Crybbe aka Curfew

CHAPTER I

Max Goff said, 'I came as soon as I heard.'

Indeed he had. It was not yet 8 a.m. Jimmy Preece was surprised that someone like Goff should be up and about at this hour. Unhappy, too, at seeing the large man getting out of his car, waddling across the farmyard like a hungry crow.

Mr Preece remembered the last time Goff had been to visit him alone.

This morning he'd been up since five and over at Court Farm before six to milk the few cows. He couldn't rely on Warren to do it – he hadn't even seen Warren yet. Mr Preece was back on the farm, which he still owned but was supposed to have retired from eight years ago to make way for future generations.

Becoming a farmer again was the best way of taking his mind off what had happened to the future generations.

Everything changing too fast, too brutally. Even this Goff looked different. His suit was dark and he wore no hat. He didn't look as if he'd had much sleep. He looked serious. He looked like he cared.

But what was it he cared about? Was it the sudden, tragic death of Jonathon, followed by the grievous injury to Jonathon's father?

Or was it what he, Goff, might get out of all this?

Like the farm.

Mr Preece thought of the crow again, the scavenger. He hated crows.

'Humble said you'd be here.' Goff walked past him into the old, bare living-room, where all that remained of Jack was a waistcoat thrown over a chair back. No photos, not even the old gun propped up in the corner any more.

Goff said, 'Reason I came so early is the meeting. It's the public meeting tonight. What I wanted to say – there's time to call it off, Mr Mayor.'

'Call 'im off?' Jimmy Preece shook his head. No, it would be an ordeal, this meeting, but it couldn't be put off. The meeting would be his best opportunity to make it clear to this Goff that he wasn't wanted in Crybbe, that this town had no sympathy with him or his ideas.

There would, however, be a great deal of sympathy – overwhelming sympathy – for old Jim Preece, who'd lost his grandson and whose son was now lying maimed for life in Hereford Hospital.

Goff would have realized this. Cunning devil.

No way Mr Preece wanted that meeting calling off.

'Too late now. People coming yere from all over. Never get word out in time.'

'If we start now, Mr Mayor, spread the word in town, get it out on Offa's Dyke Radio…'

'No, no. Very kind of you to offer, but the town council stick to their arrangements, come fire, flood. And personal tragedy, like.'

He'd be making time today to pay a final visit to each of the farmers with land around Crybbe, make sure they all understood about the need to keep the stones away. He thought they were still with him, but money could turn a farmer's head faster than a runaway bull.

'Thought I should at least make the offer, Mr Mayor. And tell you how sorry I was.'

'Aye.'

There was a long silence. Mr Preece noticed circles like bruises around Goff's eyes and his beard not as well manicured as usual.

'Well,' Mr Preece said. He might as well say it now, make it clear where they stood. 'I expect you'll be wonderin' 'bout the future of this place. What's gonna happen if Jack's crippled and with Jonathon gone, like.'

'It's a problem, Mr Mayor. If there's any way I can help… We're neighbours, right?'

'No,' Jimmy Preece said. 'There's no way you can 'elp. And no, I won't be sellin' the farm.'

Goff spread his legs apart and rocked a bit. He didn't laugh, but he looked as if he wanted to.

'Aw, jeez, I realize you got to be in an emotional and anxious state, Mr Mayor, but if you're thinking maybe I'm here because I'm angling to buy the place, let me say that was about the last thing… I'm not a fucking property shark, Mr Preece.'

'No,' Jimmy Preece said, and it might have been a question.

'This family's been here four, five centuries, yeah? Isn't there another son, young, er…?'

'Warren,' said Mr Preece.

'Yeah, Warren.'

'Who don't want anything to do with farming, as you well know, Mr Goff.'

'Huh?'

"E's gonner be a star, isn't that right?'

'I don't…'

'Pop guitarist, isn't it? You're gonner make the boy a millionaire. Sign 'im up, turn 'im into a big star so he 'e can get his lazy arse out of Crybbe and don't need to 'ave nothing to do with us ever again… You ask me if there's anything you can do, Mr Goff, I reckon you done enough.'

For the first time, Murray Beech had locked the church for the night. He'd waited until the curfew was over and then walked over with the keys, surprised to find Jimmy Preece and not his son emerging from the belfry.

In an arid voice, from which all emotion had been drained, Jimmy Preece had explained why he was here, leaving Murray horrified. He'd remembered hearing the ambulance, wondering who it was for. How could lightning strike twice, so cruelly, at a single family? How could any kind of God…?

Murray often wondered just how many of his colleagues in the church seriously believed any more in a Fount of Heavenly Wisdom. Perhaps there should be a confidential survey, some sort of secret ballot within the Organization. No one could fault the basic Christian ethic but Murray couldn't help wondering if it wasn't in the best interests of sustaining a credible, relevant, functioning clergy to have this anachronism known as God quietly phased out. God was a millstone. Three times as many people would seek clerical help with their personal problems if they didn't have to cope with God.

And without God the question of sacrilege would not arise, and nobody, he thought now, standing by the altar rail, would have to cope with… this.

The church door had not been forced last night. A window had simply been smashed in the vestry.

This morning Jonathon Preece lay apparently undisturbed, a silent sentinel, still, presumably – and Murray was not inclined to check – in his coffin, still safely supported on its bier, a slim metal trolley, only slightly more ornate than those used in hospitals. The coffin was still pointing at the altar with its white and gold cloth.

Neither the coffin nor the bier had been disturbed. Only the altar itself. In the centre of the cloth, a silver dish had been heaped high with something brown and pungent.

Murray approached with trepidation and distaste to find the substance in the dish was not what he'd feared.

Next to the dish was the tin from which the brown gunge had been scraped.

It was dog food.

Murray was almost relieved.

And so puzzled by this that he failed to carry out a more detailed inspection of the church and therefore did not find out what else had been done.

Goff raised a faint smile and both hands. 'Im starting to understand, Mr Preece. I see where you're coming from. The boy sent me a tape, right?'

'You tell me, sir, you tell me.'

'Sure I'll tell you. This kid…'

'Warren.'

'Warren, yeah. Mr Mayor, you know how many tapes we get sent to us? Jeez, I don't even know myself – a thousand, two thousand a year. How many we do anything with? In a good year – two. Young…'

'Warren.'

'Sure. Well, the reason he got further than ninety-nine point nine per cent of the others was he sent it to the Cock and I listened to it myself. The normal thing is I pay guys to pay other guys to listen to the tapes on the slushpile, saves me a lotta grief, right? But I didn't wanna appear snobbish, big London record chief sneering at local hopefuls. So I listened to the tape and I had a letter sent back, and what it said was, this stuff isn't basically up to it, but we aren't closing the door. When you feel you've improved, try us again, we're always prepared to listen. You know what that means? You'd like me to give you a frank and honest translation, Mr Mayor?'

Jimmy Preece swallowed. 'Yes,' he said. 'I'd like you to be quite frank.'

'I'm always frank, Mr Mayor, 'cept when it's gonna destroy somebody, like in the case of this tape. You ever hear your grandson's band, Mr Preece?'

'Used to practise in the barn, till Jack turned 'em out. Hens wouldn't lay.'

'Yeah, that sounds like them,' said Goff, smiling now. 'Crude, lyrically moronic and musically inept. They might improve, but I wouldn't take any bets. My advice, don't let the kid give up sheep-shearing classes.'

It went quiet in the living-room at Court Farm. In the whole house.

'Thank you,' Jimmy Preece said dully.

'No worries, Mr Preece. Believe me. The boy'll make a farmer yet.'

Behind the door, at the foot of the stairs, Warren Preece straightened up.

His face entirely without expression.

CHAPTER II

Jean's narrow town house had three floors and five bedrooms, only three of them with beds. In one, Alex awoke.

To his amazement he knew at once exactly who he was, where he was and how he came to be there.

Separating his thoughts had once been like untangling single strands of spaghetti from a bolognese.

Could Jean Wendle be right? Could it be that his periods of absent-mindedness, of the mental mush – of wondering what day it was, even what time of his life it was – were the results not so much of a physical condition but of a reaction, to his surroundings? Through living in a house disturbed by unearthly energy. A house on a ley-line.

No ley-lines passed through this house. Something Jean said she'd been very careful to establish before accepting the tenancy.

Why not try an experiment, Jean had suggested. Why not spend a night here? An invitation he'd entirely misunderstood at first. Wondering whether, in spite of all his talk, he'd be quite up to it.

Jean had left a message on Fay's answering machine to say Alex wouldn't be coming home tonight.

She'd shown him to this very pleasant room with a large but indisputedly single bed and said good night. He might notice, she said, a difference in the morning.

And, by God, she was right.

The sun shone through a small square window over the bed and Alex lay there relishing his freedom.

For that was what it was.

And all thanks to Jean Wendle. How could he ever make it up to her?

Well, he knew how he'd like to make it up to her… Yes, this morning he certainly felt up to it.

Alex pushed back the bedclothes and swung his feet on to a floor which fell satisfyingly firm under his bare feet. He flexed his toes, stood, walked quite steadily to the door. Clad only in the Bermuda shorts he'd worn as underpants since the days when they used to give ladies a laugh, thus putting them at their ease. Under the clerical costume, a pair of orange Bermuda shorts. 'I shall have them in purple, when I'm a bishop.' Half the battle, Alex had found, over the years, was giving ladies a laugh.

There was the sound of a radio from downstairs.

'… local news at nine o'clock from Offa's Dyke Radio, the Voice of the Marches. Here's Tim Benfield.

'Good morning. A farmer is critically ill in hospital after his tractor overturned on a hillside at Crybbe. The accident happened only days after the tragic drowning of his son in the river nearby. James Barlow has the details…'

Barlow? Should have been Fay, Alex thought. Why wasn't it Fay?

Alex found a robe hanging behind the door and put it on. Bit tight, but at least it wasn't frilly. In the bathroom, he splashed invigorating cold water on his face, walked briskly down the stairs, smoothing down his hair and his beard.

He found her in the kitchen, a sunny, high-ceilinged room with a refectory table and a kettle burbling on the Rayburn.

'Good morning, Alex.' Standing by the window with a slim cigar in her fingers, fresh and athletic-looking in a light-green tracksuit.

