Crybbe aka Curfew

CHAPTER I

Even for Crybbe the night was rising early.

It rose from within the shadowed places. In the covered alleyway behind the Cock. Beneath the three arches of the river bridge. In the soured, spiny woodland which skirted where the churchyard ended with a black marble gravestone identifying the place where Grace Legge, beloved wife of Canon A. L. Peters was presumed to rest.

It filtered from the dank cellars of the buildings hunched around the square like old, morose drinking companions.

It was nurtured in the bushes at the base of the Tump.

It began to spread like a slow stain across the limp, white canopy of the sky, tinting it a deep and sorrowful grey.

And not yet seven-thirty.

'Give us a white-balance,' Larry Ember said, and Catrin Jones stood in the middle of the street and held up her clipboard for him to focus on.

Guy Morrison looked at the sky. 'Shoot everything you can get. I can't see it brightening up again. I think this is it.'

'Wasn't forecast,' Larry said. 'No thunderstorms.'

'And I can't see there being one in there,' Guy said, glancing at the town hall. 'This is probably a wasted exercise.'

'What you want me to do then, boss?'

'We've got permission to go in and grab some shots of the assembly before it starts, so shoot absolutely everything you can, plenty of tight shots of faces, expressions – I'll point out a few. Then just hang on in there till they actually ask you to leave, and then… well, stay outside, close to the door, and Catrin and I will try and haul out a few punters with opinions, though I'll be very surprised if these yokels manage to muster a single opinion between them.'

The Victorian facade of the town hall reared over the shallow street like a gloomy Gothic temple, its double doors spread wide to expose a great cave-mouth, through which the younger townsfolk wandered like tourists. Many had probably never been inside before; there weren't many public gatherings Crybbe.

Guy ordered shots of their faces, shots of their feet. The feet are probably saying more than the faces, he thought with frustration. At least they're moving.

For the first time he began to wonder how he was going to avoid making a stupefyingly boring documentary. He'd been determined to keep the voice-over down to a minimum, let the events tell their own story. But to get away with that, he needed a pithy commentary on these events from a collection of outspoken locals. So far, the only outspoken local he'd encountered had been Gomer Parry, who lived at least three miles outside the town.

'What are we going to do?' he whispered despairingly to Catrin – showing weakness to an assistant, he never did that.

Catrin gave his thigh a reassuring squeeze. 'It'll be fine.'

'… God's sake, Catrin, not in public!'

Catrin. How could he have?

This place was destroying him.

Parking his Escort XR3 in the old cattle market behind the square, Gavin Ashpole had no fears at all about his story being boring.

This was the beauty of radio. The place might look like a disused cemetery, but you could make it sound like bloody Beirut. Whatever happened here tonight, Gavin was going to put down a hard-hitting voice-piece for the ten o'clock news describing the uproar, as beleaguered billionaire Max Goff faced a verbal onslaught by hundreds of angry townsfolk fearing an invasion by hippy convoys lured to the New Age Mecca.

Somebody had suggested to Gavin that perhaps he could try out the new radio-car on this one. Park right outside the meeting, send in some live on-the-spot stuff for the nine-thirty news.

Gavin thought not; the station's only unattended studio was not three minutes walk from the town hall. And he hadn't been able to drag his mind away from last night's interrupted fantasy in that same studio. Somehow, he had to get little Ms Morrison in there.

Ms Morrison who'd really screwed any chance she had of holding down the Offa's Dyke contract. Who'd failed to provide a report on last night's tractor accident. Who hadn't even been reachable on the phone all day.

'I'll go in live at nine-thirty,' he'd told the night-shift sub, James Barlow. 'And I want a full two minutes. I don't care what else happens.'

He was thinking about this as he parked his car in the old livestock market. Unusually dark this evening; even the sky looked in the mood for a set-to.

Humid, though. Gavin took off his jacket, locked it in the boot and slung his Uher over his shoulder.

Two cars and a Land Rover followed him into the market, half a dozen men got out. Tweed suits, caps, no chat, no smiles. Farmers, in town for the meeting, meaning business.

I like it, Gavin told himself. Everybody who was anybody in the district was going to be here tonight to listen, with varying degrees of enthusiasm or hostility to Goff's crazy, hippy themes. There was a small danger that if the opposition was too heavy, Goff might have second thoughts and decide to take his New Age centre somewhere else – like out of Offa's Dyke's watch, which would be no use at all. But this was highly unlikely; Goff wasn't a quitter and he'd probably already invested more than Gavin could expect to earn in the next ten years, even if he did become managing editor. No, Goff had gone too far to pull out. Too many people relying on him. Danger of too much bad publicity on a national scale if he let them down.

He crossed the square and followed everybody else into the side-street leading to the town hall.

Gavin quickened his pace and walked up between a couple – skinny guy with a ratty beard and a rather sultry wife. Gavin had to walk between the man and woman because they were so far apart, not talking to each other. Obviously had a row.

That was what he liked to see. Acrimony and tension were the core of all the best news stories. It was building in the air.

Gavin mentally rubbed his hands.

Alex and Jean were taking tea in the drawing-room.

The Canon, wearing his faded Kate Bush T-shirt, was standing in front of the Chinese fire screen, legs comfortably apart, cup and saucer effortlessly balanced in hands perfectly steady.

Earlier, he'd spotted himself in a mirror and it had been like looking at an old photograph. Hair all fluffed up, the famous twinkle terrifyingly potent again. Old boy's a walking advert for the Dr Chi New Age Clinic.

He was aware that Jean Wendle had been looking at him too, with a certain pride, and several times today they had exchanged little smiles.

'So,' Jean was on the sofa, hands linked behind her head. Jolly pert little body for her age. 'Shall we go? Or shall we stay in?'

Several times today she'd looked at him like that. Just a quick glance. One really was rather too old to jump to conclusions; however…

'Which do you think would be most, er, stimulating?'

'Och, that depends,' Jean said, 'on what turns you on. Perhaps your poor old brain is ready at last for the intellectual stimulus of public debate, as Max strives to present himself gift-wrapped, to the stoical burgers of Crybbe.'

'Give me strength,' said Alex.

'Fay'll be there, no doubt.'

'Won't want me in her hair.'

'Or there's Grace. All alone in Bell Street. Will she be worried, perhaps, that you haven't been home for a couple of nights?'

'I thought you said she didn't exist as anything more than a light form.'

'She didn't. Unfortunately, she's become a monster.'

'Uh?' Alex lost his twinkle.

'Tell me,' Jean said. 'Have you ever performed an exorcism?'

The Cock was no brighter than a Victorian funeral parlour, Denzil, the licensee, no more expressive than a resident corpse. Half past eight and only two customers – all his regulars over the town hall.

J.M. Powys stared despairingly into his orange juice, back to his habitual state of confusion. Everything had seemed so clear on the hillside overlooking the town, when Fay was aglow with insight.

Arnold lay silently under the table. Possibly the first dog in several centuries to set foot – all three of them – in the public bar of the Cock. 'We can't,' Fay had warned. 'Sod it,' Powys had replied, following the dog up the steps. 'I've had enough of this. Who's going to notice? Who's going to care?'

And, indeed, now they were inside there was nobody except Denzil to care, and Denzil didn't notice, not for a while.

Powys glanced up at Fay across the table, it could all be crap,' he said.

'There.' Fay was drinking tomato juice; it was a night for clear heads. 'You see…'

'What?'

'You're back in Crybbe. You're doubting yourself. You're thinking, what the hell, why bother? It's easy to see, isn't it, why, after four centuries, the apathy's become so ingrained.'

'Except that it could though, couldn't it? It could all be crap.'

'And we're just two weirdoes from Off trying to make a big deal out of something because we don't fit in.'

'And if it's not – not crap – what can we do about it?'

'Excuse me, sir." Denzil was standing by their table, low-browed, heavy-jowled. He picked up their empty glasses.

'Thanks,' Powys said. 'We'll have a couple more of the same.' Glanced at Fay. 'OK?'

Fay nodded glumly.

'No you won't,' Denzil said. 'Not with that dog in yere you won't.'

'I'm sorry?'

'Don't allow no dogs in yere.'

Powys said mildly, 'Where does it say that?'

'You what, sir?'

'Where does it say, "no dogs"?'

'We never 'ad no sign, sir, because…'

'Because you never had no dogs before. Now, this is interesting.' Powys tried to catch his eye; impossible. 'We're the only customers. There's nobody else to serve. So perhaps you could spell out – in detail – what this town has against the canine species. Take your time. Give us a considered answer. We've got hours and hours.'

Powys sat back and contemplated the licensee, who looked away. The bar smelled of polish and the curdled essence of last night's beer.

'No hurry,' Powys said. 'We've got all night.'

Denzil turned to him at last and Powys thought. Yes he does… He really does look like a malignant troll.

'Mr Powys,' Denzil said slowly. 'You're a clever man…'

'And we…' said Fay, '… we don't like clever people round yere.' And collapsed helplessly into giggles.

Denzil's expression didn't change. 'No more drinks,' he said. 'Get out.'

It was getting so dark so early that Mrs Seagrove decided it would be as well to draw the curtains to block out that nasty old mound. Ugly as a slag-heap, Frank used to say it was.

The curtains were dark-blue Dralon. Behind curtains like this, you could pretend you were living somewhere nice.

'There,' she said. 'That's better, isn't it, Frank?'

Frank didn't reply, just nodded as usual. He'd never had much to say, hadn't Frank. Just sat there in his favourite easy-chair, his own arms stretched along the chair arms. Great capacity for stillness, Frank had.

'I feel so much safer with you here,' Mrs Seagrove said to her late husband.

CHAPTER II

Like an old castle, the church was, when the light was going, with the tower and the battlements all black.

Something to really break into. Not like a garage or a school or a newsagent's. Magic, this was, when you got in, standing there in the great echoey space, shouting out 'fuck'

and 'piss'.

When you broke into a church, there was like an edge to it.

Sacrilege. What did it mean? What did it really mean? Religion was about being bored. They used to make him come here when he was a kid. Just you sit there, Warren, and keep it shut until they gives you a hymn to sing… and don't sing so bloody loud next time, you tryin' to show us up?

So when he stood here and shouted 'fuck' and 'piss', who was he shouting it at? His family, or the short-tempered ole God they didn't like to disturb by singing too loud?

Tonight he didn't have to break in; nobody'd bothered to lock the place after he'd done the window in the vestry, when he'd been up the belfry and then doled out this plate of dog food on the altar.

Still couldn't figure why he'd done that. Tessa's idea, she'd given him the can. Next time she'd have to explain. He was taking no more orders, not from anybody.

Warren ground his teeth and brought his foot back and slammed it into the side door, wanting to kick it in, anyway. Because it was a rotten old door that'd needed replacing years ago. Because he wanted to hear the latch splintering off its screws.

Because he wanted Jonathon to know he was coming.

Me again, Jonathon. You don't get no peace, bro, till you're in the ground.

There was a real rage in him tonight that just went on growing and growing, the more he thought about that bastard Goff and the way he'd tricked him. Warren could see right through the layers of blubber to the core of this fat phoney. The real reason he'd had a nice letter sent back to Warren with the tape was he didn't know how Warren's grandad stood the question of Warren being a professional musician – for all Goff knew the old git could've been 'supportive', as they said. And the old git was the Mayor, and Goff couldn't afford to offend him.

Warren got out his Stanley knife, the Stanley knife, and swaggered up the aisle to the coffin, saw its whitish gleam from this window over the altar that used to be stained glass, only the bloody ole stained bits blew out, once, in a gale, on account the lead was mostly gone, and they filled it up with plain frosted glass like you got in the windows of public lavs – typical that, of the cheapo bastards who ran the Church.

Anyway, what was left of the white light shone down on reliable, steady, trustworthy ole Jonathon.

Saint Jonathon now.

He flicked out the blade, felt his lips curling back into tight snarl as he sucked in a hissing breath and dug the point into the polished lid, dagger-style, and then wrenched it back getting two hands to it, one over the other.

Sssccccreeeeagh!!!!!

Remember me, Jonathon?

I'm your brother. I was there when you died. Maybe you don't remember that. Wasn't a chance I could very well miss, though, was it? Not when that feller sets it up for me so nice, chucking the old gun in the drink – couldn't go back without that, could you bro'? Couldn't face the ole man… steady, reliable, ole Jonathon lost the bloody family heirloom shooter. Didn't see me, did you? Didn't see me lying under the hedge on the other side of the bank? Well, people don't, see. I'm good at that even if I don't know nothing about farming and I'm a crap guitarist.

Always been good at not being seen and watching and listening. And you gets better at that when you know they don't give a shit for you, not any of the buggers. You learn to watch out for yourself, see.

Anyway, so there you are, wading across the river, getting closer and closer to my side. Hey, listen… how many times did the ole man tell us when we were kids: never get tempted to cross the river, that ole river bed's not stable, see, full of these gullies.

See, you might not remember this next bit, being you were in a bit of trouble at the time, like, bit of a panic, churning up the water something cruel And, like, if you did see me, well, you might still be thinking I was trying to rescue you, brotherly love, all that shit.

Might've thought I was trying to hold your head above the water. Well, fair play, that's an easy mistake to make when you're floundering about doing your best not to get yourself drowned.

Anyway, you failed, Jonathon.

Gotter admit, it's not often a bloke gets the chance like that to drown his goodie-goodie, smart-arse, chairman of the Young Farmers' brother, is it?

Worth getting your ole trainers soaked for any day, you ask me.

Gotter laugh, though, Jonathan. Gotter laugh.

It was quite impressive inside. Late nineteenth century perhaps. High-ceilinged, white-walled. And a white elephant, now, Guy thought, with no proper council any more.

He was watching from the entrance at the back of the hall, while Larry Ember was doing a shot from the stage at the front. People were pointing at Larry, whispering, shuffling in their seats. Real fly-on-the-wall stuff this was going to be, with half the punters staring straight into the lens, looking hostile.

'Make it quick, Guy, will you,' Col Croston said behind a hand. 'I've been approached about six times already by people objecting to your presence.'

Catrin said, 'Do they know who he is?'

'Stay out of this, Catrin,' said Guy. 'Col, we'll have the camera out within a couple of minutes. But as it's a public meeting, I trust nobody will try to get me out.'

'I should sit at the back, all the same,' Col said without opening his mouth.

'Look!' Larry Ember suddenly bawled out at the audience, leaping up from his camera, standing on the makeshift wooden stage, exasperated, hands on his hips. 'Stop bleedin' looking at me! Stop pointing at me! You never seen a telly camera before? Stone me, it's worse than little kids screaming "Hello, Mum." Pretend I'm not here, can't yer?'

'Maybe you shouldn't be yere, then,' a man shouted back.

'Sorry about this,' Guy said to Col Croston. 'Larry's not terribly good at public relations.'

'Better get him out,' Col said. 'I'm sorry, Guy.'

'I suspect we're all going to be sorry before the night's out,' Guy said, unknowingly blessed, for the first time in his life with the gift of prophecy.

A hush hit the hall, and Guy saw Larry swing his arms, and his camera, in a smooth arc as though he'd spotted trouble at the back of the room.

The hush came from the front left of the hall, occupied by members of the New Age community and – further back – other comparative newcomers to the town. The other side of the hall, where the Crybbe people sat, was already as quiet as a funeral.

The hush was a response to the arrival of Max Goff. Only the trumpet fanfare, Guy thought, was missing. Goff was accompanied. An entourage.

First came Hilary Ivory, wife of the tarotist, carrying her snowy hair wound up on top, like a blazing white torch. Her bony, nervy husband, Adam, was way back, behind Goff, even behind Graham Jarrett in his pale-green safari suit. There were some other people Guy recognized from last Friday's luncheon party, including the noted feminist astrologer with the ring through her nose and a willowy redhead specializing in dance therapy. There were also some accountant-looking men in John Major-style summerweight grey suits.

Max Goff, in the familiar white double-breasted and a velvet bow-tie, looked to Guy like a superior and faintly nasty teddy bear, the kind that wealthy American ladies kept on their bed; with a pistol inside.

Would you turn your town over to this man?

Guy watched Goff and his people filling the front two rows on the left, the chamber divided by its central aisle into two distinct factions. Old Crybbe and New Age, tweeds against talismans.

He felt almost sorry for Goff; this was going to be an historic fiasco. But he felt more sorry for himself because they weren't being allowed to film it.

Alex drained his cup in a hurry and bumped it back on its saucer, hand trembling slightly.

Exorcism. Oh God.

'Well, obviously, I was supposed to know about things like that. Been a practising clergyman for damn near three-quarters of my life. But… sometimes she was… in my bedroom. I'd wake up, she'd be sitting by the bed wearing this perfectly ghastly smile. Couple of seconds, that was all, then she'd be gone. Happened once, twice a week, I don't know. Fay came down to stay one weekend. I was in turmoil. Looked awful, felt awful. What did she want with me? Hadn't I done enough?'

Jean put on her knowing look.

'Yes,' Alex said, 'guilt again, you see. A most destructive emotion. Was she a product of my obsessive guilt – a lifetime of guilt, perhaps?'

Jean nodded.

'Poor old Fay. I think she thought I'd finally slipped into alcoholism. Anyway, she sent me to the doctor's, he sent me for tests and they discovered the artery problem. Everything explained. Poor old buffer's going off his nut. Can't be left alone. And that was how Fay and I got saddled with each other.'

'And do you feel you need her now?'

'Well, I… No, I'm not sure I do. Wendy, this… this Dr Chi business… Look, I don't mean to be offensive…'

'Of course not,' said Jean solemnly.

'But this renewed, er, sprightliness of mind… It's just that I don't honestly feel I'm the most worthy candidate for a miracle cure.'

Jean stood up, went over to the window and drew the curtains on the premature dusk, bent over to put on the lamp with the parchment shade, showing him her neat little gym- mistressy bum. Came back and sat down next to him on the settee, close enough for him to discover she was wearing perfume.

'There are no miracles, Alex, surely you know that by now.'

She didn't move an inch, but he felt her coming closer to him and smelled the intimacy of her perfume. He felt old stirrings he'd expected never to feel again. And yet it was somehow joyless.

'Dr Chi and I have done almost all we can for you, Alex. You've been here more than a day. Intensive treatment.'

'It seems longer.'

Jean nodded. 'You feel well now?'

Alex cleared his throat. 'Never better,' he said carefully.

'So why don't you go home?'

'Ah,' said Alex.

Jean looked steadily at him in the lamplight, unsmiling.

He said, 'What time is it?'

'Approaching eight. She'll be there soon, Alex.'

'Will she?'

'Only one way to find out,' Jean said gently, 'isn't there?'

'Oh now, Wendy, look…'

'Perhaps…' She stood up and went to lean against the mantelpiece, watching him. 'Perhaps it worries you that once you leave this house, your mind will begin to deteriorate again. And when you face her once more, the guilt will return.'

He squirmed a little.

'You might not be responsible for actually bringing her spirit back.' Her eyes narrowed, 'I think we can blame Crybbe for that. But you do seem to have made her rather more powerful in death than she was in life. You've projected upon her not only the portion of guilt to which she may or may not have been due, but all the guilt due to your wife and, no doubt, many other ladies and husbands and whatnot… and, bearing in mind your rather poor choice of profession, perhaps your God himself. Is that not so, Alex?'

'I…'

'You've been feeding her energy, Alex. The way I've been feeding you. A kind of psychic saline drip. So I'm afraid it's your responsibility to deal with her.'

Alex began to feel small and old and hollow.

'When you leave here…' Jean said regretfully. 'This house, I mean. When you do leave, there's a chance you'll lapse quite soon into the old confusion, and you'll have that to contend with, too. I'm sorry.'

Alex stared at her, feeling himself withering.

'No Dr Chi?'

Jean smiled sadly, 'I never did like scientific terms.'

'I'm on my own, then.'

'I'm afraid you let her get out of hand. Now she's become quite dangerous. She won't harm you – you're her source of energy, you feed her your guilt and she lights up. But…' Jean hesitated. 'She doesn't like Fay one bit, does she?'

'Stop it,' Alex said sharply.

'You've known that for quite a while, haven't you? You would even plead with Grace not to hurt her. It didn't work, Alex. She appeared last night to your daughter in a rather grisly fashion, and Fay fell and cut her head and almost put out an eye.'

Alex jerked as though electrocuted, opened his mouth, trying to shape a question with a quivering jaw.

'She's all right. No serious damage.' Jean came back and sat next to him again and put a hand on his shoulder. 'Don't worry, Alex, it's OK. You don't have to do anything. I won't

send you away.'

Alex began quietly to cry, shoulders shaking.

'Come on,' said Jean, taking her hand away. 'Let's go to bed. That's what you want, isn't it? Come along, Alex.'

Jean Wendle's expressionless face swam in his tears. She was offering him sex, the old refuge, when all he wanted was the cool hands.

But the cool hands were casually clasped in her lap and he knew he was never going to feel them again.

He came slowly to his feet. He backed away from her. She didn't move. He tried to hold her eyes; she looked down into her lap, where the cool hands lay.

Alex couldn't speak. Slowly he backed out of the lamplight and, with very little hope, into the darkness.

CHAPTER III

The Crybbe dusk settled around them like sediment on the bottom of an old medicine bottle.

'Thank you, Denzil,' Powys said to the closed door of the Cock. 'That was just what we needed. Of course it's not crap. Can't you feel it?'

He started to grin ruefully, thinking of New Age ladies in ankle-length, hand-dyed, cheesecloth dresses. Can't you feel that energy?

Not energy. Not life energy, anyway.

'Fay, where can we go? Quickly?'

He was aware of a picture forming in his head. Glowing oil colours on top of the drab turpentine strokes of rough sketching and underpainting. Everything starting to fit together. Coming together by design – someone else's design.

'Studio,' Fay said, opening her bag, searching for the keys.

'Right.'

He didn't need the gavel. Didn't need even to call for silence, in fact, he rather wished he could call for noise – few murmurs, coughs, bit of shifting about in seats.

Nothing. Not a shuffle, not even a passing 'Ow're you' between neighbours. Put him in mind of a remembrance service for the dead, the only difference being that when you cast an eye over this lot you could believe the dead themselves had been brought out for the occasion.

Been like this since Goff and his people had come in and the cameraman had left: bloody quiet. Sergeant Wynford Wiley, in uniform, on guard by the door as if he was expecting trouble.

No such luck, Col Croston thought. Not the Crybbe way. No wonder the cunning old devil had stuck this one on him.

Thanks a lot, Mr Mayor.

Gavin Ashpole's Uher tape recorder and its microphone lay at the front of the room, half under the chairman's table and a good sixty feet from where Gavin himself sat at the rear of the hall. The stupid, paranoid yokels had refused to accept that if he kept the machine at his feet he would not surreptitiously switch it on and record their meeting.

He saw a man from the Hereford Times and that snooty bastard Guy Morrison. Nobody else he recognized, and Gavin knew all the national paper reporters who covered this area.

There was no sign of Fay Morrison.

Bitch.

The Newsomes sat side by side, but there might have been a brick wall between them, with broken glass along the top.

Hereward had planned to come alone to the meeting, but Jocasta had got into the car with him without a word. The inference was that she did not want to remain alone in the house after this alleged experience (about which Hereward was more than slightly dubious). But he suspected the real reason she'd come was that she hoped to see her lover.

With this in mind, Hereward had subjected each man entering the hall to unobtrusive scrutiny and was also watching for reactions from his wife. The appalling thought occurred to him that he might be the only person in the hall who did not know the identity of the Other Man.

He could be a laughing stock. Or she a liar.

Col looked at the wall-clock which the caretaker had obligingly plugged in for the occasion. Five minutes past eight. Off we go then.

'Well,' he said. 'Thank you all for coming. I, er… I don't think… that we can underestimate the importance of tonight.'

Why did he say that? Wasn't what he'd meant to say. The idea was to be essentially informal, take any heat out of the situation.

'Let me say, straight off, that no decisions will be made tonight. That's not what this meeting's about. It's simply an attempt to remove some of the mystery and some of the myths, about developments here in Crybbe. Developments which are transpiring with what might seem to some of us to be rather, er, rather bewildering speed.'

Bloody bewildering speed, by Crybbe standards.

'And let me say, first of all, that, apart from minor planning matters, the changes, the developments, introduced to Crybbe by Mr Max Goff, are, for the most part, outside the remit of local government and require no special permission whatsoever.'

'What we doin' yere, then?' a lone voice demanded. A man's voice, but so high-pitched that it was like a sudden owl hoot in silent barn.

Nobody turned to look whose it was. Obviously the voice spoke for all of Crybbe.

Col looked up and saw Hereward New-some staring at him. He smiled. Hereward did not.

'Can I say, from the outset,' Col said, 'that from here on in, only questions directed through the chair will be dealt with, however – what are we doing here? This – as it happens – was the point I was about to move on to. What are we doing here?'

Col tried to look at everyone in the room; only those in the New Age quarter, to his right, looked back.

'We're here tonight… at the instigation of Mr Max Goff himself. We're here because Mr Goff is aware that aspects of his project may appear somewhat curious – even disturbing – to a number of people. What's he doing erecting large stones in fields, even if they do happen to be his own fields? Why is he keen to purchase property for sale in the locality?'

Col paused.

'What is this New Age business really all about?'

On a single page of The Ley-Hunter's Diary 1993, with a fibre-tipped pen and a none-too-steady hand, Powys had drawn the rough outline of a man with his arms spread.

Fay thought it looked like one of those chalk-marks homicide cops drew around corpses in American films.

'The Cock,' Powys said breathlessly. 'Why do they call it the Cock? It's self-explanatory.'

'This is going to be rather tasteless, isn't it?'

'Look.' Powys turned the diary around on the studio desk to face her. He marked a cross on the head of the man. 'This is the Tump.'

He made another cross in the centre of the man's throat. Crybbe Court.'

He traced a straight line downwards and put in a third cross. The Church.' It was in the middle of the chest.

'And finally…'

Where the man's legs joined he drew in a final cross.

'The Cock,' he said. 'Or more precisely, I'd guess, the alleyway and perhaps this studio.'

She looked at him uncertainly, his face soft focus in the diffused studio lighting. 'I don't understand.'

The Cock, which used to be called the Bull, occurs precisely on the genitalia. If we want to get down to details, this studio would cover the testicles, and the erect… er, organ would project into the square very much as the pub itself leans. I remember when I spent the night there with Rachel I was thinking the upper storey hung over the square like a beer gut. Close, but… Anyway, we were in the room which is directly over the passage, the alley, and we're on that same line now.'

'Joe, this is ridiculous.'

'Not really. You ever do yoga, anything like that?'

'I never had the time.'

'OK, well, Eastern mysticism – and Western magic – suggests there are various points in the human body where physical and spiritual energy gathers, and from where it can be transmitted. The chakras.'

'I've heard of them. I think.'

'So what we could be looking at here are some of the key chakras – the centre of the forehead – mental power; the throat, controlling nervous impulses; the centre of the breast, affecting emotions. And the sex glands, responding more or less to what you'd expect.'

Fay leaned back against the tape-machine. 'I'm still not getting this, Joe, you're going to have to spell it out. Like simply.'

'The town… is the man. Is the town.'

'Oh shit… What man?'

