Crybbe aka Curfew

by Phil Rickman

  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?'

  He noticed the Police Sergeant, Wiley, near the back, in full, if disarranged, uniform. Not exactly rushing to open an investigation into the killing of Murray Beech.

  Col Croston, back in the chairman's chair, next to Alex, called out. 'No need for inhibition. Consider the issue thrown open to the floor.'

  'Well, come on,' said Alex, in exasperation. 'Who's the old bat in the front row trying to avoid Murray, what about you? Mrs Byford, isn't it?'

  Mrs Byford spoke with brittle clarity, like an icicle cracking. 'Tell this rude old gentleman, Colonel, that we have no intention of moving from yere nor of entering into any discussion

  on the subject.'

  Alex said, 'Did you have much to do with Murray, Mrs Byford? Your granddaughter did. She sought his assistance. As a priest. She wanted him to exorcise a ghost from your house.

  'No!' Mrs Byford pushed her chair back into the pair of knees behind her and stood up. Murray's hand appeared to reach for her ankle and she gave a shrill cry. 'It's lies!'

  'Poor old Murray was quite thrown at first,' Alex said. 'Not every day you're recruited to cast out a malevolent spirit. Anyhow, he came to me for advice, and I said, go along and play it by ear, old boy. Nothing lost. So off he goes to the old Police House. Don't suppose you were around at the time, were you?'

  Alex could see a number of people beginning to look worried, not least Wynford Wiley, the copper. 'And where do you think he found the evil spirit, Mrs Byford?'

  "E wasn't evil!' Wynford spluttered out. "E was…'

  'Where do you think he found this malignant entity?'

  Her back arched. 'Stop this, you go no right to…'

  'You know, don't you?'

  'Keep calm, woman,' an old man said from behind. 'You got to keep calm, isn't it.'

  Alex stood up. 'He found the evil, Mrs Byford… He found it in her eyes. Ironic, isn't it?'

  Mrs Byford's hands, half-clawed, began to tremble. She stumbled into the aisle and stood there, shaking.

  'Now…' Alex sat down. 'No, please, Mrs Byford, I'm not trying to bully you. Look, sit in one of the empty chairs on the other side. Thank you. Right, now, did that gentleman mention the necessity of keeping calm? Keeping the low profile? Avoiding direct confrontation? Let's discuss this – but very quickly, please, time's running out. Ah. Mr Davies.'

  'What can we do?' The butcher. Bill Davies, had left his post by the door and was approaching the platform, a big man with a sparse sprinkling of grey curls. 'We got lo live yere, isn't it.'

  'The Mayor,' said Paul Gwatkin. 'Where's the Mayor?'

  'He's probably dead,' Col Croston said flatly.

  'You don't know that,' said Wynford Wiley.

  'And the church is on fire,' Col said. 'Don't suppose you know that.'

  'Aye, we know that,' the clerk's husband, little Billy Byford said tiredly, and sighed. His wife gave him a glance like a harpoon.

  'These yere hippy types,' said Bill Davies. 'This Goff. If they 'adn't arrived, with their experimentin' and their meddlin'… They think it's a wonderful game, see. They think the countryside's a great big adventure playground. Do what you like, long as you shuts the odd gate. They wouldn't think of strollin' across their motorways, climbin' all over their power stations. Oh no, you 'andles all that with care and if you' don't know nothin' about it, you stays out of it'

  'Sit down, Mr Davies,' said Mrs Byford. 'There's nothing to explain.'

  'I'm gonna say this, Nettie. City-type dangers is something they takes for granted – never questions it. But they never thinks there might be risks in the country, too, as they don't understand. Well, we don't understand 'em properly neither but at least… at least we knows there's risks.'

  'The inference being,' said Col, 'that Crybbe is an area with a particularly high risk-factor.'

  'You live yere,' said Bill Davies, 'you learn there's things you can do and things you can't do. Maybe some people's more careful than others, maybe some people takes it more serious like. But that's same as with a lot o' things, anywhere you goes, isn't it?'

  'Mr Davies, we don't have to explain nothing,' Mrs Byford said.

  Bill Davies ignored her. 'And it's not like you can get 'elp neither. Can't write to your MP about it, can you? You 'as to live with it, just like your parents and your grandparents, and you accepts the constraints, like.'

  The butcher sat down two seats away from Mrs Byford, to the left of the central aisle and crossed his legs defiantly.

  'Thank you,' said Col. 'I'm very' grateful to you, Bill. Canon?'

  'Yes, indeed. I think Mr Davies has put his finger on it. I can understand entirely that there are certain prevailing phenomena in this particular town which the residents have long felt unable to discuss with outsiders. Problems which, I suspect, first, er, materialized during the reign of James I, when anyone found displaying an interest in matters of a… a shall we say, supernormal nature… was in serious danger of being strung up for witchcraft.'

  He looked down at the blood-spattered blotter, saw that nothing at all had changed. Outside, the church was burning and a gullible crowd was suspended in the thrall of something even the devil-fearing James I would have been hard-pressed to envisage.

