Crybbe aka Curfew

CHAPTER I

Memory is circling like a silent helicopter over these soft, green fields, strung together with laces of bright river. It's a warm day in June or July, a Friday – the day you heard they'd sold the paperback rights to The Old Golden Land.

Directly below, throwing a shadow like a giant sundial at three clock, is the Bottle Stone.

It's about five feet tall and four thousand years old. Nobody seems to know whether erosion or some damage long ago left it shaped like a beer-bottle, or whether it was always like that.

It seems now – looking down, looking back – to be as black as its shadow. But there's an amber haze – Memory may have created this, or maybe not – around the stone. Also around the people.

Six of them, mostly young, early twenties. They're sharing a very expensive picnic. You paid for it. You led them on a raid to a posh high-street deli, then the wine-shop. And then you all piled into a couple of cars – old Henry Kettle too, although he says he'd rather have a cheese sandwich than all these fancy bits and pieces and you came out here because it was the nearest known ancient site, an obvious place to celebrate.

Memory hovers. It's trying to filter the conversation to find out who started it, who raised the question of the Bottle Stone Legend.

No good. The voices slip and fade like a radio between nations, and it's all too long ago. The first part you really remember is when Andy says… that there's a special chant, known to all the local children.

Johnny goes round the Bottle Stone.

The Bottle Stone, the Bottle Stone,

Johnny goes round the Bottle Stone,

And he goes round ONCE.

And the Big Mac went round and round the toilet bowl, and Joe Powys watched it and felt queasy.

He'd walked back to the Centre in a hurry and picked up the mail box. He hadn't looked at the mail, even though it seemed unusually profuse. Just ran into the shop and dumped it on the counter. Then he'd gone into the lavatory and thrown up.

The Big Mac had been everything they'd promised it would be. Well, big, anyway. Never having eaten – or even seen at close hand – a Big Mac before, he'd decided on impulse this morning that he should go out and grab one for breakfast. It would be one more meaningful gesture that said. Listen, I am an 'ordinary' guy, OK?

Not a crank. Not a prophet. Not a hippy. No closer to this earth than any of you. See – I can actually eat bits of dead cow minced up and glued together.

But his stomach wasn't ready to process the message.

He washed his hands, stared gloomily at himself in the mirror. He actually looked quite cheerful, despite the prematurely grey hair. He had a vision of himself in this same mirror in ten years' time, when the grey would no longer be so premature. In fact, did it look so obviously premature now?

He flushed the lavatory again. Felt better. Went through to the kitchen and made himself a couple of slices of thick toast.

Fifteen minutes before he had to open the shop. He put the plate on the counter and ate, examining the mail.

There was a turquoise letter from America. It might have been his US agent announcing proposals for a new paperback reprint of The Old Golden Land.

It wasn't; maybe he was glad.

'Dear J.M.,' the letter began.

Laurel, from Connecticut, where she was newly married to this bloke who ran a chain of roadside wholefood diners. Laurel: his latest – and probably his last – earth-mysteries groupie, once lured spellbound to The Old Golden Land. Writing to ask for J.M. for a copy of his latest book,

What latest book?

Then there was an unsolicited shrink-wrapped catalogue from a business-equipment firm. It dealt in computers, copiers, fax machines. The catalogue was addressed to,

The Managing Director,

J. M Powys Ltd.,

Watkins Street, Hereford.

In the head office of J. M. Powys Ltd., the managing director choked on a toast crumb. The head office was a three-room flat in an eighteenth-century former-brewery, now shared by an alternative health clinic and Trackways – the Alfred Watkins Centre. The business equipment amounted to a twenty-five year-old Olivetti portable, with a backspace that didn't.

Powys didn't even open three catalogues from firms with names like Crucible Crafts and Saturnalia Supplies, no doubt offering special deals on bulk orders of joss-sticks, talismans, tarot packs and cassette tapes of boring New Age music simulating the birth of the universe on two synthesizers and a drum machine.

The New Age at the door again. Once, he'd had a letter duplicated, a copy sent off to every loony New Age rip-off supplier soliciting Trackways' patronage.

It said,

This centre is dedicated to the memory and ideas of Alfred

Watkins, of Hereford, who discovered the ley system -

the way ancient people in Britain aligned their sacred

places to fit into the landscape.

Alfred Watkins was an archaeologist, antiquarian,

photographer, inventor, miller and brewer. He doesn't

appear, however, to have shown any marked interest in

ritual magic, Zen, yoga, reincarnation, rebirthing, primal

therapy, Shiatsu or t'ai chi.

So piss off.

He'd realized when he sent it that Alfred Watkins's work, had he lived another fifty years, might have touched on several of these subjects. Perhaps the old guy would have been at the heart of the New Age movement and a member of the Green Party.

The recipients of the circular obviously realized this too and kept on sending catalogues, knowing that sooner or later Joe Powys was going to give in and fill up Trackways with New Age giftware to join the solitary box of 'healing crystals' under the counter.

Because if he didn't, the way business was going, Trackways would be closing down within the year.

There were only two envelopes left now. One was made from what looked like high quality vellum which he'd never lave recognized as recycled paper if it hadn't said so on the back, prominently.

A single word was indented in the top left-hand corner of the envelope.

EPIDEMIC

Powys finished his toast, went to wash his hands, came back and turned the envelope over a couple of times before he opened it. It contained a letter which didn't mess around.

Dear J. M. Powys,

As you may have learned, Dolmen Books, publishers of

The Old Golden Land, have now been acquired by the

Epidemic Group.

Shit, Powys thought, I didn't know that.

I am writing to you on behalf of the Group Chairman,

Max Goff, Powys thought, aghast. I've been acquired by Max bloody Goff.

Mr Max Goff, who has long been an admirer of your

work and would like to meet you to discuss a proposition.

… And from what I've heard of Max Goff s propositions to personable young blokes such as myself…

We should therefore like to invite you to a small reception at

the Cock Inn, Crybbe,

… I may have to invent a prior engagement…

on Friday, 29 June at 12.30 p.m. I'm sorry it's such short

notice, but the acquisition of Dolmen was only confirmed this

week and I obtained your address only this morning.

Please contact me if you have any queries.

Please contact me anyway.

Yours sincerely,

Rachel Wade,

PA to Max Goff

Powys sat and looked around the shop for a while, thinking about this.

He could see on the shelves, among the dozens of earth-mysteries books by Alfred Watkins and his successors, the spine of the deluxe hardback edition of The Old Golden Land and about half a dozen paperback copies, including the garish American edition with the Day-Glo Stonehenge.

On the counter in front of Powys was a token display stand: dowsing rods and pendula. Mr Watkins might have been able to dowse, but he didn't have anything to say in his books about 'energy dowsing'. Or indeed about earth energies of any kind.

But all that was academic; the dowsing kits were selling well. Soon wouldn't be able to visit a stone circle without finding some studious duo slowly circumnavigating the site, dangling their pendulum and saying 'Wow' every so often.

Under the counter, because Powys hadn't had the nerve to put them on sale, was the box of 'healing' crystals which Annie – his new assistant with the Egyptian amulet – had persuaded him to buy. 'Got to embrace the New Age, Joe, and let the New Age embrace you. Mr Watkins wants you to let the New Age in, I can feel it. Sometimes I even think I can see him standing over there by the door. He's holding his hat and he's smiling.'

Wow!

Powys reached into the crystals box and helped himself to a handful of Sodalite (for emotional stability and the treatment of stress-related conditions).

Max Goff, he thought.

Max Goff!

Clutching the crystals, he discovered he was holding in his other hand a small, creased, white envelope, the last item of mail.

Mr J. Powys,

The Alfred Watkins Centre,

Hereford.

Handwritten, not too steadily. Inside, a single sheet of lined blue notepaper.

Cwm Draenog,

Titley,

Kington

Dear Mr Powys,

If you have not already heard I am sorry to have to

inform you of the death of my neighbour Mr H. Kettle.

What…?

He was killed in a road accident in Crybbe where he was

working and did not suffer.

Jesus Christ!

Mr Kettle left an envelope with me to be opened after his

death in which he stated what he wanted to happen to his

possessions as he did not trust solicitors. The house and all the

contents is to be sold and the money sent to his daughter in

Canada but he wants you to have his papers and his dowsing

rods. If you would like to come to the house I am in most of

the time and will let you into Mr Kettle's house.

Yours faithfully,

Gwen Whitney (Mrs)

J. M. Powys put down the letter. He ought to have opened the shop ten minutes ago. The Sodalite crystals (for emotional stability and the treatment stress-related conditions) began to dribble through his fingers and roll across the wooden counter.

CHAPTER II

Rachel noticed that Denzil George, licensee of the Cock, had several shaving cuts this morning. He'd obviously overslept, unused, no doubt, to rising early to prepare an 8 a.m. breakfast for his guests. What a torpid town this was.

'Parcel come for you,' the licensee said, placing a small package by Max's elbow.

'Thanks.' Max tossed it to Rachel.

'No stamp,' Rachel noticed. 'Obviously delivered by hand.'

'Better open it,' Max said, digging into some of the muesli he'd had delivered to the pub.

Rachel uncovered a tape cassette and a note. 'Who's Warren Preece?'

Max looked up.

'He's sent you a tape of his band.'

'Delivered by hand, huh?' Max put down his spoon thoughtfully. 'I dunno any Warren Preece, but the surname has a certain familiar ring. Maybe you should find out more, Rach.'

'Yes,' Rachel said, pushing back her chair. 'I'll ask the landlord.'

The Anglicans' Book of Common Prayer had nothing to say about exorcising spirits of the dead.

The Revd Murray Beech knew this and was grateful for it. But he was leafing through the prayer book anyway, seeking inspiration.

Murray was following the advice of Alex Peters and attempting to compile for himself a convincing prayer to deliver in an allegedly haunted house.

He came across the words,

'Peace be to this house and to all that dwell in it.'

This actually appeared under the order for The Visitation of the Sick, but Murray made a note of it anyway. Surely with an alleged 'haunting' – Murray recoiled from the word with embarrassment – what you were supposedly dealing with was a sick property, contaminated by some form of so-called 'psychic' radiation, although, in his 'exorcism' – Oh, God – the prayer would be aimed at the troubled souls of the living. In his view the health of a property could be affected only by the attitude and the state of mind of the current inhabitants, not by any residual guilt or distress from, ah, previous residents.

He looked around his own room. The neat bookshelves, the filing cabinets, the office desk with metal legs at which he sat, the clean, white walls – feeling a twinge of pain as he remembered the walls being painted by Kirsty exactly a fortnight before she'd said, 'I'm sorry, Murray. This isn't what I want.' Murray looked quickly back at the prayer book, turned over a page, came upon the following entreaty:

'Oh Lord, look down from heaven, behold, visit and

relieve this thy servant… defend him from the danger of

the enemy.'

He breathed heavily down his nose. He abhorred words like 'enemy'. The duty of the Church was to teach not opposition but understanding.

He was equally uncomfortable with the next and final paragraph of the prayer book before the psalms began.

A COMMINATION

or

Denouncing of God's Anger and Judgements

against Sinners.

The first page ended on an uncompromising note.

'Cursed are the unmerciful, fornicators and adulterers

covetous persons, idolaters, slanderers, drunkards and

extortioners.'

'Not many of us left uncursed,' Murray muttered.

The curse of the modern minister's life, in his opinion, was the video-hire shop. Infinitely more alluring to teenagers than the church. And full of lurid epics in which members of the clergy in bloodied cassocks wielded metal crucifixes with which

they combat scaly entities from Hell.

One result of this was that a few people seemed to think they should summon the vicar in the same way they'd call in Rentokil to deal with their dampness and their rats.

The telephone bleeped. 'I'll ring you when they're out,' she'd told him. He hadn't replied. At the time, he was considering going to her grandparents and explaining his dilemma. But he'd concluded this would not only be a cop-out, it would be wrong. Because she'd come to him in confidence and she was no longer a minor. She was eighteen and would be leaving school in two or three weeks.

Murray closed The Book of Common Prayer and picked up the phone. 'Vicarage.'

'They're out,' Tessa said.

Barry, the overweight osteopath from upstairs, was between patients, eating a sandwich – herbal pate on whole-wheat.

'I've been taken over by Max Goff,' said Powys, disconsolate.

'Dolmen has, yeah, I read that. He can't do you any harm, though, can he? You're out of print, aren't you?'

'Between impressions,' Powys corrected him. 'Barry, are you really proposing to realign somebody's slipped disc with hands covered in soya margarine?'

'Beats olive oil. And cheaper. Hey, Mandy says she saw you coming out of McDonald's this morning.'

'Couldn't have been me.'

'That's what I thought,' Barry said dubiously.

'Anyway,' Powys said, 'Goff wants to see me. In Crybbe.'

'I thought you were going to say "in the nude" for a minute,' said Barry, wiping his hands on his smock. 'No, from what I hear he's surrounding himself with people sharing his own deep commitment to the New Age movement. If it's this lunch in Crybbe on Friday, several people I know have been invited and nobody's turning him down, because if he likes you, he invites you to join his Crybbe community, which means – listen to this – that you get offered a place to live, on very advantageous terms. And all kinds of fringe benefits.'

'Why aren't you there, then?'

'Bastard's already got an osteopath,' Barry said. 'Gerry Moffat. You believe that? He could have had me, but he went for Moffat. Moffat!'

'Who else?'

'Dan Osborne, the homeopath, he's moved in already, Superior bastard. Paula Stirling. Robin Holland. Oh, and this little French aromatherapist who was in Bromvard, remember her?'

'I can still smell her. Listen, do these people know who Max Goff is?'

'Used to be, Joe. Used to be. This is the new user-friendly ozone-fresh Max Goff. Play your cards right and he'll let you feel his aura.'

'I wouldn't feel his aura with asbestos gloves,' said Powys.

'And he's got some pretty heavy mystical types as well,' said Barry. 'Jean Wendle, the spiritual healer, some guy who's reckoned to be Britain's biggest tarot hotshot and Andy Boulton-Trow. All converging on the New Age Mecca.'

'Andy?' Powys said. 'Andy's involved in this?'

'And there's a single kid,' says Andy, 'moving round the stone, very slowly at first, while all the other kids are sitting in a circle, clapping their hands, doing the chant. And by the time they finish the chant he's back where he started. Got to be a "he", it doesn't work for girls.'

