by Phil Rickman
'Well, we can't stop him. Can't block market forces, Grandad.'
'We can stop him takin' our town off us to serve his whims!'
'And how're we supposed to do that?'
'He wants a public meeting, we'll give him one.'
'What are you savin' here. Father? Give him a rough time? Let him know he isn't wanted?'
Behind the door, Warren began to seethe. This was fucking typical. Here was Max Goff, biggest bloody independent record producer in the country, on the verge of signing Fatal Accident to Epidemic. And these stick-in-the-mud bastards were scheming to get rid of him.
Jonathon was saying, 'See them stones he had delivered? Bloody great stones, dozens of 'en.'
'Building stone?'
'No, just great big stones. Huge buggers. Like Stonehenge, that kind.'
Things went quiet, then Warren heard his grandad say, 'He's oversteppin' the mark. He's got to be stopped.'
Warren wanted to strangle the old git. He wanted to strangle all three of them. Also that fucking radio woman who'd let it all out and stirred things up. The one who shouted after him through the hedge that night, called him a wanker.
Every pub they'd tried had stopped serving lunch at two o'clock – so much for all-day opening – and so they'd wound up at this Little Chef, which didn't please him. 'Bloody cooking by numbers. Two onion rings, thirty-seven chips. All this and alcohol-free lager too. And these bloody girls invariably saying, "Was it all right for you?" as if they're just putting their knickers back on.'
'At least they're there when you want them,' Fay said. getting back on the A49. 'Would you like to see Ludlow?'
'Like to go home, actually.'
'God almighty! What is it about that place?'
'Left my pills there.'
'I know you did. But luckily, I brought them. What's your next excuse?'
Alex growled. 'Wish I'd had a son.'
'Instead of me, huh?'
'Sons don't try to manage you.'
'Dad, I want to talk to you.'
'Oh God.'
'Was that the first time Guy rang, the other night?'
'Hard to say, my dear. Once I put the phone down I tend to forget all about him. He may have rung earlier. Does it really matter?'
'I don't mean just that night. Has he rung any other time when I've been out?'
'Can't remember. Suppose he could have done. I didn't think you cared.'
'I don't. It's just Guy's coming down to make a documentary about Max Goff, and I was wondering how he found out there was something interesting going on. I know you tend to absorb local gossip like a sponge and then somebody squeezes you a bit and it all comes out, and then you forget it was ever there.'
'You think I told him?'
'Did you?'
'Did I? God knows. Say anything to get rid of him. Does it matter?'
Fay glanced in her wing mirror then trod on the brakes and pulled in violently to the side of the road. 'Of course it bloody matters!'
'I think you're overwrought, my child. You're young. You need a bit of excitement. Bit of stimulation. Country life doesn't suit you.'
'Crybbe doesn't suit me.'
'So why not simply…?'
She said carefully, 'Dad. You may be right. There may be nothing at all wrong with Crybbe. But, yes, I think it's time I left. And I think it's time you left. You've no reason to stay, you've no roots there, no real friends there.'
He said sadly, 'Oh, I have.'
He wasn't looking at her. He was looking straight out at the A49, lorries chugging past.
'Who? Murray Beech? He'll be off, first chance of a bigger parish. He's got nothing to thank Crybbe for – his fiancée didn't hang around, did she?'
'No,' Alex said. 'Not Murray.'
'Who then?'
He didn't reply.
Fay fiddled with the keys in the ignition. Alex talked to everybody, old vicars never changed. A friend to everyone, essence of the job. But how many did he really know?
'What are you saying, Dad?'
'Grace,' he whispered, and Fay saw the beginning of tears in his old blue eyes.
She put a hand on his arm. 'Dad?'
'Don't ask me about this. Fay,' Alex said. 'Please. Just take me home.'
CHAPTER VIII
On top of the Tump it all came clear.
You could see over the roofs of the stables and Crybbe Court itself, which was sunk into a shallow dip. And there, only just showing above the trees, was the church tower. But then the trees hadn't always been so high – or even here at all.
