Crybbe

CHAPTER X

It was cold in the wood.

Still, he waited.

The words in his pocket, scribbled in the pages of a pocket diary, kept appearing in his mind, as though the lines were rippling across a computer screen.

'Alle the nyte came strange noyses and lytes and the dogges howled in the yarde and when he vysyted me in myne chamber he apered lyke a clowde and a yellow cullor in the aire.'

By nine-thirty, the air was singing with tension, as if great pylons were carrying buzzing, sizzling power cables across the darkening sky.

Joe Powys was standing by the new stone in the clearing, around the centre of the wood, a hundred yards or so from Keeper's Cottage.

This stone, narrow, like a sharpened bone, would be on the line from the Tump, through the Court to the church.

At either end of the clearing, undergrowth had been hacked away to form the beginning of a track. Or to reinstate an old one. He knew all about this track now. This was the legendary secret passage between the Court and Crybbe church, along which Sir Michael Wort was said to have escaped.

Like most legends, it was a literal interpretation of something more complex.

Something suggested by the notes he'd found in Keeper's Cottage, which had turned out to be a primitive kind of schoolhouse.

Primitive in that there was no electricity, only candles, and it was not very clean. It smelled of candles and mould… and paint.

There was a mattress and a duvet. Andy (or someone) had slept here. Like a monk might sleep in a little whitewashed cell with no worldly possessions. Or a rich philanthropist might feed the need to live like a squatter for a while to restructure his consciousness.

Or a modern man might have a need, somehow, to shed centuries

…

'… tolde me he would come at nyte in hys spyryte, by the olde roade.'

These were Andy's own notes, hand-written; Powys had discovered them in the only modern luxury item to be found in Keeper's Cottage – absurdly, a black leather Filofax.

The Filofax had been kept in what once might have been a bread-oven inside the stone open fireplace, which suggested this hovel was rather older than it appeared from the outside.

Upstairs, Powys had found a single room with a skylight, which appeared to be used as an artist's studio. There was a table with brushes and palettes on it and coloured inks and a large assortment of paints, oil and acrylic.

There was turpentine and linseed oil and other dilutants in tightly corked medicine bottles. He uncorked one and sniffed incautiously.

It was urine.

Another one looked like blood.

Eye of newt, he thought, toe of frog.

Christ.

This room, with its skylight, was the only well-lit area of the house; all the windows in the sides of the building were screened by dense conifers.

There was a work in progress on an easel – a canvas under-painted in black and yellow-ochre. Shapes of buildings and a figure.

He decided not to sniff the painting.

There were two chairs up here, just as there were two downstairs. Andy and a lover.

Or a pupil.

He didn't know quite why he thought that. Maybe it was because someone else had been doing what he himself was doing – copying out pages of material from the Filofax. In the bread-oven had been a small pile of loose-leaf pages with writing on them in a different hand – bold, big letters. A schoolboy hand. Or a schoolgirl. There was also a paperback book on Elizabethan magic, with pages marked. He'd read one – and immediately put the book into his pocket, to study later.

The Filofax had contained about thirty loose-leaf pages of closely written notes, together with hand-drawn plans and maps. Powys had sat down at the table with the artist's materials on it, a rough-hewn item of rustic garden furniture. He'd copied everything out as carefully as he could, including the maps and plans, some of which made sense, some of which didn't.

He could have stolen the Filofax; that would have been simpler.

But he suspected that what he held here was something like what the old magicians called a grimoire, a book of magical secrets, a Book of Shadows. It belonged only to one person. To anyone else – if you believed in all this, which he was rather afraid he did – it could be as insidiously dangerous as a radioactive isotope.

So what you did, you copied it out.

He stopped copying at one stage, his wrist aching, a distant siren sounding in his head like the beginning of a migraine.

What the hell am I doing?

I mean, am I out of my mind?

He'd crossed again into the Old Golden Land, where everything answered to its own peculiar and archaic logic.

So, by candlelight, he'd gone on copying material from the Filofax into the blank pages of a slim blue book of his own with photographs of stones and mounds in it and maps of Britain networked with irregular thin black lines. Indented gold letters on the cover spelled out. The Ley-Hunter's Diary 1993. They sent him one every year; he carried it around, the way you did, but this was the first time he'd ever actually written in one.

It took him a long time.

And if Andy had come back, caught him at it?

So what? The bastard had more explaining to do than he did.

