Crybbe

CHAPTER XVIII

If anything, it was stronger now. She thought she'd get used to it, like when you were staying on a farm during the manure-spreading season, but this wasn't manure and it was getting stronger.

In it there was human waste and animal waste, raw meat, blood perhaps, body odours, rancid fats… and now smoke.

Woodsmoke? Maybe.

Or was it the church? Could she smell the fire in the church because the church was on the line linking the centre of the square with the Court and the Tump?

Joe Powys would know. Or he wouldn't. Either way, it would be good to have him here. Not such a world-class crank after all, not when you listened to this bunch.

Fay walked among them, the night still alive with natural radio.

'He'll come back.' Graham Jarrett.

'What if he doesn't?' Hilary Ivory.

'I tried walking.' One of the lawyers, in tones of defeat. 'I kept on walking, looking for a light. I kept walking, and I just felt like I was fading out… fading away. Losing my physical resistance to the air, becoming absorbed in the atmosphere. I mean, it was very soporific, in a way. I think it'd be good to die like that. But not yet. I got scared. I thought, I've got to go back. And when I thought that, I was back. Like I hadn't been anywhere.'

'There's nowhere to go.' Oona Jopson. 'Accept it. Relish it. It's not likely to happen to you again.'

'Good.'

'Or maybe it will. Maybe we're being opened up to a permanent kind of cosmic consciousness, you know?'

She wondered what was happening outside the square. Was the church alight? Was Jimmy Preece alive? And what about Warren? Were the Crybbe people attending the meeting still inside the town hall? And what of their relatives in the town – had they any idea what was happening? Perhaps it had happened before, the town square sealing itself off in the past – a past which was always close to the surface of this town.

Not for the first time tonight, Fay genuinely wondered if this was some long and tortured dream. And, if it was not a dream, whether, when (if) it was over, it would have no more significance than if it had been.

Somebody was coughing very weakly, a thin scraping sound.

'Where's Colonel Croston?'

'I'm here. Who's that.'

'It's Dan Osborne, Colonel, I'm a homeopathic practitioner, but I have a medical qualification. There's a woman here in a bad way. Over here, just come towards my voice. I'm bending across her, you won't walk into her.'

'OK, I'm on my way. Do you know who she is?'

'She's wearing what feels like a silk blouse and… a fairly light skirt. She's got… thick hair, quite long I suppose.'

Guy said, 'is she wearing a thickish sort of necklace thing?'

'A torque, I think. Dear God, what's this…?'

'Jocasta! What's happened? Where are you?'

'She's… The bloody torque's been twisted into her neck. Please, Christ, just hold still…'

'OK, Mr Osborne, I'm here. Is she OK?'

'I don't know. She didn't bloody well do this to herself, did she? Somebody's tried to garrote her with her own…'

'OH GOD! GET ME OUT OF THIS!' The woman from the crafts shop hurling herself about the Crybbe vacuum bouncing off people. Somebody had to crack up, sooner or later.

Have one for me. Fay thought.

Col Croston sat down on the cobbles, cross-legged, and looked hard at the darkness. Held his own hand up in front of his face from six inches. He could see it. Just. Could tell it was a hand or was that because he knew it was a hand?

The woman would live. Her throat would be a mess, but she'd be OK. She'd tried to speak. 'Who did this?' he asked, but if she'd identified her attacker he hadn't been able to make out the name. Wouldn't be much use anyway; how could you go after anyone without light?

I am here, Col said silently, letting his eyes half-closed. I can sense myself. I can sense my toes (flexing them and then letting them relax), my calves (trying to tighten the muscles in his leg and letting them relax), my thighs… my stomach…

An exercise.

As a soldier (all his family were soldiers), Col had gravitated to the SAS not because of a need for action and physical stress but because he wanted to feel life and for that, he'd decided one needed to be out on the edge of something, always within sight of the abyss.

Rather thought he'd got over that stage now.

… chest (tighten, breath in, hold it… relax…

… shoulders…

Mind control. Expansion of the senses. Spent two weeks with a meditation expert learning techniques for dominating the body in tight spots. Optional course for officers; some of the chaps thought it was all crap. Not Col. He'd actually taken it further, after the course.

… neck… face (tensing the muscles in his cheeks and jaw, letting the tension go)…

At the end of this exercise – he'd done it many times over the past twenty or thirty years – there should be a moment of pure awareness. Awareness of oneself and one's situation. And sometimes.. .

… back of the head…

… one emerged from it and everything looked clearer.

And one knew precisely what to do next. Probably elements of yoga and meditation in there, so it was never wise to tell some of the chaps one was indulging in this sort of thing, or they'd be putting it round the Colonel talked to plants and things. Not a word to these New Age characters either, or they'd be recruiting him as an emblem.

Gradually, his breathing slowed and the voices around him in the void began to fade.

'Warm night, isn't it?'

'Hmm?'

'Stuffy. Humid.'

'Yes, it is really.'

