Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (108 page)

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

         
Jean stiffened. 'I do beg your
pardon.'
         
'Official council operation.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

         
The dog jumped up at her; she felt his
tongue on her legs.
         
'Oh God, Arnold.' She pushed her
hands deep into his fur.
         
Felt him stiffen.

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

         
The yellow of . . .

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

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

         
. . . of disease

         
embalming fluid

         
Grace Legge.

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

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

         
But it was the one word that did it.

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

         
And Fay flew at her.

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

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

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

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

         
The head felt heavy.

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

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

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

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

There was
a sudden, unnatural strength in Andy's arms.
         
He raised the head. He brought
it down.
         
The skull smashed into his own.
         
Michael.

         
He felt his nose shatter in a cloud of
blood.
         
Michael.

         
He felt his teeth splinter into
fragments.
         
He raised the head again, his
fingers splayed around shrivelled skin and wisps of hair.
         
Michael

                  
Michael

                            
Michael
. . .

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

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

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

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

         
'Got to laugh.'

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

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

         
Two heads are better than one.

         
Got to laugh.

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

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

         
Hand of Glory.

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

         
Never mind.

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

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

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

         
The real thing. The authentic Hand of
Glory.

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

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

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

         
'All right?' Warren yelled.

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

         
'Yeah!' Warren screeched.

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

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

         
Warren flicked out the blade and grinned.
         
"Ow're you, Wynford,' he
said.

CHAPTER VI

'
I
always
imagined,' said Fay, 'leaving Crybbe for the last time and driving off into the
sunset.'
         
There was a peach-coloured glow
in the eastern sky, over the English side of Offa's Dyke.

         
'But it must be better,' she said,
'driving into the dawn.'
         
Powys drove. They were in his
Mini.
         
All of them. Arnold half-asleep
on her knee. Two resentful black cats with Russian names in a laundry basket on
the back seat.

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

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

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

         
The real owners of Crybbe were hidden
in its own shadows

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

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

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

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

         
Nobody had seen her since.

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

         
'You bloody did,' said Joe.