Crybbe

CHAPTER XII

It was fear that drew Minnie Seagrove to the window of her lounge. Fear that if she didn't look for it, it would come looking for her.

For a short while, there was a large, early moon. It wasn't a full moon, not one of those werewolf moons by any stretch, but it was lurid and bright yellow. It appeared from behind the Tump. Before it became visible, rays had projected through the trees on the top of the mound like the beams you saw seconds before the actual headlights of an oncoming car. The trees on the Tump were waving in the breeze even though the air all around Minnie's bungalow was quite still.

She'd come to associate this breeze with an appearance of the Hound.

Afterwards, Mrs Seagrove sat with her back to the window in Frank's old Parker Knoll wing chair, feeling its arms around her and hugging a glass of whisky, the remains of Frank's last bottle of Chivas Regal malt.

Oh Lord, how she wished she hadn't looked tonight.

'I'm that cold, dear,' she said, pretending she was talking to young Joe Powys or anybody who'd believe her. 'I can't keep a limb still. I don't think I'll ever get warm again.'

Powys knew it was on its way when the naked girl at the stone began to moan and shiver.

When the moon rose, he saw that the girl was certainly no more than twenty and might even be significantly younger, which made him uncomfortable. He wondered for a time if she was real and not some kind of vision. What kind of a girl would come alone at night into this appalling place and take off all her clothes?

Powys was not at all turned on by this.

He was afraid. Afraid, he rationalized, not only for her but of her.

Afraid because he suspected she knew what was coming, while he could have no conception, except of ludicrous phosphorous fur, fiery eyes and gnashing fangs, and Basil Rathbone in his deerstalker, with his pistol.

He found his fingers were tightly entwined into some creeper on the trunk of the oak tree. He squeezed it until it hurt.

The silence in the neglected wood was absolute. No night birds, no small mammals scurrying and scrabbling. If there was any sound, any indication of movement, of change, it would be the damp chatter of decay.

Max could not move. His eyes were wide open. He took his breath in savage gulps.

He lay in awe, couldn't even think.

He could smell the candles.

As if in anticipation of a power failure, the room had been ringed with them – Max half-afraid they'd be black. But no, these were ordinary yellow-white candles, of beeswax or tallow, whatever tallow was. They didn't smell too good at first, kind of a rich, fatty smell.

Now the smell was as intoxicating as the sour red wine.

The mattress was laid out on the third level of the stable block, so he could lie in the dusk, and take in the Tump filling the window, stealing the evening light, surrounded with candles, like a great altar.

Max lay under the black duvet, feeling like a virgin, the Great Beast/Scarlet Woman sessions with Rachel a faint and farcical memory.

For the first time in his adult life, Max was terrified.

And then, when the dark figure rose over him in the yellow, waxy glow, even more frightened – and shocked rigid, at first – by the intensity of his longing.

Warren looked up into the sky, at the night billowing in, and he loved the night and the black clouds and the thin wind hissing in the grass, his insides churning, his mind clotted with a rich confusion.

But the curfew was coming and the box was screaming at him to close the lid.

He slammed it down.

Then, bewildered, he started to claw at the earth with his hands, set the box down in the hole.

Heard a rattling noise inside, the hand battering the side of the box.

It don't wanner go back in the ground.

It's done what it came for.

Now it wants to go back in the chimney.

And, sure enough, when Warren picked up the box the rattling stopped, and so he ran, holding it out in front of him like a precious gift, down from field to field until he reached the farm, where nobody else lived now, except for him and the Hand of Glory.

In the end, the curfew did come, a strained and hesitant clatter at first, and then the bell was pounding the wood like a huge, shiny axe, slicing up the night, and the girl was gone.

Joe Powys wandered blindly through the undergrowth, repeatedly smashing a fist into an open palm.

The night shimmered with images.

The bell pealed and Rose, in a pure white nightdress, threw herself from a third-floor window, fluttering hopelessly in the air like a moth with its wings stuck together, falling in slow motion, and he was falling after her, reaching out for her.

In the spiny dampness of the wood, Powys cried out, just once, and the curfew bell released, at last, his agony.

He staggered among the stricken, twisted trees and wept uncontrollably. He didn't want to control it. He wanted the tears to flow for ever. He wanted the curfew bell to peal for ever, each clang comet-bright in the shivering night.

The bell pealed on, and with that high, wild cry Rachel tumbled into the air, and then Rose and Rachel were falling together, intertwined.

A needle of light, like the filament of a low-wattage electric bulb zig-zagged across the eaves.

Silently, in slow-motion, the rusty spike pierced the white nightdress and a geyser of hot blood sprayed into his weeping eyes.