The church was at the high point of the town, the main street sloping down to the river. From here you couldn't see the street or the river – but you could see the fields on the opposite bank, rising into hills thickened now with forestry. And, at one time, before the introduction of the voracious Sitka Spruce from Alaska, that might have been bare hillside, and there would have been other markers to pick up the line.
Joe Powys looked all around him and saw how clearly the Tump had been positioned to dominate the town, even the church, and draw in the landscape like the corners of a handkerchief.
That old feeling again, of being inside an ancient mechanism. At the centre of the wheel.
Identifying the line took an act of imagination because there were no markers any more. But Henry Kettle had discovered where upright stones had once been aligned to guide the eye from the Tump to the distant horizons.
But there was something about it that Henry Kettle didn't like.
Powys moved away from the highest point and stood next to a twisted hawthorn tree. The sky was a tense, luminous grey, swollen like a great water-filled balloon, and he felt that if it came down low enough to be pricked by the tree's topmost thorns, he'd be drowned.
It was his own fault. Places like this could ensnare your mind, and your thoughts became tangled up with the most primitive instincts, old fears lying hidden in the undergrowth like trailing brambles.
As quickly as he could, but still very carefully, Powys came down from the Tump, climbed over the wall and didn't look back until he was well into the field, heading towards the road, where he'd left the Mini. Halfway across the field, there was a bumpy rise, and it was here that he found the hub-cap.
He sat on a hummock with the disc on his knee. It was muddy and badly rusted, but he could still make out the symbol in the centre – two letters: VW.
'Still the same car. then, Henry. How old is it now? Twenty-two, twenty-three?'
Holding Henry's hub-cap, Powys looked back at the Tump.
I have always disliked the Tump for some reason. Some places are naturally negative.
Powys thought, sinister bloody thing that must once have appeared as alien as a gasworks or a nuclear reactor. He looked down at the wall, realizing that the section he'd climbed over was just a few yards from the part where the stonework was so obviously scraped, but hadn't collapsed because it was too hard for that. Harder than the rusting heap of twenty-year-old tin Henry Kettle drove.
From the foot of the wall, shards of broken glass glimmered like dew in the trodden-down grass.
Christ, Henry, how could this happen?
Henry, can you hear me?
Although perhaps 'natural' is not the word I want… But I am sure there is a good scientific explanation.
You misled us, Henry- nothing psychic, you kept saying. We should have realized it was just a dirty word to you, a word for phoney mediums and fortune-tellers at the end of the pier. Ancient science was your term, because it didn't sound cranky.
He could see the tracks now, grass flattened, lumps of turf wrenched out. The field was unfenced and the car must have cut across it diagonally, ploughing straight on instead of following a sharpish left-hand bend in the road.
Powys left the metal disc on the hummock and scrambled up to the road, collecting a hard look from a man driving a Land Rover pulling a trailer.
Now, if Henry was driving out of town, he'd be pointing straight at the T
ump, then the road curved away, then it was directed towards the Tump again, very briefly, then came the left-hand bend and you were away into the hills.
But Henry never made the left-hand bend. The car left the road, taking him into the field. He might not have noticed what he'd done at first, if it was dark. And then the field went quite suddenly into this slope, and… crunch.
Not so far-fetched at alt, really. There'd be an accidental death verdict and nobody would delve any deeper. All the rest was folklore.
He went back into the field, walked down towards the Tump, skirting its walled-in base, not knowing what he was hoping for any more.
Come on, Henry. Give us a sign.
It began to rain. He ran to a clump of trees to shelter and to watch the Tump, massive, ancient, glowering through the downpour, as magnificently mysterious as the Great Pyramid.
Powys turned away and wandered among the trees, emerging on the other side into a clearing beside a building of grey-brown stone.
Crybbe Court?
