Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (102 page)

   
Couldn't remember.

   
But she didn't want to remember.
She'd never fell so warm and yet so free. She saw herself soaring above Crybbe,
and the town was decked out in ribbons of soft, coloured light anchored by ice-bright,
luminescent standing stones. Floating over square, she saw the old buildings in
a lambent Christmas-card glow. But some of them were not so old, their timbers
looked sturdy and neatly dovetailed, especially the inn, which had a simple strength
and a sign with a large, rough beast upon it, and indeed, there were farm
animals in the square around a cart with wooden wheels and sacks of grain on
it. There was a cow, three horses, a pig. And a dog! Black and white like . . .
like . . .

   
Couldn't remember.
   
'Fay.'

   
Who was Fay?
   
'Listen to me.'

   
'Yes,' she sang. 'Yes, yes,
yes, I'm listening.'

   
But she had no intention of
listening; this was the wrong voice. It didn't sound like a cello, it sounded
old and frail, an ancient banjo, cracked and out of tune.

   
She laughed.

   
Everyone was laughing.

   
New Age Heaven.

'Fay,' Alex said into her ear. 'Listen to me, please.'

   
'Yes, yes, yes,' she sang. 'But
you'll have to come with me. Can you float? Can you float like me?'

   
She wasn't floating. She was
part of a group of thirty or forty people, hands linked, slowly and gloomily
moving around in an untidy, irregular circle.

   
Alex could see most of them
now, in the spluttering amber of the blazing church.

   
In the centre of the square,
where, in many towns, there was a cross, a man stood. A tall man, stripped to
the waist. He had dark, close-shaven hair and a black beard. His eyes were closed.
He was sweating. His arms hung by his side but slightly apart from his body, the
palms of his hands upturned. The ragged circle of people moved around him, anticlockwise.

   
The old buildings seemed to be
leaning out of their foundations and into the firelight, like starved tramps at
a brazier. The buildings had never looked more decrepit or as close to collapse.

   
Similarly, the people. Alex followed
Fay around, walking behind her, peering into the faces of the men and women in the
circle, horrified at how weak and drained they looked, some of them obviously
ill. On one side of his daughter was a stocky man with a sagging belly and one
eye badly bloodshot. He was moaning faintly and saliva dribbled down his chin.
Fay's other hand lay limply in a flabby hand full of rings, obviously not very
expensive ones, for they looked tarnished now and the joints of the fingers were
swollen around them. The woman's hair was in wild, white corkscrews; her lips
were drawn back into a frozen rictus; she was breathing in spurts through clenched
teeth.

   
Diametrically opposite this
woman, Alex saw Fay's ex-husband Guy Morrison, his blond hair matt-flat,
exposing a large, white bald patch; his mouth down-turned, forming pouches of slack
skin from his cheek to his once-proud jawline. Next to him a fat girl was sobbing
inconsolably to herself as she moved sluggishly over the cobbles. On the other
side of this girl, a thin woman with shorn hair was breathing with difficulty,
in snorts, blood sparkling on her upper lip and around her nose, from which a
small ring hung messily from a torn flap of skin, and every time she took a
breath part of the ring disappeared into a nostril. She didn't seem aware of
her physical distress; nor did any of the others.

   
'Fay,' Alex whispered.

   
Fay's skin was taut and pallid,
her green eyes frozen open, her lips stretched in anguish, which made the words
issuing from them all the more pathetic.

   
'Flying away, high, into the
light. Can't keep up with me, can you?'

   
He didn't even try. He stood in
the shadows and watched her drift away.

   
He'd had to stop himself from
pulling her out of the circle. He had the awful feeling that he would simply detach
her body, that her mind would remain in the ring and she would never get it
back, would be a vegetable.

   
Which was the very worst thing
of all; Alex knew this.

   
He stood and watched her for
two more circuits of the square. A lurid flaring of amber from the dying church
picked out that woman from The Gallery, ugly blue bruises around her throat,
dried vomit on her chin, coughing weakly; couldn't see her husband.

   
Very gently he separated Fay's
fingers from those of the woman next to her and slipped her small, cold right
hand into his left. With his right hand he found the damp, fleshy finger of the
white-haired woman.

   
And so Alex slipped into the circle
and began to move slowly round.

   
He realized at once that he'd
made a terrible, terrible mistake.

   
His legs began to feel heavy
and cumbersome. At first he felt as if he'd stepped into a pair of Wellingtons
several sizes too big and was wading in them through thick, muddy water, and
then the weight spread up to his thighs - he was in the middle of a river in cumbersome
waders - and finally it was as though both legs had been set in concrete; how
he managed to move he didn't know, but he kept on, at funereal pace, his arms
feeling limp as though the blood were draining away into the other hands, his
life energy passed along the chain.

   
Progressive torpor. This was
how it happened. Initiation ceremony. They were always saying, the newcomers,
how much they wanted to fit in, become part of the community.

   
Now here they were, all these
bright, clever, New Age folk, achieving overnight what some people waited years
to attain.

   
All moving at last to the
rhythm of Crybbe.

