Crybbe

CHAPTER XVI

The acoustic in the square was tight and intimate, like a studio, and the voice was deep and resonant: strong and melancholy music. Wonderful broadcasting voice, Fay thought, trying to be cynical. Radio Three, FM.

'When you think about it,' the voice said, 'any town centre's an intensely powerful place; it's where energy gathers from all directions, thoughts and feelings pouring in. It's where we go to tap into a town, to feel its life rhythm.'

Pure radio, Fay thought. The purest radio of all, because we can't see anything. No distractions. He can design his pictures in our minds.

'The town centre is where the centuries are stored,' Andy said. 'Smell them. Smell the centuries.'

All I can smell, Fay thought, is shit. Four hundred years of shit. And all I can hear is bullshit. Had to keep telling herself that. This was Andy Boulton-Trow, of Bottle Stone farm. Descendant of Sheriff Wort, scourge of Crybbe, black magician, the most hated man in

…

'What you can smell,' Andy Boulton-Trow said (and she felt, most uncomfortably, that he was speaking directly to her), 'is many centuries of human life. There haven't always been sewerage systems and hot water and fresh vegetables. This town lived on the border of two often hostile countries, and it had to live within itself. It ground its own flour, killed its own meat and kept its own counsel.'

He paused. 'And its secrets. It kept its secrets.'

Fay thought, drab secrets densely woven into a faded, dim old tapestry.

Boulton-Trow's voice was the only sound in the square. The only sound in the world – for this square was the world. None of them could leave it, except – perhaps – by dying.

Should have been a terrifying thought. Wasn't.

She couldn't remember, for the moment, quite what he looked like, this Boulton-Trow. Only that he was tall and dark and bearded. Like Christ; that was how people saw Him.

But she couldn't see Boulton-Trow. She couldn't see anybody. You'd have thought your eyes would have adjusted by now, so that you'd be able to make our at least the shapes of men and women. But unless they were very close to you, you could see nothing. This darkness was unnatural.

Not, however, to Andy. She could feel that. He knew his way around the darkness. If anybody could lead them out of here it would be him, and that would be comforting to these people.

Perhaps it was comforting to her.

But there was no immediate comfort in Andy's message.

'And now you come here, and you want Crybbe to give up its secrets to you. To lay open its soul to you. You want to feel its spirit inside you. Isn't that right?'

'We want to help it rediscover its own spirit,' someone said 'Surely that's what this is about, this experiment.'

'This experiment.' Andy laughed. 'And who's the subject of this experiment? Is it Crybbe? Or is it us? Maybe we're here to let the town experiment on us. It's an interesting idea, isn't it? Maybe Crybbe can work its own alchemy if you're prepared to put yourselves into the crucible. Perhaps what you're experiencing now is a taster. Can you handle this? Are you strong enough?'

Talk about a captive audience. Fay thought. It was an uneasy thought. She was a captive, too. Would she not also go along with anything this man suggested if he could lead her out of here, back into where there were lights.

'Sense of place,' Andy said. 'You want to feel that sense of place that finds an echo in your own hearts. You want to belong. You want to lay yourself down in a field on a summer's evening and you want the mysteries to come to you, whispered in your ears, drifting on the air and smelling of honeysuckle.'

'Yes,' a woman said faintly. 'Yes.'

Andy paused and the night held its breath.

Thai's not how it works,' he said. 'You know that really, don't you? This is how it works. This is Sense of Place. Feel it. Smell it. Secrets come out like babies, writhing and covered in blood and slime. And all of us genteel New Age people, we turn up our noses and we start to scream. Let me out of here! I can't bear it! Give me my picturesque half-timbered cottage and my chintzy sofa and my books. Give me my incense and my crystals and my immersion tank. Give me my illusions back. Yeah?'

Nobody spoke.

'I can't give you your illusions back,' Andy said gently.

The silence was total.

Radio, Fay thought desperately. It's only radio. You know the techniques, you know the tricks. He's standing there at the mixing desk, the Presenter and also the Engineer, playing with the effects, adjusting the atmos.

'But if you trust me,' Andy said, 'I can give you the true secrets of Crybbe. Think about this. I'll be back.'

And the voice was gone.

'Andy!' Jarrett shouted into the pungent night. 'Don't go!'

'He can't go,' Oona Jopson said. 'Can he?'

'Stop!' Powys shouted.

The mechanical digger groaned.

