Crybbe aka Curfew

CHAPTER 1

THE digger was crunching through the wood like a rhino on heat, Gomer Parry at the wheel, grinning like a maniac, dead cigarette, burned to the filter, clenched between his teeth. Minnie Seagrove holding on to the makeshift passenger seat, which didn't have a working safety-belt, a three-legged black and white dog balancing, just about, on her knee and glaring out of the window, barking away.

This had all come about after they arrived back at Minnie's bungalow and Gomer, spotting the flames coming out of the town, reckoning it had to be the church, raced to Minnie's phone to summon the fire brigade and found the bloody old phone lines were down or something.

Anyway, the phone was off and so was the one in the kiosk by the layby.

'Something bloody funny yere.'

They'd climbed back into the digger, Gomer heading back towards the town, foot down, headlight blasting at the night and then – 'Oh my God, Gomer, look out!'

Bloody great wall of metal, Minnie's hands over her eyes, the dog going berserk and Gomer flattening the brakes and damn near wrenching the ole wheel out of its socket.

Flaming great articulated lorry had jack-knifed across the road at – precisely – the spot Gomer himself went adrift earlier on. Was this a coincidence? Like hell it was.

No sign of the driver, no blood in the cab, couldn't have been hurt, must've buggered off for help. So Gomer did this dynamite three-point turn and they were thundering off again.

'Gonna find out what the bloody 'ell's afoot, 'ang on to your knickers – sorry, Minnie, but I've 'ad enough o' this mystery. You can push Gomer Parry just so far, see.'

'Where are we going, Gomer?'

'Back way into Crybbe. Tradesman's entrance. Never done it all the way on four wheels before.'

And Gomer lit up a ciggy one-handed and spun the digger off the road and into the field, keeping well away from the Tump this lime, although he could tell it'd taken a hammering tonight, that ole thing, not got the power it had, see, just massive great lump of ole horseshit now, sorry Minnie.

So it was round the back of the Tump, back to the Court and into the wood.

'Ole bridle path, see.'

'But we can't get through here, Gomer.' Minnie no doubt wondering, by this time, why he didn't drop her off home. But it wasn't safe for a woman alone tonight. Besides, he liked an audience, did Gomer Parry. Not been the same since the wife snuffed it.

'If a 'orse can make it up here,' he told Minnie, 'Gomer Parry can do it in the best one-off, customized digger ever built.'

So now the digger was flattening bushes either side and ripping off branches. 'Five minutes gets us out the back, bottom end of the churchyard, and we can see what the score is…'

'Fuckin' Nora, what the 'ell's this?'

For the second time in ten minutes, Gomer was on top of the brakes and Minnie was pulling her nails off on the lumpy vinyl passenger seat.

The headlight'd found a bloody great stone right in the middle of the flaming road.

'Who the… put that thing there?' Gomer was out of his cab sizing up the stone, seven or eight feet tall but not too thick. Arnold, out of the cab, too, standing next to Gomer barking at the stone, looking up at Gomer, barking at the stone again.

'What you reckon to this then, boy?'

Woof, Arnold went. Smart dog.

'Dead right, boy,' said Gomer, looking up at the bright orange sky, like an early dawn 'cept for the sparks. 'Dead right.'

Back in the cab, Gomer lit up another ciggy, grinned like a potentially violent mental patient, and started to lower the big shovel.

And Fay, soaring above the town, far above the opalescent stones and the soft, pastel ribbons, felt a momentary lurch of nausea as the tallest, the brightest of the stones shivered, its radiance shaken, its magnesium-white core dying back to a feebly palpitating yellow.

The yellow of…

'… Fay…'

The yellow of…

'Please, F…'

The yellow of disease.

The yellow of embalming fluid.

The yellow of pus from an infected wound.

The yellow of Grace Legge.

'… Fay?'

'Dad?'

She turned and saw his face, and his skin looked as white as his hair and his beard. She saw him against what looked like the flames of hell, and his old blue eyes were full of so much mute pleading that they were almost shouting down this sick, dreadful chant.

Michael…

Michael…

MICHAEL…

MICHAEL!!!

screamed the

poor, stricken, gullible bastards in the circle, and she could see them now. She could see them. She was gripping her dad's hand, and she could see them all in the light of Hell, and hell was what they looked like.

Hell also was what Fay felt like.

Her lips were like parchment and when she tried to wet them she found her tongue was a lump of asbestos.

Michael, she wanted to say. It's Michael Wort.

But she couldn't even make it to a croak

Her eyes found the centre of the square, where the Being of Light was formed, pulsing with vibrant, liquid life energy, platinum-white.

Pulsing with energy, all right – their energy – but it was the very darkest thing she had ever seen in all of her life.

Andy Boulton-Trow, a tall, bearded man, just an ordinary man – once – had been fitted for a black halo; it shimmered around him like the sun in a monochrome photo negative.

The halo was the shadow of Black Michael. There were pinpoints of it in Trow's eyes which had flicked open and were looking steadily, curiously into hers.

She put all the strength she had into squeezing her dad's hand. It felt as cold as her own.

Trow did not move, his gaze like black velvet. Playing with her.

Who are you? the eyes were asking. Have we met?

The complete, charismatic, black evangelist.

Somehow, Fay had milked a little strength from her poor father, enough to observe and to make simple deductions.

You've had us all going around your Bottle Stone, haven't you? Children of the New Age. Follow anybody, won't they? Look at them now. Look at the Jopson woman, led by the ring in her nose and then – gentle tweak – you tear through her flesh, and she doesn't know or care. Look at bloody Guy – show him his own reflection in a mirror shaped like a TV screen and watch him slash his wrists. Look at Graham Jarrett, away in the ultimate hypnotic trance, lost his toupee and his nose needs wiping. Look at them. Look at what you've done.

Arteriosclerotic dementia.

You have good days. Sometimes you have two or three good days together and you realize what a hopeless old bugger you were the other day when the lift failed to make it to the penthouse.

And then, one night, along comes a very cunning lady with an amorphous Chinese blob on a lead (which, as you thought, does not exist, but why else would she be trailing a lead?) And all the time you're with her, you're fine, you're wonderful, you're on top of the situation.

Until it becomes apparent that the lady is a prominent member of the Opposition, planning a startling little coup in this dead-end backwater where surely nothing that happens can be of any significance in the Great Scheme of Things.

But old habits die hard. Once a priest…

Yes, all right, Guv, I confess, I've never exactly been up there with Mother Theresa and Pope John the Twenty-third. I've cut a few corners. I've coveted my neighbour's wife. OK, several wives of several neighbours, and it wouldn't be half so bad if it had only stopped at the coveting stage. I was weak. I used to think it was OK, as long as you left the choirboys alone, but I was never attracted to choirboys, anyway, obnoxious little sods.

Here, Boss, scrap of prayer for you, this'll bring back a few memories.

Oh God, merciful Father, that despisest not the sighing of a contrite heart…

Got the message? I'm sorry… I really am sorry.

Listen, I know about the Sins of the Fathers. I know all about that.

But not Fay, please – look at her; what has she ever done to you?

Thing is – look, don't take this the wrong way, but no God of mine ever took it out on the kids. That's more his god's style. Can you see him there? He represents everything you're supposed to abhor. And he's winning, damn it, the bastard's winning!

OK, here's another bit, how much do you want, for Christ's sake? Listen, this… this is the essence of it.

Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, O Lord, and by Thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night…

Lighten our darkness, geddit?

Come on, Guv'nor… we had a deal…

The stone actually broke. Cracked in two.

Split off a couple of feet from the base just as Gomer was getting underneath. Raised the shovel to ground level to have another go and gave it a bit of a clonk, accidental-like, and off it came like a thumb in a bacon-slicer. Gomer backed up, smartish, but luckily the big bugger fell the other way, straight flat across the road. Whump!

'Teach me to rush ihe job, Minnie. 'Ang on to your, er…hat.'

Slipping down to low gear he drove right over the thing. Bit of a bump, but not much worse than one of them ramps they call a sleeping policeman.

'A big fat sleeping policeman.' Gomer burst out laughing. 'Call it Wynford Wiley.'

There were big, fat tyre-marks across the middle of the stone. Gomer accelerated past Keeper's Cottage with a disparaging sideways glance. That could do with knocking down, too.

