Crybbe aka Curfew

'In which case' – Ashpole spread his hands, palms down in a flat, cutting movement – 'we'd simply stop using Morrison altogether.'

'I see,' Rachel said.

What an appalling little creep, she thought.

Over a bland buffet lunch – carnivores catered for, but strictly no smoking – Max Goff explained his plan to publish, in perhaps two years' time, The Book of Crybbe.

'Gonna be an illustrated record of the project,' said Goff. He paused and looked into his audience. 'And a blueprint for the Third Millennium.'

Warm applause. They'd needed extra tables in the dining room at the Cock.

Goff said, 'I've asked J. M. Powys to write the book. Because his work remains, to my mind, the most inspiring evocation of a country still able to make contact with its inner self.'

Powys smiled modestly. The magical, mystical J. M. Powys. Too old, he thought miserably, to become someone else. Too young not to want to.

About forty people were there, some from London and elsewhere, to hear about the project and consider getting involved. Thin, earnest men in clean jeans and trainers and women in long skirts and symbolic New Age jewellery. Powys didn't know most of them. But he felt, dispirited, that he'd met them all before.

There was a delicate-looking tarot-reader called Ivory with a wife old enough to be his mother and big enough to be his minder. A feminist astrologer called Oona Jopson, in whose charts, apparently, Virgo was a man. She had cropped hair and a small ring through her nose.

After Goff sat down, Powys listened idly to the chat. He heard an experimental hypnotist talking about regression. 'I've got an absolute queue of clients, mostly, you know, from London, but what I'd really like is to get more of the local people on the couch…'

Apart from Andy Boulton-Trow, the only person he'd actually encountered before was the spiritual healer, Jean Wendle, from Edinburgh, who was older than the rest, grey-haired with penetrating eyes.

'This really your scene, Jean?'

'This? Heaven forbid. Crybbe, though… Crybbe's interesting.'

'You reckon?'

'Well, goodness, Joe, you said it. If you hadn't revealed what a psychically charged area this was, none of us would be here at all, would we?'

'You're very cruel.'

She narrowed her eyes. 'Come round one night. We can discuss it. Anyway… She smiled at him. 'How are things now?'

He looked around the room for Rachel, couldn't see her.

'I think things are finally looking up,' he said.

Later, Goff took him into a corner of the dining-room and lowered his voice.

'Confidentially,' he said, 'I need somebody who understands these matters to make sure this arsehole Morrison doesn't screw it up. Part of the deal, he uses you as script consultant. No J. M. Powys, no documentary. J. M. Powys disagrees with anything, it doesn't go out.'

That'll be fun.'

Goff put a hand on Powys's arm. 'Hey, you know when I first knew I had to have you write the book?'

Powys smiled vacantly, beyond embarrassment.

'See, when I first came to Crybbe, the very first day I was here, I look around and suddenly I can see this about the border country being a spiritual departure lounge. I'm standing down by the river, looking over the town to the hills of England on one side and the hills of Wales on the other. And that other phrase of yours, about the Celtic Twilight Zone, I'm hearing that, and I'm thinking, yeah, this is it. The departure lounge. It just needs a refuel, right? You know what I'm getting at here? You can feel it in this room right now. All these people, all reaching out.'

'Maybe they're reaching out for different things.'

'Ah shit, J.M., it's all one thing. You know that. Down to generating energy and throwing it out. What you put out you get back, threefold. Jeez, pretty soon, this town is gonna glow'

'Seems to me there are things you need to work out, Joe,' Andy Boulton-Trow said. 'Maybe this is the place to do it.'

Those lazy, knowing, dark-brown eyes gazing into your head again, after all these years. I can see your inner self, and it's a mess, man.

Andy was probably Goff's role-model New Ager. He had the glow. Like he'd slowed his metabolism to the point where he was simply too laid-back to be affected by the ageing process.

'Let's talk,' Andy said, and they took their wine glasses into the small, shabby residents' lounge just off the dining-room.

Andy lounged back on a moth-eaten sofa, both feet on a battered coffee-table. Somehow, he made it look like the lotus position.

He said, 'Never got over it, did you?'

Powys rolled his wine-glass between his hands, looking down into it.

'I mean Rose,' Andy said.

'It was a long time ago. You get over everything in time.'

Andy shook his head. 'You're still full of shit, Joe, you know that?'

'Look,' Powys said reasonably, trying to be as cool as Andy. 'We both know I should never have gone round the Bottle Stone. And certainly not backwards.'

'Bottle Stone?' Andy said.

'And certainly not backwards. I should have told you to piss off.'

'I'm not getting you,' Andy said.

'What I saw was.. Powys felt pain like powdered glass behind his eyes. 'What I saw was happening to me, not Rose.'

'You had some kind of premonition? About Rose?'

'I told you about it.'

Andy shrugged. 'You had a premonition about Rose. But you didn't act on it, huh?'

'It was me.'

'You failed to interpret. That's a shame, Joe. You had a warning, you didn't react, and that's what's eating you up. Perhaps you've come here to find some manner of redemption.'

Andy shook his head with a kind of laid-back compassion.

If it was a big job, Gomer Parry worked with his nephew, Nev. Today Nev had just followed him up in the van and they'd got the smaller bulldozer down from the lorry, and then Nev had pushed off.

No need for a second man. Piece of piss, this one.

Unless, of course, they wanted him to take out the whole bloody mound.

Gomer chuckled. He could do that too, if it came to it.

He was sitting in the cab of the lorry, listening to Glen Miller on his Walkman. The bulldozer was in the field, fuelled up, waiting. Not far away was a van with a couple of loudspeakers on its roof, such as you saw on the street at election time. Funny job this. Had to be on site at one o'clock to receive his precise instructions. Seemed some middle bit had to come out first. Make a big thing of it, Edgar Humble had said. A spectacle. No complaints there; Gomer liked a bit of spectacle.

With the Walkman on, he didn't hear any banging on the cab door. It was the vibrations told him somebody was trying to attract his attention.

He took off the lightweight headphones, half-turned and saw an old checked cap with a square patch on the crown, where a tear had been mended. Gomer, who was a connoisseur of caps, recognized it at once and opened his door.

'Jim.'

'What you doin' yere, Gomer?' the Mayor, Jimmy Preece, asked him bluntly.