'You know,' Alex said, 'I really think it bloody well is a good morning. All thanks to you, Jean.'

Jean. It struck him that he'd persisted in calling her Wendy simply because it was something like her surname which he could never remember.

He went to the window, which had a limited view into a side-street off the square. He saw a milkman. A postman. A grocer hopefully pulling out his sunblind.

Normality.

Harmless normality.

He thought about Grace. Perhaps if he left the house then what remained of Grace would fade away. Fay had been right; there was no reason to stay here. Everything was clear from here, a different house, not two hundred yards away – but not on a spirit path.

Spirit paths. New Age nonsense.

But he couldn't remember the last time he'd felt so happy.

Hereward Newsome was seriously impressed by the painting's tonal responses, the way the diffused light was handled – shades of Rembrandt.

'How long have you been painting?'

'I've always painted,' she said.

'Just that I haven't seen any of your work around.'

'You will,' she said.

He wanted to say, Did you really do this yourself? But that might sound insulting, might screw up the deal. And this painting was now very important, after the less than satisfactory buying trip to the West Country. An item to unveil to Goff with pride.

Hereward had returned the previous afternoon, terrified of facing Jocasta, with two hotel bills, a substantial drinks tab and a mere three paintings, including a study of Silbury Hill which was little more than a miniature and had cost him in excess of twelve hundred pounds.

To his surprise, his wife had appeared almost touchingly pleased to have him home.

She'd looked tired, there were brown crescents under her eyes and her skin seemed coarser. She'd told him of the terrible incident at the Court in which Rachel Wade had died. Hereward, who didn't think Jocasta had known Rachel Wade all that well, had been more concerned at the effect on his wife, who looked… well, she looked her age. For the first time in years, Hereward felt protective towards Jocasta, and, in an odd way, stimulated.

He'd shown her his miserable collection of earth-mystery paintings.

'Never mind,' she'd said, astonishingly.

He'd trimmed his beard and made a tentative advance, but Jocasta felt there was a migraine hovering.

This morning they'd awoken early because of the strength of the light – the first truly sunny morning in a week. Jocasta had gone off before half past eight to open The Gallery, and Hereward had stayed at home to chop logs. On a day like this, it was good to be a countryman.

Then the young woman had telephoned about the painting and insisted on bringing it to the house, saying she didn't want to carry it through town.

He thought he'd seen her before, but not in Crybbe, surely. Dark hair, dark-eyed. Darkly glamorous and confident in an offhand way. Arrived in a blue Land Rover.

She wore a lot of make-up. Black lipstick. But she couldn't be older than early-twenties, which made her mature talent quite frightening.

If indeed she'd done this herself; he didn't dare challenge her.

It was a large canvas – five feet by four. When he leaned it against the dresser it took over the room immediately. What it did was to draw the room into the scene, reducing the kitchen furniture to shadows, even in the brightness of this cheerfully sunny morning.

The painting, Hereward thought, stole the sunlight away.

He identified the front entrance of Crybbe Court, the building looking as romantically decrepit as it had last week when he'd strolled over there out of curiosity, to see how things were progressing. Broken cobbles in the yard. Weeds. A dull grey sky falling towards evening.

The main door was open, and a tall, black-bearded man, half-shadowed, stood inside. Behind the figure and around his head was a strange nimbus, a halo of yellowish, powdery vapour. The man had a still and beckoning air about him. Hereward was reminded in a curious way, of Holman Hunt's The Light of the World, except there was no light about this figure, only a sort of glowing darkness.

'It's very interesting,' Hereward said. 'How much?'

'Three hundred pounds.'

Hereward was pleased. It was, in its way, a major work, lustrous like a large icon. This girl was a significant discovery. He wanted to snatch his wallet out before she could change her mind, but caution prevailed. He kept his face impassive.

'Where do you work?'

'Here. In Crybbe.'

'You're… a full-time, professional painter?'

'I am now,' she said. 'Would you like to see the preliminary sketches?'

'Very much,' Hereward said.

She fetched the portfolio from the Land Rover. The sketches were in Indian ink and smudged charcoal – studies of the bearded face – and some colour-mix experiments in acrylic on paper.

He wondered who the model was, didn't like to ask; this artist had a formidable air. Watched him, unsmiling.

And she was so young.

'Does it have a title?'

'It speaks for itself.'

'I see,' Hereward said. He didn't. 'Look,' he said. 'I'll take a chance. I'll buy it.'

She'd watched him the whole time, studying his reaction. She hadn't looked once at the painting. Most unusual for an artist; normally they couldn't keep their eyes off their own work.

'Could I buy the sketches, too?'

'You can have them,' she said. 'Keep them in your attic or somewhere.'

'I certainly won't! I shall have them on my walls.'

The girl smiled.

'One thing.' She had a trace of accent. Not local, 'I might be doing more. Even if it's sold, I'd like the painting in the window of your gallery for a couple of days. No card, no identification, just the picture.'

'Well… certainly. Of course. But you really don't want your name on a card under the picture?'

Shook her head. 'You don't know my name, anyway.'

'Aren't you going to tell me?'

She left.

It was not yet ten o'clock.

The Mayor of Crybbe was seeing his youngest grandson for the first time as a man.

An unpleasant man.

He'd patrolled the farm, checking everything was all right, collected a few eggs. Then noticed that something, apart from the tractor, was missing from the vehicle shed.

When he got back to the house, he saw Warren landing hard on the settee, like he'd been doing something else, heard his grandad and flung himself down in a hurry.

'Where's the Land Rover, Warren?'

'Lent it to a friend.'

'You… what?' Mr Preece took off his cap and began to squeeze it.

'Don't get excited, Grandad. She'll bring it back.'

'She?'

'My friend,' said Warren, not looking at him. He hadn't even shaved yet.

When Mr Preece looked at Warren, he saw just how alone he was now.

'Come on. Warren, we got things to do. Jonathon's funeral tomorrow and your dad in hospital. Your gran rung yet?'

'Dunno. Has she?'

'She was gonner phone the hospital, see what kind of night Jack 'ad, see when we can visit 'im.'

'I hate hospitals,' said Warren.

'You're not gonner go?'

"Can't see me goin' today,' said Warren, like they were talking about a football match. 'I'll be busy.'

Jimmy Preece began to shake. Sprawled across the settee was a hard, thin man with a head shaved close until you got right to the top when it came out like a stiff shaving brush. A sneering man with an ear-ring which had a little metal skull hanging from it. A man with flat, lizard's eyes.

Before, it had been an irritation, the way Warren was, but it didn't matter much. You looked the other way and you saw Jonathon, you saw the chairman of the Young Farmers' Club. You saw Jimmy Preece fifty years ago.

Now this… his only surviving grandson.

He tried. 'Warren, we never talked much… before.'

Warren's laughter was like spit. 'Wasn't no reason to talk was there? Not when there was Dad, and there was good old reliable old Jonathon.'

'Don't you talk like that about…'

'And now you wanner talk, is it? What a fuckin' surprise this is. Fair knocks me over with the shock, that does.'

Jimmy Preece squeezed his cap so tightly he felt the fabric start to rip.

This… this was the only surviving Preece, apart from himself, with two good legs to climb the stairs to the belfry.

'Now you listen to me, boy,' Jimmy said. 'There's things you don't know about…'

'Correction, Grandad.' Warren uncoiled from the couch, stood up. 'There's things I don't care about. Big difference there, see.'

Jimmy Preece wanted to hit him again. But this time, Warren would be ready for it, he could tell by the way he was standing, legs apart, hands dangling loose by his sides. Wouldn't worry him one bit, beating an old man.

Jimmy Preece saw the future.

He saw himself prising Mrs Preece out of her retirement cottage, dragging her back to this old place. He saw himself running the farm again, such as it was these days, and ringing the old bell every night until Jack was out of hospital, and then Mrs Preece caring for her crippled son, and what meagre profits they made going on hired help as he, Jimmy Preece, got older and feebler.

He knew, from last night's ordeal, how hard it was going to get, ringing that bell. Jack must've sensed it, but he hadn't said a word. That was Jack, though, keep on, grit your teeth, do your duty. You don't have to like it but you got to do it.

Going to be hard. Going to be a trial.

While this… this thing slinks around the place grinning and sneering.

Going to be no fall-back. A feeble old man, and no fall-back.

'Why don't you just let it go, Grandad,' Warren said, with a shocking hint of glee. 'What's it worth? Think about the winter, them cold nights when you're all stiff and the old steps is wet and slippery. Could do yourself a mischief, isn't it.'

Jimmy Preece seeing his youngest grandson for the first time as a man.

A bad man.

He wanted to take what Goff had told him this morning and hurl it in Warren's thin, snidey face.

Instead, he turned his back on his sole remaining grandson and walked out of the house, across the yard.

Warren went back into the fireplace and lifted out the old box.

He set the box on the hearth and opened the lid.

The hand of bones looked to be lying palm up this morning, the Stanley knife across it, the fingers no longer closed around the knife.

Like the hand was offering the Stanley knife to Warren.

So Warren took it.

CHAPTER III

… an did bnnge out hys bodie and shewde hym to the

crowde with the rope about hys necke…

Joe Powys lay on the floor still wearing last night's sweatshirt, flecked with mud and stuff from the woods and some blood from later. He was alone; she'd slipped quietly away a few minutes ago.

The hanged man was obviously the High Sheriff, Sir Michael Wort, displayed by his frightened servants to the angry townsfolk to prove that he really was dead. So if they'd seen his body, how did the legend arise that Wort had perhaps escaped down some secret tunnel?

Only one possible answer to that.

It had been in his head almost as soon as he woke, half-remembering copying out the material and half-thinking, it was part of some long, tortured dream. But The Ley-Hunter's Diary I993 was there, in his jacket on the floor by his pillow, and it was still throwing out answers. Not very credible answers.

The door was prodded open and Arnold peered round. Powys beckoned him, plunged his hands into the black and white fur. It felt warm and real. Not much else felt real.

Arnold licked his hand.

Powys looked around the room, at the dark-stained dressing-table, the wardrobe like an upturned coffin, the milk-chocolate wallpaper. Not the least depressing room he'd ever slept in.