No, not the Court itself, the stable-block – now seriously renovated, he saw. There was an enormous oblong of glass set in the wall – a huge picture-window, facing the Tump.
Behind the building he could see the corner of a forecourt, where two men stood in the rain looking down on four long, grey, jagged stones.
Powys stiffened.
One of the men was dark and thin and was talking to the other man in a voice which, had he been able to hear it, would probably have reminded him of a stroked cello.
'Least you can do, mate,' Andy tells you. 'Look at all the money the book's going to make. Think of it as a kind of appeasement of the Earth Spirit.'
Fiona claps her hands. 'Oh, go on, Joe. We'll all sit here and chant and clap.'
'Bastards.' You look at Rose, who smiles sympathetically. Reluctantly you stand up, and everybody cheers.
Well, everybody except Henry. 'Don't wanna play about with these old things.' Quaint old Herefordshire countryman.
Andy leaning on an elbow. I thought you weren't superstitious, Henry. Ancient science and all that. Nothing psychic.
'Aye, well, electricity's science too, but you wouldn't wanna go sticking your fingers up a plug socket.'
Thankful for his advice, you make as if to sit down.
'Not got the bottle for it, Joe?'
Ben starts clapping very slowly, and the others – except Henry – pick up the rhythm. 'Joey goes round the Bottle Stone, the Bottle Stone, the Bottle Stone…'
Crybbe was forty-five minutes away. Minor roads all the once they'd left the A49. Neither of them spoke; Fay thinking; hard, bringing something into focus. Something utterly repellent that she hadn't, up to now, allowed herself to contemplate for longer than a few seconds.
A woman in a cold miasma, frigid, rigid, utterly still. Not breathing. Past breathing… long past.
She looked in the driving mirror, and there was Arnold, the dog, sitting upright on the back seat; their eyes met in the mirror.
You saw her, Arnold. You saw something. But did I?
Did I see the ghost of Grace Legge?
Ghost. Spirit of the dead. And yet that image, the Grace thing, surely was without spirit. Static. Frozen. And the white eyes and that horrible smile with those little, thin fish-teeth.
That was her. Her teeth. Tiny little teeth, and lots of them, discoloured, brittle. The memory you always carried away, of Grace's fixed smile, with all those little teeth.
She'd been nothing to Fay, just Dad's Other Woman. No, not exactly nothing. Twenty years ago, she'd been something on the negative side of nothing. Somebody Fay had blamed – to herself, for she'd never spoken of it, not to anyone – for her mother's death. And she'd blamed her father, too. Perhaps this was why, even now, she could not quite love him – terrible admission.
She had, naturally, tried hard for both of them when she came down for the wedding. Water under the bridge. An old man's fumbling attempts to make amends and a very sick woman who deserved what bit of happiness remained for her.
Perhaps her dad thought he'd killed them both. Both his wives.
Compassion rising, Fay glanced sideways at Alex, sitting there with his old green cardigan unbuttoned and ATE USH in fading lettering across his chest.
What this was about – had to be – was that he, too, had seen something in the night.
And what must that be like for an old man who could no longer trust his own mind or even his memories? If she wasn't sure what she'd seen – or even if she'd seen anything – what must it be like for him?
Fay clinched the steering wheel lightly, and goose pimples rippled up both arms.
That's why you can't leave, Dad. You've seen something that none of your clerical experience could ever prepare you for. You're afraid that somehow she's still there, in the house you shared.
And you're not going to walk out on her again.
Henry Kettle had written.
It is very peculiar that there should have been so many big stones in such a small area.
Long after Andy and the other man had walked away Powys still stood silently under the dripping trees, staring in fascination at the recumbent stones in the corner of the courtyard.
Megaliths.
And Andy Boulton-Trow, whom Powys hadn't seen for twelve years. Designer of the cover of The Old Golden Land. Painter of stones, sculptor of stones, collector of stone-lore.
The stones lay there, gleaming with fresh rain. Old stones,' or new stones? Did it matter; one stone was as old as another.