Andy Boulton-Trow, lean and languid, lying back in the grass, spearing a quail's egg from the jar beside him. His voice is deep and lazy, like a stroked cello.

'And then he goes round again… only this time it's just ever-so-slightly faster…'

Johnny goes round the Bottle Stone

… and he goes round TWICE.

'And they keep on repeating it. And it gets faster and faster, building up the momentum, and the kid's got to move faster each time to maintain the pace.'

Johnny goes round the Bottle Stone

… and he goes round THRICE.

… goes round FOUR times.

… FIVE times.

'And how long do they keep it up?' Rose asks. She's looking radiantly happy today (this memory is agony). 'How many times…?'

'Oh' There's a gleam in Andy's eye. 'Thirteen. Thirteen times.'

'Must be jolly dizzy by then: one of the others says – Ben Corby's girlfriend, Fiona Something.

'Ex-act-ly,' Andy drags out the word for emphasis. 'The kid's completely confused. He's not thinking properly. And it's then that his mates all leap on him and, before he knows what's happening, they hustle him across to the fairy hill. Over there… see it?'

'Not much of a hill,' Rose observes.

'Fairies are not very big,' you tell her. 'You could fit a couple of dozen on there.'

Andy says, 'So they lie him face-down on the fairy hill… and that's when it happens.'

'What?' you ask. 'What happens?'

'Whatever happens,' says Henry Kettle, searching in the cardboard picnic box for something uncomplicated and British, 'it's all in the mind, and it don't do anybody any good, meddling with that old nonsense.'

'Oh yeah,' Barry, the osteopath, said. 'Andy's right at the centre of things. As was old Henry Kettle. I suppose you heard about that.'

'Just now,' Powys said. He hadn't planned to mention Henry. 'I had a letter from his neighbour to say he was dead. I don't know what happened, do you?'

'Have to wait for the Hereford Times for the full story, but apparently it said on the local radio that his car went off the road and ploughed into a wall around Crybbe Tump. I don't know that area too well, but…'

'Crybbe Tump? He hit the wall around Crybbe Tump?'

'Killed instantly. Bloody shame, I liked old Henry. He helped you with the book, didn't he?'

Powys nodded.

'The buzz is,' said Barry, 'that Henry was doing some dowsing for Max Goff.'

'Dowsing what?'

Barry shrugged. 'Whatever he'd been doing, he was on his way home when it happened. There was a power cut at the time, don't know whether the streetlamps were off, that may have thrown him. Bloody shame.'

'A power cut,' said Powys.

That significant?'

'Just a thought.' Powys shook his head, his mind whizzing off at a peculiar tangent, like a faulty firework

CHAPTER III

Fay awoke late. She'd lain awake until dawn, eyes open to the bedroom ceiling, Arnold a lump of solid heat alongside her on the bed.

It was nearly nine before she came downstairs. Outside it was raining. The rain on the window was the only sound. There was no mail on the mat, no sign of the Canon.

The door to the office was closed, as she'd left it last night. The note to her father still pinned to it. And don't let any CATS in there!

Rasputin.

He must still be in the office.

She opened the door but did not go in.

'Rasputin,' she called. A morning croak in her voice – that all it was. Really.

But she could not bring herself to go back into that room, not yet, though Arnold didn't seem worried. She left the door ajar, went through to the kitchen, let the dog out in the back garden.

When she turned back to the kitchen, Rasputin and Pushkin were both in the opposite corner, waiting by their bowls. Fay opened a can of Felix. The two cats looked plump and harmless. Perhaps it really had been just a horrific dream, conditioned by her own desperation.

She forked out a heap of cat food, straightened up.

'Right,' she said decisively and marched out of the kitchen and into the hall, where she tore the note off the office door and hit the door with the flat of her hand so that it was thrown wide.

She walked in, eyes sweeping the room like searchlights. She saw the Revox, two spools leaning against it. Her desk-diary open. Her father's note, about Guy's phone call. She raised her eyes to the H-shaped fireplace and the mantelpiece, to the see-through clock with the mechanism like a pair of bails still jerking obscenely from side to side.

The fireside chair was empty, its scatter cushions plumped out. If someone had been sitting in it the cushions would have been flattened.

Unless, of course, that person had tidily shaken them out and…

Oh, come on!

She made herself cross to the mirror and look into it at her own face.

The first shock was the incredible childlike fear she saw in her eyes.

The second was the other face. She whirled around in alarm.

The Canon was standing in the doorway. He wore pyjamas. His feet were bare. His hair was standing up in spikes, his beard sprayed out in all directions, like a snowstorm. His bewildered blue eyes were wide and unfocused.

He stared at Fay as if she were an intruder. Then the eyes relaxed into recognition.

'Morning, Grace,' he said.

While Max drove, Rachel took the cassette box from shoulder bag.

'OK?'

'Go ahead,' Max said.

Rachel slipped the tape into the player and studied the plastic box. The band's name was typed in capitals across the plain label: FATAL ACCIDENT. She wrinkled her nose.

Drums and bass guitar blundered out of the speakers. Rachel lowered the volume a little. By the time the first track was over, they were parked at the back of the Court, next to the stable-block, where builders were busy.

Rain slashed the windscreen.

Max turned up the sound to compensate. He was smiling faintly. They sat in the Range Rover for two more tracks. The only words Rachel could make out on the last one were 'goin' down on me', repeated what seemed like a few dozen times. She consulted the inside of the label; the song was called 'Goin' Down on Me'.

'That's the lot,' she said neutrally. There're only three numbers.' Remembering where the Max Goff Story had begun, in the punk-rock era of the mid-seventies, she didn't add 'thankfully'.

Max began to laugh.

Rachel ejected the tape, saying nothing.

Jeez,' Max said. 'Was that shit, or was that shit?'

Rachel breathed out. For a couple of minutes there, watching him smiling, she'd thought he might actually be enjoying it.

'You want me to post it down to Tommy, get him to send it back in a fortnight with the customary slip?'

What…?' Max twisted to face her. 'You want us to give the official piss-off to Mayor Preece's flaming grandson?'

'But if you tell him it's good you'll have to do something with it, won't you?'

Max shrugged. 'So be it. One single… not on Epidemic, of course. Coupla grand written off against tax.

Then he thumped the top of the dashboard. 'No, hey, listen, I'll tell you what we do – you send this kid a letter saying we think the band has promise, we think it's a… an interesting sound, right? But we're not sure any of these three tracks is quite strong enough to release as a debut single, so can we hear a few more? That'll buy some time – maybe the band'll split before they can get the material together. How's that sound to you?'

'It sounds devious,' Rachel said.

'Of course it does, Rach. Do it tonight. I mean, shit, don't get me wrong – they're no worse than say, The Damned, in '77. But it was fresh then, iconoclastic.'

'It was shit then, too.'

'Yeah, maybe,' Max conceded. 'But it was necessary. It blew away the sterile pretensions from when the seventies went bad. But now we're picking up from the sixties and we won't make the same mistakes.'

'No,' Rachel said, in neutral again.

A heavy tipper-lorry crunched in beside them. The rain had washed a layer of thick, grey dust from the door of the cab and Rachel could make out the words '… aendy Quarry, New Radnor.'

'Hey…' Max said slowly. 'If this is what I think it is…'

He threw his door open, stepped down into the rain in his white suit and was back inside a minute, excited, raindrops twinkling in his beard.

'It is, Rach. The first stones have arrived. The Old Stones of Crybbe, Mark Two.'

'Oh,' said Rachel, pulling up the collar of her Barbour for the run to the stables. 'Good.'

But Goff, Panama hat jammed over his ears, made her watch while the stones were unloaded, pointing out things.

'Different sizes, right? Even where they'd vanished entirely, Kettle was able to figure out how tall they'd been.'

'Using his pendulum, I suppose.'

'Of course, what we're seeing here gives an exaggerated idea of what they'll look like in situ. Half of the length'll be under the soil. Maybe more than half. Like giant acupuncture needle in the earth.'

'Who's going to advise you about these things now Mr Kettle's dead?' Rachel wondered, as men in donkey jackets and orange slickers moved around, making preparations to get the grey and glistening monoliths down from the truck. One stone had to be at least fifteen feet long.

'And how do you know it's the right kind of stone?' Things were moving too fast for Rachel now. Max was an awesome phenomenon when he had the hots for something.

'Yeah, well, obviously, Kettle was good – and he knew the terrain. But Andy Boulton-Trow's been studying standing stones for nearly twenty years. Been working with a geologist these past few weeks, matching samples. They checked out maybe a dozen quarries before he was satisfied, and if he's satisfied, I'm satisfied.'

A clang came from the back of the truck, a gasp of hydraulics, somebody swore. Max called out sharply, 'Hey, listen, be careful, yeah? I want you guys to handle those stones like you're dealing with radioactive flaming isotopes.'

He said to Rachel, 'Andy's moving up here, end of the week. He's gonna supervise planting stones on our land. Then we'll bring the farmers up here, show 'em what it looks like and go into negotiations. Hey, you had a call from J. M. Powys yet?'

'He'll only have got my letter this morning. Max.'

'Give him until lunchtime then call him. I want Powys. I don't care what he costs.'

The customer was short and fat and bald. He wore denims, a shaggy beard and an ear-ring.

'You're J. M. Powys, right?'

Teacher, Powys thought. Or maybe the maverick in some local government planning department.

'You are, man. Don't deny it. I recognize you from the picture on the cover. You've gone grey, that's all.'

Powys spread his arms submissively.

'Hey listen, man, that was a hell of a book. The Old Golden Land.'

'Thanks,' Powys said.

'So what are you doing here, running a shop? Why aren't you writing more? Got to be ten years since Golden Land.'

'Even longer,' Powys said. 'More like twelve.'

You could count on at least one of these a week, more in summer. Sometimes they were women. Sometimes, in the early days of the Watkins Centre, friendships had developed from such encounters. The Old Golden Land had hit the market at the right time, the time of the great mass exodus from the cities, couples in their thirties in search of meaning and purpose.

People were very kind when they found out who he was. Usually they bought something from the shop, often a paperback of the book for him to sign. Most times he felt guilty, guilty that he hadn't followed through; guilty that he'd written the thing in the first place and misled everybody.

'I did that one that takes a new look at Watkins's original leys,' he offered, a bit pathetically. 'Backtrack.'

The bald, bearded guy waved it way. 'Disappointing, if you don't mind me saying so, J.M. No magic.'

'Wasn't really meant to be magical.' Powys said. 'The idea was just to walk the leys and see if they were as obvious now as when Watkins discovered them.'

'Yeah, and you found some of them to be distinctly dodgy. That's not what we want, is it?'

Powys laughed.

'Well, it's not, is it? People pouring scorn on the whole idea, your archaeologists and so on, and here's J. M. Powys defecting to the Establishment viewpoint.'

'Not exactly. What I feel is, we might have been a bit premature in explaining them as marking out channels of earth energy. Why not – because they connect so many burial mounds and funerary sites, even churchyards- why not simply paths of the dead…?'

The customer stepped back from the dowsing display he'd been fingering. He looked shocked. 'Paths of the dead?" he said. 'Paths of the dead? What kind of negative stuff is that?'

Halfway through the door, he turned round. 'You sure you're J. M. Powys?'

'Fay?'

'Oh. Hullo, Guy.'

'You didn't return my call.'

'No, I didn't, did I? Well, Dad's having one of his difficult days.'

'He sounded fine last night.'

'Well, he isn't now,' Fay said testily. Maybe he thought she was making it all up about the Canon going batty. Maybe she ought to produce medical evidence.

'No, I'm sorry. It must be difficult for you.'

Oh, please, not the sympathy. 'What do you want, Guy?'

'I want to help you, Fay.'

No comment.

'I'd like to put some money in your purse.'

Fay began to smoulder. Purses were carried by little women.

'As you may know. I'm currently on attachment to BBC Wales as senior producer, features and docos.'

Guy had been an on-the-road TV reporter when she'd first known him. Then a regional anchorman. And then, when he'd realized there'd be rather less security in on-screen situations after he passed forty or so, he'd switched to the production side. Much safer; lots of corners to hide in at cut-back time.

'And I've got quite a nice little project on the go on your patch,' Guy said. 'Two fifty minute-ers for the Network.'

'Congratulations.' But suddenly Fay was thinking hard. It couldn't be…

Guy said, 'Max Goff? You know what Max Goff's setting up?'

Shit!

'He's developing a conscience in his middle years and putting millions into New Age research. Anyway, he's bought this wonderful Elizabethan pile not far from you, which he plans to

restore.'

'And where did you hear about this, Guy?'

'Oh… contacts. As I say, we'll be doing two programmes. One showing how he goes about… what he's going to do…how the locals feel about him, this sort of thing. And the second one, a few months later, examining what he's achieved. Or not, as the case may be. Good, hmm?'

'Fascinating.' The bastard. How the hell had he pulled it off? 'And you've got it to yourself, have you?'

'Absolutely. It means Goff will have this one reliable outlet to get his ideas across in an intelligent way.' Fay seethed.

No Radio Four documentary. Not even any exclusive insider stuff for Offa's Dyke. So much for Rachel Wade and her promises. All the time, they'd been negotiating with her ex-husband – obviously aware of the connection, keeping quiet, leading her along so she wouldn't blow the story too soon.

'So what I was thinking. Fay, is… Clearly we're not going to be around the whole time. We need somebody to keep an eye on developments locally and let us know if there's anything we should be looking at. I was thinking perhaps a little retainer for you – I can work it through the budget, we producers have full financial control now of a production, which means…'

Black mist came down. The smug, scheming, patronizing bastard.

When Fay started listening again, Guy was saying, '… would have offered you the official researcher's contract, but one of Max Goff's conditions is that we use the author of some trashy book which seems to have inspired him. Goff wants this chap to be the official chronicler of the Crybbe project and some sort of editorial adviser on the programmes. Of course, that's just a formality, I can soon lose him along the way…'

Fay put the phone down.

Screwed again.

The clock ticked. Arnold lay by her feet under the table. The chair where, in her mind, the smug, spectral Grace Legge had sat, was now piled high with box files. Nothing could sit in it now, even in her imagination.

Fay picked up the phone again and – deliberate, cold, precise – punched out the number of the Offa's Dyke Radio News desk.

'Gavin Ashpole, please. Oh, it is you. It's Fay Morrison. Listen. I can put you down a voice-piece for the lunchtime news. Explaining exactly what Max Goff intends to do in Crybbe.'