'Don't blame me for the decor.'

She stood in the doorway.

She was in a red towelling bathrobe, arms by her sides, hands invisible because the sleeves were too long.

'It's certainly very Crybbe,' he said.

Fay nodded. 'And I'm never going to sleep here again, that's for sure.'

He'd awoken several times during the night on his makeshift bed of sofa cushions laid end to end.

Once it was Arnold licking his forehead. And once with an agonizing image arising in his mind: an exquisitely defined, twilit image of Rachel's broken body, both eyes wide open in a head that lolled off-centre, the perfect, pale, Pre-Raphaelite corpse, Ophelia, 'The Lady of Shalott'…

Lady cast out upon a Rubbish Heap.

He'd stood up, hearing Fay moaning in the bed. 'Oh God.' Twisting her head on the pillow, 'it hurts. It really hurts. It was just numb for a while, now it really hurts.'

'Let me take you to a hospital.'

'I'm not leaving this room.'

'And I thought Arnold looked a mess,' she said. 'What's the time? There's only one reliable clock in this house and I couldn't bear to look at it.'

Powys consulted their two watches on the bedside cupboard. 'Half nine. Ten. Mine's probably right, yours is cracked. So it's ten.'

'Even my watch has a cracked face.' Fay smiled feebly. 'I was lying there, thinking, you know, it can't be as bad as it feels, it really can't. Then I staggered to the bathroom mirror… And it was. It really bloody was.'

The cut ran from just below the hairline to the top of the left cheek. The left eye was black, blue, orange and half-closed.

'The bitch has scarred me for life.'

He remembered all the blood on the linoleum and thought she actually looked a good deal better than the quaking thing he'd found curled up on the kitchen floor, incapable, for a long time, of coherent speech.

'It's never going to heal,' Fay said bleakly.

'It will.' But she was probably right. There'd be a long-term scar. This town was good at leaving scars. He swung his legs out of bed; quite decent, still wearing his boxer shorts, but he doubted she'd have noticed if he'd been naked.

'She's back now, all right. It's her house again.'

'Grace?'

'She's repossessed it.' Fay shivered and held her robe together at the throat, it's like… When she was alive, there was this thin veneer… of gentility, OK? Of politeness. Now she's dead there's no need to keep up appearances, it's all stripped away, and there's just this… this rotting core… Resentment. Hate. Just don't let anybody tell me the dead can't feel hatred.'

'Maybe they can just project it. Maybe we're not even talking about the dead, as such.'

Fay's right profile was all white. She turned her head with a lurid, rainbow blur and her mouth lightened with the pain.

'And don't let anybody tell me again that they're harmless. Joe, she flew at me. She was hovering near the floor – everywhere this icy stillness – and then she sprang. There was a perfumy smell, but it was a kind of mortuary perfume, to cover up the rotting, the decay, you know?'

Powys said helplessly, 'I've never seen a ghost.'

Then what did you see last night? What in Christ's name was that? The raging black horror in the wood. He was sure the girl at the stone would be killed or die of fright, but the bitch knew what she was doing.

'So I'm backing out of the office,' Fay said. 'Thinking, She can only exist in there. Jean Wendle said I should blink a couple of times, close my eyes and when I opened them she'd be gone, she's only a light effect, no more real than voices on quarter-inch, fragments of magnetic dust, and I hit the pause button and the voice cuts out in mid-sentence. So I took the advice, closed my eyes – and I got out of the room fast because she can't exist outside there, can she? That's her place, right?'

Fay's fingers were white and stiff around the collar of the red robe.

'And I'm in the hall. I've closed the door behind me. I've slammed the door. In its… in Grace's face. And suddenly just as I'm… She's there too. She's right up against me again in my face. Grace has… had… has these awful little teeth like fish-bones. And, you know, the kitchen door's opposite the office door, and so I just threw myself across the hall and into the kitchen, and I… that's all I remember.'

'You hit your head on a sharp corner of the kitchen table. She's right, he thought. She can't stay here tonight. Any more than I can spend it with the Bottle Stone. It was too dark to see much. I thought you were…'

'Thanks.'

'What would you think…?'

'No, I mean… thanks. You keep rescuing me. That's not the way it's supposed to be any more.'

'Arnold waylaid me at the top of the street and dragged me down here with his teeth.'

The dog wagged his tail, staggered to the edge of the bed and looked down dubiously.

'Good old Arnie,' said Fay. 'I'd just virtually accused him of exacting some awful psychic revenge on the Preece family for trying to shoot him. Come on, I'll make some breakfast. We have to eat.'

Neither of them had mentioned the Bottle Stone. He wished he could prove to her it had all happened, but he couldn't. He couldn't prove anything – yet.

'I wanted to call a doctor last night,' he told her. 'But you started screaming at me.'

'I hate doctors.'

'You ought to see one, all the same.'

'Sod off. Sorry, I don't mean to be churlish, but nothing seems to be fractured. Cuts and bruises. Anyway, look at the state of you.'

Powys picked Arnold up to carry him downstairs.

Fay said, 'I wonder what he sees.'

He thought, I think I've seen what he sees. He said, 'The other time you saw this Grace thing, what time was it?'

'After midnight.'

'What was it like on that occasion?'

'She didn't move. Very pale. Very still. Like a lantern slide.'

At the foot of the stairs, the office door remained closed.

'Figures,' Powys said. 'She wouldn't be up to much after midnight. Or, more correctly, after ten – after the curfew. It probably took all her energy just to manifest. But last night, it was just minutes before the curfew. That's when it's strongest. That's when the whole town's really charged up. Before the curfew shatters it.'

'What are you on about?' Fay shook her head, looked at the kitchen floor. 'God, what a mess. Who'd have thought I had so much blood in me?'

'I think…'

'You mention doctors or hospitals again, Joe, I'll never sleep with you again.'

Fay grinned, which was the wrong thing to do because it pulled on the skin around her bruised eye.

She had to go back into the office to answer the phone. It looked, as it always did in the mornings, far too boring to be haunted.

The call was from her father, sounding wonderfully bright and happy. Last night, while she was sitting by the sink, Joe trying to bathe her eye, the phone had rung and Jean's message, amplified by the answering machine, had been relayed across

the hall.

'I can't believe it,' Alex said now. 'I feel tremendous. I feel about… oh, sixty-five. Do you think I'm too old to become a New Age person?'

'You going to stay at Jean's for awhile, Dad?'

'I'll probably drift back in the course of the day. Don't want to lose touch with old Doc Chi at this stage.'

'Dad's shed a quarter of a century overnight,' Fay told Powys. 'No woman is safe.'

'Well, keep him away from the Cock.'

'Why?'

'It seems to have aphrodisiac properties. It turns people on.'

'I don't follow you.'

He told her, at last, about getting beaten up by Humble, and Rachel taking him to hers and Goff's room. What had happened then, the sudden inevitability of it. It was the right time, coming up to curfew time. I mean, Rachel was not… promiscuous. Nor me, come to that. I mean, lonely, sex-starved, but not… Anyway, I just don't think we'd ever have

got together… if it hadn't been for the time. And the place.'

'I don't understand.'

'All right, think about the condoms. All those used condoms in the alley, up by the studio. In a town surrounded by open fields, doesn't it strike you as odd that so many couples should want to do it standing up in an alley?'

'I never really thought about it. Not that way.'

'And last night again at the Cock, again in the hour before the curfew, your ex-husband was suddenly overwhelmed with, lust for his production assistant and whisked her upstairs.'

'Catrin? Guy and Catrin?'

Powys nodded. 'Why do they call it the Cock?' He was buttering more toast; it was, she reckoned, his fifth slice. How long since he last ate? 'Is that what it's really called?'

'It certainly hasn't got a sign to that effect,' Fay said.

'What do you know about Denzil the landlord? Got many kids, for instance?'

'I don't know. He isn't married, I don't think. Somebody once told me he put it about a bit, but I mean… You're getting carried away, Joe.'

'I'm a loony. I'm allowed.' He spread the toast with about half a pot of thick-cut marmalade. 'Sorry, look, I haven't got this worked out yet. Whatever I say's going to make you think I'm even more of a loony.'

'No – hang on – Joe, I…' Fay clasped her hands together tightly, squeezing them. 'I'm sorry about yesterday. I had no right to dispute your story. Town full of ghosts, no dogs… I mean, Christ… I'm sorry.'

He put a hand over both of hers. Sighed.

Tell me,' Fay said.

So he told her. He told her about the cottage and the magical Filofax and the art studio.

'Blood?' Fay touched her temple, winced. 'Urine? What does it mean?'

'I don't really know. But I wouldn't have one of those paintings on my wall.'

And then he told her about the girl at the stone, and the apparition.

'You saw it? You saw Black Michael's Hound?'

'I don't know what it was. Maybe the hound is something it suggests. Whatever it is, it's feeding off the energy which starts to build up in this town, probably at dusk. And it comes in a straight line, from the Tump, through the Court and on towards the church. It's evil, it's… cold as the grave.'

Fay shivered inside her robe. 'And this girl was… getting off on it?'

'Something like that. When the curfew began, she'd gone. She'd done this before, knew the score.'

'What does that tell us about the curfew?'

'That the curfew was established to ward something off. I think we're talking about Black Michael. Look…' He took from his jacket a slim black paperback, Elizabethan Magic by

Robert Turner. 'I found this in the bread-oven with the Filofax and I nicked it. There's a couple of chapters on Dee, but what I was really interested in was this. The page was marked.'

He opened the book at a chapter headed 'Simon Foreman, Physician, Astrologer and Necromancer (1552-1611)'. There was a picture of Foreman, who had a dense beard and piercing eyes.

'The book talks of a manuscript in Foreman's handwriting, evidently something he copied out, much as Andy did in his Filofax. It's the record of an attempt to summon a spirit, and…look… this bit.'

He cast out much fire and kept up a wonderful ado; but we

could not bring him to human form; he was seen like a great

black dog and troubled the folk in the house much and feared

them.

'So what it's suggesting,' Powys said, 'is that the black dog image is some kind of intermediary state in the manifestation of an evil spirit. In this case, the spirit's furious at not being able to get any further, so he's coming on with the whole poltergeist bit. There's a famous legend in Herefordshire where a dozen vicars get together to bind this spirit and all that's appeared since is a big black dog.'

