Crybbe

… NINE…

Can't stop. Can't stop.

Out of your hands now.

Widdershins, widdershins.

Below you, the tiny figure running around the stone.

Widdershins… all wrong.

Below. The stone and the running figure.

Widdershins.

All wrong.

…ELEVEN…

And the ball of light rising up hard, bright, glowing, pulsing

… into the chest.

Widdershins.

Engulfing your heart, but it's no longer warm, and it's bursting, with a shocking rush into your head, where it's…

He was inside the running figure now, pounding across the bridge and into the short gravel drive of the little black and white riverside cottage.

Powys flung himself en to the long-unmown lawn, soft and damp and full of buttercups and dandelions.

He lay on his stomach with his face into the grass, his eyes closed and the cool vegetation pressed into the sockets. Kept rubbing it in until it was a green mush and not so cool any more.

'You're going back,' Annie had said.

Back to the Old Golden Land. Back – he'd told himself – to find out what had happened to Henry Kettle. Back – they said behind his back – to find redemption.

The cold in his stomach told him he was back, but that there was no redemption to be found here.

He opened his eyes and blinked and then the screaming started to come out of him like aural vomit, for at the top edge of the little ridge on which the cottage stood, something black and alien thrust out of the grass.

The stone was only five feet tall but looked taller because of the prominence of its position.

Its base was fat and solidly planted in. he earth. It maintained its girth until, three feet above the ground, it tapered into a neck, presenting the illusion of a large black beer-bottle