Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (30 page)

   
Rachel said, 'Fortunately, it
didn't last. Though Crowley was about the same build as Max, Max couldn't
summon Crowley's stamina. Not too pleasant while it lasted, though. Lots of
dressing up and ritual undressing. The idea appeared to be to build up the
power and then direct it at the moment of orgasm. He was the Great Beast, I was
. . .'

   
The Scarlet Woman?' Powys
vaguely remembered Crowley's autobiography, remembered not finishing it.

   
'Terribly tawdry,' Rachel said.
'Needless to say, it didn't work - or I presume it didn't. Point is, Max isn't
a wicked man, it's just a case of what you might call Bored Billionaire Syndrome.
You've got all the money you'll ever want, all the women and all the boys. But
you're not . . . quite . . . God.'

   
'What can one do about this
minor shortfall?'
   
Rachel said, 'He's doing it.'

   
And Powys nodded, resigned, as
she told him about Goff's plans to restore the prehistoric legacy of Crybbe.
'Crybbe's Max's psychic doorway. His entrance to your Old Golden Land.'

   
'As identified by Henry
Kettle.'
   
'And how reliable was he? Is dowsing
for real?'
   
'It was in Henry's case. Henry was red
hot.'
   
'The modern equivalent of the Stone
Age shaman.'
   
'Who said that?'
   
'Max.'

   
'Figures,' Powys said. He sighed.
'Last night I went round to Henry's house to pick up his papers, his journal.
Apparently he wanted me to have them. Anyway, it was pretty clear Henry had a
few misgivings about what Goff was asking him to do - well, not so much that as
what he was finding. He didn't like the Tump.'

   
'
I
don't like the Tump,' Rachel said.

   
'And leys - we don't really
know anything about leys. All this energy-lines stuff is what people want to
believe. Henry was quite impatient with the New Agers and their designer dowsing
rods. He used to say we shouldn't mess with it until we knew exactly what we
were messing
with
.'

   
Powys watched the lattice of
light on the bedspread. 'A more plausible theory says leys are spiritual paths
to holy shrines, along which the spirits of the ancestors could also travel. Evidence
shows a lot of psychic activity at places where leys cross, as well as mental disturbance,
imbalance.'

   
'Obviously the place to bring
out the best in Max,' Rachel said drily. 'Excuse me, J.M , I need a pee.'

In the end, Jocasta had gone ahead and lit a fire, for what it was
worth. The logs fizzed, the flames were pale yellow and the smoke seeped feebly
between them, as she lay on the sheepskin rug enjoying, in a desultory way, a
favourite fantasy involving the Prince of Wales in his polo outfit.

   
There was a crack from the logs
and something stung her leg. Jocasta screamed and leapt up. A smell of burning
- flesh probably - made her beat her hands against her thigh in panic.

   
She switched on a table-lamp
with a green and yellow Tiffany shade and stood next to it, examining her leg.

   
Nothing visible, except a tiny
smudge, Jocasta licked a finger and wiped it away, pulled down her skirt and
was swamped by a sudden mud-tide of self-disgust.

   
From the living-room window she
could see the lights of the town through the trees at the end of the paddock.
The paddock itself was like a black pond. She fetched from the kitchen the
portfolio of drawings brought in by the girl. If the kid was any good at all,
she might sell them very cheaply. Not in the gallery itself, of course, but in
the small gift section they were setting up in a little room at the side.

   
Jocasta sat on the sofa and opened
the portfolio by the light of the Tiffany lamp.

   
At first she was simply surprised.
She'd expected landscapes and she'd expected an immature hesitancy of touch.

   
So the things that surprised her
were the strength and vigour of the drawing in Indian ink, spatters and
blotches used for effect, boldly controlled in the manner of Gerald Scarfe and Ralph
Steadman.

   
And the fact that they were not
landscapes, but interiors with figures.

   
An old man shaving.

   
The eyes, wide open, magnified
in a shaving mirror to alarming effect. The chin tilted, the throat uplifted to
the razor.
   
A tumbler on a window-ledge collecting
the blood.
   
At first she was simply surprised.

   
Then the shock set in. The realization,
with a rush of bile to the throat, of what was depicted in the drawing. She
tore her gaze away, covering the drawing, in horror, with her hands.

   
Then the lights went out.

   
Through the window, she saw
that the lights of the whole town had gone out, too.

   
Jocasta didn't move. She was sitting
there on the sofa staring into the sputtering half-dead logs in the grate, but
seeing, swimming in her mind, the image of the thing on her knee, still covered
by her hands, an old man cutting his own throat with
a razor.

   
She thought she was sweating at
first.

   
Under her hands the paper felt
wet and sticky and, like the sap oozing from the green logs on the open fire,
something warm seemed to be fizzing and bubbling between her fingers.

   
Jocasta let the portfolio fall
to the floor and shrivelled back into the sofa, almost sick with revulsion.

J. M. Powys stood by the window, bare feet on bare boards. Looking down
on the street, at a few customers emerging from the main entrance of the Cock
directly below. The last he saw before all the lights went out was a couple of
men stumbling on the steps and clutching at each other, obviously drunk but not
conspicuously merry.

