Crybbe

CHAPTER III

… an did bnnge out hys bodie and shewde hym to the crowde with the rope about hys necke…

Joe Powys lay on the floor still wearing last night's sweatshirt, flecked with mud and stuff from the woods and some blood from later. He was alone; she'd slipped quietly away a few minutes ago.

The hanged man was obviously the High Sheriff, Sir Michael Wort, displayed by his frightened servants to the angry townsfolk to prove that he really was dead. So if they'd seen his body, how did the legend arise that Wort had perhaps escaped down some secret tunnel?

Only one possible answer to that.

It had been in his head almost as soon as he woke, half-remembering copying out the material and half-thinking, it was part of some long, tortured dream. But The Ley-Hunter's Diary I993 was there, in his jacket on the floor by his pillow, and it was still throwing out answers. Not very credible answers.

The door was prodded open and Arnold peered round. Powys beckoned him, plunged his hands into the black and white fur. It felt warm and real. Not much else felt real.

Arnold licked his hand.

Powys looked around the room, at the dark-stained dressing-table, the wardrobe like an upturned coffin, the milk-chocolate wallpaper. Not the least depressing room he'd ever slept in.

'Don't blame me for the decor.'

She stood in the doorway.

She was in a red towelling bathrobe, arms by her sides, hands invisible because the sleeves were too long.

'It's certainly very Crybbe,' he said.

Fay nodded. 'And I'm never going to sleep here again, that's for sure.'

He'd awoken several times during the night on his makeshift bed of sofa cushions laid end to end.

Once it was Arnold licking his forehead. And once with an agonizing image arising in his mind: an exquisitely defined, twilit image of Rachel's broken body, both eyes wide open in a head that lolled off-centre, the perfect, pale, Pre-Raphaelite corpse, Ophelia, 'The Lady of Shalott'…

Lady cast out upon a Rubbish Heap.

He'd stood up, hearing Fay moaning in the bed. 'Oh God.' Twisting her head on the pillow, 'it hurts. It really hurts. It was just numb for a while, now it really hurts.'

'Let me take you to a hospital.'

'I'm not leaving this room.'

'And I thought Arnold looked a mess,' she said. 'What's the time? There's only one reliable clock in this house and I couldn't bear to look at it.'

Powys consulted their two watches on the bedside cupboard. 'Half nine. Ten. Mine's probably right, yours is cracked. So it's ten.'

'Even my watch has a cracked face.' Fay smiled feebly. 'I was lying there, thinking, you know, it can't be as bad as it feels, it really can't. Then I staggered to the bathroom mirror… And it was. It really bloody was.'

The cut ran from just below the hairline to the top of the left cheek. The left eye was black, blue, orange and half-closed.

'The bitch has scarred me for life.'

He remembered all the blood on the linoleum and thought she actually looked a good deal better than the quaking thing he'd found curled up on the kitchen floor, incapable, for a long time, of coherent speech.

'It's never going to heal,' Fay said bleakly.

'It will.' But she was probably right. There'd be a long-term scar. This town was good at leaving scars. He swung his legs out of bed; quite decent, still wearing his boxer shorts, but he doubted she'd have noticed if he'd been naked.

'She's back now, all right. It's her house again.'

'Grace?'

'She's repossessed it.' Fay shivered and held her robe together at the throat, it's like… When she was alive, there was this thin veneer… of gentility, OK? Of politeness. Now she's dead there's no need to keep up appearances, it's all stripped away, and there's just this… this rotting core… Resentment. Hate. Just don't let anybody tell me the dead can't feel hatred.'

'Maybe they can just project it. Maybe we're not even talking about the dead, as such.'

Fay's right profile was all white. She turned her head with a lurid, rainbow blur and her mouth lightened with the pain.

'And don't let anybody tell me again that they're harmless. Joe, she flew at me. She was hovering near the floor – everywhere this icy stillness – and then she sprang. There was a perfumy smell, but it was a kind of mortuary perfume, to cover up the rotting, the decay, you know?'

Powys said helplessly, 'I've never seen a ghost.'

Then what did you see last night? What in Christ's name was that? The raging black horror in the wood. He was sure the girl at the stone would be killed or die of fright, but the bitch knew what she was doing.

'So I'm backing out of the office,' Fay said. 'Thinking, She can only exist in there. Jean Wendle said I should blink a couple of times, close my eyes and when I opened them she'd be gone, she's only a light effect, no more real than voices on quarter-inch, fragments of magnetic dust, and I hit the pause button and the voice cuts out in mid-sentence. So I took the advice, closed my eyes – and I got out of the room fast because she can't exist outside there, can she? That's her place, right?'

Fay's fingers were white and stiff around the collar of the red robe.

'And I'm in the hall. I've closed the door behind me. I've slammed the door. In its… in Grace's face. And suddenly just as I'm

… She's there too. She's right up against me again in my face. Grace has… had… has these awful little teeth like fish-bones. And, you know, the kitchen door's opposite the office door, and so I just threw myself across the hall and into the kitchen, and I… that's all I remember.'

