by Unknown
'Better open it,' Max said, digging into some of the muesli he'd had delivered to the pub.
Rachel uncovered a tape cassette and a note. 'Who's Warren Preece?'
Max looked up.
'He's sent you a tape of his band.'
'Delivered by hand, huh?' Max put down his spoon thoughtfully. 'I dunno any Warren Preece, but the surname has a certain familiar ring. Maybe you should find out more, Rach.'
'Yes,' Rachel said, pushing back her chair. 'I'll ask the landlord.'
The Anglicans' Book of Common Prayer had nothing to say about exorcising spirits of the dead.
The Revd Murray Beech knew this and was grateful for it. But he was leafing through the prayer book anyway, seeking inspiration.
Murray was following the advice of Alex Peters and attempting to compile for himself a convincing prayer to deliver in an allegedly haunted house.
He came across the words,
'Peace be to this house and to all that dwell in it.'
This actually appeared under the order for The Visitation of the Sick, but Murray made a note of it anyway. Surely with an alleged 'haunting' - Murray recoiled from the word with embarrassment - what you were supposedly dealing with was a sick property, contaminated by some form of so-called 'psychic' radiation, although, in his 'exorcism' - Oh, God - the prayer would be aimed at the troubled souls of the living. In his view the health of a property could be affected only by the attitude and the state of mind of the current inhabitants, not by any residual guilt or distress from, ah, previous residents.
He looked around his own room. The neat bookshelves, the filing cabinets, the office desk with metal legs at which he sat, the clean, white walls - feeling a twinge of pain as he remembered the walls being painted by Kirsty exactly a fortnight before she'd said, 'I'm sorry, Murray. This isn't what I want.' Murray looked quickly back at the prayer book, turned over a page, came upon the following entreaty:
'Oh Lord, look down from heaven, behold, visit and
relieve this thy servant. . . defend him from the danger of
the enemy.'
He breathed heavily down his nose. He abhorred words like 'enemy'. The duty of the Church was to teach not opposition but understanding.
He was equally uncomfortable with the next and final paragraph of the prayer book before the psalms began.
A COMMINATION
or
Denouncing of God's Anger and Judgements
against Sinners.
The first page ended on an uncompromising note.
'Cursed are the unmerciful, fornicators and adulterers
covetous persons, idolaters, slanderers, drunkards and
extortioners.'
'Not many of us left uncursed,' Murray muttered.
The curse of the modern minister's life, in his opinion, was the video-hire shop. Infinitely more alluring to teenagers than the church. And full of lurid epics in which members of the clergy in bloodied cassocks wielded metal crucifixes with which
they combat scaly entities from Hell.
One result of this was that a few people seemed to think they should summon the vicar in the same way they'd call in Rentokil to deal with their dampness and their rats.
The telephone bleeped. 'I'll ring you when they're out,' she'd told him. He hadn't replied. At the time, he was considering going to her grandparents and explaining his dilemma. But he'd concluded this would not only be a cop-out, it would be wrong. Because she'd come to him in confidence and she was no longer a minor. She was eighteen and would be leaving school in two or three weeks.
Murray closed The Book of Common Prayer and picked up the phone. 'Vicarage.'
'They're out,' Tessa said.
Barry, the overweight osteopath from upstairs, was between patients, eating a sandwich - herbal pate on whole-wheat.
'I've been taken over by Max Goff,' said Powys, disconsolate.
'Dolmen has, yeah, I read that. He can't do you any harm, though, can he? You're out of print, aren't you?'
'Between impressions,' Powys corrected him. 'Barry, are you really proposing to realign somebody's slipped disc with hands covered in soya margarine?'
'Beats olive oil. And cheaper. Hey, Mandy says she saw you coming out of McDonald's this morning.'
'Couldn't have been me.'
'That's what I thought,' Barry said dubiously.
'Anyway,' Powys said, 'Goff wants to see me. In Crybbe.'