Stones didn't speak to him the way they spoke to Henry Kettle, but he was getting the idea. Max Goff, presumably, intended to place new stones in the spots identified by Henry.
And the obvious man to select and shape the stones – an act of love – was Andy Boulton-Trow, who knew more about the nature of megaliths than anyone in Europe. Powys had met Andy at art college, to which Andy had come after university to learn about painting and sculpture… with specific regard to stone.
From beyond the courtyard, he heard an engine start, a vehicle moving away.
Then all was quiet, even the rain had ceased.
Powys slid from the trees and made his way around the side of the stone stable-building to the comer of the courtyard where the stones lay.
Fay drove into Crybbe from the Ludlow road. The windscreen wipers squeaked as the rain eased off.
She thought. We're never going to be able to talk about this, are we, Dad? Not for as long as you live.
She stopped in front of the house to let him out. 'Thank you,' he said, not looking at her, it's been… a pleasant day, hasn't it?'
'I'll put the car away. You stay here, Arnold.'
She backed the car into the entry, a little tunnel affair in the terrace, parking too close to the wall; there was only just room to squeeze out. 'Come on, Arnold.'
Alex was waiting for them at the back door. His face was grave but his blue eyes were flecked – as they often were now – with a flickering confusion.
'Got the tea on. Dad?'
'Fay.. '. I..
He turned and walked into the kitchen. The kettle was not even plugged in.
'Fay…'
'Dad?'
He walked through the kitchen, into the hall, Fay following, Arnold trolling behind. At the door of the office, Grace's sitting-room, he stood to one side to let her pass.
'I'm so sorry,' he said.
At first she couldn't see what he meant. The clock was still clicking away on the mantelpiece, the fireside chair still piled high with box files.
'The back door was open,' Alex said. 'Forced.'
She saw.
They must have used a sledgehammer or a heavy axe because it was a tough machine, with a metal top.
'Why?' Fay felt ravaged. Cold and hollow and hurting like a rape victim. 'For God's sake, why?'
Her beloved Revox – night-time comfort with its swishing spools and soft-glowing level-meters – had been smashed to pieces, disembowelled.
A few hundred yards of tape had been unspooled and mixed up with the innards, and the detritus was splattered over the floor like a mound of spaghetti.
CHAPTER IX
The women who had, in recent years, been powerfully attracted to Joe Powys had tended to wear long, hand-dyed skirts and shapeless woollies. Sometimes they had frizzy hair and sometimes long, tangled hair. Sometimes they were big-breasted earth-mother types and sometimes small-boned and delicate like Arthur Rackham fairies.
Sometimes, when Powys fantasized – which was worryingly rarely, these days – he imagined having, as he put it to himself, a bit of smooth. Someone scented. Someone who shaved her armpits. Someone who would actually refuse to trek across three miles of moorland to find some tiny, ruined stone circle you practically had to dig out of the heather. Someone you could never imagine standing in the middle of this half-submerged circle and breathing, 'Oh, I mean, gosh, can't you feel it…can't you feel that primal force?'
The woman facing him now, he could tell, was the kind who'd rather see Stonehenge itself as a blur in the window of a fast car heading towards a costly dinner in Salisbury.
But even if she'd been wearing a home-made ankle-length skirt with a hemline of mud, clumpy sandals and big wooden ear-rings, he would, at this moment, have been more than grateful to see her.
She said, 'I think you could let him go now, Humble. He really doesn't look very dangerous.'
'Find out who he is first,' said the hard-faced bastard with a grip like a monkey-wrench, the guy he'd first seen frowning at him through the window of a Land Rover when he was checking out the Tump.
He made Powys bend over the vehicle's high bonnet, which tossed another pain-ball into his stomach.
This man had punched him in the guts with a considered precision and such penetration that he was seriously worried about internal bleeding.
'Ta very much.' Deftly removing Powys's wallet from the inside pocket of his muddied jacket. Not a local accent; this was London.