, amorphous faith.

As if something was stealing that faith, feeding from it.

His collar felt like a shackle; he wanted to tear it off.

He knew he had to get out of here. Knowing this, while hearing his voice, intoning the meaningless litany.

'Bring us, Lord, safely from the captivity of our bodies and the more insidious snare of our baser thoughts. Lead