Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (101 page)

   
But if he believed in it, it
might work. If he was prepared to give up his life he'd be creating so much
energy that . . .
   
'Christ!'

   
He kicked the box along the
cobbles. God save us New Age philosophy. Energy. The life force. Mother-sodding
earth.

   
Not got the bottle for it, Joe?

   
Powys gave the Court a baleful
glare.

   
'Yeah, OK, you can play it that
way, if you want,' he told the house. 'You can spit me out, like Rachel and
Tiddles the cat.'

   
'But when I go ...
he
goes.'

   
He picked up the box, put the
lamp on top and followed the beam towards the main door. It would, he knew, open.

Alex simply walked out of the town hall, down the steps and the few
yards to the end of the street leading to the square. He glanced behind him
once at the blue light from a high window, listened to the noise of the generator
from the basement, looked above the buildings to the orange glow in the sky
from the church. Reality, or as much of it as a bumbling old cleric might perceive.

   
He thought about the Deal.
   
If he walked into the square, he
doubted he'd get out of it so easily, if at all.
   
This would be it.

It was like one of those experiments you did at school in your very
first physics lesson. Fay couldn't recall the technicalities of it, but it was
all to do with making your own electricity and you did something like turning a
handle - really couldn't remember the details, never any good at science - and
this little bulb lit up, just faintly at first, but the faster you did whatever
it was you did, the brighter the bulb became, the more sustained was the light.

   
There they all were, moving
round in the circle - backwards, anti clockwise - the thin golden ring (or not
gold, it was yellow, the yellow of . . . of . . .).

   
And there it was, in the centre
of the circle. New Age schoolchildren dancing around a lamppost and making the
lamp light up, like the bulb in the physics lesson, through the power they were
helping to generate.

   
'Faster, please,' the Teacher
saying in that wonderfully smooth voice, like an old cello, and they were able,
without much effort, to move faster. Fay beginning to tingle with the
excitement of what they were doing - making light.

   
An incandescent blob in the
air, yellow and fuzzed at the edges, but filaments of hard white light forming
at the centre, extending out like branches or veins, blood-vessels - light
vessels - the whole thing pulsing with it. Hilary Ivory beginning to quiver and
moan, as if reaching orgasm. Larry Ember, on the other side, giggling wildly.
Never heard a cameraman giggle before, dour bastards in general, this must
really be something coming.

   
'All my life!' she heard a woman
(probably that loopy Jopson woman) cry in ecstasy. 'All my life I've waited for
you . . .!'

   
'Michael,' a man - the Teacher
- said. Simply that, nothing more.

   
And a woman said, 'Yes,
Michael. The Archangel Michael, slayer of dragons.'

   
No, Fay thought, confused, not
him . . . that's wrong . . .
   
But what did it matter?

   
Couldn't very well contradict
them, could she, not all of them, everybody shouting in unison now, a great
chant.

   
'Michael . . .
Michael .
. . MICHAEL . . .
MICHAEL
!'

   
The Being of Light was
responding to the summons, the filaments forming into a complexity of vibrating
muscles, pipes and organs, rippling into arms and legs, and between the legs -
bloody hell. Fay thought . . .

   
Realizing she was chanting,
too.

   
'Michael. . . Michael . .
.'

   
The bells erupted again, a huge
joyful clangour, cracking the night into splinters. The sound of bells in a blazing
church.

   
The rational explanation. Col
Croston thought, was that the flames had been funnelled into the tower,
creating a huge jet which exploded into the belfry.

   
He stood in the town-hall
doorway and peered into the street. Above him the night sky was frying. If
Jimmy Preece was indeed dead, this made him the First Citizen of Crybbe. An
auspicious start to his year of office; at this rate he'd be mayor of a
burned-out ghost-town before morning.

   
He looked for Alex, but the end
of the street still dropped off the edge of the world, and Alex was gone and
Col's sorrowful feeling was that he would never see the old man again.

CHAPTER XXI

Before, the last and only time he'd been inside Crybbe Court, it had
been very much Henry's
dead place
; now
it was repellently alive.
   
It had been cold and dry; now it was
warm and moist, and going into it was disturbingly, perversely sexual. The
Court was a very old woman, grotesquely aroused, and she wanted him.
   
The main door had not been locked. He
ventured quietly in, the box under his arm. Stone floor, low ceiling and slits
of windows set high in the walls. And the walls leaked.

   
Joe Powys ran a cautious finger
along the stone and found it warm and slimy. Under the light, he saw dead
insects on the walls, all of them quite recently dead, not husks. Moths, flies and
bluebottles trapped in a layer of . . . fat, it smelled like fat.

   
Or tallow maybe, grease from
candles made of animal fat.
   
Crybbe Court was alive and sweating.
   
He moved towards the stone stairs,
thinking, inevitably, of Rachel. What had it taken to make her so hot and
feverish and desperate to get out of here that . . . ?

   
But you don't know what
happened, you don't
know
.
   
Though you'll soon find out, as you
retrace her steps up these stone steps, butcher's shop slippery now, like the
walls.