'Wort. Black Michael. In essence he's never gone away. He's fused his energy system, his spirit, with the town. I'm not putting this very well.'

'No, you're not.'

'This girl Jane – the character assumed by Catrin Jones – speaks of the sheriff promising he'll never leave her. He hasn't. He's left the sexual part of him here. His cock.'

Fay looked down at the Electrovoice microphone, eight inches long with a bulb-like head. 'Jesus…'

'It might even be – I don't know - buried somewhere…'

'Powys, I don't want to hear this. This is very seriously creepy.'

'So anybody making love – having sex, love doesn't come into it – is getting some added… impetus, buzz, whatever, from a four-hundred-year-old…'

Fay never wanted to do another voice-piece with that microphone. 'Come on,' she said, between her teeth, 'let's get out of here before – if what you say is correct – we start ripping each other's clothes off.'

Ironically – given the ragged quality of local communal singing, the absence of a trained choir or the will to form one – the church was widely known for its excellent acoustics.

And so the Revd Murray Beech heard it all.

Standing, appalled, behind the curtain separating the side entrance from the nave, he heard everything.

The astounding confession, and then the bumps and crashes.

It was not long after eight, although dark enough to be close to ten, the churchyard outside reduced to neutral shades, the birdsong stilled, the small, swift bats gliding through the insect layer.

When Murray had first picked up the noises he'd been on his way to the public meeting at which, he rather hoped, he would be able to assume the role of mediator, while at the same time putting a few pertinent theological questions to the self-styled heralds of the New Age.

He was wearing a new sports jacket over his black shirt and clerical collar. He'd felt more relaxed than for quite some time. Had, in fact, been looking forward to tonight; it would be his opportunity to articulate the fears of townsfolk who were… well, unpractised, let us say, in the finer techniques of oratory.

At least, he had been relaxed until he'd heard from within the church what sounded like a wild whoop of joy. In this situation it might, in fact, be wise to summon the police.

Or it might not. He'd look rather foolish if it turned out to be a cry of pain from someone quite legitimately in the church who'd, say, tripped over a hassock.

Also he hadn't reported the minor (by lay standards) acts of vandalism of the past two nights. And if this intruder did turn out to be the perpetrator of those sordid expressions of contempt, a quiet chat would be more in order. This was a person with serious emotional problems.

So Murray had hesitated before going in quietly by the side door, noting that its latch had been torn away and was hanging loose, which rather ruled out the well-meaning but clumsy parishioner theory.

No, sadly, this was the sick person.

'Well, well,' he heard now. 'Don't you look cheesed-off?'

As, behind the floor-length curtain, he could not be seen from anywhere in the church, the remark could not have been aimed at him.

Which meant Warren Preece was addressing his dead brother. His – if this crazed boy was to be believed – murdered brother.

The confession had emerged in a strange intermittent fashion, incomplete sentences punctuated by laughter, as if it was a continuous monologue but some of it was being spoken only in Warren's head.

It was deranged and eerie, and Murray remembered the malevolence of Warren's face in the congregation on Sunday, the way the hate had spurted out in shocking contrast to the unchanging stoical expressions of his father and his grandparents.

Murray was in no doubt that this boy at least believed he'd drowned Jonathon. The hard-working, conscientious, older brother slain by the youthful wastrel. Almost like Cain and Abel in reverse.

He ought, he supposed, to make a quiet exit, summon the police and let them deal with it. And yet there was, in this situation, a certain social challenge of a kind not hitherto apparent in Crybbe. The inner cities were full of disturbed youth like Warren Preece – always a valid project for the Church although some ministers shied away.

If Warren Preece was a murderer, Murray could hardly protect him. But if there was an element of self-delusion brought about by guilt, causing a strange inversion of grief, he could perhaps help the boy reason it out.

He heard footsteps but could not be sure from which direction they came or in which direction they were moving, for these acclaimed acoustics could, he'd found, sometimes be confusing.

With three sharp clicks, the lights came on, and Murray clutched at the curtain in alarm.

'Very nice' he heard. 'Very nice indeed.'

And the perverse laughter again, invoking an image in his head of the communion chalice on the altar and what it had contained.

A sudden, white-hot sense of outrage overrode his principles, his need to understand the social and psychological background to this, and he swept the curtain angrily aside.

'All right!'

Murray entered the nave in a single great stride, surprised at his own courage but aware also of the danger of bravado, his eyes sweeping over the body of the church, the stonework lamplit pale amber and sepia, the stained-glass windows rendered blind and opaque.

And in the space between the front pews and the altar rail, the aluminium bier empty and askew like an abandoned supermarket trolley.

'Stay where you are!' Murray roared.

And then realized, in a crystal moment of shimmering horror, how inappropriate this sounded. Because the only Preece in view had no choice.

The vicar wanted to be sick, and the bile was behind his voice as it rose, choking, to the rafters lost in their shadows.

'Come out! Come out at once, you… you filthy…!'

Another slack, liquid chuckle… 'eeeheheh…' trailing like spittle.

Murray could not move, stood there staring compulsively into the closed, yellowed eyes of Jonathan Preece.

The open coffin propped up against the pulpit like a showcase, the body sunk back like a drunk asleep in the bath, the shroud now slashed up the middle to reveal the livid line of the post-mortem scar, where the organs had been put back and the torso sewn up like a potato sack.

Jonathon's corpse splayed in its coffin like a pig in the back of a butcher's van, and Murray Beech could not move.

His nose twitched in acute, involuntary distaste as the smell reached him. Otherwise, he was so stiff with shock that he didn't react at first to the swift movement, as a shadow fell across him and he heard a very small, neat, crisp sound, like a paper bag being torn along a crease.

When he looked down and saw that his clerical shirt had come apart – a deep, vertical split down the chest and upper abdomen, so that he could see his white vest underneath turning pink then bright red – he couldn't at first work out precisely what this meant.

CHAPTER IV

The square was absolutely empty. Flat, dead quiet under a sky that was too dark, too early.

Powys looked up at the church tower hanging behind the serrated roofs of buildings which included the town hall. Behind him, leaning towards him, was the Cock.

They stood in the centre of the square, which was where the navel would be.

'We're on the solar plexus,' Powys said. 'The solar plexus, I think, is the most significant chakra, more so than the head. It's like the centre of the nervous system – I think – where energy can be stored and transmitted.'

Fay hung on to his arm, wanting warmth, although the night was humid.

'You see, I've never gone into this too deeply. It's just thing you pick up in passing. We may not even be looking at chakra at all.'

Fay began to shiver. She began to see the town as something covered by a huge black shadow, man-shaped. She knew nothing about chakras, almost nothing about ley-lines, energy lines, paths of the dead…

'It's happening tonight,' she said. 'Isn't it? Black Michael is coming back.'

'Yeah.' Powys nodded. 'I think it's possible.'

It was working. From the rear of the hall – packed out, way beyond the limits of the fire regulations – Guy Morrison saw it all as though through the rectangle of a TV screen, and, incredibly, it was working.

In spite of his evangelical white suit, Goff was starting to convey this heavy, sober sincerity, beside which even the authoritative Col Croston looked lightweight. Col in his ornate Gothic chairman's chair, Max Goff standing next to him at the table, having vacated a far humbler seat, but oozing Presence.

Goff standing with his hands loosely clasped below waist level.

Goff, looking down at first, saying, not too loudly, 'I want you to forget everything you ever heard or read about the New Age movement. I'm gonna give you the Crybbe version. I'm gonna tell you how it might relate to this town. I'm gonna make it simple, no bull.'

Then slowly raising his eyes. 'And the moment I cease to make sense to any one of you, I wanna know about it.'

Smiling a little now, an accessible kind of smile, if not exactly warm. 'I want you to stand up and stop me. Say, "Hey, we aren't following this, Max." Or "Max, we don't believe you.

We think you're trying to pull the wool." '

It could have sounded patronizing. It didn't. Guy could see only the backs of the heads of the two distinct factions – New Age, Old Crybbe. No heads moved on either side. They'd been expecting a showman in a white suit, but Goff had changed. Even his small eyes were compelling. Not a showman but a shaman.

'You see, what I don't want is any of you people just sitting there thinking, "Who is this lunatic? Why are we listening to this garbage? Who's he think he's kidding?" because…'

Bringing his gaze down very slowly from the back rows to the front rows, taking in everybody.

'… Because I'm not kidding. I never kid.'

'I look at this town,' Fay said, 'and I don't see streets and buildings any more, I only see shadows.'

Powys didn't say anything. He'd been seeing shadows everywhere, for years.

'When there's a gust of wind,' Fay said, 'I look over my shoulder.'

Maybe it's me, he thought. Maybe I've contaminated her

'And when the lights go out…'

'Look.' Powys said quickly, 'he's always been there. Bits of him.' He kept snatching breath, trying to keep his mind afloat. 'Just like, behind us, along the passage there's a pool of sexual energy that builds up in the hours approaching the curfew. Accumulates in the place where the studio is. No doubt other forms of energy gather elsewhere. But it all dissipates when the curfew bell starts to ring. Each night, the ringing of the curfew frustrates the spirit's attempts to collect enough energy to activate all the power centres simultaneously.'

'All right,' Fay said. 'So, one hundred strong, evenly spaced tolls of the bell sends the black energy back to the Tump with its tail between its legs. Why do real dogs howl?'

She looked down at Arnold, lying on the bottom step front of the Cock, panting slightly.

'I'm guessing,' Powys said. 'OK?'

'It's all guesswork, isn't it? Go on. This is the big one, Joe. Why – precisely – do dogs howl at the curfew?"

'Right.' He sat down on the second step, and Arnold laid his chin on his shoe. 'I've been thinking about this a lot. The curfew's a very powerful thing. It's like – an act of violence, hits the half-formed spirit like a truck. And the spirit wants to scream out in rage and frustration. Now. There are two possibilities. Either, because it's at this black dog stage, it communicates its agony to anything else in the town on the canine wavelength. Or it simply emits some kind of ultrasonic scream, like one of those dog whistles people can't hear. How's that?'

'Well,' Fay conceded, 'it does have a certain arcane logic.'

She looked up at the church tower.

Powys pushed at his forehead with the tips of his fingers 'Somebody – let's continue to call him John Dee – saw what was happening, what Michael Wort had left behind – in essence an opening for him to return to… possess Crybbe, literally, from beyond the grave. And he recommended certain steps -get rid of the stones, build a wall around the Tump, ring the curfew every night, one hundred times. Avoid any kind of psychic or spiritual activity which will be amplified in an area like this anyway and could open up another doorway. And so the rituals are absorbed into the fabric of local life and Crybbe becomes what it is today.'

'Morose,' Fay said. 'Apathetic. Resistant to any kind of change. Every night the curfew leaves the place literally limp.'

Guy Morrison was clenching his fists in frustration. This would have been terrific television. He looked around for the Mayor of Crybbe – the man who, more than anybody else in the entire world, he now wanted to strangle.

Jimmy Preece was, in fact, not six yards away, on the end of a row close to the back – presumably so that he could slip, away to ring his precious curfew. Guy moved forward a little to see how the Mayor was taking this and discovered that, for a change, Mr Preece's face was not without expression.

He looked very nervous. His Adam's apple bobbed in his chicken's neck and his eyes kept blinking as though the lids were attached by strings to his forehead, where new wrinkles were forming like worm-casts in sand.

The poor old reactionary's worried Max is going to win them over, Guy thought. He's afraid that, by the end of the night, this will be Max Goff's town and not his any more.

And why not?

For Goff, indirectly, was promising them the earth. But somebody had told him about the way business was done in this locality and about the border mentality, and he was handling it accordingly. What he was telling them, in an oblique kind of way, was, I can help you – I can recreate this town, make it soar – if you co-operate with me. But I don't need you. I don't need anybody.

Goff was talking now about his dreams of expanding the sum of human knowledge and enlightenment. Speaking of the great shrines of the world, subtly mentioning Lourdes and all the thousands of good, hopeful, faithful people it attracted all year round.

Mentioning – in passing – the amount: of money it made out of the good, hopeful, faithful thousands.

'But tourism's not what I'm about,' Goff said. 'What I'm concerned with is promoting serious research into subjects rejected by universities in Britain as… well, let's say as… insufficiently intellectual. The growth of basic human happiness, for instance, has never been something which has tended to absorb our more distinguished scholars. Far too simple. Life and death? The afterlife? The beforelife The human soul? Why should university scientists and philosophers waste time pondering the imponderable? Why not simply study the psychology of the foolish people who believe in all this nonsense?

Goff paused, with another disarming smile. 'You shoulda stopped me. Tourism is an option this town can explore at its leisure. You want tourists, they can be here – tens of thousands of them. You don't want tourists, you say to me, "Max, this is a quiet town and that's the way we like it." And I retire behind the walls of Crybbe Court and I become so low profile everyone soon forgets I was ever here.'

Guy conceded to himself that, had he been the kind of person who admired others, he might at this moment have admired Goff. This was very smart – Goff saying. Of course nobody's forcing this town to be exceedingly wealthy.

Laying it on the line for them: I have nothing to lose, you have everything to gain.

Not even the faintest hint of threat.

How could they resist him?

They'll listen very patiently to what Goff has to say, then they'll ask one or two very polite questions before drifting quietly away into the night. And then, just as quietly, they'll do their best to shaft the blighter…'

But why should Col Croston think they'd want to? The man was offering them the earth.

'Limp. Stagnant.' Powys lowered his voice, although they were alone in the square. Afraid perhaps, Fay thought, that the town itself would take offence, as if that mattered now.

Over the roofs of shops, she could see the Victorian-Italianate pinnacle of the town-hall roof, the stonework blooming for the first time in the glow from its windows. There were probably more people in there tonight than at any other time since it was built. All the people who might be on the streets, in the pub, scattered around town.

'And then Goff arrives,' Powys said. 'Unwitting front man for Andy Trow, last of the Worts, a practising magician. The heir. Crybbe is his legacy from Michael.'

Fay sat next to him on the step, Arnold between them. Apart from them, the town might have been evacuated. Nobody emerged from the street leading to the town hall, nobody went in.

'OK,' she said. 'He's put the stones back – as many as he can. He's knocked a hole in the wall around the Tump, so that whatever it is can get into the Court – the next point on the line, right?'

'I saw its light in the eaves. I watched it spit… Rachel out. Along with the cat. Not much of a guardian any more, but it was there, it had to go. The next point on the line is the church, supposedly the spiritual and emotional heart of the town, from where the curfew's rung. Jack Preece rings the curfew, Jonathon, his son, was to inherit the job. Something's weeding out Preeces.'

'No wonder old Jimmy was so desperate to get to the church after Jack had his accident.'

'He's a bit doddery, isn't he, the old chap?'

'Stronger than he looks, I'd guess. But, sure, at that age he could go anytime. Joe, can nobody else ring it? What about you? What about me? What about – what's his name – Warren?'

'I don't see why not. But it was a task allotted to the Preeces and perhaps only they know how vital it is. The big family secret. The Mayor's probably training this Warren to take over. He's got to, hasn't he?'

Fay was still trying to imagine taciturn, wizened old Jimmy Preece in the role of Guardian of the Gate to Hell. No more bizarre, she supposed, than the idea of Crybbe Court being looked after by a mummified cat.

'What happens,' she said, 'if the curfew doesn't get rung?'

Powys stood up. 'Then it comes roaring and spitting out of the Tump, through the Court, through the new stone in the wood and straight into the church – through the church, gathering enormous energy… until it reaches…'

He began to walk across the cobbles, his footsteps hollow in the dark and the silence. '… here.'

He stood in the centre of the square. The centre of Crybbe.

'My guess is there used to be a stone or a cross on this spot, but it was taken down with all the stones. I bet if you examine Goff's plans, you'll find proposals for some kind of monument. Wouldn't matter what it was. Could be a statue of Jimmy Preece.'

'The Preece Memorial,' Fay said.

'Wouldn't that be appropriate?'

Fay was silent, aware of the seconds ticking away towards ten o'clock. Sure she could feel something swelling in the air and a rumbling in the cobbles where Arnold lay quietly, no panting now.

'So what do we do?'

'If we've got any sense,' Powys said, 'we pile into one of the cars and drive like hell across the border to the nearest place with lots of lights. Then we get drunk.'

'And forget.'

'Yeah. Forget.'

Fay said, 'My father's here. And Jean.'

'And Mrs Seagrove. And a few hundred other innocent people.'

The rumbling grew louder. Fay was sure she could feel the cobbles quaking.

'We can't leave.'

Powys said, 'And Andy's here somewhere, Andy Wort. I don't even like to imagine what he's doing.'

'It's too quiet.'

'Much too quiet.'

Except for the rumbling, and two big, white, blazing eyes on the edge of the square.

Powys said, 'What the hell's that?'

The eyes went out, and now the thing was almost luminous in the dimness. A large yellow tractor with a mechanical digger on the front.

'I'm gonner park 'im yere.' They saw the glow of a cigarette and two tiny points of light from small, round spectacles. 'Nobody gonner mind for a few minutes.'

'It's Gomer Parry,' Fay said.

'Ah… Miss Morris, is it?'

'Hello, Gomer. Where are you off to?'

'Gonner grab me a swift pint, Miss. Just finished off down the Colonel's, got a throat like a clogged-up toilet. Flush 'im out, see?'

They watched Gomer ascending the steps to the Cock, a jaunty figure, entirely oblivious of whatever was accumulating.

The commotion of the digger's arrival had, for just a short time, pushed back the dark.

Powys said, 'Fay, look, we've got to start making our own waves. It'll be feeble, it probably won't do anything, but we can't drive away and we can't just stand here and watch.'

'Sure,' Fay said, more calmly than she felt.

'We need to try and break up that meeting well before ten. Because if they all start pouring out of the town hall and there's something… I don't know, something in the square, I don't know what might happen. We're going to have to break it up, set off the fire alarm or something.'

'I doubt if they've got one, but I'll think of something.'

'I didn't necessarily mean you.'

'I'm the best person to do it. I've got nothing to lose. I have no credibility left. What you need to do – because you know all the fancy terminology – is go and see Jean, see if she's got any ideas. And make sure Dad lies low. Can you take Arnold?'

'Sure.'

He looked down at her. He couldn't see her very well. She looked like an elf, if paler than the archetype. A plaster elf that fell off the production line at the painting stage, so all the colours had run into one corner of its face.

He put his arms around her and lightly kissed her lips. The lips were very dry, but they yielded. He felt her fear and hugged her.

Fay smiled up at him, or tried to. 'Watch it, Joe,' she said. 'Remember where you are.'

CHAPTER V

Have you ever performed an exorcism?

Sitting in the near-dark in Grace's parlour. Sitting awkwardly, with his elbows on the table where Fay used to keep her editing machine until… until somebody broke it.

And the only voices he could hear were Jean's and Murray's alternately repeating the same strange question.

Exorcism.

Well, have I?

Canon Alex Peters remembered the sunny afternoon when Murray was here – only about a week ago – the very last sunny afternoon he could remember.

Remembered exploring his memory with all the expectation of a truffle-hunter in Milton Keynes… finally dredging up the Suffolk business. 'Wasn't the full bell, book and candle routine… more of a quickie, bless-this-house operation.

'Actually I think I made it up as I went along.'

Grace's chair waited in front of Grace's fireplace. The brass balls twisted in the see-through base of Grace's clock, catching the last of the light, pulsing with the final death-throes of the day.

And now, when you really need the full bell, book and candle routine, you haven't got the right book and the only bell in town is the bloody curfew which we don't talk about.

Candles, though. Oh yes, plenty of bloody candles. Everybody in power-starved Crybbe has a houseful of bloody candles.

Alex dipped his head into his hands and moaned.

What are you doing to me, Wendy? I can't handle this, you know I can't.

He looked at the clock. He could see the twisting balls but not the time. But it must be getting on for nine.

Nine o'clock and Alex sitting waiting for his dead wife, and frightened.

Oh yes. Coming closer to the end didn't take away the fear.

'Dear Lord,' said Alex hopelessly. 'Take unto Thee Thy servant, Grace. Make her welcome in Thine Heavenly Kingdom, that she should no longer dwell in the half-light of limbo. Let her not remain in this place of suffering but ascend for ever into Thy holy light.'

Alex paused and looked across at the mantelpiece as though it were an altar.

'Amen,' he said, and lowered his chin to his chest.

He had no holy water, no vestments, no Bible, no prayer book.

An old man in faded Kate Bush T-shirt, tracksuit trousers and an ancient, peeling pair of gymshoes, standing, head bowed in the centre of the room, making it up as he went along.

What else could he do?

Certainly not this strident stuff about commanding unquiet spirits to begone. Not to Grace, a prim little lady who never even went to the newsagent's without a hat and gloves.

'Forgive me, Grace,' Alex said.

He sat down in the fireside chair, which had been hers, on those special occasions when the sitting-room was in use.

'Forgive me,' he said.

And fell asleep.

Fay slipped into the hall unprepared for the density of the crowd.

How could so many be so silent?

Every seat was taken and there were even more people standing, lining every spare foot of wall, two or three deep in some places.

Wynford Wiley, guardian of the main portal, turned his sweating cheese of a head as she came in, rasping at her. 'Not got that tape recorder, 'ave you?'

Fay held up both hands to show she hadn't, and Wynford still looked suspicious, as if he thought she might be wired up, with a hidden microphone in her hair. For Christ's sake, what did it matter?

She stood just inside the doors and saw the impossibility of her task. There must be over three hundred people in here. Joe Powys hadn't been entirely serious, but he'd been right: the best thing they could have done was pile into the car and make a dash for civilization. And she'd been so glib: I'll think of something.

Fay looked among the multitude, at individual faces, each one set as firm as a cardboard mask. Except in the New Age ghetto, towards the front of the hall, to her left, where there was a variety of expressions. A permanent half-smile on the nodding features of a smart man in a safari suit. A woman with an explosion of white hair wearing a beatific expression, face upturned to the great god Goff.

Max was being politely cross-examined on behalf of the townsfolk by the chairman, craggy Colonel Croston, who Fay knew from council meetings – the only councillor who'd ever spoken to her before the meetings.

'I think one thing that many people would like me to ask you, Mr Goff, is about the stones. Why is it necessary to erect what I suppose many people would regard as crude symbols of pagan worship?'

Goff seemed entirely at ease with the question.

'Well, you know…' Leaning back confidently in his chair 'I think all that pagan stuff is a concept which would raise many an eyebrow in most parts of Wales, where nearly every year a new stone circle is erected as part of the national eisteddfod. I realize the eisteddfodic tradition is not so strong here on the border any more – if it ever was – but if you were to place these stones in the ground in Aberystwyth, or Caernarfon, or Fishguard, I doubt anyone would even notice. The point is, Mr Chairman… all this is largely symbolic. It symbolises a realisation that this town was once important enough to be a place of pilgrimage – like Lourdes, perhaps. And that it can be again.'

Spontaneous sycophantic applause burst from the New Age quarter.

Is he blatantly lying, Fay wondered. Or does he seriously believe this bullshit?

Or are we, Joe Powys and I, grossly, insultingly, libelously wrong about everything?

But almost as soon as she thought this, she began to feel very strongly that they were not wrong.

It was ten minutes past nine, the chamber lit by wrought-iron electric chandeliers, and she just knew there was going to be a power cut within the next half hour.

'Come in, Joe,' Jean Wendle said. 'I fear we shall be losing our electricity supply before too long.'

How do you know that?'

Carrying Arnold, he followed her down the hall and into her living-room, where a pleasant Victorian lamp with a pale-blue shade burned expensive aromatic oil.

'There's a sequence,' Jean said, perching birdlike on a chair-arm. Tea?'

'No time, thanks. What's the sequence?'

'Well, temperature fluctuation, to begin with. Either a drop or a raising of the temperature. Coupled with a kind of tightening of the air pressure that you come to recognize. Y'see, these new trip mechanisms or whatever they use do seem to be rather more vulnerable to it than the old system. Or so it seems to me.'

Jean crossed her legs neatly. She was wearing purple velour trousers and white moccasins. 'No time, eh? My.'

He put Arnold down. 'When you say "it"…?'

'It? Oh, we could be talking about anything, from the geological formation – did you know there's a fault line running through mid Wales and right along the border here, there've been several minor but significant earthquakes in recent years, there's the geology, to start with…'

'Jean,' Powys said, 'we're in a lot of trouble.'

'Aye,' Jean Wendle said, 'I know.'

'So let's not talk about temperature fluctuations or rock strata, let's talk about Michael Wort.'

'What about him?'

Powys sat down, gathered his thoughts and then spent three minutes telling her, in as flat and factual a way as he could manage, his and Fay's conclusions. Ending with the shadow of Black Michael falling over Crybbe, whatever remained of his earthly power centres fused with the town's, the exchange of dark energy.

He felt Arnold pushing against his legs in the way he'd done last night in Bell Street, before leading him to the blood and the semi-conscious Fay. Powys reached down a hand and patted him, and Arnold began to pant. He's aware of the urgency, too, Powys thought. But then, he's a dowser's dog.

'It'll try and take the church tonight,' he said. 'And then… God knows…'

Jean sat and listened. When he finished she was silent for over a minute. Powys looked at his watch and then bit on a knuckle.

'That's very interesting,' Jean said. 'You may be right.'

Arnold whined.

'Shush.' Powys laid a hand on the dog's side. Arnold breathing rapidly.

'We haven't any time to waste, Jean. I think… it seems to me I need to get over to the church and ensure that… well, that old Preece makes it to the belfry. I can't think what else I can do that's halfway meaningful, can you?'

Jean thought for a moment and then shook her head.

'What I think is… in fact I know… that you ought to go for the source.'

Her eyes were very calm and sure.

Powys said, 'I don't know what you mean.'

'The source, Joe. Where it begins.'

He thought of the great dark mound with its swaying trees and the blood of Henry Kettle on its flank.

'That's right,' Jean said. 'The Tump.'

'I…' It was forbidding enough by daylight.

'Don't think you can handle that?'

'I don't see the point, I'm not a magician. I'm not a shaman – I'm just a bloody writer. Not even that any more.'

No, he might just as well have said. I don't think I can handle it. This was Jean Wendle he was talking to. Jean Wendle, the psychic. Also Jean Wendle the barrister. The human lie detector.

'Oh, Joe, Joe… You're like Alex. You won't face up to the way it is. To what has to be done. You lost the wee girl Rose, you lost Rachel Wade.'

'No.' He shook his head. He didn't understand. He hadn't understood when it happened – either time – and he didn't understand now.

What am I missing? Suddenly he was in a mental frenzy Why did she have to say that? Why did she have to slap him across the face with the incomprehensible horror of Rose and Rachel? And was he missing something?

'Don't let yourself lose this one,' Jean said.

Fay?

Please… What can't I see?

'And when I get to the Tump,' he asked weakly. 'What am I supposed to do then?'

'You're looking for Boulton-Trow, aren't you?'

He stared at her, Arnold throbbing against his ankle.

'If Boulton-Trow has orchestrated all this, then he has to find somewhere, has he not, with his wee conductor's baton. He has to have a podium, from which… if you really want to end all this – you must dislodge him. I'm sorry, Joe, it's never easy. You know that really, don't you? You could indeed lend Jim Preece a supporting arm as he climbs the steps to the belfry, but are you going to be there again tomorrow night, and the night after?'

