'You remember now?'
'Yes. It was in the papers, wasn't it? How long's she been in Crybbe?'
'As I understand it,' he said, 'she was one of the first of Goff's big-name signings. Rachel says Max wanted to put her into this old rectory he's bought, a couple of miles outside town. But she insisted on being at the heart of things, so she's living in a town house on the square.'
'I didn't know she knew my father.'
'Jean gets to know everybody. Unobtrusively.'
'She was sitting so still,' Fay said. 'In church. So very still.'
'She slows her breathing sometimes. She's a bit uncanny. She… intuits things. Absorbs atmospheres and interprets what's really going on. I'm impressed by Jean, Scares me a bit too, I must admit.'
'Scared me,' Fay said, 'in church. I thought I was seeing Dad's late wife.' She paused. 'Again,' she said.
They were coming into Crybbe. Powys slowed for the 10 m.p.h. speed limit.
'You said…
'She was called Grace Legge The house we live in was hers. She died last year. I saw her last week.'
'Bloody hell, Fay.'
'I'd never seen one before. You know how it is – you've read about ghosts, you've seen the films, you've interviewed people who swear they've seen one. But you don't…quite… believe they exist.'
'Except in people's minds,' he said.
'Yes.' Fay ran her fingers deep into Arnold's warm fur. 'I don't recommend the experience. You know what they say – about the flesh creeping? The spine feeling chilled? Grace was ghastly, dead. What's the time?'
'Ten past five.'
'We haven't eaten,' Fay remembered. 'No wonder I'm shooting my mouth off. Light-headed. You coming in for something, Powys? Omelette? Sandwich? I'm afraid Dad'll be there', so forget everything I said about Grace.'
'Thanks, but I ought to find Rachel.'
Powys pulled up at the bottom of Bell Street, took out the keys and passed them to Fay.
Arnold tried to stand up on Fay's knee. 'Hang on,' Powys said. He went round to open Fay's door and she handed Arnold to him while she got out and shook off the dog hairs.
As Powys handed Arnold back, as gently as he could, Fay looked him hard in the eyes. Serious, almost severe.
'If you've got any sense, Joe Powys,' she said, 'you'll piss off out of Crybbe pronto and take Rachel with you. She's gold. She's the only person I know around here who's got her act together. Come on, Arnie, I'm afraid we're home.'
'What about you? Strikes me you need to get out more urgently than any of us.'
'Why? Because I'm losing my marbles like Dad?'
And like me? he wondered, walking down the street towards the river.
And immediately twelve years fell away and he was going around the stone again.
Powys stood on the bridge and threw up his hands, warding it off, wiping it away, but the atmosphere was thick with it. He could feel Memory's helicopter beating the air above his head with great sweeping, buffeting strokes. It had never been so powerful. He was standing upright on the bridge, but his mind was ducking and crouching, cowering. He looked around for somewhere to run to, but it was all around him.
He was inside the running figure now, pounding across the bridge and into the short gravel drive of the little black and white riverside cottage.
Powys flung himself en to the long-unmown lawn, soft and damp and full of buttercups and dandelions.
He lay on his stomach with his face into the grass, his eyes closed and the cool vegetation pressed into the sockets. Kept rubbing it in until it was a green mush and not so cool any more.
'You're going back,' Annie had said.
Back to the Old Golden Land. Back – he'd told himself – to find out what had happened to Henry Kettle. Back – they said behind his back – to find redemption.
The cold in his stomach told him he was back, but that there was no redemption to be found here.
He opened his eyes and blinked and then the screaming started to come out of him like aural vomit, for at the top edge of the little ridge on which the cottage stood, something black and alien thrust out of the grass.
The stone was only five feet tall but looked taller because of the prominence of its position.
Its base was fat and solidly planted in.he earth. It maintained its girth until, three feet above the ground, it tapered into a neck, presenting the illusion of a large black beer-bottle
CHAPTER VIII
Previously, the cardboard box had contained a new kind of foot-massaging sandal from Germany which Max was trying out on the advice of his reflexologist. As a coffin it was not entirely satisfactory.
She'd found the box in Max's bedroom, which was built into the eaves over the far end of the long room where his desk stood. The four-poster bed, facing the mound, had deep-grey drapes. Max had not spent a single night here yet, but it seemed to Rachel that the atmosphere in the room was already foetid with tension and a lingering sense of suffocated longing. Rachel thought of the nights of the Great Beast and the Scarlet Woman, and was sickened and ashamed. She'd snatched the shoe-box and fled.