'So when we talk about Black Michael's Hound…'

'We're probably talking about the ghost of Michael himself. We know from these notes of Andy's – which I'm attributing to John Dee, for want of a more suitable candidate – that Michael Wort, while alive, appeared to have taught himself to leave his body and manifest elsewhere… travelling on the "olde road", which is presumably a reference to ley-lines. Spirit paths. And then there's this legend about him escaping by some secret passage when the peasantry arrived to lynch him. Dee, or whoever, records that Wort's body was brought out after he hanged himself, to prove he was indeed dead. So maybe he escaped out of his body… along the "olde road", maybe his ghost was seen – bringing a lot of black energy with it – and they managed to contain it… to reduce it to the black dog stage… by some ritual which has at its heart the curfew.'

'How does that stop it?'

'Well, making a lot of noise – banging things, bells, tin-cans, whatever – was popularly supposed to be a way of frightening spirits off. Maybe by altering the vibration rate; I'm not really qualified to say.'

'This is…' Fay held on to his hand, 'seriously eerie. I mean, you're the expert, you've been here before, but Christ, it scares the hell out of me.'

'No, I'm not,' he said. 'I'm not any kind of expert. I wrote a daft, speculative book. I'm not as qualified as most of these New Age luminaries. All I know is that Andy Boulton-Trow, with or without Goff's knowledge, is experimenting with what we have to call dark forces. He's probably been doing it for years… since… Well, never mind. Now we know why Henry Kettle was getting the bad vibes.'

'Boulton-Trow put Goff on to this place?'

'Probably. Something else occurred to me, too. I don't know how much to make of it, but… try spelling Trow backwards.'

'Tr…?' Her eyes widened. 'Jesus.'

'I mean, it could be pure coincidence.'

'There are too many coincidences in Crybbe, Fay said. She stood up. 'OK, what are we going to do about this?'

'I think… we need to get everything we can, and quickly, on Michael Wort. Any local historians you know?'

Fay smiled, in Crybbe, Joe, an historian is somebody who can remember what it said in last week's paper.'

'What about the local-authority archives? Where, for instance, would we find the transactions of the Radnorshire Society?'

'County Library, I suppose. But that's in Llandrindod Wells.'

'How far?'

'Twenty-five, thirty miles.'

'Let's get over there.' He started to get up. 'Oh God.' Sat down again. 'I can't. I have to go to Hereford Crematorium. It's Henry Kettle's funeral.'

'You can't not go to Henry's funeral,' Fay said. 'Look, I'll go to the library. Tell me what we're looking for.'

'You can't drive with that eye.'

'Of course I can. And they're only country roads. What am I looking for?'

'Anything about Wort – his experiments, his hangings, his death. And the Wort family. If they're still around, if we can get hold of any of them. And John Dee. Can we establish a connection? But, I mean, don't make a big deal of it. If we meet back here at… what? Four o'clock?'

'OK, Joe, look… is there nobody we can go to for help?'

'What about Jean Wendle?'

'Ha.' Fay put a hand up to her rainbow eye. 'Her assessment of Grace wasn't up to much, was it? Harmless, eh?'

'We're on our own, then,' Powys said.

CHAPTER IV

Crybbe town hall was in a short street of its own, behind the square. An absurdly grandiose relic of better days, Colonel Colin 'Col' Croston thought, strolling around the back to the small door through which members of the town council sneaked, as though ashamed of their democratic role.

Tonight, the huge Gothic double doors at the front would be thrown open for the first time in twenty years. Suspecting problems, Col Croston had brought with him this morning a small can of Three-in-One Penetrating Oil to apply to the lock and the hinges.

Col Croston let himself in and strode directly into the council chamber. The cleaner would not be here until this afternoon, and so Col made his way to the top of the room where the high-backed chairman's chair stood on its platform.

He sat down in the chair. There was a pristine green blotter on the table in front of him, and on the blotter lay a wooden gavel, unused – like the chair – since local government reorganisation in 1974.

Before reorganisation, the rural district authority had been based here. But 'progress' had removed the seat of power to a new headquarters in a town thirty miles away. Now there was only Crybbe town council, a cursory nod to local democracy, with ten members and no staff apart from its part-time clerk, Mrs Byford, who dealt with the correspondence and took down the minutes of its brief and largely inconsequential meetings.

The council chamber itself had even been considered too big for the old RDC, and meetings of the town council were self-conscious affairs, with eleven people hunched in a corner of the room trying to be inconspicuous. Although their meetings were public, few townsfolk were ever moved to attend.

Tonight, however, it seemed likely the chamber would actually be too small for the numbers in attendance, and the chairman would be occupying, for the first time in nearly twenty years, the official chairman's chair.

The chairman tonight would be Col Croston.

Mrs Byford, the clerk, had telephoned him at home to pass on the Mayor's apologies and request that he steer the public meeting.

'Why, surely,' Col said briskly. 'Can hardly expect old Jim to be there after what's happened.'

'Oh, he'll be there, Colonel,' Mrs Byford said, 'but he'll have to leave soon after nine-thirty to see to the bell, isn't it.'

'Shouldn't have to mess about with that either at his age. All he's got to do is say the word and I'll organize a bunch of chaps and we'll have that curfew handled on a rota system, makes a lot of sense, Mrs Byford.'

The clerk's tone cooled at once. 'That bell is a Preece function, Colonel.'

Oh dear, foot in it again, never mind. 'All got to rally round at a time like this, Mrs Byford. Besides, it could be the first step to getting a proper team of bell-ringers on the job. Crying shame, the way those bells are neglected.'

'It's a Preece function,' Mrs Byford said from somewhere well within the Arctic Circle. 'The meeting starts at eight o'clock.'

Minefield of ancient protocol, this town. Col Croston often thought Goose Green had been somewhat safer.

Col was deputy mayor this year. Long army career (never mentioned the SAS but everybody seemed to know). Recommended for a VC after the Falklands (respectfully suggested it be redirected). But still regarded becoming deputy mayor of Crybbe as his most significant single coup, on the grounds of being the only incomer to serve on the town council long enough to achieve the honour – which virtually guaranteed that next year he'd become the first outsider to wear the chain of office.

His wife considered he was out of his mind snuggling deep into this hotbed of small-minded prejudice and bigotry. But Col thought he was more than halfway to being accepted. And when he made mayor he was going to effect a few tiny but democratically meaningful changes to the wav the little council operated – as well as altering the rather furtive atmosphere with which it conducted its affairs.

He often felt that, although it gave a half-hearted welcome to new industry, anything providing local jobs, this council appeared to consider its foremost role was to protect the town against happiness.

Indeed, until being asked to chair it, he'd been rather worried about how tonight's meeting would be handled. He been finding out as much as he could about Max Goff's plans and had to say that the New Age people he'd met so far hadn't invariably been the sort of head-in-the-clouds wallies one had feared. If it pulled in a few tourists at last, it could be a real economic shot in the arm for this town.

So Col Croston was delighted to be directing operations.

With a mischievous little smile he lifted the gavel and gave it a smart double rap.

'Silence! Silence at the back there!'

Whereupon, to his horror, Mrs Byford materialised in doorway with a face like a starched pinny.

'I hope, Colonel, that you're banging that thing on the blotter and not on the table.'

'Oh, yes, of course, Mrs Byford. See…' He gave it another rap, this time on the blotter. It sounded about half as loud. 'Yes…ha. Well, ah… your morning for the correspondence, is it?

Mrs Byford stalked pointedly to the corner table used for town council meetings and placed upon it the official town council attache case.

'Glad you came in, actually,' Col Croston said, 'I think we ought to send an official letter of condolence to the relatives I that poor girl who had the accident at the Court.'

'I see no necessity for that.' Mrs Byford began to unpack her case.

'There's no necessity, Mrs B. Just think it'd be a sympathetic thing to do, don't you?'

'Not my place to give an opinion, Colonel. I should think twice, though, if I were you, about making unauthorised use of council notepaper.'

Col Croston, who'd once made a disastrous attempt to form a Crybbe cricket club, estimated that if he bowled the gavel at the back of Mrs Byford's head, there'd be a fair chance of laying the old boot out.

Just a thought.

It was Bill Davies, the butcher, who rang Jimmy Preece to complain about the picture. 'I'm sorry to 'ave to bother you at time like this, Jim, but I think you should go and see it for yourself. I know you know more about these things than any of us, but I don't like the look of it. Several customers mentioned it, see. How is Jack now?'

'Jack's not good,' Jimmy Preece said, and put the phone down.

He could see trouble coming, been seeing it all the morning, in the calm of the fields and the weight of the clouds.

In the cold, gleeful eyes of his surviving grandson.

Ten minutes after talking to Bill Davies, the Mayor was walking across the square towards The Gallery, traders and passers-by nodding to him sorrowfully. Nobody said, 'Ow're you'. They all knew where he was going.

Even in today's profoundly pessimistic mood, he was not prepared for the picture in the window of The Gallery. He had to turn away and get some control of himself.

Then, face like parchment, he pushed through the pine-panelled door with its panes of bull's-eye glass.

The woman with too much make-up and a too-tight blouse opened her red lips at him. 'Oh. Mr Preece, isn't it? I'm so terribly, terribly…'

'Madam!' Mr Preece, his heart wrapped in ice, had seen in the gloating eyes of the yellow-haloed man in the picture that the accident to Jack and the drowning of Jonathon were only the start of it. This was what they'd done with their meddling and their New Age rubbish.

'That picture in the window. Where'd 'e come from?'

'My husband brought it back from Devon. Why, is there…?'

'Did 'e,' Mr Preece said heavily. 'Brought it back from Devon, is it?'

Couldn't stop himself.

'Devon…? Devon…?'

Saw the woman's lips make a colossal great 'O' as he raised a hand and brought it down with an almighty bang on the thick smoked-glass counter.

The cremation was at twelve, and Powys was late. He felt bad about this because there was barely a dozen people there. He spotted Henry's neighbour, Mrs Whitney. He noted the slight unassuming figure of another distinguished elder statesman of dowsing. And there was his old mate Ben Corby, now publishing director of Dolmen, newly acquired by Max Goff.