'You hit your head on a sharp corner of the kitchen table. She's right, he thought. She can't stay here tonight. Any more than I can spend it with the Bottle Stone. It was too dark to see much. I thought you were…'

'Thanks.'

'What would you think…?'

'No, I mean… thanks. You keep rescuing me. That's not the way it's supposed to be any more.'

'Arnold waylaid me at the top of the street and dragged me down here with his teeth.'

The dog wagged his tail, staggered to the edge of the bed and looked down dubiously.

'Good old Arnie,' said Fay. 'I'd just virtually accused him of exacting some awful psychic revenge on the Preece family for trying to shoot him. Come on, I'll make some breakfast. We have to eat.'

Neither of them had mentioned the Bottle Stone. He wished he could prove to her it had all happened, but he couldn't. He couldn't prove anything – yet.

'I wanted to call a doctor last night,' he told her. 'But you started screaming at me.'

'I hate doctors.'

'You ought to see one, all the same.'

'Sod off. Sorry, I don't mean to be churlish, but nothing seems to be fractured. Cuts and bruises. Anyway, look at the state of you.'

Powys picked Arnold up to carry him downstairs.

Fay said, 'I wonder what he sees.'

He thought, I think I've seen what he sees. He said, 'The other time you saw this Grace thing, what time was it?'

'After midnight.'

'What was it like on that occasion?'

'She didn't move. Very pale. Very still. Like a lantern slide.'

At the foot of the stairs, the office door remained closed.

'Figures,' Powys said. 'She wouldn't be up to much after midnight. Or, more correctly, after ten – after the curfew. It probably took all her energy just to manifest. But last night, it was just minutes before the curfew. That's when it's strongest. That's when the whole town's really charged up. Before the curfew shatters it.'

'What are you on about?' Fay shook her head, looked at the kitchen floor. 'God, what a mess. Who'd have thought I had so much blood in me?'

'I think…'

'You mention doctors or hospitals again, Joe, I'll never sleep with you again.'

Fay grinned, which was the wrong thing to do because it pulled on the skin around her bruised eye.

She had to go back into the office to answer the phone. It looked, as it always did in the mornings, far too boring to be haunted.

The call was from her father, sounding wonderfully bright and happy. Last night, while she was sitting by the sink, Joe trying to bathe her eye, the phone had rung and Jean's message, amplified by the answering machine, had been relayed across the hall.

'I can't believe it,' Alex said now. 'I feel tremendous. I feel about… oh, sixty-five. Do you think I'm too old to become a New Age person?'

'You going to stay at Jean's for awhile, Dad?'

'I'll probably drift back in the course of the day. Don't want to lose touch with old Doc Chi at this stage.'

'Dad's shed a quarter of a century overnight,' Fay told Powys. 'No woman is safe.'

'Well, keep him away from the Cock.'

'Why?'

'It seems to have aphrodisiac properties. It turns people on.'

'I don't follow you.'

He told her, at last, about getting beaten up by Humble, and Rachel taking him to hers and Goff's room. What had happened then, the sudden inevitability of it. It was the right time, coming up to curfew time. I mean, Rachel was not… promiscuous. Nor me, come to that. I mean, lonely, sex-starved, but not… Anyway, I just don't think we'd ever have got together… if it hadn't been for the time. And the place.'

'I don't understand.'

'All right, think about the condoms. All those used condoms in the alley, up by the studio. In a town surrounded by open fields, doesn't it strike you as odd that so many couples should want to do it standing up in an alley?'

'I never really thought about it. Not that way.'

'And last night again at the Cock, again in the hour before the curfew, your ex-husband was suddenly overwhelmed with, lust for his production assistant and whisked her upstairs.'

'Catrin? Guy and Catrin?'

Powys nodded. 'Why do they call it the Cock?' He was buttering more toast; it was, she reckoned, his fifth slice. How long since he last ate? 'Is that what it's really called?'

'It certainly hasn't got a sign to that effect,' Fay said.

'What do you know about Denzil the landlord? Got many kids, for instance?'

'I don't know. He isn't married, I don't think. Somebody once told me he put it about a bit, but I mean… You're getting carried away, Joe.'

'I'm a loony. I'm allowed.' He spread the toast with about half a pot of thick-cut marmalade. 'Sorry, look, I haven't got this worked out yet. Whatever I say's going to make you think I'm even more of a loony.'

'No – hang on – Joe, I…' Fay clasped her hands together tightly, squeezing them. 'I'm sorry about yesterday. I had no right to dispute your story. Town full of ghosts, no dogs… I mean, Christ

… I'm sorry.'

He put a hand over both of hers. Sighed.

Tell me,' Fay said.

So he told her. He told her about the cottage and the magical Filofax and the art studio.

'Blood?' Fay touched her temple, winced. 'Urine? What does it mean?'

