Crybbe

CHAPTER XXI

Before, the last and only time he'd been inside Crybbe Court, it had been very much Henry's dead place; now it was repellently alive.

It had been cold and dry; now it was warm and moist, and going into it was disturbingly, perversely sexual. The Court was a very old woman, grotesquely aroused, and she wanted him.

The main door had not been locked. He ventured quietly in, the box under his arm. Stone floor, low ceiling and slits of windows set high in the walls. And the walls leaked.

Joe Powys ran a cautious finger along the stone and found it warm and slimy. Under the light, he saw dead insects on the walls, all of them quite recently dead, not husks. Moths, flies and bluebottles trapped in a layer of… fat, it smelled like fat.

Or tallow maybe, grease from candles made of animal fat.

Crybbe Court was alive and sweating.

He moved towards the stone stairs, thinking, inevitably, of Rachel. What had it taken to make her so hot and feverish and desperate to get out of here that…?

But you don't know what happened, you don't know.

Though you'll soon find out, as you retrace her steps up these stone steps, butcher's shop slippery now, like the walls.

Coming to the first floor – the big family living-room and the bedchambers off. In one of these, Fay had told him, Tiddles the mummified cat had slept, most recently, in a chest that was not very old. Tiddles had come down from the rafters, but had never left the house, presumably, until she and Rachel had been hurled out of the prospect chamber.

Fay.

Picturing her standing in the field overlooking Crybbe, the blue cagoule streaming from under her arm, her rainbow eye watering in the wind.

It made him so sad, this image, that he had a wild urge to dump the box and race out of the Court – filthy, clammy, raddled old hag – and run back to Crybbe to find Fay and hold her, even if they only had a few minutes before…

Before whatever was to happen, happened.

He wore his sense of foreboding like the black bag over a condemned man's head. Yet he was still half-amazed at what he was planning to do: black comedy, a bizarre piece of alternative theatre. Verdict: took his own life while the balance of mind was disturbed.

The voice of the police inspector, Hughes, landed in his head. Are you sure he didn't say anything to you, Mrs Morrison, by way of suicide note, so to speak? Or did he assume, do you think, that his method of taking his own life would be self-explanatory?

Well, he was a crank, wasn't he? You only had to read his book.

He wondered if the day would ever come when an inquest would concede that the balance of mind might be affected by prevailing psychic conditions.

Bloody New Age crap.

There was a stench of rancid fat. He felt sick.

It would be good, in a way, to be out in the fresh air.

As Col turned the corner of the back street linking the town hall with the churchyard, there was an enormous splintering roar and a belch that shook the ground. And then – as if massive furnace doors had been flung wide – huge, muscular arms of flame reached out for the heavens.

'Go easy,' Col said. 'I think the church roof's collapsed.'

There were about twenty men with him, the youngest and strongest of them. Bill Davies, the butcher, was there, and the three burly Gwatkin brothers.

'God preserve us,' one of them said and then turned away, embarrassed, his face already reddened in the glare from the church.

'It's down to you now,' Col said. He hoped to God the stone walls of the church would contain the fire so that it wouldn't spread into the town, but the heat was unbelievable; anything could happen. Crackling splinters – in fact, great burning brands – were being thrown off, and every so often there'd be a chaotic clanging of the bells.

'What we're going to do…' Col said. 'All over the churchyard, you'll see pieces of wood ablaze. I want six of you to get the ones you can handle at one end and bring them out. This is bloody dangerous, so be damned careful, but we've got to have light where we're going.'

'Why can't we just go 'ome and get torches?' a young lad of seventeen or eighteen, said.

'Do as he says, boy,' Bill Davies grunted. 'Nobody goes out of this street. You step into that square, you'll wish you'd stayed and burned.'

As a handful of men climbed over the churchyard wall, Bill Davies took Col aside. 'I'm not wrong, am I, Colonel?'

'Look, be a good chap…'

'Tell me. Colonel. I 'ave to know, see. Is it… in that square… Oh hell, is it the year 1593 over there, or is it an illusion? Is this town living an illusion, do you know?'

Joe Powys went up the stairs, past a small landing with an oak door four inches thick, which was open, revealing the stairs up to the attic.

Walking up the steps, towards the death-chamber of Michael Wort with what he believed to be the head of Michael Wort in a wooden box under his arm.

People like me would no more come up here alone, he remembered thinking, than pop into a working abattoir to shelter from the rain.

But you aren't alone, are you?

The box was heavy.

Trying to avoid touching the walls because the stone was slick with something that felt like mucous. Suspecting that if he switched off the lamp, it would glow on the stones, luminous.

And so he came, at last, to the alcove leading to the prospect chamber.

When he put down the box to open the door, he felt Rachel was standing at his side. Remembering being here with her. How two wafers of light from holes in the roof had crossed just above her head and he'd recalled her standing by the window of the room at the Cock, naked and pale and ethereal.

Now he could almost see her calm, silvery shade; they'd go hand in hand into the prospect chamber.

This… is the only part of the house I really like.

And together they'd take the head of Michael Wort back into the night.

He turned the metal handle and put his shoulder to the old, oak door.

New Age Heaven.