She listened to Ashpole asking all the obvious questions.

'Oh yes,' she said. 'Impeccable sources.'

Fay put down the phone, picked up the pad and began to write.

CHAPTER IV

The police station was at the southern end of the town centre, just before the road sloped down to the three-arched river bridge. Attached to the station was the old police house. Murray Beech strode boldly to the front door and rapped loudly with the knocker, standing back and looking around for someone he might say hello to.

He very much wanted to be seen. Did not want anyone to think there was anything remotely surreptitious about this visit, indeed, he'd been hoping Police Sergeant Wynford Wiley would be visible through the police-station window so he could wave to him. But he was not. Nobody was there.

As a last resort Murray had been round to Alex Peters's house, hoping to persuade the old man lo come with him as adviser, witness and… well, chaperone. There'd been no sign of Alex or his daughter, no answer to his knocks.

But Murray didn't have to knock twice on the door of the old police house. She must have been waiting behind it.

'Good afternoon, Tessa,' he said loudly, putting on his most clergymanly voice.

Tessa Byford looked at him in silence. Eighteen. Dark-haired, dark-eyed, pale-faced. Often seen leather-jacketed on street corners with the likes of Warren Preece.

But not an unintelligent girl. A talented artist, he'd heard. And more confident than most local girls. Born here, but brought up in Liverpool until her mother died and her father had dumped her on his parents in Crybbe so he could go back to sea.

Murray could understand why she'd never forgiven he father for this.

He thought: sullen, resentful and eighteen. Prime poltergeist fodder… if you accept the tenets of parapsychology.

About which Murray, of course, kept an open mind.

He smiled. 'Well,' he said, 'I'm here.'

Tessa Byford did not smile back. Without a word, she led him into a small, dark sitting-room, entirely dominated by an oppressive Victorian sideboard, ornate as a pulpit, with many stages, canopies and overhangs.

Murray felt it was dominating him, too. He was immediately uncomfortable. The room seemed overcrowded, with the sideboard and the two of them standing there awkwardly, an unmarried clergyman and a teenage girl. It hit him then, the folly of what he was doing. He should never have come.

She looked down over his dark suit.

'You've not brought any holy water, have you?'

Murray managed a weak smile. 'Let's see how we get on, shall we?'

It occurred to him that, while she might be an adult now, this was not actually her house. He'd allowed himself to be lured into somebody else's house.

'You should've brought holy water,' she said sulkily.

Murray tried to relax. His plan was merely to talk to the girl, say a helpful prayer and then leave. He found a straight-backed dining chair and sat on it squarely – always felt foolish sinking into someone's soft fireside furniture, felt it diminished him.

'I still wish your grandparents were here.'

'Gone shopping,' she said, still standing, 'in Hereford. Won't be back until tonight. I only stayed to wait for you. I was going to give you another five minutes. Wouldn't stay here on me own. Not any more.'

Why did he think she was lying?

'I wish you'd felt able to discuss this with them.'

She shook her head firmly. 'Can't. You just can't.' Her thin lips went tight, her deep-set eyes stoney with the certainty of it.

'Have you tried?'

Tessa's lips twisted. 'Me gran… says people who are daft enough to think they've seen a ghost ought to keep it to themselves.'

'So you have tried to talk to her about it.'

Tessa, grimacing, went through the motions of wiping something nasty off her hands.

Murray tried to understand but couldn't. Neither Mrs Byford nor her husband appeared to him to be particularly religious. They came to church, if not every week. He'd watched them praying, as he did all his parishioners from time to time, but detected no great piety there. Just going through the motions, lip movements, like the rest of them. A ritual as meaningless as Sunday lunch, and rather less palatable.

There was no Bible on the shelf, no books of any kind, just white china above a small television set. No pictures of Christ on the wall, no framed religious texts.

And yet the room itself stank of repression, as if the people who lived here were the narrowest type of religious fundamentalists.

Tessa was standing there expressionless, watching him. The next move was his. Because he was trying so hard not to be, he was painfully aware of her breasts under what, in his own teenage days, had been known as a tank top.

'I know what you're thinking,' she said, and Murray sucked in a sharp breath.

'But I'm not,' she said. 'I'm not imagining any of it. You don't imagine things being thrown at you in the bathroom, even if…'

Her lips clamped and she looked down at her feet.

'If what?' Murray said.

'Show you,' Tessa mumbled.

Murray felt sweat under his white clerical collar. He stood up, feeling suddenly out of his depth, and followed Tessa Byford into the hall and up the narrow stairs.

All right, Fay?'

'I don't know.'

She was going hot and cold. Maybe succumbing to one of those awful summer bugs.

All she needed.

'Give me a minute… Elton. I want to make a few adjustments to the script.'

'OK, no hurry. I've got a couple of pieces to top and tail. Come back to you in five minutes, OK?'

'Fine,' Fay said, 'fine.'

She took off the cans and leaned back in the studio chair, breathing in and out a couple of times. Outside it was still raining and not exactly warm; in here, she felt clammy, sticky, she pulled her T-shirt out of her jeans and flapped it about a bit.

The air in here was always stale. There should be air-conditioning. The Crybbe Unattended itself was probably a serious infringement of the Factories Act or whatever it was called these days.

And the walls of the studio seemed to be closer every time she came in.

That was psychological, of course. Hallucinatory, just like… She slammed a door in her mind on the icy Grace Legge smile, just as she'd slammed the office door last night before stumbling upstairs after the dog. She wondered how she was ever going to go into that room again after dark. She certainly wouldn't leave the dog in there again at night.

How primitive life had become.

'Fay!' A tinny voice rattling in the cans on the table. She put them on.

Ashpole.

'Fay, tell me again what he's doing…'

'Goff?'

She told him again about the New Age research centre, about the dowsers and the healers. She didn't mention the plan to reinstate the stones. She was going to hold that back – another day, another dollar.

'No rock stars, then.'

'What?'

'All a bit of a disappointment, isn't it, really,' Ashpole said.

'Is it?' Fay was gripping the edge of the table. Just let him start…

'Nutty stuff. New Age. Old hippies. Big yawn. Some people'll be interested, I suppose. When can we talk to the great man in person?'

'Goff? I'm working on it.'

That was a laugh. Some chance now. I'll ask my ex-husband – he owns all the broadcasting rights. God, God, God!

'Hmm,' Ashpole said, 'maybe we should…'

Without even a warning tremor. Fay erupted. 'Oh sure. Send a real reporter down to doorstep him! Why don't you do that? Get him to claim on tape that he's the son of God and he's going to save the fucking world!'

She tore off the cans and hurled them at the wall, stood up so violently she knocked the chair over. Stood with her back to the wall, panting, tears of outrage bubbling up.

What was happening to her?

'See that mirror?"

She was pointing at a cracked circular shaving mirror in metal frame.

'It flew off the window-ledge,' Tessa Byford said. 'That's how it got the crack. 'Course, they accused me of knocking it off.'

'How can you be sure you didn't?'

It was a very cramped bathroom. Murray moved up against the lavatory trying not to brush against the girl.

Ludicrous. He fell completely and utterly ludicrous; he was suffocating with embarrassment.

"Look,' she said, oblivious of his agony, 'I just opened the door and it flew off at me. And other things. Shaving brush, toothpaste. But it was the mirror that started it. I had to look in the mirror.'

'It could have been a draught, Tessa.' Appalled at how strangled his voice sounded.

'It wasn't a bloody draught!'

'All right, calm down. Please.'

'And when I picked it up, the mirror, there was blood in the crack.'

'Your blood?'

'No!'

'Whose, then?'

'The old man's.'

'Your grandfather?'

'No, the old man! He used to live here. I saw him. I could see him in the mirror.'

'You're saying he's dead, this old man?'

'What do you think?' Tessa said, losing patience with him. Tension rising. The girl was disturbed. This was not what the Church should be doing. This was psychiatric country.

'And you think you saw his face in the mirror.'

'And other mirrors.' She sighed. 'Always in mirrors.'

'Tessa, listen to me. When you first told me all about this you said you thought it was a poltergeist and you thought it was happening because you were at that age when… when… But you're eighteen. You're not an adolescent any more.'

'No.'

He saw something moving in her dark eyes, and there was a little dab of perspiration above her top lip. Murray began to feel soiled and sordid. She said softly – and almost euphorically, he thought later – 'His throat was cut. When I saw him in the mirror, he'd cut his throat. Put his razor through the artery. That was where the blood…'

Murray swallowed. There was an overpowering smell of bleach.

'Would you mind,' he said, 'if we went back downstairs?'

When the studio phone rang it was Gavin Ashpole being soft-spoken and understanding. They all knew these days that if a woman dared up uncharacteristically it had to be a spot of premenstrual tension. Tact and consideration called for.

'So, when you're ready, love,' Ashpole said amiably, 'just give us the fifty-second voice-piece. And then you can play it by ear with Goff. I mean, don't worry about it – long as nobody gets him first, I'll be happy. Must go, the other phone, thanks Fay.'

She shouldn't have exploded like that. Most unprofessional

Fay put on the cans, adjusted the mike on its stand.

'Ow!'

Bloody thing was hot.

Surely that wasn't possible with a microphone, even if there was an electrical fault. She didn't touch it again but looked round the back, following the flex to where it plugged into the console. Nothing amiss.

There was nothing to come unscrewed on this mike. It was a standard American-made Electro Voice, about six and a half inches long, gunmetal grey with a bulb bit enlarging the end, like…

Well, like a penis, actually.

Fay put out a finger, touched the tip, giggled.

Sex-starved cow. Pull yourself together.

'You ready now, Fay?'

'Oh yes. I'm ready, Elton. I really am.'

'Bit for level, then…'

She picked up the script, which would take up the story from the newsreader's link.

'It's widely known,' Fay enunciated clearly into the microphone, 'that Max Goff has been involved in setting up a charitable trust to…'

'Yeah, fine. Go in five.'

Fay composed herself. Not easy in this heat. The T-shirt was sticking to her again. Have to put in a complaint. Four, three, two…

'It's widely known that Max Goff has been involved in setting up a charitable trust to finance so-called "New Age" ventures – such as alternative healing techniques and the promotion of "Green" awareness.

'He's also interested in fringe science and the investigation of ley-lines, which are supposed to link standing stones, Bronze Age burial mounds and other ancient sites across the landscape…'

Most times, when you were putting in a voice-piece – especially if, like this, it wasn't live – you weren't really aware of the sense of it any more. Only the pattern of the words, the balance, the cadence and the flow. It was conversational and yet completely artificial. Automatic-pilot stuff after a while. Easy to see how some radio continuity announcers simply fell in love with their own voices.

'The project will be based at sixteenth-century Crybbe Court, for which Mr Goff is believed to have paid in excess of half a million pounds. It's expected to be a major boost to the local economy, with…'

'Whoah, whoah,' Elton shouted in the cans. 'What are you doing, Fay?'

'What?'

'You're distorting.'

'Huh?'

'How close are you to the mike?'

'I…'

Fay tasted metal.

'Oh…!'

Her eyes widened, a movement went through her, like an earth tremor along a fault line. Her hands thrust the microphone away, revolted.

The mike fell out of its stand and over the end of the table where it dangled on its flex. Fay sat there wiping the back of a hand over her lips.

'What the hell…?' said the voice in the cans. 'Fay? Fay, are you there?'

'Oh Lord, we humbly beseech you, look down upon us with compassion…'

Eyes tensely closed, Murray was trying to concentrate. He could still smell bleach from the bathroom, although they were downstairs again now, in the sitting-room that was full of repressed emotions, deep-frozen. In the shadow of the pulpit-sideboard.

Churchlike. More churchlike, anyway, than a bathroom.

But the Church was not a building. He, in this dark little parlour, at this moment, was the Church.

Two feet away… an eighteen-year-old girl in holed jeans and a straining tank top. A girl he didn't think he liked very much any more. A girl with a glistening dab of sweat over her upper lip.)

And, because there was nothing to help him in The Book of Common Prayer, he must improvise.

'… look down with compassion, Lord, on our foolish fancies and fantasies. Lift from this house the burden of primitive superstition. Hold up your holy light and guide us away from the darkened recesses of our unconscious minds.,.'

His voice came back at him in a way he'd never experienced before in prayer. Not like in church, the words spinning away, over the congregation and up into the rafters. Or muted, behind bedside screens, against the chatter and rattle and bustle of a hospital ward.

Here, in a room too crowded with still, silent things for an echo, it all sounded as slick and as shallow as he rather suspected it was. He was stricken with isolation – feeling exposed and raw, as if his veneer of priestly strength was bubbling and melting like thin paint under a blowlamp.

Murray ran a damp finger around the inside of his clerical collar. He realized in horror that the only ghost under exorcism in this house was his own undefined, amorphous faith.

As if something was stealing that faith, feeding from it.

His collar felt like a shackle; he wanted to tear it off.

He knew he had to get out of here. Knowing this, while hearing his voice, intoning the meaningless litany.

'Bring us, Lord, safely from the captivity of our bodies and the more insidious snare of our baser thoughts. Lead us…'

Her voice sliced through his.

'I think it likes you. Vicar,' Tessa said sweetly.

His eyes opened to a white glare. The girl was holding the cracked shaving mirror at waist-level, like a spot lamp, and when she tilted the mirror, he saw in it the quivering, flickering image of a cowering man in a dark suit and a clerical collar – the man gazing down at his hands, clasping his rearing penis in helpless remorse, in a tortured parody of prayer.

Murray screamed and fled.

A few moments later, when he tumbled half-sobbing, half-retching into the street, he could hear her laughter. He stood with his back to a lamppost, sob-breathing through his mouth. He looked down and felt his fly; the zip was fully fastened.

He felt violated. Physically and spiritually naked and shamed.

A door slammed behind him, and he still thought he could hear her laughing. At intervals. As if whatever had got into her was sharing the fun.

CHAPTER V

THE bitch doesn't get in here again. Not ever. Under any circumstances. You understand?'

Max was pulsing with rage. Rachel had seen it before, but not often.

Offa's Dyke Radio had run the item on its lunchtime bulletin – from which, Rachel had been told, the story had been picked up by a local freelance hack and relayed to the London papers. Several of which had now called Epidemic's press office to check it out.

And Goff s secretary in London had phoned Goff in time for him to catch the offending Offa's Dyke item on the five o'clock news.

'That report… from Fay Morrison, our reporter in Crybbe,' the newsreader had said unnecessarily at the end.

