by Phil Rickman
With a wild, hydraulic wrench, the cast-iron shovel came
down several feet too quickly and simply smashed in the lop of the stone.
He leaned out of his cab and heard the uppity Scotch woman shrieking.
There was a sudden, unnatural strength in Andy's arms.
He raised the head. He brought it down.
The skull smashed into his own.
Michael.
He felt his nose shatter in a cloud of blood.
Michael.
He felt his teeth splinter into fragments.
He raised the head again, his fingers splayed around shrivelled skin and wisps of hair.
Michael
Michael
Michael…
The blows continued, with a vengeful intensity, long after Andy was dead.
From the doorway, Warren Preece looked on, fascinated by the head clutched in the two hands, the arms moving ferociously up and down until the other head on the floor was red pulp.
The ole candle was near burnt to nothing when Warren picked it up.
But then, so was Warren. Stripped to the waist, and his chest was black, like charcoal. He could smell his own scorched skin. He figured his lips had been burnt away, too, so that his teeth were stuck in this permanent grin, like the head that was now rolling across the dusty, boarded floor towards him.
'Got to laugh.'
He didn't have to tell the head. The ole head was laughing already at what it'd done.
Warren picked it up and stuck it under his arm, like one of
them ghosts.
Two heads are better than one.
Got to laugh.
With his other hand he picked up the candle, just melted wax now, but he picked it up, squeezed it tight, so the boiling hot wax bubbled up between his fingers, feeling painful as hell.
Feeling good.
He held up his hand, and there was wax dripping down the clenched fist, so it was like the hand had become the candle, the wick sticking up through his knuckles with a little white flame on the end.
Hand of Glory.
He went over to the Teacher, brought his hand down to get some light on the face. The face looked good, all smashed, one eye hanging out. Wished he could take this head too, bung it under his other arm, but cutting off a head with a Stanley knife would take too long. Thought about it with the other feller before deciding on the vice.
Never mind.
Warren walked out of the room, by the light of his own hand. He felt really full of power now, like he'd just done a one-man gig in front of thousands of his fans.
With the head under his arm, he walked down the ole steps in a sprightly kind of way. Felt like he owned the place. Probably did. Least, he owned the farm now, with every bugger else dead or crippled, like.
Strolled through the ole baronial hall-type place straight to the front door, his hand held out before him. He could smell the skin smouldering now. Pretty soon it'd all start frizzling off and there'd be nothing left but wax and bones.
The real thing. The authentic Hand of Glory.
The front door of Crybbe Court was open wide, and Warren Preece walked out into the spotlights.
Just like he'd always known it'd be, one day.
The courtyard was lined with people, silent, awestruck like. Warren recognized a few of them, local farmers and shopkeepers and such. But also there were two ambulances and… FIVE cop cars. All the headlights trained on the door he'd just come out of.
'All right?' Warren yelled.
Didn't seem much point to the candle, with all these spotlights, so he squashed it out between his legs. Then he held up the head with both hands, way up over his own head, like the FA cup.
'Yeah!' Warren screeched.
About half a dozen coppers were coming towards him in a semi-circle. Warren stuck the head under his arm and fished out his Stanley knife.
'Come on, son,' one of the coppers said. 'Let's not do this the hard way.'
Warren flicked out the blade and grinned.
"Ow're you, Wynford,' he said.
CHAPTER VI
'I always imagined,' said Fay, 'leaving Crybbe for the last time and driving off into the sunset.'
There was a peach-coloured glow in the eastern sky, over the English side of Offa's Dyke.
'But it must be better,' she said, 'driving into the dawn.'
Powys drove. They were in his Mini.
All of them. Arnold half-asleep on her knee. Two resentful black cats with Russian names in a laundry basket on the back seat.
Fay would probably have brought her dad as well, if the body would've fitted in the boot. But she'd get him out. He wasn't going to be buried in Crybbe.