Powys stood up. His legs felt very weak. He was afraid. He gathered the trembling Arnold awkwardly into his arms, looked vaguely around. 'Where's the Canon?'

Jean saw him to the door. 'Don't worry about Alex. He's coming to grips with his past, too.' She gave his arm a sympathetic squeeze, it's the night for it.'

Col Croston was pleased and yet disappointed, too. It was going smoothly, Max Goff was making his points very cogently and had been impressing him as the strictly neutral chairman. And, no, he hadn't expected fireworks.

But wasn't this just a little bit too tame?

Hadn't once had to bang his gavel or call for silence. Just that spot of aggression towards the cameraman – minor pre-meeting nerves. And that single, reedy interruption during his introduction. All of this before he'd even called on Goff to address the meeting.

And now the fellow had been given a more than fair hearing.

'Right,' Col said. 'Well, I think I've put all my questions, so what about all of you? What's the general feeling? I think we at least owe it to Mr Goff for him to be able to walk away from here tonight with some idea of how the townsfolk of Crybbe are reacting to his ideas.'

Wasn't awfully surprised to get a lot of blank looks.

'Well, come on, don't be shy. This is a public meeting and you are, in fact, the public'

When he did get a response it came, unsurprisingly, from the wrong side of the room.

The large, middle-aged woman with the white hair was on her feet.

'Yes?' said Col. 'Mrs Ivory, isn't it? Go ahead.'

'Mr Chairman,' Mrs Ivory said sweetly, 'I'm sure we seem a pretty strange lot to the local people.'

She paused. If she was waiting to be contradicted, Fay thought, she'd be on her feet for the rest of the night.

'Well…' Mrs Ivory blushed. 'I suppose we all have adjustments to make, don't we. I know I got some very odd looks when I went into a sweetshop and said I preferred carob to chocolate, actually, and didn't mind paying the extra for a no dairy alternative.'

Good grief, Col thought, is this the best you can do?

'What I mean is, Mr Chairman, I suppose we have got what seem like some funny ideas, but, well, we're harmless, and don't mind people thinking I'm an eccentric, as long as they accept me as a harmless eccentric. That's the point I want to make. We don't want to take over or impose some weird new regime. We're not like the Jehovah's Witnesses – we won't be knocking on doors or handing out pamphlets saying, "Come and join the New Age movement." We're gentle people, and we're not going to intrude and… well, that's all I have to say really. Thank you.'

'Thank you, Mrs Ivory,' said Col. 'Well, there you are, I think that was very, er… a valuable point. So. What about some local reaction? Mr Mayor, you're down there on the floor of the meeting tonight, somewhat of a new experience for you, but what it does mean is you are entitled to speak your mind. Give us the benefit of your, er…'

He was going to make a little New Age sort of joke then about the Mayor's 'ancient wisdom', but decided perhaps not.

'… years of experience.'

He watched Jimmy Preece rising skeletally to his feet.

'Not expecting a sermon. Just a few words, Mr Mayor.'

'Well, I…' Jimmy Preece looked down at his boots, and then he said prosaically, 'On behalf of the town, I'd like to thank Mr Goff for coming along tonight and telling us about his plans. Very civil of 'im. I'm sure we'll all bear in mind what 'e's 'ad to say.'

And the Mayor sat down.

Col looked helplessly at Max Goff.

At the back of the room Fay Morrison looked at her watch, saw it was coming up to twenty minutes past nine and was very much relieved. Within a couple of minutes the meeting would be wound up and all these people would go their separate ways, they'd be off the line, away from what she was slowly and less credulously corning to think of as the death path.

'Thank you, Mr Mayor,' Goff said, rising to his feet. 'Thank you, Mr Chairman. But this is only the start of things…'

What?

Goff said, 'I'd like you to meet at this point some of the people you'll be seeing around town. For those who wanna know more about the heritage of the area, the distinguished author M. Powys will be, er, with us presently. But I'd like to acquaint you, first of all, with some of the very skilled practitioners who, for an introductory period, will be making their services available entirely free of charge to anyone in Crybbe who'd like to know more about alternative health. As Hilary said a few moments ago, there'll be no proselytizing, they'll simply be around if required, so first of all I'd like you to meet…'

He stopped. The chairman had put a hand on his arm.

'One moment, Mr Goff, I think we appear to have another question… Think I saw a hand going up at the back. Oh.'

Col had recognized Fay Morrison, the radio reporter. This was public meeting, not a media event; however, in the absence of any worthwhile response from the floor, he supposed it would be all right to let her have her say.

'Yes,' he said. 'Mrs Morrison.'

Goff's head spun round. 'This is not a press conference, Mr Chairman.'

'Yes, I'm aware of that, Mr Goff, but Mrs Morrison is a resident of Crybbe.'

'Yeah, sure, but…'

'And I am the chairman,' Col said less affably.

Goff shut up, but he wasn't happy.

Col was. This was more like it.

'Go ahead, Mrs Morrison.'

I'd like to know if Mr Goff is going to introduce us to his chief adviser, Mr Boulton-Trow.'

'I'm afraid,' Goff said coldly, 'that Mr Boulton-Trow is unable to be with us tonight.'

'Why not?'

Goff dropped his voice. 'Look, Mr Chair, I've had dealings with this woman before. She's a load of trouble. She makes a practice of stirring things up. She's been fired by the local radio station for inaccuracy, she's…'

'Mr Goff…' Thin steel in Col's voice. 'This is a public meeting, and I'm the chairman. Go ahead, Mrs Morrison, but I hope this is relevant. I don't want a slanging match.'

'Thank you, Mr Chairman,' Fay said. 'I've certainly no intention of being at all argumentative.'

Oh God, go for it, woman.

'I'd simply like to ask Mr Goff what contribution he expects will be made to the general well-being of Crybbe by employing a descendant of perhaps… perhaps the most hated man the history of the town.'

She paused. People were turning to look at her, especially from the Crybbe side of the room and Goff was on his feet. 'This is ridiculous…'

The chairman slammed down his gavel. 'Please!'

'I'm referring,' Fay said, raising her voice, 'to the sixteenth century sheriff known popularly, since his death, as Black Michael, and widely known at the tune for unjustly hanging…'

'Mrs Morrison,' said the chairman. 'With the best will in the world, I don't honestly think…'

'Andy Trow has, of course, reversed his real surname. He is Andy Wort, isn't he, Mr Goff?'

There was a silence.

Oh fuck it. Fay thought. Take it all the way.

'He's also, I understand, your lover.'

And the lights went out.

CHAPTER VI

Plea se. Take my arm.

Better.

Good.

Do you remember when I used to offer you my arm in the street and you absolutely refused to accept it 'Not until we're married,' you would say, even though you were quite poorly. Worried about your reputation, I suppose. Bit late for that.

And then, of course, when we were married it was quite impossible, with you in a wheelchair and me pushing the damn thing…

All right now, though, isn't it?

Yes. All right now.

Which way shall we go? No, you choose. Down to the river?

No?

To the church! Yes, of course. Bring back some memories. Young Murray did rather well, I thought. Yes, I agree about the amendments to the vows; saved any embarrassment, didn't it? Indeed it did.

It is dark, isn't it? Careful now. Mind you don't trip over the kerb or the end of your shroud.

Do tell me, won't you, if you're feeling tired.

Jolly good.

As Joe Powys drove, on full headlights, into the lane that slipped down beside the church, he formed an image of Crybbe as an old and poorly built house riddled with damp. Periodically new people would move in and redecorate the rooms: bright new paint, new wallpaper, new furniture. But the wet always came through and turned the walls black and rotted the furniture.

And eventually people stopped throwing money at it and just tried to insulate themselves and their families as best they could. It wasn't much fun to live in, and the people who stayed there were the ones with few prospects and nowhere else to go.

And that was the basic socio-economic viewpoint.

Trying to explain the supernatural aspects in terms of rising damp was more complicated.

If only he could speak to the shadowy figure who, in the late 1500s, had attempted to install, just above ground-level, an effective damp-proof course.

Let's assume this man was John Dee, astrologer at the court of Queen Elizabeth I.

Powys braked hard as a baby rabbit shot from the hedgerows, into the centre of the road and then stopped, turning pale terrified eyes into the headlights.

He switched off the lights, and the rabbit scampered away

Just for a moment, Powys smiled.

There's a portrait. John Dee in middle age. A thin-faced man with high cheekbones. Watchful, but kindly eyes. He wears a black cap, suggesting baldness, and has a luxurious white beard, like an ice-cream cone.

In Andy's notes, Dee (if it is he) gives only graphic descriptions of experiences, like the visit of the spirit (Wort?) in the night.

Perhaps somewhere Dee has documented the action he took to contain the rampant spirit after Wort's death.

Dee never seems to have been very wealthy. Towards the end of his life he was virtually exiled to the north, as warden of Christ's College, Manchester. With Elizabeth dead and James on the throne – James who was in constant fear of Satanic plots and clamped down accordingly on all forms of occultism – the elderly Dee was forced to defend himself and his reputation as a scholar against various accusations that he practised witchcraft. Ill-founded accusations, no doubt, but these were dangerous, paranoid times.

So what would the penurious Dee do if contacted by old friends or relatives in Crybbe with tales of hauntings and oppression by dark forces invoked by the late Sir Michael Wort?

He drove past the turning to Court Farm and could see no lights between the trees. No lights anywhere. He might, out there, be twenty miles from the nearest town. It was like driving back in time, or into another dimension

To Percival Weale,

Merchant of Crybbe

My Dear Mr Weale,

It was with much sorrow that I received your letter

informing me that our mutual associate, Sheriff Wort

continues to torment the town from a place beyond this life.

It has long been apparent to me that the ethene layer is so

dense upon the atmosphere along the border of Wales and

England that it may not always be so comfortable a place of

habitation.. .

And did Dee, old, impecunious and in constant fear of arrest, appeal to Percy Weale to make financial provision for the curfew to be rung (so that the most dangerous hours of darkness might remain peaceful) and to assign some long-established local family to the task?

And being unable to travel to Crybbe himself, did he vaguely suggest that if the malignant spirit were to be controlled it was essential for the stones to be removed, the Tump walled in and the spiritual energy level to remain low.

And you must warn the townspeople to continue with their

lives but not to expand the town to any great extent and,

above all, to offer no challenge to the spirit. And, as for the

hand and any other of his limbs or organs that should come

to light, no purpose will be served in their destruction. You

must take these and enclose them in separate and confined

places – I would suggest within a chimney or fireplace or

beneath a good stone floor – where they may never be exposed

to the light or the air. This is far from satisfactory, but my

knowledge does not extend to more. Forgive me.

Powys drove between the gateposts of Crybbe Court and felt the house before he saw it, a dark and hungry maw.

He thought, Hand? What hand? I don't know anything about a hand.

Get your act together, Powys.

He thought about Fay and started to worry, so he thought about Rachel instead, and he looked up towards the house and felt bitterly angry.

Better keep to the path, I think, my dear. Somewhat safer, in the dark.

Not that they take much care of this path, or indeed the church itself, never much in the way of civic pride in Crybbe. Poor Murray's got his hands full.

Ah. Now. I know where we're going.

We're going to your grave, aren't we?

Now, look, before you say anything, I'm sorry it had to be down at this end – not exactly central, I realise that, another few yards in fact, and you'd be in the wood. But it's surely shady on a warm day, and you never did like too much sun, did you? I suppose you spent most of your life in the shade, really, and… well, you know I always had the impression that was how you wanted it to be.

I know, I know… the flowers. I keep forgetting, memory isn't what it was, as you know. You bring a few flowers with the best of intentions, and then you forget all about them and the next time you come they're all dead and forlorn and there are stalks and seed-pods everywhere, all a terrible mess, and I do understand the way you feel about that, of course I do.

Hello, who's this?

Oh, Grace, look, it's young Murray.

No, don't get up, old chap.

Well, er… it's a lovely night, isn't it?

Yes. Indeed.

What's that?

Cain and Abel?

I'm sorry… I'm not quite getting your drift. What you're saying is, Abel killed Cain?

Well, not in my version, old son, but I suppose you modernists have your own ideas.

Abel killed Cain, eh?

Well, if you say so, Murray, if you say so.

Arnold was not at all happy about being left in the Mini. Joe Powys had pushed back the slide-opening driver's window several inches to give him plenty of air, and he stood up on the seat and pressed his head through the gap and whined frantically.

'I can't take you,' Powys said. 'Please, Arnold.' He'd left the dog a saucer of water on the back shelf. Poured from a bottle he kept in the boot because the radiator had been known to boil dry.

Knowing full well that he was doing all this just in case, for some unknowable reason, he didn't get back.

'Good boy,' he said. 'Good boy.'

He locked the car and moved quickly, uncomfortably away. He didn't want to be here. He felt he was in the wrong place, but he didn't trust his own feelings. He trusted Jean Wendle's feelings because Jean was an experienced psychic and a Wise Woman, and he was just a writer; and when it came to dealing with real life, writers didn't know shit.

The Mini was tightly parked in a semi-concealed position behind the stable-block. Powys carried a hand-lamp with a beam projecting a good fifty yards in front of him. It was probably a mistake; he should be more surreptitious. What was he going to do – stand amid the ruins of the wall, pinning Andy in the powerful beam as he cavorted naked in the maelstrom of black energy?

'It all sounds,' he said aloud into the night, 'so bloody stupid.'

Earth mysteries.

Book your seats for a magical, mind-expanding excursion to the Old Golden Land.

A fun-filled New Age afternoon. A book of half-baked pseudo-mystical musings on your knee as you picnic by a sacred standing stone, around it a glowing aura of fascinating legend. As he moved uncertainly across the field towards the Tump, it struck him that it was past ten o'clock and there'd been no curfew. Well, it was late last night, too. Took old Preece longer to make it to the belfry.

But he still thought, that's where I should be. Or with Fay.

Not here.

Or am I just trying to put it off again, the confrontation – afraid my reasoning's all to cock and this man, with his precise, laid-back logic and his superior knowledge of the arcane, is going to hold up another dark mirror.

As was usual with these things, he didn't notice it happening until it had been happening for quite some time.

Climbing easily over the ruins of the wall, where somebody had taken a bulldozer for a midnight joy-ride, the rhythm of his breath began to change so that it was a separate thing from what he was doing, which was labouring up the side of the mound. Normally, to do this, he would be jerking the breath in like a fireman on a steam train shovelling more and more coal on, breath as fuel. But he was conscious, in an unconcerned dreamlike way, of the climb being quite effortless and the breathing fuelling something else, some inner mechanism.

Each breath was a marathon breath, long, long, long, but not at all painful. When you discovered that you, after all, possessed a vast inner strength, it was a deeply pleasurable thing.

He followed what he thought was the beam from the lamp until he realized the lamp had gone out but the beam had not…as though he was throwing a shadow, a negative shadow, which made it a shadow of light.

Out of the tufted grass and into the bushes, moving with ease, watching his legs doing the work, as legs were meant to do, tearing through the undergrowth in their eagerness to take him to the summit of the mound.

The source.

Each breath seeming to take minutes, breathing in not only air, but colours, all the colours of the night, which were colours not normally visible to undeveloped human sight.

Moving up the side of the Tump, between bushes and tree trunks and moving effortlessly. Effortlessly as the last time.

goes round… thrice…

goes round...

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.

chapter viii

His own light was in his eyes.

'You know, Mr Powys,' Humble said, 'Mr Trow was dead right about you.'

The hand-lamp was tucked into the cleft between two tree roots. Humble was sitting in the grass a few feet away from the lamp.

He couldn't see Humble very well, but he could see what Humble was holding. It was a crossbow: very modern, plenty of black metal. It had a heavy-looking rifle-type butt, which was obviously what Humble had hit him with. Back of the neck, maybe between the shoulder blades. Either way, he didn't want to move.

'What he said was,' Humble explained, 'his actual words: "Joe Powys is very obedient." He always does what he's told. Someone tells him to go to the Tump, he goes to the Tump.'

Powys senses were numbed.

'Well, that's how I prefer it,' Humble said. 'Making people do fings is very time consuming. I much prefer obedience.'

'Where's Andy?' Powys was surprised to discover he could still talk.

'Well, he ain't here, is he? Somebody indicate he might be?'

Humble lifted his crossbow to his shoulder, squinted at Powys. He was about ten feet away. The was a steel bolt in the crossbow.

Powys cringed.

'Pheeeeeeew,' Humble said. "Straight frew your left eyeball, Mr Powys.'

Powys didn't move. You live in fear of the unknown and the unseen and, when you're facing death, death turns out to be a yobbo with a mousetrap mouth and a lethal weapon favoured by the lower type of country-sport enthusiast.

'But it won't come to that,' Humble said. 'Seeing as obedience is one of your virtues. I won't say that's not a pity – I never done a human being with one of these – but if I got to postpone the experience, I got to postpone it. On your feet, please, Mr P.'

'I don't think I can. I think you broke my collar-bone.'

'Oh, that's where you keep your collar-bone these days, is it? Don't fuck with me please, get up.'

And Powys did, accepting without question that this guy would kill him if he didn't. Humble stood up, too. He was wearing a black gilet, his arms bare. Humble was a timeless figure, the hunter. He killed.

'Now, we're going to go down off the Tump, Mr Powys, on account you can't always trust your reactions up here, as you surely know. We're going to go down, back over that wall, OK?'

'Where's Andy?' Powys said.

'I'm empowered to answer just one of your questions, and that wasn't it, I'm sorry.'

Powys tripped over a root and grabbed at a bush. 'Aaah.' Thorns.

'Keep going, please. Don't turn round.'

Powys froze. He's going to kill me. He's going to shoot me from behind.

Something slammed into his back and be cried out and lost his footing and crashed through the thorn bush and rolled over and over.

'… did tell you to keep going.'

As he lay in a tangle at the foot of the mound, Humble dipped down beside him, just inside the wall.

'I'll tell you the answer, shall I? Then you can work out the question at your leisure. The answer is – you ready? – the answer is… his mother. Now get on your feet, over the wall

and across to the old house.'

The night has gathered around Warren, and he's loving it. Earned himself a piece of it now – a piece of night to carry 'round with him and nibble on whenever he's hungry.

And he's still hungry, his appetite growing all the time.

He's off out of the back door of the town hall and across the square, into the alley by the Cock, the Stanley knife hot his right hand. Only it's not his hand any more; this is the Hand of Glory.

The ole box is just a box now, and what's in the box is just bones. His is the hand and his will be the glory.

Felt like doing a few more while he was in there. That Colonel Croston, of the SAS. That'd have been a laugh.

Incredible, the way he just walked in the back way and the lights had gone, dead on cue, like wherever he goes he brings the night in with him.

He has this brilliant night vision now. Just like daylight. Better than daylight 'cause he can see and no bugger else can.

Standing behind this fat phoney, big man on a squidgy little chair, glaring white suit – you'd have to be blind not to see him – and all the time in the world to choose where to put it in.

Didn't need to choose. The Hand of Glory knew.

Brilliant. Thought he'd be squealing like a pig, but he never made more than a gurgle.

Brilliant.

There's someone behind Tessa in the alley. Tall guy.

'Who's this?'

Tessa laughing. 'My teacher.'

'How's it going, Warren?' the teacher saying. 'How are you feeling?'

Warren grinning, savouring the night in his mouth, and his eyes are like lights. Headlights, yeah.

'Good lad,' says the teacher.

Minnie Seagrove was not too happy with the Bourbon creams.

It was long after nine when she placed a small china plate of the long brown biscuits on one of the occasional tables and set it down by the side of Frank's chair at just the right height. Putting the camping light on the table next to the plate, still dubiously pursing up her lips. 'I do hope they're all right, Frank. They're nearly a month over the sell-by date. I remember I bought them the day they took you into the General. They'd just opened that new Safeways near the station, and I thought I'd go down there from the hospital, 'cause it's not far to walk, take me mind off it, sort of thing.'

Tears came into Mrs Seagrove's eyes at the memory. 'I bought a whole rainbow trout, too. I thought, he's never managed to catch one, least I can do is serve him one up for his first dinner when he comes out.'

She turned away and grabbed a Scottie from the box to dab her eyes. They were Kleenex really, but Mrs Seagrove called all tissues Scotties because it sounded more homely.

'Had to throw it in the bin, that trout, well past its sell-by. Still, you did come back from the General, after all, didn't you, Frank?'

Looking at him through the tears, Mrs Seagrove had to keep blinking and on every other blink, Frank seemed to disappear. She applied the Scottie to her eyes again and sat down opposite him. He didn't look well, she had to admit.

'Eat your Bourbons, Frank,' she said. 'There'll be nothing left of you if you go on like this. I know, I'll put the wireless on – you can listen to the local news.'

Mrs Seagrove kept the wireless on the sideboard. To tell the truth, it wasn't her kind of wireless at all. Justin had bought it for them last Christmas but one. It was a long black thing with dozens of switches and you could see all these speakers through the plastic grilles, big ones and little ones, all jumbled up. Why they couldn't make them with just one speaker and cover it up neatly like they used to, she'd never know.

Being that changing stations was so complicated, she had it permanently tuned to Offa's Dyke Radio. She'd have preferred Radio Two herself, that young Chris Stuart had ever such a comforting voice, but Frank said if you were living in a place you ought to keep up with what was happening around you, even if it wasn't very interesting. Mrs Seagrove certainly found most of it quite boring – too much about councils and sheep prices – so she put it on quite low tonight (Frank had good ears, belter than hers) and she only turned it up when she heard that Max Goff mentioned.

'… at a packed public meeting to discuss his plans for the so-called New Age mystical healing centre in the border town of Crybbe… from where Gavin Ashpole now reports.'

Gavin who? What had happened to Fay Morrison? She might have been a bit awkward about the… thing. But she did seem quite a nice girl when you actually met her.

'… Townsfolk listened in hostile silence as Max Goff explained his plans to turn Crybbe into a kind of New Age Lourdes, bringing in thousands of tourists from all over the world and providing a massive boost for the local economy. However, he said, it would be up to the town whether it… Oh… Oh, you bitch…oh, you… oh, please…'

Mrs Seagrove recoiled from the wireless as if a wasp had flown out of one of the speakers.

'Frank, did you hear that?'

'Oh… oh… please… yes… yes, do it…! CHEW IT OFF!!'

There was a long silence and then the voice of the news reader came back.

'I'm sorry, I… I'm not sure what happened there. We'll try and return to that report… er, other news now…'

'Frank,' said Minnie Seagrove. 'Did you hear that, Frank? That's your precious Offa's Dyke Radio for you. Chris Stuart never goes to pieces like that. Did you hear… Frank?'

Frank's chair was empty.

All the Bourbon biscuits were still on the plate, six of them arranged in a little semi-circle.

'Frank? Frank, where are you?'

Breathing faster, Mrs Seagrove turned and switched off the wireless and turned back to the chair and rubbed her eyes with the screwed-up tissue, but Frank was gone and the door was closed.

She started to feel very confused.

Get a grip, Minnie, get a grip.

Nothing was right. Nothing was right. Mrs Seagrove went to the window and flung back the curtains. 'It's you, isn't it? It's you.'

Great, ugly slag-heap thing. She'd probably be able to see the church if it wasn't for that; always liked to see a church in the distance, even if she didn't go.

She could see the mound quite clearly tonight, even though there was no moon. It was a bit like the mound was lit up from inside, not very lit up, sort of a yellowish glow like a lemon jelly.

She thought she could see a shadow moving across the field.

'Is that you, Frank?' She banged on the window. 'You're not going out in that wet grass this time of night!'

He was stupid sometimes, Frank, like a little boy. He'd walk down to that river and just stare at it, wondering why he never caught that many fish.

She pulled her walking shoes from under the sideboard. 'You come back here, Frank Seagrove. It's not safe out there!'

CHAPTER IX

FAY was still seeing it like a bad home video: fuzzy, ill-lit, full of camera-shake and over-reaction. Women screaming, people staring at each other in shock, trying to speak, faces hard and grainy in the blue, deep-freeze light. Stricken Max Goff convulsing on the floor. Col Croston bending over him.

'Get a doctor!'

Portly man from Off shouldering his way to the front. Fay recognized him as the local GP.

Wynford Wiley – probably the last to react – moving like a sleepwalker, Fay following in his considerable wake, up the central aisle, pushing past Guy. Hilary Ivory stumbling towards them, face in a permanent contortion like that painting of Munch s – The Scream – etched in similar stark, nervy colours because of the stammering lights.

Hilary's hands squeezing her hair and then the hands coming out like crimson rubber-gloves and Hilary's shrieks almost shredding Col's crisp command:

'Nobody move! Nobody leaves the hall!'

And then, turning to the doctor, 'Bloody obvious. Had his throat slashed.'

At which point, spangled brightness burst out of the wrought-iron chandeliers – an electrical blip – and Fay saw the Mayor, Councillor James Oswald Preece, standing on the edge of the raised area, holding his arms as though, with his frail frame, he could conceal the carnage.

'Silence!'

Even Wynford Wiley stopped, so suddenly that Fay almost bumped into his big blue back. The big lights stuttered again, leaving the Mayor with a momentary jagged aura of yellow and black.

'Listen to me!'

'Is he dying?' a woman demanded from the New Age quarter.

One of the men in suits said, 'Look, I'm his legal advisor and this is…'

'Is Max dead?'

'… I insist you call an ambulance.'

'Is he…?'

'Will… you… be… quiet madam!'

A new and significant Jimmy Preece, Fay saw. No longer the husk of a farmer, flat-capped, monosyllabic – 'ow're you, 'ow're you… Authority there now. Resonance.

'Now,' Jimmy Preece said. 'I'm not going to elaborate on this. Isn't the time. So don't none of you ask me. I'm speaking to you as your First Citizen, but I'm also speaking as a Preece and most of you'll know what I'm saying yere.'

The Mayor's eyes flickered to one side. 'For all the newcomers, I'd ask you to accept my word that… that we are in… well…'

He stopped. His jaw quivered.

'.. . in serious, mortal danger… '

He let this sink in. Fay looked around to see how they were taking it. Some of the Crybbe people looked at each other with anxiety and varying amounts of understanding.

'Serious. Mortal. Danger,' Jimmy Preece intoned again, almost to himself, looking down at his boots.

The lawyer said, 'Oh, for heaven's sake, man…'

'And it's more than us what's in danger. And it's more than our children and… and their children.'

The doctor stood up, flecks of blood on his glasses.

'No!' somebody shouted. 'Oh God, no!' And the New Age quarter erupted.

Jimmy Preece held up a hand. 'I…' His voice slumped. I'm sorry he's dead.'

'… through the oesophagus, I'd imagine,' the doctor told Col Croston quietly, but not quietly enough.

'I mean it,' the Mayor said. 'I wished 'im no harm, I only wished 'im… gone from yere.'

Fay glanced at Guy. His face sagged. His blond hair, disarranged, revealed a hitherto secret bald patch. Catrin Jones was several yards away, looking past him to where Larry Ember was walking up the aisle, camera on his shoulder.

'Who let you in?' Jimmy Preece said wearily, 'Switch that thing off, sir, or it'll be taken from you.' Guy turned, tapped Larry's arm and shook his head.

