Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (32 page)

   
She was spotlit by two thin
beams from roof-gaps. He remembered her standing next to him, naked, in the
window last night, pale, slim, silvery. She'd brought a small flashlight, and
he shone it to the upper extremity of the rope, where it was tied around a
beam.

   
'How many poor bastards did the
Hanging Sheriff dispose of up here?'

   
'Hard to say, he was only
sheriff for a year. But you could be hanged for most things in those days.
Stealing cattle or sheep, picking your nose in church . . .'

   
That's how Wort got his rocks
off, do you think? Watching people dangle?'

   
Rachel wrinkled her nose in
distaste. 'They say he was obsessed with what you might call the mechanics of
mortality, what happens the moment the spirit leaves the body. Him and his
friend, John Dee.'

   
'Not the John Dee?'

   
'The guy who was Elizabeth I's
astrologer. His old family home's along the valley.'

   
'Of course it is,' said Powys,
remembering. 'It's a farm now. I went over there when 1 was doing
Golden Land
. Somebody told me Dee had
been into ancient sites and dowsing.'

   
'Well, he must have been into
hanging, too.' Rachel said. 'If he was a mate of Michael Wort's.'

   
A jet of wind flew across the
attic with a thin whine like a distant baby crying. The rope started to sway,
very slowly.

   
Powys said, 'He was certainly
into magic, but back in the sixteenth century magic and science were filed in
the same drawer.'

   
He put out a hand to stop the
rope swinging. He didn't like this rope with its dangling strands - somehow
more disturbing than if there'd been an actual noose on the end. A sense of
something recently severed.

   
'Anyway,' said Rachel, 'the
last hanging up here was Wort's own. There was some sort of peasants' revolt in
the town, and one night they all gathered outside wielding flaming torches and
threatening to burn the place down unless he came out.'

   
'We know you're in there . . .'
Powys said flippantly, still holding the rope, not feeling at all flippant.

   
'So he shuffled up here and
topped himself. That's one story. Another says there was a secret tunnel
linking this place with Crybbe church and he escaped.'

   
'Where was he buried?'

   
'I don't know,' Rachel said. 'I
never really thought about it. Probably at some crossroads with a stake through
his heart, wouldn't you think? Naturally, they say he haunts the place - or rather
his dog does.'

   
'This place?'

   
The town. The outskirts. The
quiet lanes at sunset. Over the years, according to Max, people have claimed to
come face to face with this big black dog with glowing eyes. And then they die,
of course. Like in
The Hound of the
Baskervilles.'

   
Powys took his hand away from
the rope, and it began to swing again, very gently.

   
'Rachel, luv,' he said, 'can
you hear voices?'

   
'Shit.' Rachel moved to the
stairs. 'Nobody was supposed to be here for another hour.'

   
She went swiftly down the
steps, Powys following, not wanting to be left alone up here, where Rachel
believed the only danger was the unstable floor. Blessed are the sceptics. For
they shall be oblivious of the numinous layers, largely unaffected by the
dreary density of places, unbowed by the dead-weight of ancient horror.

   
While people like me, he
thought, would no more come up here alone than pop into a working abattoir to
shelter from the rain.

   
Only a short way down the
stairs, Rachel disappeared.

   
Powys shone the torch down the
twisting stone steps. The beam just reached to the great oak door at the
bottom.

   
'Rachel!' He felt panic in his
throat, like sandpaper. There was a creak to his left; he spun round and the
beam found a
 
shadowed alcove he hadn't
noticed on the way up here.

   
Suddenly, white light blasted
him and he hid his eyes behind an arm.

   
'This,' Rachel said, from
somewhere, 'is the only part of the house I really like.'

'What's known as a prospect chamber.'

   
The window directly facing
them, almost floor to ceiling, was without glass. In fact, it wasn't really a
window, simply a gap between two ivy-matted gables. A rusting iron bar was
cemented into the gap at chest-height.

   
The prospect chamber was tiny,
too small for any furniture. But it had a view.

   
Powys's eyes widened.

   
He saw they were directly above
the cobbled forecourt. Then there were the two gateposts and then the straight
road through the wood. Over the tops of the trees he could see the weathercock
on the church tower.

   
Without the wood, the town
would be at his feet.

   
And everything - the gateway,
the road, the church - was in a dead straight line.

   
He'd seen this view before.

   
In fact, if he turned and
looked over his shoulder. . .
   
He
did
turn and looked only into blackness.
   
But if he could see through the walls
of the house, what he would see behind him, following the same dead straight
line . . . would be the Tump.

   
'Is this opening as old as the
house?'
   
'I presume so,' Rachel said.
'Spectacular, isn't it?'
   
'Which means Wort had it built. Maybe
this
is why John Dee came here, nothing
to do with the bloody hangings. Rachel, have you ever actually
seen
a ley-line?"
   
'This?'