He was scared, though. You couldn't not be, in this environment. Not if you were inclined to believe it worked.

As he wrote, he started to understand. Not all of it, but enough. Enough to convince him that the original source of some of these notes was probably Dr John Dee, astrologer to Elizabeth I. That Dee, who lived along the valley, who was not psychic but studied people who were, had been the recipient of the visit from the man who came "at nyte in hys spyryte'.

And that the visitor was Michael Wort. High Sheriff of Radnorshire.

And you can prove that?

Of course not. What does that matter? I believe it.

But you're not rational, Powys. You're a certifiable crank.

He'd put the Filofax back into the bread-oven, wishing there was somewhere to wash his hands, and climbed out through the window again, walking away into the dusk, the wood gloomy, treacherous place now, spiked with fallen branches bramble tentacles.

The night coming on, and he didn't feel so certain of ability to deal with this, this… diabolical sorcerie.

This phrase appeared several times in the text.

Standing, now, by the stone, feeling the tension like an impending thunderstorm, only denser. And the feeling that when the storm broke and the rain crashed down, the rain would be black and afterwards the earth would not be cleansed and purified but in some way poisoned.

Acid rain of the soul.

He moved a few feet away from the stone, stood behind a thick old oak tree bound with vines and creepers. The logic of the Old Golden Land told him that right next to the stone was not the place to be when the storm broke.

It also told him that the ringing of the curfew every night was some kind of climax and if he wanted to get a feel of what was going on, he ought to stay near that stone for… what?

He stretched his arm towards the sky to see his watch.

For less than half an hour.

He was frightened, though, and really wanted to creep back through the wood to the nearest lights.

So he thought about Henry Kettle and he thought about Rachel. And found himself thinking about Fay too.

She sped through the shadowed streets, Arnold on the passenger seat.

Not the other son – what was his name?… Warren – not him, surely.

She could hear her own voice-piece. The accident came only a week after Warren's brother, Jonathan, was tragically drowned in the swollen river near his home…

The usual reporter's moral conflict taking place in her head. Better for the Preece family if it was someone else. Better for the media if it was another Preece – Double Disaster for Tragic Farm Family.

Better for her, in truth, if she was away from Offa's Dyke Radio, which was clearly in the process of ditching her anyway. And away from Crybbe also, which went without saying.

Headlights on, she dropped into the lane beside the church. Nothing like other people's troubles to take your mind off your own.

Other, brighter headlights met hers just before the turning to Court Farm, and she swung into the verge as the ambulance rocketed out and its siren warbled into life.

Still alive, anyway. But that could mean anything.

Fay drove into the track. She'd never been to Court Farm before.

Firemen were standing around the yard, and there was a policeman, one of Wynford's three constables. Fay ignored him; she'd always found it easier to get information out of firemen.

'Didn't take you long,' one said, teeth flashing in the dusk. 'You wanner interview me' Which way's the camera?'

'No need to comb your hair,' Fay said. 'It's radio.'

'Oh, in that case you better talk to the chief officer. Ron!'

Firemen were always affable after it was over. 'Bugger of a job getting to him,' Ron said. 'Right up the top, this bloody field, and the ground was all churned up after all this rain. Still, we done it. Bloody mess, though. Knackered old thing it was, that tractor. Thirty-odd years old.'

'It just turned over?'

'Ah, it's not all that uncommon,' said Ron. 'I reckon we gets called to at least two tractor accidents every year. Usually young lads, not calculated the gradients. Never have imagined it happening to Jack Preece, though.'

'Jack Preece?'

'Hey, now, listen, don't go putting that out till the police confirms the name, will you? No, see, I can't figure how it could've happened, Jack muster been over there coupla thousand times. Just shows, dunnit. Dangerous job, farming.'

'How is he? Off the record.'

'He'll live,' Ron said, changing his boots. 'Gets everywhere this bloody mud. His left leg's badly smashed. I don't know… Still, they can work miracles these days, so I'm told.'

Fay got him to say some of it again, on tape. It was 9.40, nearly dark, because of all the cloud, as she pulled out of the farmyard.

She was halfway down the track when a figure appeared in the headlights urgently waving both arms, semaphoring her to stop.

Arnold sat up on the seat and growled.

Fay wound her window down.

'Give me a lift into town, will you?'

It was too dark to see his face under the cap, but she recognized his voice at once from meetings of the town council and the occasional 'Ow're you' in the street.

'Mr Preece!'

Oh, Christ.