'Fay Morrison? Guy Morrison?' Goff said.

Rachel shook her head. 'Hardly likely.'

"Yeah,' Goff accepted. And then he spelled it out for her again, just in case she hadn't absorbed his subtext. When he wanted the world to know about something, he released the information in his own good time. He released it.

'So from now on, you don't talk to anybody. You don't even think about the Project in public, you got that?'

'Maybe,' Rachel said, offhand, tempting fate, 'you should fire me.'

"Don't be fucking ridiculous,' Max snapped and stormed out of the stable-block to collect his bags from the Cock. He was driving back to London tonight, thank God, and wouldn't be returning until Friday morning, for the lunch party.

When she could no longer hear the Ferrari arrogantly clearing its throat for the open road, Rachel Wade rang Fay, feeling more than a little aggrieved.

They shouted at each other for several minutes before Rachel made a sudden connection and said slowly, 'You mean Guy Morrison is your ex-husband?'

'He didn't tell you? Well, of course, he wouldn't. Where's the kudos in having been married to me?'

Rachel said, thoughtlessly, 'He's really quite a hunk, isn't he?'

A small silence, then Fay said, 'Hunk of shit, actually.'

'Max was right,' Rachel said. 'You're being a bitch. You did the radio piece as a small act of vengeance because your ex had pushed your nose out.'

'Now look…'

'No, you look. Guy's programmes wouldn't have affected anything. You'd still have had the stories for Offa's Dyke Radio, and you'd have had them first. I do actually keep my promises.'

Fay sighed and told her that the truth was she was hoping to do a full programme. For Radio Four. However, with a TV documentary scheduled, that now looked like a non-starter.

'So I was cutting my losses, I suppose. I really didn't think it'd come back on you. Well… I suppose I didn't really think at all. I over-reacted. Keep over-reacting these days, I'm afraid. I'm sorry.'

'I'm sorry, too,' Rachel said, 'but I have to tell you you've burned your boats. Max has decreed that you should be banned from his estate forever.'

'I see.'

'I can try and explain, but he isn't known for changing his mind about this kind of thing. Why should he? He is the deity in these parts.'

In the photograph over the counter, Alfred Watkins wore pince-nez and looked solemn. If there were any pictures of him smiling, Powys thought, they must be filed away in some family album; smiling was not a public act in those days for a leading local businessman and a magistrate. It was perhaps just as well – Alfred Watkins needed his dignity today more than ever.

'Don't forget,' Powys said, 'he'll be watching you. Any joss-sticks get lit, he'll be very unhappy.'

'No he won't,' Annie said. Annie with the Egyptian amulet, still living in 1971, before the husband and the four kids. 'He fancies me, I can tell by the way he smiles.'

'He never smiles.'

'He smiles at me,' Annie said. 'OK, no joss-sticks. If you're not back by tomorrow I'll open at nine, after I get rid of the kids.'

'I'm only going to Kington.'

'You're going back to the Old Golden Land,' Annie said, half-smiling. He'd shown her the letter from Henry's neighbour, Mrs Whitney. 'Admit it, you're going back.'

'What happens?' Andy says- 'Well, you go around the stone thirteen times and then you lie on the fairy hill and you get the vision. You see into the future, or maybe just into yourself. According to the legend, John Bottle went round the stone and when he lay on the mound he went down and down until he entered the great hall of the Fairy Queen with whom he naturally fell in love. It was so wonderful down there that he didn't want to leave. But they sent him back, and when he returned to the real world he became a great seer and prophet.

'Of course.. – Andy ate a black olive -',.. he could never settle in the mundane world, and he knew that one day he'd have to go back..

Powys drove his nine-year-old Mini out of the city, turning off before the Wye bridge.

In essence, Alfred Watkins had been right about the existence of leys. Powys felt this strongly. And Henry Kettle had been better than anybody at finding where the old tracks ran, by means of dowsing.

'After all these years,' he'd said once to Powys, 'I still don't know what they are. But I know they're there. And I know that sometimes, when you're standing on one, it can affect you. Affect your balance, like. Give you delusions sometimes, like as if you've had a few too many. Nothing psychic, mind, nothing like that. But they do interfere with you. Sometimes.'

They might interfere with you when you were walking along them, with or without your dowsing rods. Or when you were driving along a stretch of road which happened – as many did – to follow one of the old lines. Many accident blackspots had been found to be places where leys crossed.

Coincidence.

Of course. And you could go crazy avoiding stretches of road just because they happened to align with local churches and standing stones. Nobody really went that far.

Certainly not Henry. Who, you would have thought, was too experienced a dowser ever to be caught out that way.

But when an experienced dowser crashed into a wall around an ancient burial mound, it demanded the kind of investigation the police would never conduct.

He didn't expect to find anything. But Henry Kettle was his friend. He was touched and grateful that Henry had bequeathed to him his papers – perhaps the famous journal that nobody had ever seen. And the rods, of course, don't forget the rods. (Why should he leave his rods to a man who couldn't dowse?)

Powys left Hereford by King's Acre and headed towards the Welsh border, where the sun hung low in the sky. During his lunchbreak, he'd spent half an hour with the OS maps of Hereford and eastern Radnorshire. He'd drawn a circle around the blob on the edge of the town of Crybbe where it said:

The Tump

(mound)

He'd taken a twelve-inch Perspex ruler and put one end over the circle and then, holding the end down with one finger, moved the ruler in an arc, making little pencil marks as he went along, whenever he came upon an ancient site. When the ruler had covered three hundred and sixty degrees he took it away and examined all the marks- haphazard as circles and crosses in a football-pool coupon.

And stared into the map like a fortune-teller into a crystal ball or the bottom of a teacup. Waiting for a meaningful image or a pattern to form among the mesh of roads and paths and contour lines… mound, circle, stone, church, earthwork, moat, holy well…

But from a ley-hunter's point of view, it was all very disappointing.

There was a large number of old stones and mounds all along the Welsh border, but the Tump didn't seem to align with any of them. The nearest possible ancient site was Crybbe parish church, less than a mile away. He looked it up in Pevsner's Buildings and established that it was certainly pre-Reformation – always a strong indication that it had been built on a pre-Christian site. But when he drew a line from the Tump to the church and then continued it for several miles, he found it didn't cross any other mounds, churches or standing stones. Not even a crossroads or a hilltop cairn.

The ley system, which appeared to cover almost the whole of Britain and could be detected in many parts of the world, seemed to have avoided Crybbe.

'Bloody strange,' Powys had said aloud, giving up.

What the hell was there for Henry Kettle to dowse in Crybbe? Why had Max Goff chosen the place as a New Age centre?

Powys came into the straggling village of Pembridge, where the age-warped black-and-whites seemed to hang over the street instead of trees. Driving down towards Kington and the border, he felt a nervousness edging in, like a foreign station on the radio at night. He rarely came this way. Too many memories. Or maybe only one long memory, twisted with grief.

Fiona, Ben's girlfriend, laughing and burrowing in one of the bags for the bottle of champagne. 'Better open this now, warm shampoo's so yucky.'

Ben holding up a fresh-from-the-publisher copy of the book. On the cover, a symbolic golden pentagram is shining on a hillside. In the foreground, against a late-sunset sky, a few stars sprinkled in the corners, is the jagged silhouette of a single standing stone. Across the top, the title. The Old Golden Land. Below the stone, in clean white lettering, the author's name, J. M. Powys.

And below that it says. With photographs by Rose Hart.

Rose looks at you, and her eyes are bright enough to burn through the years, and now the pain almost dissolves the memory.

Ben saying, 'A toast, then…'

But Andy is raising a hand. 'There remains one small formality.'

Everybody looking at him.

'I think Joe ought to present himself to the Earth Spirit in the time-honoured fashion.'

Forget it, you think. No way.

'I mean go round the Bottle Stone. Thirteen times.'

Fiona clapping her hands. 'Oh, yes. Do go round the stone, Joe.'

CHAPTER VI

Henry's place was the end of a Welsh long-house, divided into three cottages. The other two had been knocked into one, and Mrs Gwen Whitney lived there with her husband.

Powys arrived around eight-thirty, driving through deep wells of shadow. Remembering Henry coming out to meet him one evening round about this time, his dog, Alf, dancing up to the car.

That night, twelve years ago, Powys pleading with Henry: 'Come on… it's as much your book as mine. The Old Golden Land by Henry Kettle and Joe Powys.'

'Don't be daft, boy. You writes, I dowses. That's the way of it. Besides, there's all that funny stuff in there – I might not agree with some of that. You know me, nothing psychic. When I stop thinking of this as science… well, I don't know where I'll be.'

And an hour or so later: 'But, Henry, at the very least…'

'And don't you start offering me money! What do I want any more money for, with the wife gone and the daughter doing more than well for herself in Canada? You go ahead, boy. Just don't connect me with any of it, or I'll have to disown you, see.'

Silence now. The late sun turning the cottage windows to tinfoil. No dog leaping out at the car.

Mrs Whitney opened her door as he walked across.

'Mr Powys.' A heavy woman in a big, flowery frock. Smiling that sad, sympathetic smile which came easily to the faces of country women, always on nodding terms with death.

'You remember me?'

'Not changed, have you? Anyway, it's not so long.'

'Twelve years. And I've gone grey.'

'Is it so long? Good gracious. Would you like some tea?'

'Thank you. Not too late, am I?'

'Not for you, Mr Powys. I remember one night, must have been four in the morning when we finally heard your car go from here.'

'Sorry about that. We had a lot to talk about.'

'Oh, he could talk, Mr Kettle could. When he wanted to.' Mrs Whitney led him into her kitchen, 'I think it looks nice grey,' she said.

Later, they stood in Henry's cell-like living-room, insulated by thousands of books, many of them old and probably valuable, although you wouldn't have thought it from the way they were edged into the shelves, some upside down, some back to front. On a small cast-iron mantelshelf, over the Parkray, were a few deformed lumps of wood. Local sculpture, Henry called it. He'd keep them on the mantelpiece until he found more interesting ones in the hedgerows, then he'd use the old ones for the fire.

Mrs Whitney handed Powys a battered old medical bag. 'This was in the car with him. Police brought it back.'

A thought tumbled into Powys's head as he took the bag. 'What about Alf?'

'Oh, old Alf died a couple of years back. He got another dog – Arnold. Funny-looking thing. I says, "You're too old for another dog, Mr Kettle." "Give me a reason to keep on living," he says. Always said he couldn't work without a dog at his side. Arnold, he was in the car with Mr Kettle, too. He wasn't killed. A lady's looking after him in Crybbe. She'll have her hands full. Year or so with Mr Kettle, they forgot they was supposed to be dogs.'

Powys smiled.

'Daft about animals, Mr Kettle was. He's left half his money – I didn't put this in the letter – half his money's going to a dog's shelter over the other side of Hereford. Daughter won't like that.'

'Henry knew what he was doing,' Powys said. 'What's going to happen to the house?'

'She'll sell it. She won't come back, that one. She'll sell it and it'll go to some folks from Off, who'll put a new kitchen in and one of them fancy conservatories. They'll likely stop a couple of years, and then there'll be some more folks from Off. I don't mind them, myself, they never does no harm, in general.'

Powys opened the medical bag. The contents were in compartments, like valuable scientific equipment. Two remodelled wire coat-hangers with rubber grips.

Mrs Whitney said, 'There's a what-d'you-call-it, pendulum thing in a pocket in the lid.'

'I know,' Powys said. 'I remember.'

'Mr Kettle had his old dowsing records in… you know, them office things.'

'Box files.'

'Aye, box files. Must be half a dozen of them. And there's this I found by his bed.'

It was a huge old black-bound business ledger, thick as a Bible. He opened it at random.

… and in the middle meadow I detected the foundations

of an old house from about the fifteenth century. I got so

engrossed in this I forgot all about finding the well…

He could hear Henry chuckling as he wrote in black ink with his old fountain pen, edge to edge, ignoring the red and black rules and margins.

He turned to the beginning and saw the first entry had been made nearly twenty years earlier. Out of four or five hundred pages, there were barely ten left unfilled. End of an era.

Powys closed the ledger and held it, with reverence, in both hands.

'His journal. I doubt if anybody else has ever seen it.'

'Well, you take it away,' said Mrs Whitney. 'Sometimes I had the feeling some of them things Mr Kettle was doing were – how shall I say? – not quite Christian.'

'Science, Mrs Whitney. He was always very particular about that.'

'Funny sort of science,' Mrs Whitney said. 'There's a letter, too, only gave it to me last week.'

A pale-blue envelope, 'J. M. Powys' handwritten in black ink.

'Oh, he was a nice old chap,' Mrs Whitney said. 'But, with no ill respect for the departed, he'd have been the first to admit as he was more'n a bit cracked.'

For Fay, there would be no secret pleasure any more in editing tape in the office at night, within the circle of Anglepoise light, a soft glow from the Revox level-meters, and all the rest into shadow.

For none of what dwelt beyond the light could now be assumed to be simply shadow. Once these things had started happening to your mind, you couldn't trust anything any more.

That evening, she and the Canon watched television in what used to be Grace's dining-room at the rear of the house and was now their own sitting-room. Two bars of the electric fire were on – never guess it was summer, would you?

Arnold lay next to Alex on Grace's enormous chintzy sofa. The dog did not howl, not once, although Fay saw him stiffen with the distant toll of the curfew. He'd be sleeping upstairs again tonight.

She watched Alex watching TV and sent him mind-messages. We have to talk, Dad. We can't go on here. There's nothing left. There never was anything, you ought to realize that now.

Alex carried on placidly watching some dismal old black and white weepie on Channel Four.

Fay said, at one point, 'Dad?'

'Mmmm?'

Alex kept his eyes on the screen, where Stewart Granger was at a crucial point in his wooing of Jean Simmons.

'Dad, would you…' Fay gave up, 'care for some tea? Or cocoa?'

'Cocoa. Wonderful. You know, at one time, people used to say I had more than a passing resemblance to old Granger.'

'Really?' Fay couldn't see it herself.

'Came in quite useful once or twice.'

'I bet it did.'

Fay got up to make the cocoa, feeling more pale and wan than Jean Simmons looked in black and white. In one day she'd hung up on Guy, betrayed Rachel, demolished relations with Goff before she'd even met him. And caught herself about to give a blow job to a microphone in the privacy of the Crybbe Unattended Studio.