To the side of Guy, the Newsomes mutely held hands.

'I'm going now,' Jimmy Preece said, 'to see to the bell. I urge you all – and this is vital – to stay absolutely calm.'

'… come with you, Jim,' somebody said.

'No you won't. You'll stay yere. You'll all stay yere.'

'Ah, look…' Col Croston said, 'Mr Mayor, there's been a murder here. It's not a normal situation.'

'No, Colonel, it's not normal, and that's why nobody goes from yere till I sees to the bell. I don't say this lightly. Nobody is to leave, see. Nobody.'

'Who's to say,' Col came close to the Mayor, 'whoever did this isn't still in the room?'

'No. 'E isn't yere, Colin, you can…'

Wynford Wiley pleaded, 'Let me radio for assistance, Jim. Least let me do that.'

'Leave it, Wynford. You're a local man, near enough. This is not a police matter.'

'But it's a murder,' Col Croston protested.

'It's a Crybbe matter, sir!'

'Jim,' Wynford whined, 'it's more than my…'

'Your job? A blue vein throbbed in the Mayor's forehead. 'Your piffling little job? You'll take out your radio, Wynford Wiley, and you'll put 'im on that table.'

Wynford stood for a moment, his small features seeming to chase each other around his Edam cheese of a face. 'I can't.' He hung his head, turned away and trudged back towards the main door.

But when he reached it, he found his way barred by four large, quiet men of an unmistakably agricultural demeanour.

'Don't be a bigger fool than you look. Wynford,' said the Mayor, walking slowly down the aisle. 'Just give me that radio.'

Wynford sighed, took out the pocket radio in the black rubber case with the short rubber aerial and placed it in Jimmy Preece's bony, outstretched hand.

'It's for the best, Wynford. Now.' The Mayor turned and looked around him. 'Where's Mrs Morrison?'

Oh Christ.

'I'm here, Mr Preece.'

His deeply scored lips shambled into something that might have become a smile. 'You're not very big, Mrs Morrison, but you been stirring up a lot o' trouble, isn't it?'

'What's that supposed to mean?'

One of the men opened a door for him. Another handed him a lamp, a farmer's lambing light.

'Means I don't want you left in yere,' said Jimmy Preece 'Christ alone knows what ole rubbish you'd be spoutin'.'

He pushed her out of the door in front of him.

Outside, it was fully dark.

It was only 9.40.

Oh my God, my God… Oh…

'It's only a dead body,' Mr Preece said, 'It can't hurt you, any more than that Goff can hurt anyone now.'

'It's horrible,' Fay said. 'It's… perverse. You knew it was here, didn't you, like… like this?'

She was shaking. She couldn't help it.

'No,' said the Mayor. 'I didn't think it was gonner be like this. But it don't surprise me.'

'But, Mr Preece, it's your own grandson. How can you bear it?'

'I can bear it, 'cause I got no choice,' said Mr Preece simply. He turned the light away from the coffin and pulled her back, but she could still see the image of Jonathon showcased like a grotesque Christmas doll.

Glad the power was off. Only wished somebody would disconnect the atmosphere.

Was she imagining this, or was it Jonathon she could smell, sweet corruption, bacteria stimulated by exposure to the dense, churchy air?

'Would you mind if I waited outside?'

'You'll stay yere.'

'It's… I'm sorry, Mr Preece, it's the smell.'

'Aye. We should lay him flat and put the lid back on.'

Don't ask me to help. Please don't ask me to help.

'Gonner give me a hand, then?'

No…! But he was taking her arm. 'We 'ave time. Ten minutes yet, see.' Guiding her into the body of the church. She held fingers over her nose.

'Mr Preece…'

'What?'

She took her hand away from her face. 'Why me? Why'd you really bring me along?'

The question resounded from invisible walls and rafters.

'Just hold that.' Giving her the lambing light.

Fay stayed where she was, well back, and shone the light on the coffin, looking away.

'Closer, girl. Shine it closer.'

She felt him watching her. She moved a little closer. The smell was appalling. She imagined bloated, white maggots at work inside Jonathon Preece, although she knew that was ludicrous. Wasn't it?

Fay pushed knuckles into her mouth to stifle the rising panic.

Mr Preece was on his knees beneath the coffin, its top propped against the pulpit. 'Never get 'im back on that trolley. Lay 'im… flat… on the ground. All we can do.' He pushed at the coffin until it was almost upright and the body began sag and belly out, like a drunk in a shop doorway.

'Jesus, Mr Preece, he's slipping! He's going to fall out! He's going to fall on me!'

'Push him back in, girl! Put the light down.'

'I can't!'

'Do it, woman!'

She did. She touched him. She pushed his chest, felt the ruched line of the post-mortem scar. He was cold, but far from stiff now, and she remembered him on the riverbank, soaked and leaking, tongue out and the froth and his skin all crimped.

She closed her eyes and pretended the stink was coming from elsewhere, until the coffin, with its sickening cargo, was flat on the stones and Jimmy Preece was fitting the lid on. Then she was bending over a pew, retching, nothing coming up but bile, like sour, liquid terror.

'Dead, poor boy,' Jimmy Preece said.

She stood up. Wiped her mouth on her sleeve. The smell was still in the air, sweetly putrid. Would she ever get away from that smell?

Heard herself saying. 'Who was it, Mr Preece? Who did this? Who made a sideshow out of him?'

'Dead,' he said. 'Can't hurt you now, can 'e?' He came close. 'Won't hurt that dog, neither, will 'e?'

Oh no. Something had been whispering to her that it was going to be this, but she'd kept pushing it back.

'That's why you brought me, isn't it? That's why you made me touch him.'

He stood there, recovering from the exertion, his breathing like coins rattling in a biscuit tin. Max Goff stabbed to death something unspeakably vile seeping into Crybbe, but it was the death by drowning of one Jonathon Preece, young farmer of this parish…

'Family thing,' he said, voice as dry as wood ash. 'Something I 'ave to know before I die. Jack sent Jonathon out to make away with that animal of yours.'

'And why?' she said, but he didn't answer that.

'And he never came back.'

'OK, I'll tell you,' Fay said, in a rush. 'I'll tell you what happened, OK?'

His words of a moment long ago lurched back at her… before I die? Have to know before I die.

She didn't even want to think what he meant by this, so she told him everything. Everything except for the feelings Joe Powys had said he'd experienced on the riverbank with the gun in his hands and the urge to kill.

Mr Preece went on breathing like a dying man. When she'd finished, he said, 'There's more to it than that.'

'No, there isn't, I swear.'

'Jonathon was a strong boy and a good swimmer. 'E also – unlike that brother of 'is – 'e had a bit o' common sense.'

'I'm sorry,' Fay said. 'I can't tell you what happened when he'd gone. Perhaps… I mean, with hindsight, we should have stayed. With hindsight, we should never have thrown the gun in the river in the first place. I'm sorry. I really am desperately sorry, Mr Preece…' She was aware of her voice becoming very small and a bit pathetic.

He was moving away towards the entrance, pulling out a pocket watch the size of a travel alarm-clock. It had big luminous hands.

'Right,' he said. 'You can wait in the porch, by yere, but you don't go out. You don't open that door until the bell's finished, you understand?

'I want to come up with you.'

'We goes up alone,' he snapped. 'Now you remember what I said, you keep that door shut. Understand?'

'Yes. Look… Mr Preece…'

'Make it quick, Miss, make it very quick.'

She was remembering how controlled he'd been in the hall, how sure that the killer had left the building.

'You know who did this… to Jonathon, don't you?…you know who killed Max Goff when the lights were out.'

He turned his back on her and mounted the first step.

'Don't you?'

He didn't look back, and a turn in the spiral staircase took the light away.

'Is that a Crybbe matter, as well?' she yelled. 'Or is it…?'

God, she thought, as the darkness in the church became for a while, absolute, I can still smell it. Still smell Jonathon.

And she put her hands over her face.

Is it a family matter? was what she'd almost said.

Because it ought to be Warren he was bringing up here tonight. It ought to be Warren.

She heard the Mayor stumble on the steps.

'Are you all right, Mr Preece?'

She heard another footstep, and his ratchet breathing starting up again, like a very old lawn-mower.

Quietly, she began to ascend the steps, until she could see his wavering torch beam reflecting from the curved stonework. And then the beam was no longer visible and she climbed two or three steps until the stairway curved round and she could see the weakening glimmer once more.

The footsteps above her stopped. There was a long silence and then,

'Get back, you…'

He began to cough, and she could hear the fluid gathering in his lungs and throat, like thick oil slurping in the bottom a rusty old can.

'All right, I'm sorry, I'm going back…all right.'

Clattering back to the foot of the stairway, thinking, anything happens to him now, am I going to have the guts to go up there, drag him out of the way or climb over him and pull on the rope a hundred times?

Have I the strength to pull a bell-rope a hundred times? (There's a kind of recoil, isn't there, like a gun, and the rope shoots back up and sometimes pulls large men off their feet.) God almighty, will I have the strength to pull it once?

Leave him. He knows what he's doing. He won't stumble and break his ankle. He won't have a stroke. He won't have a heart attack. He's a Preece.

Like Jack, mangled by his own tractor, under intensive care in Hereford.

Like Jonathon, putrefying in his coffin just a few yards away.

But was there, at the heart of the Preece family, something even more putrid?

She stood at the bottom of the steps, waiting for the blessed first peal which only a few nights ago, walking Arnold in the old streets of this crippled town, she'd dreaded.

Presently, she saw the light hazing the stones again and heard his footsteps.

Don't understand.

He's coming down.

She heard his rattling breath, then there was a clatter and the light was all over the place as she heard the lamp rolling down from step to step.

It went out as she caught it.

'Mr Preece… are you…?'

He stood before her breathing roughly, breathing as though he didn't care if each breath was his last.

Fay flicked frantically at the switch and beat the lamp against the palm of her left hand until it hurt. It relit and she shone it at him and reeled back, almost dropping the thing in her shock, and the beam splashed across the nave.

She held the lambing light with both hands to stop it shaking and shone it at the wall to the side of Mr Preece so it wouldn't find him and terrify her with the obscenity of it.

It was wrapped around him like a thick snake.

'What is it?' Fay whispered, and as the whisper dried in her throat she knew.

Perhaps it was winding itself around his neck, choking out of him what little life remained.

Mr Preece let it fall to the stone floor.

He said hoarsely, 'It's the bell-rope, girl. Somebody cut the bell-rope.'

And even Jonathon, with his putrid perfume and his post-mortem scar, hadn't scared her half so much as the s face of his grandfather, an electric puzzle of pulsing vessels, veins and furrows.

CHAPTER X

GRACE PETERS

I928-I992

Beloved wife of

Canon A. L. Peters

White letters.

Cold, black marble.

Pressing his forehead against it, he thought, A. L. Peters. That's me, isn't it? But it isn't my grave. Not yet, anyway. Only one of us is dead, Grace.

What am I doing here?

He remembered now, walking in a dignified fashion through the darkened streets, arm in a crook parallel to his chest. In his best suit, of course, with his dog-collar; she would not be seen out with him if he were attired in anything less.

Certainly not a faded T-shirt with the flaking remains of Kate Bush across his chest.

Peered down at it. Too dark to read the words, not white and gleaming like the letters on the grave. But he remembered the name, Kate Bush. Who the hell was Kate Bush, anyway?

Ought to know that.

Or maybe not. He could hear somebody, a woman, saying:

'There's a chance you'll lapse quite soon into the old confusion and you'll have that to contend with, too. I'm sorry.'

Sorry. Well, aren't we all? Hmmph.

Cold black marble.

Cool hands.

What was all that about?

Alex shook his head.

Well, here I am, sitting on Grace's grave at the less-fashionable end of Crybbe churchyard at God knows what time of night. Haven't the faintest idea how the bloody hell I got here. Not exactly a cold night, but this is no place to spend it.

Wonder if I simply got pissed? And a bit maudlin, the way I do. Stagger along to pay your respects to the little woman. Sorry if I dislodged some of these dinky chippings that your will was so insistent we should use to make this end of the churchyard look like a bloody crazy-golf course. No wonder Murray had you shoved out here – probably hoping the wood would overgrow the thing. And the sooner the better, stupid cow, no taste at all, God knows how I ever got entangled with you.

Guilty? Me? Bloody hell, you ensnared me, you conniving creature.

Alex clambered to his feet. Chuckled. Don't take any notice of me, old girl, I'm rambling again. Must have been on the sauce, I could certainly do with a pee.

He stumbled into the wood and relieved himself with much enjoyment. There were times, he thought, when a good pee could be more satisfying than sex.

Consideration for the finer feelings of his late wife, who – let's get this in proportion once and for all – did not deserve it, had taken him deeper into the wood than he'd intended, and it took him a while to find his way back to the blasted churchyard.

Emerging, in fact, several yards away from Grace's grave, catching a foot on something, stumbling, feeling himself going into a nosedive.

'Damn.' Alex threw out both hands to break his fall. Bad news at his age, a fall, brittle bones, etc. – and, worst of all, a geriatric ward.

Something unexpectedly soft broke his fall. One hand felt cloth, a jacket perhaps.

'Oh gosh, terribly sorry.' Thinking at first he must have tripped over some old tramp trying to get an early night. This was before he felt all the wet patches.

'Oh dear. Oh hell.' It was all very sticky indeed, and his hands felt as if they were covered in it already. Tweedy sort of jacket. Shirt. And blood; no question of what the sticky stuff was.

'Hello. Are you all right?'

Bloody fool. Of course the chap wasn't all right. Wished he had a flashlight; couldn't see a damn thing.

Tentatively, he put out a hand and found a face. It, was very wet, horribly sticky and unpleasantly cold, poor beggar must be slashed to ribbons. He lowered his head, listening for breathing. None at all.

There wasn't a clergyman in the world who didn't recognise the presence of death.

'Oh hell.'

Alex's sticky fingers moved shakily down over the blood caked lips, over the chin, down to the neck where he felt…

Oh God. Oh Jesus.

I've…

I've stumbled over my own body!

I was wrong. I am dead. I think I've been murdered. Grace, you stupid bitch, why didn't you tell me? Is this how it is? Is this what happens? Oh Lord, somebody get me away from here. Beam me up God, for Christ's sake.

For the body wore a stiff, clerical collar.

Crybbe Court in view again.

'Uh!'

Humble had prodded him in the small of the back, presumably with the butt of the crossbow.

They were on the edge of the Tump field, facing the courtyard. As Powys looked up at the black house, its ancient frame seemed to tense against the pressure of the night. There was a small sparkling under the eaves, like the friction of flints, and the air was faintly tainted with sulphur.

Powys felt his anger rekindle.

In the moment of the sparks, he'd seen the hole in the eaves that was the prospect chamber. Below it, slivers of light had figured the edge of a piece of furniture halfway up the pile of rubbish which had broken Rachel Wade's fall and her neck.

'We're going in,' Humble said, picking up the lamp from the grass.

'You might be going in,' said Powys, 'it's too spooky for me, quite honestly.'

Humble laughed.

'You must think I'm fucking stupid,' Powys said. 'You want me to go up to the prospect chamber and kind of lose my balance, right?'

It would, he knew, make perfect sense to the police.

'Since you ask,' Humble said, 'that would be quite tidy, yeah, and it would save me a bit of trouble. But if you say no, I get to use this thing on you, which'll be a giggle anyway, so you can please yourself, mate, I ain't fussy.'

'How would you get rid of the body?'

'Not a problem. Really. Trust me.'

'None of this scares you?'

'None of what?'

'Like, we just saw a light flaring under the roof. It wasn't what you'd call natural…'

'Did we? I didn't.'

Humble stood with his back to the broken wall around the Tump, a hard, skinny, sinewy, ageless man. Powys could run away and Humble would run faster. He could go for Humble,

maybe try and kick him in the balls, and Humble would damage him quickly and efficiently before his shoe could connect. He could sit down and refuse to move and Humble would put a crossbow bolt into his brain.

Powys said, 'You don't feel a tension in the air? A gathering in the atmosphere? I thought you were supposed to be a countryman.'

Humble snorted, leaning on the butt of his crossbow.

'There are countrymen,' he said, 'and there are hippies. I'm fit, I've got good hearing and ace eyesight. I'm not a bad shot. I can snare rabbits and skin 'em, and I can work at night and ain't scared. Ghosts, evil spirits, magic stones, it's all shit. If the people who employ me wanna believe in it, that's fine, no skin off my nose."

Blessed are the sceptics, Powys thought.

Rachel was a sceptic.

'And I get paid very well. See, I can go in that house any time of the day or night, I don't give a shit. I can piss up the side of a standing stone in the full moon. So what? Countrymen aren't hippies, Mr Powys.'

He was telling Powys indirectly who it was who'd locked the door when Rachel was in the Court. And, maybe, who had pushed her out.

He got paid very well.

'Andy pays you,' Powys realised.

Humble said, 'I'm in the employ of the Epidemic Group – a security consultant.'

'And Andy's been paying you as well.'

Humble lifted his crossbow. 'Let's go.'

'Where's Andy?'

'I said, let's move!'

'No.'

'Fair enough,' Humble said. 'Fair enough.' He moved backwards a few paces into the field until he was almost invisible against the night.

'OK, you made your decision. I got to get this over wiv in a couple of minutes, so you got a choice. You can run. Or you can turn around and walk away. Just keep walking, fast or slow as you like, and you'll never know. Some people like to run.'

Oh Jesus, Powys thought. For the past twelve years he hadn't really cared too much about life and how long it would last.

'I thought you'd never shot anybody.'

'Not wiv a crossbow. On the two other occasions,' said Humble, 'I used a gun.'

Fay, he thought obliquely. Caught an image of the elf with the rainbow eye. I'm going to lose Fay.

'Or, of course,' said Humble reasonably, 'you can just stand there and watch.'

He brought up the crossbow. Powys instinctively ducked and went down on his knees, his arms around his head.

Through his arms, he heard a familiar lop-sided semi-scampering.

'No!' he screamed. 'No, Arnold! Get back! Get away!'

He saw the black and white dog limping towards him from the darkness and, out of the corner of his eye, watched the crossbow swivel a couple of inches to the right.

'Beautiful,' Humble said, and fired.

She ran at the door and snatched at the bolts, throwing one of them back before Mr Preece grabbed her from behind and pulled her away.

She struggled frantically and vainly. He might look like a stretcher case, but his arms were like bands of iron.

She felt her feet leave the floor, and he hauled her back from the porch and set her down under the stone font. The lambing light was in her eyes, but it didn't blind her because it was losing strength, going dimmer.

'What the fuck are you doing, Mr Preece? What bloody use is this place as protection?'

All she could hear from behind the dying light was his dreadful breathing, something out of intensive care at the chest clinic.

There's no spirituality here any more. All there was was the bell and now you can't reach that, there's no way you can resist… him… in this place. A church is only a church because the stones are steeped in centuries of worship… human hopes and dreams, all that stuff. All you've got here is a bloody warehouse'

'Stay quiet,' Jimmy Preece hissed. 'Keep calm. Keep…'

'Oh, sure, keep your head down! It's what this piss-poor place is all about. Don't make waves, don't take sides, we don't want no clever people. Oh!' She beat her head into her arms and sobbed with anger and frustration.

Needing the rage and the bitterness, because, if you could keep them stoked, keep the heat high, it would burn out the fear.

She looked into the light – not white any more, but yellow, her least-favourite colour, the yellow of disease, of embalming fluid. The yellow of Grace Legge.

How would he come?

Would he come like Grace, flailing and writhing with white-eyed malevolence?

How would he come?

'What's going to happen, Mr Preece?' she said. It was the small voice, and she was ashamed.

'I don't know, girl.' There was a wheezing under it that she hadn't heard before. 'God help me, I don't know.'

She thought about her dad. At least he'd be safe. He was with Jean, and Jean was smart. Jean knew about these things.

'She can't talk to you, she can't see you, there's no brain activity there… Entirely harmless.'

No she doesn't. She isn't smart at all. A little knowledge and a little intuition – nothing more dangerous. Jean only thinks she's smart.

And now Powys had gone to Jean, saying, help us, 0 Wise One, get us out of this, save Crybbe, save us all.

Oh, Powys, whatever happened to the Old Golden Land?

It began with a rustling up at the front of the church near the coffin, and then the sound of something rolling on stone.

'What's that?'

But Mr Preece just breathed at her.

She clutched at the side of the font, all the hot, healthy anger and the frustration and bitterness drenched in cold, stagnant fear. She couldn't move. She imagined Jonathon Preece stirring in his coffin, cracking his knuckles as his hands opened out.

Washerwoman's hands.

Fay felt a pain in her chest.

'Oh, God.' The nearest she could produce to a prayer. Not too wonderful, for a clergyman's daughter.

And then came the smell of burning and little flames, a row of little, yellow, smoky flames, burning in the air, four or five feet from the floor.

Fay watched, transfixed, still sitting under the font, as though both her legs were broken.

'Heeeeeeee!' she heard. High-pitched – a yellow noise flecked with insanity.

Jimmy Preece moved. He picked up the light and walked into the nave and shone what remained of the light up the aisle.

'Aye,' he said, and his breathing was so loud and his voice so hoarse that they were inseparable now.

Down the aisle, into the lambing light, a feeble beam, a figure walked.

Fay saw cadaverous arms hanging from sawn-off sleeves, eyes that were as yellow-white as the eyes of a ghost, but still – just – human eyes.

The arms hanging loosely. Something in one hand, something stubby, blue-white metal still gleaming through the red-brown stains.

Behind him the yellow flames rose higher.

A foot kicked idly at something on the stone floor and it rolled towards Fay. It was a small tin tube with a red nozzle, lighter fuel.

Warren had opened up the Bible on its lectern and set light to the pages.

'Ow're you, Grandad,' Warren said.

CHAPTER XI

There were too many people in here.

'Don't touch him, please,' Col said. There was quite a wide semi-circle around Goff's body into which nobody, apart from this girl, had been inclined to intrude, there'd be sufficient explanations to make after tonight as it was, and Col was determined nobody was going to disturb or cover up the evidence, however unpleasant it became, whatever obnoxious substances it happened to discharge.

The girl peered down, trying to see Goff's face.

'I paint,' she explained casually, 'I like to remember these things.'

'Oh. It's Tessa, isn't it. Tessa Byford.'

Col watched her with a kind of appalled admiration. So cool, so controlled. How young women had changed. He couldn't remember seeing her earlier. But then there were a few hundred people here tonight – and right now, he rather wished there hadn't been such a commendable turn-out.

He was angry with himself. That he should allow someone to creep in under cover of darkness and slash the throat of the guest of honour. Obviously – OK – the last thing one would expect in a place like Crybbe. And yet rural areas were no longer immune from sudden explosions of savage violence – think of the Hungerford massacre. He should – knowing of underlying trepidation about Goff's plans – have been ready to react to the kind of situation for which he'd been training half his life. He remembered, not too happily, telling Guy Morrison how the Crybbe audience would ask Goff a couple of polite questions before drifting quietly away.

And then, just as quietly, they'll shaft the blighter.

Shafted him all right.

Whoever it was had come and gone through the small, back door, the one the town councillors used. It had been unlocked throughout. That had been a mistake, too.

Couldn't get away from it – he'd been bloody lax. And now he was blindly following the orders of a possibly crazy old man who'd decreed that nobody was permitted to depart – which, if the police were on their way, would have been perfectly sensible, but under the circumstances…

He didn't even know the circumstances.

All he knew was that Jimmy Preece had the blind support of an appreciable number of large, uncompromising, tough looking men and, if anybody made an attempt to leave, the situation was likely to turn ugly.

Not – looking at Max Goff sprawled in his own blood – that it was particularly attractive as things stood.

Every so often, people would wander over to Col, some angry, others quite sheepish.

'It doesn't make a lot of sense, now does it, Colonel?', Graham Jarrett argued, sweat-patches appearing under the arms of his safari suit. 'A man's been murdered, and all we're doing is giving his murderer time to get clean away.'

'Not if he's in this room we aren't,' said Col very quickly.

Jarrett's eyes widened. 'That's not likely, is it?'

'Who knows, Mr Jarrett, who knows?'

Graham Jarrett looked around nervously, as if wondering which of the two or three hundred people it might be safest to stand close to. The main exit was still guarded by large uncommunicative farmers.

'Can't be long now, anyway,' Col said. 'I'd guess the Mayor's already been in touch with the police.'

No chance. This is a Crybbe matter.

Madness. It didn't even have the logic of a street riot. And Col Croston, who'd served six terms in Belfast, was beginning to detect signs of something worryingly akin to sectarianism.

New Age versus Old Crybbe.

The Crybbe people scarcely moved. If they went to the toilets they went silently and returned to their seats. They did not converse among themselves. They seemed to know what this was about. Or, at least, they appeared satisfied that Jimmy Preece knew what it was about and there seemed to be this unspoken understanding that they should remain calm, restrain their emotions.

Bloody eerie. Just as they behaved in church. Admirable self-control or mindless apathy? Beggared belief, either way, and Col Croston knew he couldn't allow the situation to continue much longer. He was under pressure from the New Age delegates who, while in a minority of about twenty to one, were making virtually all the noise. So much for relaxation techniques and meditative calm. Struck him there was a lot they might learn from the indigenous population.

A man in a suit, one of the Epidemic lawyers, said, 'Look – let us out of here now and we'll say no more about it. But if this goes on, I'm warning you, you're all going to be in very serious trouble. Impeding the course of justice'll be the very least of it.'

'I've found,' Col told him, very clipped, 'that in a situation like this, telling people what serious trouble they're going to be in is the fastest way to inflame what could be a highly combustible situation. I estimate there are more than three hundred adults in this room and the fact that one of them happens to be dead could just turn out to be the very least of our worries. Now please sit down.'

Aware of a sudden commotion by the main doors, he yelled into the New Age quarter, 'will somebody please restrain that lady!'

The feminist astrologer was threatening to damage the genitals of one of the farmers if he didn't get out of her way. It was Catrin Jones, physically stronger than the astrologer and also a woman, who was finally able to lead her back to her seat.

'They're not real, these people.' The astrologer shook her spiky head. 'They're bloody zombies. Everything's freaky.'

The Cock being empty and Denzil looking at a bit of a loose end, Gomer Parry thought it was only reasonable to have two pints, aware this could conceivably put him over the limit. But what kind of copper stopped a digger driver trundling along a country lane at 30 m.p.h.?

It was after ten when he drove out of the square in the yellow tractor with the big shovel raised up out of the way. The roads were about as quiet as you could get.

Fact everywhere was a bit on the quiet side. This Goff was obviously a big attraction. Not a soul on the streets and with all the lights out, Crybbe looked like one of them film-sets when everybody'd gone home.

Pulling out on to the Ludlow road, something else struck Gomer: he hadn't heard the bell. They never didn't ring that bell. Used to be said that old Jimmy Preece – well, young Jimmy Preece as he'd have been then – had even rung the curfew the day he got married. A hundred bongs on his wedding night, Mrs Preece wouldn't be that lucky.

Poor old devil back on the night-shift now, then. Talk about bad luck… you wouldn't credit it. Even if Jack pulled through with both legs still attached, didn't seem likely he'd be in any state to make it up them old steps for a good long while. Have to be putting the arm on that young tearaway, Warren.