There was the merest tremor in Trow's gaze; enough for her to pull her eyes away. Turned to her father and found that Hilary Ivory on the other side, had also turned her face, with faint confusion, towards the old man in the Kate Bush T-shirt.

Alex tried to smile. He couldn't speak.

Hilary looked at Fay, her eyes troubled. She didn't understand. The first step to recovery – the moment when, quite suddenly, you don't understand.

But Alex's hands were warm.

Dad?

A deep warmth seeped into Fay's right hand and rippled up her arm and into her breast. She could feel her heart drumming.

Alex's eyes were vibrantly blue. They made the fire in the sky look cheap and lurid. He turned his head towards Hilary lvory and she started to smile, like people smile when they're coming out of anaesthetic.

Alex's hand tightened around Fay's.

Fay grinned.

'You old bugger,' she said, quite easily.

On the other side, Larry Ember, recipient of the warmth from her own left hand, demanded gruffly, 'What the bleedin' hell's this?'

Alex's lips were white. Almost as white as the beard around them. First they tried to smile, then they were trying to shape a word.

'C…'

His hands hot now, but his lips were white.

'Dad?'

Fay squeezed his hand, almost too hot to hold.

She felt strong enough to risk a glance to the centre of the square where Trow was no longer still, but moving within his own darkness. Squirming.

Trow screamed once,

'Michael!'

The cello grotesquely off-key.

Alex found his word.

'Colonel?' he said mildly, and the piercing blue faded from his eyes; clouds were in them now. He dropped Hilary's hand, held on to Fay's for an extra moment and then let that go too.

There was a gap now between Fay and her dad, a clear gap in the circle, and the backcloth, the screen of false reality, was torn away and the flames in the sky were no longer phantasmal but a source of savage heat and acrid fumes.

'Now.' Col Croston's crisp voice, and the Crybbe hordes poured through the gap, bearing their flaming torches, farmers in tweed trousers and sleeveless body-warmers over their vests, Bill Davies, incongruously clad in his butcher's apron, Wynford Wiley ludicrously wielding his truncheon. Faces she'd seen on the streets – 'Ow're you, 'ow're you' – now hard with determination below the blazing brands. The circle in disarray.

Lights appearing in windows. From somewhere in the innards of the Cock, the sound of a generator starting up.

Col Croston, bringing up the rear, scanning the square.

'Over there! That's the man. The Sheriff! Don't let him…'

The Sheriff?

'Right!' Fav was screaming. 'The Sheriff! He's in the cen…'

But she couldn't, in fact, see the man they were looking for. Andy Boulton-Trow had gone from the square.

He's taken his darkness back into the night.

'Larry! Camera!'

Guy was in a mess. He'd lost his jacket, lost his cool, lost his hair. 'Larry, we have to get this…'

'Piss off, Guy,' Larry Ember shouted happily, from somewhere.

Fay found she was giggling. Hysterics. Absurd.

'Dad?'

Alex managed a smile.

'Dad… We did it! You did it.'

Alex touched her arm, stumbled. Sat down quietly on the cobbles. Fay went down beside him, taking his hand.

Which was not so hot any more, not very hot at all. The blue in his eyes had drifted away. Far away. Gently and discreetly, Alex slid over on to his side. He was breading. Just. Hilary Ivory crouched down next to Fay. 'Is he OK? I used be a… a nurse… Well, sort of alternative nurse, really.'

Fay didn't reply. She pulled off her cotton top, rolled it into a ball, slid it between Alex's head and the cobbles.

'Dad?' Softly.

Fairly sure he couldn't hear her.

She picked up his hand; very little warmth remained. Alex's lips moved and she put an ear to his mouth. One word came out intact.

'Deal,' he said.

Alex's breathing ended almost imperceptibly.

Fay sat for a long time on the cobbles holding her father's cooling hand under the hot red sky.

CHAPTER II

A single candle burned in the attic at Crybbe Court. It was two inches thick and sat in a blackened pewter candle-holder with a tray, laid on the topmost stone step. It was a tallow candle and it stank; it filled the roofspace with a pungent organic stench; it reeked, somehow, of death.

Or perhaps this was because of the wan and waxy aura it gave to the rope.

The old, frayed rope which had hung from the central joist in the attic was gone. Its replacement was probably just as old, but was oily and strong. An inch thick, it dangled four feet from the apex of the roof, and at the end was a noose, a very traditional hangman's noose secured with ten rings of rope. It was into this noose that Andy Boulton-Trow fitted his head.

He had, it would emerge, studied hanging.

The original short-drop method, with the rope only a few feet long and the condemned person's feet almost touching the ground, resulted in a rather prolonged death by slow strangulation. Whereas the long-drop system, introduced in Britain in the late nineteenth century, by which the subject fell about ten feet, perhaps through a trapdoor, brought about a swifter and more merciful death by fracturing neck vertebrae. In the sixteenth century, it appeared. Sir Michael Wort had experimented with both techniques and others besides.

A trapdoor had been constructed in the attic floor, originally to dispose of bodies after execution by dropping them into a narrow, windowless, well-like chamber directly underneath.

In later years, more squeamish owners of the house had boarded over the trapdoor space, but the floor remained weak at this point, the boards had rotted, there were cracks. When Andy Boulton-Trow stood on the beam, nearly two feet thick, from which the executees – and Sir Michael himself – had taken a final step, he could see a few jagged black holes below his feet.

First, he had taken off his shoes and his trousers, so that he stood naked now in the candlelight with the noose loosely around his neck.

For the purposes of magical projection, a modification of the short-drop method was the most appropriate. That it had worked, to a significant extent, for Michael had been amply demonstrated to Andy tonight. Andy, who had spent twice as many years as Michael in study and preparation, was warm after his sprint through the wood, still angry at the damage to the stone and the debacle in the square. But the night was churning with chaos, and out of chaos…

There was little time to waste. He was hot inside, with excitement and anticipation.

To make sure everything was still in working order, he and Humble had once hanged a fisherman Humble had chanced upon, casting alone into the upper reaches of the river. It had not really been necessary, but Humble had enjoyed it.

Just as Humble would enjoy watching Andy hang. So why wasn't he here?

Perhaps he was. Humble could be quite discreet.

Andy put both hands behind his head and tightened and adjusted the noose under his chin. It was so easy to make a mistake.

He stood on the floor-joist in the candlelight and began to visualize, to bring himself to the necessary state of arousal.

He visualized the woman who'd looked at him across the square, telling him with her eyes that she was slipping out of the enchantment. Andy smiled; he would return for her one night, quite soon perhaps.

A small wind drifted through the holes in the slates; there was no wind tonight.

'Good evening, Michael,' Andy said. 'Again.'

He closed his eyes, and Michael was within him once more – a now familiar sensation. In his solar plexus he felt a stillness which was also a stirring, and there was the familiar small tug at the base of his spine.

In time, the walls of the Court evaporated, and he saw the town at his feet. He held back, and the vapours rose within him. He felt the blazing chaos that was Crybbe, the dissolution of barriers, the merging of the layers, one with another, the lower levels open to the higher levels, the atmosphere awash with spirit.

He felt his destination.

And when the time was right, he stepped lightly from the beam.

There was a bright light, a widening carpet of light, and something rolling along it, towards him.

This was the first thing he was really aware of after he stepped into space and the noose tightened above his Adam's apple.

There was no pain, only darkness and then the carpet of night and the thing that was rolling.

Rolling very slowly at first, but its momentum was increasing. And then he was staring into the face of Michael Wort.

The eyes had gone. The lips had gone. There was some hair, but not much; most of the beard had disappeared. There were gaps in the ghastly brown and yellow grin; few people in Michael's day had kept their teeth beyond middle age.

'Michael,' he said eventually.

The noose was still around his neck but it was slack. There was no pain in speech.

Behind the lamp, he saw a pair of sneakers and legs in muddy jeans.

'He came with me,' Joe Powys said. 'He couldn't manage the steps on his own.'

Andy had smashed through the floor, spinning and twisting. He'd screamed once, but it had sounded more like triumph than terror, suggesting he was unaware of anything having gone wrong.

Well, you wouldn't be, if this was the first time you'd hanged yourself.

The way he was lying in the centre of the windowless, stone chamber was bent, unnatural. Powys said, with little concern, 'Can you move?'