'Get in the back, Arnold,' Fay hissed. As she pushed the dog into the back seat, something shocking wrenched at her mind, but she hadn't time to develop the thought before the passenger door was pulled open and the Mayor collapsed into the seat next to her, gasping.

'In a hurry. Hell of a hurry.'

The old man breathing heavily and apparently painfully as they crunched down the track. As she turned into the lane, Mr Preece said, 'Oh. It's you.' Most unhappy about this, she could tell, 'I didn't know it was you.'

'I'm terribly sorry,' Fay said, 'about Jack. It must be…'

'Aye…' Mr Preece broke off, turned his head, recoiled. 'Mighter known! You got that… damn thing in yere!'

'The dog?'

The shocking thought of a couple of minutes ago completed itself with an ugly click. As she was pushing Arnold into the back seat she'd felt the stump of his rear, left leg and heard Ron, the leading fireman, in her head, saying, left leg's badly smashed.

'Mr Preece,' Fay said carefully, 'I'd like to come and see you. I know it's a bad time – a terrible time – but I have to know what all this is about.'

He said nothing.

Fay said, 'I have to know – not for the radio, for myself – why nobody keeps a dog in Crybbe.'

The Mayor just breathed his painful soggy breaths, never looked behind him at what crouched in the back seat, said not a word until they moved up alongside the churchyard and entered the square.

'I'll get out yere.'

'Mr Preece…'

The old man scrambled out. Started to walk stiffly away. Then turned and tried to shout, voice cracking up like old brown parchment.

'You leave it alone, see…' He started to cough. 'Leave it alone, you…'

Mr Preece hawked and spat into the gutter.

'… stupid bitch,' he said roughly, biting off the words as if he was trying to choke back more phlegm and a different emotion. And then, leaving the passenger door for her to close, he was off across the cobbles, limping and stumbling towards the church.

He's going to ring the curfew. Fay thought suddenly.

His son's just been mangled within an inch of his life in a terrible accident and all he can think about is ringing the curfew.

Jonathon had been saying for months – years even – that it was time they got rid of that old tractor.

Probably this wasn't what he'd had in mind, Warren thought, standing in Top Meadow, alone with the wreckage of the thing that had crippled his Old Man, all the coppers and the firemen gone now.

The Old Man had been working on that tractor all day, giving himself something to concentrate on, take his mind off Jonathon and his problem of having nobody to hand over the farm to when he was too old and clapped out. Then he'd mumbled something about testing the bugger and lumbered off in it, up the top field, silly old bastard.

Testing it. Bloody tested it all right.

Warren had to laugh.

With the last of the light, he could more or less see what had happened, the tractor climbing towards the highest point and not making it, sliding back in the mud, out of control and tipping over, the Old Man going down with it, disappearing underneath as the bloody old antique came apart.

But Warren still couldn't figure how he'd let it happen, all the times he'd been up here on that bloody old tractor. At least, he couldn't see rationally, like, how it had happened.

It was the unrational answer, the weird option, glittering in his head like cold stars, that wouldn't let him go home.

He followed the big tracks through the mud by the field gate, up the pitch to the point where the tractor had started rolling back prior to keeling over. He followed the tracks to the very top of the rise, to where the tractor had been headed, glancing behind him and seeing the trees moving on top of the old Tump half a mile away.

By the time he was on top of the pitch, he was near burning up with excitement. It hadn't seemed like the right part of the field at all, but that was because he'd come in by a different, gate, looking at it from a different angle.

Warren hesitated a moment and then dashed back down to the tractor. Somebody had left behind a shovel they'd been using to shift the mud so the firemen could get their cutting gear to the Old Man. He snatched up the shovel, carried it back up the pitch, prised away the top sod – knowing instinctively exactly where to dig – threw off a few shovelfuls of earth, and there it was, the old box.

The jagged thrill that went through him was like white-hot electric wire. 'Oh, fuck, oh fuck.' Blinded by his power. 'I done it. Me.'

His fingers were rigid with excitement as he opened the box, just to make sure, and he almost cried out with the euphoria of the moment.

He couldn't see proper, but it was like the hand of bones, the Hand of Glory in the box had bent over and become a fist.

It was curled around the Stanley knife, gripping it, and the blade was out.

Warren shivered violently in horror and pleasure – the combination making him feel so alive it was like he was a knife himself, sharp and savage, steely and invulnerable.

The only indestructible Preece.