'I don't really know. But I wouldn't have one of those paintings on my wall.'

And then he told her about the girl at the stone, and the apparition.

'You saw it? You saw Black Michael's Hound?'

'I don't know what it was. Maybe the hound is something it suggests. Whatever it is, it's feeding off the energy which starts to build up in this town, probably at dusk. And it comes in a straight line, from the Tump, through the Court and on towards the church. It's evil, it's… cold as the grave.'

Fay shivered inside her robe. 'And this girl was… getting off on it?'

'Something like that. When the curfew began, she'd gone. She'd done this before, knew the score.'

'What does that tell us about the curfew?'

'That the curfew was established to ward something off. I think we're talking about Black Michael. Look…' He took from his jacket a slim black paperback, Elizabethan Magic by

Robert Turner. 'I found this in the bread-oven with the Filofax and I nicked it. There's a couple of chapters on Dee, but what I was really interested in was this. The page was marked.'

He opened the book at a chapter headed 'Simon Foreman, Physician, Astrologer and Necromancer (1552-1611)'. There was a picture of Foreman, who had a dense beard and piercing eyes.

'The book talks of a manuscript in Foreman's handwriting, evidently something he copied out, much as Andy did in his Filofax. It's the record of an attempt to summon a spirit, and… look… this bit.'

He cast out much fire and kept up a wonderful ado; but we could not bring him to human form; he was seen like a great black dog and troubled the folk in the house much and feared them.

'So what it's suggesting,' Powys said, 'is that the black dog image is some kind of intermediary state in the manifestation of an evil spirit. In this case, the spirit's furious at not being able to get any further, so he's coming on with the whole poltergeist bit. There's a famous legend in Herefordshire where a dozen vicars get together to bind this spirit and all that's appeared since is a big black dog.'

'So when we talk about Black Michael's Hound…'

'We're probably talking about the ghost of Michael himself. We know from these notes of Andy's – which I'm attributing to John Dee, for want of a more suitable candidate – that Michael Wort, while alive, appeared to have taught himself to leave his body and manifest elsewhere… travelling on the "olde road", which is presumably a reference to ley-lines. Spirit paths. And then there's this legend about him escaping by some secret passage when the peasantry arrived to lynch him. Dee, or whoever, records that Wort's body was brought out after he hanged himself, to prove he was indeed dead. So maybe he escaped out of his body… along the "olde road", maybe his ghost was seen – bringing a lot of black energy with it – and they managed to contain it… to reduce it to the black dog stage… by some ritual which has at its heart the curfew.'

'How does that stop it?'

'Well, making a lot of noise – banging things, bells, tin-cans, whatever – was popularly supposed to be a way of frightening spirits off. Maybe by altering the vibration rate; I'm not really qualified to say.'

'This is…' Fay held on to his hand, 'seriously eerie. I mean, you're the expert, you've been here before, but Christ, it scares the hell out of me.'

'No, I'm not,' he said. 'I'm not any kind of expert. I wrote a daft, speculative book. I'm not as qualified as most of these New Age luminaries. All I know is that Andy Boulton-Trow, with or without Goff's knowledge, is experimenting with what we have to call dark forces. He's probably been doing it for years… since… Well, never mind. Now we know why Henry Kettle was getting the bad vibes.'

'Boulton-Trow put Goff on to this place?'

'Probably. Something else occurred to me, too. I don't know how much to make of it, but… try spelling Trow backwards.'

'Tr…?' Her eyes widened. 'Jesus.'

'I mean, it could be pure coincidence.'

'There are too many coincidences in Crybbe, Fay said. She stood up. 'OK, what are we going to do about this?'

'I think… we need to get everything we can, and quickly, on Michael Wort. Any local historians you know?'

Fay smiled, in Crybbe, Joe, an historian is somebody who can remember what it said in last week's paper.'

'What about the local-authority archives? Where, for instance, would we find the transactions of the Radnorshire Society?'

'County Library, I suppose. But that's in Llandrindod Wells.'

'How far?'

'Twenty-five, thirty miles.'

'Let's get over there.' He started to get up. 'Oh God.' Sat down again. 'I can't. I have to go to Hereford Crematorium. It's Henry Kettle's funeral.'

'You can't not go to Henry's funeral,' Fay said. 'Look, I'll go to the library. Tell me what we're looking for.'

'You can't drive with that eye.'

'Of course I can. And they're only country roads. What am I looking for?'

'Anything about Wort – his experiments, his hangings, his death. And the Wort family. If they're still around, if we can get hold of any of them. And John Dee. Can we establish a connection? But, I mean, don't make a big deal of it. If we meet back here at… what? Four o'clock?'

'OK, Joe, look… is there nobody we can go to for help?'

'What about Jean Wendle?'

'Ha.' Fay put a hand up to her rainbow eye. 'Her assessment of Grace wasn't up to much, was it? Harmless, eh?'

'We're on our own, then,' Powys said.