'I don't know,' Andy said, his feelings sheathed. 'What did you do?'

'I saved your life.'

'Thanks,' Andy said. 'You fucker.'

Powys said nothing. He was shaking.

'Humble,' Andy said, after a while. 'He was supposed to have killed you.'

'Yeah?'

'He will.'

'Can't see it,' Powys said, 'somehow.'

He had the feeling both of them were in shock. He put a hand out to the wall; it was dry again, and dusty. The Court was a dead place again. The room was narrow enough for there to be an enforced intimacy, and yet there was a distance, too, because the Court was dead.

'I nearly killed myself, though,' he said, still appalled enough at what might have happened to want to hear himself talk about it. 'Seems absolutely bloody insane when I look back, but I had this idea that the only way I could straighten this out was to take the head up to the prospect chamber and hurl us both out. I couldn't have been thinking straight. Well, obviously. But you don't, do you, in these situations?'

'And what stopped you,' Andy asked him, 'from killing yourself?'

Powys smiled weakly. 'Couldn't get in. The door in the alcove was locked, and there was a sign that said: Danger. Keep Out.'

The final bitter irony. Rachel had saved his life. He'd stood outside the door, on the greasy stairs, and felt her there again, cool and silvery. You really can do better than this, J.M.

'So then I saw the light in the attic. Thought maybe you were up there, but there was only one rope. Hate nooses. Went back outside and broke into the stable-block, through window, with a brick. I pinched a bread knife. Brought it up to the attic and sawed through most of the rope until it was just hanging together by a few threads. Where I'd cut it, I covered it up with the coils of the noose.'

He saw that Andy was thinking very hard, the muscles in his face working.

'I figured it out,' Powys said. 'It came clear. When I saw the noose. You were going to do' – he pointed a foot at the head – 'what he did. On the four-hundredth anniversary of his death. I couldn't believe it at first. I can't understand that level of obsession.'

'Of course you can't.' Andy glanced up at him, eyes heavy with contempt. 'You puny little cunt.'

'We're talking sex magic, aren't we? I was once at a signing session for Golden Land. Some regional book fair, and one of the other writers there was this retired pathologist. He said, apropos of something, that a remarkable number of hangings which look like suicide are actually accidents. Blokes – or teenage kids in a lot of cases – trying for this uniquely mind-blowing sexual buzz you're supposed to get from hanging by the neck.

Like, when the rope jerks, you jerk off down there, too. That it?'

Andy said nothing. Powys could see him trying surreptitiously to move different muscles.

'And with sex magic, you use the build up of sexual tension to harden and focus your will. And then, at the moment of orgasm… whoosh. Max Goff used to play about with it. Who taught him? You?'

Andy was stretching his neck, easing it from side to side.

'Sex and death. Hell of a powerful combination. This was how Black Michael pro…'

'Don't call him that,' Andy snapped.

'This was how Sir Michael Wort…' Bloody hell, Joe Powys always does what he's told… 'This was how Black fucking Michael projected himself into Crybbe, fused his spirit with the spirit of the town so that the town is the man is the town is the…'

Andy stopped trying to flex muscles and stared at Powys in the electric lamplight, and his eyes were so strange that Powys wasn't sure any more which of them he was talking to, Andy or Michael. But, clearly, the stage Andy had been striving to reach was something that went beyond personalities.

'What did it really mean, though?' Powys said. 'Was it simply a quest for eternal power? Some kind of semi-physical immortally?'

You have to fracture the cool, he remembered telling himself. To damage this guy, you have to tip his balance, dislodge him from his mental lotus position. Even lying there, with unknown injuries, he can, maybe, still take you unawares.

'Or is it,' Powys said casually, 'just the ultimate ego-trip? Getting your end away from beyond the grave?'

He had to look away. The blackness from Andy's eyes came out like iron spikes.

Iron spikes. Images of Rose cruelly speared his own cool and he stared back into the eyes of the thing that had dispassionately manipulated their fate.

'I can't move,' Andy said suddenly, the first sign of human panic, 'I can't fucking move, Joe. I can't move my arms or legs. I'm fucking paralysed.'

'What I think…' Powys remembered conversations with Barry the osteopath, his neighbour in the Trackways building '… is your back was broken in the fall. You can obviously move your neck. What about your shoulders? Try shrugging your shoulders.'

Andy's shoulders convulsed. There was a sudden sheen of sweat on his body.

'How's your breathing?'

'I can breathe.'

'In that case,' Powys said slowly and callously, 'you'll probably be what's known as a tetraplegic. It won't be much fun, but no doubt a lot of innocent people'll be saved a lot of grief by your confinement in Stoke Mandeville or wherever you wind up.'

'You're a worthless piece of shit, Joe.'

'Me? I'm shit?'

'You couldn't even kill me.'

'You're safer like this. Dead, you could be a problem.'

Andy turned his head and looked into the eye-sockets of Black Michael. As an exercise in mummification, Powys thought, Michael had turned out to be rather less impressive than Tiddles.

He said, 'Where are the other bits buried?'

'Why should I tell you that?'

'The head, naturally, was in the Tump. Did you ever go into the Tump? Physically, I mean.'

'No.'

'And the genitals are under the Cock. Walled up somewhere in the cellars, I'd guess, somewhere directly beneath that passageway leading to the studio. The heart under the church – is there a crypt?'

Andy didn't reply.

'And who would have buried your bits, Andy, after the hanging? Humble?'

'Where is Humble? Occurring to Andy, perhaps, that there might be more wrong than he knew.

Powys said, 'What's happening down in the town? What's on fire?'

'Not my problem,' Andy said.

'You're beyond me.' He was getting impatient. And nervous. He was face to face with the man who'd smashed his life and all he wanted to do was get out of here. Call an ambulance, anonymously. Man with a broken back. Tried to hang himself. Take him away.

Yet there were things he had to know.

'Look… I mean… For Christ's sake, why? Is your mother behind this?'

'What?'

'Jean Wendle.'

Andy laughed. It wasn't a very strong laugh, suggesting his breathing was not, after all, unaffected. 'There's no blood link between Jean and me. She's my spiritual mother, if you like. It's a concept you wouldn't understand.'

'Which of you is the descendant, then?'

'Listen… Jean had been studying Wort for years, right? There's almost… this kind of Michael Wort Society. Very exclusive, Joe. Not for the New Age morons. Not for the wankers. Not for the… authors of popular trash books. Not for the… the fucking popularisers. For the Few. And now…'

Andy began to cough.

'I can't feel that,' he said. 'I can't feel it in my guts, you know?'

'And now… what?'

'The New Age.' He gave a short, wheeze of a laugh. 'Suddenly this… worldwide movement dedicated to throwing esoteric knowledge at the masses. Max Goff – millions of pounds to…'

'So you hijacked Goff?'

'Well put. Yeah, I hijacked Goff. He loved me. In all kinds of ways.'

'To provide the money and the psychic energy you needed to condition Crybbe for the Second Coming of Black Michael.'

Andy grimaced. 'Let's get this right, there was no Second Coming. We were just completing Michael's plan. I've had access to all his papers since I was sixteen, and to the people who could explain what it all meant. And then it got to the stage where I knew more than any of them. We were completing the plan. Patching up the damage John Dee did. Also, removing the Preece problem and altering the psychic climate.'

'Stirring things up. Emotional conflict. Anger, bitterness and confusion.'

'We awoke the place,' Andy said, 'from centuries of sleep. An unhealthy, drugged sort of sleep. Psychic Mogadon, self administered. I've been planting little time bombs, like… OK, I took a job for a few months, teaching art at the local high school. I wanted a girl. I wanted to take a girl living in Crybbe and turn her. There was a perfect one – I mean, this happens, Joe, there's always somebody there who fits, and she was entirely perfect. I worked with this kid over a year. I taught her to paint, I mean really paint…'

'In your studio. In the wood.'

'Sure. I taught her the arts. The real arts. You give them a little at that age, they become quite insatiable. She was a natural. She can make paintings that become doorways… But that's something else. Also, I used her… to penetrate the Preece clan. And in the heart of the Crybbe household, I – well, Michael and I – we created the most wonderful little monster, a creature entirely without heart, dedicated to destruction. In the heart of the Preece household. Again, ripe for it. Warren Preece. Maybe you'll meet him. Everybody ought to meet Warren.'

