Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (99 page)

   
'Question I've been asking most
of my life. Kept putting off having to answer it.'

   
Keep cool, Col instructed
himself. Keep your head. And for God's sake, don't go back in there. (In where?
And how did I get out?)

   
'Canon . . .'

   
'Alex.'

   
'Do you know what's
happening?"

   
'Only the vaguest notion, old
chap. But I believe I'm getting there.'

   
'It
is
something . . . psychological, isn't it? Damned if I'm going to
use that other word.'

   
'Good Lord, no, old boy, never
say that.'

   
'Well.' Col levered himself to
his feet. He could actually see lamps in some of the houses on this side of the
square. 'You know a man's been murdered?'

   
'Oh yes. Murray Beech, the
vicar.'

   
'The
vicar
?'

   
'Stabbed to death. Lying in the
churchyard. And the church is on fire. Look . . .'

   
Col looked up from the
blackness of the square and this vague shapes of roofs, and saw the sky
blooming red and orange.

   
And you know the strangest
thing?' said Alex. 'Nobody'd come out to watch.'

   
'You've rung the fire brigade I
take it.'
   
'No.'

   
'Good God, man, it might burn
down.'

   
'It might. But if the fire brigade
come, they'll have to go in through the square, won't they, and they might just
mow down a lot of innocent people who didn't appear to see them coming, or not
be able to get through. I don't know. Don't know
what
could happen. But I think, on balance, that it's safest to let
it burn, don't you? Only a bloody church.'

   
The old chap looked gloomy, but,
Col noted, entirely in command of his faculties. The word around town had been
that Canon Peters was losing his marbles.

   
'I think,' the Canon said,
'that we're in the middle of what used to be known technically as A Crybbe Matter.
However, on this occasion, there's been outside interference and the locals are
seriously out of their depth. That's my feeling.'

   
'Can we help?'

   
'That's a very interesting
question,' Alex Peters said.

Silly children's game. Fay thought, Hilary Ivory on one side of her, the
cameraman, Larry Ember on the other. Or perhaps only their voices. Their voices
and their hands.

   
Silly children's game, New Age
nonsense, where's the harm?

   
No harm.

   
'We're all going to pool our
energy,' Andy's voice making soft chords in the night air. 'We're going to
bring down the night.'

   
Silly children's game. No harm
in it. Make a circle, everybody hold hands, dance gaily, stop, hold out hands
to the sky as if in welcome. Wasn't there something like this at the end of
Close Encounters
? And something else.
Wasn't it in something else?

   
Very silly.

'Got him?'

   
'Just about. Bit stiff. Bit of
rigor."

   
Col heaved the corpse across
his shoulder, fireman's lift job.

   
Behind him, flames were coming
through the church roof.

   
He followed Alex, the body over
his shoulder. I am here. I'm walking through a churchyard with a dead vicar
over my shoulder and the church is on fire.

   
This is not like Belfast, after
a bomb blast. There are no spectators, no fire brigade, no police, no Army.
Only the huge flames chewing up the night.

   
'I trust,' Alex said, 'that when
we get to the town hall, you'll have no difficulty getting us in.'

   
'Count on it,' Col Croston said
through gritted teeth.

The box became unaccountably heavy and Joe Powys had to put it down in
the courtyard.
   
Open
it?

   
The Mini was still parked up by
the stable-block. It had been his intention to load the box into the boot and
then drive it out of Crybbe, but there was some uncertainty. What did you do
with these things?

   
Open
it.

   
You could take in into a church
- a real, functioning church outside of Crybbe, and place it on the altar. But
you never knew, with churches in the border country, what other forces might be
at work, what damage you might be inflicting on some other quiet and vulnerable
community while the people slept.
   
Or
open it
.
   
Or you could throw it into a deep
lake. This had been done in numerous legends to calm an excitable spirit, in a
ceremony normally involving about twelve priests.

   
He didn't have twelve priests
to hand. Also this was not a whole unquiet spirit.

   
Not the whole thing. But
unquiet, yes. Walking back to the Court, holding the box with both hands, the
lamp balanced on top, he'd had the illusion of something moving inside.

   
Open it,'

   
Psychological trickery. Mind
games. I'm not listening.
   
OPEN
IT!

CHAPTER XIX

Somehow they had formed a circle in the dark. When you moved around in
this formation, you couldn't, of course, see the individual people comprising
the circle, but soon you began to see the collective thing, the movement, the
circle itself.

   
'A ring of pure golden light,'
Hilary- Ivory breathed, isn't it beautiful? And we've made it ourselves.
We've
made it.'

   
Yes, Fay thought remotely, it
is rather beautiful. But it's not quite golden. More a darkish yellow. The
yellow of ... of what?

   
Hilary held her right hand,
Larry Ember her left. Hilary breathed and sighed, as if she was making love,
while Larry chuckled to himself, not in a cynical or ironic way, but a chuckle
of pleasure. Pleasure in self-discovery.

   
Round and round they went in a
slow circle, mindlessly, innocently round and round, like children in the
schoolyard.