Gomer was never sorry to leave Crybbe – miserable old place: miserable buildings, miserable folk – but he was never that happy about going home neither, not since his old lady had handed in her mop and bucket. He'd work every hour of daylight to put off that terrible moment when he had to get his own keys out instead of seeing the door opening as he tramped across the yard and hearing the old kettle whistling on the Rayburn.

When midsummer was past and the working days started getting shorter, Gomer's spirits started to droop, and tonight had been a freak foretaste of autumn, black clouds crowding in for a storm that never came, and dark by nine.

Now there was mist as well. That came down bloody quick. Gomer snapped on the full beams, only to discover his left headlight bulb had gone.

Bollocks. No copper'd be able to resist pulling him in to point this out, and then he'd get a good whiff of Gomer's breath… Mind just blowing in this yere nozzle, sir… Oh, dear, afraid I'll have to ask you to accompany me to the station, well, Gomer could already see the smile cracking up the fat features of that bastard Wynford Wiley, and he couldn't stick

that.

What he'd have to do then was switch off the headlights and try and get through the mist on the itsy-bitsy sidelights which were bugger-all use on these roads on the best of nights.

So he flicked off the heads and slowed down to about twenty, and it was still like skin-diving in a cesspit and he had to drop down to second gear.

Bloody Crybbe.

Didn't know why he said that, you couldn't blame everything on Crybbe.

Well, you could...

Gomer hit the brakes. 'What the 'ell's that?'

Bloody hell fire, it's the old Tump. Where'd he come from?

Hang on a bit, boy, you done something a bit wrong yere. Isn't usual to see that thing straight up ahead, looming out of the mist so sudden like that, enough to scare the life out of you.

Hello… not on the road now, are we?

We surely are not!

Bloody teach you to go over the limit. Thought you could handle a couple of pints, no problem, but the thing is, you're getting older, boy, your reactions isn't what they was, see.

And now, look what you done, you gone clean off the road, over the verge and you're on the bloody common now and if you keep on like this you'll be knocking down that Goff's wall for him after all and buggering up your digger like they did the bulldozer.

Gomer was about to pull up sharp when the front end took a dip and he realized that if he didn't go with it he was likely to turn this thing over. And he thought about Jack Preece… talk about lightning striking twice. Well, he didn't like this, not one bit.

'I can't stand it!' Hilary Ivory shrieked suddenly. 'This room so black and negative. It's oppressing me, I've got to have out. And I can't stand to look at him any more!'

'Well, I'm sorry, but I'm not going to cover him up,' Col told her. 'Really daren't risk disturbing anything, isn't that right, Sergeant?' Wynford Wiley nodded vaguely, his cheese face sliced clean of expression; he'd given up – he should be directing this situation and look at him… jacket off, tie around his ear, glazed-eyed and sweating like a pig.

'All I can suggest is you look the other way, Mrs Ivory, I'm sorry.'

'It's your fault,' Hilary turned furiously on her husband 'You knew it was coming. You should have warned him. What use is a seer who sees and doesn't tell?'

'Me?' Hitherto gloomily silent, Adam Ivory was stunned into speech. 'You didn't want me to say a word, you bloody hypocritical cow!' Halfway out of his seat, gripping his knees 'You didn't want to throw a shadow over things. You didn't want to lose your cosy little flat in your cosy little town in.. in…'

'Just a minute.' Col Croston jumped down from the platform and strode over to where the couple were sitting amidst Jarrett, a bunch of healers, the Newsomes and Larry Ember standing up, smoking a cigarette, his camera held between his ankles.

'What's this about? What are you saying?'

Guy Morrison said wearily, Adam reads tarot cards. He saw disaster looming.'

'Oh,' said Col, disappointed, 'I see.'

'No, you don't,' said Guy. 'Don't knock it, Col. This is a very weird set-up. Guy Morrison used to think he knew everything there was to know about the supernatural, i.e. that the whole thing was a lame excuse for not milking real life for everything one could get.'

Guy made a steeple out of the fingers of both hands and pushed them together, hard. 'But for once,' he said, 'Guy Morrison was wrong.'

'What d'you mean exactly?' Col looked for somewhere to sit down. There wasn't a spare chair, so he squatted, hands on thighs. 'What's the score here, as you see it, Guy? I mean, Christ, I've been around. Been in some pretty odd places, among some pretty primitive people, but, well, we don't notice things under our noses, sometimes. We think it's what you might call… what? Rural eccentricity, I suppose.'

'No. Look…' Guy had taken off his expensive olive leather jacket. He didn't seem to notice it was lying on the floor now, entangled in dusty shoes. 'Which is Mrs Byford? Ask her if she knows her granddaughter's some kind of witch… that girl, the artist. Ask her about the ex-policeman who cut his throat in her bathroom. Go on. Ask her.'

Oh hell, Col Croston thought. Bit barmy. He decided not to tell Guy the girl was here, displaying an anatomical interest in the corpse.

'You think I'm crazy, don't you? Ask her!'

'Shut up,' Jocasta Newsome hissed. 'Just shut up, Guy. Just for once.'

Guy whirled on her, eyes alight. 'You know I'm not crazy, you of all people. You showed me the drawings. You sent me to talk to the bloody girl. You… uuurh.'

Hereward Newsome's thin, sensitive, artistic hands were around his throat. 'You… smooth… self-opinionated… bastard!'

Col Croston leapt up as Guy's chair crashed over into the aisle, the chair's and Guy's legs both in the air, Hereward, teeth clenched, trying to smash Guy's head into the boarded floor.

'No wonder… she wanted you to… open the fucking…exhibition.' Col Croston gripping Hereward's shoulder, wrenching him off, as Catrin Jones – 'Guy!' – fell down heavily beside her producer 'Are you all right?' Lifting his head into her lap. 'Guy?' Staring up, appalled, at the madman with the thinning hair and the greying, goatee beard, held back by his collar like a snarling dog, hands clawing at the air.

'He's only been screwing my wife,' the madman spat, and Catrin froze – maybe he was not so mad, after all – allowing Guy's head to fall to the floor with an audible thump.

Larry Ember was cradling his camera, ostensibly to save it from being kicked, the lens pointed casually at the scene before him. 'One for the Christmas tape,' he murmured to Tom, the soundman. 'Got to keep the old spirits up, ain'tcha?' On the same tape were the pictures he'd surreptitiously shot of Max Goff's body, while carrying the camera under his arm at waist level.

'You'll put that thing away!' Sharp-featured Mrs Byford, the council clerk, was on her feet, back arched.

'Wasn't aware it was out, darlin'.' Larry inspecting his trousers.

'Colonel!'

'Come on, old boy, please. Leave the thing under the table, hmm?'

'I don't think so, squire.' Larry raising the camera to his shoulder, aiming it at Col, adjusting the focus.

'Guy, would you mind exerting your…?'

But Guy, still sprawled half-stunned in the aisle, was staring over the Colonel's shoulder, eyes widening. 'She… she's there … Jocasta… tell them…'

The girl stood on the edge of the platform. She wore black jeans and a black top. Even her lipstick was black. Her skin, in the blue fluorescence, was like a grim, cloudy day.

A small, grey-faced man, perhaps the husband, snatched ineffectually at Mrs Byford's arm as she stepped out, screeching, 'Tessa! What you doing in yere…? Get out… No, 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.

CHAPTER XII

The first bell had begun at the moment Warren Preece cut his grandfather.

'You,' Mr Preece had said, dead-voiced, as the Bible burned. No surprise there. Fay noticed. No horror at the reptilian thing prancing, white-eyed in the firelight – the thing for which Fay had at first felt only revulsion, becoming aware soon afterwards that revulsion was actually one of the lower forms of fear.

Mr Preece said, 'I 'oped to 'eaven it wouldn't be, but at the heart of me I always knew it was.'

Tipped up his brother in the coffin, slashed the shroud. Not much left in Warren Preece, Fay concluded numbly, that you could call human.

'You don't even know it all yet. Grandad.' Warren grinned meaningfully. 'Got a bit to learn yet, see.'

' 'Ow long you been in yere, Warren?'

'Long time, Grandad.' Warren put on a whining, old-man voice.' "Oh, 'e was a strong boy, Jonathon. Good swimmer." '

Shadows leapt with the flames from the blazing Bible. Scorched scraps of pages flew into the air; billowing, black snowflakes.

'Smart boy, Jonathon,' Warren said. 'Bit o' sense. Not like that brother of 'is, see.'

'Oh, Warren,' the old man said sorrowfully. 'You never once tried to…'

Warren smiled slyly. "E wasn't that good a swimmer, though, Grandad.'

The Bible began to crackle.

'Not with somebody sittin' on 'is head, anyway.'

Fay wanted to reach out to Mr Preece and hold him back, but she couldn't get her body to shift, and, God knew, the poor old bloke was moving slowly enough, fragmented motion, like battered clockwork toy winding down.

'Mr Preece… don't do anything…' The old man was advertising his uncontainable anger as clearly as if it were written on sandwich-boards and lunging for his grandson as awkwardly as he would if he were wearing them.

'Come on then. Grandad.' Warren lounged against the carved wooden side of a back pew. 'Let's get this over. Owed you one for a couple o' days. Since you knocked me down, like. Shouldn't 'ave done that, Grandad. Bad move… see.'

Mr Preece lurched ineffectually forward as Warren's right hand described a lazy arc. And then he stopped, unsure what had happened.

Fay's hand went to her mouth. There was another fine line on the contour map of the Mayor's face, five inches long, neatly dividing the withered left cheek into two.

Then Warren was jumping back, the silver skull bouncing from his ear, the hand which held the knife leaping and twirling as though given life by the touch of fresh blood.

Oh Christ… Fay was barely aware of backing off. Her mind was distancing itself too, not wanting to cope with this.

'Heeee!'

You wouldn't expect, Fay thought remotely, almost callously, as the curfew bell began to toll, that Mr Preece would bleed so normally, in such quantity, through skin like worn-out, dried-up leather.

As she watched him bleed, a question rolled into her head and lay there innocuously for a few seconds before starting to sizzle like a hot coal.

'Listen…' Warren Preece hissed in excitement.

Who was ringing the curfew?

'Yeah!' Warren leapt on to a pew, looking up to the rafters, both fists clenched, one around the knife, and shaking.

A droplet of Jimmy Preece's blood fell from the blade and landed on a prayer book.

And then the other bells began, and Fay clapped her hands to her ears, although it was not so loud in here – nothing to what it would be in the streets.

It just… could not be happening.

The Mayor of Crybbe stood very still. He did not raise a hand to his cheek and the blood poured down his face, copious as bitter tears.

By his feet, the lambing light expired.

But the fire from the Bible was enough to show her the crazed Warren dancing on a pew to the discordance of bells, blood glistening on the knuckles of the fist that held the knife.

The smoke made her cough, and Warren seemed to notice for the first time that he and his grandfather were not alone. He leapt – seemed to float in the smoky air – over the back the pew, and put himself between Fay and the porch, bouncing on the balls of his feet, grinning at her, slack-jawed, vacant.

Jimmy Preece sagged against the font, unmoving. She couldn't even hear his breathing any more.

'Who… who's ringing the bells?' That could not be her speaking. Nobody sounding like that could ever have passed BBC voice-test.

'Well, can't be me,' Warren said conversationally. 'An' it can't be Grandad, can it, Grandad?'

Mr Preece, Fay thought bleakly, might have died. Heart failure. Blood pressure – a stroke. Respiratory congestion.

"E sez, no,' Warren said. 'Sez it's not 'im neither. An' I've been in yere ages, an' nobody come in with me, see. Wonder what that means?'

Is that what Crybbe does? Is this the kind of 'rebel' produced by a sick old town from which all unfurtive, abandoned pleasure has been bled?

'Maybe ole Jonathon…' Warren suggested. 'Maybe 'e come crawlin' out of 'is coffin. Bleeeaagh!'

He hunched his shoulders. Tossed the knife from the right hand to the left and then back again. 'Tell you what… why'n't you go up an' 'ave a look, lady? Go on…'

When she didn't move he suddenly lurched at her, the knife creating whingeing sounds as he made criss-cross slashes in the yellow, smoky air. 'Hey, it's you…'

Fay began to back away, coughing, in the opposite direction, up the nave until she could feel the heat from the petrol-soaked Bible on her back.

Warren produced a high-pitched trumpeting noise. 'This is Offa's Dyke Radio!'

He slashed the air again, twice.

'Voice of the Marches!' he said. 'Yeah!'

'That's right,' Fay said, cheerfully hysterical. 'Voice of the Marches. That's me.'

Warren stopped. Reflected a moment. 'We done a good job on your ole tape recorder, didn't we?'

Oh my… God.

'Yes,' she said weakly. 'Very impressive.'

His face went cold. Should have kept her mouth shut.

He opened the hand which held the Stanley knife, looked down at it, the hand and the knife's long, metal handle both splattered with criss-cross layers of blood, bright fresh blood on brown dried blood.

'Hand of Glory,' Warren said. And the fingers clenched again.

As he advanced on her, up the aisle, she saw – almost hypnotized – that his eyes were altering.

She'd never seen Warren Preece close-up before (only – Oh my God – his spidery shape scurrying across a field at sunset) and she was sure that she wasn't seeing him now.

Something in the eyes. The eyes were no longer vacant. Someone in residence.

'Aaah.' The heat at her back was acutely painful. She couldn't go any further: fire behind her, the knife coming at her. She went rigid, looked back towards the door, saw Jimmy Preece had slipped to the floor by the font.

'Black Michael,' she said, as the savage heat at her back became too much to bear and she was sure her clothing was about to catch fire. 'You're Black Michael.'

Warren Preece obviously took this as a huge compliment. He grinned lavishly, and the bloodstained Stanley knife trembled in his hand as he closed in.

'Say hello,' he said, 'to the Hand of Glory.' And lunged.

Fay threw herself sideways, landing hard on the stone. Crawled, coughing wretchedly, to the top of the altar step where the firelight was reflected in Jonathon Preece's closed coffin. A storm of shrivelled scraps of burning paper wafted from the Bible; she saw an orange core of fire eating through to the spine and the varnish bubbling on the wooden lectern as she rolled over, drew back her foot and stabbed out once sharply.

The lectern shook. It was made of carved oak, caked in layer upon layer of badly applied varnish, which dripped an blistered and popped. It moved when she hit it with her foot, but not enough, and she fell on her back beside the coffin, her face stinging from the heat and sparks, as Warren Preece sprang up the steps and the short, reddened blade of the Stanley knife came down at her, clasped in a fist gloved in smoke.

She curled up, and the bells clanged like wild, drunken laughter.

The bells, he thought, the bells of hell. Ringing to welcome old Alex.

He stood in the graveyard, looked up at the church tower and saw the window-slits outlined in light, glowing a feeble yellow at first and then intensifying to pure white as the clangour grew louder until it seemed the walls would crumble and there would only be these bright bells hanging in the night.

Welcome to hell.

No one more welcome in hell than a unfrocked priest except… except… a priest who ought to have been unfrocked and escaped the dishonour through devious means.

Oh Lord, yes. No one more welcome in hell.

The bells rang randomly, as one might expect, a mocking parody of the joyful Sunday peal.

The bells of hell hurt his ears as they were meant to do and would continue to do, he assumed, forever and ever.

He brushed against the Bible and it set light to the black vest he was wearing; little flames swarmed up his chest.

He seemed absolutely delighted. Looking proudly down at himself, dropping down a couple of steps, grinning hugely, as the petrol-soaked spine of the heavy old Bible collapsed into red-hot ash and the two halves toppled from the lectern.

Fay rammed both feet into the wooden stem.

Very slowly it began to fall towards him, and Warren didn't move.

He opened his arms wide, as the lectern fell like a tree, and he embraced it, hugging the blistering stem to his chest.

'Yeah!'

Roaring and blazing.

Fay didn't move, watched in hypnotized awe until she felt and smelt something burning, very, very close, and found a single charring page wrapped around her arm.

Book of David, she read, the page curling sepia, reminding her of the opening credits of some dreadful old American Civil War movie, and she found that her lungs were full of smoke.

CHAPTER XIII

His body jerked in the grass, a convulsion. The crashing bells he accepted as the death vibrations of a brain cleaved by a steel bolt.

'Mr Powys.'

Oh Christ, he thought at once, it wasn't me, it was Arnold; he wants me to see what he's done to Arnold before he puts one into me.

He'd flung himself at the dog, just as Fay had done in the field by the river when Jonathon Preece had been strolling nonchalantly across with his gun. But Powys had missed and Arnold had kept on running, towards Humble and his crossbow, leaving Powys sprawled helplessly, arms spread, waiting for the end. The way you did.

'Mr Powys.'

He rolled very slowly on to his back, pain prodding whatever was between his shoulder-blades, the place where Humble had hit him with the butt of the crossbow.

'It is you, isn't it? Joe?'

He focused on a face in the middle of a pale-coloured head scarf. He saw a woolly jumper. Below that some kind of kilt. Campbell tartan. Memory told him ridiculously.

'Mmmm…' Couldn't get the name out.

'It's Minnie Seagrove,' she said clearly. 'I want you to speak to me, please. Say something. I'm ever so confused tonight. I've been seeing Frank, and now it's bells. Bells everywhere.'

Powys came slowly to his feet. He didn't know about seeing Frank, but they couldn't both be hallucinating bells.

Mrs Seagrove gazed anxiously up at him, although she looked rather calmer than he felt. Behind her the Tump swelled like a tumour that grew by night. From out of the town can the wild pealing.

Powys was disoriented. He looked rapidly from side to side and then behind him. 'Where's…?'

'That's another thing, I'm afraid,' Minnie Seagrove said. 'I think I've killed the man with the… what do you call it?'

'What…?'

"Thank God. It's your voice. Here…' She pushed something into his hand – his lamp. 'I can't switch it on, it's got a funny switch on it.'

Powys switched it on, and the first thing it showed him on the ground was the crossbow. And then an outstretched, naked arm.

'Now just don't ask me how I got here,' Mrs Seagrove said 'because I don't know. It's been a very funny night, all told. But there you were, on the ground and this man with the thingy – crossbow – pointing it down at you – he had the lamp on – taking aim, like. I thought, Oh God, what can I do? And I came up behind him when the bells started, and it put him off, sort of thing, the bells starting up like that, so sudden. Put him off – just for a second. And I still wasn't sure any of it was really happening, do you understand? I thought, well, if it's a dream, no harm done, sort of thing, so I hit him. Is he dead, Joe? Can you tell?'

'I shouldn't think so, Minnie.' Powys kicked the crossbow out of the way and bent over Humble with the lamp, nervous of getting too close, ready to smash the lamp down in Humble's face if he moved.

He stood up, finally. 'Er… what exactly was it you hit him with?'

'He's dead, isn't he, Joe? Come on now, I don't want any flim-flam.'

'Well, yes. He is actually.'

The back of Humble's head was like soft Turkish Delight.

'Bring the light over here, please, Joe. It was like an iron bar. Only hollow. Like a pipe. I threw it down somewhere… Here…'

Powys crouched down. It was indeed a piece of pipe, with jagged rust at one end and blood at the other. He didn't touch it. It seemed likely that Humble, for all his strength and his spectacular night vision, was one of those people with a particularly thin skull.

'It isn't a dream, is it, Joe?'

'Well, not in the accepted sense, no. But really, I mean… don't worry about it.' He put his hands on her shoulders. 'You did save my life. He wasn't exactly what anybody would call a nice man. In fact, offhand, I can only think of one person who's actually nastier. No, maybe two, now.'

He thought of something else and played the beam over the weapon again. Experienced a moment of pure, liquid euphoria; wanted to laugh aloud.

It looked like the tip of Henry Kettle's exhaust pipe.

He kept quiet about it, all the same. Don't tie this thing down too hard to reality. She's keeping herself together because she isn't yet fully convinced it's not part of the dream,

like Frank. 'Look, Minnie, you didn't see a dog, did you? He he might have been hit, I don't know.'

'He ran off,' said Mrs Seagrove. 'He was off like the clappers, over that way.'

She pointed at the gap where the stone wall had been broken down.

'The one I mean is a black and white dog,' Powys said gently. 'Escaped from my car. Left the window open too wide. But he couldn't have been going like the clappers, he's only got three legs now. You remember, he was shot.'

'Yes, it was the same dog. Fay Morrison's dog. Joe, what going on? What's up with the bells?'

'God knows. Be nice to think it was a few of the townsfolk up in the tower, ringing every bell they've got as a sign they've finally woken up to something after a few centuries.'

He looked over his shoulder towards Crybbe Court, remembered the sparking under the eaves, like flints. Could see nothing now.

Which didn't mean a thing.

'Joe.'

'Mmm?'

'What's that?'

There was a ray of light playing among the trees on the Tump, flickering erratically.

And then a dog began to bark.

'Stay here,' Powys said.

'With him? Not likely.'

The dog was barking fiercely.

Powys watched the light moving among the trees

'Who is it, Joe?'

'I think it's one of those other people I mentioned who are even nastier than Humble.'

Mrs Seagrove said, 'You're frightened, aren't you, Joe?'

Alex had remembered who Kate Bush was now.

Dark hair and sort of slinky. Seen her on the box once, a few years ago, at young Fay's flat. Made the usual comments – if I was forty years younger, etc. – and the next day Fay had presented him with this T-shirt as a bit of a joke, and he'd become quite attached to the garment, made him feel youthful, having Kate Bush next to the skin.

Even tried to listen to the music…

Going up that hill… make a deal with God.

Alex was going down the hill, towards the river.

He stood on the bridge and stared down at the dark water.

'Rather funny, really,' he mused aloud to the river. 'Thought I was dead. Can you believe that?'

Always been able to talk to rivers. Sometimes they even burbled back. Not this one, this being a Crybbe river.

'Must have gone out for a breath of air, wound up in the sodding boneyard, mooning over old Grace's plot. Went for a Jimmy in the woods, came back and could've sworn I found my own body. No – honest to God -I remember tripping over something, about to fall flat on my face and it broke the fall. It wore a dog-collar. And there was blood. Got it on my hands. Fell awfully sticky

'Jolly convincing, really.'

Alex rubbed his hands together and they felt strangely stiff. He held them out and couldn't see them at all.

You're an old humbug, Alex, who was it said that? Not Grace, not Fay, not…

Wendy!

How could he have forgotten Wendy so soon. Only left her house… when? Was it tonight? Or was it last night? Or was it last week?

She said something like, Go back out there and you might start losing your marbles again. But you've got to do it, Alex. Got to go back.

Why? Why had he got to go back?

Because Wendy knows best, Wendy has cool hands.

Actually, he thought suddenly, for the first time, they're quite cold hands. And they all think they know best, don't they? The doctors, your relatives.

Suddenly Alex felt quite angry.

You start to lose your mind and everybody wants a bit. Even if you could get it back, it wouldn't be worth having. Shop-soiled. Messed about.

He said a civil goodnight to the river and began to walk back up the hill towards the square.

Deal with God. Why, after sixty years looking after His best interests, doesn't the bugger ever want to talk business with me?

The street had been quiet when he was walking down to the river; now he could hear people moving about, up over the brow of the hill, around the square.

Alex came to a house with a paraffin lamp burning in the window. He stopped and held up his hands.

They were covered with dried blood.

'Oh Lord,' Alex said, and it didn't start out as a prayer.

Frightened?

Well, how could you not be? But it was no bad thing, most of the time. The worst thing was a belief that you were in some way protected if you did what somebody else said was right. Like walking into the Humble situation because Jean Wendle had told him he needed to go back to the source.

But he always did what he was told. Max Goff: There's a place for you here – think about it.

Andy Boulton-Trow: I think Joe ought to present himself to the Earth Spirit in the time-honoured fashion.

I mean go round the Bottle Stone. Thirteen times.

Even dear old Henry Kettle: My house is to be left to you. Consider it as a token of my confidence.

Sod them all. But then he thought about Fay, with her rainbow eye.

'No,' he told Minnie Seagrove. 'I'm not frightened.'

And it's too dark to see me shaking.

He was scared, for instance, to set foot on the Tump; even Humble had said you couldn't always trust your reactions up there.

So they'd stay on the ground and, where possible, outside the wall.

He'd briefly considered taking Humble's crossbow. But he didn't know how to work it, and this was no time to learn.

That was another problem: what was he going to do about Humble? There was no way this one could be suicide or an accident. And while the police would never suspect Minnie Seagrove, they'd be hauling Joe Powys in within half an hour of the body being found. Minnie would, of course, explain the circumstances, but circumstances like these would sound more than a little suspect in court.

They began to walk around the perimeter of the Tump towards the light.

'Quietly,' Powys said. 'And slowly.'

The dog wasn't barking any more. If Andy had done anything to Arnold, he'd kill him.

OK, I'm full of shit, but I'm not going to obey instructions any more, not from you, not from Goff. And especially not from Jean.

Jean, of course – it made appalling sense – was not protecting him, she was protecting Andy, and Andy, typically, had wanted him to know that before he died.

Humble had said, I'm empowered to answer just one of your questions… I'll tell you the answer, shall I? Then you can work out the question at your leisure. The answer is – you ready? – the answer is… HIS MOTHER.

He would trace the Wort family tree later, if he ever got out of this. Meanwhile, it had a dispiriting logic, and it cleared up a few questions about Jean that he'd never even thought to ask. The idea of an experienced barrister giving it all up to act as the unpaid, earthly intermediary for Dr Chi had never sounded too likely. Jean's professional life had been built on ambition, power and manipulation: dark magic.

But she's cured people. That can't be dark magic. What about Fay's dad?

Oh, Jesus.

'What's wrong?' Mrs Seagrove whispered.

Fay had started pulling at Jimmy Preece's clothing and slapping at his face and screaming at him through the smoke. 'Please, Mr Preece, please, you can't be…'

Just a sign of life, anything, a blink, a twitch. Where do you keep a pulse in a neck like an old, worn-out concertina?

'Mr Preece!'

She pulled him down from the font and he collapsed onto her, dead-weight, and she had to let him slide to the floor, managing to get both hands under his head before it hit the stone. But she could do no more because the appallingly blackened, smoke-shrouded scarecrow thing was dancing down the aisle, its clothes smouldering and its eyes, all too alight. Her own eyes weeping with the smoke, with pity for Jimmy Preece and with fear for herself, she ran through the porch and began now to wrestle with the bolts, throwing herself, coughing and sobbing against the doors.

When she was out, she didn't look back, but she carried inside her head the image of the blackened monster and the scorched smell of him, knowing that if she stopped to breathe, he would be on her.

She ran gasping through the churchyard and out of the lychgate, her lungs feeling like burst balloons, the bells crashing around her like bombs. She could hear voices in the square and she ran towards them, eyes straining, looking for lights.

But the nearer she got to the square and the louder the voices became, the darker it got, as if there was not only night to contend with, but fog. She thought at first it was her eyes, damaged by the smoke, but quite soon the bells stopped and Fay began to realize there was something about the square that was unaccountably wrong.

CHAPTER XIV

First off, anybody got a torch? Yes? No?'

The bells had stopped, and the silence ought to have glistened, Col Croston thought, but it didn't. The silence after the bells was the ominous silence you could hear when the phone rang and you picked it up and there was apparently nobody on the other end but you knew there was.