'You're a scumbag, Andy,' Powys said.

'So kill me,' Andy said quietly.

There was silence in the little well-like cell, its ceiling jaggedly open to the attic.

'You still got that bread knife? Kill me. Cut my throat. It's that easy. Even Warren managed to cut Max Goff's throat tonight, with a Stanley knife.'

'What?'

'You didn't know about Max? He was killed in the public meeting during a power cut. It was quite beautiful. And perhaps the most beautiful thing of all is that when this is all over, who's going to get the blame for this orgy of destruction? The New Age movement. You've got to laugh. Warren says that. Got to laugh.'

Powys said coldly, 'You're insane. Your brains have turned to shit. I'll get you an ambulance.'

'No, you'll kill me, Joe.'

'Like I said, I wouldn't trust you dead.'

'You'll kill me. Look, you're squeamish about knives, use the rope. Strangle me. No hassle. I'm weak, I'll go easy. It'll just look like I hanged myself and the rope broke.'

He'd almost forgotten the noose still hanging loosely around Andy's neck. Hesitantly, he walked across, began to remove the rope, trying not to touch Andy's skin. 'Just in case you're lying about not being able to move your arms. Hate you to try and do it yourself.'

Andy grinned, white teeth exploding through the beard.

'Do it!'

'No.'

'OK, something you didn't know. Rose, right? Poor spiked little Rosie. And the baby was spiked too, yeah? Your baby, Joe?'

Powys shook his head. 'I've got past that. I don't want to kill you for that. I'm happy you're going to be a paraplegic or a tetraplegic. I hope your breathing degenerates, you'll be even safer in an iron lung.'

'It wasn't your baby, Joe.'

His hands froze on the rope.

'I'd been fucking Rose quite intensively for several months. I've always found I can get any woman, any man… I want. Part of the Wort legacy, if you will. Also, it was my understanding that, come bedtime, the great visionary writer's creative imagination would tend to go into abeyance, and so…'

Powys wrenched down the noose, jerked Andy's head back, slammed the knot tight into the back of the neck. Andy grinned up at him; even the whites of his eyes were almost black.

Abruptly, Joe Powys let the rope go slack and pulled the noose over Andy's head.

'I'll get you an ambulance,' he said.

CHAPTER III

Gomer couldn't get near the church, least not within thirty- yards. Not much he could have done, though, anyway. Be a long time before that ole place saw another service. If ever. Roof mostly gone, windows long gone. Still some flames – plenty of wood in the nave, pews and stuff, to keep them well-nourished for some hours yet – but the worst was over. The stone walls would stay up, and so would the tower, even it wasn't much more than a thick chimney by now.

'Bugger-all use fetchin' the fire brigade,' Gomer concluded.

'Burned 'imself out, see.' He turned to his companion; no way of hedging round any of this. 'Pardon me askin' this, but your Jonathon – was 'e gonner be cremated anyway, like? 'Cause, if 'e 'ad to…'

'Gonner be buried. And he still will be, whatever's left.'

They'd come upon Jimmy Preece sitting on the low part of the churchyard wall watching the fire. The digger had crunched out of the wood and there the old feller was, hunched up, knotted and frazzled like a rotting tree stump, sounding like it was gonner take Dyno-Rod to clear his lungs. And it was clear, straight off to Gomer that nothing happening tonight would have been a mystery to Jimmy Preece.

'Who done this, Jim?' he asked bluntly. 'And don't give me no bull.'

Arnold the dog limped over to Jimmy Preece and stood there, watchful. Jimmy Preece leaned down, hesitated for several seconds and then patted him. Arnold wagged his tail, only twice and just as hesitant, and then plodded off. Gomer had the feeling this was a very strange thing, momentous-like and patting a dog was only pan of what it was about.

'I'm glad,' the Mayor said, to nobody in particularly. 'Wish I was dead, but I'm glad. Couldn't go on, see.'

'What couldn't?'

'You're not a Crybbe man, Gomer, is the problem.'

'Well, hell, Jim, I'm only a few miles up the valley, born an' bred.'

'Not a Crybbe man,' Jimmy Preece said firmly. Gomer was near fuming.

'Who done it, Jim? Too late for all that ole crap. Just bloody spit it out.'

Something gave. Jim's grimy face wobbled and what had looked like a smear of thick oil down one side of it gleamed in the firelight and didn't look like oil any more. When he opened his mouth the words oozed out in a steady stream.

'Same one as run your bulldozer in the wall, same one as slashed my face, same one as left me to suffocate, same one as… as done for Jonathon.'

The Mayor looked away. 'Pretended I was dead, see – didn't take a lot o' pretendin' Wanted to close the ole door to the tower, keep the fire out, last duty, see. Then I was gonner lie down. Next to Jonathon.'

Gomer saw Minnie Seagrove trying to climb out of the digger and held up a hand to tell her to stay where she was.

'Couldn't do it,' Jimmy Preece said, studying his boots now. 'Not got the guts. Fire too hot. Ole body sayin', get me out o' yere. Ole body allus wins.'

'Where is 'e, Jim?' Gomer had no doubts who they were talking about any more. 'Where is e? Dead?'

'That's all I got left to hope for,' said Jimmy Preece. 'But I reckon we've long ago given up all rights to hope. In Crybbe.'

'Jim…' Gomer feeling sorry for him now, town falling apart, family collapsing round his ears. 'I'd like to 'elp.'

The Mayor stared for a long time into the ruined church before he replied.

'You reallv wanner do some'ing, Gomer?'

'What I said.'

'Then get rid of all these bloody stones for me. Do it before morning, while every bugger's otherwise engaged, like. Whip 'em out. Make it like so's they was never yere, know what I'm askin'?'

'Tall order,' said Gomer. 'Still… Only I don't know where they all are. Seen a couple around, like.'

'I'll tell you where they are. Every one of 'em.'

'Might mean goin' on people's property, though, isn't it? Trespassin'.'

'Depends on what you thinks of as other people's property, isn't it?'

'Course, if it was an official council contract, like…'

'Consider it an official council contract,' said Jimmy Preece wearily.

They carried Alex into The Gallery, Joe Powys and the capable looking guy who'd introduced himself as Col Croston.

He was quite a weight.

'Obviously too much for his heart,' Col said. 'And it was a hell of a big heart. How old was he?'

'Old,' Fay said distantly. 'Pushing ninety.' She sniffed. 'Pushed too hard.'

Alex had still been lying on the cobbles when Powys had stumbled uncertainly into the square, seemingly bringing the lights with him – the power was back. He'd walked past Wynford Wiley and Wiley had hardly glanced at him. Guy Morrison had nodded and said nothing. He'd gone directly to where Fay sat, close to the steps of the Cock, guarding her father's body like a mute terrier. 'I thought you were going to be dead, too,' was all she'd said, and then had laughed – unnaturally, he thought, and he wasn't entirely surprised.

They put Alex on the only flat, raised surface in The Gallery, the display window, under mini-spotlights. He looked peaceful, laid out with pictures. 'He'd hate that,' Fay mumbled. 'Looking peaceful.'

'Don't suppose,' Col Croston said, 'that there's much I can say, is there? The awful thing is, nobody will ever know what he achieved in the last few minutes of his life. Even I can't begin to explain it, and I was there. And I know…' He broke off, looking uncharacteristically lost. 'I don't know what I know, really. I'm sorry.'

'He won't mind,' Fay said. 'It was quick, and he never became a vegetable, did he? That was all he was scared of. The geriatric ward. He might have done something silly. Like half a bottle of malt whisky and some pills, or a last train to Soho or somewhere, with a view to departing in the arms of some… ageing harlot.'

She's rambling, Powys thought. She's blocking it out. Her body's producing natural Valium. Everybody has a breaking point.

From behind them, a small, raw cry.

After letting them in, the woman who ran The Gallery, Mrs Newsome, had remained silently in the doorway, leaving Powys wondering about the weals and bruising on her throat.

Now she was pointing at a door to the left of the glass counter. It was a white door, but there were marks and smears all over it now, in red.

Col saw the blood, flung out an arm to hold everyone back, snapped, 'What's behind there?'

'He…' It wasn't easy for her to talk and her voice, when it emerged, was like a crow's. Hereward's workroom.'

