Crybbe

CHAPTER VII

Nobody panicked.

Well, they wouldn't, would they? Not in Crybbe. They'd be quite used to this by now. Part of everyday life. Everynight life, anyway.

So there were no screams, no scrambles for the door. Guy Morrison knew this because he was standing only yards from the exit where the fat policeman, Wiley, was doubtless still at his post.

'Only a matter of time, wasn't it?' Col Croston called out. 'Don't worry, it often happens during council meetings. Mrs By ford's gone to switch on the generator.'

It was a bloody mercy, in Guy's opinion.

The woman was completely and utterly insane.

For the first time, Guy was profoundly thankful he and Fay had never had children.

He hoped that by the time the lights came on she'd have had the decency to make herself scarce. The sheer embarrassment of it!

'Guy?'

Somebody snuggled against his chest.

'Just as well it is me,' he whispered, and she giggled and kissed his neck.

A worrying thought struck him.

'You're not wearing lipstick, are you, Catrin?'

'Not any more,' Catrin Jones said, and Guy plunged a hand into his jacket pocket, searching frantically for a handkerchief.

'No, I'm not,' Catrin said. 'Honest. I'm sorry.'

'Shut up then,' he hissed, conscious of the fact that nobody else appeared to be talking.

'Won't be long now,' Col Croston shouted cheerfully. At least, Guy thought, it would be an opportunity for him to pretend the five minutes before the power cut had never happened.

He became aware that somebody had drawn back the curtains at the windows, and what little light remained in the sky showed him a scene like the old black and white photographs he'd seen of the insides of air-raid shelters in the blitz, only even more overcrowded. All it needed was someone with rampant claustrophobia to start floundering about and there'd be total chaos.

But nobody moved and nobody spoke and it was quite uncanny. He felt Catrin's hand moving like a mouse in one of his hip pockets. When they got back to Cardiff he'd suggest she should be transferred. Something she couldn't very well refuse – six months' attachment as an assistant trainee radio producer, or anything else that sounded vaguely like promotion.

As his eyes adjusted, Guy was able to make out individual faces. A fat farmer who hadn't taken off his cap. That cocky little radio chap trying vainly to see his watch. Jocasta Newsome and her husband – strange that she wasn't talking; perhaps they'd had a row.

The radio bloke – at least this outfit had had the good sense not to have Fay covering the meeting – was on his feet and moving to the door.

'Just a minute,' Guy heard Wiley say officiously. 'Where do you think you're goin'?'

'Look, I've got an urgent news report to go down. Gavin Ashpole, Offa's Dyke Radio.'

'Well, you can 'ang on yere. Studio won't be workin' if there's no power, is it?'

'Then I'll do it by phone. Do you mind?'

'I'm not bein' offensive, sir, but you might 'ave lifted somebody's wallet in there and be makin' off with the proceeds.'

'Oh, for… Look, pal, I've got an expensive tape recorder on the floor under the chairman's table. You can hold it to for ransom if I don't come back. Now, please.'

'Lucky I recognizes your voice, Mr Ashpole,' Wynford Wiley said genially, and Guy heard a bolt go back.

'Thanks.'

Guy heard the door grinding open, but he didn't hear it close again. He didn't hear anything.

Had he been looking through the viewfinder of a camera, it would have seemed at first like a smear on the lens.

Then it took shape, like a sculpture of smoke, and a figure was standing in the central aisle between the two blocks of chairs. It looked lost. It moved in short steps, almost shuffling, like a Chaplinesque tramp in an old film, but in slow-motion. There was a yellowish tinge to its ill-defined features. It was a man.

His nose was large and bulbous, his eyes were pure white and he was moving down the aisle towards Guy Morrison.

Even without his razor, Guy would have known him anywhere.

Guy screamed.

'No! Get away! Get back.'

Catrin gasped and moved sharply away from him.

But ex – very-ex – Police Sergeant Handel Roberts continued to shuffle onwards as if the room were not illegally overcrowded but empty apart from Guy Morrison and himself.

'Jocasta!' Guy screamed. "Look! It's him. It's him!'

Closing his eyes, throwing an arm across his face, he plunged forward like someone making a desperate dash through flames to the door of a blazing room.

There was a ghastly, tingling moment, a damp and penetrating cold, and then he was on his knee, his head in her lap, his hands clawing at her dress, mumbling incoherently into her thighs. He began to sob. 'Oh God, Jocasta, it's…'

Jocasta Newsome didn't move. When he opened his eyes he saw there were lights on in the room, but different lights, fluorescent bars high on the walls. He looked up at her face and found it harsh and grainy in the new light and frozen into an expression of ultimate disdain.

'You filthy bastard,' the thin, bearded man next to her said.

Moving like a train through the night, the track unrolling before you, a ribbon of light, straight as a torch beam There are deep-green hills on either side – deep green because they are dense with trees – and the silver snaking river, all of this quite clearly visible, for they do not depend on sunlight or moonlight but have their own inner luminescence.

There are no buildings in this landscape, no farms or cottages or barns or stables or sheep-sheds, no cars, no tractors, no gates, no fences, no hedges. In some places, the trees give way, diminishing themselves, become not separate, definite organic entities but a green wash, a watercolourist's view of trees. Then they fade into fields, but with the spirit of the old woodland still colouring their aura.

It is a strange land at first, but then not so strange, for what you see is the true essence of the countryside you know. This is a country unviolated by Man.

This is the spirit landscape.

What you once presumed to call the Old Golden Land.

And the unfurling ribbon of light is what, over half a century earlier, your mentor Alfred Watkins had presumed to call the Old Straight Track.

Alf. Alf Watkins, isn't it? You here too?