'I thought you were going to say "in the nude" for a minute,' said Barry, wiping his hands on his smock. 'No, from what I hear he's surrounding himself with people sharing his own deep commitment to the New Age movement. If it's this lunch in Crybbe on Friday, several people I know have been invited and nobody's turning him down, because if he likes you, he invites you to join his Crybbe community, which means - listen to this - that you get offered a place to live, on very advantageous terms. And all kinds of fringe benefits.'
'Why aren't you there, then?'
'Bastard's already got an osteopath,' Barry said. 'Gerry Moffat. You believe that? He could have had me, but he went for Moffat. Moffat!'
'Who else?'
'Dan Osborne, the homeopath, he's moved in already, Superior bastard. Paula Stirling. Robin Holland. Oh, and this little French aromatherapist who was in Bromvard, remember her?'
'I can still smell her. Listen, do these people know who Max Goff is?'
'Used to be, Joe. Used to be. This is the new user-friendly ozone-fresh Max Goff. Play your cards right and he'll let you feel his aura.'
'I wouldn't feel his aura with asbestos gloves,' said Powys.
'And he's got some pretty heavy mystical types as well,' said Barry. 'Jean Wendle, the spiritual healer, some guy who's reckoned to be Britain's biggest tarot hotshot and Andy Boulton-Trow. All converging on the New Age Mecca.'
'Andy?' Powys said. 'Andy's involved in this?'
'And there's a single kid,' says Andy, 'moving round the stone, very slowly at first, while all the other kids are sitting in a circle, clapping their hands, doing the chant. And by the time they finish the chant he's back where he started. Got to be a "he", it doesn't work for girls.'
Andy Boulton-Trow, lean and languid, lying back in the grass, spearing a quail's egg from the jar beside him. His voice is deep and lazy, like a stroked cello.
'And then he goes round again . . . only this time it's just ever-so-slightly faster . . .'
Johnny goes round the Bottle Stone
. . . and he goes round TWICE.
'And they keep on repeating it. And it gets faster and faster, building up the momentum, and the kid's got to move faster each time to maintain the pace.'
Johnny goes round the Bottle Stone
. . . and he goes round THRICE.
. . . goes round FOUR times.
. . . FIVE times.
'And how long do they keep it up?' Rose asks. She's looking radiantly happy today (this memory is agony). 'How many times . . . ?'
'Oh' There's a gleam in Andy's eye. 'Thirteen. Thirteen times.'
'Must be jolly dizzy by then: one of the others says - Ben Corby's girlfriend, Fiona Something.
'Ex-act-ly,' Andy drags out the word for emphasis. 'The kid's completely confused. He's not thinking properly. And it's then that his mates all leap on him and, before he knows what's happening, they hustle him across to the fairy hill. Over there . . . see it?'
'Not much of a hill,' Rose observes.
'Fairies are not very big,' you tell her. 'You could fit a couple of dozen on there.'
Andy says, 'So they lie him face-down on the fairy hill. . . and that's when it happens.'
'What?' you ask. 'What happens?'
'Whatever happens,' says Henry Kettle, searching in the cardboard picnic box for something uncomplicated and British, 'it's all in the mind, and it don't do anybody any good, meddling with that old nonsense.'
'Oh yeah,' Barry, the osteopath, said. 'Andy's right at the centre of things. As was old Henry Kettle. I suppose you heard about that.'
/> 'Just now,' Powys said. He hadn't planned to mention Henry. 'I had a letter from his neighbour to say he was dead. I don't know what happened, do you?'
'Have to wait for the Hereford Times for the full story, but apparently it said on the local radio that his car went off the road and ploughed into a wall around Crybbe Tump. I don't know that area too well, but . . .'
'Crybbe Tump? He hit the wall around Crybbe Tump?'
'Killed instantly. Bloody shame, I liked old Henry. He helped you with the book, didn't he?'
Powys nodded.
'The buzz is,' said Barry, 'that Henry was doing some dowsing for Max Goff.'
'Dowsing what?'
Barry shrugged. 'Whatever he'd been doing, he was on his way home when it happened. There was a power cut at the time, don't know whether the streetlamps were off, that may have thrown him. Bloody shame.'