'Anybody in there,' Col called out harshly, 'will get back against the wall and keep very still. Understood?'

The marks on the door included smeared fingerprints and one whole palmprint.

'Mrs Newsome, have you any idea…?'

The act of shaking her head looked as painful as talking.

Col shrugged and nodded. 'Everybody keep back then,' he said and hit the door with a hard, flat foot, directly under the handle. Powys wondered why he didn't simply open it. Shock value, he supposed, as the door splintered open and Col jumped back and went into a crouch.

'Oh, Christ.' Powys stared into the shadowed face of the man he'd left fifteen minutes earlier lying crippled in the centre of a little stone chamber.

Remembered thinking as he'd run out of the Court that Andy might not be so badly injured as he appeared. That someone practised in yoga and similar disciplines might be able to contort his body sufficiently to simulate a broken spine.

But Powys hadn't gone back. He'd kept on running all the way to the car and then driven to the phone box on the edge of town. Which worked, thank God. 'Ambulance, yes. And… police, I suppose. And the fire brigade. In fact, send the lot, Jesus. In force.'

'God in heaven,' Col Croston was saying. 'Don't come in, Mrs Newsome."

The face, Powys saw with short-lived relief, was only in a very large painting – Andy dressed in the kind of sombre clothing Michael Wort might have worn, standing by a door meaningfully ajar. Powys remembered Andy talking about the girl, the artist, who could 'create doorways'. With that in mind he didn't look at it again. But what was beneath it was worse

The unframed canvas was hanging on the wall above a wooden workbench with sections of frames strewn across it and fastened to the side, a large wood-vice with a metal handle and wooden jaws.

The vice would hold a piece of soft timber firmly, without damaging it, unless you really leaned on the handle, in which case it would probably squash anything softer than iron.

Powys nearly choked. He didn't go in. Blood was still dripping to the sawdusted floor and there were deltas down the walls made by high-pressure crimson jets.

The dead man was on his knees, the jaws of the vice clamped like the hands of a faith-healer either side of this giant red pepper, his head, once.

Powys's stomach lurched like a car doing an emergency stop.

Col Croston emerged expressionless, pulling the door closed behind him. 'Mrs Newsome… Let's get some air, shall we?'

Her face began to warp. Col Croston took her arm and steered her into the square. Powys quickly closed the door behind them and stood with his back to it; he didn't want to hear this.

'What's in there?' Fay said from far away.

'A body.'

'Is it Hereward? Hereward Newsome?'

'Hard to say, he's been… damaged. And I don't know him. And if I did, it wouldn't help. Look, Fay, can we…?'

'Warren Preece,' Fay said, as if this explained everything. 'I expect Warren Preece did it.'

She took a last disbelieving look at her dad and watched Powys flick off the lights. She didn't move. He took her hand and towed her into the street. She went with him easily, like one of those toy dogs on wheels. From down the hill, across the river, blue emergency beacons were strobing towards the town with a warble of sirens.

Powys pulled Fay into a side-street. 'It'd be a bit daft to leave town, but I'd rather not be the first in line to make a police statement, would you?'

'Where shall we go?'

'My cottage?' They were in a street of narrow terraces and no lights. 'Or your house?'

'I suppose it is my house now,' Fay said, still sounding completely disconnected. 'Unless Dad's left it to some mysterious totty. I mean… I don't want it. I'll take the cats, but I'm not having Grace. Can you give a house to charity?'

He took hold of her upper arms, gently. 'Fay, please.'

She looked at him in mild enquiry, her green eyes calm as rock pools at low tide.

'I need you,' Powys said, and he hadn't meant to say that.

Fay said, 'Do vou?' from several miles away.

He nodded. They seemed to have been through years of experience together in about two days.

He'd tried to explain briefly what had happened. About the Tump, the head in the box. About Andy. Not about Jean Wendle; it wasn't the time.

What he wanted to tell her now was that something had been resolved. He wanted to say reassuring things about her dad.

But as he reached out for her he felt his body breaking up into awful, seismic shivers. It's not over – the words squeezed into his brain like the fragmented skull of the man in the vice - it's not over.

CHAPTER IV

Joe had left the candle behind.

Taken the lamp but brought the candle down from the attic and left it on the floor in the open doorway, well out of the reach of Andy Boulton-Trow.

The candlelight would guide the paramedics with their stretcher to the room where Andy lay, feeling no pain, only frigid fury which he knew he had to contain if he were to preserve the legacy.

Andy fancied he could hear distant sirens; didn't have much time. He picked up the head of Michael Wort and held it above him – oh, yes, he could use his arms, he'd lied about that. But not his legs; he couldn't feel his legs or his lower body, only the bubbling acid of rage which he would have to control and channel.

'Michael,' he hissed, and his lungs fell very small and also oddly detached, as though they were part of some ancillary organism.

The head of Michael Won had no eyes, his remaining teeth were bare, its skin reduced to pickled brown flakes. But the skull was hard.

Andy looked deep into the dark sockets and summoned the spirit of the man who, four hundred years ago this night, had dared to seize the Infinite.

'Dewch,' he whispered, 'Tyrd i lawr, Michael.' He lay back and – balancing the head on his solar plexus – closed his eyes, slowed his breathing, began to visualise with an intensity he'd never known. 'Tyrd I lawr.'

The first police car arrived as they approached the bridge. Joe didn't want to cross at first, in case they were stopped. Joe was a worrier. Fay didn't see any problem.

And the car didn't stop.

As the police car warbled away, she remembered something. 'Where's Arnold?'

'Mrs Seagrove's looking after him. He's… Well, I'll tell you. Some time.'

Some time? Fay looked at him curiously. Then said to herself, My father's dead. Every time she thought of something else, she was going to make herself repeat this, with emphasis.

What she wanted was to be suddenly overcome with immeasurable grief, to sob bitterly, throw a wobbly in the street.

No parents at all any more. No barrier. In the firing line now. Stand up, Fay Morrison. Bang.

Bang.

Bang!

Fay stopped. MY DAD'S DEAD.

Yes. But that wasn't the whole point. This was Crybbe. In Crybbe, death wasn't necessarily the worst thing that could happen to you. He'd looked peaceful under the gallery spotlights, with the paintings. But was he at peace, or was he going to bang around, like Grace, as some kind of psychic detritus?

Was this the destiny of the dead of Crybbe, to moulder on, like the town?

'Psychic pollution,' she said suddenly. 'What can you do about psychic pollution?'

She peered over the bridge parapet, down to where the dark water loitered indolently around the stone buttresses.

'Nuclear waste you can just about bury,' she said. 'Hundreds of feet underground in immovable granite. And, maybe, after four hundred years…'She straightened up. 'You know, I really underestimated the… the toxicity of this town.'

Joe was staring at her. I need you, he'd said, the words sounding strange. Probably because nobody had actually said that to her before. Not her dad, not Offa's Dyke Radio, not even her old boss at Radio Four. Certainly not Guy. (We could be good for each other, Fay.) No. Nobody.

She looked at Joe in the light of the streetlamp at the end of the bridge. She thought he was a nice guy. She could, in better circumstances, be quite seriously attracted to him.

He still looked sort of wary, though.

'Maybe they were right,' he was saying, 'with their curfew and their Crybbe mentality. Maybe it was the best they could do. Maybe they just hadn't got the knowledge or the resources to handle it.'

'Handle what exactly, Joe?'

'I don't know. I don't suppose we'll ever know. Whatever… properties it has. To amplify things. The Old Golden Land. Where psychic doorways are easy to open.'

'And pretty near impossible to close.'

'John Dee knew it,' Joe said. 'Wort knew it. Just goes a lot deeper than either of them probably imagined. When you think about it, the great Michael Wort was probably just another loony. Like Andy. He didn't know what the fuck he was doing either.'

They were approaching the cottage which overlooked the river.

Fay said, without thinking about it, 'Is that the Bottle Stone I can hear?'

'What?'

'Thin drone, like the hum from a pylon.'

'I can't hear anything.'

'Probably nothing.'

'Probably,' he said uncertainly. 'Funny, isn't it? We build up this big theory about Black Michael, and because he was four hundred years ago we think he's some kind of god. But he was just another… just another pollutant.'

Out of the night came a slow clapping of hands. Ironic, essentially mocking applause.