'Bloody minister never even mentioned dowsing,' Ben said.

It had been a swift, efficient service. No sermon. Nothing too religious, nothing psychic.

Powys said, 'I don't think Henry would have wanted to be wheeled in under an arch of hazel twigs, do you?'

'Too modest, Joe. All the bloody same, these dowsers. Look at old Bill over there – he wouldn't do me a book either.'

Powys smiled. 'Henry left me his papers.'

'In that case, you can do the book. The Strange Life of Henry Kettle, an official biography by his literary executor. How's that? Come and have a drink, my train back to Paddington's at ten past two.'

Ben Corby. Plump and balding Yorkshireman, the original New Age hustler. They went to a pub called the Restoration and sat at a window-table overlooking a traffic island with old stone cross on it.

'Golden Land Two,' said Ben. 'How long? A year?'

Not the time, Powys thought, to tell him there wasn't going to be a book.

'Seen Andy lately?' he asked.

'Great guy, Max,' Ben said. 'Best thing that could've happened to Dolmen. Been burdened for years with the wispy beard brigade, wimps who reckon you can't be enlightened and make money. Give me the white suit and the chequebook any day. The New Age movement's got to seize the world by the balls.'

'Andy,' Powys said patiently. 'You seen him recently?'

'Andy? Pain in the arse. He wouldn't write me a book either. He's always been an Elitist twat. Hates the New Age movement, thinks earth mysteries are not for the masses… but, there you go, he knows his stuff; I gather he's giving Max good advice.'

'Maybe he's just using Max.'

'Everybody uses everybody, Joe. It's a holistic society.'

'How did Andy get involved?'

Ben shrugged. I know he was teaching art at one of the local secondary schools. Had a house in the area for years, apparently.'

That made sense. Had he really thought Andy was living in a run-down woodland cottage with no sanitation?

But why teaching? Teaching what?

'Andy's hardly short of cash.'

'Maybe he hit on hard times,' said Ben. 'Maybe he felt he had a duty to nurture young minds.'

Young minds. Powys thought of the girl at the stone. And then a man leaned over and tapped him on the shoulder.

'Excuse me, Mr Powys, could I have a word? Peter Jarman, Mr Kettle's solicitor.'

Peter Jarman looked about twenty-five; without his glasses he'd have looked about seventeen. He steered Powys into a corner. 'Uncle Henry,' he said. 'We all called him Uncle Henry. My grandfather was his solicitor for about half a century. Did you get my letter?'

Powys shook his head. 'I've been away.'

'No problem. I can expand on it a little now. Uncle Henry's daughter, as you may have noticed, hasn't come back from Canada for his funeral. He didn't really expect her to, which, I suspect, is why he's left his house to you.'

'Bloody hell. He really did that?'

'Seems she's done quite well for herself, the daughter, over in Canada. And communicated all too rarely with Uncle Henry. He seems to have thought you might value the house more than she would. This is all rather informal, but there are formalities, so if you could make an appointment to come to the office.'

'Yes,' Powys said faintly. 'Sure.'

'In the meantime,' said young Mr Jarman, 'if you want to get into the cottage at any time, Mrs Whitney next door is authorised to let you in. Uncle Henry was very specific that you should have access to any of his books or papers at any time.'

'You told me,' Jocasta Newsome said, suppressing her emotions, but not very well, 'that you hadn't managed to buy much in the West Country, and you proceeded to prove it with that mediocre miniature by Dufort.'

Hereward nervously fingered his beard. Now that it was almost entirely grey, he'd been considering shaving the thing off. As a statement, it was no longer sufficiently emphatic.

The black beard of the dark-eyed figure in the picture seemed to mock him.

'Where did it come from, Hereward?'

'All right,' he snapped, 'it wasn't from the West. A local artist sold it to me.'

Jocasta planted her hands on her hips. 'Girl?'

'Well… young woman.'

'Get rid of it,' Jocasta said, not a request, not a suggestion.

'Don't be ridiculous.'

'Take it back. Now.'

'What the hell's the matter with you? It's a bloody good painting! Worth eight or nine hundred of anybody's money and that's what Max Goff's going to pay!'

'So if Goff's going to pay the money, what's it doing in our window upsetting everybody?'

'One man!' He couldn't believe this.

'The Mayor of this town, Hereward. Who was so distressed he nearly cracked my counter.'

'But.. Hereward clutched his head, 'he's the Mayor! Not a bloody cultural arbiter! Not some official civic censor! He's just a tin-pot, small-town… I mean, how dare the old fuck come in here, complaining about a picture which isn't even… an erotic nude or… or something. What's his problem?'

'He calmed down after slapping the counter,' Jocasta admitted. 'He apologized. He then appealed to me very sincerely – for the future well-being of the town, he said – not to flaunt a picture which appeared to be heralding the return of someone called Black Michael, who was apparently the man who built Crybbe Court and was very unpopular in his day.'

'He actually said that? In the year nineteen hundred and ninety-three, the first citizen of this town – the most senior elected member of the town council – seriously said that?'

'Words to that effect. And I agreed. I told him it would be removed immediately from the window and off these premises by tonight. I apologised and told him my husband obviously didn't realise when he purchased it – 'in the West Country' – that it might cause offence.'

For a moment, Hereward was speechless. When his voice returned, it was hoarse with outraged incredulity.

'How dare you? How bloody dare you? Black bloody Michael? What is this… bilge? I tell you, if this gallery is to have any artistic integrity…'

'Hereward, it's going,' Jocasta said, bored with him. 'I don't like that girl, she's a troublemaker. I don't like her weird paintings, and I want this one out.'

'Well, I can't help you there,' Hereward said flatly. 'I promised it would stay in the window until tomorrow.'

Jocasta regarded him as she would something she'd scraped from her shoe. It occurred to him seriously, for the first time, that perhaps he was something she'd like to scrape from her shoe. In which case, the issue of his failed trip to the West, his attempt to recover ground by buying this painting on the artist's eccentric terms, all this would be used to humiliate him again and again.

She turned her back on him and as she stalked away, Hereward saw her hook the tip of one shoe behind the leg of the wooden easel on which sat the big, dark picture.

He tried to save it. As he lunged towards the toppling easel, Jocasta half-turned and, seeing his hands clawing out, must have thought they were clawing at her. So she struck first. Hereward felt the nails pierce his cheek, just under his right eye.

It was instinctive. His left hand came back and he hit her so hard with his open palm that she was thrown off her feet and into a corner of the window, where she lay with her nose bleeding, snorting blood splashes on to her cream silk blouse.

There was silence.

A bunch of teenage boys just off the school bus, home early after end-of-term exams, gathered outside the window and grinned in at Jocasta.

The picture of the unsmiling man with the yellow halo in the doorway of Crybbe Court had fallen neatly and squarely in the centre of the floor and was undamaged. Its darkness flooded the gallery and Hereward Newsome knew his marriage and his plans for a successful and fashionable outlet in Crybbe were both as good as over.

Assessing his emotions, much later, he would decide he'd been not so much sad as angry and bitter at the way a seedy little town could turn a civilized man into a savage.

Jocasta didn't get up. She took a tissue from a pocket in the front of her summery skirt and dabbed carefully at her nose.

Hereward knew there was blood also on his torn cheek. He didn't touch it.

Outside, the school kids began to drift away. Jocasta had her back against the window, unaware of them.

Still she made no attempt to get up, only said calmly, voice nasally blocked, as if she had a cold, ' I accepted some drawings from that girl a few days ago. Sale or return. Do you remember them?'

'I didn't make the connection,' Hereward said quietly.

'They were drawings of an old man.'

'I didn't see them.'

'He was cutting his own throat.'

'Yes,' Hereward said dully. '… What?'

'The reason I don't want this painting here is that the other night, while you were away, the figure, the likeness of this old man, the old man in the drawings, was seen in our bathroom.'

Hereward said nothing.

'Not by me, of course,' his wife assured him. 'But the man I was sleeping with swears it was there.'

Everything was completely still in The Gallery. Hereward Newsome stunned, aware of a droplet of blood about to fall from his chin. Jocasta Newsome lying quietly in the window, red splashes like rose petals on her cream silk blouse.

CHAPTER V

Fay had a whole pile of books and just two short names.

She was alone in the reading room of the County Library in Llandrindod Wells, nearly thirty rural miles from Crybbe and another world: bright, spacy streets, a spa town.

Two names: Wort and Dee.

Fortunately there was an index to the dozens of volumes of transactions of the Radnorshire Society, a huge collection of many decades of articles by mainly amateur scholars, exploring aspects of the social, political and natural history of the most sparsely populated county in southern Britain.

There were also books on Tudor history and three biographies of John Dee (1527-1608) whose family came from Radnorshire.

She read of a farmhouse, Nant-y-groes, once the Dee family home, at Pilleth, six miles from Crybbe. But it had, apparently, been demolished and rebuilt and was now unrecognisable as Elizabethan.

Dee himself had been born in the south-east of England but had always been fascinated by his Welsh border ancestry. The name Dee, it seemed, had probably developed from the Welsh Du meaning black.

History, Fay discovered, had not been over-generous to this mathematician, astronomer and expert on navigation – perhaps because of his principle role as astrologer to the court of Elizabeth I and his lifelong obsession with magic and spiritualism. Most schoolchildren learned about Walter Raleigh and Francis Bacon, but John Dee hardly figured on the syllabus, despite having carried out major intelligence operations in Europe, on behalf of the Queen, during periods of Spanish hostility.

Two hours' superficial reading convinced Fay that John Dee was basically sound. He studied 'natural magic' – a search for an intelligence behind nature. But there was no serious evidence, despite many contemporary and subsequent attempts to smear him, of any involvement in black magic.

Dee wanted to know eternal secrets, the ones he believed no human intelligence could pass on. He sought communion with spirits and 'angels', for which a medium was required.

Fay read of several professed psychics, who sometimes turned out to be less well-intentioned than he was. People like the very dubious Sir Edward Kelley, who once claimed the spirits had suggested that, in order to realise their full human potential, he and Dee should swap wives.

Now that, Fay thought, was the kind of scam Guy might try to pull.