'A power cut,' said Powys.
That significant?'
'Just a thought.' Powys shook his head, his mind whizzing off at a peculiar tangent, like a faulty firework
CHAPTER III
Fay awoke late. She'd lain awake until dawn, eyes open to the bedroom ceiling, Arnold a lump of solid heat alongside her on the bed.
It was nearly nine before she came downstairs. Outside it was raining. The rain on the window was the only sound. There was no mail on the mat, no sign of the Canon.
The door to the office was closed, as she'd left it last night. The note to her father still pinned to it. And don't let any CATS in there!
Rasputin.
He must still be in the office.
She opened the door but did not go in.
'Rasputin,' she called. A morning croak in her voice - that all it was. Really.
But she could not bring herself to go back into that room, not yet, though Arnold didn't seem worried. She left the door ajar, went through to the kitchen, let the dog out in the back garden.
When she turned back to the kitchen, Rasputin and Pushkin were both in the opposite corner, waiting by their bowls. Fay opened a can of Felix. The two cats looked plump and harmless. Perhaps it really had been just a horrific dream, conditioned by her own desperation.
She forked out a heap of cat food, straightened up.
'Right,' she said decisively and marched out of the kitchen and into the hall, where she tore the note off the office door and hit the door with the flat of her hand so that it was thrown wide.
She walked in, eyes sweeping the room like searchlights. She saw the Revox, two spools leaning against it. Her desk-diary open. Her father's note, about Guy's phone call. She raised her eyes to the H-shaped fireplace and the mantelpiece, to the see-through clock with the mechanism like a pair of bails still jerking obscenely from side to side.
The fireside chair was empty, its scatter cushions plumped out. If someone had been sitting in it the cushions would have been flattened.
Unless, of course, that person had tidily shaken them out and . . .
Oh, come on!
She made herself cross to the mirror and look into it at her own face.
The first shock was the incredible childlike fear she saw in her eyes.
The second was the other face. She whirled around in alarm.
The Canon was standing in the doorway. He wore pyjamas. His feet were bare. His hair was standing up in spikes, his beard sprayed out in all directions, like a snowstorm. His bewildered blue eyes were wide and unfocused.
He stared at Fay as if she were an intruder. Then the eyes relaxed into recognition.
'Morning, Grace,' he said.
While Max drove, Rachel took the cassette box from shoulder bag.
'OK?'
'Go ahead,' Max said.
Rachel slipped the tape into the player and studied the plastic box. The band's name was typed in capitals across the plain label: FATAL ACCIDENT. She wrinkled her nose.
Drums and bass guitar blundered out of the speakers. Rachel lowered the volume a little. By the time the first track was over, they were parked at the back of the Court, next to the stable-block, where builders were busy.
Rain slashed the windscreen.
Max turned up the sound to compensate. He was smiling faintly. They sat in the Range Rover for two more tracks. The only words Rachel could make out on the last one were 'goin' down on me', repeated what seemed like a few dozen times. She consulted the inside of the label; the song was called 'Goin' Down on Me'.
'That's the lot,' she said neutrally. There're only three numbers.' Remembering where the Max Goff Story had begun, in the punk-rock era of the mid-seventies, she didn't add 'thankfully'.
Max began to laugh.
Rachel ejected the tape, saying nothing.
Jeez,' Max said. 'Was that shit, or was that shit?'
Rachel breathed out. For a couple of minutes there, watching him smiling, she'd thought he might actually be enjoying it.
'You want me to post it down to Tommy, get him to send it back in a fortnight with the customary slip?'
What. . . ?' Max twisted to face her. 'You want us to give the official piss-off to Mayor Preece's flaming grandson?'
'But if you tell him it's good you'll have to do something with it, won't you?'
Max shrugged. 'So be it. One single ... not on Epidemic, of course. Coupla grand written off against tax .
