Crybbe aka Curfew

He fell silent.

'What do you want?' Fay said. 'A drum roll?'

'Sorry. OK. It goes back over twelve years. To the Moot.'

'The Moot,' Fay said solemnly.

'It's organized every year by The Ley-Hunter magazine. It's a gathering of earth- mysteries freaks from all over the place. We meet every year in a different town to discuss the latest theories and walk the local leys.'

'I bet you all have dowsing rods and woolly hats.'

'You've been to one?'

Fay laughed. It sounded very strange, laughter, today.

'This particular year,' Powys said, 'it was in Hereford. Birthplace of Alfred Watkins. Everybody was amazed there wasn't a statue – nothing at all in the town to commemorate him, which is how I came to establish Trackways a couple of years later. But, anyway, all the big names in earth mysteries were there. And we were all there too. Rose and me. Andy. Ben Corby, who was at college with us, bit of a wheeler-dealer, the guy who actually managed to sell Golden Land to a publisher. And Henry Kettle, of course. We knew there was a deal coming through, and on the Monday morning after the Moot, before we all set off for home, Ben rang the publishers and learned they'd flogged the paperback rights for ten thousand quid.'

Powys smiled. 'Bloody fortune. Well, it was a nice day, so we decided, Rose and I, to invite the others – the people who'd been in on the book from the beginning – to come out for a celebratory picnic. We wondered where we could go within reach of Hereford. Then Andy said, 'Listen,' he said, 'I know this place…'

She looked out through the side window of the Mini. She didn't recognize the country. One hill made a kind of plateau. She counted along the top – like tiny ornaments on a green baize mantelpiece – three mounds, little tumps. A thin river was woven into the wide valley bottom.

Powys was dizzily swivelling his head. 'Somewhere here…'

The third mound had a cleft in it, like an upturned vulva.

'Yes,' he said. 'Yes.' He hit the brakes, pulled into the side of the road. 'It was down there.'

'The Bottle Stone?'

Powys nodded.

'Let me get this right,' Fay said. 'This… legend, whatever it was…'

'It's a common enough ritual, I've found out since. It can be a stone or a statue or even a tree – yew trees are favourites for it. You walk around it, usually anticlockwise, a specific number of times – thirteen isn't uncommon. And then you have an experience, a vision or whatever. There's a church in south Herefordshire where, if you do it, you're supposed to see the Devil.'

'But you didn't see anything like that?'

'No, just this sensation of plunging into a pit and becoming… impaled. And there was nothing ethereal about it, I can feel it now, ripping through the tissue, blood spurting out…'

'Yes, thank you, I get the picture.'

'But it happened to me. That was the point. No indication of any danger to Rose.'

'Was she unhappy?'

'Not at all. That day at the Bottle Stone, she was very happy. That's what's so agonizing. I've had twelve years to get over it… I can't. If I could make sense of it… but I can't.'

'And it was… how long, before… she fell?'

'Not quite two weeks. OK, thirteen days.'

'Hmm.' Fay's fingers were entwined in the fur around Arnold's ears. 'Was… was she unhappy at all afterwards? I mean, pregnant women…'

'It was at a very early stage. I don't even know if it had been officially confirmed.'

'She hadn't told you?'

Powys shook his head. 'The post mortem report – that was the first I knew about it.'

'So this experience you had on the so-called fairy mound… What are your feelings about that? Do you feel you were being given a warning, that there was something you should have realized?'

Powys said, 'You're interviewing me, aren't you? I can spot the inflection.'

'Oh God, I'm sorry, Joe. Force of habit. How about if I try and make the questions less articulate?'

'No, carry on. At least it's more civilized than the cops. No, it didn't make any sense. Any more than the average nightmare.'

'And you told Rose?'

'No.'

'Why not?'

'Because it had been such a nice day up to then. Because the future looked so bright. Because I didn't want to cast a pall. I just said when they dumped me on the mound I must have fainted. I said I was very dizzy. I did tell Andy about it after… after Rose died.'

'And what did he say?'

'He said I should have told Rose.'

'That was tactful of him.'

'And what do you think, Fay? What do you think I should have done?'

'What about Henry Kettle. What did he say?'

'He wanted nothing to do with it. He used to say this kind of thing was like putting your fingers in a plug socket.'

Fay glanced at him quickly, uneasily, over Arnold's ears. Was it possible that Joe Powys was indeed insane? Or, worse perhaps, was it possible he was sane?

He was hunched over the steering wheel. 'Oh, Fay, how could I have killed Rachel?'

He looked at her. 'I'm not saying I was in love with her. We'd only known each other a couple of days, but…'

She looked up into the hills, all the little tumps laid out neatly.

He said, 'Think Arnold can manage a walk?'

Arnold struggled to his feet on Fay's knee.

'He obviously thinks so,' Fay said. 'Come on, then. Let's go and find the Bottle Stone.'

Max began to breathe hard.

It was astonishing.

'Take me over again, Mel,' Max said. 'Then maybe we'll get Guy Morrison and his crew to come up with you. We have to have pictures of this. For the record.'

He leaned forward, thoughts of Rachel's death blown away by all this magic.

Melvyn, his helicopter pilot, took them over the town again making a wide sweep of the valley. Max counted six standing stones – first time round he'd missed the one by J. M. Powys's cottage near the river.

He couldn't believe it. A week ago Crybbe was scattered… random, like somebody'd crapped it out and walked away. Now it had form and subtle harmonies, like a crystal. It had been earthed.

He could spot, clear as if it had been blasted in with a giant aerosol paint-spray, the main line coming off the Tump. It cut through the Court, cleaved a path through the woods until it came to a small clearing, and in the centre of this clearing, surrounded by tree stumps and chain-sawed branches, there was a tall stone, thin and sharp as a nail from up here.

Lucky he owned the wood. Lucky, also, that nobody in Crybbe seemed to give a shit about tree conservation.

Nice work, Andy.

Andy. Such a plain and simple user-friendly name. But the thought of Andy made him shiver, and he liked to shiver.

The line eased out of the wood, across the graveyard and sliced into the church, clean down the centre of the tower. Then it ploughed across the square and hit this building.