It was too dark to see who was with him on the square, but he could guess. Or rather, he could guess who was not on the square i.e. anybody born and bred within the precincts of the ancient town of Crybbe.

Graham Jarrett said, 'A torch is not normally considered essential for a public meeting, even in Crybbe. Besides, even when the power's off it's not usually as dark as this.'

'No. Quite.'

The town-hall doors had been slammed and barred behind the last of them and then, minutes later, Col had watched as they were opened again, just briefly, and a bloated figure had emerged, stood grotesquely silhouetted between two men and then tumbled without a word down the six steps to the pavement.

The late Max Goff had rejoined his New Age community, we'll let him lie where he fell; somebody would have to explain this to the police and he didn't see why it had to be him.

Around the square, tiny jewels of light appeared, people striking matches. But almost as soon as a match was struck it seemed to go out, as if there was a fierce wind. Which there wasn't. Not any kind of wind.

There weren't even any lamps alight in the windows of the town houses tonight.

'OK, listen,' Col shouted. 'We need some lights. Anybody with a house near here, would they please go home and bring whatever torches or lamps or even candles they can find. I also need a telephone. Who lives closest?'

'We have a flat,' Hilary Ivory said. 'Over the Crybbe Pottery.'

Hereward Newsome said, 'There's a phone in the gallery, that'd probably be quickest.'

Good. I'll come with you. Stay where you are and keep talking, so I can find you. Mrs Ivory, if you could find your way to your flat and bring out any torches et cetera.'

'I don't think we have torches, as such. When the electricity goes out we use this rather interesting reproduction Etruscan oil lamp. Would that do?'

I'm sure it looks most attractive, but one of those heavy duty motoring lanterns with a light each end might be a little more practical.'

We haven't got a car.'

Col whistled tunelessly through his teeth.

'Colin, I'm over here.'

'Yes, OK, got you, Hereward. Now listen everybody. I don't know any more than you do what the hell's going on tonight. What I do know is that none of us should attempt to leave the scene until after the police arrive. I'm going with Hereward to his gallery to ring headquarters and acquaint them fully with the situation. Any questions?'

'Oh lots,' Graham Jarrett said dreamily. 'And I may spend the rest of my life trying to find the answers.'

'Just hurry it up,' a woman said. 'There's an awful smell.'

'I can't smell anything.'

Actually he could, but didn't want to draw attention to it. It rather smelled as if a couple of people had lost control their bowels, and, frankly, that wouldn't be too surprising under the circumstances.

'God, yes. It's vile.' Sounded like the woman who ran the craft shop. Magenta something.

'Well, obnoxious as it might be, try not to move too far away. Lead on, Hereward. Keep talking.'

'Strange,' Hereward said, 'how when anyone asks you to keep talking you can never think of anything to say… Good grief, Colin, she was right about that smell. It's dreadful.'

In certain periods of his SAS career, Col had been exposed long hours to various deeply unpleasant bodily odours, but he had to admit – if only to himself – this was the most sickening. It was more than simply faeces, though there was certainly that. There was also a dustbin kind of pungency and all manner of meaty smells – newly killed to faintly putrid.

'No power, and now the drains are blocked. You'll probably turn on the tap, when you get home, Hereward, and find the bloody water's off, too. I really do think it's about time I put a bomb under my esteemed colleagues on the council. Not that they can actually do anything except talk about it.'

'You can certainly count on my support. For as long as I'm here, anyway. Look, I'm sorry about what happened in there, I overreacted, I suppose.'

'Wouldn't any of us, old chap? Some of these TV types do tend to think they have a kind of droit de seigneur wherever they happen to be hanging up their… Is it far, Hereward?'

'No, that is… I'm sorry, one gets disoriented in the dark, especially as dark as this. I've never known it this dark, I… it really should be about here, Colin. Can you feel the wall?'

'I can feel some kind of surface. Is there a timber-framed bit next to your place?'

'Actually, there is, and it goes straight from that to the large window, but…'

'Maybe we're on the wrong side of the square. Pretty easy to do, even when you're on what you think of as familiar ground.'

'No, I don't think… Oh hell, I seem to be way out.'

'Isn't there a pavement in front of your gallery? Because we're still on the cobbles, you know.'

'I thought there was a pavement all around the square, actually. Shows how you…'

A few yards away Col heard a woman scream. 'It's gone. It's gone, I tell you, Hilary', the whole bloody front… All I can feel is this… urrrgh, it's filthy.'

'Colonel Croston, can you help us, please. It sounds terribly stupid, but Celia's lost her Pottery.'

'Look.' Col took a step back. 'Let's calm down and get this in proportion. Funny, how you live in a place for years but never quite notice what order the shops are in. Right. Between the Crybbe Pottery and The Gallery we've got the Lamb, OK, and that… what's it called?'

'Middle Marches Crafts,' Hereward said.

'Right. And then, after the Pottery, the road starts sloping down to the bridge and across from there, we've got the Cock. Hereward…' He paused, confused. 'The Cock's got its generator, hasn't it?'

'Yes, it has.'

'So why isn't it on?'

'Colin…' A brittle panic crumbling from Hereward's voice. 'Something's horribly wrong, don't you feel that?'

'It's all wrong…' Hilary's companion wailed. 'Nothing is the same.'

'If we only had light,' Col said. 'I know – cars. If someone has a car parked on the square, they can open it up and switch on the headlights, then we can see where we're at.'

'Look…' Hereward breathing rapidly. 'I don't want to start a panic, but there were cars parked on three sides of the square when I went into the meeting. We haven't bumped into a single one, have we?'

'Well, they can't all have been nicked. Just spread the word. We're looking for anybody with a car parked on the square. Just… do it, Hereward, please.'

Col walked to the side of the building, felt wood and some type of chalky plaster. And the cobbles, under his feet.

Knowing full well that the pavement around the square had been replaced two years ago, and there'd already been one there for years before that. And now there were cobbles. Again.

He steadied his breathing.

Face facts. It was true; everything was different. Road surface, buildings… even the atmosphere itself. What would it look like… What would it look like if they could actually see any of it?

Mass hallucination. Col decided logically. Some kind of gas, perhaps. Why had the townsfolk refused to come out of the town hall and, indeed, locked themselves in? Because they knew what was happening, they knew it was too dangerous to go into the square.

Were the bells some form of alarm? Had somebody actually hung all the ropes for this occasion?

And why didn't the locals warn everybody else? Because they only suspected what it might be and were afraid of being laughed at?

Or because they wanted the newcomers to be exposed to it? It was insane. Any way you looked at it, it was all utterly insane.

Concentrate. Col dug the nails of his left hand into the back of his right. Just for a few moments there, completely forgot this was not, so far, the night's most appalling development, Max Goff savagely killed in front of all of them, and that was no hallucination.

Something touched his arm and, such was the state of his nerves, he almost swung round and struck out with the side of his hand.

'Colonel Croston.'

'Who's that?'

'It's Fay Morrison. Keep your voice down.'

'Mrs Morrison!'

'Christ, Colonel…'

'I'm sorry,' he whispered. 'Where the hell's Jim? You left with him, the Mayor…'

'He's… he's in the church. Listen… I've been following you around for the last ten minutes. I couldn't approach you until you knew. At least…'

'I don't know anything, Mrs Morrison. I've never been more in the dark. Excuse the humour. It isn't felt.'

'But you know everything's changed. I heard you talking to Hereward. You realize this is not, in any sense, the Crybbe we know and love.'

'Oh, now, look…!'

'I'm trying to keep calm, Colonel.'

'I'm sorry. This is beyond me. Some kind of gas, I suspect.'

'Colonel…'

'Col.'

'Col. Forget about gas. Please listen. First of all, I think Preece is dead. Stroke, heart attack maybe, I don't know about these things. But I do know Max Goff was killed by Warren Preece, you know who I mean?'

'The grandson. Punkish type. Where is he?'

'He's hurt. He's badly burned. There was a fire. In the church.'

'Are you serious?'

'Yes, I know, you can't see any flames. But you can't see anything else either, can you?'

Col gripped her arm. He wanted to feel she was real.

'Please don't,' she said. 'I've got a burn.'

'I'm sorry, but this… Jesus.'

'Just listen. If you think this is mad, don't say anything. Just walk away and keep it to yourself.'

He tried to see her eyes, but all he could make out was the white of her face. 'OK,' he said.

'On this night,' Fay Morrison said. 'And I mean this night, this actual night, exactly four hundred years ago, a large number of people gathered in the square, where we are now, trying to decide what to do about the High Sheriff, who'd taken to hanging men and compelling their wives to have sex with him. And there were various other alleged examples of antisocial behaviour even by sixteenth-century standards that I won't go into now. But the bottom line is the people of this town decided they'd taken enough.'

He would have stopped her, he was in no mood for a long history lecture, but he supposed he'd given his word he'd listen to what she had to say.

'You can imagine the scene,' she said. 'A bit of a rabble, not exactly organized. Not much imagination, but angry and scared, too. Only finding courage in numbers, you know the kind of thing. So they march on Crybbe Court, flaming torches, the full bit. And there are a lot of them, and it really wasn't something this Sheriff would have expected. Not the border way. Keep your heads down, right? Don't make waves. But they did – for once. They made waves. They surrounded the Court and they said to the servants, men-at-arms, whatever,

"You send this bastard out or we're going to burn this place down." Maybe they set light to a barn or something to reinforce the threat, but, anyway, it was pretty clear to the Sheriff by now that he was in deep shit.'

From somewhere close to what he imagined was the centre of the square, Col could hear Graham Jarrett, the hypnotist guy, shouting, 'You're taking absolutely the wrong attitude, you know.'

'He seems to have gone into the attic,' Fay said, 'and topped himself.'

'Hear him out, will you?' a woman bawled. Sounded like that astrologer Oona Jopson, shorn head, ring through nose, who'd threatened to emasculate the doormen.

Fay said, 'What you have to remember about this particular Sheriff is that he was skilled in what I'm afraid we have to call the Black Arts. Except he thought it was science.' She paused. 'Do you want me to stop?'

'I'm not laughing,' Col said. 'Am I?'

'I'll carry on then. Before he hanged himself. Or while he was hanging himself – I mean, don't think I'm an expert on this stuff, I'm not – but, anyway, he left something of himself behind. It's called a haunting, Col. Still with me?'

'Open mind,' Col said. 'Go on.'

'It wasn't a spur-of-the-moment job. He'd been planning this for a long time. Dropped hints to his women. Expect more of the same when I'm gone.'

'Look,' Graham Jarrett was shouting, 'if you'll all just quieten down a minute, we'll do a bit of reasoning out. But I think we've been selected as participants in a wonderful, shared experience that's really at the core of what most of us have been striving for over many years.'

'And here we are… panicking!' the Jopson woman piped up. 'Well, I'm not panicking, I've never been so excited.'

Guy Morrison shouted, 'What about poor bloody Goff? He didn't look too excited. He looked a bit bloody dead to me.'

'Yeah, but was he?' Jopson. 'Is he? I mean, how much of that was for real? How much of what we perceive is actual reality?'

Col Croston said, 'Jesus Christ.'

'It smells so awful,' the woman from the crafts shop, which now sold mainly greetings cards, said.

'It smells awful to us, that's all. Or only to you, maybe. To me, it's a wonderful smell. It smells of reality, not as it is to us these days, with our dull senses and our tired taste-buds and our generally limited perception of everything. What we're feeling right now is the essence of this place. I mean, shit, it is… this is higher consciousness.'

'And is she right?' Col asked Fay Morrison in a low voice.

'What do you think?'

'I think she's nuts.'

Guy said, 'Has anybody tried just walking away from here in any direction, just carrying on walking until they find an open door or somebody with a torch or a lamp?'

'My…' There was the sound of some struggling. 'Give me some space.' It was Jocasta Newsome. 'My husband… he said he was going to get help. He's… I can't find him.'

'Don't worry,' Graham Jarrett said. 'He'll be around. I don't think he can go anywhere, you see, I don't think anyone can. I don't think there's any light to be found.'

'I think there is, Graham,' a new voice said. A cool, dark voice. Lazy.

'Who's that? Is that Andy?'

Col Croston heard Fay Morrison inhale very sharply through her mouth.

'I think,' the dark voice said, 'that we should consider how we can find our own light.'

'Who's that?' Col whispered.

'Boulton-Trow.'

'I don't think I know him.'

'I mentioned him during the meeting. You haven't forgotten that, have you?'

'Oh,' said Col. 'That.'

Her outburst. It occurred lo Col that there was something personal at the back of this. That Fay Morrison had some old probably sexual score to settle with Boulton-Trow. Anyway, it was all rather too much for a practical man to take. He had to reassemble his wits and get to a phone.

'Well, thank you, Mrs Morrison,' Col said. 'You've given me a lot of food for thought.'

'Col, it has to be food for action, or something unbelievably awful's going to happen.'

'Look,' Col said 'I'll come back to you, OK?'

'No, don't go…'

But he'd gone

'Oh, please. Fay Morrison breathed into the foul-smelling dark. 'Please…'

CHAPTER XV

The dog was in a pool of light on the side of the Tump where the grass looked almost white, and the dog was barking nonstop.

'Wait,' Joe Powys whispered to Minnie Seagrove. 'Don't go any closer. Stay out of the light.'

He moved quietly around the base of the Tump to see what was happening, who it was. Don't look at me, Arnold. I'm not here. Ignore me.

There was a single spotlight directed at the mound from the field, on the side facing the road, the side from which Henry Kettle had come on his last ride in his clapped-out old Volkswagen Variant.

The light went out. The dog stopped barking.

Powys waited.

He heard a vehicle door slam. Moved closer. Saw a match flare and then the red glow on the end of a cigarette.

'Well,' a voice said, 'you buggered yourself yere all right, boy.'

'Gomer! Mrs Seagrove had appeared at Powys's side. 'It's Gomer Parry!'

'Oh Christ,' they heard, and an orange firefly crash-landed in the field.

'Gomer. It's Minnie Seagrove. You replaced my drains.'

'Flaming hell, woman, what you tryin' to do, scare the life out of me? Ruddy dog was bad enough. Hang on a second.'

Two small lights appeared in the front of what proved to be a tractor with an unwieldy digger contraption overhanging the cab. Powys had last seen it parked in the square.

He whispered, 'Ask him if he's alone.'

'Course I'm bloody alone. Who you got there with you, Mrs Seagrove?'

'It's a friend of mine.'

'Choose some places to bring your boyfriends, all I can say.'

'You mind your manners, Gomer Parry. We're coming down.'

He was scrabbling in the grass when they reached him. 'Dropped my ciggy somewhere.' The digger's sidelights were reflected in his glasses. 'Sod it, won't set a fire, grass is bloody wet.' He peered at Powys. I seen you before, isn't it? You was with that radio lady, Mrs Morris, hour or so ago. Get yourself about, don't you, boy?'

'Gomer!' Mrs Seagrove snapped.

'Aye, all right. Nice lady, that Mrs Morris. Very nice indeed.'

'Pardon me for asking, Mr Parry,' Powys sad, deadpan, but somebody wouldn't by any chance be paying you to take out the rest of the wall?'

'Now just a minute! You wanner watch what you're saying, my friend.'

'Only it's, er, kind of outside normal working hours.'

'Aye, well,' said Gomer Parry. 'Bit of an accident, like. Got a bit confused, what with the ole power bein' off, no streetlights, and I come clean off the road. Dunno what come over me. I never done nothin' like that before, see, never.'

'Don't worry about it,' Powys said. 'Not as if you're the first.'

'What's that?' said Gomer, suspicious. 'Oh, bugger me…'Enry Kettle! Is this where 'Enry Kettle…?'

'You knew Henry?'

'Course I knew 'im. 'Enry Kettle, oh hell, aye. Wells, see. Wells. 'E'd find 'em, I'd dig 'em. Talk about a tragic loss. Friend o' yours too, was 'e?'

He nodded and put out his hand. 'Joe Powys.'

Gomer shook it. 'Gomer Parry Plant Hire.'

Powys did some rapid thinking. Gomer had gone off the road, probably at the same spot as Henry. And yet Gomer had survived.

'What happened? When you came off the road?'

'Bloody strange,' Gomer said. 'Thought I muster been pissed, like – sorry Mrs S – but I'd only 'ad a couple, see. Anyway. it was just like I'd blacked out and come round in the bloody field… only I never did. And then it was like… well, it was like goin' downhill with a hell of a strong wind up your arse – sorry, Mrs…'

'You see anything?'

'Oh, er…' Gomer scratched his face. 'Got in a bit of a panic, like, tell the truth. See all sortser things, isn't it? Thought I'd seen a feller one second, up there, top o' the Tump, 'mong the ole trees, like, but nat'rally I was more bothered 'bout not turnin' the ole digger over, see. Best one I got this. Customized, fixed 'im myself, big David Brown tractor an' half of this ole JCB I got off my mate over Llandod way. Bloody cracker, this ole thing. Managed to stop 'im 'fore I reached the ole wall – if 'e 'ad gone into it, I'd've been pretty bloody sore about it, I can tell you.'

'Word has it,' said Powys, 'that you were pretty bloody sore when somebody borrowed your bulldozer.'

'Don't you talk to me 'bout that!' said Gomer in disgust. 'Bloody vandals.'

'You were warned off, weren't you? You could've had this wall down no problem, but they warned you off.'

"Ow'd you know that?' demanded Gomer.

'Made sense.'

'Oh aye? You know anythin' else makes sense?'

'Going back to this figure on the top of the Tump. Where exactly were you when you saw him?'

'You're askin' a lot o' questions. Mister. You with the radio, too?' Although he didn't sound as if he'd mind if this were the case. 'No, see, I said I thought I seen 'im. 'E was prob'ly another tree with the light catchin' 'im funny, like.'

'Your headlights are that powerful, that you could see a man standing on top of the Tump when you're coming down and the lights are pointing down?'

'Light. Only got one 'eadlight workin', Joe.'

'So when you said a tree caught in the light…'

'Aye,' Gomer said thoughtfully. 'You're right. Not possible, is it? See, I'll tell you what it was like. You know kids when they gets a torch and they wants to frighten other kids and flashes it under their chin and their face lights up really well, on account of half it's in shadow. Well, it was like that, only it was like his whole body was lit up that way. Scary. Only I'm strugglin' with the wheel, I thinks, get off, it's only an tree.'

Minnie Seagrove looked at Powys. 'I used to think like that when I first saw the Hound. You do. You look for explanations, sort of thing.'

'The hound?' said Gomer.

Arnold began to bark.

'Right,' said Gomer, opening the door of the cab. 'If there's anybody else up there I'm gonner bloody find out this time.'

The single headlight spotlit the Tump again, and Powys watched as Arnold ran into the white circle.

Ran. Arnold ran into the light.

He'd lost a leg just a few days ago, and he was running.

Was this Arnold?

'Arnold!' Powys shouted. 'Come on!'

The dog trotted down to the foot of the mound and ambled across. Powys bent down and the dog snuffled up at him and licked his hands. Gently, Powys slid one hand underneath, he could actually feel the stitching.

Arnold squirmed free and made off, back across the field towards the Tump, looking back at Powys every few yards and barking.

'He's found something,' Minnie Seagrove said. 'He wants to show you something.'

I can't believe this, Powys thought. This is seriously weird. He isn't even limping.

Arnold's tail started to wave when he saw Powys was following him. He ran a few yards up the side of the Tump and then sat down.

He sat down.

The dog with only one back leg sat down.

Arnold barked. He turned around and put his nose into the side of the Tump and snuffled about. Then he turned round again and started to bark at Powys.

Powys thought – the words springing into his mind in Henry Kettle's voice – he's a dowser's dog.

He wandered back to the digger, rubbing his forehead. 'Gomer, what are the chances of you doing a spot of excavation?'

'What?' Gomer said, in there?'

'Be a public service,' Powys said. 'That Tump's a liability. If it wasn't for that Tump, Henry Kettle would be alive today and locating wells.'

'Protected Ancient Monument, though, isn't it?' Gomer said. 'That's an offence, unauthorized excavation of a Protected Ancient Monument.'

'Certainly is,' said Powys.

'That's all right, then,' said Gomer, glasses twinkling. 'Where you want the 'ole?'

CHAPTER XVI

The acoustic in the square was tight and intimate, like a studio, and the voice was deep and resonant: strong and melancholy music. Wonderful broadcasting voice, Fay thought, trying to be cynical. Radio Three, FM.

'When you think about it,' the voice said, 'any town centre's an intensely powerful place; it's where energy gathers from all directions, thoughts and feelings pouring in. It's where we go to tap into a town, to feel its life rhythm.'

Pure radio, Fay thought. The purest radio of all, because we can't see anything. No distractions. He can design his pictures in our minds.

'The town centre is where the centuries are stored,' Andy said. 'Smell them. Smell the centuries.'

All I can smell, Fay thought, is shit. Four hundred years of shit. And all I can hear is bullshit. Had to keep telling herself that. This was Andy Boulton-Trow, of Bottle Stone farm. Descendant of Sheriff Wort, scourge of Crybbe, black magician, the most hated man in…

'What you can smell,' Andy Boulton-Trow said (and she felt, most uncomfortably, that he was speaking directly to her), 'is many centuries of human life. There haven't always been sewerage systems and hot water and fresh vegetables. This town lived on the border of two often hostile countries, and it had to live within itself. It ground its own flour, killed its own meat and kept its own counsel.'

He paused. 'And its secrets. It kept its secrets.'

Fay thought, drab secrets densely woven into a faded, dim old tapestry.

Boulton-Trow's voice was the only sound in the square. The only sound in the world – for this square was the world. None of them could leave it, except – perhaps – by dying.

Should have been a terrifying thought. Wasn't.

She couldn't remember, for the moment, quite what he looked like, this Boulton-Trow. Only that he was tall and dark and bearded. Like Christ; that was how people saw Him.

But she couldn't see Boulton-Trow. She couldn't see anybody. You'd have thought your eyes would have adjusted by now, so that you'd be able to make our at least the shapes of men and women. But unless they were very close to you, you could see nothing. This darkness was unnatural.

Not, however, to Andy. She could feel that. He knew his way around the darkness. If anybody could lead them out of here it would be him, and that would be comforting to these people.

Perhaps it was comforting to her.

But there was no immediate comfort in Andy's message.

'And now you come here, and you want Crybbe to give up its secrets to you. To lay open its soul to you. You want to feel its spirit inside you. Isn't that right?'

'We want to help it rediscover its own spirit,' someone said 'Surely that's what this is about, this experiment.'

'This experiment.' Andy laughed. 'And who's the subject of this experiment? Is it Crybbe? Or is it us? Maybe we're here to let the town experiment on us. It's an interesting idea, isn't it? Maybe Crybbe can work its own alchemy if you're prepared to put yourselves into the crucible. Perhaps what you're experiencing now is a taster. Can you handle this? Are you strong enough?'

Talk about a captive audience. Fay thought. It was an uneasy thought. She was a captive, too. Would she not also go along with anything this man suggested if he could lead her out of here, back into where there were lights.

'Sense of place,' Andy said. 'You want to feel that sense of place that finds an echo in your own hearts. You want to belong. You want to lay yourself down in a field on a summer's evening and you want the mysteries to come to you, whispered in your ears, drifting on the air and smelling of honeysuckle.'

'Yes,' a woman said faintly. 'Yes.'

Andy paused and the night held its breath.

Thai's not how it works,' he said. 'You know that really, don't you? This is how it works. This is Sense of Place. Feel it. Smell it. Secrets come out like babies, writhing and covered in blood and slime. And all of us genteel New Age people, we turn up our noses and we start to scream. Let me out of here! I can't bear it! Give me my picturesque half-timbered cottage and my chintzy sofa and my books. Give me my incense and my crystals and my immersion tank. Give me my illusions back. Yeah?'

Nobody spoke.

'I can't give you your illusions back,' Andy said gently.

The silence was total.

Radio, Fay thought desperately. It's only radio. You know the techniques, you know the tricks. He's standing there at the mixing desk, the Presenter and also the Engineer, playing with the effects, adjusting the atmos.

'But if you trust me,' Andy said, 'I can give you the true secrets of Crybbe. Think about this. I'll be back.'

And the voice was gone.

'Andy!' Jarrett shouted into the pungent night. 'Don't go!'

'He can't go,' Oona Jopson said. 'Can he?'

'Stop!' Powys shouted.

The mechanical digger groaned.

Arnold barked.

'Take it slowly, OK. We could be coming to something.

Gomer's customized digger had an extra spotlight, mounted on the cab. It wasn't as strong as the single headlight, but least you could focus it on the target.

Powys had been worried the wall would be a problem, but Gomer had done some skilled manoeuvring, putting on a show, riding the digger like a trick-cyclist, plant-hire choreographer, tapping the wall with the edge of the shovel in exactly the right places, until the stones crumbled apart like breezeblocks. Powys asking him, 'Out of interest, how long would it have taken you to take this wall apart with the bulldozer?'

Gomer had leaned out of his cab, his cigarette pointing upwards from his mouth so the red end was reflected in his glasses. 'You what, Joe? This ole wall? Gimme hour or so you'd never know there'd been a wall yere. Tell you what, it bloody hurt me, that did, havin' to say I couldn't 'andle 'it without a bigger 'dozer.'

Afterwards, it had just been a question of removing enough rubble to get the digger to the Tump. And after that…'

'Piece o' piss,' Gomer said. 'Sorry, Minnie.'

Mrs Seagrove sat on a broken section of the wall, dust all over her kilt, Arnold lying across her knees, watchful, both of them watching the action.

'Isn't he good, though, Joe?' she said as Gomer went into the Tump like a surgeon. 'Isn't he a marvel?'

Powys smiled. She was loving it. He wondered if she remembered killing Edgar Humble, or if she still half-thought that was all a dream, no more real now than Frank, her dead husband.

'Hold it a minute, Gomer, we've got…'

Gomer backed up, raised the shovel. Powys slid under it, lumps of earth falling on him from its great metal teeth.

'Minnie, can you pass me the hand-lamp?'

It looked like an opening. No more than five feet in, and they could be into some kind of tunnel. He shone the light inside and he could see a roof of solid stone, like the capstone of a dolmen.

'Gomer, we've cracked it.'

'Course we 'ave, boy. Want me to widen the 'ole?'

'OK.'

He stepped back and the shovel adjusted itself then went in again.

He couldn't believe this. They'd gone in at precisely the spot where Arnold had been sitting (sitting – a leg short and he was sitting) and after no more than twenty minutes they were into the heart of this thing.

Powys looked up towards the sky, black and starless.

'Henry?' he said, 'is this you, you old bugger?'

Fay moved among them, listening, but speaking to no one.

It was obvious by now that Col Croston was not coming back to her. Perhaps, like Hereward, he'd gone to try and find a way out of the square.

'We're not in a different time zone,' Graham Jarrett was saying. 'It's not as simplistic as that. We're in what you might call a timeless zone. A place where the past and present exist in the same continuum.'

'What he was saying, about the town centre,' Adam Ivory said. 'I think that's literally central to this experience. The town centre's this kind of energy vortex…'

Fay moved on. They were creating a dream within a dream, the way New Age people tended to do, moving around scattering meaningless jargon, making themselves comfortable inside the experience.