But there was no mention of Dee working with Sir Michael Wort in Radnorshire.

She skipped over all the weird, impenetrable stuff about Dee's so-called Angelic Conversations and went back to the Radnorshire transactions.

It emerged that while Dee himself might not have been a medium he clearly was, like Henry Kettle, an expert dowser.

In 1574, he wrote to Elizabeth's Lord Treasurer, Lord Burghley, requesting permission to seek 'hidden treasure' using a method that was scientific rather than magical (nothing psychic), Fay smiled, involving a particular type of rod.

He was also most interested in folklore and local customs, druidic lore and landscape patterns.

OK. Speculation time.

If there were such things as ley-lines, the mounds and stones which defined them must have been far more in evidence in Dee's time.

If ley-lines had psychic properties, Dee's interest in the remains would have been of a more than antiquarian nature.

If he'd been in the area in the 1570s he could hardly have failed to run into Wort.

If Dee felt that Wort had knowledge or psychic abilities he lacked, he might have been inclined to overlook the sheriff's less savoury practices.

Fay looked up Wort and found only passing references. No mention of hangings. His name was in a chronological list of high sheriffs, and that was all.

She looked up Trow and found nothing. She looked in the local telephone directories, found several Worts and several Trows, noted down numbers.

Then she simply looked up Crybbe and found surprisingly little, apart from references to the curfew, with the usual stuff about the legacy of Percy Weale, a mention of the town hall as one of the finest in the area.

Had Crybbe received so little attention because, for much of its history, it had been in England? Or was it, as she'd intimated to Powys, because local historians weren't too thick on the ground.

It was almost as though nobody wanted the place to have a history.

And so Fay emerged from the library with only one significant piece of information.

It came from a brief mention of Crybbe Court in an article dated 1962 about the few surviving manor houses of Radnorshire. Crybbe Court, which the writer said was in dire need of extensive restoration, had been built in the 1570s by a local landowner, Sir Michael Wort, who later served as High Sheriff of the county and who lived there until his death in the summer of 1593.

It was precisely four centuries since the hanging of Black Michael.

'Oh, what the hell,' Colonel Col Croston said. 'Don't see why not.'

'I'm really very grateful,' Guy told him.

It was the first piece of genuine co-operation to come his way. Well, from the locals, anyway. Whether you could call this chap a local was highly debatable, but he was the deputy mayor.

As soon as Guy had found out that the public meeting wasn't, after all, going to be chaired by old Preece, he'd driven off by himself to the deputy's home, a partly renovated Welsh long-house across the river, about a mile out of town on the Ludlow road.

Col Croston had turned out to be an affable, pale-eyed, sparse-haired, athletic-looking chap in his fifties. He lived quite untidily with a couple of Labradors, who rather resembled him, and a tough-looking little wife who didn't. There was a mechanical digger working on a trench fifty yards or so from the house. Try and ignore the smell,' the Colonel had greeted him breezily. 'Spot of bother with the old septic tank.'

What the deputy mayor had just agreed was to let Guy shoot a few minutes of videotape in the meeting before it actually started, so there would at least be some pictures of an assembly of townsfolk and councillors. Guy would milk this opportunity for character close-ups of the taciturn, grizzled faces of Old Crybbe.

His heart lurched. He wished he hadn't thought of grizzled old faces. With bulbous noses and bulging eyes and blood fountains from severed arteries.

'And… er… Colonel,' he said hurriedly. 'What I'd also like, if you have no objections, is a little interview with you, possibly before and after, outlining the issues – the town's

attitudes to becoming a major New Age centre.'

'Well, I'll do my best, Guy. But I must say, one of the things I was hoping to learn in there tonight is what exactly New Age is. Drink?'

Thanks, just a small one. You like it here, Colonel?'

'Col. Name's Colin. Well, you know, got to settle somewhere. No, it's not a bad place. Once one gets used to their little peculiarities. Like the dogs – used to take these chaps into town of a morning, pick up the paper, that kind of thing. Always well-behaved, never chase anything. But a word or two was said and now I walk them in the other direction. Compromise, you see. Secret of survival in the sticks. I don't mind.'

'So if I were to ask you how people here feel about Max Goff and…'

'Ho!' said Mrs Croston, passing through, wearing a stained boiler suit.

'Ruth's not terribly impressed with Mr Goff,' Col said. 'My own feeling is it's no bad thing at all, long as it doesn't get out of hand. You've got to have an economy, and this place has ignored the possibilities of tourism and that kind of business for too long. Agriculture's going down the chute so, on the whole, I think we're quite fortunate to have him.'

'Will you say that on camera?'

'Oh… why not? Long as it's clear I'm speaking personally, not on behalf of the council.'

'Super,' Guy said. 'Now what about all these prehistoric stones Goff's sticking in the ground?'

'Ah well, there've been rumblings there, I have to say. Fine by me, but country folk are incredibly superstitious. Who, after all, got rid of the original stones? Money, however – money does tend to overcome quite a lot, doesn't it? But I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of them started disappearing again.'

'Interesting,' Guy said. 'So you think there'll be fireworks in there tonight.'

Col laughed. 'Will there be disagreement? Oh yes. Will there be suspicion, resentment, resistance? Definitely. Fireworks? Well, they'll listen very patiently to what Goff has to say, then they'll ask one or two very polite questions before drifting quietly away into the night. And then, just as quietly, they'll do their best to shaft the blighter. That's how things are done in Crybbe If they don't like you, best to keep the removal van on standby with the engine running.'

'Doesn't sound as if it would have made very good telly, in that case, even if we got in.'

'Excruciatingly boring telly,' Col confirmed. 'Unless you've got some sort of infra-red equipment capable of filming undercurrents. 'Nother one?'

'No… no thanks.' Guy covered his glass with a hand. 'Sounds like you have this place pretty well weighed up, Col.'

'Good Lord, no. Only been here a few years. That's just about long enough to realise one needs to've been established here a good six generations to even get close to it. Annoy the hell out of me, these newcomers who profess to be like that – Col hooked two fingers together – 'with the locals after a month or two. I know where I stand, and I don't mind, we've got an interesting home with about fourteen acres I'm still trying to decide what to do with. And I'm the token outsider on the council, which is just about as close as anyone can aspire to get. When I'm Mr Mayor I'll try to effect a few minor structural changes on the council which will doubtless disappear when the next chap takes over. Mrs Byford will see to that – she's the clerk. Mayors come and go, Mrs B doesn't.'

'Is that Tessa Byford's mother?' Guy watched the Colonel's eyes.

'Grandmother.' No specific reaction. 'The girl, Tessa, lives with them. What they call in Crybbe a problem child. Shows a lot of promise as an artist, apparently – that's not a very Crybbe thing to be, as you'll have realised. She'll leave, go to college and never come back. They all do.'

'All?'

'Anybody who doesn't want to be a farmer or a shopkeeper or some such. Sad, but that's the way it tends to be.'

'Ah,' said Guy, 'but will she move away now – now there's a place for artistic types? Now Crybbe looks set to become a little melting pot for ideas and creativity?'

'Look, Guy, creativity and ideas have always been frowned upon in Crybbe – and, before you ask, no, I certainly won't say any of that on camera. 'Nother drink, did I ask you?"

Graham Jarrett was just too smooth, too confident. Powys didn't trust him. He'd wander down to your subconscious like he owned the fishing rights.

'I assure you," Jarrett insisted, 'that this is on the level. I've checked dates, I've checked what facts I can and… Now, here's something… The Bull. The girl said she lived at the Bull, and as you know there's no such pub in Crybbe any more. But I've discovered the Bull was actually the original name of the Cock. And that's not a cock-and-bull story.' Graham Jarrett straightened his cardigan. 'I have it on very reliable authority.'

He'd given Powys a transcript of the Catrin tape without argument, because Graham Jarrett wanted to be in The Book, didn't he?

'OK, how many other cases have you encountered where the subject is regressed to the very same town where the regression is taking place?'

'It's been known. Very often they specifically return to a town because they feel they've been there before.'

'But she didn't. She came here to work.'

Jarrett opened his hands. 'Stranger things…'

'Yeah, OK. But you've got a situation here where one personality is fading and another just forces its way in over the top, right?'

Graham Jarrett shrank back into the dark-green drapery of his consulting room. Powys was sure there must be more on the tape than there was on the transcript. Jarrett claimed he'd given the cassette to Guy, but he wouldn't have done that before making a copy.

'I know what you're going to suggest, Joe.'

'Well?'

'Don't. Don't even use that word "possession" in here.'

There was a bonus for Guy in his visit to Col Croston's house. He'd raised the matter of the suicide, the old man and the razor, less inhibited about it now and less intimidated by it as time went on. There'd been no disturbance in his room at the Cock last night, unless one included Catrin's shrill moments of ecstasy. Catrin had been quite amazing. With the light out.

'No,' Col Croston said. 'Can't say I have.' But he'd referred the question to his wife, neither of them, fortunately, seeming over-curious about Guy's interest in local suicides.

'I know,' Mrs Croston had said. 'Why not ask Gomer? Gomer knows everything.'

The little man working on the soakaway to the Crostons' septic tank had been only too happy to come out of his trench for a chat. There was a disgustingly ripe smell in the vicinity of the trench and Guy found that he and Gomer Parry were very soon left alone.

'Good chap, the Colonel,' Gomer said. "Ad this other job lined up, over to Brynglas, see, and it was postponed, last minute. Straightaway, the Colonel says, you stick around, boy, do my soakaway. Fills in two days perfect. Very considerate man, the Colonel.'

It didn't take him long to get a reaction on the suicide. Unlike most people in this area, Gomer appeared to have a healthy appetite for the unpleasant.

'Handel Roberts.' Gomer beamed. 'Sure to be.'

'And who precisely was Handel Roberts?

'Copper,' said Gomer. 'While back now. I wasn't so old, but I remember Handel Roberts all right. Didn't Wynford tell you about this? No, I s'pose 'e wouldn't. Coppers, see. They don't gossip about their own.'

Gomer broke off to wipe something revolting from his glasses with an oily rag.

