Crybbe

CHAPTER I

Memory is circling like a silent helicopter over these soft, green fields, strung together with laces of bright river. It's a warm day in June or July, a Friday – the day you heard they'd sold the paperback rights to The Old Golden Land.

Directly below, throwing a shadow like a giant sundial at three clock, is the Bottle Stone.

It's about five feet tall and four thousand years old. Nobody seems to know whether erosion or some damage long ago left it shaped like a beer-bottle, or whether it was always like that.

It seems now – looking down, looking back – to be as black as its shadow. But there's an amber haze – Memory may have created this, or maybe not – around the stone. Also around the people.

Six of them, mostly young, early twenties. They're sharing a very expensive picnic. You paid for it. You led them on a raid to a posh high-street deli, then the wine-shop. And then you all piled into a couple of cars – old Henry Kettle too, although he says he'd rather have a cheese sandwich than all these fancy bits and pieces and you came out here because it was the nearest known ancient site, an obvious place to celebrate.

Memory hovers. It's trying to filter the conversation to find out who started it, who raised the question of the Bottle Stone Legend.

No good. The voices slip and fade like a radio between nations, and it's all too long ago. The first part you really remember is when Andy says… that there's a special chant, known to all the local children.

Johnny goes round the Bottle Stone.

The Bottle Stone, the Bottle Stone,

Johnny goes round the Bottle Stone,

And he goes round ONCE.

And the Big Mac went round and round the toilet bowl, and Joe Powys watched it and felt queasy.

He'd walked back to the Centre in a hurry and picked up the mail box. He hadn't looked at the mail, even though it seemed unusually profuse. Just ran into the shop and dumped it on the counter. Then he'd gone into the lavatory and thrown up.

The Big Mac had been everything they'd promised it would be. Well, big, anyway. Never having eaten – or even seen at close hand – a Big Mac before, he'd decided on impulse this morning that he should go out and grab one for breakfast. It would be one more meaningful gesture that said. Listen, I am an 'ordinary' guy, OK?

Not a crank. Not a prophet. Not a hippy. No closer to this earth than any of you. See – I can actually eat bits of dead cow minced up and glued together.

But his stomach wasn't ready to process the message.

He washed his hands, stared gloomily at himself in the mirror. He actually looked quite cheerful, despite the prematurely grey hair. He had a vision of himself in this same mirror in ten years' time, when the grey would no longer be so premature. In fact, did it look so obviously premature now?

He flushed the lavatory again. Felt better. Went through to the kitchen and made himself a couple of slices of thick toast.

Fifteen minutes before he had to open the shop. He put the plate on the counter and ate, examining the mail.

There was a turquoise letter from America. It might have been his US agent announcing proposals for a new paperback reprint of The Old Golden Land.

It wasn't; maybe he was glad.

'Dear J.M.,' the letter began.

Laurel, from Connecticut, where she was newly married to this bloke who ran a chain of roadside wholefood diners. Laurel: his latest – and probably his last – earth-mysteries groupie, once lured spellbound to The Old Golden Land. Writing to ask for J.M. for a copy of his latest book,

What latest book?

Then there was an unsolicited shrink-wrapped catalogue from a business-equipment firm. It dealt in computers, copiers, fax machines. The catalogue was addressed to,

The Managing Director,

J. M Powys Ltd.,

Watkins Street, Hereford.

In the head office of J. M. Powys Ltd., the managing director choked on a toast crumb. The head office was a three-room flat in an eighteenth-century former-brewery, now shared by an alternative health clinic and Trackways – the Alfred Watkins Centre. The business equipment amounted to a twenty-five year-old Olivetti portable, with a backspace that didn't.

Powys didn't even open three catalogues from firms with names like Crucible Crafts and Saturnalia Supplies, no doubt offering special deals on bulk orders of joss-sticks, talismans, tarot packs and cassette tapes of boring New Age music simulating the birth of the universe on two synthesizers and a drum machine.

The New Age at the door again. Once, he'd had a letter duplicated, a copy sent off to every loony New Age rip-off supplier soliciting Trackways' patronage.

It said,

This centre is dedicated to the memory and ideas of Alfred

Watkins, of Hereford, who discovered the ley system – the way ancient people in Britain aligned their sacred places to fit into the landscape.

Alfred Watkins was an archaeologist, antiquarian, photographer, inventor, miller and brewer. He doesn't appear, however, to have shown any marked interest in ritual magic, Zen, yoga, reincarnation, rebirthing, primal therapy, Shiatsu or t'ai chi.

So piss off.

He'd realized when he sent it that Alfred Watkins's work, had he lived another fifty years, might have touched on several of these subjects. Perhaps the old guy would have been at the heart of the New Age movement and a member of the Green Party.

The recipients of the circular obviously realized this too and kept on sending catalogues, knowing that sooner or later Joe Powys was going to give in and fill up Trackways with New Age giftware to join the solitary box of 'healing crystals' under the counter.

Because if he didn't, the way business was going, Trackways would be closing down within the year.

There were only two envelopes left now. One was made from what looked like high quality vellum which he'd never lave recognized as recycled paper if it hadn't said so on the back, prominently.

A single word was indented in the top left-hand corner of the envelope.