PART NINE

In actuality, of course, dowsing as an
activity is no more
spiritual than riding a bicycle: spirituality is in the
person . . . Compared to this rich matrix of mystery the
New Age 'energy' ideas are conceptually bankrupt.

PAUL DEVEREUX
Earth Memory - the Holistic
Earth Mysteries Approach to
Decoding Ancient Sacred Sites

CHAPTER 1

THE
digger was crunching through the wood like a rhino on heat, Gomer Parry at the
wheel, grinning like a maniac, dead cigarette, burned to the filter, clenched
between his teeth. Minnie Seagrove holding on to the makeshift passenger seat,
which didn't have a working safety-belt, a three-legged black and white dog
balancing, just about, on her knee and glaring out of the window, barking away.

         
This had all come about after they
arrived back at Minnie's bungalow and Gomer, spotting the flames coming out of
the town, reckoning it had to be the church, raced to Minnie's phone to summon
the fire brigade and found the bloody old phone lines were down or something.

         
Anyway, the phone was off and so was
the one in the kiosk by the layby.

         
'Something bloody funny yere.'

         
They'd climbed back into the digger,
Gomer heading back towards the town, foot down, headlight blasting at the night
and then - 'Oh my God, Gomer, look out!'

         
Bloody great wall of metal, Minnie's
hands over her eyes, the dog going berserk and Gomer flattening the brakes and
damn near wrenching the ole wheel out of its socket.

         
Flaming great articulated lorry had
jack-knifed across the road at -
precisely
- the spot Gomer himself went adrift earlier on. Was this a coincidence? Like
hell it was.

         
No sign of the driver, no blood in the
cab, couldn't have been hurt, must've buggered off for help. So Gomer did this
dynamite three-point turn and they were thundering off again.
         
'Gonna find out what the bloody
'ell's afoot, 'ang on to your knickers - sorry, Minnie, but I've 'ad enough o'
this mystery. You can push Gomer Parry
just
so far
, see.'

         
'Where are we going, Gomer?'

         
'Back way into Crybbe. Tradesman's
entrance. Never done it all the way on four wheels before.'

         
And Gomer lit up a ciggy one-handed
and spun the digger off the road and into the field, keeping well away from the
Tump this lime, although he could tell it'd taken a hammering tonight, that ole
thing, not got the power it had, see, just massive great lump of ole horseshit
now, sorry Minnie.

         
So it was round the back of the Tump,
back to the Court and into the wood.

         
'Ole bridle path, see.'

         
'But we can't get through here,
Gomer.' Minnie no doubt wondering, by this time, why he didn't drop her off
home. But it wasn't safe for a woman alone tonight. Besides, he liked an audience,
did Gomer Parry. Not been the same since the wife snuffed it.

         
'If a 'orse can make it up here,' he
told Minnie, 'Gomer Parry can do it in the best one-off, customized digger ever
built.'

         
So now the digger was flattening
bushes either side and ripping off branches. 'Five minutes gets us out the
back, bottom end of the churchyard, and we can see what the score is . . .'

         
'Fuckin' Nora, what the 'ell's this?'

         
For the second time in ten minutes,
Gomer was on top of the brakes and Minnie was pulling her nails off on the
lumpy vinyl passenger seat.

         
The headlight'd found a bloody great
stone right in the middle of the flaming road.

         
'Who the . . . put that thing there?'
Gomer was out of his cab sizing up the stone, seven or eight feet tall but not
too thick. Arnold, out of the cab, too, standing next to Gomer barking at the
stone, looking up at Gomer, barking at the stone again.

         
'What you reckon to this then, boy?'
         
Woof, Arnold went. Smart dog.

         
'Dead right, boy,' said Gomer, looking
up at the bright orange sky, like an early dawn 'cept for the sparks. 'Dead
right.'
         
Back in the cab, Gomer lit up
another ciggy, grinned like a potentially violent mental patient, and started
to lower the big shovel.

And Fay,
soaring above the town, far above the opalescent stones and the soft, pastel
ribbons, felt a momentary lurch of nausea as the tallest, the brightest of the
stones shivered, its radiance shaken, its magnesium-white core dying back to a
feebly palpitating yellow.

         
The yellow of . . .

         
' . . .
Fay
. . .'

         
The yellow of . . .

         
'Please,
F
. . .'

         
The yellow of disease.

         
The yellow of embalming fluid.

         
The yellow of pus from an infected
wound.

         
The yellow of Grace Legge.

         
' . . . Fay?'

         
'Dad?'

         
She turned and saw his face, and his
skin looked as white as his hair and his beard. She saw him against what looked
like the flames of hell, and his old blue eyes were full of so much mute
pleading that they were almost
 
shouting
down this sick, dreadful chant.

         
Michael . . .

                  
Michael . . .

                            
MICHAEL . . .

                                     
MICHAEL!!!

                                               
screamed
the

poor,
stricken, gullible bastards in the circle, and she could see them now. She
could see them. She was gripping her dad's hand, and she could see them all in
the light of Hell, and hell was what they looked like.