He blinked at Guy. 'That's better. Aye, Handel Roberts. He was station sergeant, see, like Wynford. Only there was twice as many police in them days, before there was any crime to speak of – there's logic, isn't it? Well, this was the time they'd built the new police 'ouses as part of the council estate. And it comes to Handel retiring and the County Police lets him carry on living in the old police 'ouse, peppercorn rent, sort of thing, everybody happy. Until – I forget the details – but some new police authority takes over and they decides the old police 'ouse is worth a bob or two so they'll sell it.'

Guy could see where this was going. Old Handel Roberts, unable to afford the place, no savings, nowhere to go.

Nowhere but the bathroom.

'Ear to ear,' Gomer said with a big grin. 'Blood everywhere. But 'e 'ad the last laugh, the old boy did. They couldn't sell the police 'ouse after that, not for a long time. And then it was a cheap job, see. Billy Byford 'ad it for peanuts. Newly wed at the time – Nettie played 'ell, wouldn't move in till Billy stripped that bathroom back to the bare brick, put in new basin, bath and lavvy.'

Guy said delicately, 'And he still, er, that is Handel Roberts, was believed to haunt the place, I gather.'

'Well, you're better informed than what I am,' Gomer said. 'Anything funny going on there, Nettie'd've been off like a rabbit. Oh hell, aye. Want me to tell you all this for the telly cameras? No problem, just gimme time to get cleaned up, like.'

'No, no… just something I needed to check.'

'Anything else you wanner know, you'll find me around most of the week. 'Ad this job lined up with the council, but it's been put back, so I'm available, see, any time.'

'That's very' kind of you indeed, Gomer. I won't hesitate. Oh, there is one final thing… Handel Roberts, what did he look like?'

Gomer indulged in a long sniff. He seemed immune to the appalling stench from the soakaway.

'Big nose is all I remember, see. Hell of a big nose.'

Powys drove to Fay's house, but there was no one in. He didn't know where else to go, so he sat there in the Mini, in Bell Street. It was two-thirty. He'd bought some chips for lunch and ended up dumping most of them in a litter bin, feeling sick.

He'd learned from Graham Jarrett that Rachel's body had been sent for burial to her parents' home, somewhere in Essex, Jarrett thought. He ought to find out, send flowers, with a message.

Saying what? I think I know why you died, Rachel. You died because of a cat. A cat placed in the rafters to ward off evil spirits. You died because a four-hundred-year-old dead cat can't hurl itself from the building. Because somebody has to be holding it and, unfortunately for you, nobody else was around at the time.

The Bottle Stone was no more than a sick coincidence, albeit the kind that questioned the whole nature of coincidence.

But the cat had been part of the ritual procedure to prevent something returning. Before the spirit could regain its occupancy, the cat had to go.

Just a little formality.

Powys took a tight hold of the steering wheel.

I am not a crank.

CHAPTER VI

Powys waited half an hour for Fay. She didn't show. He couldn't blame her if she'd just taken off somewhere for the night or possibly forever, she and Arnold, battle-scarred refugees from the Old Golden Land.

Leaving him to convince Goff that the Crybbe project was a blueprint for a small-scale Armageddon.

On impulse, he started the car and drove slowly through the town towards the Court.

The afternoon was dull and humid. The buildings bulged, as though the timber frames were contracting, squeezing the bricks into dust. And the people on the streets looked drained and zombified, as if debilitated by some organic power failure affecting the central nervous system or the blood supply.

Which made Powys think of Fay's dad, the old Canon, whose blood supply had been impeded but who now was fast becoming a symbol of the efficacy of New Age spiritual healing.

Maybe everybody here could use a prescription from Jean Wendle's Dr Chi. Maybe, in fact, Jean, the acceptable, self-questioning face of the New Age, was the person he ought to be talking to this afternoon.

But first he would find Goff and, with any luck, Andy too. Sooner or later Andy had to resurface. It seemed very unlikely, for instance, that he wouldn't be at tonight's public meeting.

Rachel had said Goff was 'besotted with Boulton-Trow'. If there was indeed a sexual element, that would mean complications. But Goff wasn't stupid.

However, even as he drove into the lane beside the church he was getting cold feet about making a direct approach to Goff, and when he arrived at the Court he saw why it was useless.

Something had changed. Something with its beginnings, perhaps, in an effluvial flickering in the eaves two nights ago.

Powys drove out of the wood, between the gateposts and, when the court came into view, he had to stop the car.

You didn't have to be psychic to experience it.

Where, before, it had worn this air of dereliction, of crumbling neglect, of seeping decay – the atmosphere which had caused Henry Kettle to record in his journal,

… the Court is a dead place, no more than a shell. I

can't get anything from the Court.

– it was now a distinct and awesome presence, as if its ancient foundations had been reinforced, its Elizabethan stonework strengthened. As if it was rising triumphantly from its hollow, the old galleon finally floating free from the mud-flats.

He knew that, structurally, nothing at all had altered, that he was still looking at the building he'd first seen less than a week ago as a shambling pile of neglect.

It had simply been restored to life.

Its power supply reconnected.

Occupancy regained.

There was a glare from the rear-view mirror. The Mini was stopped in the middle of the narrow drive, blocking the path of a big, black sports car. Goff's Ferrari, headlights flashing. As Powys released the handbrake, prepared to get out of the way, the Ferrari's driver's door opened and Goff squeezed out,

raising a hand.

Powys switched the engine off.

'J.M.! Where ya been?'

Goff, untypically, was in a dark double-breasted suit over a white open-necked shirt. He looked strong and, for a man of his girth, buoyantly fit.

'You're a very elusive guy, J.M. I've been calling you on the phone, putting out messages. Listen, that problem with cops… that's sorted out now?'

'I'd like to think so. Max.'

'Fucking arsehole cops can't see further than the end of their own truncheons. They got so little real crime to amuse them in these parts, they can't accept a tragic accident for what it is.'

Powys said nothing. He was pretty sure Goff must have known about him and Rachel.

'Listen,' Goff said, 'the reason I've been trying to track you down – I need you at the meeting tonight. I don't anticipate problems, I think the majority of people in Crybbe are only too glad to see the place get a new buzz. But… but I'm the first to recognise they might find me a little – how can I put this – overwhelming? Larger than life? Larger than their lives, anyhow. You, on the other hand… you're a downbeat kind of guy, J.M. Nobody's gonna call you flash, nobody's gonna call you weird.'

'That a compliment, Max?'

Goff laughed delightedly and clapped Powys on the shoulder. 'Just be there, J.M. I might need you.'

Powys nodded compliantly, then said casually, 'Where's Andy these days, Max?'

Goff's little eyes went watchful. 'He's around.'

'Just for the record… this whole idea, the idea of coming to Crybbe. That was Andy's, wasn't it?'

'It was mine,' Goff said coldly.

'But you did know about Andy's ancestral links with the Court?'

Dangerous ground, Powys. Watch his eyes.

Goff said, 'You got a problem with that?'

'I was just intrigued that nobody talks about it.'

'Maybe that's not yet something you advertise.' Goff went quiet, obviously thinking something over. Then he put a hand on Powys's shoulder.

'J.M., come over here.' He steered Powys into the centre of the drive, to where the Court opened out before them like an enormous pop-up book. 'Will you look at that? I mean really look.'

Powys did, and felt, uncomfortably, that the house was looking back at him.

'J.M., this was once the finest house in the county. Not that it had much competition – this part of the border's never been a wealthy area – but it was something to be envied. You can imagine what it musta been like. This introverted, taciturn region where, by tradition, survival means keeping your head down. And this guy builds a flaming palace. Well, jeez – to these people, they're looking at a Tower of Babel situation. Here's a guy who takes a pride in the place he lives, who loves this countryside, who wants to make a statement about that. They couldn't get a handle on any of it, these working farmers, these… peasants.'

Powys said, to get the name out, 'Sir Michael Wort.'

'Listen, this guy has been seriously maligned.'

'He hanged people.'

'Goddamn it, J.M., all high sheriffs hanged people.'

'In the attic?'

'Arguably more humane than public execution. But, yeah, OK, that was the other thing about him they couldn't handle. He was a scientist. And a philosopher. He wanted to know where he came from and where he was going to. He wanted to find – what's that phrase? – the active force…'

'The force above human reason which is the active principle in nature.'

'Yeah.'

'Definition of natural magic. John Dee.'

'Yeah. I got this Oxford professor who's so eminent I don't get to name him till he comes through with it, but this guy's doing a definitive paper on the collaboration between John Dee and Wort. Has access to a whole pile of hitherto unknown correspondence.'

'From the Wort side?' Powys thought of Andy's Filofax, wondered whether the professor had been given all the correspondence.

'Maybe. Yeah. Maybe, also, some of Dee's papers that came into Wort's possession, all authenticated material. This is heavy stuff, J.M. Point is, you can imagine how the people hereabouts reacted to it back in the sixteenth century?'

'Pretty much the way some of them are reacting to your ideas now, I should have thought.' Powys wondering how Dee's private notes – if that was what they were – had fallen into Wort's hands. Unless Wort had taken steps to acquire them in order to remove any proof of the collaboration.

'They drove Wort to suicide, the people around here. A witch hunt by ignorant damn peasants, threatening to burn down the Court.' Goff stood up straight, his back to his domain. 'Tell you one thing, J.M. No fucker's gonna threaten to burn me out.'

You do have this one small advantage. You haven't hanged anybody. Yet.'

Goff laughed. 'You really wanna know about this hanging stuff, doncha? Listen, how many people get the opportunity to study precisely what happens when life is extinguished? When the spirit leaves the body?'

'Doctors do. Priests do.'

Goff shook his head. 'They got other things on their minds. The doctor's trying to save the dying person, the priest's trying to comfort him or whatever else priests do, last rites kinda stuff.'

Powys saw Goff's eyes go curiously opaque.

'Only the watcher at the execution can be entirely dispassionate,' Goff said. Powys could tell he was echoing someone else. 'Only he can truly observe.'

CHAPTER VII

In a helter-skelter hill road, a mile and a half out of Crybbe, there was a spot where you could park near a wicket gate with a public-footpath sign. The path, quite short, linked up with the Offa's Dyke long-distance footpath and was itself a famous viewpoint. From just the other side of the gate, you could look across about half the town. You could see the church tower and the edge of the square, with one corner of the Cock. You could see the slow, silvery river.