What I need, she thought, is to plug myself into a ley-line, and she smiled to herself – a despairing kind of smile – at the absurdity of it all.

The box files wouldn't all fit in the boot of the Mini. Three had to be wedged on the back seat, with the doctor's bag.

But the ledger, the dowsing journal of Henry Kettle, was on the passenger seat where Powys could see it, Henry's letter on top.

Just past the Kington roundabout he gave in, pulled into the side of the road and, in the thinning light, he opened the letter.

Dear Joe,

I'm doing this now, while I feel the way I do. If it all

sorts itself out you'll probably never read this letter. None of

it will make much sense to you at first and if it never does

make any sense it means my fears will be groundless.

What it comes down to is I've been working out at Crybbe

for a chap called Max Goff who's bought Crybbe Court.

The nature of the job is dowsing some old alignments

where the stones and such have all gone years ago, and it's

been giving me the shivers, quite honestly, that whole place.

Don't get me wrong, there's nothing psychic or any of that

old rubbish, but it's not right and as far as I can work out

it's a long-term kind of thing. I intend to keep an eye on the

situation in the weeks and months and, God willing, the years

ahead and keep on revising my notes, but I'm not getting any

younger and you could go any time at my age and I feel as

how I ought to inform somebody. You have had some daft

ideas in your time but you're a good boy basically and the

only person I can think of who I can trust not to dismiss this

out of hand as an old fool's rumblings.

God knows, I'm not infallible and I could be wrong and

I don't even know as yet the nature of what's up in Crybbe,

only I get the feeling it's long-term, and I'd like to think there

was somebody who could keep an eye on what that Goff's

up to.

Now my daughter, we've grown apart, no kidding myself

any more. She's out in Canada and she's VERY WELL

OFF. So I've written to my solicitor in Hereford informing

him that as well as all the papers my house is to be left to

you. Consider it as a token of my confidence.

Yours sincerely,

H. Kettle

(Henry)

'God almighty,' Powys said.

He could see lights coming on in Kington, through the trees on the other side of the road, darkening hills. Somewhere, on the other side of the hills, Crybbe.

Leaving him the house was ridiculous. He'd probably have changed his mind by now, anyway.

But the letter was dated 19 June.

Only two days before Henry's death.

Powys opened the ledger at the last completed page. It also was dated 19 June.

Quite a successful day. Located three more old stones.

One of them would be eleven feet above the ground, which

would make it quite rare for the Crybbe area, the nearest one

as high as that being down near Crickhowell. I have been

over this twice to make sure. It is very peculiar that there

should have been so many big stones in such a small area. I

tried to date this big one, but all I could come up with was

1593 when it was destroyed. It seemed certain to me that this

was done quite deliberately, the whole thing taken out and

broken up. This was all quite systematic, like the burning

down of monasteries during the Reformation.

What intrigues me is how this Goff could have obtained

the information about there having been stones here when even

I had never heard of them. Sometimes I feel quite excited by

all this, it is undoubtedly the most remarkable discovery of

prehistoric remains in this country for many years, even if the

archaeologists will never accept it. At other times, however,

I do get quite a bad feeling that something here is not right,

although I cannot put my finger on it. I have always disliked

the Tump for some reason. Some places are naturally negative,

although perhaps 'natural' is not the word I want. The Welsh

border is a very funny place, but I am sure there is a good

scientific explanation.

The last entry. Neatly dated and a line drawn under it. Two days later Henry Kettle was lying dead in his car under Crybbe Tump.

It was dark when Powys got back to Hereford. He lugged the box files up the stairs to his little flat above Trackways and left them in the middle of the floor, unopened. It would take months to explore that lot.

Bui he was committed now.

He went down to the shop and put on the lights. From his photograph, Alfred Watkins frowned down on the counter, Powys could see why: Annie had put the box of 'healing' crystals on display.

He wrote out a note and left it wedged under the crystals box.

Dear Annie,

Please hold fort until whenever. I'll call you. Don't light

too many joss-sticks.

Feeling a need to explain, he added,

Gone to Crybbe.

P.S. Don't get the wrong idea. It might be old, but it's

not golden.

When he put out the lights in the shop, he noticed the answering machine winking red.

A woman's low, resonant voice.

'J. M. Powys, this is Rachel Wade at Crybbe Court. I wanted to remind you about Friday. I'd be grateful if you could call back on Crybbe 689, which is the Cock Hotel or 563, our new office at Crybbe Court. Leave a message if I'm not around. Things are a little chaotic at present, but we'd very much like to hear from you. If you can't make it on Friday, we could arrange another day. Just please call me.'

'I'll be there,' Powys said to the machine. 'OK?'

He went upstairs to bed and couldn't sleep. He'd seen Henry barely half a dozen times in the past ten years. If the old guy really had left him his house to underline his feelings about Crybbe then they had to be more than passing fears.

'What have you dumped on me, Henry?" he kept asking the ceiling. And when he fell asleep he dreamt about the Bottle Stone.

CHAPTER VII

The following day was overcast, the sky straining with rain that never seemed to fall. After breakfast, Jimmy Preece, gnarled old Mayor of Crybbe, went to see his son.

He found Jack tinkering with the tractor in the farmyard, his eldest grandson, Jonathon, looking on, shaking his head.

'Always the same,' Jack grunted. 'Just when you need it. Mornin', Father.'

'I been telling him,' Jonathon said. 'Get a new one. False economy. This thing gets us through haymaking, I'll be very surprised indeed.'

Jimmy Preece shook his head, then he nodded, so that neither of them would be sure which one he was agreeing with.

'Got to take an overview,' said Jonathon, this year's chairman of the Crybbe and District Young Farmers' Club. 'Goin' from day to day don't work any more.'

'Break off a minute, will you?' Jimmy said. 'Come in the 'ouse. I want a bit of advice.'

He knew that'd get them. Jack straightened up, tossed his spanner into the metal toolbox and walked off without a word across the farmyard to the back door. 'Warren!' he roared. 'Put that bloody guitar down and make some tea.'

In the kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil, Warren whipped the letter out of his back pocket and read it through again. He'd thought at first it might have been Peter, the drummer pulling his pisser again. But where would Peter have got hold of Epidemic headed notepaper?

Dear Mr Preece,

Thank you for sending us the cassette of FATAL

ACCIDENT, which I return.

Max Goff has listened with interest to your songs and

believes then could be considerable potential here…

It was signed by this Rachel Wade, the snooty tart Warren had seen driving Max Goff around. It had to be genuine.

Well, fuck, what had he got to be surprised about? Max Goff hadn't got where he was today without he could spot a good band when he heard one.

Have to get working, then. Have to get a few more numbers together. Get on the phone to the boys, soon as the old man and bloody Jonathon were out the way.

Warren took their tea. They were sprawled around the big living-room, grandad getting his knackered old pipe out. Looked like the start of a long session, and the phone was in the same room. Warren was nearly grinding his teeth in frustration.

Stuff this, he'd walk into town and use the phone box by the post office. He left the tray of mugs on a stool and cleared out quick, before the old man could come up with some filthy old job for him.

Out in the hallway, though, he stopped, having second thoughts. Warren liked to know about things. He tramped loudly to the main door, kicked it shut, then crept quietly back and stood by the living-room door, listening.

And soon he was bloody glad he had.

Fay had decided that what she must do, for a start, was get her dad out of the town for a few hours so she could talk to him. Really talk.

It seemed ridiculous that she couldn't do this in the house but that was how it was. Often, in Crybbe, you simply couldn't seem to approach things directly. There were whole periods when everything you tried to do or say was somehow deflected.

In the same way, she felt the place smothered your natural curiosity, made the urge to find out – the act of wanting to know – seem just too much trouble.

It wasn't that the air was in any way soporific, she thought unlocking the Fiesta. Not like the famous country air was supposed to be, or the dreamy blue ozone at the seaside that sent you drifting off at night on waves of healthy contentment.

Here, it was as if the atmosphere itself was feeding off you, quietly extracting your vital juices, sapping your mental energy, so that you crawled into bed and lay there like a dried out husk.

Had the air done this to the people? Or had the people done it to the air?

Or was it just her, living with an old man whose mind was seizing up.

Fay gave him a blast on the horn. Come on. Dad, you're not changing your mind now.

In the local paper she'd found a story about people in a village fifteen miles away receiving some kind of conservation award for adopting their local railway station, planting flowers on the embankments, that kind of thing. Ashpole had agreed it would probably make a nice little soft package. End of the programme stuff, keep it down to four minutes max.

From the back seat, Arnold barked. It was a gruff, throaty bark, and his jaws clamped down on it as soon as it was out. It was the first one Fay had ever heard him produce. He must be settling in. She leaned over and ruffled his big ears, pleased.

Alex emerged by the front door at last. It had been far from easy persuading him to come with her, even though he did seem much better today, more aware.

He sat with his hands on his lap as she drove them out of town, on the Welsh side. 'Hope you know a decent pub over there, my child.'

'We'll find one.'

The sky was brightening as she drove into the hills, the border roads unravelling through featureless forestry, then open fields with sheep, a few cows, sparse sprinklings of cottages, farm buildings and bungalows.

The little railway station was on the single-track Heart of Wales line, which went on to Shrewsbury. It wasn't much more than a halt, with a wooden bench and a waiting room the size of a bus-shelter.

Fay had arranged to meet the Secretary of this enthusiastic committee which existed to defend the unprofitable line against what seemed to be a constant threat of imminent closure by British Rail. He turned out to be a genial guy and a good talker, and he'd brought along a couple of villagers who spent their weekends sprucing up the station surrounds, cutting back verges, planting bulbs. They were friendly and self-deprecating.

In Crybbe it would have to have been the newcomers who took the job on. But Crybbe didn't have a station, anyway. Only B-roads.

Interviews done, she stood for a moment at the edge of the line, looking out towards the hills and thinking what a quiet, serene place this actually was. Untampered with. All the old patterns still apparent.

A buzzard glided overhead, then banked off like a World War II fighter, flashing the white blotches under its wings.

She thought, it's me. All this is wonderful. It isn't mean and tight and stifling at all. I'm just a sour bitch who thinks she's had a raw deal, and I'm blaming the poor bloody border country.

Alex was in the car, white beard brushing his Guardian as he read, still managing without glasses at pushing ninety. He was wearing a baggy cardigan over his Kate Bush T-shirt. Fay thought suddenly, I wish I knew him better.

… and Mrs Wozencraft's cottage – old Jessie Wozencraft – that's his as well, he's bought that.'

'Good luck to him,' Jonathon said. 'Old place is near enough falling down.'

'That's not the point, Jonathon,' said Jack Preece. 'Point your grandad's makin' is…'

'Oh, I know what he's sayin' – and he's dead right. What bloody use is an acupuncturist in Crybbe?'

'What do they do, anyway?'

'They sticks needles in you, to cure things.'

'Wouldn't stick any in me, boy, I hates them injections.'

'It don't matter what they does!' Warren heard his grandad say, thumping the chair-arm. It's the principle. Retired folk I don't mind so much, give 'em a bit of bird watchin' and a library book and they don't bother nobody, and they always dies after a few years anyway. What I object to is these clever-arsed fellers as wants to change things to what they thinks they should be, if you know what I'm sayin'. Everything pretty-pretty and no huntin' the little furry animals. And no jobs either, 'cause factories spoils the view.'

'Market forces, Grandad. You can't do nothin' about market forces.'

'Nine properties, 'e's had so far, I counted. Nine! Everything for sale within a mile of town, he's bought it.'

'Many as that, eh?'

Warren didn't like the way this conversation was going. He fingered the crisp Epidemic notepaper in his pocket.

Jonathon said, 'Well, nobody else'd've bought 'em, would they? Not with interest rates the way they are. All right, it's speculation…'

'It's not just speculation, Jonathon. There's a purpose to it, and it's not right. You heard that woman on the wireless. New Age and psychic powers. I don't know nothin' about any of it and I don't want to, and I don't want him doin' it yere.'

'Woken a lot of people up to it, that bit on the radio,' Jack said. 'Everybody talkin' about it in the Cock last night, the post office this morning. Lot of people's worried it's going to bring the hippies in.'

'What are any of 'em but hippies? Quack healers, fortune- tellers…'

'Who is she, Father? Somebody said it was that girl who lives with 'er dad, the old feller with the beard.'

'Fay Morrison,' Grandad said. 'Nice enough girl. Comes to council meetings.'

'Tidy piece,' Jonathon said.

Warren knew who they meant. Seen her the other night, coming back from the Court with that dog. Followed her behind the hedge. Spying, most likely, she was, nosy cow.

'I admit I never wanted 'em to put that radio studio in,' his grandad said. 'But if it 'adn't been for this girl nobody'd've believed it. They years it on the wireless, it brings it 'ome to 'em, isn't it?' Warren heard the old feller sucking on his pipe. 'Ah, but he's a crafty bugger, that Goff. Comes to my door tryin' to get round me, all the things he's goin' to do for the town. Get the Mayor on his side, first – tactics, see.'

'Well, we can't stop him. Can't block market forces, Grandad.'

'We can stop him takin' our town off us to serve his whims!'

'And how're we supposed to do that?'

'He wants a public meeting, we'll give him one.'

'What are you savin' here. Father? Give him a rough time? Let him know he isn't wanted?'

Behind the door, Warren began to seethe. This was fucking typical. Here was Max Goff, biggest bloody independent record producer in the country, on the verge of signing Fatal Accident to Epidemic. And these stick-in-the-mud bastards were scheming to get rid of him.

Jonathon was saying, 'See them stones he had delivered? Bloody great stones, dozens of 'en.'

'Building stone?'

'No, just great big stones. Huge buggers. Like Stonehenge, that kind.'

Things went quiet, then Warren heard his grandad say, 'He's oversteppin' the mark. He's got to be stopped.'

Warren wanted to strangle the old git. He wanted to strangle all three of them. Also that fucking radio woman who'd let it all out and stirred things up. The one who shouted after him through the hedge that night, called him a wanker.

Every pub they'd tried had stopped serving lunch at two o'clock – so much for all-day opening – and so they'd wound up at this Little Chef, which didn't please him. 'Bloody cooking by numbers. Two onion rings, thirty-seven chips. All this and alcohol-free lager too. And these bloody girls invariably saying, "Was it all right for you?" as if they're just putting their knickers back on.'

'At least they're there when you want them,' Fay said. getting back on the A49. 'Would you like to see Ludlow?'

'Like to go home, actually.'