No answer. He isn't here. You're alone. Lying between two tall trees on top of the Tump in the heat, and moving like fast train in the night.

Until, with no warning, the track buckles in front of you and the night shatters into a thousand shards of black glass.

'Remember me?

A whisper. Tumult in the hall. Nobody else heard the whisper, dry as ash.

'Who's that?'

'Oh… don't reckernize the voice, then, is it? Yeard it before, though, you 'ave.'

'Huh?'

'Crude.'

'What?'

'Lyrically… mor… onic'

'What the…?'

'An' musically… musically inept.'

'Jeez, you must be…'

"Can't even remember my fuckin' name, can you?'

'Listen, I'll talk to you later. Tomorrow. Make an appointment.'

'You're a bloody old bag of shit, you are.'

'Listen, I can understand…'

'Don't let the kid give up sheep-shearing classes. That's what you said.'

'Yeah, but…'

'I knows 'ow to shear sheep, already, though, see. What you do is…'

Gavin Ashpole was discovering that there was virtually nowhere quite as dark as a tiny, windowless, unattended radio studio during a power cut.

Belonging as it did to Offa's Dyke Radio, the Crybbe Unattended, unlike the town hall, did not have a generator, the emergency lighting amounted to an old bicycle lamp which Fay Morrison left on the table in the outer office. It took several minutes and a lot of explicit cursing for Gavin Ashpole to find it.

He knew time must be getting on as he sat down at the desk to transcribe his notes and scramble together a voice-piece. A phone call confirmed it.

'Gavin! Where've you been, man? You're on air in two minutes!'

'Huh?' Gavin aimed the bicycle lamp at his watch. It said 9.28. Shit, shit, shit.

'Much of a story, is it, Gav? We've left you a full two minutes, as instructed.'

'Sod all,' he said tersely. 'And you're getting it down the phone – the fucking power's off. Listen, James, cut me back to one and shove it back down the bulletin. Bring me in around 10.35, OK?'

'Not sure we've got…'

'Just do it, eh? Take down the link now, I'll keep it tight. OK, ready? There's been a hostile reception tonight for billionaire businessman Max Goff at a packed public meeting to discuss his plans for a so-called New Age mystical healing centre in the border town of Crybbe… from where Gavin Ashpole now reports. Got that?'

Gavin hung up.

He had enough for one minute with what he'd already written. He pulled off his tie, stretched out his legs, switched off the lamp and waited for the studio to ring.

Sodding power cut. Maybe he should have brought the radio car after all. He could have done an exclusive interview with the famous Fay Morrison.

Stupid slag. She deserved everything she was going to get. Everybody knew Max Goff was pretty well-established in shirt lifting circles, but, unless you were seriously suicidal, you didn't bring up this issue before about three hundred witnesses including a couple of suits who looked like outriders from the Epidemic legal department.

He should sue the pants off the bitch. pants off the bitch.

Aaaah!

Went through him like a red-hot wire. He nearly took off.

Ssssstrewth!

He wanted her.

In truth, he wanted anybody, but superbitch Fay Morrison was the one whose image was projected naked into his lap with its legs wrapped around him in the dark.

Hot.

Stifling in here, warm air jetting at him like a fan-heater.

Too fucking hot.

And who was there to notice, anyway, if he took off his trousers?

The phone rang. 'Gavin, news studio, can you hear this OK?'

Plugged into the news… Major row erupted in the Commons tonight when Welsh Nationalist MP Guto Evans challenged the Government's…' Then faded down, and James Barlow's voice in the earpiece. 'Gavin, we'll be coming to you in about a minute and a half, and you've got fifty seconds, OK?'

'Yeah,' Gavin croaked. 'Yeah.'

The fluorescent bars were only secondary lighting, linked to what must have been a small generator. The room was still only half-lit and the light from the walls was blue and frigid.

Fay, unmoving at the rear of the hall, knew that something had changed and the light was part of it; it altered the whole ambience of the room and better reflected the feeling of the night.

In that it was a cold, unnatural light.

She couldn't understand, for a moment, why so few people were taking in the ludicrous spectacle of her ex-husband, the sometimes almost-famous TV personality, making such a prat of himself over the appalling Jocasta Newsome.

Then she heard the silence. Silence spreading like a stain down the hall, from the people at the front who'd seen it first.

Fay looked and didn't believe, her eyes hurrying back to stupid Guy – standing in the aisle now, dusting off his trousers, mumbling, 'Sorry, sorry, must have tripped.'

Col Croston, up on the platform next to Max Goff, didn't see it either, at first; Goff's back was turned to him. 'Ah,' Col Croston was saying. 'Here we are. Lights. We can continue. Splendid. Well, I think, if there are no more questions, we'll… Sorry?'

Max Goff's hand on his arm.

'You want to say something? Sure. Fine. Go ahead.'

Fay was not aware that Goff had actually asked the Colonel anything, but now the bulky man was coming slowly, quite lazily, to his feel and opening his mouth as if to say something monumentally significant. But there was no sign of the large, even, white teeth which normally shone out when the smooth mat of red beard divided. A black hole in the beard, Goff trying to shape a word, but managing only:

'Aw…'

And then out it all came.

He's being sick, said the sensible part of Fay's mind. He's been eating tomato chutney and thick, rich strawberry jam full of whole, ripe strawberries.

'Awk…'

A gob of it landed – thopp – on the blotter in front of Max Goff.

In the front row, Hilary Ivory exploded into hysterics and struggled to get out of her seat, something crimson and warm having landed in her soft, white hair.

Fay saw that Max Goff had two mouths, and one was in his neck.

He threw back his head with an eruption of spouting blood, raised both white-suited arms far above his head – like a last, proud act of worship. And then, overturning the table, he plunged massively into the well of screams.