Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (91 page)

   
'
Exactly,
' said Guy.

   
Col's feelings about newcomers
who tried to take over, assuming a more elevated intellect and an understanding
of the rural psyche, were warning him to take it easy. But there was an
ice-ball forming in the pit of his stomach.

   
'Stop it!' Jocasta Newsome, rising
like a Fury. 'Stop it, stop it, stop it! What are you all trying to do?'

   
'Aye,' a man's voice said.
"Can't you, none of you, control yourselves?'

   
'At least we're not brain dead!'
- the feminist astrologer with the ring through her nose - 'Look at you all . .
. you're fucking pathetic. Somebody tells you to sit there and don't move again
until they tell you you can stand up and leave. A man's been brutally murdered .
. . You don't even react! What kind of fucking morons . . .'

   
A girl in her twenties, built
like Catrin Jones, only more muscular, stamped across the room, 'You'll shut
your mouth, lady, or I'm gonner shut it for you.'

   
'Oh yeah, we'll all shut our
mouths and turn a blind eye and ask no questions. And where has that got you all
these years? Max Goff was the only promising thing that ever happened to this
shithole, and what do you do?, . . you kill him, like . . . like the bloody
savages did to the missionaries. Except they weren't savages really, at least
they had this ethnic . . .'

   
'Sit down, the pair of you!'
Mrs Byford's husband was quaking. 'Can't you see, this is what it
wants
. . . Jimmy Preece said, be calm.
He knows . . . it's what it wants . . . rowing and . . . and conflict,
everybody all worked up, like.'

   
'Mr Byford is absolutely right,'
Col said, wondering what the hell Mr Byford was on about.
'I'm
going to go out and find the Mayor, call the police and get
this . . .'

   
'No you're not, Colonel . . .'

   
'Look . . .'

   
And then there was a crash from
the front of the hall. Larry Ember hadn't exactly
dropped
his camera - which Col suspected no self-respecting TV
cameraman
ever
did, even if he'd been
shot - but he'd certainly put it down quite heavily, and he was stumbling back along
the centre aisle, moaning in some distress with both hands over his face.

   
Col Croston looked up at the
platform; there was no sign of Tessa Byford. 'What's wrong, man, you OK?''

Guy grabbed Larry's arm; Larry shook him off, the way a child does, in a
kind of frenzy. He'd abandoned the camera in the middle of the floor - unheard
of in Guy's experience - and was threshing towards the entrance.

   
'Sorry, pal.' A tweeded arm in
his way.

   
Larry took his hands away from
his face. 'Oh Lord!' the man said, and Larry's knee went up into a corduroy
crotch.

   
'Right,' the cameraman shouted,
'I'm out of here.' Hitting the doors with his shoulder, and they burst open and
the night came in, and Guy strove for the exit, followed by the Ivorys and the
men in suits, and Catrin Jones was dragged along too.
   
'Stop them!' somebody screamed. 'Shut
them doors!'

   
For just a moment, Larry Ember
turned around in the doorway. Hilary Ivory screamed, and Guy nearly fell back
into the room.

   
Larry's right eye, his
viewfinder eye . . .
   
'Just get me away from that girl.'

   
'I think it's a blood vessel,'
Guy said nervously.
   
'I'm going in tight on her,' Larry
recalled, voice unsteady. 'And her eyes . . . are actually fucking
zooming back
. Giving me daggers, Guy.
And then she's in the bleed'n' camera. Daggers, Guy, know what I mean?'

   
Larry's eye looked like a squashed
tomato.
   
'Maybe . . . maybe several blood
vessels,' Guy said, 'I don't know . . . Look, you get some air, I'll get Catrin
to fetch your camera.'

   
'Leave it!' Larry screamed, 'I
don't wanna see the bleed'n' tape, all right? I wan' it destroyed . . .'

   
Two of the farmers on the doors
were struggling to close them again, but now there was a wild crush of people
fighting to get out. Larry and Guy were pushed out into the square.
    
'Let them go!' Col shouted. 'Or somebody's
going to get hurt.'

   
There was hysterical laughter
from behind him. 'They'll be hurt, all right, Colonel,' shrilled Mrs Byford.

   
And Col Croston heard what
seemed at first to be a very encouraging noise; the curfew bell was ringing,
the familiar, steady clangs.

   
'It's the Mayor!' he called back
into the room. 'Panic over. He said it'd be OK to leave when the curfew began.
Everybody just sit down for a moment and we'll file out in an orderly fashion.'

   
'You fool,' somebody said
quietly.

   
Few among the Crybbe people had
even moved.

   
And he knew why, quite soon, as
a second bell began a hollow, discordant counterpoint, and then a third came
in, and a fourth, and then they were all going.

   
Col stood and looked at the
rows of stricken, frightened faces.

   
'What's going on?'

   
Never, in this town, had he
seen such obvious reaction on so many faces.

   
He wanted to cover his eyes,
his ears. It was like being violently awoken in the dead of night by the
sudden, shattering clamour of a roomful of alarm-clocks.

   
Only louder. The loudest noise
there'd ever been in Crybbe, a blitz of bells, hard and blindingly bright,
bells to break windows, and loosen teeth and the foundations of ancient buildings
- bells to burst the sky and burn up the air.

   
For the first time in his life,
Col Croston, the only qualified bell-ringer in the town, was stilled by a most
basic primitive terror, like a cold, thin wire winding around his spinal cord.