   
Coming to the first floor - the
big family living-room and the bedchambers off. In one of these, Fay had told
him, Tiddles the mummified cat had slept, most recently, in a chest that was not
very old. Tiddles had come down from the rafters, but had never left the house,
presumably, until she and Rachel had been hurled out of the prospect chamber.

   
Fay.

   
Picturing her standing in the
field overlooking Crybbe, the blue cagoule streaming from under her arm, her
rainbow eye watering in the wind.

   
It made him so sad, this image,
that he had a wild urge to dump the box and race out of the Court - filthy,
clammy, raddled old hag - and run back to Crybbe to find Fay and hold her, even
if they only had a few minutes before . . .

   
Before whatever was to happen,
happened.

   
He wore his sense of foreboding
like the black bag over a condemned man's head. Yet he was still half-amazed at
what he was planning to do: black comedy, a bizarre piece of alternative theatre.
Verdict: took his own life while the balance of mind was disturbed.

   
The voice of the police
inspector, Hughes, landed in his head
.
Are you
sure
he didn't say anything
to you, Mrs Morrison, by way of suicide note, so to speak? Or did he assume, do
you think, that his method of taking his own life would be self-explanatory?

   
Well, he
was
a crank, wasn't he? You only had to read his book.

   
He wondered if the day would
ever come when an inquest would concede that the balance of mind might be
affected by prevailing psychic conditions.

   
Bloody New Age crap.

   
There was a stench of rancid
fat. He felt sick.

   
It would be good, in a way, to
be out in the fresh air.

As Col turned the corner of the back street linking the town hall with
the churchyard, there was an enormous splintering roar and a belch that shook
the ground. And then - as if massive furnace doors had been flung wide - huge,
muscular arms of flame reached out for the heavens.

   
'Go easy,' Col said. 'I think
the church roof's collapsed.'

   
There were about twenty men
with him, the youngest and strongest of them. Bill Davies, the butcher, was
there, and the three burly Gwatkin brothers.

   
'God preserve us,' one of them
said and then turned away, embarrassed, his face already reddened in the glare
from the church.

   
'It's down to you now,' Col
said. He hoped to God the stone walls of the church would contain the fire so
that it wouldn't spread into the town, but the heat was unbelievable; anything could
happen. Crackling splinters - in fact, great burning brands - were being thrown
off, and every so often there'd be a chaotic clanging of the bells.

   
'What we're going to do . . .'
Col said. 'All over the churchyard, you'll see pieces of wood ablaze. I want
six of you to get the ones you can handle at one end and bring them out. This is
bloody dangerous, so be
damned
careful, but we've got to have light where we're going.'

   
'Why can't we just go 'ome and
get torches?' a young lad of seventeen or eighteen, said.

   
'Do as he says, boy,' Bill Davies
grunted. 'Nobody goes out of this street. You step into that square, you'll
wish you'd stayed and burned.'

   
As a handful of men climbed
over the churchyard wall, Bill Davies took Col aside. 'I'm not wrong, am I,
Colonel?'
   
'Look, be a good chap . . .'

   
'Tell me. Colonel. I 'ave to
know, see. Is it . . . in that square ... Oh hell, is it the year 1593 over
there, or is it an illusion? Is this town living an illusion, do
you
know?'

Joe Powys went up the stairs, past a small landing with an oak door four
inches thick, which was open, revealing the stairs up to the attic.

   
Walking up the steps, towards
the death-chamber of Michael Wort with what he believed to be the head of
Michael Wort in a wooden box under his arm.

   
People like me would no more
come up here alone, he remembered thinking, than pop into a working abattoir to
shelter from the rain.

   
But you
aren't
alone, are you?

   
The box was heavy.

   
Trying to avoid touching the
walls because the stone was slick with something that felt like mucous.
Suspecting that if he switched off the lamp, it would glow on the stones, luminous.

   
And so he came, at last, to the
alcove leading to the prospect chamber.

   
When he put down the box to
open the door, he felt Rachel was standing at his side. Remembering being here
with her. How two wafers of light from holes in the roof had crossed just above
her head and he'd recalled her standing by the window of the room at the Cock,
naked and pale and ethereal.

   
Now he could almost see her calm,
silvery shade; they'd go hand in hand into the prospect chamber.

   
This . . . is the only part of the house I really like.

   
And together they'd take the
head of Michael Wort back into the night.

   
He turned the metal handle and
put his shoulder to the old, oak door.

New Age Heaven.

   
Blissful, blissful, blissful.

   
'I want to touch him,' the
woman next to her cried. 'I want to bathe in him.'

   
Michael,
Michael
, MICHAEL,
MICHAEL
!

   
The Being of Light lifted his
head and spread his arms to embrace his town. Bright people were gathering
around him, both sexes, shimmering, all shapes and sizes, from the large, smiling
man in the incandescent white suit to the tiny little lady, mouth opening in
delight to reveal small, sharp white teeth, like a fish's, like . . . like . .
.