'Persuasively argued, Joe,' Jean Wendle said.

Joe Powys froze.

Jean Wendle was leaning against the cottage wall. She was wearing a pink velour tracksuit, She looked elegant and relaxed.

Two police cars went rapidly past, followed by a fire-engine.

Joe froze, and Fay sensed it wasn't because of the police cars, not this time.

'But quite wrong,' said Jean. 'And you know it.'

He didn't say anything.

'Michael Wort,' said Jean, 'had one of the finest of the Renaissance minds. Scientist, philosopher… these terms simply cannot encompass Michael's abilities. We no longer like to use words like magus, but that's what he was, and the reason he isn't as famous as Francis Bacon and Giordano Bruno and even – God forbid – John Dee… is that he realized the futility of books and so never wrote any. And also, of course, he lived not in Florence or Rome, or even London. But in Crybbe.'

Fay could see Joe trying to say something, trying to frame words.

'If he never wrote anything,' he said, 'how do you know he was so great?'

'Because,' said Jean, 'like all great teachers, he passed on his knowledge through training and through experience.'

Another police car went past, followed by another fire-engine.

'There's a Michael Wort tradition,' Jean said. 'It began with his own family, and then was passed to selected scholars.'

'What kind of tradition?'

'Fascinating stuff,' Jean said. 'All to do with the spirit landscape, and the interpenetration of planes. Knowledge we are only now beginning to approach.'

'They called him Black Michael,' Fay said.

'As they would. In Crybbe.'

'He hanged people.'

'He studied death, and he utilized his period as high sheriff to pursue that study. That was all.'

How bizarre. Fay thought. All hell breaking loose up in the town and here we are, three uncommitted observers from Off, calmly discussing the background as if it's a piece of theatre.

'Knowledge,' said Jean, 'isn't evil.'

'And what about what happened on the square? What about the killing of Max Goff? What about…?'

'You know, as I do, my dear, that there are some very misguided and unbalanced people in Crybbe, and there always have been. People Michael was trying to help.'

'I didn't know,' Fay said, 'that you knew so much about Michael Wort.'

'You didn't ask,' said Jean. Her short grey hair shone like a helmet in the street light.

'Fay…' Joe said.

'Joe's trying to tell you to come away,' Jean said. 'He doesn't want to end what he began.'

'Which is?'

'The Bottle Stone,' Jean said gently. 'Come and see the Bottle Stone.'

'No!' Joe backed away.

'He blames it for everything,' Jean said. 'For all his problems, all his failed relationships. The deaths of his women.'

'Fay.' Joe sounded suddenly alarmed. 'I don't know what she's doing, but don't fall for it. I meant to tell you. Jean and Andy are in this together. She sent me up to the Tump tonight, she set me up for Humble…'

'Did he tell you,' said Jean, 'how the Bottle Stone followed him here?'

'Yes,' Fay said, her throat suddenly quite dry. 'He told me that.'

'Come and see the Bottle Stone, Fay. Come on.'

'Fay.'

'Come along,' said Jean.

She rose from the wall and picked her way carefully to the gate of the cottage. 'Come on.'

Fay glanced at Joe. 'Don't,' he said quietly. 'Please.'

I meant to tell you.

She turned and followed Jean Wendle.

They went around the side of the cottage and across the damp lawn to the piece of land at the rear. Jean had produced a small torch and they followed its thin beam. Fay could hear the river idly fumbling at its banks. Jean stopped. She directed the beam a short way across the grass until it found the thick, grey base of a standing stone. Then Jean casually flipped the torch up so that they could see the top of the stone.

'It doesnae look awfully like a bottle, does it?' Jean said.

The stone appeared no more than three and half feet tall. It was fairly wide, but slim, like a blade.

Fay said, 'It doesn't look anything like a bottle.'

Andy Boulton-Trow lay on his back, holding the head above him with both hands. The hands didn't ache now.

'Michael,' he said, 'forgive me. It was a shambles. I was using weak, stupid people. I failed you.'

In the doorway, the candle was burning very low. He'd thought he could hear sirens a while back. He couldn't hear anything now.

Joe Powys hadn't rung for an ambulance.

Joe Powys had lied.

CHAPTER V

'One more, I make it,' Gomer said, a short trail of recumbent stones in his destructive wake. 'Then that's the lot.'

'You know, Gomer,' Minnie Seagrove said, sitting quite placidly next to him in the cab, the three-legged dog on her lap. 'You've surprised me tonight.'

'Surprised myself,' Gomer said gruffly. 'I'll be very surprised if I collect a penny for all this.'

'No, what I mean is… Well, I'd come to the conclusion – and I'm sorry if this sounds insulting – I'd come to the conclusion that there weren't any really decent men in Crybbe. Like, men we used to say would do anything for you. Nothing too much trouble, sort of thing… if it was the right thing.'

'Done a few bloody wrong things tonight, Minnie, my love,'

Gomer said, plunging the digger halfway down the riverbank. 'That's for certain.'

'No they weren't. They weren't wrong things at all. You've saved me from being arrested for murder, you're working overtime at a minute's notice to help that poor old chap who looks like he's on his last legs. And you've been no end of help to

young Joe…'

Gomer ploughed through an unstable-looking fence and up into the field that served as a narrow flood-plain for the river.

'I got no regrets about gettin' you out of a bit o' bother,' he said. 'An' I'd stand up in court an' say so. But that Joe – well, I'd like to think that young feller'll keep 'is mouth shut, see, that's all. You know much about 'im?'

'Not a lot,' said Minnie. 'But I'm sure he's all right.'

'It's rather sad, really,' Jean said. 'They're all bottle stones to Joe.'

Fay started to feel faint. To pull herself together, she said – screamed it out inside her head, like biting on something hard, to fight extreme pain,

MY FATHER IS DEAD.

And wondered if Jean knew about that yet. Jean who'd given him a new lease of life. Which he'd expended in whst appeared at this moment to be a distressingly futile way.

Fay felt sick.

'I don't know precisely what happened,' Jean was saying. 'Over this girl of Joe's, Rose, I mean. Whether it was an accident or suicide or…'

'Murder,' Fay said.

Jean put a hand on Fay's arm. Look, my dear, it's over. It's all in the past. Whatever happened, there's nothing we can change now. Nobody we can bring back to life.'

'No,' Fay said numbly.

Something white in places caught her eye, over to the right of the Bottle Stone. Joe Powys's muddy T-shirt. He was standing on the other side if the perimeter wall, watching them silently, like an abandoned scarecrow.

'About Andy,' Jean said. 'Andy's not a bad boy. A little wild, perhaps, in his younger days, a little headstrong. His lineage is not a direct one to Michael, but he developed a very strong interest in the Tradition from his early teens. And, give him his due. he didn't deviate in his resolve to discover things for himself.'

'And the Bottle Stone ritual?'

'Exists not at all,' said Jean sadly, 'outside the head of J. M. Powys."

'He showed me the field," Fay said. 'Where it happened.'

'And was there a Bottle Stone there? And a fairy mound? With a fairy on it?'

'What about Henry Kettle? He was there too. There was nothing wrong with Henry Kettle.'

'Oh? Henry told you, did he? He said he was there?'

A police car howled a long way away.

'No,' Fay said bleakly.

'Oh, my dear…'

Fay was bent over, gripping her thighs with both hands. She felt a stabbing stomach-cramp coming on.

'Oh God,' she breathed. 'Oh God.'

And as Andy's breathing, shallow as it was, began to regulate, he looked into the dark sockets and saw within them pinpricks of distant light.

He watched the lights as they came closer – or, rather, as he moved closer to them, his consciousness was focused and drawn into the sockets, now as wide as caverns.

He felt the familiar tug at the base of his spine, and never before had it felt so good, so strong, so positive, so indicative of freedom. For, while imprisoned within his twisted body, Andy could no longer feel anything at all at the base of his spine.

When it happened – and he'd been far from certain that it would under such conditions – there was an enormous burst of raw energy (O Michael! O Mother!) and he was out of his body and soaring towards the lights.

'It's a shame about Crybbe,' Jean said. 'But it's no different in any of these places. You ask the ordinary man in the street in Glastonbury how he feels about the Holy Grail. How many miracles he's seen. They're not the least bit interested and indeed often quite antagonistic'

Looking beyond the stone. Fay could no longer see Joe. Perhaps he'd crept away.

