Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (97 page)

   
'How do you know that?'

   
'Because, in the picture, he's
standing in a doorway, like The Light of the World, in reverse, because he's so
dark. But darkness and light, it's all the same when you can't see, isn't it?'

   
'I don't . . .'

   
'I'm going through the doorway,
Jocasta.'
   
'Hereward?'

   
'It really is the only way out
of here, through the doorway. The only way out for me, anyway.'
   
'Hereward, I'm getting very scared.'
   
'There's no need to be scared. Come
here, darling. There.'
   
'No. No, please.'

   
'There . . . there . . .'

   
'Aaaugh.'

   
'There.'

Hereward felt the woman go limp, and his hands fell away from her
throat. He felt himself smiling into the dark as he walked away.

   
The lamp was alight, and the
door was ajar. When he pushed, it swung open at once, and Hereward found
himself in the comfortingly familiar setting of his own workshop next
to The Gallery.

   
A candle glowed on the
workbench, where he'd made frames
. Do you
know, in the early days, we used actually to make our own frames . . .

   
Fragments of frames were scattered
over the bench and the floor; a corner section was still wedged in the
wood-vice. He wouldn't need to make frames any more; that phase was over. Perhaps
he'd employ someone to do it.

   
'Don't suppose you'd be interested
in a job, would you?' he said to the shadow sitting on the bench, next to the
candle.

   
The shadow stopped whittling at
a piece of framing-wood with its Stanley knife and slipped to the floor.

   
Hereward saw it wasn't really a
shadow; it was just black.

CHAPTER XVII

Laughter in the dark.

   
Laughter like ice-crystals
forming in the air.
   
'Andy.'

   
Who did you think it was going to be, Joe? Did you think you were
finally about to meet Sir Michael himself?
   
Andy, but he wasn't here.

   
He was mainly grey, shimmering
to nearly white at his fingertips, the extremities of him.
   
Andy, but he wasn't there.

   
Powys heard the voice in his
head. He spoke aloud, but heard the replies in his head.

   
He wasn't thinking about this
too hard, analysis was useless. Couldn't play new games by old rules.

   
Don't touch him. He can't harm
you.

   
BUT DON'T TOUCH HIM.

   
'The box. What's in the box,
Andy?'

   
Why don't you open it, Joe? The lock's no big deal. Ornament as
much as anything. Also it's very old. Pick up a stone. Break the lock.

   
'I don't think so.'

   
No? You're still very much full of shit, Joe, you know that? You go to
all this trouble to get into here, and you won't face up to the final
challenge. What's the problem? Not got the guts, Joe? Not got the bottle? Think
about this. . . think hard. . . what's it
 
been worth, if you don't open it?

   
'Maybe I will,' Powys said.

   
You'll find a couple of stones behind you, near where you left your
lamp. One's narrow and thin, it used to be a spearhead. The other's chunky, like
a hammer. You can slide the spearhead into the crack below the lid.

   
'But not here.'

   
The eyes were white, though.
The eyes were alight, incandescent.

   
Andy, but he wasn't here.

   
'I'm not going to open it here.
You can piss off, mate. I'm going to pick up the box, and I'm going to take it
away.'

   
You don't want to do that, Joe. You might awaken the Guardian.
You don't want that.

   
'No.
You
don't want that. But you can piss off.'

   
Powys felt a trickle of
euphoria, bright and slippery as mercury and, very quickly, he covered it up.
Smothered it with fear. Stay frightened. At all costs, stay frightened.

   
A rapid pattering on the
close-packed earthern floor, and something warm against his leg.

   
'Arnie.'

   
Stay frightened. It might not
be.
   
He bent down.

   
And the growling began.
   
He felt Arnold's fur stiffen and
harden under his hand, and the growling went on, a hollow and penetrating sound
that came from far back in the dog's throat, maybe further back than that.
Maybe much further back. The growl was continuous and seemed to alter the
vibration of the night.
   
'You're not growling at
me,
are you, Arnie?'
   
The grey thing hung in the air like an
old raincoat, but he was fairly sure that Andy was not there any more.

   
Powys switched on the lamp and
the grey thing vanished.
   
He walked over to the stone in the
centre of the chamber and he picked up the wooden box.

Warm. Cosy. Just as before. The deep, Georgian windows, the Chinese
firescreen, the Victorian lamp with the pale-blue shade burning perfumed oil.

   
'I wondered,' she said, 'if you
would come back.'

   
'Hullo, Wendy,' Alex said.

   
She was dressed for bed.

   
And how.

   
Black nightdress, sort of
shift-thing, filigree type of pattern, so you could see through it in all the
right places. Alex couldn't take his eyes off her.

   
'Sit down,' Jean said.

   
'Wendy, there's something
awfully funny happening out there, did you know?'
   
'Funny?'