Arnold barked.

'Take it slowly, OK. We could be coming to something.

Gomer's customized digger had an extra spotlight, mounted on the cab. It wasn't as strong as the single headlight, but least you could focus it on the target.

Powys had been worried the wall would be a problem, but Gomer had done some skilled manoeuvring, putting on a show, riding the digger like a trick-cyclist, plant-hire choreographer, tapping the wall with the edge of the shovel in exactly the right places, until the stones crumbled apart like breezeblocks. Powys asking him, 'Out of interest, how long would it have taken you to take this wall apart with the bulldozer?'

Gomer had leaned out of his cab, his cigarette pointing upwards from his mouth so the red end was reflected in his glasses. 'You what, Joe? This ole wall? Gimme hour or so you'd never know there'd been a wall yere. Tell you what, it bloody hurt me, that did, havin' to say I couldn't 'andle 'it without a bigger 'dozer.'

Afterwards, it had just been a question of removing enough rubble to get the digger to the Tump. And after that…'

'Piece o' piss,' Gomer said. 'Sorry, Minnie.'

Mrs Seagrove sat on a broken section of the wall, dust all over her kilt, Arnold lying across her knees, watchful, both of them watching the action.

'Isn't he good, though, Joe?' she said as Gomer went into the Tump like a surgeon. 'Isn't he a marvel?'

Powys smiled. She was loving it. He wondered if she remembered killing Edgar Humble, or if she still half-thought that was all a dream, no more real now than Frank, her dead husband.

'Hold it a minute, Gomer, we've got…'

Gomer backed up, raised the shovel. Powys slid under it, lumps of earth falling on him from its great metal teeth.

'Minnie, can you pass me the hand-lamp?'

It looked like an opening. No more than five feet in, and they could be into some kind of tunnel. He shone the light inside and he could see a roof of solid stone, like the capstone of a dolmen.

'Gomer, we've cracked it.'

'Course we 'ave, boy. Want me to widen the 'ole?'

'OK.'

He stepped back and the shovel adjusted itself then went in again.

He couldn't believe this. They'd gone in at precisely the spot where Arnold had been sitting (sitting – a leg short and he was sitting) and after no more than twenty minutes they were into the heart of this thing.

Powys looked up towards the sky, black and starless.

'Henry?' he said, 'is this you, you old bugger?'

Fay moved among them, listening, but speaking to no one.

It was obvious by now that Col Croston was not coming back to her. Perhaps, like Hereward, he'd gone to try and find a way out of the square.

'We're not in a different time zone,' Graham Jarrett was saying. 'It's not as simplistic as that. We're in what you might call a timeless zone. A place where the past and present exist in the same continuum.'

'What he was saying, about the town centre,' Adam Ivory said. 'I think that's literally central to this experience. The town centre's this kind of energy vortex…'

Fay moved on. They were creating a dream within a dream, the way New Age people tended to do, moving around scattering meaningless jargon, making themselves comfortable inside the experience.

But Jean Wendle, the most experienced of them all, was not here.

Or was she?

Fay moved around in the darkness, almost floating, coming to sense the nearness of other bodies and the emotions emanating from them: fear and exhilaration in equal quantities now. But she doubled there was one of them who would not prefer this experience in retrospect, returning to the square by daylight:

Yes, this was where it happened, just about here, yes, you can still feel the essence of it, yes, it'll never be the same again for me, this place, always be special, yes, it was like an initiation, becoming a part of this town. And now I feel I can tap into it whenever I want to, and I can really work here effectively now because I belong, because I've felt the Spirit of Crybbe.

Fay moved on. Through the radio world.

And now he was inside the Tump.

He'd been inside them before – burial chambers, passage graves. It was suggested that many of the stone dolmens cromlechs around the country had once been covered over, like this, with earth.

The passageway was perhaps three and a half feet wide, and was low, and he had to walk painfully bent over. He directed the beam at the walls and the ceiling; the structure appeared to be a series of cromlechs joined up, like vertebrae, wide slabs of grey-brown stone overhead, a floor of close-packed earth.

He turned around, with difficulty, and he couldn't see the entrance any more. He wasn't naturally claustrophobic, but he shuddered briefly at the thought of the opening being sealed behind him, great bucket-loads of earth dumped back and rubble from the wall heaped across so that nobody would ever know there was a passageway, so that he slowly suffocated in here and became one more well-preserved pile of bones in forgotten Bronze Age burial chamber.

