Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (106 page)

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

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

         
From behind them, a small, raw cry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

         
'Mrs Newsome, have you any idea . . .
?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

         
'A body.'

         
'Is it Hereward? Hereward Newsome?'

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

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

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

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

         
'Where shall we go?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

chapter iv

Joe had
left the candle behind.
         
Taken the lamp but brought the
candle down from the attic and left it on the floor in the open doorway, well
out of the reach of Andy Boulton-Trow.
         
The candlelight would guide the
paramedics with their stretcher to the room where Andy lay, feeling no pain,
only frigid fury which he knew he had to contain if he were to preserve the
legacy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

         
Some time? Fay looked at him
curiously. Then said to herself, My father's dead. Every time she thought of
something else, she was going to make herself repeat this, with emphasis.
         
What she wanted was to be
suddenly overcome with immeasurable grief, to sob bitterly, throw a wobbly in
the street.

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

         
Bang.

         
Bang
!

         
Fay stopped.
MY DAD'S DEAD.

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

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

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

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

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

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

         
He still looked sort of wary, though.

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

         
'Handle what exactly, Joe?'

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

         
'And pretty near impossible to close.'

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

         
They were approaching the cottage
which overlooked the river.

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

         
'Thin drone, like the hum from a
pylon.'
         
'I can't hear anything.'
         
'Probably nothing.'

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

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

         
'Persuasively argued, Joe,' Jean
Wendle said.