Blissful, blissful, blissful.

'I want to touch him,' the woman next to her cried. 'I want to bathe in him.'

Michael, Michael, MICHAEL, MICHAEL!

The Being of Light lifted his head and spread his arms to embrace his town. Bright people were gathering around him, both sexes, shimmering, all shapes and sizes, from the large, smiling man in the incandescent white suit to the tiny little lady, mouth opening in delight to reveal small, sharp white teeth, like a fish's, like… like…

Couldn't remember.

But she didn't want to remember. She'd never fell so warm and yet so free. She saw herself soaring above Crybbe, and the town was decked out in ribbons of soft, coloured light anchored by ice-bright, luminescent standing stones. Floating over square, she saw the old buildings in a lambent Christmas-card glow. But some of them were not so old, their timbers looked sturdy and neatly dovetailed, especially the inn, which had a simple strength and a sign with a large, rough beast upon it, and indeed, there were farm animals in the square around a cart with wooden wheels and sacks of grain on it. There was a cow, three horses, a pig. And a dog! Black and white like… like. ..

Couldn't remember.

'Fay.'

Who was Fay?

'Listen to me.'

'Yes,' she sang. 'Yes, yes, yes, I'm listening.'

But she had no intention of listening; this was the wrong voice. It didn't sound like a cello, it sounded old and frail, an ancient banjo, cracked and out of tune.

She laughed.

Everyone was laughing.

New Age Heaven.

'Fay,' Alex said into her ear. 'Listen to me, please.'

'Yes, yes, yes,' she sang. 'But you'll have to come with me. Can you float? Can you float like me?'

She wasn't floating. She was part of a group of thirty or forty people, hands linked, slowly and gloomily moving around in an untidy, irregular circle.

Alex could see most of them now, in the spluttering amber of the blazing church.

In the centre of the square, where, in many towns, there was a cross, a man stood. A tall man, stripped to the waist. He had dark, close-shaven hair and a black beard. His eyes were closed. He was sweating. His arms hung by his side but slightly apart from his body, the palms of his hands upturned. The ragged circle of people moved around him, anticlockwise.

The old buildings seemed to be leaning out of their foundations and into the firelight, like starved tramps at a brazier. The buildings had never looked more decrepit or as close to collapse.

Similarly, the people. Alex followed Fay around, walking behind her, peering into the faces of the men and women in the circle, horrified at how weak and drained they looked, some of them obviously ill. On one side of his daughter was a stocky man with a sagging belly and one eye badly bloodshot. He was moaning faintly and saliva dribbled down his chin. Fay's other hand lay limply in a flabby hand full of rings, obviously not very expensive ones, for they looked tarnished now and the joints of the fingers were swollen around them. The woman's hair was in wild, white corkscrews; her lips were drawn back into a frozen rictus; she was breathing in spurts through clenched teeth.

Diametrically opposite this woman, Alex saw Fay's ex-husband Guy Morrison, his blond hair matt-flat, exposing a large, white bald patch; his mouth down-turned, forming pouches of slack skin from his cheek to his once-proud jawline. Next to him a fat girl was sobbing inconsolably to herself as she moved sluggishly over the cobbles. On the other side of this girl, a thin woman with shorn hair was breathing with difficulty, in snorts, blood sparkling on her upper lip and around her nose, from which a small ring hung messily from a torn flap of skin, and every time she took a breath part of the ring disappeared into a nostril. She didn't seem aware of her physical distress; nor did any of the others.

'Fay,' Alex whispered.

Fay's skin was taut and pallid, her green eyes frozen open, her lips stretched in anguish, which made the words issuing from them all the more pathetic.

'Flying away, high, into the light. Can't keep up with me, can you?'

He didn't even try. He stood in the shadows and watched her drift away.

He'd had to stop himself from pulling her out of the circle. He had the awful feeling that he would simply detach her body, that her mind would remain in the ring and she would never get it back, would be a vegetable.

Which was the very worst thing of all; Alex knew this.

He stood and watched her for two more circuits of the square. A lurid flaring of amber from the dying church picked out that woman from The Gallery, ugly blue bruises around her throat, dried vomit on her chin, coughing weakly; couldn't see her husband.

Very gently he separated Fay's fingers from those of the woman next to her and slipped her small, cold right hand into his left. With his right hand he found the damp, fleshy finger of the white-haired woman.

And so Alex slipped into the circle and began to move slowly round.

He realized at once that he'd made a terrible, terrible mistake.

His legs began to feel heavy and cumbersome. At first he felt as if he'd stepped into a pair of Wellingtons several sizes too big and was wading in them through thick, muddy water, and then the weight spread up to his thighs – he was in the middle of a river in cumbersome waders – and finally it was as though both legs had been set in concrete; how he managed to move he didn't know, but he kept on, at funereal pace, his arms feeling limp as though the blood were draining away into the other hands, his life energy passed along the chain.

Progressive torpor. This was how it happened. Initiation ceremony. They were always saying, the newcomers, how much they wanted to fit in, become part of the community.

Now here they were, all these bright, clever, New Age folk, achieving overnight what some people waited years to attain.

All moving at last to the rhythm of Crybbe.