Crybbe

I…'

'Nobody gets out,' Tessa said sweetly.

Guy was up, staggering, one hand massaging the back of his head, the other groping for the cameraman's arm. 'The girl. Shoot her. I want the girl.'

As Larry advanced slowly towards the girl, camera on his shoulder, eye hard to the projecting viewfinder, Mrs Byford launched herself at him from behind, pummelling his back, clawing at his neck.

'Nettie!' the grey-faced man shouted. 'No! Don't cause no.. .'

Col pulled her off with one hand, getting his face scratched. 'Mrs Byford! Guy, can't you stop this stupid bastard before…'

'So…' Guy was panting, 'this is Mrs Byford, is it? Perhaps she can tell us all about Handel Roberts, who topped himself in her bathroom… and yet was in this room tonight?'

'Now listen, Mr Clever TV Man… Guy turned slowly and painfully and looked into tiny, round eyes and a small, fleshy mouth set into a face too big for them.

'Handel Roberts is dead,' said Wynford Wiley.

'Exactly,' said Guy.

Col's feelings about newcomers who tried to take over, assuming a more elevated intellect and an understanding of the rural psyche, were warning him to take it easy. But there was an ice-ball forming in the pit of his stomach.

'Stop it!' Jocasta Newsome, rising like a Fury. 'Stop it, stop it, stop it! What are you all trying to do?'

'Aye,' a man's voice said. "Can't you, none of you, control yourselves?'

'At least we're not brain dead!' – the feminist astrologer with the ring through her nose – 'Look at you all… you're fucking pathetic. Somebody tells you to sit there and don't move again until they tell you you can stand up and leave. A man's been brutally murdered… You don't even react! What kind of fucking morons.. .'

A girl in her twenties, built like Catrin Jones, only more muscular, stamped across the room, 'You'll shut your mouth, lady, or I'm gonner shut it for you.'

'Oh yeah, we'll all shut our mouths and turn a blind eye and ask no questions. And where has that got you all these years? Max Goff was the only promising thing that ever happened to this shithole, and what do you do?,.. you kill him, like… like the bloody savages did to the missionaries. Except they weren't savages really, at least they had this ethnic…'

'Sit down, the pair of you!' Mrs Byford's husband was quaking. 'Can't you see, this is what it wants… Jimmy Preece said, be calm. He knows… it's what it wants… rowing and… and conflict, everybody all worked up, like.'

'Mr Byford is absolutely right,' Col said, wondering what the hell Mr Byford was on about. 'I'm going to go out and find the Mayor, call the police and get this…'

'No you're not, Colonel…'

'Look…'

And then there was a crash from the front of the hall. Larry Ember hadn't exactly dropped his camera – which Col suspected no self-respecting TV cameraman ever did, even if he'd been shot – but he'd certainly put it down quite heavily, and he was stumbling back along the centre aisle, moaning in some distress with both hands over his face.

Col Croston looked up at the platform; there was no sign of Tessa Byford. 'What's wrong, man, you OK?''

Guy grabbed Larry's arm; Larry shook him off, the way a child does, in a kind of frenzy. He'd abandoned the camera in the middle of the floor – unheard of in Guy's experience – and was threshing towards the entrance.

'Sorry, pal.' A tweeded arm in his way.

Larry took his hands away from his face. 'Oh Lord!' the man said, and Larry's knee went up into a corduroy crotch.

'Right,' the cameraman shouted, 'I'm out of here.' Hitting the doors with his shoulder, and they burst open and the night came in, and Guy strove for the exit, followed by the Ivorys and the men in suits, and Catrin Jones was dragged along too.

'Stop them!' somebody screamed. 'Shut them doors!'

For just a moment, Larry Ember turned around in the doorway. Hilary Ivory screamed, and Guy nearly fell back into the room.

Larry's right eye, his viewfinder eye…

'Just get me away from that girl.'

'I think it's a blood vessel,' Guy said nervously.

'I'm going in tight on her,' Larry recalled, voice unsteady. 'And her eyes… are actually fucking zooming back. Giving me daggers, Guy. And then she's in the bleed'n' camera. Daggers, Guy, know what I mean?'

Larry's eye looked like a squashed tomato.

'Maybe… maybe several blood vessels,' Guy said, 'I don't know… Look, you get some air, I'll get Catrin to fetch your camera.'

'Leave it!' Larry screamed, 'I don't wanna see the bleed'n' tape, all right? I wan' it destroyed…'

Two of the farmers on the doors were struggling to close them again, but now there was a wild crush of people fighting to get out. Larry and Guy were pushed out into the square. 'Let them go!' Col shouted. 'Or somebody's going to get hurt.'

There was hysterical laughter from behind him. 'They'll be hurt, all right, Colonel,' shrilled Mrs Byford.

And Col Croston heard what seemed at first to be a very encouraging noise; the curfew bell was ringing, the familiar, steady clangs.

'It's the Mayor!' he called back into the room. 'Panic over. He said it'd be OK to leave when the curfew began. Everybody just sit down for a moment and we'll file out in an orderly fashion.'

'You fool,' somebody said quietly.

Few among the Crybbe people had even moved.

And he knew why, quite soon, as a second bell began a hollow, discordant counterpoint, and then a third came in, and a fourth, and then they were all going.

Col stood and looked at the rows of stricken, frightened faces.

'What's going on?'

Never, in this town, had he seen such obvious reaction on so many faces.

He wanted to cover his eyes, his ears. It was like being violently awoken in the dead of night by the sudden, shattering clamour of a roomful of alarm-clocks.

Only louder. The loudest noise there'd ever been in Crybbe, a blitz of bells, hard and blindingly bright, bells to break windows, and loosen teeth and the foundations of ancient buildings – bells to burst the sky and burn up the air.

For the first time in his life, Col Croston, the only qualified bell-ringer in the town, was stilled by a most basic primitive terror, like a cold, thin wire winding around his spinal cord.

Because there was no way it could be happening. With one single exception, all the bell-ropes had been taken down years and years ago.

Tonight, in some unholy celebration, the bells of Crybbe were ringing themselves.