   
The air was still pungent, but
the pungency was fortifying and compelling now. Tobacco could seem noxious and
nauseous the first time you inhaled it, but when you were accustomed to it, it
was deeply satisfying.

   
So it was with the scent of
shit and blood and rotting vegetables, as the human circle revolved, quite
slowly at first, anticlockwise, in the opposite direction to the sun, which was
OK, Fay reasoned dreamily, because there was no sun, anyway, at night.

Every face was blue-lit, anxious and staring bleakly at Alex without
enmity but without any hope either. A quarantine situation; nobody was to go outside,
nobody from outside was to come in because of what else might enter.

   
But Col Croston had got them
into the hall, without too much difficulty. He knew both men on the rear door -
Paul Gwatkin, one of the three Gwatkin brothers who, between them, farmed Upper
Cwm and Lower Cwm, and Bill Davies, the butcher. Decent chaps, both of them.

   
'Paul,' Col had said, very reasonably,
'it's essential that my friend the Canon and I come in, and I have to tell you
if you don't get out of the way I may hurt you quite badly. Problem is, I was
never trained to hurt people only slightly. You see my problem.'

   
'And I hope, Colonel,' said Bill
Davies, standing aside, 'that you might be startin' to see ours.'

   
Col had laid a sympathetic hand
on the butcher's should 'We're here to help, Bill.'

   
'Wastin' your time, I'm afraid.
Colonel, it's . . .'

   
'I know,' Col said. 'A Crybbe
matter.'

   
Now, standing on the platform
with its table and two empty chairs, Alex addressed the assembly, quite
cordially.

   
'Good evening. Some of you know
me, some of you don't, some of you might have seen me around. Peters, my name.
For what it's worth, I appear to be the only living priest in town. And you, I
take it, are what one might call the backbone of Crybbe.'

   
He looked carefully at his
audience, perhaps three hundred of them, men outnumbering women by about two to
one, the majority of them older people, over fifty anyway - such was the age-ratio
in Crybbe. The scene reminded him of the works of some painter. Was it Stanley
Spencer, those air-raid shelter scenes, people like half-wrapped mummies?

   
'Strange sort of evening,' Alex
said, 'I expect you've noticed that, otherwise what are you all doing penned up
like sheep overnight in the market? Hmm?'

   
No response. Nobody did
anything to dispel the general ambience of the stock-room as a mortuary. The
blue-faced, refrigerated dead.

   
What would it take to move
these people? And, more to the point, had he got it?

   
As Alex stood there and watched
them, he saw himself as they must be seeing him. Bumbling old cleric. Woolly
haired and woolly headed; mind known to be increasingly on the blink.

   
But he'd made a Deal, if only
with his inner self. He thought about the possible implications of the Deal,
and a suitably dramatic quote occurred to him, from the Book of Revelations.

   
His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow; and
his eyes were as a flame of fire.

   
'Right,' Alex said, stoking the
fire, summoning it into his eyes, 'if that's the way you want it. Colonel,
would you ask Murray to step inside?'

   
'Huh?' Col Croston glanced
sharply at Alex, who merely nodded. 'Oh,' Col said and walked out.

   
Alex said bluntly, 'I
understand Max Goff was slaughtered like a pig in here tonight.'

   
Some of the women looked away.
Nobody spoke. Alex let the silence simmer for over a minute, observing finally,
'You seem to have thrown the body out. Out of sight out of mind, I suppose.
Didn't know the chap myself. However, I did know
this
poor boy.'

   
Col Croston had returned with
his arms full. Paul Gwatkin and Bill Davies didn't try to stop him, but neither
seemed anxious to help him with his bloody burden.

   
'He's sorry he was late,' Alex
said. 'He was obliged to stop on the way, to get murdered.'

   
Col carried the corpse around
the table, where the blotter was brown with dried blood, and curling.

   
Alex said, 'You remember
Murray? Young Murray Beech?'

   
Col dropped the body like a sack
of coal, and it rolled over once, on to its back, a stiff, bloody hand coming
to rest against the knee of a woman on the front row, Mrs Byford, clerk to Crybbe
town council. She did not move, except to shrink back in her chair, as if
retracting the essential Mrs Byford so that the dead hand was only touching her
shell.

   
'That's right,' Alex said. 'Pretend
he's not there. But then, you never noticed he
was
here, did you? He was only another vicar from Off. And now he's
dead. But I'll tell you one thing ... he isn't as bloody dead as any of
you.
'

   
He saw Murray Beech's body, in
the light, for the first time. The front of his black clerical shirt had been
slashed neatly from neck to navel. The shirt was soaked and stiff.

   
Mrs Byford delicately removed
the hand from her knee, her mouth beginning to quiver. Murray's own mouth was
widened from one corner, like a clown's. It continued almost to an ear. Or what
remained of an ear.

   
Alex lowered himself into the
chair where another body had slumped. It was sticky. He looked down into a
blotter thick with blood and lumps and clots. 'Talk to me,' he said. 'Tell me
about what happened four hundred years ago when your ancestors went out to
lynch this chap Wort. What had
they
got in the way of incentive that you haven't, hmm?'