   
He'd been here several times,
but never at night. Never heard the curfew before. And now, as if the curfew
had been a warning that the town would close down in precisely one
hour, somebody had switched off the lights.

   
Such coincidences were not
uncommon on the border.

   
He remembered manufacturing the
phrase The Celtic Twilight Zone as the title for Chapter Six of Golden Land.

   
The border country - any border country - has a special quality. Two
cultures merging, two types of landscape, an atmosphere of change and
uncertainty. In such places, it used to be said, the veil between this world
and others is especially thin. Border country: a transition zone . . . a
psychic departure lounge . . .

   
Rachel returned, slipped out of
the robe, joined him at the window, naked. The moon was out now, and her
slender body was like a silver statuette.

   
'You get used to it,' Rachel
said, 'living in Crybbe.'
   
The electricity?'

   
'It seems we're on the end of a
power line, or something. So whenever there's a problem elsewhere it trips a
switch and the whole valley goes off. Something like that. It'll be back on in
a few minutes, probably.'

   
Powys put out a hand to her
then held back and put the hand on the cool window-ledge. Things to sort out
first, before he allowed himself to forget.

   
'Henry Kettle,' he said. 'His
car went out of control and crashed into the wall around the Tump. Freak
accident. What did Goff have to say about that?'

   
Rachel said, 'You don't want to
hear that. Come back to bed, J.M.'

   
They did go back to bed. But
she told him anyway.
   
'The nearest thing to a Stone Age
shaman. I mentioned that.'

   
She lay in the crook of his
arm, his hand cupped under her breast.

   
Powys said. 'Nobody knows a
thing about Stone Age shamans or what they did.'

   
'Maybe it was Bronze Age.'

   
'Know bugger all about them
either.'

   
'Max said they would sometimes
sacrifice themselves or allow themselves to be sacrificed to honour the Earth
Spirit or some such nonsense.'

   
'Theory,' Powys said.

   
'He said it must have been like
that with Henry Kettle. Getting old. Knew he was on borrowed time. So he . . .
consciously or subconsciously, he decided to end it all and put his life energy
into Max's project. Max was standing there looking at the wreckage of Kettle's
car. "Whoomp!" he kept saying. "Whoomp!" And clapping his
hands.'

   
'OK, you've convinced me,'
Powys said. 'This guy's wanking in the dark, and he has to be stopped before it
goes all over everybody . . .'

Arnold whimpered. Fay awoke, feeling the dog trembling against her leg.

   
Although the bedroom light was
out, she knew somehow that
all
the
lights were out.

   
Knew also that in the office below,
the little front room that had been Grace Legge's sitting-room, she was in
residence. Pottering about, dusting the china and the clock. The empty grin,
eye-sockets of pale light.

   
And would she see, through
those resentful, dead sockets, the hulk of the wrecked Revox and the fragments
of its innards sprayed across the room?

   
Or was that not a part of her
twilit existence?
   
Oh, please . . . Fay clutched Arnold.

   
Probably there was nothing down
there.
   
Nothing.

   
Probably.

PART FOUR

Most of the natives once stood in superstitious
awe of the
ancient standing stones which are dotted up and down
Radnorshire. Even today there are farmers who prefer to
leave the hay uncut which grows round such stones and
some people avoid them at night as they would a
graveyard.

W. H. Howse,
History of Radnorshire

CHAPTER I

Around mid-morning. Fay picked up the phone and sat there for several
minutes, holding it to her ear, staring
 
across the office, at nothing. The scene-of-crime man had just left, a
young detective with a metal case. Lots of prints on the Revox and the desk,
but they'd probably turn out to be her own and her father's, the SOCO had said
cheerfully, fingerprinting them both. Everybody was a bit of a pro these days.
He blamed television.

   
Fay held the phone at arm's
length as it started making the continuous whine that told you you'd knocked it
off its rest. She looked into the mouthpiece. The SOCO had fingerprinted that
as well.

   
She tapped the button to get
the dialling tone back. Could she really make this call?

   
. . . And what's the story. Fay?

   
It's very bizarre, Gavin. The fact is, I've discovered there are
no dogs in Crybbe.
   
No dogs in Crybbe.
   
None at all. That is, except one.
   
Just the one.

   
Yes, mine. That's how I found out.
   
I see. And how come there are no dogs
in Crybbe, Fay?
   
Because they howl at the curfew bell,
Gavin. People don't like that.

   
That figures. But if there are no dogs in Crybbe, how do you know
they howl at the curfew?

   
Well, I don't. I'm assuming that's the case, because Arnold howls
at it. That's Arnold, my dog. Least, I think he's my dog.

   
Yes, well, thank you very much. Fay. Look, this illness your old
man's got. This dementia. Anything hereditary there, by any chance?

   
'Oh
God
!'

   
Fay crashed the phone down.

   
Arnold lay at her feet, an
ungainly black and white thing with monster ears and big, expressive eyes.
   
The only dog in Crybbe.