'God almighty! What is it about that place?'

'Left my pills there.'

'I know you did. But luckily, I brought them. What's your next excuse?'

Alex growled. 'Wish I'd had a son.'

'Instead of me, huh?'

'Sons don't try to manage you.'

'Dad, I want to talk to you.'

'Oh God.'

'Was that the first time Guy rang, the other night?'

'Hard to say, my dear. Once I put the phone down I tend to forget all about him. He may have rung earlier. Does it really matter?'

'I don't mean just that night. Has he rung any other time when I've been out?'

'Can't remember. Suppose he could have done. I didn't think you cared.'

'I don't. It's just Guy's coming down to make a documentary about Max Goff, and I was wondering how he found out there was something interesting going on. I know you tend to absorb local gossip like a sponge and then somebody squeezes you a bit and it all comes out, and then you forget it was ever there.'

'You think I told him?'

'Did you?'

'Did I? God knows. Say anything to get rid of him. Does it matter?'

Fay glanced in her wing mirror then trod on the brakes and pulled in violently to the side of the road. 'Of course it bloody matters!'

'I think you're overwrought, my child. You're young. You need a bit of excitement. Bit of stimulation. Country life doesn't suit you.'

'Crybbe doesn't suit me.'

'So why not simply…?'

She said carefully, 'Dad. You may be right. There may be nothing at all wrong with Crybbe. But, yes, I think it's time I left. And I think it's time you left. You've no reason to stay, you've no roots there, no real friends there.'

He said sadly, 'Oh, I have.'

He wasn't looking at her. He was looking straight out at the A49, lorries chugging past.

'Who? Murray Beech? He'll be off, first chance of a bigger parish. He's got nothing to thank Crybbe for – his fiancée didn't hang around, did she?'

'No,' Alex said. 'Not Murray.'

'Who then?'

He didn't reply.

Fay fiddled with the keys in the ignition. Alex talked to everybody, old vicars never changed. A friend to everyone, essence of the job. But how many did he really know?

'What are you saying, Dad?'

'Grace,' he whispered, and Fay saw the beginning of tears in his old blue eyes.

She put a hand on his arm. 'Dad?'

'Don't ask me about this. Fay,' Alex said. 'Please. Just take me home.'

CHAPTER VIII

On top of the Tump it all came clear.

You could see over the roofs of the stables and Crybbe Court itself, which was sunk into a shallow dip. And there, only just showing above the trees, was the church tower. But then the trees hadn't always been so high – or even here at all.

The church was at the high point of the town, the main street sloping down to the river. From here you couldn't see the street or the river – but you could see the fields on the opposite bank, rising into hills thickened now with forestry. And, at one time, before the introduction of the voracious Sitka Spruce from Alaska, that might have been bare hillside, and there would have been other markers to pick up the line.

Joe Powys looked all around him and saw how clearly the Tump had been positioned to dominate the town, even the church, and draw in the landscape like the corners of a handkerchief.

That old feeling again, of being inside an ancient mechanism. At the centre of the wheel.

Identifying the line took an act of imagination because there were no markers any more. But Henry Kettle had discovered where upright stones had once been aligned to guide the eye from the Tump to the distant horizons.

But there was something about it that Henry Kettle didn't like.

Powys moved away from the highest point and stood next to a twisted hawthorn tree. The sky was a tense, luminous grey, swollen like a great water-filled balloon, and he felt that if it came down low enough to be pricked by the tree's topmost thorns, he'd be drowned.

It was his own fault. Places like this could ensnare your mind, and your thoughts became tangled up with the most primitive instincts, old fears lying hidden in the undergrowth like trailing brambles.

As quickly as he could, but still very carefully, Powys came down from the Tump, climbed over the wall and didn't look back until he was well into the field, heading towards the road, where he'd left the Mini. Halfway across the field, there was a bumpy rise, and it was here that he found the hub-cap.

He sat on a hummock with the disc on his knee. It was muddy and badly rusted, but he could still make out the symbol in the centre – two letters: VW.

'Still the same car. then, Henry. How old is it now? Twenty-two, twenty-three?'

Holding Henry's hub-cap, Powys looked back at the Tump.

I have always disliked the Tump for some reason. Some places are naturally negative.

Powys thought, sinister bloody thing that must once have appeared as alien as a gasworks or a nuclear reactor. He looked down at the wall, realizing that the section he'd climbed over was just a few yards from the part where the stonework was so obviously scraped, but hadn't collapsed because it was too hard for that. Harder than the rusting heap of twenty-year-old tin Henry Kettle drove.

From the foot of the wall, shards of broken glass glimmered like dew in the trodden-down grass.

Christ, Henry, how could this happen?

Henry, can you hear me?

Although perhaps 'natural' is not the word I want… But I am sure there is a good scientific explanation.

You misled us, Henry- nothing psychic, you kept saying. We should have realized it was just a dirty word to you, a word for phoney mediums and fortune-tellers at the end of the pier. Ancient science was your term, because it didn't sound cranky.

He could see the tracks now, grass flattened, lumps of turf wrenched out. The field was unfenced and the car must have cut across it diagonally, ploughing straight on instead of following a sharpish left-hand bend in the road.

Powys left the metal disc on the hummock and scrambled up to the road, collecting a hard look from a man driving a Land Rover pulling a trailer.

Now, if Henry was driving out of town, he'd be pointing straight at the Tump, then the road curved away, then it was directed towards the Tump again, very briefly, then came the left-hand bend and you were away into the hills.

But Henry never made the left-hand bend. The car left the road, taking him into the field. He might not have noticed what he'd done at first, if it was dark. And then the field went quite suddenly into this slope, and… crunch.

Not so far-fetched at alt, really. There'd be an accidental death verdict and nobody would delve any deeper. All the rest was folklore.

He went back into the field, walked down towards the Tump, skirting its walled-in base, not knowing what he was hoping for any more.

Come on, Henry. Give us a sign.

It began to rain. He ran to a clump of trees to shelter and to watch the Tump, massive, ancient, glowering through the downpour, as magnificently mysterious as the Great Pyramid.

Powys turned away and wandered among the trees, emerging on the other side into a clearing beside a building of grey-brown stone.

Crybbe Court?

No, not the Court itself, the stable-block – now seriously renovated, he saw. There was an enormous oblong of glass set in the wall – a huge picture-window, facing the Tump.

Behind the building he could see the corner of a forecourt, where two men stood in the rain looking down on four long, grey, jagged stones.

Powys stiffened.

One of the men was dark and thin and was talking to the other man in a voice which, had he been able to hear it, would probably have reminded him of a stroked cello.

'Least you can do, mate,' Andy tells you. 'Look at all the money the book's going to make. Think of it as a kind of appeasement of the Earth Spirit.'

Fiona claps her hands. 'Oh, go on, Joe. We'll all sit here and chant and clap.'

'Bastards.' You look at Rose, who smiles sympathetically. Reluctantly you stand up, and everybody cheers.

Well, everybody except Henry. 'Don't wanna play about with these old things.' Quaint old Herefordshire countryman.

Andy leaning on an elbow. I thought you weren't superstitious, Henry. Ancient science and all that. Nothing psychic.

'Aye, well, electricity's science too, but you wouldn't wanna go sticking your fingers up a plug socket.'

Thankful for his advice, you make as if to sit down.

'Not got the bottle for it, Joe?'

Ben starts clapping very slowly, and the others – except Henry – pick up the rhythm. 'Joey goes round the Bottle Stone, the Bottle Stone, the Bottle Stone…'

Crybbe was forty-five minutes away. Minor roads all the once they'd left the A49. Neither of them spoke; Fay thinking; hard, bringing something into focus. Something utterly repellent that she hadn't, up to now, allowed herself to contemplate for longer than a few seconds.

A woman in a cold miasma, frigid, rigid, utterly still. Not breathing. Past breathing… long past.

She looked in the driving mirror, and there was Arnold, the dog, sitting upright on the back seat; their eyes met in the mirror.

You saw her, Arnold. You saw something. But did I?

Did I see the ghost of Grace Legge?

Ghost. Spirit of the dead. And yet that image, the Grace thing, surely was without spirit. Static. Frozen. And the white eyes and that horrible smile with those little, thin fish-teeth.

That was her. Her teeth. Tiny little teeth, and lots of them, discoloured, brittle. The memory you always carried away, of Grace's fixed smile, with all those little teeth.

She'd been nothing to Fay, just Dad's Other Woman. No, not exactly nothing. Twenty years ago, she'd been something on the negative side of nothing. Somebody Fay had blamed – to herself, for she'd never spoken of it, not to anyone – for her mother's death. And she'd blamed her father, too. Perhaps this was why, even now, she could not quite love him – terrible admission.

She had, naturally, tried hard for both of them when she came down for the wedding. Water under the bridge. An old man's fumbling attempts to make amends and a very sick woman who deserved what bit of happiness remained for her.

Perhaps her dad thought he'd killed them both. Both his wives.

Compassion rising, Fay glanced sideways at Alex, sitting there with his old green cardigan unbuttoned and ATE USH in fading lettering across his chest.

What this was about – had to be – was that he, too, had seen something in the night.

And what must that be like for an old man who could no longer trust his own mind or even his memories? If she wasn't sure what she'd seen – or even if she'd seen anything – what must it be like for him?

Fay clinched the steering wheel lightly, and goose pimples rippled up both arms.

That's why you can't leave, Dad. You've seen something that none of your clerical experience could ever prepare you for. You're afraid that somehow she's still there, in the house you shared.

And you're not going to walk out on her again.

Henry Kettle had written.

It is very peculiar that there should have been so many big stones in such a small area.

Long after Andy and the other man had walked away Powys still stood silently under the dripping trees, staring in fascination at the recumbent stones in the corner of the courtyard.

Megaliths.

And Andy Boulton-Trow, whom Powys hadn't seen for twelve years. Designer of the cover of The Old Golden Land. Painter of stones, sculptor of stones, collector of stone-lore.

The stones lay there, gleaming with fresh rain. Old stones,' or new stones? Did it matter; one stone was as old as another.

Stones didn't speak to him the way they spoke to Henry Kettle, but he was getting the idea. Max Goff, presumably, intended to place new stones in the spots identified by Henry.

And the obvious man to select and shape the stones – an act of love – was Andy Boulton-Trow, who knew more about the nature of megaliths than anyone in Europe. Powys had met Andy at art college, to which Andy had come after university to learn about painting and sculpture… with specific regard to stone.

From beyond the courtyard, he heard an engine start, a vehicle moving away.

Then all was quiet, even the rain had ceased.

Powys slid from the trees and made his way around the side of the stone stable-building to the comer of the courtyard where the stones lay.

Fay drove into Crybbe from the Ludlow road. The windscreen wipers squeaked as the rain eased off.

She thought. We're never going to be able to talk about this, are we, Dad? Not for as long as you live.

She stopped in front of the house to let him out. 'Thank you,' he said, not looking at her, it's been… a pleasant day, hasn't it?'

'I'll put the car away. You stay here, Arnold.'

She backed the car into the entry, a little tunnel affair in the terrace, parking too close to the wall; there was only just room to squeeze out. 'Come on, Arnold.'

Alex was waiting for them at the back door. His face was grave but his blue eyes were flecked – as they often were now – with a flickering confusion.

'Got the tea on. Dad?'

'Fay.. '. I..

He turned and walked into the kitchen. The kettle was not even plugged in.

'Fay…'

'Dad?'

He walked through the kitchen, into the hall, Fay following, Arnold trolling behind. At the door of the office, Grace's sitting-room, he stood to one side to let her pass.

'I'm so sorry,' he said.

At first she couldn't see what he meant. The clock was still clicking away on the mantelpiece, the fireside chair still piled high with box files.

'The back door was open,' Alex said. 'Forced.'

She saw.

They must have used a sledgehammer or a heavy axe because it was a tough machine, with a metal top.

'Why?' Fay felt ravaged. Cold and hollow and hurting like a rape victim. 'For God's sake, why?'

Her beloved Revox – night-time comfort with its swishing spools and soft-glowing level-meters – had been smashed to pieces, disembowelled.

A few hundred yards of tape had been unspooled and mixed up with the innards, and the detritus was splattered over the floor like a mound of spaghetti.

CHAPTER IX

The women who had, in recent years, been powerfully attracted to Joe Powys had tended to wear long, hand-dyed skirts and shapeless woollies. Sometimes they had frizzy hair and sometimes long, tangled hair. Sometimes they were big-breasted earth-mother types and sometimes small-boned and delicate like Arthur Rackham fairies.

Sometimes, when Powys fantasized – which was worryingly rarely, these days – he imagined having, as he put it to himself, a bit of smooth. Someone scented. Someone who shaved her armpits. Someone who would actually refuse to trek across three miles of moorland to find some tiny, ruined stone circle you practically had to dig out of the heather. Someone you could never imagine standing in the middle of this half-submerged circle and breathing, 'Oh, I mean, gosh, can't you feel it…can't you feel that primal force?'

The woman facing him now, he could tell, was the kind who'd rather see Stonehenge itself as a blur in the window of a fast car heading towards a costly dinner in Salisbury.

But even if she'd been wearing a home-made ankle-length skirt with a hemline of mud, clumpy sandals and big wooden ear-rings, he would, at this moment, have been more than grateful to see her.

She said, 'I think you could let him go now, Humble. He really doesn't look very dangerous.'

'Find out who he is first,' said the hard-faced bastard with a grip like a monkey-wrench, the guy he'd first seen frowning at him through the window of a Land Rover when he was checking out the Tump.

He made Powys bend over the vehicle's high bonnet, which tossed another pain-ball into his stomach.

This man had punched him in the guts with a considered precision and such penetration that he was seriously worried about internal bleeding.

'Ta very much.' Deftly removing Powys's wallet from the inside pocket of his muddied jacket. Not a local accent; this was London.

'If this is a mugging,' Powys said awkwardly, face squashed into the bonnet, 'you could be…'

'Fucking shut it.' His nose crunched into the metal, Powys felt blood come.

'Don't even twitch, pal, OK?'

'Mmmph.'

'Right, then, I'm going to have a little butcher's through here, see what you got by way of ID, all right?'

'Humble, if you don't let him go I'm going to call the police.'

'Rachel, you do your job, I do mine. Our friend here don't want that. Ask him. Ask him what he was doing on private property. Ain't a poacher. Ain't got the bottle.'