   
Because there was no way it
could be happening. With one single exception, all the bell-ropes had been
taken down years and years ago.

   
Tonight, in some unholy celebration,
the bells of Crybbe were ringing themselves.

CHAPTER XII

The first bell had begun at the moment Warren Preece cut his
grandfather.

   
'You,' Mr Preece had said,
dead-voiced, as the Bible burned. No surprise there. Fay noticed. No horror at
the reptilian thing prancing, white-eyed in the firelight - the thing for which
Fay had at first felt only revulsion, becoming aware soon afterwards that
revulsion was actually one of the
lower
forms of fear.

   
Mr Preece said, 'I 'oped to
'eaven it wouldn't be, but at the heart of me I always knew it was.'

   
Tipped up his brother in the coffin,
slashed the shroud. Not much left in Warren Preece, Fay concluded numbly, that
you could call human.

   
'You don't even know it all
yet. Grandad.' Warren grinned meaningfully. 'Got a bit to learn yet, see.'

   
' 'Ow long you been in yere,
Warren?'

   
'Long time, Grandad.' Warren
put on a whining, old-man voice.' "Oh, 'e was a strong boy, Jonathon. Good
swimmer." '

   
Shadows leapt with the flames
from the blazing Bible. Scorched scraps of pages flew into the air; billowing,
black snowflakes.

   
'Smart boy, Jonathon,' Warren
said. 'Bit o' sense. Not like that brother of 'is, see.'

   
'Oh, Warren,' the old man said
sorrowfully. 'You never once tried to . . .'

   
Warren smiled slyly. "E
wasn't that good a swimmer, though, Grandad.'

   
The Bible began to crackle.

   
'Not with somebody sittin' on
'is head, anyway.'

   
Fay wanted to reach out to Mr
Preece and hold him back, but she couldn't get her body to shift, and, God
knew, the poor old bloke was moving slowly enough, fragmented motion, like battered
clockwork toy winding down.

   
'Mr Preece . . . don't do
anything . . .' The old man was advertising his uncontainable anger as clearly
as if it were written on sandwich-boards and lunging for his grandson as awkwardly
as he would if he were wearing them.

   
'Come on then. Grandad.' Warren
lounged against the carved wooden side of a back pew. 'Let's get this over. Owed
you one for a couple o' days. Since you knocked me down, like. Shouldn't 'ave
done that, Grandad. Bad move . . . see.'

   
Mr Preece lurched ineffectually
forward as Warren's right hand described a lazy arc. And then he stopped,
unsure what had happened.

   
Fay's hand went to her mouth.
There was another fine line on the contour map of the Mayor's face, five inches
long, neatly dividing the withered left cheek into two.

   
Then Warren was jumping back,
the silver skull bouncing from his ear, the hand which held the knife leaping
and twirling as though given life by the touch of fresh blood.

   
Oh Christ . . . Fay was barely
aware of backing off. Her mind was distancing itself too, not wanting to cope
with this.

   
'Heeee!'

   
You wouldn't expect, Fay
thought remotely, almost callously, as the curfew bell began to toll, that Mr
Preece would bleed so normally, in such quantity, through skin like worn-out,
dried-up leather.

   
As she watched him bleed, a
question rolled into her head and lay there innocuously for a few seconds
before starting to sizzle like a hot coal.

   
'Listen . . .' Warren Preece
hissed in excitement.

   
Who was ringing the curfew?

   
'Yeah!' Warren leapt on to a
pew, looking up to the rafters, both fists clenched, one around the knife, and
shaking.

   
A droplet of Jimmy Preece's
blood fell from the blade and landed on a prayer book.

   
And then the other bells began,
and Fay clapped her hands to her ears, although it was not so loud in here -
nothing to what it would be in the streets.

   
It just . . .
could not be happening.

   
The Mayor of Crybbe stood very
still. He did not raise a hand to his cheek and the blood poured down his face,
copious as bitter tears.

   
By his feet, the lambing light
expired.

   
But the fire from the Bible was
enough to show her the crazed Warren dancing on a pew to the discordance of
bells, blood glistening on the knuckles of the fist that held the knife.

   
The smoke made her cough, and
Warren seemed to notice for the first time that he and his grandfather were not
alone. He leapt - seemed to float in the smoky air - over the back the pew, and
put himself between Fay and the porch, bouncing on the balls of his feet, grinning
at her, slack-jawed, vacant.

   
Jimmy Preece sagged against the
font, unmoving. She couldn't even hear his breathing any more.

   
'Who . . . who's ringing the bells?'
That could not be her speaking. Nobody sounding like that could ever have
passed BBC voice-test.

   
'Well, can't be me,' Warren
said conversationally. 'An' it can't be Grandad, can it, Grandad?'

   
Mr Preece, Fay thought bleakly,
might have died. Heart failure. Blood pressure - a stroke. Respiratory
congestion.

   
"E sez, no,' Warren said.
'Sez it's not 'im neither. An' I've been in yere ages, an' nobody come in with
me, see. Wonder what
that
means?'

   
Is that what Crybbe does? Is
this the kind of 'rebel' produced by a sick old town from which all unfurtive,
abandoned pleasure has been bled?

   
'Maybe ole Jonathon . . .'
Warren suggested. 'Maybe 'e come crawlin' out of 'is coffin. Bleeeaagh!'

   
He hunched his shoulders. Tossed
the knife from the right hand to the left and then back again. 'Tell you what .
. . why'n't you go up an' 'ave a look, lady? Go on . . .'