Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (8 page)

   
He raised the
Guardian
high so that all she could see
was his fluffy while hair, like the bobble on an old-fashioned ski hat.

   
'Anyway,' he mumbled. 'Early
stages yet. Could be months before I'm a dribbling old cabbage.'

   
'Dad, I'll . . . !' The phone rang.
'Yes, what . . . ? Oh, Mrs. Seagrove.'

   
All she needed.

   
'Serves you right,' rumbled the
Canon from the depths of the
Guardian.

   
'I saw it again, Mrs Morrison.
Last night. When the power was off.'

   
'Oh,' Fay said, as kindly as
she could manage. 'Did you?'

   
'I can't bear it any more, Mrs
Morrison.'

   
Fay didn't bother to ask her
how she could see a huge coal-black beast when all the lights were out; she'd
say she just
could
. She was one of
the aforementioned lonely old Midland immigrant widows in a pretty cottage on
the edge of town. One of the people who rang local reporters because they needed
someone to make a cup of tea for.

   
'I'm at the end of my tether,
Mrs Morrison. I'm going out of my mind. You wouldn't think anything as black as
that could glow, would you? I'm shivering now, just remembering it.'

   
In other places they rang the
police for help. But in Crybbe the police was Sergeant Wynford Wiley and nobody
wanted to make a cup of tea for him.

   
'I've tried to explain, Mrs
Seagrove. It's a fascinating . . .'

   
'It's not fascinating, my love,
it's terrifying. It's no joke. It's frightening me out of my mind. I can't
sleep.'

   
'But there's nothing I can do
unless you're prepared to talk about it on tape. I only work for the radio, and
unless we can hear your voice . . .'

   
'Why can't you just say someone's
seen it without saying who I am or where I live?'

   
'Because . . . because that's
not the way radio works. We have to hear a voice. Look,' Fay said, 'I really
would like to do the story. Perhaps you could find someone else who's seen it
and would be prepared to talk about it and have it recorded.'

   
Mrs Seagrove said bitterly,
They all know about it. Mrs Francis at the post office, Mr Preece. They won't
admit it. They won't talk about it. I've tried telling the vicar, he just
listens and he smiles, I don't think he even believes in God, that vicar.
Perhaps if you came round this afternoon, we could . . .'

   
'I'm sorry,' Fay said, 'I've
got several jobs on the go at the moment.'

   
'Ho, ho,' said the
Guardian
.

   
'Look,' Fay said. 'Think about
it. It's quite easy and informal, you know. Just me and a portable recorder,
and if you make any fluffs we can keep doing it again until you've got it
right.'

   
'Well, perhaps if you came
round we could . . .'

   
'
Not
unless you're prepared to talk about it on tape,' Fay said
firmly.

   
'I'll think about it,' Mrs Seagrove
said.

   
Fay put the phone down. Of
course she felt sorry for the lady. And ghost stories always went down well
with producers, even if the eye-witnesses were dismissed as loonies. Local
radio
needed
loonies; how else, for
instance, could you sustain phone-in programmes in an area like this?

   
But ghost stories where nobody
would go on the record as having seen the apparition were non-starters. On that
same basis, Fay thought ruefully, a lot of stories had been non-starters in
Crybbe.

CHAPTER II

The windscreen was in splinters. There was blood on some of them, dried
now. And there were other bits, pink and glistening like mince on a butcher's
tray, which Max Goff didn't want to know about.

   
'What are you saying here?' he
demanded irritably. 'You're saying it's a fucking
omen
?'

   
He looked up at the hills
shouldering their way out of the morning mist, the sun still offstage, just.

   
He turned and gazed at the
Tump. A prosaic, lumpen word for the mystic mound, the branches of the trees on
its summit still entwined with tendrils of mist.

   
A thing so ancient, so haunted,
yet so benign. Yeah, well,
he
believed in omens, but. . .

   
There was some kind of awful
creaking, tearing sound as the breakdown truck hauled the car out of the wall.
A heavy crump and a rattle as the VW's shattered front end came down on the
turf, its radiator ripped off, car-intestines hanging out.

   
Max Goff winced. Beside him,
Rachel Wade, his personal assistant, was saying in her deep voice, 'Don't be
silly.' Spreading out her hands in that superior, pained, half-pitying way she had.
'All I'm saying is it's not exactly an
auspicious
start, is it?'

   
Goff stared coldly at Rachel in
her shiny, new Barbour coat and a silk scarf. Knowing how much he'd depended on
her judgement in the past, but knowing equally that this was an area where she
was well out of her depth. A situation where the smooth bitch couldn't be
relied upon to get it right. No way.

   
She didn't, of course, want him
to go through with it. Nobody whose opinion was worth more than shit had been exactly
encouraging, but Rachel was subtler than most of them. She hadn't said a word
about the nylon sheets in their room at the Cock. Had made no comment about the
coffee at breakfast being instant, just sat there, languid and elegant and at
ease, refusing everything they offered her with a professional smile. Yeah, OK,
under normal circumstances Goff himself would have insisted on different sheets
and ground coffee and some kind of muesli instead of Rice Krispies. But he
might need the
Cock again.

   
Actually, he might need to buy
it.