   
'Well, I'd been down to the river
and came back up the hill and when I got to near the top, just at the entrance
to the square, it all went very dark. I mean, I know it's obviously dark
without the electricity supply, but this really was extra dark, as if there was
a thick fog. Lots of people about the square, I could hear them talking, but I
couldn't see any of them.'

   
'Oh my.'

   
'And . . . hard to explain this,
but it was as if there was a sort of screen between all these people and me.
Now, I know what you're going to say - the only reason there's a screen between
me and the rest of the world is because I've erected it myself - but it wasn't
like that. Not at all. This was really well, physical, but not . . . How do you
explain it?

   
'I think you should come and
sit down Alex and not get yourself get too worked up about this.'

   
'That's what you think, is it?'

   
'I think you need to calm
down.'

   
Alex slumped into the sofa and
she came down next to him as light as a bird, perching on the edge of the
cushion, and the shift-thing riding up her legs. Pretty remarkable legs, had to
admit that.

   
'And I heard Fay,' Alex said.
'I'd walked back - couldn't seem to make progress, you see, kept on walking and
wasn't getting anywhere. You know that feeling? Happens in dreams, sometimes.
Anyway, I'm coming up the hill again, and this time it's Fay I can hear,
talking to some chap. Telling him about how all the people had gathered in this
very square exactly four hundred years ago to the night, to get up a posse to
go along and lynch old whatsisname . . . Sheriff Wort.'

   
'I see,' Jean said. She leaned
over and picked up his left hand. One of her nipples was poking through the
black filigree shift.

   
Alex swallowed. 'Then this chap
she was talking to, he must have drifted away. I said, "Listen, Fay,"
I said, "why don't you tell me - tell
me
- what all this is about . . . ?" But she couldn't hear me. Why
couldn't she hear me, Wendy?'

   
Jean said, 'What's this on your
hands?'

   
'Blood,' he said quickly, it's
Murray Beech. He's been stabbed to death. Only realized as I was walking up the
hill.'

   
'Stabbed to death,' Jean said
neutrally. 'I see.'

   
'Don't you believe me?'

   
'Alex, I believe you believe
that Murray Beech has been stabbed to death. And what about Grace?'

   
'She took me to her grave. We
walked together. I think we came to an agreement.'

   
'I see.'

   
'But you don't really believe
any of this, do you, Wendy?'

   
Jean smiled.
   
'Or do you?'

   
'Alex,' said Jean, 'would you
like to sleep with me?'
   
Alex's throat went dry.
   
'Well?' she said gently.

   
'Oh gosh,' Alex said. 'Do you
think I could manage it?'
   
Jean smiled. 'Perhaps we should find
out.'
   
'That's what you think, is it?'

   
The answer burned quietly, like
a kind of incense, in her eyes.

   
Alex stood up. He felt very calm.
Calmer than ever he could remember feeling before. He did not know the meaning
of the word 'dementia'. His heart was strong. His eyes, he knew, were twinkling
quite dramatically.

   
The aromatic oil from the lamp
was exquisite.

   
Jean unwound from the sofa and
he took her in his arms, his breathing rate quickened at once. She tilted her
face to kiss him, but he ran a hand into her soft, short hair and pressed her
face to his chest, bent his head and whispered into her ear.

   
'You cunning bitch.'

   
Her body went rigid, and he let
her go.

   
What a waste, he thought. What
a tragic bloody waste.

   
When Jean Wendle faced him from
across the room, her eyes were in deep shadow, her lips were drawn back and the
inside of her mouth looked so black that she seemed, momentarily, to have no
teeth at all.

   
The aromatic oil from the lamp
smelt like the floor of a urinal.

   
'Oh my. You've blown it, now,
Alex,' Jean whispered, voice like tinder.

   
Alex shook his head.

   
'You'd had it. You were
finished. You were going very rapidly into the final decline. A bed in the
bottom comer of the geriatric ward, to where the naughty boys are consigned,
the nurses treating you like a difficult child when you try to pinch their
bottoms. Poor old man, he used to be a priest.'

   
'Nothing more welcome in hell
than an unfrocked priest,' Alex mused. 'Except perhaps a priest who ought to
have been unfrocked but never was, because he was too damned plausible - all
his life, so plausible, right up to the end, shafting ladies.'

   
'I brought you back,' Jean
said, I fed you energy.'
   
'But what kind of energy?'

   
'Och.' Jean turned away with a
dismissive wave of the hand. 'You blew it.'

   
'I don't think so,' Alex said.
'I made a deal. I went up the hill and I made a deal.'

   
He smiled. His heart was strong
and his eyes still twinkled.
   
Jean Wendle turned her head and peered
at him, curious. He saw in her face a pinched look, ravaged, and not the ravage
of years.

   
'Made a deal,' Alex said.
'After a period of protracted and considered negotiation, the Management and I
formulated the basis of an agreement, nothing binding, either, party retaining the
right to pull out at any given time if the Second Party should happen to lose his
bottle.'

   
Alex walked out of the room.
'Good night, Wendy.'

   
Bloody waste, he thought sadly.