He cringed, expecting Humble to tap him in the guts again to prove his point. But the pressure eased and he was allowed to stand. His nose felt wet, but he didn't think it was broken. He looked at the woman, who must be close to his own age, had light, mid-length hair and calm eyes. 'I'm sorry,' she said. 'Humble's used to dealing with the more urban type of trespasser.'

'Trespasser?' Powys wiped off some blood with the back of a hand. 'Now, look… You tell this bloody psycho…' He stopped. What could she tell him? He wondered where Andy Boulton-Trow had vanished to.

'All right now, are we?' Dipping into Powys's wallet, Humble smiled with the lower half of a face which had all the personality of a mousetrap. He pulled out a plastic-covered driving licence and handed it to the woman. She took it from him reluctantly. Opened it out. Gave a little gasp.

'Oh dear,' she said.

'Yeah, don't tell me. One of Max's bits of fluff.' Humble smirked, in which case, no problems, he'll have been enjoying himself.'

Rachel closed the licence and held out her hand for the wallet. Very carefully she put the licence back, then she handed the wallet to Powys.

'Not entirely accurate, Humble,' she said. 'And when he hears about this, Max, I suspect, is going to have you strung up by the balls.'

Police Sergeant Wynford Wiley was shaking his great turnip head. 'Mindless.'

'Mindless?' said Fay. 'You think it's mindless?'

'We always prided ourselves,' Wynford said, thick blue legs astride the wreckage. 'Never suffered from no vandalism in this town. Not to any great extent, anyhow.'

Only vandalism by neglect, Fay thought dully. She wondered why she'd bothered to call the police now. Wynford was just so sinister – like one of those mean-eyed, redneck police chiefs you saw in moody American movies set in semi-derelict, one-street, wooden towns in the Midwest.

'Think somebody would've seen 'em, though.' The gap narrowed between Wynford's little round eyes. ' 'Course, Mrs Lloyd next door, deaf as a post, see. Knock on the door, she don't answer. You got to put your face up to the window.'

Fay imagined Wynford's face, flattened by glass. Give the poor old girl a heart attack.

He said, 'Scene-of-crime boy'll be over later, with his box of tricks. I'll knock on a few doors along the street, see what I can turn up.'

He paused in the doorway, looked back at the wreckage. 'Mindless,' he said.

Fay turned to her dad for support, but Alex, gazing down his beard at the Revox ruins, had nothing to say.

'Doesn't it strike you as odd,' Fay said clinically, 'that this tornado of savagery appears somehow to have focused itself on one single item? I'm no criminologist, but I've witnessed my share of antisocial behaviour, and this, Sergeant, is not what I'd call mindless. Psychopathic, perhaps, but mindless in the sense of randomly destructive, no.'

Wynford's big, round face was changing colour. Nobody, she thought, contradicts Chief Wiley on his own manor.

'What you sayin' 'ere, then? Somebody wants to stop you broadcastin'? That it?'

'It's possible. Isn't it?

'And is it gonner stop you broadcastin'?'

'Well, no, as it happens. I.. I've got a portable tape recorder I do all my interviews on, and I can edit down at the studio in town, there's a machine there. But would they know that?'

'Listen.' Wynford was row wearing an expression which might have been intended to convey kindness. Fay shuddered. 'He – they – just came in and smashed up the most expensive thing they could find. Then, could be as 'e was disturbed – or, thought 'e was gonna be disturbed, maybe 'e yers somebody walkin' past…'

'Maybe he wasn't disturbed at all,' Fay said. 'Maybe he just left because he'd achieved what he set out to do.

'I think you're watchin' too much telly.'

'Can't very well watch too much TV in Crybbe. The power's never on for longer than three hours at a stretch.'

Wynford turned his back on her, opened the office door. Arnold walked in, saw Wynford and growled.

'See you've still got that dog Didn't leave 'im in the 'ouse, then, when you went out?'

'What? Oh. No, he came with us,' Fay said. 'What happened with the RSPCA, by the way? Does anybody want to claim him?'

'No. I reckon 'e's yours now. If 'e stays.'

'How do you mean?'

'Well. If 'e don't take off, like.'

He was wearing such a weird smile that Fay pursued him to the front door, 'I don't understand.'

Wynford shrugged awkwardly. 'Well, you might wake up one day, see, and…'e'll be… well, 'e won't be around any more.'

Fay felt menaced. 'Meaning what? Come on… what are you saying?'

Wynford's face went blank. 'I'll go and talk to some neighbours,' he said, and he went.

'Dad,' Fay said, 'I've said this before, but there's something very wrong with that guy.'

"Sorry, my dear?' Alex looked up. His eyes were like floss.

'Sit down. Dad, you've had a shock.'

'I'm fine,' Alex said. 'Fine. If there's nothing I can do here, I'll probably have an early night.'

Fay watched the policeman walk past the window, imagined him peering through it with his face squashed against the glass, like a robber in a stocking mask.

She recoiled, stared at the gutted hulk of the Revox, a bizarre idea growing in her head like a strange hybrid plant.

She turned to Arnold, who was standing placidly in the doorway gazing up, for some reason, at Alex, his tail well down.

'Christ,' Fay said.

Something had occurred to her that was so shatteringly preposterous that…

'Dad, I have to go out.'

'OK,' Alex said.

… if she didn't satisfy herself that it was completely crazy, she wasn't going to get any sleep tonight.

'You go and walk off your anger,' Alex said. 'You'll feel better.'

'Something…' Fay looked around for Arnold's plastic clothes-line. 'Dad, I've just got to check this out. I mean, it's so…' Fay shook her head helplessly. 'I'll be back, OK?'

She took J. M. Powys to her room at the Cock. The big room on the first floor that she shared with Max. But Max was in London.

The licensee, Denzil, watched them go up.]. M. Powys looked, to say the least, dishevelled, but Denzil made no comment. Rachel suspected that if she organized an orgy for thirty participants, Denzil would have no complaints as long as they all bought drinks in the bar to take up with them.

Rachel closed the bedroom door. The room was laden with dark beams and evening shadows. She switched a light on.

So this was J. M. Powys. Not what she'd imagined, not at all.

'Don't take this wrong, but I thought you'd be older.'

'I think I am older.' He tried to smile; it came out lop-sided. There was drying blood around his mouth. His curly hair was entirely grey.

'Er, is there a bathroom?'

'Across the passage,' Rachel said. 'The en-suite revolution hasn't happened in Crybbe yet. Possibly next century. Here, let me look… Take your jacket off.'

It was certainly an old jacket. The once-white T-shirt underneath it was stiff with mud and blood.

Gently, Rachel prised the T-shirt out of his jeans. The colours of his stomach were like a sky with a storm coming on. 'Nasty. That man is a liability.'

'I've never…' Powys winced, 'been beaten up by a New Age thug before. It doesn't feel a lot different, actually.'

Rachel said, 'Humble has his uses in London and New York, but… Just move over to the light, would you… really don't like the way he's going native, I caught him laying snares the other day. Look, Mr Powys, I don't know what I can do for bruising, apart from apologize profusely and buy you dinner. Not that you'll thank me for that, unless you're into cholesterol in the basket.'

'I don't mind that. I had a Big Mac the other day.'

He sounded almost proud. Perhaps J. M. Powys was as loony as his book, after all.

Addressing the fireplace, Alex said, 'Why? You've always been so houseproud. Why do this?'

He mustn't touch anything. Fingerprints. Couldn't even tidy the place up a bit until they'd looked for fingerprints. Waste of time, all that. They wouldn't have Grace on their files.

Alex started to cry.

'Why can't you two get on together?'

A tangled ball of black, unspooled tape rustled as he caught it with his shoe. Like the tape, the thoughts in his head were in hopeless, flimsy coils and, like the tape, could never be rewound.

All the way up the High Street, Fay kept her eyes on the gutter. She saw half a dozen cigarette-ends. A crumpled crisp packet and a sweet-wrapper. Two ring-pulls from beer cans. And a bus ticket issued by Marches Motors, the only firm which ran through Crybbe – twice a week, if you were lucky.

But neither in the gutter nor up against the walls did she find what she was looking for.

When Arnold stopped to cock his leg up against a lamppost, Fay stopped, too, and examined the bottom of the post for old splash-marks.

There were none that she could see, and Arnold didn't hang around. He was off in a hurry, straining on the clothes-line as he always did on the street. She'd have to get him a lead tomorrow.

Now there was a point. Fay steered Arnold past Middle Marches Crafts and the worn sign of the Crybbe Pottery, which her dad said was about to close down. There was a hardware shop round the corner.

Hereward Newsome was emerging from The Gallery. 'Oh, hi, Fay. Out on a story?'.

'You're working late.'

'We're rearranging the main gallery. Making more picture space. Time to expand, I think, now the town's taking off.'

'Is it?'

'God, yes, you must have noticed that. Lots of new faces about. Whatever you think of Max Goff, he's going to put this place on the map at last. I've been talking to the marketing director of the Marches Development Board – they're terribly excited. I should have a word with him sometime, they're very keen to talk about it.'

'I will. Thanks. Hereward, look, you haven't got a dog, have you?'

'Mmm? No. Jocasta had it in mind to buy a Rottweiler once – she gets a little nervous at night. Be good deal more nervous with a Rottweiler around, I said. Hah. Managed to talk her out of that one, thank God.'

'Do you know anybody who has got one?'

'A Rottweiler?'

'No, any sort of dog.'

'Er… God, is that the time? No, it's not something I tend to notice, who has what kind of dog. Look, pop in sometime; there's a chap – artist – called Emmanuel Walters. Going to be very fashionable. You might like to do an interview with him about the exhibition we're planning. Couple of days before we open, would that be possible? Give you a ring, OK?'

She nodded and smiled wanly, and Hereward Newsome walked rapidly away along the shadowed street, long strides, shoulders back, confident.

Fay dragged Arnold round the corner to the hardware shop. Like all the other shops in Crybbe, there was never a light left on at night, but at least it had two big windows – through which, in turn, she peered, looking for one of those circular stands you always saw in shops like this, a carousel of dog leads, chains and collars.

There wasn't one.

No, of course there wasn't. Wouldn't be, would there? Nor would there be cans of dog food or bags of Bonios.

The streets were empty and silent. As they would be, coming up to curfew time, everybody paying lip-service to a tradition which had been meaningless for centuries. She was starting to work it out, why there was this artificial kind of tension in the air: nobody came out of anywhere for about three minutes either side of the curfew.

Except for the newcomers.

'Fay. Excuse me.'

Like Murray Beech.

Walking across the road from the church, one hand raised, collar gleaming in the dusk.

'Could I have a word?'

When he reached her, she was quite shocked at how gaunt he appeared. The normally neatly chiselled face looked suddenly jagged, the eyes seemed to glare. Maybe it was the light.

Fay reined Arnold in. There was a sense of unreality, of her and the dog and the vicar in a glass case in the town centre, public exhibits. And all the curtains parting behind the darkened windows.

Sod this. Sod it!

'Murray,' she said quite loudly, very deliberately, 'just answer me one question.'

He looked apprehensive. (In Crybbe, every question was a threat.)

Fay said, 'Do you know anybody with a dog?' The words resounded around the square.

The vicar stared at her and his head jerked back, as if she'd got him penned up in a corner with her microphone at his throat.

'Anybody,' Fay persisted. 'Any kind of dog. Anybody in Crybbe?'

'Look, it was about that I…'

'Because I've been scouring the gutters for dog turds and I can't find any.'

'You…'

'Not one. Not a single bloody dog turd. Surprise you that, does it? No dog turds in the streets of Crybbe?'

Fay became aware that she was coiling and uncoiling the clothes-line around her fingers, entwining them until the plastic flex bit into the skin. She must look as mad as Murray did. She felt her face was aflame and her hair standing on end. She felt she was burning up in the centre of Crybbe, spontaneous emotional combustion in the tense minutes before the curfew's clang.

'No dog turds, Murray. No dog leads in the shops. No…' The sensation of going publicly insane brought tears to her eyes. 'No rubber bones…'

Murray pulled himself together. Or perhaps, Fay thought, in comparison with me it just looks as though he's together.

'Go home. Fay,' he said.

'Yes,' Fay said, 'I will.'

With Arnold tight to her legs, she turned away and began to walk back in the direction she'd come along the silent street. It was nearly dark now, but there were no lights in any of the houses.

Because people would be watching at the windows. The woman, the vicar and the dog. A tableau. A little public drama.

She turned back. 'It's true, though, isn't it? Apart from Arnold here, there aren't any dogs in Crybbe.'

'I don't know,' Murray said. It was obvious the idea had never occurred to him. 'But… well, it's hardly likely, is it?' She couldn't see his face any more, only his white collar, luminous like a cyclist's armband.

'Oh yes,' Fay said, 'it's likely. Anything's likely in this town.'

'Yes, well… I'll just. -. I'll just say what I've been asked to say before… before you go.'

There came a heavy metallic creak from the church tower. The bell swinging back.

and… Clangggg!

It had never sounded so Loud. The peal hit the street like a flash of hard, yellow light.

Arnold sat down in the road and his head went back.

Fay saw him and fell on her knees with both hands around his snout. As the first peal died, Murray Beech said, 'I've been asked… to tell you to keep the dog off the streets.'

'What?'

'Especially at… curfew time. People don't… they don't like it.'

Rage rippled through Fay. She looked up into the vicar's angular, desperate face.

'What?'

Her hands unclasped. She came slowly to her feet.

She watched as Arnold swallowed, shook his head once and then quivered with the vibration from the tower as the great bell swung back.

Clangggg!

Arnold's first howl seemed to rise and meet the peal in the air above the square with an awful chemistry.

'Who?' Fay said quietly.

'Go home!' the vicar hissed urgently. 'Take the thing away.'

'Who told you to tell me?'

There was a shiver in the night, the creak of the bell hauled back.

Fay shrieked, 'Who told you, you bastard?'

The bell pealed again, like sheet-lightning. Arnold howled. The old buildings seemed to clutch each other in the shadows.

And she was hearing the muffled clatter of his footsteps before she was aware that Murray Beech was running away across the square, as if Hell was about to be let loose in Crybbe.

CHAPTER X

You really didn't have to go to all this trouble,' J. M. Powys said. 'Chicken in the basket would have been fine.'

Rachel said, 'Care to send down for some?'

'Forget it.' He was remembering how she'd massaged the bruises on his stomach with her lips. What happened? How did this come about?