'So you can imagine how they reacted in Crybbe,' Jean went on. 'A place so remote and yet so conducive to psychic activity. Can one blame the peasantry? I don't know. The knowledge has always been for the Few. Not everyone has the spiritual metabolism to absorb it. Not everyone has the will to see through the dark barriers to the light.'

All at once, as if to illustrate Jean's point, the stone which bore no resemblance at all to a bottle was lit up from its grassy base to its sharp, fanglike tip.

'Goodness,' Jean said. 'Whatever's that?'

Beyond the stone, there was a kind of parapet overlooking the river and to one side, dropping down to the flood-plain, a narrow, muddy track, its entire width now taken up by a crawling, grunting monster with it single bright eye focused on the stone.

Fay saw a wiry figure leap from the creature and advance upon the stone. Jean flashed her torch at it and the light was reflected in a pair of old-fashioned wire-rimmed National Health glasses.

'Evening, ladies. Gomer Parry Plant Hire. I realize it's a bit late, like, but I got official instructions to remove that stone, see.'

Jean stiffened. 'I do beg your pardon.'

'Official council operation.'

'Now why is it,' Jean asked smoothly, 'that I rather doubt that?'

'Madam, I got special authorization yere from the Town Mayor 'isself.'

'Oh, Gomer,' Fay blurted out. 'The Mayor's dead.'

'Miss Morris?'

'Isn't it sad?' said Jean, isn't it primitive? There was once a notorious farmer, you know, in Wiltshire, known as Stonebreaker Robinson, who devoted his energies to eradicating megalithic remains from the face of the countryside. It's been popularly thought that such Philistine ignorance was dead.'

She turned to Gomer Parry. 'Do yourself a big favour, little man. Go home to bed.'

'Do me a favour.' Joe Powys scrambled down from the perimeter wall. 'Flatten the bloody thing.' He stood next to Gomer.

Jean switched off her torch. Now both Gomer and Powys existed only as wavy silhouettes in the headlight's blast.

But the stone was fully illuminated.

'What are you afraid of, Joe? Afraid of what you'll do to Fay?'

He didn't say anything. He seemed to be shaking his head.

'I shouldn't worry, my dear,' Jean said to Fay. 'You can stay at my house tonight.'

'Flatten it,' Powys said.

'Lay one finger on that stone, little man,' said Jean, 'and, I promise you, you'll regret it for what passes for the rest of your life.'

'It's not an old stone, Gomer," Powys said, 'if it was a genuine prehistoric monument, I wouldn't let you touch it.'

There was a flurrying then in the track of the headlight. It was so fast that Fay thought at first it was an owl until it veered out of the light. At which point it ought to have disappeared, but it didn't. It carried its own luminescence, something of the will-o'-the-wisp.

'Oh my G…' Fay gasped as, with a small, delighted whimper, it landed on her feet. 'Arnold!'

The dog jumped up at her; she felt his tongue on her legs.

'Oh God, Arnold.' She pushed her hands deep into his fur.

Felt him stiffen.

The air above the standing stone seemed to contract, and to draw into it the headlight beam. The headlamp itself grew dim, fading to a bleary yellow.

The yellow of…

Fay felt Arnold's hackles rise under her hands. He growled from so far back in his throat that it seemed to come not from him at all but from somewhere behind him.

'Bloody battery!" Gomer Parry ran for his cab.

… of disease

embalming fluid

Grace Legge.

The stone glowed feebly at its base, rising in intensity until its tip was hit with a magnesium radiance, and Fay felt an intense cold emanating from it, a cold that you could almost see, like steam from a deep-freeze.

The yellow, and the cold. And the aura of steam around the stone formed into an unmistakable shape of a beer-bottle.

But it was the one word that did it.

'Yesssss.' Drawn from Jean Wendle's throat like a pale ribbon of gauze.

And Fay flew at her.

She smashed her open palm so hard into Jean's face that Jean, caught unawares, was thrown back, off her feet, and Fay heard a small crack and felt wetness in her hand and pain too, as if it had been broken. Heard Joe Powys crying, 'Gomer… Go for it… Now... ' Saw the lights in the stone shiver and shrink and the digger's lone headlight brighten and the metal beast heaving about, its shovel raised high like a wrecking hammer.

For several icy-white, agonizing seconds, Andy Boulton-Trow once again experienced his whole body… a savage, searing sensation, a long, physical scream.

The experience came as the lights exploded and he was tossed contemptuously back into his body like a roll of old carpet.

He was still staring, from a place beyond the boundaries of despair; into the sockets in the head of Michael Wort. The sockets were just as black but no longer empty. The eyes of Michael Wort swirled like oil. The smile made by the exposed, chipped, brown teeth was malign.

The head felt heavy.

Gomer was not proud of what happened. There was no control, no precision… no finesse.

With a wild, hydraulic wrench, the cast-iron shovel came

down several feet too quickly and simply smashed in the lop of the stone.

He leaned out of his cab and heard the uppity Scotch woman shrieking.

There was a sudden, unnatural strength in Andy's arms.

He raised the head. He brought it down.

The skull smashed into his own.

Michael.

He felt his nose shatter in a cloud of blood.

Michael.

He felt his teeth splinter into fragments.

He raised the head again, his fingers splayed around shrivelled skin and wisps of hair.

Michael

Michael

Michael…

The blows continued, with a vengeful intensity, long after Andy was dead.

From the doorway, Warren Preece looked on, fascinated by the head clutched in the two hands, the arms moving ferociously up and down until the other head on the floor was red pulp.

The ole candle was near burnt to nothing when Warren picked it up.

But then, so was Warren. Stripped to the waist, and his chest was black, like charcoal. He could smell his own scorched skin. He figured his lips had been burnt away, too, so that his teeth were stuck in this permanent grin, like the head that was now rolling across the dusty, boarded floor towards him.

'Got to laugh.'

He didn't have to tell the head. The ole head was laughing already at what it'd done.

Warren picked it up and stuck it under his arm, like one of

them ghosts.

Two heads are better than one.

Got to laugh.

With his other hand he picked up the candle, just melted wax now, but he picked it up, squeezed it tight, so the boiling hot wax bubbled up between his fingers, feeling painful as hell.

Feeling good.

He held up his hand, and there was wax dripping down the clenched fist, so it was like the hand had become the candle, the wick sticking up through his knuckles with a little white flame on the end.

Hand of Glory.

He went over to the Teacher, brought his hand down to get some light on the face. The face looked good, all smashed, one eye hanging out. Wished he could take this head too, bung it under his other arm, but cutting off a head with a Stanley knife would take too long. Thought about it with the other feller before deciding on the vice.

Never mind.

Warren walked out of the room, by the light of his own hand. He felt really full of power now, like he'd just done a one-man gig in front of thousands of his fans.

With the head under his arm, he walked down the ole steps in a sprightly kind of way. Felt like he owned the place. Probably did. Least, he owned the farm now, with every bugger else dead or crippled, like.

Strolled through the ole baronial hall-type place straight to the front door, his hand held out before him. He could smell the skin smouldering now. Pretty soon it'd all start frizzling off and there'd be nothing left but wax and bones.

The real thing. The authentic Hand of Glory.

The front door of Crybbe Court was open wide, and Warren Preece walked out into the spotlights.

Just like he'd always known it'd be, one day.

The courtyard was lined with people, silent, awestruck like. Warren recognized a few of them, local farmers and shopkeepers and such. But also there were two ambulances and… FIVE cop cars. All the headlights trained on the door he'd just come out of.

'All right?' Warren yelled.

Didn't seem much point to the candle, with all these spotlights, so he squashed it out between his legs. Then he held up the head with both hands, way up over his own head, like the FA cup.

'Yeah!' Warren screeched.

About half a dozen coppers were coming towards him in a semi-circle. Warren stuck the head under his arm and fished out his Stanley knife.

'Come on, son,' one of the coppers said. 'Let's not do this the hard way.'

Warren flicked out the blade and grinned.

"Ow're you, Wynford,' he said.

CHAPTER VI

'I always imagined,' said Fay, 'leaving Crybbe for the last time and driving off into the sunset.'

There was a peach-coloured glow in the eastern sky, over the English side of Offa's Dyke.

