Crybbe

Johnny goes round the Bottle Stone

'And how long do they keep it up?' Rose asks. She's looking radiantly happy today (this memory is agony). 'How many times…?'

'Oh' There's a gleam in Andy's eye. 'Thirteen. Thirteen times.'

'Must be jolly dizzy by then: one of the others says – Ben Corby's girlfriend, Fiona Something.

'Ex-act-ly,' Andy drags out the word for emphasis. 'The kid's completely confused. He's not thinking properly. And it's then that his mates all leap on him and, before he knows what's happening, they hustle him across to the fairy hill. Over there… see it?'

'Not much of a hill,' Rose observes.

'Fairies are not very big,' you tell her. 'You could fit a couple of dozen on there.'

Andy says, 'So they lie him face-down on the fairy hill… and that's when it happens.'

'What?' you ask. 'What happens?'

'Whatever happens,' says Henry Kettle, searching in the cardboard picnic box for something uncomplicated and British, 'it's all in the mind, and it don't do anybody any good, meddling with that old nonsense.'

'Oh yeah,' Barry, the osteopath, said. 'Andy's right at the centre of things. As was old Henry Kettle. I suppose you heard about that.'

'Just now,' Powys said. He hadn't planned to mention Henry. 'I had a letter from his neighbour to say he was dead. I don't know what happened, do you?'

'Have to wait for the Hereford Times for the full story, but apparently it said on the local radio that his car went off the road and ploughed into a wall around Crybbe Tump. I don't know that area too well, but…'

'Crybbe Tump? He hit the wall around Crybbe Tump?'

'Killed instantly. Bloody shame, I liked old Henry. He helped you with the book, didn't he?'

Powys nodded.

'The buzz is,' said Barry, 'that Henry was doing some dowsing for Max Goff.'

'Dowsing what?'

Barry shrugged. 'Whatever he'd been doing, he was on his way home when it happened. There was a power cut at the time, don't know whether the streetlamps were off, that may have thrown him. Bloody shame.'

'A power cut,' said Powys.

That significant?'

'Just a thought.' Powys shook his head, his mind whizzing off at a peculiar tangent, like a faulty firework