Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (49 page)

   
Money to burn. Hardly New Age
What happened to recycling?

   
The pile was over twelve feet
high. Filthy carpets which, unrolled, would probably turn out to be Indian. A
rocking-chair. A couple of chests, one thick with varnish, the other newer,
bound with green-painted metal strips, black lettering across its lid; you
couldn't make out what it said.

   
Rachel looked hard at the
second chest. Where had she seen it before?

   
Good Lord! She ran to the chest
and pulled up its lid. They couldn't do this . . .
   
But they had.

   
Exposed to full daylight,
Tiddles, the mummified cat, looked forlorn, a wisp of a thing, his eye-sockets
full of dust, one of his sabre-teeth broken, probably in transit to the heap.

   
Tiddles, the guardian. Evicted.

   
She looked up at the Court, its
lower windows mainly boarded up, the upper ones too small to give any
indication of what was going on inside.

   
One thing she knew. Tiddles
might not be Tudor - seventeenth century, somebody had suggested - but he was
part of that place. He would have to go back.

         
         
Goes round FOUR times.

   
The earth force (assume it exists) rising up through the soles of
your feet, a kind of liquid light. Up into your legs and then, into the body
itself, the solar plexus, the first major energy centre. Feel it forming into a
pulsing ball of warm, white light, while the chant goes on, the rhythmic clapping
. . .

                  
And he goes round FIVE times.

   
'Powys. I need to tell you . . .'

   
'Sorry?'

   
'Are you OK, Powys?'
   
'Yes, sorry, I was . . .'

   
Powys driving Fay's Fiesta
through a delirium of damp trees, their foliage burgeoning over the road. Fay
sitting in the passenger seat with Arnold on the blanket on her knee, fondling
the dog's disproportionately large ears.

   
'Powys, I need to tell you why
I went berserk in church.'

   
He said nothing. She seemed a
good deal more relaxed now; something had obviously resolved itself.

   
'Have you ever seen a ghost?'

   
He shook his head. 'Terrible
admission, isn't it? My belief in ghosts is founded entirely on hearsay.'
   
'Who exactly is Jean Wendle?'

   
'She's a spiritual healer. One
of the more convincing ones. Nice woman. Used to be a lawyer. Barrister. Or an
advocate, as they say in Scotland. Very high-octane. Then she found she could
heal people, so she gave up the law to devote her life to it. They were about
to make her a judge at the time. It caused . . . uproar in legal circles.'

   
'Oh!'

   
'You remember now?'

   
'Yes. It was in the papers,
wasn't it? How long's she been in Crybbe?'

   
'As I understand it,' he said,
'she was one of the first of Goff's big-name signings. Rachel says Max wanted
to put her into this old rectory he's bought, a couple of miles outside town.
But she insisted on being at the heart of things, so she's living in a town
house on the square.'

   
'I didn't know she knew my
father.'

   
'Jean gets to know everybody.
Unobtrusively.'

   
'She was sitting so still,' Fay
said. 'In church. So very still.'

   
'She slows her breathing
sometimes. She's a bit uncanny. She . . . intuits things. Absorbs atmospheres
and interprets what's really going on. I'm impressed by Jean, Scares me a bit
too, I must admit.'

   
'Scared me,' Fay said, 'in
church. I thought I was seeing Dad's late wife.' She paused. 'Again,' she said.

   
They were coming into Crybbe.
Powys slowed for the 10 m.p.h. speed limit.

   
'You said . . .
late
wife?'

   
'She was called Grace Legge The
house we live in was hers. She died last year. I saw her last week.'
   
'Bloody hell, Fay."

   
'I'd never seen one before. You
know how it is - you've read about ghosts, you've seen the films, you've
interviewed people who swear they've seen one. But you don't . . .quite . . .
believe they exist.'

   
'Except in people's minds,' he
said.

   
'Yes.' Fay ran her fingers deep
into Arnold's warm fur. 'I don't recommend the experience. You know what they
say - about the flesh creeping? The spine feeling chilled? Grace was ghastly,
dead. What's the time?'

   
'Ten past five.'

   
'We haven't eaten,' Fay
remembered. 'No wonder I'm shooting my mouth off. Light-headed. You coming in
for something, Powys? Omelette? Sandwich? I'm afraid Dad'll be there', so
forget everything I said about Grace.'

   
'Thanks, but I ought to find
Rachel.'

   
Powys pulled up at the bottom
of Bell Street, took out the keys and passed them to Fay.

   
Arnold tried to stand up on
Fay's knee. 'Hang on,' Powys said. He went round to open Fay's door and she
handed Arnold to him while she got out and shook off the dog hairs.

   
As Powys handed Arnold back, as
gently as he could, Fay looked him hard in the eyes. Serious, almost severe.