But Jean Wendle, the most experienced of them all, was not here.

Or was she?

Fay moved around in the darkness, almost floating, coming to sense the nearness of other bodies and the emotions emanating from them: fear and exhilaration in equal quantities now. But she doubled there was one of them who would not prefer this experience in retrospect, returning to the square by daylight:

Yes, this was where it happened, just about here, yes, you can still feel the essence of it, yes, it'll never be the same again for me, this place, always be special, yes, it was like an initiation, becoming a part of this town. And now I feel I can tap into it whenever I want to, and I can really work here effectively now because I belong, because I've felt the Spirit of Crybbe.

Fay moved on. Through the radio world.

And now he was inside the Tump.

He'd been inside them before – burial chambers, passage graves. It was suggested that many of the stone dolmens cromlechs around the country had once been covered over, like

this, with earth.

The passageway was perhaps three and a half feet wide, and was low, and he had to walk painfully bent over. He directed the beam at the walls and the ceiling; the structure appeared to be a series of cromlechs joined up, like vertebrae, wide slabs of grey-brown stone overhead, a floor of close-packed earth.

He turned around, with difficulty, and he couldn't see the entrance any more. He wasn't naturally claustrophobic, but he shuddered briefly at the thought of the opening being sealed behind him, great bucket-loads of earth dumped back and rubble from the wall heaped across so that nobody would ever know there was a passageway, so that he slowly suffocated in here and became one more well-preserved pile of bones in forgotten Bronze Age burial chamber.

He stopped.

His chest tightened.

Gomer. Could he really trust Gomer Parry?

So many old allegiances, never spoken of, in Crybbe. And new ones, too. Could you ever know exactly who belonged to whom?

Maybe he should have asked Gomer to come with him, but he couldn't leave Mrs Seagrove outside on her own.

Look, don't think about it, OK. Too much at stake to go back now. Concentrate on where you are, what it can tell you.

Keep going…

It would probably be an actual Bronze Age grave, although he doubted he was the first person since then to enter this mound. You couldn't excavate a prehistoric burial chamber in under an hour.

But was he the first to get inside since Michael Wort?

Abruptly it ended.

Out of the passage and into the chamber itself, wider, maybe eight feet in diameter, but not quite circular any more. It was cold in here; the air smelled old and rank.

In the centre of the chamber was a single flat stone.

On the stone was a wooden box.

Powys stopped at the entrance to the chamber, put the lamp on the ground, stood blocking the entrance, head bowed.

They didn't have boxes in the Bronze Age, not carved oak boxes anyway, with iron bands and locks.

He stood staring at the box in the lamp's beam, and his breathing tightened. The box was about twelve inches deep and eighteen inches square. It sang to him, and it sang of ancient evil.

Oh, come on…

He walked across the chamber to the box, and found he couldn't touch it.

There is no evil, only degrees of negativity.

Powys started to laugh, and then, quite deliberately, he bent down and switched off the lamp.

What is this about?

Well, he couldn't see the box any more, or the inside of the stone chamber; he could be anywhere, no visual images, no impressions coming in now.

Just me. And it. This is a real fairy hill, and I'm in the middle of it, and I've come here of my own free will and there's no Andy and no Jean and I'm scared. I've put out the light to induce a state of fear, and the nerve-ends are bristling with it and I'm ready.

I'm ready.

'Hereward?'

'Yes.'

'Thank God.'

'Why? Why are you thanking God?'

'Because I thought… I thought you weren't going to come back. Hereward, I'm so desperately sorry. I was only trying to get away. All I've ever wanted is to get away from here.'

'And you thought Guy Morrison would take you away?'

'No… yes… Oh God, I don't know what I thought, I was just so lonely and messed up. He – Guy – was passing through, he wasn't part of Crybbe, he was going somewhere and I was stuck fast. I was like someone just dashing outside and thumbing a lift. And he stopped. I'm sorry, that's all mixed up, I'm not very clear tonight, not very articulate.'

'Don't cry.'

'I'm sorry. I'm sorry about the picture, too, but you don't know what pictures can do.'

'Oh, I do.'

'I'm not talking about aesthetics.'

'I know.'

'Do you?'

'Pictures are doorways.'

'Yes.'

'Artists put elements of themselves into pictures, and also elements of other things. The man in that picture of Tessa's, he's her teacher, you know. He has a studio in the woods, and she's been going down there and he's been teaching her how to paint. And what to paint. How to make a picture into doorway.'

'How do you know that?'

'Because, in the picture, he's standing in a doorway, like The Light of the World, in reverse, because he's so dark. But darkness and light, it's all the same when you can't see, isn't it?'

'I don't…'

'I'm going through the doorway, Jocasta.'

'Hereward?'

'It really is the only way out of here, through the doorway. The only way out for me, anyway.'

'Hereward, I'm getting very scared.'

'There's no need to be scared. Come here, darling. There.'

'No. No, please.'

'There… there…'

'Aaaugh.'

'There.'

Hereward felt the woman go limp, and his hands fell away from her throat. He felt himself smiling into the dark as he walked away.

The lamp was alight, and the door was ajar. When he pushed, it swung open at once, and Hereward found himself in the comfortingly familiar setting of his own workshop next

to The Gallery.

A candle glowed on the workbench, where he'd made frames. Do you know, in the early days, we used actually to make our own frames…

Fragments of frames were scattered over the bench and the floor; a corner section was still wedged in the wood-vice. He wouldn't need to make frames any more; that phase was over. Perhaps he'd employ someone to do it.

'Don't suppose you'd be interested in a job, would you?' he said to the shadow sitting on the bench, next to the candle.

The shadow stopped whittling at a piece of framing-wood with its Stanley knife and slipped to the floor.

Hereward saw it wasn't really a shadow; it was just black.

CHAPTER XVII

Laughter in the dark.

Laughter like ice-crystals forming in the air.

'Andy.'

Who did you think it was going to be, Joe? Did you think you were finally about to meet Sir Michael himself?

Andy, but he wasn't here.

He was mainly grey, shimmering to nearly white at his fingertips, the extremities of him.

Andy, but he wasn't there.

Powys heard the voice in his head. He spoke aloud, but heard the replies in his head.

He wasn't thinking about this too hard, analysis was useless. Couldn't play new games by old rules.

Don't touch him. He can't harm you.

BUT DON'T TOUCH HIM.

'The box. What's in the box, Andy?'

Why don't you open it, Joe? The lock's no big deal. Ornament as much as anything. Also it's very old. Pick up a stone. Break the lock.

'I don't think so.'

No? You're still very much full of shit, Joe, you know that? You go to all this trouble to get into here, and you won't face up to the final challenge. What's the problem? Not got the guts, Joe? Not got the bottle? Think about this… think hard… what's it been worth, if you don't open it?

'Maybe I will,' Powys said.

You'll find a couple of stones behind you, near where you left your lamp. One's narrow and thin, it used to be a spearhead. The other's chunky, like a hammer. You can slide the spearhead into the crack below the lid.

'But not here.'

The eyes were white, though. The eyes were alight, incandescent.

Andy, but he wasn't here.

'I'm not going to open it here. You can piss off, mate. I'm going to pick up the box, and I'm going to take it away.'

You don't want to do that, Joe. You might awaken the Guardian. You don't want that.

'No. You don't want that. But you can piss off.'

Powys felt a trickle of euphoria, bright and slippery as mercury and, very quickly, he covered it up. Smothered it with fear. Stay frightened. At all costs, stay frightened.

A rapid pattering on the close-packed earthern floor, and something warm against his leg.

'Arnie.'

Stay frightened. It might not be.

He bent down.

And the growling began.

He felt Arnold's fur stiffen and harden under his hand, and the growling went on, a hollow and penetrating sound that came from far back in the dog's throat, maybe further back than that. Maybe much further back. The growl was continuous and seemed to alter the vibration of the night.

'You're not growling at me, are you, Arnie?'

The grey thing hung in the air like an old raincoat, but he was fairly sure that Andy was not there any more.

Powys switched on the lamp and the grey thing vanished.

He walked over to the stone in the centre of the chamber and he picked up the wooden box.

Warm. Cosy. Just as before. The deep, Georgian windows, the Chinese firescreen, the Victorian lamp with the pale-blue shade burning perfumed oil.

'I wondered,' she said, 'if you would come back.'

'Hullo, Wendy,' Alex said.

She was dressed for bed.

And how.

Black nightdress, sort of shift-thing, filigree type of pattern, so you could see through it in all the right places. Alex couldn't take his eyes off her.

'Sit down,' Jean said.

'Wendy, there's something awfully funny happening out there, did you know?'

'Funny?'

'Well, I'd been down to the river and came back up the hill and when I got to near the top, just at the entrance to the square, it all went very dark. I mean, I know it's obviously dark without the electricity supply, but this really was extra dark, as if there was a thick fog. Lots of people about the square, I could hear them talking, but I couldn't see any of them.'

'Oh my.'

'And… hard to explain this, but it was as if there was a sort of screen between all these people and me. Now, I know what you're going to say – the only reason there's a screen between me and the rest of the world is because I've erected it myself – but it wasn't like that. Not at all. This was really well, physical, but not… How do you explain it?

'I think you should come and sit down Alex and not get yourself get too worked up about this.'

'That's what you think, is it?'

'I think you need to calm down.'

Alex slumped into the sofa and she came down next to him as light as a bird, perching on the edge of the cushion, and the shift-thing riding up her legs. Pretty remarkable legs, had to admit that.

'And I heard Fay,' Alex said. 'I'd walked back – couldn't seem to make progress, you see, kept on walking and wasn't getting anywhere. You know that feeling? Happens in dreams, sometimes. Anyway, I'm coming up the hill again, and this time it's Fay I can hear, talking to some chap. Telling him about how all the people had gathered in this very square exactly four hundred years ago to the night, to get up a posse to go along and lynch old whatsisname… Sheriff Wort.'

'I see,' Jean said. She leaned over and picked up his left hand. One of her nipples was poking through the black filigree shift.

Alex swallowed. 'Then this chap she was talking to, he must have drifted away. I said, "Listen, Fay," I said, "why don't you tell me – tell me - what all this is about…?" But she couldn't hear me. Why couldn't she hear me, Wendy?'

Jean said, 'What's this on your hands?'

'Blood,' he said quickly, it's Murray Beech. He's been stabbed to death. Only realized as I was walking up the hill.'

'Stabbed to death,' Jean said neutrally. 'I see.'

'Don't you believe me?'

'Alex, I believe you believe that Murray Beech has been stabbed to death. And what about Grace?'

'She took me to her grave. We walked together. I think we came to an agreement.'

'I see.'

'But you don't really believe any of this, do you, Wendy?'

Jean smiled.

'Or do you?'

'Alex,' said Jean, 'would you like to sleep with me?'

Alex's throat went dry.

'Well?' she said gently.

'Oh gosh,' Alex said. 'Do you think I could manage it?'

Jean smiled. 'Perhaps we should find out.'

'That's what you think, is it?'

The answer burned quietly, like a kind of incense, in her eyes.

Alex stood up. He felt very calm. Calmer than ever he could remember feeling before. He did not know the meaning of the word 'dementia'. His heart was strong. His eyes, he knew, were twinkling quite dramatically.

The aromatic oil from the lamp was exquisite.

Jean unwound from the sofa and he took her in his arms, his breathing rate quickened at once. She tilted her face to kiss him, but he ran a hand into her soft, short hair and pressed her face to his chest, bent his head and whispered into her ear.

'You cunning bitch.'

Her body went rigid, and he let her go.

What a waste, he thought. What a tragic bloody waste.

When Jean Wendle faced him from across the room, her eyes were in deep shadow, her lips were drawn back and the inside of her mouth looked so black that she seemed, momentarily, to have no teeth at all.

The aromatic oil from the lamp smelt like the floor of a urinal.

'Oh my. You've blown it, now, Alex,' Jean whispered, voice like tinder.

Alex shook his head.

'You'd had it. You were finished. You were going very rapidly into the final decline. A bed in the bottom comer of the geriatric ward, to where the naughty boys are consigned, the nurses treating you like a difficult child when you try to pinch their bottoms. Poor old man, he used to be a priest.'

'Nothing more welcome in hell than an unfrocked priest,' Alex mused. 'Except perhaps a priest who ought to have been unfrocked but never was, because he was too damned plausible – all his life, so plausible, right up to the end, shafting ladies.'

'I brought you back,' Jean said, I fed you energy.'

'But what kind of energy?'

'Och.' Jean turned away with a dismissive wave of the hand. 'You blew it.'

'I don't think so,' Alex said. 'I made a deal. I went up the hill and I made a deal.'

He smiled. His heart was strong and his eyes still twinkled.

Jean Wendle turned her head and peered at him, curious. He saw in her face a pinched look, ravaged, and not the ravage of years.

'Made a deal,' Alex said. 'After a period of protracted and considered negotiation, the Management and I formulated the basis of an agreement, nothing binding, either, party retaining the right to pull out at any given time if the Second Party should happen to lose his bottle.'

Alex walked out of the room. 'Good night, Wendy.'

Bloody waste, he thought sadly.

Joe Powys came out of the passage into the night, into a blinding light and the face of Edgar Humble.

He didn't have to force the fear.

'Hold it. Don't move.'

Powys half out of the hole in the side of the Tump, the wooden box in his arms, Arnold at his ankles.

Humble's eyes were fully open, his lips apart.

'You're dead,' Powys said from a throat full of hairline cracks.

'Course he's fucking dead,' Gomer Parry said, leaning out of his cab. 'Sorry, Minnie.'

Humble lay across the jaw of the digger, quite stiff now, one arm still flung out and his crossbow on his chest. The big shovel was almost blocking the entrance to the passage.

Minnie Seagrove wasn't looking.

Gomer said, 'What you got there, then, Joe?'

'Buried Treasure,' said Powys. is that thing safe?'

'Gimme a second.' Gomer raised the shovel so Powys could climb out from underneath it.

'Right, then.' The little man climbed out of his cab, rubbing his hands on his overalls. 'We got a bit o' talkin' to do yere, Joe. First off, you finished in there? Got what you want?'

'I think so.'

'Safe to block 'im up again, then.'

'Don't see why not.'

'Good. Mind out, then.'

He climbed back into his cab, cigarette end waggling, lowered the shovel, started to tip Humble's body over the entrance of the hole.

'What the hell are you doing, Gomer?'

Minnie Seagrove turned away as Humble's remains tumbled into the soil and rock.

'Nicked that box, did you?' Gomer shouted.

'What?'

'Treasure trove, that, boy. I won't say nothin' if you don't.'

'I had to tell him, Joe,' Minnie Seagrove said. 'I said, I'll go to the police and admit everything. And you'll speak up for me, won't you, Joe? You're a famous writer, that'll count for quite a lot. But he wouldn't hear of it.'

'Bollocks,' said Gomer. 'Could be centuries before they finds 'im, if ever. And if they does turn 'im up, 'ow could it possibly have anythin' at all to do with a sweet little old lady? Sorry, Minnie, I didn't mean old…'

The more Powys thought about it, the less difficult it became to fault.

'You can't leave him near the entrance.'

I shall drag 'im in just as far as 'e'll go, then I'll fill this 'ole up and pack 'im tight, see, and pile up them stones, so it looks like the wall collapsed on it, like.'

'I can't stop to help you, Gomer, I'm sorry. I've got to go somewhere and I don't think there's much time.'

'No problem. I'll take Minnie 'ome.'

'And could you do me another favour – take Arnold, too.'

'I'll take him,' Mrs Seagrove said.

'I'll come back for him.'

I hope.

Or Fay will.

'Thanks, Arnie,' said Powys, pulling the box down and sinking his hands into Arnold's fur, rubbing his face at the dog's encouragingly cold nose.

Arnold licked him once.

'And thank Henry for me,' Powys said, 'if you see him around.'

He picked up the box. It was quite heavy but not too unwieldy. He balanced the lamp on top. 'You're sure this is going to be all right? I have the awful feeling it'll look like a excavation site.'

'Joe,' said Gomer patiently, 'this yere is Gomer Parry Plant Hire you're dealin' with. I already got the reputation of havin' fucked up once on this site – sorry, Minnie – and I'm not gonner risk 'avin' myself pulled in by that Wiley if I can 'elp it, am I?'

Gomer lit another cigarette, lowered his voice. 'Wynford Wiley,' he said. 'Wouldn't give 'im the satisfaction. Fat bastard.'

Powys nodded. 'Minnie. I…'

'She never did nothin',' Gomer Parry said gruffly. 'So you got nothin' to thank 'er for, is it? Bugger off. Good luck.'

CHAPTER XVIII

If anything, it was stronger now. She thought she'd get used to it, like when you were staying on a farm during the manure-spreading season, but this wasn't manure and it was getting stronger.

In it there was human waste and animal waste, raw meat, blood perhaps, body odours, rancid fats… and now smoke.

Woodsmoke? Maybe.

Or was it the church? Could she smell the fire in the church because the church was on the line linking the centre of the square with the Court and the Tump?

Joe Powys would know. Or he wouldn't. Either way, it would be good to have him here. Not such a world-class crank after all, not when you listened to this bunch.

Fay walked among them, the night still alive with natural radio.

'He'll come back.' Graham Jarrett.

'What if he doesn't?' Hilary Ivory.

'I tried walking.' One of the lawyers, in tones of defeat. 'I kept on walking, looking for a light. I kept walking, and I just felt like I was fading out… fading away. Losing my physical resistance to the air, becoming absorbed in the atmosphere. I mean, it was very soporific, in a way. I think it'd be good to die like that. But not yet. I got scared. I thought, I've got to go back. And when I thought that, I was back. Like I hadn't been anywhere.'

'There's nowhere to go.' Oona Jopson. 'Accept it. Relish it. It's not likely to happen to you again.'

'Good.'

'Or maybe it will. Maybe we're being opened up to a permanent kind of cosmic consciousness, you know?'

She wondered what was happening outside the square. Was the church alight? Was Jimmy Preece alive? And what about Warren? Were the Crybbe people attending the meeting still inside the town hall? And what of their relatives in the town – had they any idea what was happening? Perhaps it had happened before, the town square sealing itself off in the past – a past which was always close to the surface of this town.

Not for the first time tonight, Fay genuinely wondered if this was some long and tortured dream. And, if it was not a dream, whether, when (if) it was over, it would have no more significance than if it had been.

Somebody was coughing very weakly, a thin scraping sound.

'Where's Colonel Croston?'

'I'm here. Who's that.'

'It's Dan Osborne, Colonel, I'm a homeopathic practitioner, but I have a medical qualification. There's a woman here in a bad way. Over here, just come towards my voice. I'm bending across her, you won't walk into her.'

'OK, I'm on my way. Do you know who she is?'

'She's wearing what feels like a silk blouse and… a fairly light skirt. She's got… thick hair, quite long I suppose.'

Guy said, 'is she wearing a thickish sort of necklace thing?'

'A torque, I think. Dear God, what's this…?'

'Jocasta! What's happened? Where are you?'

'She's… The bloody torque's been twisted into her neck. Please, Christ, just hold still…'

'OK, Mr Osborne, I'm here. Is she OK?'

'I don't know. She didn't bloody well do this to herself, did she? Somebody's tried to garrote her with her own…'

'OH GOD! GET ME OUT OF THIS!' The woman from the crafts shop hurling herself about the Crybbe vacuum bouncing off people. Somebody had to crack up, sooner or later.

Have one for me. Fay thought.

Col Croston sat down on the cobbles, cross-legged, and looked hard at the darkness. Held his own hand up in front of his face from six inches. He could see it. Just. Could tell it was a hand or was that because he knew it was a hand?

The woman would live. Her throat would be a mess, but she'd be OK. She'd tried to speak. 'Who did this?' he asked, but if she'd identified her attacker he hadn't been able to make out the name. Wouldn't be much use anyway; how could you go after anyone without light?

I am here, Col said silently, letting his eyes half-closed. I can sense myself. I can sense my toes (flexing them and then letting them relax), my calves (trying to tighten the muscles in his leg and letting them relax), my thighs… my stomach…

An exercise.

As a soldier (all his family were soldiers), Col had gravitated to the SAS not because of a need for action and physical stress but because he wanted to feel life and for that, he'd decided one needed to be out on the edge of something, always within sight of the abyss.

Rather thought he'd got over that stage now.

… chest (tighten, breath in, hold it… relax…

…shoulders…

Mind control. Expansion of the senses. Spent two weeks with a meditation expert learning techniques for dominating the body in tight spots. Optional course for officers; some of the chaps thought it was all crap. Not Col. He'd actually taken it further, after the course.

… neck… face (tensing the muscles in his cheeks and jaw, letting the tension go)…

At the end of this exercise – he'd done it many times over the past twenty or thirty years – there should be a moment of pure awareness. Awareness of oneself and one's situation. And sometimes…

… back of the head…

… one emerged from it and everything looked clearer.

And one knew precisely what to do next. Probably elements of yoga and meditation in there, so it was never wise to tell some of the chaps one was indulging in this sort of thing, or they'd be putting it round the Colonel talked to plants and things. Not a word to these New Age characters either, or they'd be recruiting him as an emblem.

Gradually, his breathing slowed and the voices around him in the void began to fade.

'Warm night, isn't it?'

'Hmm?'

'Stuffy. Humid.'

'Yes, it is really.'

Old chap in a T-shirt sitting in a doorway a few yards away.

'Colonel Croston, isn't it?'

'Col. Hey, just a minute…'

He could see this chap. It was still dark, but he could see him, could see his white beard and what it said on the front of his T-shirt. Didn't make any sense, half-faded, but he could…

'It's Canon Peters, isn't it? Seen you in the Cock.'

'Alex.'

Col turned around to look at the square. He could see the shapes of buildings, very dimly; he could hear the sound of people talking and possibly screaming although there was nothing immediate about this, no involvement; more like the sound of someone's TV set from a distance.

'Heard you talking to my daughter,' the old man said 'Young Fay.'

'Fay Morrison. Yes. I was. But you weren't… with us were you? You weren't in… in… Look, Canon, can you help me to understand this? When you heard us talking, could you, you know, see us?'

'No.'

Col sighed. 'Thought not. Started out thinking it was some sort of gas. Some leakage from somewhere. Or an MOD experiment, just the kind of place they'd choose. And now I'm inclined to think it's something psychological coming out. Some mass-psychosis thing. I can't begin to… I mean, what your daughter had to say was interesting in a purely academic sense but not… Frankly, I'm lost, Canon. Where does one start…?'

'Question I've been asking most of my life. Kept putting off having to answer it.'

Keep cool, Col instructed himself. Keep your head. And for God's sake, don't go back in there. (In where? And how did I get out?)

'Canon…'

'Alex.'

'Do you know what's happening?"

'Only the vaguest notion, old chap. But I believe I'm getting there.'

'It is something… psychological, isn't it? Damned if I'm going to use that other word.'

'Good Lord, no, old boy, never say that.'

'Well.' Col levered himself to his feet. He could actually see lamps in some of the houses on this side of the square. 'You know a man's been murdered?'

'Oh yes. Murray Beech, the vicar.'

'The vicar?'

'Stabbed to death. Lying in the churchyard. And the church is on fire. Look…'

Col looked up from the blackness of the square and this vague shapes of roofs, and saw the sky blooming red and orange.

And you know the strangest thing?' said Alex. 'Nobody'd come out to watch.'

'You've rung the fire brigade I take it.'

'No.'

'Good God, man, it might burn down.'

'It might. But if the fire brigade come, they'll have to go in through the square, won't they, and they might just mow down a lot of innocent people who didn't appear to see them coming, or not be able to get through. I don't know. Don't know what could happen. But I think, on balance, that it's safest to let it burn, don't you? Only a bloody church.'

The old chap looked gloomy, but, Col noted, entirely in command of his faculties. The word around town had been that Canon Peters was losing his marbles.

'I think,' the Canon said, 'that we're in the middle of what used to be known technically as A Crybbe Matter. However, on this occasion, there's been outside interference and the locals are seriously out of their depth. That's my feeling.'

'Can we help?'

'That's a very interesting question,' Alex Peters said.

Silly children's game. Fay thought, Hilary Ivory on one side of her, the cameraman, Larry Ember on the other. Or perhaps only their voices. Their voices and their hands.

Silly children's game, New Age nonsense, where's the harm?

No harm.

'We're all going to pool our energy,' Andy's voice making soft chords in the night air. 'We're going to bring down the night.'

Silly children's game. No harm in it. Make a circle, everybody hold hands, dance gaily, stop, hold out hands to the sky as if in welcome. Wasn't there something like this at the end of Close Encounters? And something else. Wasn't it in something else?

Very silly.

'Got him?'

'Just about. Bit stiff. Bit of rigor."

Col heaved the corpse across his shoulder, fireman's lift job.

Behind him, flames were coming through the church roof.

He followed Alex, the body over his shoulder. I am here. I'm walking through a churchyard with a dead vicar over my shoulder and the church is on fire.

This is not like Belfast, after a bomb blast. There are no spectators, no fire brigade, no police, no Army. Only the huge flames chewing up the night.

'I trust,' Alex said, 'that when we get to the town hall, you'll have no difficulty getting us in.'

'Count on it,' Col Croston said through gritted teeth.

The box became unaccountably heavy and Joe Powys had to put it down in the courtyard.

Open it?

The Mini was still parked up by the stable-block. It had been his intention to load the box into the boot and then drive it out of Crybbe, but there was some uncertainty. What did you do with these things?

Open it.

You could take in into a church – a real, functioning church outside of Crybbe, and place it on the altar. But you never knew, with churches in the border country, what other forces might be at work, what damage you might be inflicting on some other quiet and vulnerable community while the people slept.

Or open it.

Or you could throw it into a deep lake. This had been done in numerous legends to calm an excitable spirit, in a ceremony normally involving about twelve priests.

He didn't have twelve priests to hand. Also this was not a whole unquiet spirit.

Not the whole thing. But unquiet, yes. Walking back to the Court, holding the box with both hands, the lamp balanced on top, he'd had the illusion of something moving inside.

Open it,'

Psychological trickery. Mind games. I'm not listening.

OPEN IT!

CHAPTER XIX

Somehow they had formed a circle in the dark. When you moved around in this formation, you couldn't, of course, see the individual people comprising the circle, but soon you began to see the collective thing, the movement, the circle itself.

'A ring of pure golden light,' Hilary- Ivory breathed, isn't it beautiful? And we've made it ourselves. We've made it.'

Yes, Fay thought remotely, it is rather beautiful. But it's not quite golden. More a darkish yellow. The yellow of… of what?

Hilary held her right hand, Larry Ember her left. Hilary breathed and sighed, as if she was making love, while Larry chuckled to himself, not in a cynical or ironic way, but a chuckle of pleasure. Pleasure in self-discovery.

Round and round they went in a slow circle, mindlessly, innocently round and round, like children in the schoolyard.

The air was still pungent, but the pungency was fortifying and compelling now. Tobacco could seem noxious and nauseous the first time you inhaled it, but when you were accustomed to it, it was deeply satisfying.

So it was with the scent of shit and blood and rotting vegetables, as the human circle revolved, quite slowly at first, anticlockwise, in the opposite direction to the sun, which was

OK, Fay reasoned dreamily, because there was no sun, anyway, at night.

