Crybbe

CHAPTER XI

At first, the figure was dressed in dark clothes so that when it filtered through the twilit trees only the soft footsteps and the rustlings told Powys anyone was coming.

He moved behind his oak tree, sure it was going to be Andy. Holding himself still, packing away the anger and the grief – an unstable mixture – because, for once, he intended to have the advantage.

What he had to do was break this guy's habitual cool. To raise the vibration rate until the bass-cello voice distorted and the lotus position collapsed in a muscular spasm.

He'd never seen Andy anything but laid-back. This, he realized, was the most impenetrable of all screens. Laid-back people were not evil. Laid-back people were wise. Evil people ranted like Hitler.

They weren't people you'd known half your life. And they were never called Andy.

But then, Powys thought, watching the figure enter the clearing and move towards the stone, the stench from a rotten egg was only apparent when the perfectly rounded, smooth, white shell was cracked.

The stone gleamed pearly grey, collecting what light remained, a ghostly obelisk. Powys watched and tried to slow his breathing. Not yet time; to get a stake into Dracula, you had to wait for daylight.

Or, in this case, until the curfew was over. The curfew was central to the Crybbe experience. The curfew was pivotal. Whatever had been building up – tension, fear, excitement – climaxed and then died with the curfew.

He'd experienced it twice, in radically different ways. The first night with Rachel, when they'd wound up in bed at the Cock so fast they hadn't even been aware of the chemical interacting until the chemicals had fully interacted. And then by the river, when he'd found the shotgun in his hands and come within a twitch of blowing Jonathon Preece in half.

He lifted the sleeve of his sweatshirt to expose his watch; it was too dark to be certain, but he was sure it must be ten o'clock.

Ten o'clock and no curfew?

Staggering into the church, Jimmy Preece was faced with its silent, solitary occupant, a wooden arrow pointing at the altar rails.

He stood gasping in the doorway, and there was Jonathon's smooth, mahogany coffin shining like a taunt, a pale gleam of polish in the dimness.

Mr Preece couldn't find his breath, his legs felt like wet straw, and the urge to pray had never been as strong.

Please, God, protect us, he wanted to cry out until the words leapt into every corner of the rafters and came back at him with the illusion of strength.

And illusion was all it would be. He remembered the trouble there'd been when the old vicar was ill and the diocese had sent a replacement who'd turned out to be one of these Charismatics, some new movement in the church, this chap spouting about something he called Dynamic Prayer, shouting and quivering and making them all sing like darkies and hug each other.

No end of disturbance, until a phone call to the bishop had got rid of him. Not the border way, they told him. Not the Crybbe way.

Oh, Jonathon, Jonathon… Mr Preece felt his chest quake in agony, and he turned away, groping for the narrow, wooden door to the belfry.

The old routine, making his painful way to the steps. But, for the first time, the routine resisted him and his foot failed to find the bottom step. Twenty-seven years he'd done it, without a break, until Jack started to take over, and now Jimmy Preece had come back and he couldn't find the blessed step.

Mr Preece squeezed his eyes shut, dug his nails into his cheeks, raised his other foot and felt the step's worn edge slide under his shoe.

What time was it? Was he late?

His chest pumping weakly like these old brass fire-bellows his wife still kept, although the leather was holed and withered. His foot slipped on the edge of the second step.

Come on, come on, you hopeless old bugger.

He set off up the narrow stone steps, some no more than two foot wide.

Used to be… when he was ringing the old bell every night

… that… these steps was… never a problem… even when he'd been working… solid on the lambing or the haymaking and was

… bone tired… because…

Mr Preece paused to catch a breath, six steps up.

Because sometimes, in the old days, he'd just, like, floated to the top, like as if there were hands in the small of his back rushing him up the steps, and then the same hands would join his on the rope, because it was meant.

But tonight there were different hands, pressing down from above, pressing into his chest: go back, you poor, tired old bugger, you don't wanner do this no more.

A son in the hospital. A grandson in his coffin.

What if you dies on the steps?

One Preece in the hospital. One in his coffin. One in a heap on the flagstones. And Warren.

Best not to think about Warren.

And a silence in the belfry.

No!

In a rage, Mr Preece snatched out his dentures, thrust them down into a pocket of his old tweed jacket, forced some air into his broken bellows of a chest and made it up two more steps.

He'd do it. He'd be late but he'd do it. Never been so important that he should do it.

He saw the light above him and the ropes. Never more important, now the wall around the Tump had been breached and something was in the Court.

As had been shown by the death of that woman.

But it had never been in the church. It couldn't get into church.

No, it couldn't.

But it wasn't Andy Boulton-Trow, waiting by the stone.

It was a woman. Well, a girl.

And naked now.

She stood with her back to the stone, as if sculpted from it, her eyes closed and her mouth open, and the night sang around her.

Jesus God, Powys whispered, the voyeur behind the oak tree, stunned into immobility.