From up here, under a sporadic sprinkling of sunlight from a deeply textured sky, Crybbe looked venerable, self-contained and almost dignified.

It was nearly 5 p.m.

They'd come out here because there were secrets to exchange which neither felt could be exchanged in Crybbe; there was always a feeling that the town itself would eavesdrop.

When Powys had returned to Bell Street, Fay had been in her car outside, with Arnold. 'Dad's not back yet. Tried to steel myself to go in. Couldn't do it alone. Feeble woman chickens out.'

'Well, if you've left anything in there that you want me to fetch,' he said, 'forget it.'

'I suspect you're being indirectly patronising there, Powys, but I'll let it go.'

Her eye actually looked worse, the rainbow effect quite spectacular. Part of the healing process, no doubt. He was surprised how glad he was to see her again.

Although there must be no involvement. Not this time.

Up here the air was fresher, and a gust of wind carrying a few drops of rain, hit them like a sneeze. It was unexpected and blew Arnold over; he got up again, looking disgruntled.

'I'm beginning to feel I'm part of Andy's game,' Joe Powys said. 'Suppose he left all that stuff in the bread-oven for me to find, to give me a chance to figure it all out – while knowing there was nothing I could do about it.'

'And have you figured it out?'

'Black Andy,' Powys said, I mean… Black Andy? How can anyone called Andy possibly be evil? Andy Hitler, Andy Capone. Andy the Hun, Andy the Ripper.'

'So you're convinced now. It's Andy Wort?'

'Families often change their name if something's brought it into disrepute. Why shouldn't they simply reverse it?'

'I made some enquiries. That's why I was late. There are no Worts left in Crybbe. What remained of the family seemed to have sold up everything – well, nearly everything, and moved down to the West Country. As for the Bottle Stone…'

'Please,' Powys said. 'Let's not… I think that whole episode was Andy trying out his emergent skills, weaving a fantasy around a stone, creating a black magic ritual, seeing what happened.'

'Yes, but…'

'Look down there,' Pouts said. 'Goff's prehistoric theme park. The old stones back in place.'

They could see a sizeable megalith at a point where the river curved like a sickle.

'On that bit of tape you played me, Henry was puzzled by a standing stone he'd located because it didn't seem to be an old stone. He recorded the same problem in his journal. Experienced dowsers can date a stone with the pendulum, asking it questions – too complicated to explain, but it seems to work. Anyway, Henry noted that he couldn't date this particular stone back beyond 1593… when it was destroyed.'

'After Wort's death. The townsfolk destroyed the stones after his death.'

'Perhaps they were advised to… to stop him coming back along the spirit paths. But the point is… perhaps Henry couldn't date the thing earlier than 1593 because that was also when it was erected'

There was another gust of wind and the blue cagoule Fay carried under her arm billowed behind her like a wind-sock.

'Wort erected the old stones of Crybbe. They weren't prehistoric at all. He was marking out his own spirit paths, along which he believed he could travel outside of his body.'

'Are we saying here that Wort – perhaps in collaboration with John Dee – had created his own ley-lines…?'

'Look,' Powys said. 'There's this growing perception of leys as ghost roads… paths reserved for the spirits… therefore, places where you could contact spirits. Sacred arteries linking two worlds – or two states of consciousness. New Agers say they're energy lines – in their eternal quest for something uplifting, they're discarding the obvious: leys tend to link up a number of burial sites – tumps, barrows, cemeteries, this kind

of thing.'

'No healing rays?'

Powys shrugged. 'Whether this rules out the energy-line theory I don't know – we might just be talking about a different kind of energy. There's certainly a lot of evidence of psychic phenomena along leys or at points where they cross. And ghosts need energy to manifest, so we're told.'

'And Crybbe, for some reason, has all these curious pockets of energy, fluctuations causing power cuts, all this…'

I'd be interested to know how many people in Crybbe have seen a ghost or experienced something unnatural. Hundreds I'd guess. Especially along the main line, which comes down from the Tump, through the Court, the church, the square… and along the passage leading to your studio. I'm surprised nothing strange has happened to you in there, with this kind of hermetically sealed broadcasting area.'

'Maybe it has.'

'Oh?'

'I don't think I want to talk about it,' Fay said, tasting the Electrovoice microphone. 'Look…' She spread out the cagoule on the damp grass at the edge of a small escarpment overlooking the town. She patted it. They both sat down.

'Let's not mess about any more,' Fay said. 'We're not kids. We've both had some distinctly unpleasant experiences in this town. Let's not be clever, or pseudo-scientific about this. Let's not talk about light effects or atmospheric anomalies. I've had it with all that bullshit. So. In simple, colloquial English, what's actually happening here?'

She looked down on Crybbe. The sky had run out of sunlight, and it was once again a mean, cramped little town surrounded by pleasant, rolling countryside, to which the inhabitants seemed entirely oblivious. Almost as if they were deliberately turning their backs on it all, living simple, functional lives on the lowest practical level, without joy, without beauty, without humour, without any particular faith, without…

'I've had a thought about the Crybbe mentality,' Fay said. 'But you're the expert, you go first.'

'OK,' Powys said. 'This is what I think. I reckon Andy's got hold of a collection of family papers – may have had them years for all I know – relating to Wort's experiments. Some of them seem to have been written by an outsider, perhaps John Dee, relating how Wort came to visit him – in spirit – using what he calls the "olde road".'

'Wort was haunting him?'

'No, I think Wort was alive then. I'd guess he'd found a way… You said you wanted this straight…?'

'Yes, yes, go on.'

'OK. A way to project his spirit – that's his astral body – along the leys, in much the same way as it's suggested the old shamans used to do it, or at least believed they could do it.'

'The psychic departure lounge.' said Fay.

'Glib, but it wasn't far out. And I've seen a transcript of the so-called regression of Catrin Jones. The character assumed by Catrin seems to be suggesting that not only was the sheriff bonking her – and quite a few other women – on a fairly regular basis in his physical body, but that he was also able to observe them while not actually there in the flesh.'

'Quite a bastard.'

Powys nodded. 'And in conclusion she says something on the lines of, "He swears he'll never leave me… never." Which suggests to me that Wort believed he would still be able to use these spirit paths, these astral thoroughfares, after his death. Except there's something stopping him, so he can only actually manifest as a… black dog or whatever.'

'The curfew.'

'Every night at ten o'clock somebody goes up the church tower and rings the curfew bell one hundred times, and when the bell sounds, the energy which has been gathering along the leys is released and dissipated. We know this happens, we've both experienced it.'

Fay stood up, held out a hand. 'Come on. I'll tell you my theory about the Crybbe mentality.'

She led him a few paces along the footpath, Arnold hobbling along between them, until the town square came into view, the buildings so firmly defined under the mouldering sky that she felt she could reach out and pinch slates from the roofs. They stood on the ridge and watched a school bus stop in the square. A Land Rover pulling a trailer carrying two sheep had to wait behind the bus. Traffic chaos hits Crybbe.

Fay extended an arm, like a music-hall compere on the edge of a stage.

'Miserable little closed-in town, right? Sad, decrepit, morose.'

'Right,' said Powys, cautiously.

'The border mentality,' Fay shouted into the wind. 'Play your cards close to your chest. Don't take sides until you know who's going to win. Here in Crybbe the whole attitude intensified, and it operates on every level. Particularly spiritual.'

A big crow landed on the wicket gate and watched them.

Powys said, thoughtfully, 'But there isn't any noticeable spirituality in Crybbe.'

'Precisely. You've seen them in church, sitting there like dummies. Drives Murray mad. But they're just keeping their heads down. Never take sides until you know who's winning. Doesn't matter who the sides are. The Welsh or the English. Good or evil.'

Fay's cagoule rose up from the ground in the wind, and the crow flew off the gate, cawing. Fay went back and scooped up the cagoule.

Powys said, 'Strength in apathy?'

'Joe, look… being a vicar's daughter isn't all about keeping your frock clean and not pinching the cream cakes at the fete. You learn a few things. Confrontation between good and evil is high-octane stuff. The risks are high, so most people stay on the sidelines. Even vicars… What am I saying?… Especially vicars. But maybe it's harder to do that in Crybbe because the psychic pressure is so much greater, so they have to keep their heads even lower down.'

'Neither good nor evil can thrive in a place without a soul. Who was it said that?'

'Probably you. More to the point, "We don't like clever people round yere." Who said that?'

'Wynford Wiley. The copper.'

'Well, there you are. We don't like clever people. Says it all, doesn't it.'

'Does it?'

'Yes… because, for centuries, Crybbe's been avoiding making waves, disturbing the psychic ether or whatever you call it. If anybody happens to see a ghost, they keep very quiet about it until it goes away. Don't do anything to encourage them, don't give them any… energy to play with. If they see the black dog, they try and ignore it, they don't want it to get ideas above its station. How am I doing so far?'

'Go on.'

'Traditionally, dogs react to spirits, don't they? Dogs howl, right? Dogs howl when someone dies because they can see the spirit drifting away. So, in Crybbe, dogs simply get phased out. Maybe they've even forgotten why they don't like them, but traditions soon solidify in a place like this. The dogs, the curfew, there may be others we don't know anything about. But. anyway, suddenly…'

'The town's flooded with clever people. Max Goff and his New Agers.'

'Absolutely the worst kind of clever people,' said Fay. 'Dabblers in this and that.'

The rain came in on the breeze. Pulling on the blue cagoule. Fay looked down into the town and saw that the air appeared motionless down there; it was probably still quite humid in the

shadow of the buildings.

'It's hard to believe,' Powys said, 'that Andy didn't know about all this when he planted on Goff the idea of establishing a New Age centre in Crybbe. Especially if he's a descendant of Michael Wort. He'd know it could generate a psychic explosion down there, and maybe… Christ…'

He took Fay's hand and squeezed it. The hand felt cold.

'… maybe generate enough negative energy to invoke Michael Wort in a more meaningful form. Get him beyond the black dog stage. Of course he bloody knew.'

'In just over three hours' time,' Fay said, 'the public meeting begins. Crybbe versus the New Age. Lots of very negative energy there.'