Then he thumped the top of the dashboard. 'No, hey, listen, I'll tell you what we do - you send this kid a letter saying we think the band has promise, we think it's a ... an interesting sound, right? But we're not sure any of these three tracks is quite strong enough to release as a debut single, so can we hear a few more? That'll buy some time - maybe the band'll split before they can get the material together. How's that sound to you?'
'It sounds devious,' Rachel said.
'Of course it does, Rach. Do it tonight. I mean, shit, don't get me wrong - they're no worse than say, The Damned, in '77. But it was fresh then, iconoclastic.'
'It was shit then, too.'
'Yeah, maybe,' Max conceded. 'But it was necessary. It blew away the sterile pretensions from when the seventies went bad. But now we're picking up from the sixties and we won't make the same mistakes.'
'No,' Rachel said, in neutral again.
A heavy tipper-lorry crunched in beside them. The rain had washed a layer of thick, grey dust from the door of the cab and Rachel could make out the words '. . . aendy Quarry, New Radnor.'
'Hey . . .' Max said slowly. 'If this is what I think it is . . .'
He threw his door open, stepped down into the rain in his white suit and was back inside a minute, excited, raindrops twinkling in his beard.
'It is, Rach. The first stones have arrived. The Old Stones of Crybbe, Mark Two.'
'Oh,' said Rachel, pulling up the collar of her Barbour for the run to the stables. 'Good.'
But Goff, Panama hat jammed over his ears, made her watch while the stones were unloaded, pointing out things.
'Different sizes, right? Even where they'd vanished entirely, Kettle was able to figure out how tall they'd been.'
'Using his pendulum, I suppose.'
'Of course, what we're seeing here gives an exaggerated idea of what they'll look like in situ. Half of the length'll be under the soil. Maybe more than half. Like giant acupuncture needle in the earth.'
'Who's going to advise you about these things now Mr Kettle's dead?' Rachel wondered, as men in donkey jackets and orange slickers moved around, making preparations to get the grey and glistening monoliths down from the truck. One stone had to be at least fifteen feet long.
'And how do you know it's the right kind of stone?' Things were moving too fast for Rachel now. Max was an awesome phenomenon when he had the hots for something.
'Yeah, well, obviously, Kettle was good - and he knew the terrain. But Andy Boulton-Trow's been studying standing stones for nearly twenty years. Been working with a geologist these past few weeks, matching samples. They checked out maybe a dozen quarries before he was satisfied, and if he's satisfie
d, I'm satisfied.'
A clang came from the back of the truck, a gasp of hydraulics, somebody swore. Max called out sharply, 'Hey, listen, be careful, yeah? I want you guys to handle those stones like you're dealing with radioactive flaming isotopes.'
He said to Rachel, 'Andy's moving up here, end of the week. He's gonna supervise planting stones on our land. Then we'll bring the farmers up here, show 'em what it looks like and go into negotiations. Hey, you had a call from J. M. Powys yet?'
'He'll only have got my letter this morning. Max.'
'Give him until lunchtime then call him. I want Powys. I don't care what he costs.'
The customer was short and fat and bald. He wore denims, a shaggy beard and an ear-ring.
'You're J. M. Powys, right?'
Teacher, Powys thought. Or maybe the maverick in some local government planning department.
'You are, man. Don't deny it. I recognize you from the picture on the cover. You've gone grey, that's all.'
Powys spread his arms submissively.
'Hey listen, man, that was a hell of a book. The Old Golden Land.'
'Thanks,' Powys said.
'So what are you doing here, running a shop? Why aren't you writing more? Got to be ten years since Golden Land.'
'Even longer,' Powys said. 'More like twelve.'
You could count on at least one of these a week, more in summer. Sometimes they were women. Sometimes, in the early days of the Watkins Centre, friendships had developed from such encounters. The Old Golden Land had hit the market at the right time, the time of the great mass exodus from the cities, couples in their thirties in search of meaning and purpose.
People were very kind when they found out who he was. Usually they bought something from the shop, often a paperback of the book for him to sign. Most times he felt guilty, guilty that he hadn't followed through; guilty that he'd written the thing in the first place and misled everybody.