'But it must be better,' she said, 'driving into the dawn.'

Powys drove. They were in his Mini.

All of them. Arnold half-asleep on her knee. Two resentful black cats with Russian names in a laundry basket on the back seat.

Fay would probably have brought her dad as well, if the body would've fitted in the boot. But she'd get him out. He wasn't going to be buried in Crybbe.

Once they'd crossed the town boundary, past the signpost at the top of the hill, Joe stopped the car. He took her hand – the other one, not the one that was nearly broken rupturing Jean Wendle's nose – and led her out to the famous viewpoint, near the stile.

Below them, Crybbe was a sombre, smoky little town which had sometimes been in Wales and sometimes in England but had never belonged to either.

The real owners of Crybbe were hidden in its own shadows

and weren't apparent at dawn, for Crybbe's time, as Fay long ago realized, was dusk.

She could see smoke still rising from the ruins of the church. The nave had collapsed, but the bell-tower remained, Col Croston had told her a few minutes ago. And one bell still hung – the seventh bell.

'Which I intend to ring myself,' Col said. 'Every night, in the ruins. These picturesque old traditions,' he said with a tight smile, 'shouldn't be allowed to lapse.'

When the stone was down they hadn't even looked for Jean Wendle. What could they do about her anyway? She'd committed no crimes.

Nobody had seen her since.

'I didn't believe her, of course,' Fay said now.

'You bloody did,' said Joe.

'She had me going for a while,' Fay said. 'However – as I did try to tell you at one point yesterday – I checked out the Bottle Stone. It was in that field in Radnor Forest and it was shaped like a bottle and he did take it away.'

Powys reeled.

'I'm a reporter,' Fay said. 'I came back that way from the library and went to the nearest farm. Took a while – you know what farmers are – but I got it out of them. That land – about eighteen acres – still belongs to the Trows. It was funny, the farmer actually called them Worts, sort of contemptuously. He rents the grazing, but they wouldn't sell the land.'

'Andy?'

'Andy showed up there – about ten years ago, the guy said, but it was probably twelve – with a stone on the back of a lorry, and he had the stone planted in the middle of the field, which annoyed the farmer, but he couldn't do anything about it. Andy promised to come back and take it away, and he did – last week.'

'Why didn't you…?'

'You kept saying you didn't want to talk about the Bottle Stone, and anyway…'

'And there was I, thinking you had faith in me.'

'Oh, I did, Joe. That's the point – I didn't need to have the Bottle Stone bit confirmed. It was… a formality.'

Powys said, 'Your eye looks better.'

'Let's not start lying to each other at this stage,' Fay said.

'Of course…' Chief Inspector Hughes, hands in pockets, was pacing the square. 'There are still things we don't understand.'

'Really?' Col Croston was trying to sound surprised. A slow, dawn drizzle glazed the square. There was the acrid, dispiriting smell of fire and water.

'Oh, I've got most of it,' Hughes said quickly. 'And I think I grasp the social pressures which caused it.'

Col had forgotten that Hughes was one of the 'new' policemen with a degree in something appropriate.

'You look at the background,' Hughes said. 'The kid's stifled by it. Rural decline, brought up in this crumbling farm. And let's face it, this town's a good half-century behind everywhere else.'

'At least,' said Col.

'So young Preece listens to rock music and he dreams… without much hope. And then along comes Salvation with a capital S, in the shape of our late friend Mr Goff. He sends Goff a tape of his band, and Goff, no doubt conscious of the politics of the situation responds favourably.'

'How do you know this?'

'Letter from Epidemic in Warren's pocket. Charred, but readable. We can only assume he made another approach to Goff and Goff told him to clear off. I'm telling you all this, Colonel, in the hope you can throw a bit of light…'

'All new to me, Chief Inspector.'

'So we're assuming this is what pushed Warren over the edge. Given all the other pressures – losing his only brother and then his father's tractor accident. The boy seems to be of limited intellect – must have thought the whole world was against him.'

'Psychiatrists will have a field day,' said Col. 'Where is he now?'

'Hospital, I'd like to think he was going to be fit to plead one day, but I wouldn't put money on it. He took most of Wiley's nose off with that Stanley knife before we disarmed him.'

'Lovable little chap. I'm furious with myself. I was just yards away when he killed Goff.'

'Who would have expected it?'

'I was trained to expect the unexpected, for God's sake. Do you know how many he's killed? I make it four – Goff, the vicar, poor old Hereward Newsome… and of course that chap, Trow.'

'Tie things up nicely if he put his hand up to the Rachel Wade business, too – her signature was on the letter suggesting Warren's music wasn't half bad. But what I was going to ask you, Colonel… the Trow killing's somewhat different in style. I can't go into details, but Warren seems to have finished him off by bludgeoning him with this other skull. We thought we had another murder when he came out of the old house with that thing, but it's obviously of some age. So where did it come from? Have any graves been disturbed locally?'

Col thought this over. 'Well, he was obviously in the church and there are a couple of tombs in there. Might be worth sifting through the ruins.'

'Oh, we'll do that, all right. Obviously, it's not a major issue, but it's something we have to clear up.'

'Well, I have to congratulate you. Chief Inspector. You seem to be putting it all together very nicely.'

Hughes nodded. 'Open and shut, really,' he said.

Fay said, 'I could be making a fortune at this very moment. There'll be a hundred reporters here before breakfast, like a flock of pigeons scrabbling for crumbs. Even poor bloody Ashpole seems to have missed it all.'

'And what are they all going to say?'

'Hard to say precisely how they'll work it, but I can guarantee that, by tonight, Warren Preece will be very famous.'

'And Michael Wort?'

'Who's Michael Wort?' said Fay.

More to the point, Joe Powys thought, where is Michael Wort? Back – hopefully – in his own carefully constructed limbo. He was still unsure what had happened over the Bottle Stone – whether it had been installed at the riverside cottage and then replaced with another stone, or whether the power of suggestion had made him see the Bottle Stone in the tense, burgeoning atmosphere before Rachel's death. In that case, where was the original Bottle Stone now?

Powys looked over his shoulder, half-expecting to see the thing sprouting from the earth behind him.

Fay said, 'I have to say it didn't occur to me for quite a while that what she… what Jean was doing at the stone was trying to generate – in me – enough negative energy for him – Andy, Wort, whatever – to make some kind of final leap. To save himself… itself.'

'It occurred to me,' Powys said.

'Well, it would, wouldn't it. You're a clever person. And you know what we thinks about clever people yereabouts.'

Arnold limped towards them and fell over. He stood again and shook himself, exasperated.

Fay Morrison and Joe Powys looked at each other. Eyebrows were raised.

Neither of them had said a word about Arnold's remarkable turns of speed at critical moments. One day, Fay thought, she'd dare to mention that strange, glowing, phantom fourth leg. But not yet.

'He's a dowser's dog,' Joe said laconically.

As she bent down to pick up the dog, a disturbing thought struck her. 'What about the girl… Tessa?'

'She should really be taken away,' Joe said, 'and put through some kind of psychic readjustment programme. Except they probably don't exist, so she'll go on causing minor havoc, until she grows up and turns into something even nastier. Like Jean.'

'Is there nothing anyone can do?'

'World's full of them,' Powys said. 'Crybbe'll always attract them, and sometimes it'll manufacture its own.'

'We can't just leave it.'

'We bloody can.'

'Yes,' Fay said. 'I suppose we can.'

And she turned her back on the town, albeit with an uncomfortable feeling that one day they might feel they had to come back.

They got into the car. They were going to Titley, to Henry Kettle's cottage, which Joe had said was the best sanctuary he could think of. For a few weeks at least, he said, there'd be danger of residual nasties from Crybbe clinging to them. Grace type things.

Fay said, 'Can we handle that?'

'Count on it,' Joe Powys said grimly.

From the back seat, Rasputin the cat mewed in protest at his confinement in the laundry basket.

Fay said, 'When you said you, er, needed me… what did you mean exactly?'

'I don't know. It just came out. Heat of the moment.'

He turned on the engine.

'However.. Joe said, looking straight ahead through the windscreen. 'I know what I'd mean if I were to say it now.'

Fay smiled. 'What did the police say to you?'

They said, "Don't leave town." '

Joe Powys grinned and floored the accelerator.