   
He'd been pondering this
possibility, deciding not to discuss it with Ms Wade just yet, when the local
Plod had turned up, waiting respectfully in the lobby until he'd finished his
Nescafe, then asking, 'Are you Mr Goff, sir? Mr
Max
Goff?' as if they didn't recognize him.

   
The body had been taken away by
the time they got to the scene. Max Goff only hoped the poor old bastard had at
least one surviving relative. He didn't really feel like identifying the Kettle
corpse in some seedy white-tiled mortuary where the atmosphere was heavy with
obnoxious smells and bodily gases.

   
If it came to that, Rachel could
do it. She'd hired Kettle originally. And nothing ever fazed Rachel, just as
nothing ever blew her mind - there was even something suspiciously nonchalant
about her orgasms.

   
'Right, Tom,' somebody shouted,
and the breakdown truck started across the field, the broken car on its back, a
smashed coffin on an open hearse.

   
Then the truck stopped for some
reason.

   
And, in that moment, the sun
came out of the mist and the land was suddenly aglow and throbbing with life
force.

   
And Goff remembered what day
this was.

   
He turned towards the light, head
back, eyes closing and the palms of his hands opening outwards to receive the
burgeoning energy.

   
I am here. At the zenith of the year. I am in a state of total submission.

   
'It's the solstice,' he
whispered. 'I'd forgotten.'

   
'Oh,' said the uncommitted
Rachel Wade. 'Super.'

   
As if guided. Max Goff turned
back to the open field, opened his eyes and saw . . .

   
. . . reflected, quite perfectly,
in the rear window of Henry Kettle's smashed-up old Volkswagen on the back of
the truck, he saw the venerable mound, the Tump at Crybbe Court, and the sun
above it like a holy lamp.

   
And the connection was formed.

   
Revelation.

   
The truck started up again,
moved off towards the road.

   
Goff pointed urgently at the
mound, talking rapidly, forefinger stabbing at the air between him and Rachel.
'Listen, when they built these things, the old Bronze Age guys, they'd, you
know, consecrate them, according to their religion, right?'

   
Rachel Wade looked at him, expressionless.

   
'What they'd do is, they'd sacrifice
somebody. I mean, the remains have been found, sacrifices, not burials - they
have ways of telling the difference, right?'

   
Rachel freed a few strands of
pale hair from the collar of her Barbour, flicked them back.

   
'And sometimes, right,' Goff
surged on, 'at very important sites, the high priest himself would be
sacrificed. Without resistance. Willingly, yeah?'

   
Rachel said, 'How would they
know that?"

   
'Know what?'

   
'"a", that he died
willingly. And "b", that the fragment of bones or whatever belonged
to a high priest?'

   
Goff was annoyed. 'Jeez, they
know
, OK? Doesn't matter how, I'm not a
flaming archaeologist. But what it meant was the sacrifice would put the seal
on the sanctity of the place. The dead priest would live on as its guardian.
For all time, right?'

   
A police sergeant came over,
the same one who'd fetched them from the Cock. Big moon-faced guy, didn't
strike Goff as being all that bright. 'We'd just like you to make a statement if
you would, sir.'

   
'Everything Max Goff does is a
Statement,' Goff told him and grinned. 'Who was it wrote that?'

   
'Time Out'
said Rachel automatically and a little wearily. 'August
1990.'

   
The police sergeant didn't get
it. 'You appear to have been the last person to see Mr. Kettle alive, sir.
You'll probably be called to give evidence to that effect at the inquest.'

   
'Shit,' Goff said. 'How . .. ?
No, that's OK. That's fine. I'll join you back at the house. Ten minutes,
right?'

   
'If you wouldn't mind, sir.'

   
'Point I was making,' Goff
said, impatiently turning his back on the departing Plod, 'is that Henry Kettle
was about as close as you could find to a kind of high priest these days. Get in
tune with the earth and its spirit, responding to its deeper impulses. Shamanic,
yeah?' Closing his eyes, he felt the holy light of the solstice on his face. Carried
on talking with his eyes squeezed tightly shut. Talking to himself really,
letting his thoughts unravel, the connections forming.

   
'So Henry Kettle - how old was
the guy? Eighty-five? How long did he have to go, anyway? So, OK, we have this
old man, the shaman, homing in, a dead straight line across the field - straight
at the mound, the Tump, right - and . . .'

   
Goff opened his eyes suddenly
and fully, and was dazzled by radiant blobs of orange and blue spinning from
the top of the mound.

   
'. . . and . . . whoomp!' He
clapped his big hands violently together. Smiling hugely at Rachel Wade.
'Listen, what I'm saying, we're not looking at some bad omen here. It's a
positive thing. Like the high priest going almost willingly to his death, sacrificing
himself all over again to put his life energy into my project. Whoomp!'

   
Rachel said, 'That's really sick.
Max.' But Goff was looking up at the mound with a new pride, not listening.

   
'I bet if we mark out those
tyre-tracks across that field we'll find they correspond exactly to line B.'

   
'Line B?'

   
'The fucking ley-line, Rachel.'
   
'Max, that's . . .'

   
Goff looked hard at Rachel. She
shut up.

   
Jesus, she thought.

   
Whoomp.

CHAPTER III

   
'Bit for level, Fay.'
   
'OK, here we go . . .'
   
Mr. Kettle said, '. . .
All right then, we know there's got to be
water yereabouts . . .'