Crybbe

MICHAEL…

screamed the poor, stricken, gullible bastards in the circle, and she could see them now. She could see them. She was gripping her dad's hand, and she could see them all in the light of Hell, and hell was what they looked like.

Hell also was what Fay felt like.

Her lips were like parchment and when she tried to wet them she found her tongue was a lump of asbestos.

Michael, she wanted to say. It's Michael Wort.

But she couldn't even make it to a croak

Her eyes found the centre of the square, where the Being of Light was formed, pulsing with vibrant, liquid life energy, platinum-white.

Pulsing with energy, all right – their energy – but it was the very darkest thing she had ever seen in all of her life.

Andy Boulton-Trow, a tall, bearded man, just an ordinary man – once – had been fitted for a black halo; it shimmered around him like the sun in a monochrome photo negative.

The halo was the shadow of Black Michael. There were pinpoints of it in Trow's eyes which had flicked open and were looking steadily, curiously into hers.

She put all the strength she had into squeezing her dad's hand. It felt as cold as her own.

Trow did not move, his gaze like black velvet. Playing with her.

Who are you? the eyes were asking. Have we met?

The complete, charismatic, black evangelist.

Somehow, Fay had milked a little strength from her poor father, enough to observe and to make simple deductions.

You've had us all going around your Bottle Stone, haven't you? Children of the New Age. Follow anybody, won't they? Look at them now. Look at the Jopson woman, led by the ring in her nose and then – gentle tweak – you tear through her flesh, and she doesn't know or care. Look at bloody Guy – show him his own reflection in a mirror shaped like a TV screen and watch him slash his wrists. Look at Graham Jarrett, away in the ultimate hypnotic trance, lost his toupee and his nose needs wiping. Look at them. Look at what you've done.

Arteriosclerotic dementia.

You have good days. Sometimes you have two or three good days together and you realize what a hopeless old bugger you were the other day when the lift failed to make it to the penthouse.

And then, one night, along comes a very cunning lady with an amorphous Chinese blob on a lead (which, as you thought, does not exist, but why else would she be trailing a lead?) And all the time you're with her, you're fine, you're wonderful, you're on top of the situation.

Until it becomes apparent that the lady is a prominent member of the Opposition, planning a startling little coup in this dead-end backwater where surely nothing that happens can be of any significance in the Great Scheme of Things.

But old habits die hard. Once a priest…

Yes, all right, Guv, I confess, I've never exactly been up there with Mother Theresa and Pope John the Twenty-third. I've cut a few corners. I've coveted my neighbour's wife. OK, several wives of several neighbours, and it wouldn't be half so bad if it had only stopped at the coveting stage. I was weak. I used to think it was OK, as long as you left the choirboys alone, but I was never attracted to choirboys, anyway, obnoxious little sods.

Here, Boss, scrap of prayer for you, this'll bring back a few memories.

Oh God, merciful Father, that despisest not the sighing of a contrite heart…

Got the message? I'm sorry… I really am sorry.

Listen, I know about the Sins of the Fathers. I know all about that.

But not Fay, please – look at her; what has she ever done to you?

Thing is – look, don't take this the wrong way, but no God of mine ever took it out on the kids. That's more his god's style. Can you see him there? He represents everything you're supposed to abhor. And he's winning, damn it, the bastard's winning!

OK, here's another bit, how much do you want, for Christ's sake? Listen, this… this is the essence of it.

Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, O Lord, and by Thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night. ..

Lighten our darkness, geddit?

Come on, Guv'nor… we had a deal…

The stone actually broke. Cracked in two.

Split off a couple of feet from the base just as Gomer was getting underneath. Raised the shovel to ground level to have another go and gave it a bit of a clonk, accidental-like, and off it came like a thumb in a bacon-slicer. Gomer backed up, smartish, but luckily the big bugger fell the other way, straight flat across the road. Whump!

'Teach me to rush ihe job, Minnie. 'Ang on to your, er. .. hat.'

Slipping down to low gear he drove right over the thing. Bit of a bump, but not much worse than one of them ramps they call a sleeping policeman.