  'And one can see,' said Alex, 'how this quite-understandable reticence would, given the comparative remoteness of the town become, in tune, more or less endemic. Yes, I can understand why it's been allowed to fester.

  'But, by God,' Alex stood up, his hands either side of the bloodstained blotter, summoning the flames, 'if you don't take some action tonight you'll regret it for the rest of your small little lives.'

  CHAPTER XX

  The box was making a strange noise, a rolling, creaking sound, suggesting that the item inside had been dislodged from whatever secured it.

  OPEN IT!

  'Not a chance,' Joe Powys said aloud, attempting to sound confident, in control. But for whose benefit?

  The box lay in the centre of the courtyard, the lamp on topo f it, its beam directed at the Court, no more the derelict warehouse, the disused factory without echoes of laughter or the residue of sorrow.

  Periodically, Powys would look up towards the eaves, but there were no flickerings any more, no ignition sparks. The Court was fully alive now and crackling and hissing at him.

  OPEN IT!

  The appalling temptation, of course, was to break open the box to confirm that it did in fact contain what he suspected, which was the mummified head of Sir Michael Wort, or at least a head.

  But Powys was scared to look into the eyes of Black Michael, even if only the sockets remained. There was too much heavy magic here; Andy, the shaman, the heir, was projecting himself at will along
the spirit path, able to manifest a disembodied presence in the Tump and probably elsewhere, while his physical body was… where?

  The old ley-line, which progressed from the Tump to the square and beyond had been reopened, a dark artery to the heart of Crybbe. Reopened for the ancestor, Black Michael.

  Whose head now lay in an oak box at Powys's feet. The head was a crucial part of the process and as long as he had the head he was part of it, too, until the pressure

  became unbearable.

  So what am I going to do with it?

  He thought, as he'd thought so many times, I could out of this situation, I could leave the box lying on the ground, leap into the car and accelerate back into what passes for the Real World. I could simply stop believing in all of this. Because if you don't invite it into your life it simply doesn't occur. |

  Blessed are the sceptics.

  For they shall…

  they shall…

  die with a broken neck on a convenient rubbish heap.

  Powys closed his eyes to ambush renegade tears. You daft bastard, this is Crybbe, where normal rules don't apply. Where once you're in the game, you have to go on playing.

  Because Fay is down there in that sick little town with Jean Wendle and probably Andy Trow, and the twisted essence of something four centuries old at the door, and Fay could go

  snap! – like Rachel, like Rose. But you wouldn't die, Powys – you'd go on living with the knowledge of what you failed prevent – even though you were fully aware, at last, of what was happening – because you were scared and because you thought it expedient, at this stage of the game, to take the sceptic's way out.

  All right, all right. I'll play. Deal me in.

  He tried to envisage the layout. The Tump was the head, the church was the centre of the breast, the town square was the solar plexus and the Cock was the genitalia.

  He realized he must be standing on Black Michael's throat, (the throat chakra, influencing the nervous system, controlling stress, anxiety).

  There came another noise from the box, like the head rolling from side to side, and his eyes were wrenched open, the breath catching in his chest like a stone.

  I've got to get rid of it.

  He snatched the lamp, bent down and examined the box. It was bound not with iron as he'd imagined but with strips of lead. It occurred to him that it was probably not locked at all and all he had to do was raise the lid and…

  No…

  He sprang to his feet and backed away.

  God help me… I've got the four-hundred-odd-year-old head of Michael Wort in a box, and I don't know what the hell to do with it.

  The Court wanted it, he could tell that. The Court squatted in its hollow with the vengeful, violated Tump bunched over it, glowering. The Court throbbed with an ancient need, and Powys knew that it wanted him inside it so that it could digest his spirit and spit him out like poor Rachel, like Tiddles the mummified cat which had been stuck for centuries, a tiny, constricting hairball in its throat.

  The throat had been blocked. The Court had coughed and the blockage had come out of the mouth.

  The open mouth was the prospect chamber.

  What he had to do – the clear, bright certainty of it – went through him like a fork of cold and jagged lightning.

  'I can't,' he told the night, 'I don't have the strength. I don't have the courage.'

  'I can't.'

  It still made no sense, of course, according to what was accepted as normal, but it answered to the logic of the place, it extended the rules of the game to put him in with a chance.

  What he had to do was enter the Court and carry the box up the stone stairs to the prospect chamber. And then he had to stand in the opening, lift the box above his head and cast it out into the night so that it fell on to the rubbish heap and smashed, symbolically, to pieces.

  A ritualistic, shamanistic act which would sever the connection between Black Michael and the Court, leave a meaningful crater, a great pothole in the middle of the spirit path.

  And, well… he knew that the ritual would be more perfect, more complete, if he went out of the prospect chamber, too, his arms wrapped around the box.

  Sacrifice. Always more energy with a sacrifice. Perhaps also, because he was hijacking Andy's ritual, he'd be releasing and recycling the energy created by Rose's fall and Rachel's.

  He stood with one foot on the box and thought about this.