Once they'd crossed the town boundary, past the signpost at the top of the hill, Joe stopped the car. He took her hand – the other one, not the one that was nearly broken rupturing Jean Wendle's nose – and led her out to the famous viewpoint, near the stile.
Below them, Crybbe was a sombre, smoky little town which had sometimes been in Wales and sometimes in England but had never belonged to either.
The real owners of Crybbe were hidden in its own shadows
and weren't apparent at dawn, for Crybbe's time, as Fay long ago realized, was dusk.
She could see smoke still rising from the ruins of the church. The nave had collapsed, but the bell-tower remained, Col Croston had told her a few minutes ago. And one bell still hung – the seventh bell.
'Which I intend to ring myself,' Col said. 'Every night, in the ruins. These picturesque old traditions,' he said with a tight smile, 'shouldn't be allowed to lapse.'
When the stone was down they hadn't even looked for Jean Wendle. What could they do about her anyway? She'd committed no crimes.
Nobody had seen her since.
'I didn't believe her, of course,' Fay said now.
'You bloody did,' said Joe.
'She had me going for a while,' Fay said. 'However – as I did try to tell you at one point yesterday – I checked out the Bottle Stone. It was in that field in Radnor Forest and it was shaped like a bottle and he did take it away.'
Powys reeled.
'I'm a reporter,' Fay said. 'I came back that way from the library and went to the nearest farm. Took a while – you know what farmers are – but I got it out of them. That land – about eighteen acres – still belongs to the Trows. It was funny, the farmer actually called them Worts, sort of contemptuously. He rents the grazing, but they wouldn't sell the land.'
'Andy?'
'Andy showed up there – about ten years ago, the guy said, but it was probably twelve – with a stone on the back of a lorry, and he had the stone planted in the middle of the field, which annoyed the farmer, but he couldn't do anything about it. Andy promised to come back and take it away, and he did – last week.'
'Why didn't you…?'
'You kept saying you didn't want to talk about the Bottle Stone, and anyway…'
'And there was I, thinking you had faith in me.'
'Oh, I did, Joe. That's the point – I didn't need to have the Bottle Stone bit confirmed. It was… a formality.'
Powys said, 'Your eye looks better.'
'Let's not start lying to each other at this stage,' Fay said.
'Of course…' Chief Inspector Hughes, hands in pockets, was pacing the square. 'There are still things we don't understand.'
'Really?' Col Croston was trying to sound surprised. A slow, dawn drizzle glazed the square. There was the acrid, dispiriting smell of fire and water.
'Oh, I've got most of it,' Hughes said quickly. 'And I think I grasp the social pressures which caused it.'
Col had forgotten that Hughes was one of the 'new' policemen with a degree in something appropriate.
'You look at the background,' Hughes said. 'The kid's stifled by it. Rural decline, brought up in this crumbling farm. And let's face it, this town's a good half-century behind everywhere else.'
'At least,' said Col.
'So young P
reece listens to rock music and he dreams… without much hope. And then along comes Salvation with a capital S, in the shape of our late friend Mr Goff. He sends Goff a tape of his band, and Goff, no doubt conscious of the politics of the situation responds favourably.'
'How do you know this?'
'Letter from Epidemic in Warren's pocket. Charred, but readable. We can only assume he made another approach to Goff and Goff told him to clear off. I'm telling you all this, Colonel, in the hope you can throw a bit of light…'
'All new to me, Chief Inspector.'
'So we're assuming this is what pushed Warren over the edge. Given all the other pressures – losing his only brother and then his father's tractor accident. The boy seems to be of limited intellect – must have thought the whole world was against him.'
'Psychiatrists will have a field day,' said Col. 'Where is he now?'
'Hospital, I'd like to think he was going to be fit to plead one day, but I wouldn't put money on it. He took most of Wiley's nose off with that Stanley knife before we disarmed him.'
'Lovable little chap. I'm furious with myself. I was just yards away when he killed Goff.'
'Who would have expected it?'
'I was trained to expect the unexpected, for God's sake. Do you know how many he's killed? I make it four – Goff, the vicar, poor old Hereward Newsome… and of course that chap, Trow.'