The room, overlooking the cobbled square, bulged from the Cock's aged frame above an entryway. Once, they'd heard footsteps on the stones directly underneath.

Lights shone blearily from town houses, and the room's leaded windows dropped a faint trellis on the sheets.

They lay in complete silence for a long time before he turned to her and said, 'Er… well…'

'Don't look at me' Rachel said. 'I certainly didn't intend it to happen. I know I'm hardly the person to claim she isn't a whore, but we didn't even know each other until a couple of hours ago. And I'm not actually promiscuous. Most of the time these days I can take it or leave it.'

It had been the curfew which had seemed to shatter the idyll. They'd fallen apart, Powys feeling bewildered, Rachel looking almost perturbed.

He didn't even remember getting into bed. They hadn't drunk anything, or smoked anything and it was not yet ten-thirty. He'd quite fancied her, certainly, but there'd been other things on his mind. Like serious pain.

He thought she was smiling. It felt like she was smiling. In her deep and opulent voice, she said, 'Perhaps we should think of it as one of those whirlwind passions.'

'Well, I'm glad you're not annoyed,' said Powys. He couldn't remember much until the curfew, crashing in like an alarm clock hauling him out of a hot dream. 'That curfew,' he said. 'Kind of eerie, don't you think? Did you hear a dog howling at the same time, at one point? Or was that me?'

'No, it was a dog all right. Really rather spooky, J.M.'

'Why do people keep calling me J.M.?'

'It sounds classier than Joseph Miles.'

He remembered the circumstances in which she'd seen his driving licence. Suddenly his stomach was hurting again.

Tell me,' she said. 'Are you really a descendant of John Cowper Powys?'

I wouldn't entirely rule it out.' To take his mind off the pain, he flicked aside a few strands of fine, fair hair to admire the curve of her long neck. 'Hey, look, what would Max Goff say if he found out I'd been in his bed with his…?'

His… what, exactly?

'Don't worry about that, he'd be honoured. I'm only a minion; you're his inspiration. But he isn't going to find out.' Rachel turned her face towards him. I won't even tell him you were trespassing on his property.'

'I wasn't trespassing. It was what you might call an exploratory tour.'

'Quite,' said Rachel. 'You were snooping.'

'Well, probably. Look, I really am sorry about…'

'J.M., I'm not a virgin. The unwritten part of my job description includes ensuring that the boss goes to sleep fully relaxed.'

'What?' He was shocked.

'Routine,' Rachel said dismissively. 'Like winding up an alarm clock.'

'Stone me.' He found this impressively cool and candid. And rather sad. He felt a faintly surprising tenderness coming on.

'I must say.' Rachel said, 'I was genuinely surprised to find out who you were. I was rather expecting]. M. Powys to be a vague, if benevolent old cove in a woolly hat and half-moon glasses. By the way, I think your book's a dreadful sham. Do you mind?'

'Golden Land?' He started to smile. He'd been right about Rachel. Nothing Arthur Rackham about this woman. 'Why do you think that? No, I don't mind at all. I don't bruise as easily is a cursory examination might suggest.'

'Well, let's not talk about that now.'

'No, go on. Talk about it.'

'Really?' Rachel faced him across the bed, not touching. OK. Well, the central premise, if I have this right, is that there's a hidden link between us and the earth, a link known to our remote ancestors, but which we've forgotten about.'

'The psychic umbilicus.' As time went on, Powys had grown less and less convinced he'd written this crap.

'And, by going to the various ancient shrines, stone circles, holy wells, places like that, we can unblock the doorways and find our way back, as it were, into the Old Golden Land. Which seems to be your metaphor, or whatever, for this kind of harmony with the environment, feeling a part of one's surroundings. Us and the earth feeding each other?'

Powys nodded. 'What's wrong with it so far?'

'Nothing at all,' Rachel said. 'Perfectly commendable. Except it's translated itself into all these old hippies staggering about with their dowsing rods and holding up their hands and feeling the Earth Spirit. I mean – let's be realistic about this – if these are the people with the keys to the cosmos, then God help us.'

Powys was impressed. 'I think you could be my ideal woman."

'Jesus,' said Rachel. 'You really are mixed up.'

After a minute or two, he said, 'I got a lot of it wildly wrong. It was nearly thirteen years ago, that book. I was too young to write it. I'd like to do it again. Or better still, I'd like not to have done it in the first place.'

'It's a bit late for that,' Rachel said. 'You do realize you're largely responsible for Max's very costly fantasies?'

'What does that mean?'

'It means he's going to be the first king of the Old Golden Land, and he wants you to be the Royal Scribe and tell the world about it.'

'Oh, my God. You think I should disappear?'

Rachel pulled his left hand to her breast. 'Not just yet. If you really have found the flaws in your own arguments, I can't help wondering if you ought not be the one person who can bring him to his senses.

Jocasta Newsome didn't know which was worse: spending a night in with Hereward or being alone.

She thought about lighting a fire, but, like most aspects of country life, it had lost its magic.

Could she ever have imagined there'd come a time when a log-fire in an open fireplace would not only fail to induce a small romantic thrill but would actually have become, a drag? In the end, she'd been forced to admit that logs were messy, time-consuming and not even very warm. The only one who got overheated was Hereward, chopping away and coming in covered with sweat – nearly as damp as most of his logs, which were so full of sap that when you threw them on the fire they just sat there for hours and hissed at you.

And the Aga, of course. Very attractive, very prestigious for dinner parties. But it wasn't made to run all the radiators one needed for a barn like this. If they wanted proper oil-fired central heating, they'd have to install a boiler – electric heating was, of course, out of the question with all the power cuts and Hereward turning white when the quarterly bill arrived.

It had now become Jocasta's ambition to make sufficient money out of The Gallery to sell it and acquire premises somewhere civilized. With or without Hereward, but preferably without.

This morning Rachel Wade had phoned to say Max Goff had been terribly pleased with the Tump triptych. And would they please look out for more pictures of ancient sites. Or any local landscapes by local artists.

Local artists! There were none. Even Darwyn Hall was Birmingham-born.

This afternoon, just before closing time – after school, presumably – another 'local' artist had called in. A girl of seventeen or eighteen. An odd, dark, solemn girl. Would they like to put on an exhibition of her drawings?

Well, God forbid it should ever come to that. Children's drawings!

The girl's portfolio was now propped against the antique pine dresser in the kitchen – 'Yes, of course we'll look at them my dear, but our artists do tend to be experienced professionals you know.'

She'd let Hereward examine them when he returned from his weekly attempt to become accepted in the public bar of the Cock by proving he could be as boring as the natives. If they only knew how far ahead of them in the boredom stakes he really was, he'd never have to buy his own drinks again.

Jocasta stretched like a leopard on the sofa.

She herself was bored out of her mind. Farmers were said to shag sheep in these hills. Maybe she should go out and find a ram.

'Sex magic.' Rachel was telling Powys the sordid story of her life as Goff's overpaid PA. 'That was the other thing that almost pushed me over the edge.'

'Isn't all sex magic?' Thinking, particularly, of tonight.

'Certainly not,' said Rachel.

'Yeah, I know. I do know what you're talking about. Aleister Crowley, all that stuff?'

Rachel said, 'Fortunately, it didn't last. Though Crowley was about the same build as Max, Max couldn't summon Crowley's stamina. Not too pleasant while it lasted, though. Lots of dressing up and ritual undressing. The idea appeared to be to build up the power and then direct it at the moment of orgasm. He was the Great Beast, I was…'

The Scarlet Woman?' Powys vaguely remembered Crowley's autobiography, remembered not finishing it.

'Terribly tawdry,' Rachel said. 'Needless to say, it didn't work – or I presume it didn't. Point is, Max isn't a wicked man, it's just a case of what you might call Bored Billionaire Syndrome. You've got all the money you'll ever want, all the women and all the boys. But you're not… quite… God.'

'What can one do about this minor shortfall?'

Rachel said, 'He's doing it.'

And Powys nodded, resigned, as she told him about Goff's plans to restore the prehistoric legacy of Crybbe. 'Crybbe's Max's psychic doorway. His entrance to your Old Golden Land.'

'As identified by Henry Kettle.'

'And how reliable was he? Is dowsing for real?'

'It was in Henry's case. Henry was red hot.'

'The modern equivalent of the Stone Age shaman.'

'Who said that?'

'Max.'

'Figures,' Powys said. He sighed. 'Last night I went round to Henry's house to pick up his papers, his journal. Apparently he wanted me to have them. Anyway, it was pretty clear Henry had a few misgivings about what Goff was asking him to do – well, not so much that as what he was finding. He didn't like the Tump.'

'I don't like the Tump,' Rachel said.

'And leys – we don't really know anything about leys. All this energy-lines stuff is what people want to believe. Henry was quite impatient with the New Agers and their designer dowsing rods. He used to say we shouldn't mess with it until we knew exactly what we were messing with.'

Powys watched the lattice of light on the bedspread. 'A more plausible theory says leys are spiritual paths to holy shrines, along which the spirits of the ancestors could also travel. Evidence shows a lot of psychic activity at places where leys cross, as well as mental disturbance, imbalance.'

'Obviously the place to bring out the best in Max,' Rachel said drily. 'Excuse me, J.M, I need a pee.'

In the end, Jocasta had gone ahead and lit a fire, for what it was worth. The logs fizzed, the flames were pale yellow and the smoke seeped feebly between them, as she lay on the sheepskin rug enjoying, in a desultory way, a favourite fantasy involving the Prince of Wales in his polo outfit.

There was a crack from the logs and something stung her leg. Jocasta screamed and leapt up. A smell of burning – flesh probably – made her beat her hands against her thigh in panic.

She switched on a table-lamp with a green and yellow Tiffany shade and stood next to it, examining her leg.

Nothing visible, except a tiny smudge, Jocasta licked a finger and wiped it away, pulled down her skirt and was swamped by a sudden mud-tide of self-disgust.

From the living-room window she could see the lights of the town through the trees at the end of the paddock. The paddock itself was like a black pond. She fetched from the kitchen the portfolio of drawings brought in by the girl. If the kid was any good at all, she might sell them very cheaply. Not in the gallery itself, of course, but in the small gift section they were setting up in a little room at the side.

Jocasta sat on the sofa and opened the portfolio by the light of the Tiffany lamp.

At first she was simply surprised. She'd expected landscapes and she'd expected an immature hesitancy of touch.

So the things that surprised her were the strength and vigour of the drawing in Indian ink, spatters and blotches used for effect, boldly controlled in the manner of Gerald Scarfe and Ralph Steadman.

And the fact that they were not landscapes, but interiors with figures.

An old man shaving.

The eyes, wide open, magnified in a shaving mirror to alarming effect. The chin tilted, the throat uplifted to the razor.

A tumbler on a window-ledge collecting the blood.

At first she was simply surprised.

Then the shock set in. The realization, with a rush of bile to the throat, of what was depicted in the drawing. She tore her gaze away, covering the drawing, in horror, with her hands.

Then the lights went out.

Through the window, she saw that the lights of the whole town had gone out, too.

Jocasta didn't move. She was sitting there on the sofa staring into the sputtering half-dead logs in the grate, but seeing, swimming in her mind, the image of the thing on her knee, still covered by her hands, an old man cutting his own throat with

a razor.

She thought she was sweating at first.

Under her hands the paper felt wet and sticky and, like the sap oozing from the green logs on the open fire, something warm seemed to be fizzing and bubbling between her fingers.

Jocasta let the portfolio fall to the floor and shrivelled back into the sofa, almost sick with revulsion.

J. M. Powys stood by the window, bare feet on bare boards. Looking down on the street, at a few customers emerging from the main entrance of the Cock directly below. The last he saw before all the lights went out was a couple of men stumbling on the steps and clutching at each other, obviously drunk but not conspicuously merry.

He'd been here several times, but never at night. Never heard the curfew before. And now, as if the curfew had been a warning that the town would close down in precisely one

hour, somebody had switched off the lights.

Such coincidences were not uncommon on the border.

He remembered manufacturing the phrase The Celtic Twilight Zone as the title for Chapter Six of Golden Land.

The border country – any border country – has a special quality. Two cultures merging, two types of landscape, an atmosphere of change and uncertainty. In such places, it used to be said, the veil between this world and others is especially thin. Border country: a transition zone… a psychic departure lounge…

Rachel returned, slipped out of the robe, joined him at the window, naked. The moon was out now, and her slender body was like a silver statuette.

'You get used to it,' Rachel said, 'living in Crybbe.'

The electricity?'

'It seems we're on the end of a power line, or something. So whenever there's a problem elsewhere it trips a switch and the whole valley goes off. Something like that. It'll be back on in a few minutes, probably.'

Powys put out a hand to her then held back and put the hand on the cool window-ledge. Things to sort out first, before he allowed himself to forget.

'Henry Kettle,' he said. 'His car went out of control and crashed into the wall around the Tump. Freak accident. What did Goff have to say about that?'

Rachel said, 'You don't want to hear that. Come back to bed, J.M.'

They did go back to bed. But she told him anyway.

'The nearest thing to a Stone Age shaman. I mentioned that.'

She lay in the crook of his arm, his hand cupped under her breast.

Powys said. 'Nobody knows a thing about Stone Age shamans or what they did.'

'Maybe it was Bronze Age.'

'Know bugger all about them either.'

'Max said they would sometimes sacrifice themselves or allow themselves to be sacrificed to honour the Earth Spirit or some such nonsense.'

'Theory,' Powys said.

'He said it must have been like that with Henry Kettle. Getting old. Knew he was on borrowed time. So he… consciously or subconsciously, he decided to end it all and put his life energy into Max's project. Max was standing there looking at the wreckage of Kettle's car. "Whoomp!" he kept saying. "Whoomp!" And clapping his hands.'

'OK, you've convinced me,' Powys said. 'This guy's wanking in the dark, and he has to be stopped before it goes all over everybody…'

Arnold whimpered. Fay awoke, feeling the dog trembling against her leg.

Although the bedroom light was out, she knew somehow that all the lights were out.

Knew also that in the office below, the little front room that had been Grace Legge's sitting-room, she was in residence. Pottering about, dusting the china and the clock. The empty grin, eye-sockets of pale light.

And would she see, through those resentful, dead sockets, the hulk of the wrecked Revox and the fragments of its innards sprayed across the room?

Or was that not a part of her twilit existence?

Oh, please… Fay clutched Arnold.

Probably there was nothing down there.

Nothing.

Probably.