Every face was blue-lit, anxious and staring bleakly at Alex without enmity but without any hope either. A quarantine situation; nobody was to go outside, nobody from outside was to come in because of what else might enter.

But Col Croston had got them into the hall, without too much difficulty. He knew both men on the rear door – Paul Gwatkin, one of the three Gwatkin brothers who, between them, farmed Upper Cwm and Lower Cwm, and Bill Davies, the butcher. Decent chaps, both of them.

'Paul,' Col had said, very reasonably, 'it's essential that my friend the Canon and I come in, and I have to tell you if you don't get out of the way I may hurt you quite badly. Problem is, I was never trained to hurt people only slightly. You see my problem.'

'And I hope, Colonel,' said Bill Davies, standing aside, 'that you might be startin' to see ours.'

Col had laid a sympathetic hand on the butcher's should 'We're here to help, Bill.'

'Wastin' your time, I'm afraid. Colonel, it's…'

'I know,' Col said. 'A Crybbe matter.'

Now, standing on the platform with its table and two empty chairs, Alex addressed the assembly, quite cordially.

'Good evening. Some of you know me, some of you don't, some of you might have seen me around. Peters, my name. For what it's worth, I appear to be the only living priest in town. And you, I take it, are what one might call the backbone of Crybbe.'

He looked carefully at his audience, perhaps three hundred of them, men outnumbering women by about two to one, the majority of them older people, over fifty anyway – such was the age-ratio in Crybbe. The scene reminded him of the works of some painter. Was it Stanley Spencer, those air-raid shelter scenes, people like half-wrapped mummies?

'Strange sort of evening,' Alex said, 'I expect you've noticed that, otherwise what are you all doing penned up like sheep overnight in the market? Hmm?'

No response. Nobody did anything to dispel the general ambience of the stock-room as a mortuary. The blue-faced, refrigerated dead.

What would it take to move these people? And, more to the point, had he got it?

As Alex stood there and watched them, he saw himself as they must be seeing him. Bumbling old cleric. Woolly haired and woolly headed; mind known to be increasingly on the blink.

But he'd made a Deal, if only with his inner self. He thought about the possible implications of the Deal, and a suitably dramatic quote occurred to him, from the Book of Revelations.

His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow; and his eyes were as a flame of fire.

'Right,' Alex said, stoking the fire, summoning it into his eyes, 'if that's the way you want it. Colonel, would you ask Murray to step inside?'

'Huh?' Col Croston glanced sharply at Alex, who merely nodded. 'Oh,' Col said and walked out.

Alex said bluntly, 'I understand Max Goff was slaughtered like a pig in here tonight.'

Some of the women looked away. Nobody spoke. Alex let the silence simmer for over a minute, observing finally, 'You seem to have thrown the body out. Out of sight out of mind, I suppose. Didn't know the chap myself. However, I did know this poor boy.'

Col Croston had returned with his arms full. Paul Gwatkin and Bill Davies didn't try to stop him, but neither seemed anxious to help him with his bloody burden.

'He's sorry he was late,' Alex said. 'He was obliged to stop on the way, to get murdered.'

Col carried the corpse around the table, where the blotter was brown with dried blood, and curling.

Alex said, 'You remember Murray? Young Murray Beech?'

Col dropped the body like a sack of coal, and it rolled over once, on to its back, a stiff, bloody hand coming to rest against the knee of a woman on the front row, Mrs Byford, clerk to Crybbe town council. She did not move, except to shrink back in her chair, as if retracting the essential Mrs Byford so that the dead hand was only touching her shell.

'That's right,' Alex said. 'Pretend he's not there. But then, you never noticed he was here, did you? He was only another vicar from Off. And now he's dead. But I'll tell you one thing… he isn't as bloody dead as any of you.'

He saw Murray Beech's body, in the light, for the first time. The front of his black clerical shirt had been slashed neatly from neck to navel. The shirt was soaked and stiff.

Mrs Byford delicately removed the hand from her knee, her mouth beginning to quiver. Murray's own mouth was widened from one corner, like a clown's. It continued almost to an ear. Or what remained of an ear.

Alex lowered himself into the chair where another body had slumped. It was sticky. He looked down into a blotter thick with blood and lumps and clots. 'Talk to me,' he said. 'Tell me about what happened four hundred years ago when your ancestors went out to lynch this chap Wort. What had they got in the way of incentive that you haven't, hmm?'

He noticed the Police Sergeant, Wiley, near the back, in full, if disarranged, uniform. Not exactly rushing to open an investigation into the killing of Murray Beech.

Col Croston, back in the chairman's chair, next to Alex, called out. 'No need for inhibition. Consider the issue thrown open to the floor.'

'Well, come on,' said Alex, in exasperation. 'Who's the old bat in the front row trying to avoid Murray, what about you? Mrs Byford, isn't it?'

Mrs Byford spoke with brittle clarity, like an icicle cracking. 'Tell this rude old gentleman, Colonel, that we have no intention of moving from yere nor of entering into any discussion

on the subject.'

Alex said, 'Did you have much to do with Murray, Mrs Byford? Your granddaughter did. She sought his assistance. As a priest. She wanted him to exorcise a ghost from your house.

'No!' Mrs Byford pushed her chair back into the pair of knees behind her and stood up. Murray's hand appeared to reach for her ankle and she gave a shrill cry. 'It's lies!'

'Poor old Murray was quite thrown at first,' Alex said. 'Not every day you're recruited to cast out a malevolent spirit. Anyhow, he came to me for advice, and I said, go along and play it by ear, old boy. Nothing lost. So off he goes to the old Police House. Don't suppose you were around at the time, were you?'

Alex could see a number of people beginning to look worried, not least Wynford Wiley, the copper. 'And where do you think he found the evil spirit, Mrs Byford?'

"E wasn't evil!' Wynford spluttered out. "E was…'

'Where do you think he found this malignant entity?'

Her back arched. 'Stop this, you go no right to…'

'You know, don't you?'

'Keep calm, woman,' an old man said from behind. 'You got to keep calm, isn't it.'

Alex stood up. 'He found the evil, Mrs Byford… He found it in her eyes. Ironic, isn't it?'

Mrs Byford's hands, half-clawed, began to tremble. She stumbled into the aisle and stood there, shaking.

'Now…' Alex sat down. 'No, please, Mrs Byford, I'm not trying to bully you. Look, sit in one of the empty chairs on the other side. Thank you. Right, now, did that gentleman mention the necessity of keeping calm? Keeping the low profile? Avoiding direct confrontation? Let's discuss this – but very quickly, please, time's running out. Ah. Mr Davies.'

'What can we do?' The butcher. Bill Davies, had left his post by the door and was approaching the platform, a big man with a sparse sprinkling of grey curls. 'We got lo live yere, isn't it.'

'The Mayor,' said Paul Gwatkin. 'Where's the Mayor?'

'He's probably dead,' Col Croston said flatly.

'You don't know that,' said Wynford Wiley.

'And the church is on fire,' Col said. 'Don't suppose you know that.'

'Aye, we know that,' the clerk's husband, little Billy Byford said tiredly, and sighed. His wife gave him a glance like a harpoon.

'These yere hippy types,' said Bill Davies. 'This Goff. If they 'adn't arrived, with their experimentin' and their meddlin'… They think it's a wonderful game, see. They think the countryside's a great big adventure playground. Do what you like, long as you shuts the odd gate. They wouldn't think of strollin' across their motorways, climbin' all over their power stations. Oh no, you 'andles all that with care and if you' don't know nothin' about it, you stays out of it'

'Sit down, Mr Davies,' said Mrs Byford. 'There's nothing to explain.'

'I'm gonna say this, Nettie. City-type dangers is something they takes for granted – never questions it. But they never thinks there might be risks in the country, too, as they don't understand. Well, we don't understand 'em properly neither but at least… at least we knows there's risks.'

'The inference being,' said Col, 'that Crybbe is an area with a particularly high risk-factor.'

'You live yere,' said Bill Davies, 'you learn there's things you can do and things you can't do. Maybe some people's more careful than others, maybe some people takes it more serious like. But that's same as with a lot o' things, anywhere you goes, isn't it?'

'Mr Davies, we don't have to explain nothing,' Mrs Byford said.

Bill Davies ignored her. 'And it's not like you can get 'elp neither. Can't write to your MP about it, can you? You 'as to live with it, just like your parents and your grandparents, and you accepts the constraints, like.'

The butcher sat down two seats away from Mrs Byford, to the left of the central aisle and crossed his legs defiantly.

'Thank you,' said Col. 'I'm very' grateful to you, Bill. Canon?'

'Yes, indeed. I think Mr Davies has put his finger on it. I can understand entirely that there are certain prevailing phenomena in this particular town which the residents have long felt unable to discuss with outsiders. Problems which, I suspect, first, er, materialized during the reign of James I, when anyone found displaying an interest in matters of a… a shall we say, supernormal nature… was in serious danger of being strung up for witchcraft.'

He looked down at the blood-spattered blotter, saw that nothing at all had changed. Outside, the church was burning and a gullible crowd was suspended in the thrall of something even the devil-fearing James I would have been hard-pressed to envisage.

'And one can see,' said Alex, 'how this quite-understandable reticence would, given the comparative remoteness of the town become, in tune, more or less endemic. Yes, I can understand why it's been allowed to fester.

'But, by God,' Alex stood up, his hands either side of the bloodstained blotter, summoning the flames, 'if you don't take some action tonight you'll regret it for the rest of your small little lives.'

CHAPTER XX

The box was making a strange noise, a rolling, creaking sound, suggesting that the item inside had been dislodged from whatever secured it.

OPEN IT!

'Not a chance,' Joe Powys said aloud, attempting to sound confident, in control. But for whose benefit?

The box lay in the centre of the courtyard, the lamp on topo f it, its beam directed at the Court, no more the derelict warehouse, the disused factory without echoes of laughter or the residue of sorrow.

Periodically, Powys would look up towards the eaves, but there were no flickerings any more, no ignition sparks. The Court was fully alive now and crackling and hissing at him.

OPEN IT!

The appalling temptation, of course, was to break open the box to confirm that it did in fact contain what he suspected, which was the mummified head of Sir Michael Wort, or at least a head.

But Powys was scared to look into the eyes of Black Michael, even if only the sockets remained. There was too much heavy magic here; Andy, the shaman, the heir, was projecting himself at will along the spirit path, able to manifest a disembodied presence in the Tump and probably elsewhere, while his physical body was… where?

The old ley-line, which progressed from the Tump to the square and beyond had been reopened, a dark artery to the heart of Crybbe. Reopened for the ancestor, Black Michael.

Whose head now lay in an oak box at Powys's feet. The head was a crucial part of the process and as long as he had the head he was part of it, too, until the pressure

became unbearable.

So what am I going to do with it?

He thought, as he'd thought so many times, I could out of this situation, I could leave the box lying on the ground, leap into the car and accelerate back into what passes for the Real World. I could simply stop believing in all of this. Because if you don't invite it into your life it simply doesn't occur. |

Blessed are the sceptics.

For they shall…

they shall…

die with a broken neck on a convenient rubbish heap.

Powys closed his eyes to ambush renegade tears. You daft bastard, this is Crybbe, where normal rules don't apply. Where once you're in the game, you have to go on playing.

Because Fay is down there in that sick little town with Jean Wendle and probably Andy Trow, and the twisted essence of something four centuries old at the door, and Fay could go

snap! – like Rachel, like Rose. But you wouldn't die, Powys – you'd go on living with the knowledge of what you failed prevent – even though you were fully aware, at last, of what was happening – because you were scared and because you thought it expedient, at this stage of the game, to take the sceptic's way out.

All right, all right. I'll play. Deal me in.

He tried to envisage the layout. The Tump was the head, the church was the centre of the breast, the town square was the solar plexus and the Cock was the genitalia.

He realized he must be standing on Black Michael's throat, (the throat chakra, influencing the nervous system, controlling stress, anxiety).

There came another noise from the box, like the head rolling from side to side, and his eyes were wrenched open, the breath catching in his chest like a stone.

I've got to get rid of it.

He snatched the lamp, bent down and examined the box. It was bound not with iron as he'd imagined but with strips of lead. It occurred to him that it was probably not locked at all and all he had to do was raise the lid and…

No…

He sprang to his feet and backed away.

God help me… I've got the four-hundred-odd-year-old head of Michael Wort in a box, and I don't know what the hell to do with it.

The Court wanted it, he could tell that. The Court squatted in its hollow with the vengeful, violated Tump bunched over it, glowering. The Court throbbed with an ancient need, and Powys knew that it wanted him inside it so that it could digest his spirit and spit him out like poor Rachel, like Tiddles the mummified cat which had been stuck for centuries, a tiny, constricting hairball in its throat.

The throat had been blocked. The Court had coughed and the blockage had come out of the mouth.

The open mouth was the prospect chamber.

What he had to do – the clear, bright certainty of it – went through him like a fork of cold and jagged lightning.

'I can't,' he told the night, 'I don't have the strength. I don't have the courage.'

'I can't.'

It still made no sense, of course, according to what was accepted as normal, but it answered to the logic of the place, it extended the rules of the game to put him in with a chance.

What he had to do was enter the Court and carry the box up the stone stairs to the prospect chamber. And then he had to stand in the opening, lift the box above his head and cast it out into the night so that it fell on to the rubbish heap and smashed, symbolically, to pieces.

A ritualistic, shamanistic act which would sever the connection between Black Michael and the Court, leave a meaningful crater, a great pothole in the middle of the spirit path.

And, well… he knew that the ritual would be more perfect, more complete, if he went out of the prospect chamber, too, his arms wrapped around the box.

Sacrifice. Always more energy with a sacrifice. Perhaps also, because he was hijacking Andy's ritual, he'd be releasing and recycling the energy created by Rose's fall and Rachel's.

He stood with one foot on the box and thought about this.

It was a complete load of New Age crap.

But if he believed in it, it might work. If he was prepared to give up his life he'd be creating so much energy that…

'Christ!'

He kicked the box along the cobbles. God save us New Age philosophy. Energy. The life force. Mother-sodding earth.

Not got the bottle for it, Joe?

Powys gave the Court a baleful glare.

'Yeah, OK, you can play it that way, if you want,' he told the house. 'You can spit me out, like Rachel and Tiddles the cat.'

'But when I go… he goes.'

He picked up the box, put the lamp on top and followed the beam towards the main door. It would, he knew, open.

Alex simply walked out of the town hall, down the steps and the few yards to the end of the street leading to the square. He glanced behind him once at the blue light from a high window, listened to the noise of the generator from the basement, looked above the buildings to the orange glow in the sky from the church. Reality, or as much of it as a bumbling old cleric might perceive.

He thought about the Deal.

If he walked into the square, he doubted he'd get out of it so easily, if at all.

This would be it.

It was like one of those experiments you did at school in your very first physics lesson. Fay couldn't recall the technicalities of it, but it was all to do with making your own electricity and you did something like turning a handle – really couldn't remember the details, never any good at science – and this little bulb lit up, just faintly at first, but the faster you did whatever it was you did, the brighter the bulb became, the more sustained was the light.

There they all were, moving round in the circle – backwards, anti clockwise – the thin golden ring (or not gold, it was yellow, the yellow of… of…).

And there it was, in the centre of the circle. New Age schoolchildren dancing around a lamppost and making the lamp light up, like the bulb in the physics lesson, through the power they were helping to generate.

'Faster, please,' the Teacher saying in that wonderfully smooth voice, like an old cello, and they were able, without much effort, to move faster. Fay beginning to tingle with the

excitement of what they were doing – making light.

An incandescent blob in the air, yellow and fuzzed at the edges, but filaments of hard white light forming at the centre, extending out like branches or veins, blood-vessels – light vessels – the whole thing pulsing with it. Hilary Ivory beginning to quiver and moan, as if reaching orgasm. Larry Ember, on the other side, giggling wildly. Never heard a cameraman giggle before, dour bastards in general, this must really be something coming.

'All my life!' she heard a woman (probably that loopy Jopson woman) cry in ecstasy. 'All my life I've waited for you…!'

'Michael,' a man – the Teacher – said. Simply that, nothing more.

And a woman said, 'Yes, Michael. The Archangel Michael, slayer of dragons.'

No, Fay thought, confused, not him… that's wrong…

But what did it matter?

Couldn't very well contradict them, could she, not all of them, everybody shouting in unison now, a great chant.

'Michael… Michael... MICHAEL… MICHAEL!'

The Being of Light was responding to the summons, the filaments forming into a complexity of vibrating muscles, pipes and organs, rippling into arms and legs, and between the legs – bloody hell. Fay thought…

Realizing she was chanting, too.

'Michael… Michael...'

The bells erupted again, a huge joyful clangour, cracking the night into splinters. The sound of bells in a blazing church.

The rational explanation. Col Croston thought, was that the flames had been funnelled into the tower, creating a huge jet which exploded into the belfry.

He stood in the town-hall doorway and peered into the street. Above him the night sky was frying. If Jimmy Preece was indeed dead, this made him the First Citizen of Crybbe. An auspicious start to his year of office; at this rate he'd be mayor of a burned-out ghost-town before morning.

He looked for Alex, but the end of the street still dropped off the edge of the world, and Alex was gone and Col's sorrowful feeling was that he would never see the old man again.

CHAPTER XXI

Before, the last and only time he'd been inside Crybbe Court, it had been very much Henry's dead place; now it was repellently alive.

It had been cold and dry; now it was warm and moist, and going into it was disturbingly, perversely sexual. The Court was a very old woman, grotesquely aroused, and she wanted him.

The main door had not been locked. He ventured quietly in, the box under his arm. Stone floor, low ceiling and slits of windows set high in the walls. And the walls leaked.

Joe Powys ran a cautious finger along the stone and found it warm and slimy. Under the light, he saw dead insects on the walls, all of them quite recently dead, not husks. Moths, flies and bluebottles trapped in a layer of… fat, it smelled like fat.

Or tallow maybe, grease from candles made of animal fat.

Crybbe Court was alive and sweating.

He moved towards the stone stairs, thinking, inevitably, of Rachel. What had it taken to make her so hot and feverish and desperate to get out of here that…?

But you don't know what happened, you don't know.

Though you'll soon find out, as you retrace her steps up these stone steps, butcher's shop slippery now, like the walls.

Coming to the first floor – the big family living-room and the bedchambers off. In one of these, Fay had told him, Tiddles the mummified cat had slept, most recently, in a chest that was not very old. Tiddles had come down from the rafters, but had never left the house, presumably, until she and Rachel had been hurled out of the prospect chamber.

Fay.

Picturing her standing in the field overlooking Crybbe, the blue cagoule streaming from under her arm, her rainbow eye watering in the wind.

It made him so sad, this image, that he had a wild urge to dump the box and race out of the Court – filthy, clammy, raddled old hag – and run back to Crybbe to find Fay and hold her, even if they only had a few minutes before…

Before whatever was to happen, happened.

He wore his sense of foreboding like the black bag over a condemned man's head. Yet he was still half-amazed at what he was planning to do: black comedy, a bizarre piece of alternative theatre. Verdict: took his own life while the balance of mind was disturbed.

The voice of the police inspector, Hughes, landed in his head. Are you sure he didn't say anything to you, Mrs Morrison, by way of suicide note, so to speak? Or did he assume, do you think, that his method of taking his own life would be self-explanatory?

Well, he was a crank, wasn't he? You only had to read his book.

He wondered if the day would ever come when an inquest would concede that the balance of mind might be affected by prevailing psychic conditions.

Bloody New Age crap.

There was a stench of rancid fat. He felt sick.

It would be good, in a way, to be out in the fresh air.

As Col turned the corner of the back street linking the town hall with the churchyard, there was an enormous splintering roar and a belch that shook the ground. And then – as if massive furnace doors had been flung wide – huge, muscular arms of flame reached out for the heavens.

'Go easy,' Col said. 'I think the church roof's collapsed.'

There were about twenty men with him, the youngest and strongest of them. Bill Davies, the butcher, was there, and the three burly Gwatkin brothers.

'God preserve us,' one of them said and then turned away, embarrassed, his face already reddened in the glare from the church.

'It's down to you now,' Col said. He hoped to God the stone walls of the church would contain the fire so that it wouldn't spread into the town, but the heat was unbelievable; anything could happen. Crackling splinters – in fact, great burning brands – were being thrown off, and every so often there'd be a chaotic clanging of the bells.

'What we're going to do…' Col said. 'All over the churchyard, you'll see pieces of wood ablaze. I want six of you to get the ones you can handle at one end and bring them out. This is bloody dangerous, so be damned careful, but we've got to have light where we're going.'

'Why can't we just go 'ome and get torches?' a young lad of seventeen or eighteen, said.

'Do as he says, boy,' Bill Davies grunted. 'Nobody goes out of this street. You step into that square, you'll wish you'd stayed and burned.'

As a handful of men climbed over the churchyard wall, Bill Davies took Col aside. 'I'm not wrong, am I, Colonel?'

'Look, be a good chap…'

'Tell me. Colonel. I 'ave to know, see. Is it… in that square… Oh hell, is it the year 1593 over there, or is it an illusion? Is this town living an illusion, do you know?'

Joe Powys went up the stairs, past a small landing with an oak door four inches thick, which was open, revealing the stairs up to the attic.

Walking up the steps, towards the death-chamber of Michael Wort with what he believed to be the head of Michael Wort in a wooden box under his arm.

People like me would no more come up here alone, he remembered thinking, than pop into a working abattoir to shelter from the rain.

But you aren't alone, are you?

The box was heavy.

Trying to avoid touching the walls because the stone was slick with something that felt like mucous. Suspecting that if he switched off the lamp, it would glow on the stones, luminous.

And so he came, at last, to the alcove leading to the prospect chamber.

When he put down the box to open the door, he felt Rachel was standing at his side. Remembering being here with her. How two wafers of light from holes in the roof had crossed just above her head and he'd recalled her standing by the window of the room at the Cock, naked and pale and ethereal.

Now he could almost see her calm, silvery shade; they'd go hand in hand into the prospect chamber.

This… is the only part of the house I really like.

And together they'd take the head of Michael Wort back into the night.

He turned the metal handle and put his shoulder to the old, oak door.

New Age Heaven.

Blissful, blissful, blissful.

'I want to touch him,' the woman next to her cried. 'I want to bathe in him.'

Michael, Michael, MICHAEL, MICHAEL!

The Being of Light lifted his head and spread his arms to embrace his town. Bright people were gathering around him, both sexes, shimmering, all shapes and sizes, from the large, smiling man in the incandescent white suit to the tiny little lady, mouth opening in delight to reveal small, sharp white teeth, like a fish's, like… like…

Couldn't remember.

But she didn't want to remember. She'd never fell so warm and yet so free. She saw herself soaring above Crybbe, and the town was decked out in ribbons of soft, coloured light anchored by ice-bright, luminescent standing stones. Floating over square, she saw the old buildings in a lambent Christmas-card glow. But some of them were not so old, their timbers looked sturdy and neatly dovetailed, especially the inn, which had a simple strength and a sign with a large, rough beast upon it, and indeed, there were farm animals in the square around a cart with wooden wheels and sacks of grain on it. There was a cow, three horses, a pig. And a dog! Black and white like… like…

Couldn't remember.

'Fay.'

Who was Fay?

'Listen to me.'

'Yes,' she sang. 'Yes, yes, yes, I'm listening.'

But she had no intention of listening; this was the wrong voice. It didn't sound like a cello, it sounded old and frail, an ancient banjo, cracked and out of tune.

She laughed.

Everyone was laughing.

New Age Heaven.

'Fay,' Alex said into her ear. 'Listen to me, please.'

'Yes, yes, yes,' she sang. 'But you'll have to come with me. Can you float? Can you float like me?'

She wasn't floating. She was part of a group of thirty or forty people, hands linked, slowly and gloomily moving around in an untidy, irregular circle.

Alex could see most of them now, in the spluttering amber of the blazing church.

In the centre of the square, where, in many towns, there was a cross, a man stood. A tall man, stripped to the waist. He had dark, close-shaven hair and a black beard. His eyes were closed. He was sweating. His arms hung by his side but slightly apart from his body, the palms of his hands upturned. The ragged circle of people moved around him, anticlockwise.

The old buildings seemed to be leaning out of their foundations and into the firelight, like starved tramps at a brazier. The buildings had never looked more decrepit or as close to collapse.

Similarly, the people. Alex followed Fay around, walking behind her, peering into the faces of the men and women in the circle, horrified at how weak and drained they looked, some of them obviously ill. On one side of his daughter was a stocky man with a sagging belly and one eye badly bloodshot. He was moaning faintly and saliva dribbled down his chin. Fay's other hand lay limply in a flabby hand full of rings, obviously not very expensive ones, for they looked tarnished now and the joints of the fingers were swollen around them. The woman's hair was in wild, white corkscrews; her lips were drawn back into a frozen rictus; she was breathing in spurts through clenched teeth.

Diametrically opposite this woman, Alex saw Fay's ex-husband Guy Morrison, his blond hair matt-flat, exposing a large, white bald patch; his mouth down-turned, forming pouches of slack skin from his cheek to his once-proud jawline. Next to him a fat girl was sobbing inconsolably to herself as she moved sluggishly over the cobbles. On the other side of this girl, a thin woman with shorn hair was breathing with difficulty, in snorts, blood sparkling on her upper lip and around her nose, from which a small ring hung messily from a torn flap of skin, and every time she took a breath part of the ring disappeared into a nostril. She didn't seem aware of her physical distress; nor did any of the others.

'Fay,' Alex whispered.

Fay's skin was taut and pallid, her green eyes frozen open, her lips stretched in anguish, which made the words issuing from them all the more pathetic.

'Flying away, high, into the light. Can't keep up with me, can you?'

He didn't even try. He stood in the shadows and watched her drift away.

He'd had to stop himself from pulling her out of the circle. He had the awful feeling that he would simply detach her body, that her mind would remain in the ring and she would never get it back, would be a vegetable.

Which was the very worst thing of all; Alex knew this.

He stood and watched her for two more circuits of the square. A lurid flaring of amber from the dying church picked out that woman from The Gallery, ugly blue bruises around her throat, dried vomit on her chin, coughing weakly; couldn't see her husband.

Very gently he separated Fay's fingers from those of the woman next to her and slipped her small, cold right hand into his left. With his right hand he found the damp, fleshy finger of the white-haired woman.

And so Alex slipped into the circle and began to move slowly round.

He realized at once that he'd made a terrible, terrible mistake.

His legs began to feel heavy and cumbersome. At first he felt as if he'd stepped into a pair of Wellingtons several sizes too big and was wading in them through thick, muddy water, and then the weight spread up to his thighs – he was in the middle of a river in cumbersome waders – and finally it was as though both legs had been set in concrete; how he managed to move he didn't know, but he kept on, at funereal pace, his arms feeling limp as though the blood were draining away into the other hands, his life energy passed along the chain.

Progressive torpor. This was how it happened. Initiation ceremony. They were always saying, the newcomers, how much they wanted to fit in, become part of the community.

Now here they were, all these bright, clever, New Age folk, achieving overnight what some people waited years to attain.

All moving at last to the rhythm of Crybbe.