   
'It's textbook. In fact . . .'
He leaned across the iron bar, not pushing it because it didn't look too steady.
This is the strongest evidence I've seen that the ley system was recognized in
Elizabethan times. We know that John Dee occasionally came back to his old home
and during those times he studied dowsing and investigated old churches and
castle sites. He called it, in his records and his letters, treasure hunting.
But what kind of treasure, Rachel? You know, what I think . .

   
He stopped. There were the
voices again.

   
'Humble,' Rachel said. 'And
somebody else.'

   
Powys's stomach contracted
painfully.

   
'I don't think Humble actually
got round to apologizing to you, did he?' said Rachel.

   
'l owe him one.'

   
'Don't even contemplate it.
He's a very nasty person. Ah, they were waiting for Max.'

   
The black Ferrari hit the
gravel with an emphatic crunch. Humble stepped out and opened the driver's
door. Andy Boulton-Trow was with him.

   
'I don't like the company he
keeps either,' Powys said.

   
'Humble? Or Boulton-Trow?'

   
'Either.'

   
Rachel said, 'Is there
something I don't know about you and Boulton-Trow?'

                  
Joey goes round the Bottle Stone,
                  
The Bottle Stone, the
Bottle Stone,

                  
Joey goes round the Bottle Stone,
                  
Ana he goes round . . .

'Hold it!'

   
They all look at Andy.
   
'It's widdershins,' he says.
   
'What?' says Ben.

   
'Widdershins. Anticlockwise. You're going round the wrong way,
Joe.'

   
'Why?'

   
'Because that's what you have to do. I was watching a bunch of
kids. It's traditional. Widdershins, OK?'

   
You shrug, but you aren't entirely happy about this. Old Henry
Kettle gets up, turns his back and walks off, down towards the river.

   
'OK,' Ben says. 'Start again.'

   
Sod it. Only a game You start to tramp slowly around the stone.
There's a smile on your face because what you're thinking about is how much you
love Rose and how glad you are that they managed to get her name on the cover.

                  
And he goes round . . . ONCE.

When Guy came to the door, Fay simply pretended there was nobody in,
knowing it had to be her ex-husband calling in on the way to his lunch date
with Max Goff and his cohorts.

   
Knowing, also, that if Guy was
in the mood he was arrogant enough to have lined her up as today's emergency
standby leg-over.
Fay, hi! (Long time, no
bonk!)

   
Behind the bathroom door she
clenched her fists.

   
There was a second ring.

   
Fay sat on the lavatory with
the lid down. The lid was still topped by one of Grace's dinky little
light-green candlewick loo-mats.

   
Grace. Her dad thought that
Grace Legge, dead, had smashed the Revox. Somehow. It was insane. And there was
no way they could talk about it.

   
There was no third ring.

   
Arnold sat at Fay's feet and
wagged his tail. He never reacted to the doorbell.
   
Only the curfew bell.

   
'Arnold,' Fay said, 'do you
want to talk about this?' Arnold looked at her with sorrowful eyes. Even when
his tail was wagging his eyes were sorrowful.

   
She held his muzzle between her
hands. She couldn't remember ever feeling so confused, so helpless. So
completely wiped out.

   
The phone rang in the office.
Fay drifted down to answer it, not in any hurry. She wished she'd put on the
answering machine, but the thing had been disabled so many times by power cuts
that she'd almost abandoned it.

   
'Hello.'

   
There was a hollow silence at
the other end.

   
'Mrs Morrison?' A local accent.
Male.

   
'Yes. Who's that?'

   
'Mrs Morrison, you been told.'

   
'Have I? Told what?'

   
'So this is your last warning,
Mrs Morrison. You 'ave till weekend.'

   
'To do what?'

   
But, of course, she knew.

   
'And what if I don't?' Fay said
grimly. 'What if I say I have no intention of even considering getting rid of
the dog? Especially as nobody seems prepared to explain what the hell this is
all about?'

   
'You been told,' the voice
said. 'And that's it.'

Chapter III

Gomer Parry did plant hire.

   
He operated from an old wartime
aircraft hangar up the valley, outside the village where he lived. In this
hangar he had two lorries, the heaviest tractor in the county, a big JCB, a
small JCB and these two bulldozers.

   
You didn't hire the equipment;
what you hired was Gomer Parry, a tough little bloke with mad, grey hair and
wire-rimmed glasses.

   
Been a farmer for nearly twenty
years before the magic of plant hire had changed his life. sold most of his
land to buy the old hangar and the machinery. Gomer Parry: sixty-four now, and
he never looked back.

   
Gomer could knock buildings
down and make new roads through the forestry. He could dig you a new septic
tank and a soakaway that soaked away even in Radnorshire clay. And during bad
winters the highways authority always hired him as a snow-plough.

   
This was the only time that
other people recognised the truly heroic nature of his job. They'd pour out of
their homes, dozens of them, as he busted through the last snowdrift to
liberate some remote hamlet that'd been cut off for a fortnight. Big cheers.
Mug of tea. Glass of Scotch. Good old Gomer.