'Tie things up nicely if he put his hand up to the Rachel Wade business, too – her signature was on the letter suggesting Warren's music wasn't half bad. But what I was going to ask you, Colonel… the Trow killing's somewhat different in style. I can't go into details, but Warren seems to have finished him off by bludgeoning him with this other skull. We thought we had another murder when he came out of the old house with that thing, but it's obviously of some age. So where did it come from? Have any graves been disturbed locally?'
Col thought this over. 'Well, he was obviously in the church and there are a couple of tombs in there. Might be worth sifting through the ruins.'
'Oh, we'll do that, all right. Obviously, it's not a major issue, but it's something we have to clear up.'
'Well, I have to congratulate you. Chief Inspector. You seem to be putting it all together very nicely.'
Hughes nodded. 'Open and shut, really,' he said.
Fay said, 'I could be making a fortune at this very moment. There'll be a hundred reporters here before breakfast, like a flock of pigeons scrabbling for crumbs. Even poor bloody Ashpole seems to have missed it all.'
'And what are they all going to say?'
'Hard to say precisely how they'll work it, but I can guarantee that, by tonight, Warren Preece will be very famous.'
'And Michael Wort?'
'Who's Michael Wort?' said Fay.
More to the point, Joe Powys thought, where is Michael Wort? Back – hopefully – in his own carefully constructed limbo. He was still unsure what had happened over the Bottle Stone – whether it had been installed at the riverside cottage and then replaced with another stone, or whether the power of suggestion had made him see the Bottle Stone in the tense, burgeoning atmosphere before Rachel's death. In that case, where was the original Bottle Stone now?
Powys looked over his shoulder, half-expecting to see the thing sprouting from the earth behind him.
Fay said, 'I have to say it didn't occur to me for quite a while that what she… what Jean was doing at the stone was trying to generate – in me – enough negative energy for him – Andy, Wort, whatever – to make some kind of final leap. To save himself… itself.'
'It occurred to me,' Powys said.
'Well, it would, wouldn't it. You're a clever person. And you know what we thinks about clever people yereabouts.'
Arnold limped towards them and fell over. He stood again and shook himself, exasperated.
Fay Morrison and Joe Powys looked at each other. Eyebrows were raised.
Neither of them had said a word about Arnold's remarkable turns of speed at critical moments. One day, Fay thought, she'd dare to mention that strange, glowing, phantom fourth leg. But not yet.
'He's a dowser's dog,' Joe said laconically.
As she bent down to pick up the dog, a disturbing thought struck her. 'What about the girl… Tessa?'
'She should really be taken away,' Joe said, 'and put through some kind of psychic readjustment programme. Except they probably don't exist, so she'll go on causing minor havoc, until she grows up and turns into something even nastier. Like Jean.'
'Is there nothing anyone can do?'
'World's full of them,' Powys said. 'Crybbe'll always attract them, and sometimes it'll manufacture its own.'
'We can't just leave it.'
'We bloody can.'
'Yes,' Fay said. 'I suppose we can.'
And she turned her back on the town, albeit with an uncomfortable feeling that one day they might feel they had to come back.
They got into the car. They were going to Titley, to Henry Kettle's cottage, which Joe had said was the best sanctuary he could think of. For a few weeks at least, he said, there'd be danger of residual nasties from Crybbe clinging to them. Grace type things.
Fay said, 'Can we handle that?'
'Count on it,' Joe Powys said grimly.
From the back seat, Rasputin the cat mewed in protest at his confinement in the laundry basket.
Fay said, 'When you said you, er, needed me… what did you mean exactly?'
'I don't know. It just came out. Heat of the moment.'
He turned on the engine.
'However.. Joe said, looking straight ahead through the windscreen. 'I know what I'd mean if I were to say it now.'
Fay smiled. 'What did the police say to you?'
They said, "Don't leave town." '
Joe Powys grinned and floored the accelerator.
Phil Rickman
***
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