   
'If you've got any sense, Joe
Powys,' she said, 'you'll piss off out of Crybbe pronto and take Rachel with
you. She's gold. She's the only person I know around here who's got her act
together. Come on, Arnie, I'm afraid we're home.'

   
'What about you? Strikes me you
need to get out more urgently than any of us.'

   
'Why? Because I'm losing my
marbles like Dad?'

And like me? he wondered, walking down the street towards the river.

   
And immediately twelve years
fell away and he was going around the stone again.

Round and round. Mesmeric.
Tribal.

   
Widdershins, widdershins . . . against the sun, against nature .
. .

                  
. . . And he goes round SEVEN times . . .

Powys stood on the bridge and threw up his hands, warding it off, wiping
it away, but the atmosphere was thick with it. He could feel Memory's
helicopter beating the air above his head with great sweeping, buffeting strokes.
It had never been so powerful. He was standing upright on the bridge, but his
mind was ducking and crouching, cowering. He looked around for somewhere to run
to, but it was all around him.

                  
...EIGHT times...

   
Fluidity of movement, breathing changing rhythm. Something else
breathing for you, running beside you . . . widdershins, widdershins . . . and
doing your breathing.

                  
. . . NINE. . .

   
Can't stop. Can't stop.
   
Out of your hands now.
   
Widdershins, widdershins.

                  
. . . TEN. . .

   
Below you, the tiny figure running around the stone.

   
Widdershins . . . all wrong.

   
Below. The stone and the running figure.

   
Widdershins.

   
All wrong.

                  
...ELEVEN . . .

   
And the ball of light rising up hard, bright, glowing, pulsing .
. . into the chest.
   
Widdershins.

   
Engulfing your heart, but it's no longer warm, and it's bursting,
with a shocking rush into your head, where it's . . .
   
WIDDERSHINS!

He was inside the running figure now, pounding across the bridge and
into the short gravel drive of the little black and white riverside cottage.

   
Powys flung himself en to the
long-unmown lawn, soft and damp and full of buttercups and dandelions.

   
He lay on his stomach with his
face into the grass, his eyes closed and the cool vegetation pressed into the
sockets. Kept rubbing it in until it was a green mush and not so cool any more.

   
'You're going back,' Annie had
said.

   
Back to the Old Golden Land.
Back - he'd told himself - to find out what had happened to Henry Kettle. Back
- they said behind his back - to find redemption.

   
The cold in his stomach told
him he was back, but that there was no redemption to be found here.

   
He opened his eyes and blinked
and then the screaming started to come out of him like aural vomit, for at the
top edge of the little ridge on which the cottage stood, something black and
alien thrust out of the grass.

   
The stone was only five feet
tall but looked taller because of the prominence of its position.

   
Its base was fat and solidly
planted in .he earth. It maintained its girth until, three feet above the
ground, it tapered into a neck, presenting the illusion of a large black
beer-bottle

CHAPTER VIII

Previously, the cardboard box had contained a new kind of foot-massaging
sandal from Germany which Max was trying out on the advice of his
reflexologist. As a coffin it was not entirely satisfactory.

   
She'd found the box in Max's
bedroom, which was built into the eaves over the far end of the long room where
his desk stood. The four-poster bed, facing the mound, had deep-grey drapes. Max
had not spent a single night here yet, but it seemed to Rachel that the
atmosphere in the room was already foetid with tension and a lingering sense of
suffocated longing. Rachel thought of the nights of the Great Beast and the
Scarlet Woman, and was sickened and ashamed. She'd snatched the shoe-box and
fled.

   
The box was necessary. There
was no way she could carry Tiddles's chest up to the attic on her own. As she
knelt in the yard by the rubbish pile, she was worried the mummified cat would
come apart or disintegrate while being transferred from the chest. He fell as
light as wads of dust under an old sofa.

   
'Poor little devil,' Rachel
said. 'You certainly haven't much energy left to put into Max's project.'

   
Returning Tiddles to his sentry
post in the Court would, she decided, be her last meaningful task in Crybbe.

   
And she didn't want witnesses.

   
For over an hour Tiddles lay in
his box on the kitchen table in the stables while Rachel waited for the workmen
to finish clearing the Court. It was gone 7 p.m.; still she could hear them
inside, while a van waited in the courtyard.

   
At nearly 8 p.m., she threw on
her Barbour, picked up the shoe-box, marched purposefully across to the Court's
main entrance and hauled open the dusty oak door.

   
There was a clang from above. A
thump. The sound of a large piece of furniture being hurled to the floor.

   
What were they
doing
up there? And who exactly were
they?

Not - judging by the quality of the stuff they'd tossed out - a
knowledgeable antique dealer among them. Rachel decided it was time to throw
them
out.

   
Or time, at least, to establish
the identity of the smart-arse who was deciding so arbitrarily which items of
furniture to discard.

   
With the shoe-box under her
arm, she went in.
   
'Hello . . . Excuse me!'