Crybbe

CHAPTER XIII

Max awoke to find himself alone, damp and smouldering, like a bonfire in the rain. The cold deluge had been the curfew. When the curfew was gone, he realized at last, the town would be free.

He got up and shambled to the big window, wrapped in the black duvet. It was too dark to see the Tump; it didn't matter, he could feel the Tump. It was like the stables and maybe even the Court itself hid been absorbed by the mound, so that he was, in essence, inside it.

No going back now, Max.

Feeling very nearly crazy, his face and hands slashed by boughs and bushes, Powys followed a dead straight line back into Crybbe.

As if the path was lit up for him. Which perhaps it was – the bell strokes landing at his feet like bars of light. All he did was lurch towards the belt, each stroke laid on the landscape, heavy as a gold ingot. And when he emerged from the wood into the churchyard, scratched and bleeding from many cuts, he just collapsed on the first grave he came to.

Its stone was of new black marble, with white lettering, and when he saw whose grave it was he started to laugh, slightly hysterically.