'A big fat sleeping policeman.' Gomer burst out laughing. 'Call it Wynford Wiley.'

There were big, fat tyre-marks across the middle of the stone. Gomer accelerated past Keeper's Cottage with a disparaging sideways glance. That could do with knocking down, too.

There was the merest tremor in Trow's gaze; enough for her to pull her eyes away. Turned to her father and found that Hilary Ivory on the other side, had also turned her face, with faint confusion, towards the old man in the Kate Bush T-shirt.

Alex tried to smile. He couldn't speak.

Hilary looked at Fay, her eyes troubled. She didn't understand. The first step to recovery – the moment when, quite suddenly, you don't understand.

But Alex's hands were warm.

Dad?

A deep warmth seeped into Fay's right hand and rippled up her arm and into her breast. She could feel her heart drumming.

Alex's eyes were vibrantly blue. They made the fire in the sky look cheap and lurid. He turned his head towards Hilary lvory and she started to smile, like people smile when they're coming out of anaesthetic.

Alex's hand tightened around Fay's.

Fay grinned.

'You old bugger,' she said, quite easily.

On the other side, Larry Ember, recipient of the warmth from her own left hand, demanded gruffly, 'What the bleedin' hell's this?'

Alex's lips were white. Almost as white as the beard around them. First they tried to smile, then they were trying to shape a word.

'C…'

His hands hot now, but his lips were white.

'Dad?'

Fay squeezed his hand, almost too hot to hold.

She felt strong enough to risk a glance to the centre of the square where Trow was no longer still, but moving within his own darkness. Squirming.

Trow screamed once,

'Michael!'

The cello grotesquely off-key.

Alex found his word.

'Colonel?' he said mildly, and the piercing blue faded from his eyes; clouds were in them now. He dropped Hilary's hand, held on to Fay's for an extra moment and then let that go too.

There was a gap now between Fay and her dad, a clear gap in the circle, and the backcloth, the screen of false reality, was torn away and the flames in the sky were no longer phantasmal but a source of savage heat and acrid fumes.

'Now.' Col Croston's crisp voice, and the Crybbe hordes poured through the gap, bearing their flaming torches, farmers in tweed trousers and sleeveless body-warmers over their vests, Bill Davies, incongruously clad in his butcher's apron, Wynford Wiley ludicrously wielding his truncheon. Faces she'd seen on the streets – 'Ow're you, 'ow're you' – now hard with determination below the blazing brands. The circle in disarray.

Lights appearing in windows. From somewhere in the innards of the Cock, the sound of a generator starting up.

Col Croston, bringing up the rear, scanning the square.

'Over there! That's the man. The Sheriff! Don't let him

…'

The Sheriff?

'Right!' Fav was screaming. 'The Sheriff! He's in the cen…'

But she couldn't, in fact, see the man they were looking for. Andy Boulton-Trow had gone from the square.

He's taken his darkness back into the night.

'Larry! Camera!'

Guy was in a mess. He'd lost his jacket, lost his cool, lost his hair. 'Larry, we have to get this…'

'Piss off, Guy,' Larry Ember shouted happily, from somewhere.

Fay found she was giggling. Hysterics. Absurd.

'Dad?'

Alex managed a smile.

'Dad… We did it! You did it.'

Alex touched her arm, stumbled. Sat down quietly on the cobbles. Fay went down beside him, taking his hand.

Which was not so hot any more, not very hot at all. The blue in his eyes had drifted away. Far away. Gently and discreetly, Alex slid over on to his side. He was breading. Just. Hilary Ivory crouched down next to Fay. 'Is he OK? I used be a… a nurse… Well, sort of alternative nurse, really.'

Fay didn't reply. She pulled off her cotton top, rolled it into a ball, slid it between Alex's head and the cobbles.

'Dad?' Softly.

Fairly sure he couldn't hear her.

She picked up his hand; very little warmth remained. Alex's lips moved and she put an ear to his mouth. One word came out intact.

'Deal,' he said.

Alex's breathing ended almost imperceptibly.

Fay sat for a long time on the cobbles holding her father's cooling hand under the hot red sky.