Old chap in a T-shirt sitting in a doorway a few yards away.

'Colonel Croston, isn't it?'

'Col. Hey, just a minute…'

He could see this chap. It was still dark, but he could see him, could see his white beard and what it said on the front of his T-shirt. Didn't make any sense, half-faded, but he could…

'It's Canon Peters, isn't it? Seen you in the Cock.'

'Alex.'

Col turned around to look at the square. He could see the shapes of buildings, very dimly; he could hear the sound of people talking and possibly screaming although there was nothing immediate about this, no involvement; more like the sound of someone's TV set from a distance.

'Heard you talking to my daughter,' the old man said 'Young Fay.'

'Fay Morrison. Yes. I was. But you weren't… with us were you? You weren't in… in… Look, Canon, can you help me to understand this? When you heard us talking, could you, you know, see us?'

'No.'

Col sighed. 'Thought not. Started out thinking it was some sort of gas. Some leakage from somewhere. Or an MOD experiment, just the kind of place they'd choose. And now I'm inclined to think it's something psychological coming out. Some mass-psychosis thing. I can't begin to… I mean, what your daughter had to say was interesting in a purely academic sense but not… Frankly, I'm lost, Canon. Where does one start…?'

'Question I've been asking most of my life. Kept putting off having to answer it.'

Keep cool, Col instructed himself. Keep your head. And for God's sake, don't go back in there. (In where? And how did I get out?)

'Canon…'

'Alex.'

'Do you know what's happening?"

'Only the vaguest notion, old chap. But I believe I'm getting there.'

'It is something… psychological, isn't it? Damned if I'm going to use that other word.'

'Good Lord, no, old boy, never say that.'

'Well.' Col levered himself to his feet. He could actually see lamps in some of the houses on this side of the square. 'You know a man's been murdered?'

'Oh yes. Murray Beech, the vicar.'

'The vicar?'

'Stabbed to death. Lying in the churchyard. And the church is on fire. Look…'

Col looked up from the blackness of the square and this vague shapes of roofs, and saw the sky blooming red and orange.

And you know the strangest thing?' said Alex. 'Nobody'd come out to watch.'

'You've rung the fire brigade I take it.'

'No.'

'Good God, man, it might burn down.'

'It might. But if the fire brigade come, they'll have to go in through the square, won't they, and they might just mow down a lot of innocent people who didn't appear to see them coming, or not be able to get through. I don't know. Don't know what could happen. But I think, on balance, that it's safest to let it burn, don't you? Only a bloody church.'

The old chap looked gloomy, but, Col noted, entirely in command of his faculties. The word around town had been that Canon Peters was losing his marbles.

'I think,' the Canon said, 'that we're in the middle of what used to be known technically as A Crybbe Matter. However, on this occasion, there's been outside interference and the locals are seriously out of their depth. That's my feeling.'

'Can we help?'

'That's a very interesting question,' Alex Peters said.

Silly children's game. Fay thought, Hilary Ivory on one side of her, the cameraman, Larry Ember on the other. Or perhaps only their voices. Their voices and their hands.

Silly children's game, New Age nonsense, where's the harm?

No harm.

'We're all going to pool our energy,' Andy's voice making soft chords in the night air. 'We're going to bring down the night.'

Silly children's game. No harm in it. Make a circle, everybody hold hands, dance gaily, stop, hold out hands to the sky as if in welcome. Wasn't there something like this at the end of Close Encounters? And something else. Wasn't it in something else?

Very silly.

'Got him?'

'Just about. Bit stiff. Bit of rigor."

Col heaved the corpse across his shoulder, fireman's lift job.

Behind him, flames were coming through the church roof.

He followed Alex, the body over his shoulder. I am here. I'm walking through a churchyard with a dead vicar over my shoulder and the church is on fire.

This is not like Belfast, after a bomb blast. There are no spectators, no fire brigade, no police, no Army. Only the huge flames chewing up the night.

'I trust,' Alex said, 'that when we get to the town hall, you'll have no difficulty getting us in.'

'Count on it,' Col Croston said through gritted teeth.

The box became unaccountably heavy and Joe Powys had to put it down in the courtyard.

Open it?

The Mini was still parked up by the stable-block. It had been his intention to load the box into the boot and then drive it out of Crybbe, but there was some uncertainty. What did you do with these things?

Open it.

You could take in into a church – a real, functioning church outside of Crybbe, and place it on the altar. But you never knew, with churches in the border country, what other forces might be at work, what damage you might be inflicting on some other quiet and vulnerable community while the people slept.

Or open it.

Or you could throw it into a deep lake. This had been done in numerous legends to calm an excitable spirit, in a ceremony normally involving about twelve priests.

He didn't have twelve priests to hand. Also this was not a whole unquiet spirit.

Not the whole thing. But unquiet, yes. Walking back to the Court, holding the box with both hands, the lamp balanced on top, he'd had the illusion of something moving inside.

Open it,'

Psychological trickery. Mind games. I'm not listening.