  It was a complete load of New Age crap.

  But if he believed in it, it might work. If he was prepared to give up his life he'd be creating so much energy that…

  'Christ!'

  He kicked the box along the cobbles. God save us New Age philosophy. Energy. The life force. Mother-sodding earth.

  Not got the bottle for it, Joe?

  Powys gave the Court a baleful glare.

  'Yeah, OK, you can play it that way, if you want,' he told the house. 'You can spit me out, like Rachel and Tiddles the cat.'

  'But when I go… he goes.'

  He picked up the box, put the lamp on top and followed the beam towards the main door. It would, he knew, open.

  Alex simply walked out of the town hall, down the steps and the few yards to the end of the street leading to the square. He glanced behind him once at the blue light from a high window, listened to the noise of the generator from the basement, looked above the buildings to the orange glow in the sky from the church. Reality, or as much of it as a bumbling old cleric might perceive.

  He thought about the Deal.

  If he walked into the square, he doubted he'd get out of it so easily, if at all.

  This would be it.

  It was like one of those experiments you did at school in your very first physics lesson. Fay couldn't recall the technicalities of it, but it was all to do with making your own electricity and you did something like turning a handle – really couldn't remember the details, never any good at science – and this little bulb lit up, just faintly at first, but the faster you did whatever it was you did, the brighter the bulb became, the more sustained was the light.

  There they all were, moving round in the circle – backwards, anti clockwise – the thin golden ring (or not gold, it was yellow, the yellow of… of…).

  And there it was, in the centre of the circle. New Age schoolchildren dancing around a lamppost and making the lamp light up, like the bulb in the physics lesson, through the power they were helping to generate.

  'Faster, please,' the Teacher saying in that wonderfully smooth voice, like an old cello, and they were able, without much effort, to move faster. Fay beginning to tingle with the

  excitement of what they were doing – making light.

  An incandescent blob in the air, yellow and fuzzed at the edges, but filaments of hard white light forming at the centre, extending out like branches or veins, blood-vessels – light vessels – the whole thing pulsing with it. Hilary Ivory beginning to quiver and moan, as if reaching orgasm. Larry Ember, on the other side, giggling wildly. Never heard a cameraman giggle before, dour bastards in general, this must really be something coming.

  'All my life!' she heard a woman (probably that loopy Jopson woman) cry in ecstasy. 'All my life I've waited for you…!'

  'Michael,' a man – the Teacher – said. Simply that, nothing more.

  And a woman said, 'Yes, Michael. The Archangel Michael, slayer of dragons.'

  No, Fay thought, confused, not him… that's wrong…

  But what did it matter?

  Couldn't very well contradict them, could she, not all of them, everybody shouting in unison now, a great chant.

  'Michael… Michael... MICHAEL… MICHAEL!'

  The Being of Light was responding to the summons, the filaments forming into a complexity of vibrating muscles, pipes and organs, rippling into arms and legs, and between the legs – bloody hell. Fay thought…

  Realizing she was chanting, too.

  'Michael… Michael...'

  The bells erupted again, a hug
e joyful clangour, cracking the night into splinters. The sound of bells in a blazing church.

  The rational explanation. Col Croston thought, was that the flames had been funnelled into the tower, creating a huge jet which exploded into the belfry.

  He stood in the town-hall doorway and peered into the street. Above him the night sky was frying. If Jimmy Preece was indeed dead, this made him the First Citizen of Crybbe. An auspicious start to his year of office; at this rate he'd be mayor of a burned-out ghost-town before morning.

  He looked for Alex, but the end of the street still dropped off the edge of the world, and Alex was gone and Col's sorrowful feeling was that he would never see the old man again.

  CHAPTER XXI

  Before, the last and only time he'd been inside Crybbe Court, it had been very much Henry's dead place; now it was repellently alive.

  It had been cold and dry; now it was warm and moist, and going into it was disturbingly, perversely sexual. The Court was a very old woman, grotesquely aroused, and she wanted him.

  The main door had not been locked. He ventured quietly in, the box under his arm. Stone floor, low ceiling and slits of windows set high in the walls. And the walls leaked.

  Joe Powys ran a cautious finger along the stone and found it warm and slimy. Under the light, he saw dead insects on the walls, all of them quite recently dead, not husks. Moths, flies and bluebottles trapped in a layer of… fat, it smelled like fat.

  Or tallow maybe, grease from candles made of animal fat.

  Crybbe Court was alive and sweating.

  He moved towards the stone stairs, thinking, inevitably, of Rachel. What had it taken to make her so hot and feverish and desperate to get out of here that…?

  But you don't know what happened, you don't know.

  Though you'll soon find out, as you retrace her steps up these stone steps, butcher's shop slippery now, like the walls.

  Coming to the first floor – the big family living-room and the bedchambers off. In one of these, Fay had told him, Tiddles the mummified cat had slept, most recently, in a chest that was not very old. Tiddles had come down from the rafters, but had never left the house, presumably, until she and Rachel had been hurled out of the prospect chamber.