The pupil!

It was one of those nights when the thoughts were so deep you couldn't remember getting home or putting the car away. Some small thing brought you back into your body – like the tiny grind of metal in metal as your Yale key penetrated the front-door lock.

Fay could just about read her watch in what remained of the light and the glow from neighbouring windows; she couldn't believe how rapidly the days had been shortening since Midsummer Day.

Mr Preece was already a couple of minutes late with the curfew. She imagined him toiling up all those steps to the belfry, poor old sod.

Obsessive behaviour. Did he really think the family might lose Percy Weale's sixteenth-century bequest if the curfew remained unrung for a single night because of a dire family crisis? Had to be more than that. Joe Powys would find out.

Oh, God, Powys, where are you?

One thing was sure: Jack Preece wouldn't be ringing the curfew for a long, long time – if ever again.

What does it mean, Joe?

She ought to have gone with him, even if this was something crazy between him and Boulton-Trow, something that went back twelve years or more.

It was so easy at night to believe in the other side of things, that there was another side. That Rachel – and Rose – had died because of a magic with its roots four centuries deep… or perhaps deeper, perhaps as old as the stones.

With Arnold tucked, not without some effort, under her arm, Fay went into the house. It was far too late now to send the tape for the morning news. The late-duty engineer at Offa's Dyke would be long gone. She'd have to go into the studio early in the morning again, having rung Hereford General to find out Jack's condition.

She lowered the dog to the doormat.

'I wish I could trust you, Arnold,' Fay said, not quite knowing what she meant. His tail was well down; he looked no happier than she was. Jonathon Preece had set out to kill him and had died in the river. Arnold had lost a leg, so might Jack Preece by now…

If this was the seventeenth century she'd have been hanged as a witch, Arnold stoned to death as her familiar.

Stop it, you stupid bitch.

She clenched her fists and felt her nails piercing the palms of her hands. Everyone around her seemed to be carrying a burden of possibly misplaced guilt. Powys for Rose and Rachel. Her dad for Grace and for her mother. She herself…

Fay went down on her knees in the hall, the front door open to the street behind her. She buried her head in Arnold's fur. Arnold who looked no more evil than… than Joe Powys. As she began quietly to sob, all the lights went out in the neighbouring homes.

Bloody electricity company. How could this keep happening?

Fay choked a sob in bitter anger and punched at the wall until her knuckles hurt. Oh God, God, God, God, God.

She stood up shakily.

'Dad?'

There was no response.

She closed the front door behind her. He'd either gone to bed or he was still over at Jean Wendle's having his treatment. Or his end away if he'd got lucky. Fay sniffed and smiled She'd once asked the local doctor what the Canon's condition meant libido-wise. 'He'll be less inhibited,' the doctor had said, 'By which I mean he'll talk about it more often.'

The Canon wasn't back.

But – Arnold whimpering – somebody was.

As Fay stiffened in the darkness of the hallway, she saw vague yellowish light under the door of the office.

Very slowly the office door began to open.

Fay caught her breath.

It did not creak; she only knew it was opening because the wedge of yellow light was widening, and it was not the soft and welcoming, mellow yellow of a warm parlour at suppertime.

This was the yellow of congealing fat, the yellow of illness.

The hallway was very cold. It was a cold she remembered.

'Grace?' Fay heard herself say in a voice she didn't recognize, a voice that seemed to come from someone else.

She felt her lips stretch tight with fear. She kicked the office door open.

'Did she speak?' Jean Wendle had asked.

'Not a word'

Grace Legge wore a nightdress. Or a shroud. Was this what shrouds looked like?

'And she didn't move?'

'No.'

Grace was standing by the window, very straight, a hand on a hip, half-turned towards Fay. She was haloed in yellow light. The yellow of diseased flesh. The yellow of embalming fluid.

She was hovering six inches off the floor.

'Harmless, then.'

'Grace,' Fay said slowly. 'Go away, Grace.'

But Grace did not go away. She began to move towards Fay, not walking because her feet were bound in the shroud, which faded into vapour.

Fay backed away into the hall.

Dead eyes that were fixed, burning like small, still lamps. Burning like phosphorous.

'She can't talk to you, she can't see you; there's no brain activity there… Blink a couple of times.., and she'll be gone.'

Fay shut her eyes, screwed them tight. Stood frozen in the doorway with her eyes squeezed tight. Stood praying. Praying to her father's God for deliverance. Please make it go away, please, please, please…

She smelled an intimate smell, sickly, soiled perfume, and felt cold breath on her face. She opened her eyes because she was more afraid not to, opened them into a fish-teethed snarl and yellow orbs alight with malice, and spindly, hooked fingers – the whole thing swirling and shimmering and coming for her, rancid and vengeful, filling the room with a rotting, spitting, incandescent yellow haired.

Fay began to scream.