Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (22 page)

   
How primitive life had become.

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

   
'Fay, tell me again what he's
doing . . .'
   
'Goff?'

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

   
'No rock stars, then.'

   
'What?'

   
'All a bit of a disappointment,
isn't it, really,' Ashpole said.
   
'Is it?' Fay was gripping the edge of
the table. Just let him start . . .

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

   
'Goff? I'm working on it.'

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

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

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

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

'See that mirror?"

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

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

   
'How can you be sure you
didn't?'

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

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

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

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

   
'It wasn't a bloody draught!'
   
'All right, calm down. Please.'

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

   
'Your blood?'
   
'No!'

   
'Whose, then?'
   
'The old man's.'
   
'Your grandfather?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

   
'No.'

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

   
Murray swallowed. There was an
overpowering smell of bleach.

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

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

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

   
She shouldn't have exploded
like that. Most unprofessional
   
Fay put on the cans, adjusted the mike
on its stand.
   
'Ow!'

   
Bloody thing was hot.

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

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

   
Well, like a penis, actually.

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

   
Sex-starved cow. Pull yourself
together.

   
'You ready now, Fay?'

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

   
'Bit for level, then . . .'

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

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

   
'Yeah, fine. Go in five.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

   
'What?'

   
'You're distorting.'
   
'Huh?'

   
'How close are you to the
mike?'
   
'I . . .'

   
Fay tasted metal.
   
'Oh . . . !'

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

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

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

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

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

   
Churchlike. More churchlike,
anyway, than a bathroom.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   
Her voice sliced through his.

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

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

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

   
He felt violated. Physically
and spiritually naked and shamed.

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

CHAPTER V

THE bitch doesn't get in here again. Not ever. Under any circumstances.
You understand?'
   
Max was pulsing with rage. Rachel had
seen it before, but not often.

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