Crybbe aka Curfew

really worked until 8 p.m. on a Sunday evening? Certainly not the kind of unskilled vandals who'd been let loose in here.

What, then, if it had been Humble who had come up here and made a lot of noise to lure her inside? He'd never liked her, and he knew she didn't like him. He might think she was putting the knife in for him with Max. Maybe Max had found out what Humble had done to J.M. that night. Maybe Humble's job was on the line, and he thought she was responsible.

But if Humble was behind this he would have needed an accomplice. One of them up here to make all the racket, one to lock the door after she'd gone through.

Which still meant that someone was up here with her now, on this side of the locked door. Keeping very, very quiet.

Rachel spun round.

It was so dark with the door closed that she could hardly see as far as the twist in the staircase which took it to the attic. Anything could be around that bend, not six feet away.

'Humble!'

Not much authority left in her voice, nor much anger. She was a woman alone in the darkness of a decaying old house, with a man who intended her harm.

Humble, listen… whichever side of the door you are… I don't know why you're doing this. I wish you'd tell me, so we can have it out. But if it's anything to do with what happened the other night with J. M. Powys, I want you to know that I haven't said anything to Max and I don't intend to. A mistake is a mistake. Humble, can you hear me?'

The door didn't have a handle, only a lock. She bent down and tried to look into the keyhole, to see if there was a key in the other side.

She couldn't tell one way or the other; it was too dark. Her own keys were in her bag, on the kitchen table.

'Humble, look, if you've heard what I said, just unlock the door and I'll give you time to get out of the building. I don't want any unpleasantness because…'

Oh, what the hell did it matter now?

'… because I'm handing in my notice tomorrow. I've got another job. In London. You won't have to deal with me again. Did you hear that? Do you understand what I'm saying? Humble!'

Rachel beat her fists on the oak door until she felt the skin break.

She had grown cold. She wrapped her Barbour around her and sat down on a stone stair next to the cardboard coffin and listened hard.

Nothing. She couldn't even hear the birds singing outside, where there was light.

But from the attic, clearly not far beyond the top of the spiral stairway came a single, sharp, triumphant bump.

CHAPTER IX

He remembered… TWELVE… spiralling down out of the sky, seeing the stone thickening and quivering and throbbing, the haze around it like a dense, toxic cloud. At which point Memory went into negative, the fields turned purple, the river black. Everything went black.

He didn't remember the scramble of feet, all four of them rushing the new author, J.M. Powys, picking him up, carrying him to the so-called fairy mound and dumping him face-down on its grassy funk with shrieks of laughter.

He was only able to construct this scene from what Ben Corby had told him years later.

From Ben's story, he'd tried to form an image of Rose, but he couldn't be sure whether she was laughing too or whether she'd stopped short, her face clouding, feeling premonition like a small tap on the shoulder from a cold, stiff hand.

Every time he pushed himself into replaying the scene in his head, he forced Rose to be laughing when they dumped him on the mound. He always put the laugh on freeze frame and then pulled the plug. So that he could climb out of it without breaking down.

Powys stood in the neutrality of a sunless summer evening and put both hands on the Bottle Stone – at its shoulders, when it began to taper into the neck – and pushed hard.

It was solid. A proper job, as Henry Kettle would have said. Probably several feet of the thing underground, the earth compressed around it, a few rocks in there maybe. Tufts of long grass embedded at the base. It might have been here for four thousand years. You could dig for three hours and it would still be erect.

It needed a JCB to get it out.

But first he had to force himself to touch it, to walk around it (only not widdershins, never widdershins). The stone, a cunningly hewn replica of something which had speared his dreams for twelve years.

He also reserves the right, Rachel had said, to install standing stones or other ritual artefacts on your lawn.

All down to Andy Boulton-Trow. He could imagine Andy's unholy delight at finding, among Goff's collection of newly quarried megaliths, one roughly (not roughly, exactly) the size and shape of the Bottle Stone.

Or maybe, knowing that Powys was coming to Crybbe, he'd actually had one cut to shape and then planted it in a spot that would emphasize the correlation of the stone and the river, recreating the fateful scene of twelve years ago.

Rough therapy? Or another of Andy's little experiments.

Fifty yards away, the brown river churned like a turbulence of worms towards the bridge.

The Canon was angry.

'And you didn't tell me. You didn't even tell me.'

They'd taken one of the big cushions from the sofa in what was now their living-room, at the rear of the house, and put it on the rug in front of the fire, and then put the three-legged dog on the cushion.

Arnold didn't object to this at all, but something in Alex had clearly snapped.

'It's got to stop, Fay. It isn't helping. In fact, it's making things a good deal worse.'

'I'm sorry. I didn't want to get you all worked up.'

'Well I am worked up. Even though it was young Preece and he's dead. Divine retribution, if you ask me.'

'That's not a very Christian thing to say, Dad.'

'Listen, my child.' Alex, kneeling on the rug, waved a menacing forefinger. 'Don't you ever presume to tell me what's Christian.'

He went down on his hands, face to face with Arnold. 'Poor little perisher. Shouldn't be allowed out with you, Fay, the way you get up people's noses.'

'Oh, I get up people's noses, do I?'

'If you got up noses for a living, you couldn't do a better job. Coming here with your superior Radio Four attitude – 'Oh dear, have to work for the little local radio station, never mind, at least there's no need to take it seriously…' '

'Now just a minute, Dad…'

' '… Oh, God, how am I expected to do any decent interviews with people who're too thick to string three coherent sentences together?' '

The Canon clambered awkwardly to his feet and then dumped himself into an armchair he'd battered into shape over several months. He swung round, as if the chair was a gun-turret, training on her a hard, blue glare. A once- familiar glare under which she used to crumble.

'You,' he said, 'were never going to adapt to their way of life, because it was the wrong way to do things, because they keep their heads down and don't parade in front of the council offices with placards if they don't get their bins emptied.'

'Dad, I'm supposed to be a reporter…'