He stopped.

His chest tightened.

Gomer. Could he really trust Gomer Parry?

So many old allegiances, never spoken of, in Crybbe. And new ones, too. Could you ever know exactly who belonged to whom?

Maybe he should have asked Gomer to come with him, but he couldn't leave Mrs Seagrove outside on her own.

Look, don't think about it, OK. Too much at stake to go back now. Concentrate on where you are, what it can tell you.

Keep going…

It would probably be an actual Bronze Age grave, although he doubted he was the first person since then to enter this mound. You couldn't excavate a prehistoric burial chamber in under an hour.

But was he the first to get inside since Michael Wort?

Abruptly it ended.

Out of the passage and into the chamber itself, wider, maybe eight feet in diameter, but not quite circular any more. It was cold in here; the air smelled old and rank.

In the centre of the chamber was a single flat stone.

On the stone was a wooden box.

Powys stopped at the entrance to the chamber, put the lamp on the ground, stood blocking the entrance, head bowed.

They didn't have boxes in the Bronze Age, not carved oak boxes anyway, with iron bands and locks.

He stood staring at the box in the lamp's beam, and his breathing tightened. The box was about twelve inches deep and eighteen inches square. It sang to him, and it sang of ancient evil.

Oh, come on…

He walked across the chamber to the box, and found he couldn't touch it.

There is no evil, only degrees of negativity.

Powys started to laugh, and then, quite deliberately, he bent down and switched off the lamp.

What is this about?

Well, he couldn't see the box any more, or the inside of the stone chamber; he could be anywhere, no visual images, no impressions coming in now.

Just me. And it. This is a real fairy hill, and I'm in the middle of it, and I've come here of my own free will and there's no Andy and no Jean and I'm scared. I've put out the light to induce a state of fear, and the nerve-ends are bristling with it and I'm ready.

I'm ready.

'Hereward?'

'Yes.'

'Thank God.'

'Why? Why are you thanking God?'

'Because I thought… I thought you weren't going to come back. Hereward, I'm so desperately sorry. I was only trying to get away. All I've ever wanted is to get away from here.'

'And you thought Guy Morrison would take you away?'

'No… yes… Oh God, I don't know what I thought, I was just so lonely and messed up. He – Guy – was passing through, he wasn't part of Crybbe, he was going somewhere and I was stuck fast. I was like someone just dashing outside and thumbing a lift. And he stopped. I'm sorry, that's all mixed up, I'm not very clear tonight, not very articulate.'

'Don't cry.'

'I'm sorry. I'm sorry about the picture, too, but you don't know what pictures can do.'

'Oh, I do.'

'I'm not talking about aesthetics.'

'I know.'

'Do you?'

'Pictures are doorways.'

'Yes.'

'Artists put elements of themselves into pictures, and also elements of other things. The man in that picture of Tessa's, he's her teacher, you know. He has a studio in the woods, and she's been going down there and he's been teaching her how to paint. And what to paint. How to make a picture into doorway.'

'How do you know that?'

'Because, in the picture, he's standing in a doorway, like The Light of the World, in reverse, because he's so dark. But darkness and light, it's all the same when you can't see, isn't it?'

'I don't…'

'I'm going through the doorway, Jocasta.'

'Hereward?'

'It really is the only way out of here, through the doorway. The only way out for me, anyway.'

'Hereward, I'm getting very scared.'

'There's no need to be scared. Come here, darling. There.'

'No. No, please.'

'There… there…'

'Aaaugh.'

'There.'

Hereward felt the woman go limp, and his hands fell away from her throat. He felt himself smiling into the dark as he walked away.

The lamp was alight, and the door was ajar. When he pushed, it swung open at once, and Hereward found himself in the comfortingly familiar setting of his own workshop next to The Gallery.

A candle glowed on the workbench, where he'd made frames. Do you know, in the early days, we used actually to make our own frames. ..

Fragments of frames were scattered over the bench and the floor; a corner section was still wedged in the wood-vice. He wouldn't need to make frames any more; that phase was over. Perhaps he'd employ someone to do it.

'Don't suppose you'd be interested in a job, would you?' he said to the shadow sitting on the bench, next to the candle.

The shadow stopped whittling at a piece of framing-wood with its Stanley knife and slipped to the floor.

Hereward saw it wasn't really a shadow; it was just black.