Crybbe (AKA Curfew)

by Unknown

  Mr Preece paused to catch a breath, six steps up.

  Because sometimes, in the old days, he'd just, like, floated to the top, like as if there were hands in the small of his back rushing him up the steps, and then the same hands would join his on the rope, because it was meant.

  But tonight there were different hands, pressing down from above, pressing into his chest: go back, you poor, tired old bugger, you don't wanner do this no more.

  A son in the hospital. A grandson in his coffin.

  What if you dies on the steps?

  One Preece in the hospital. One in his coffin. One in a heap on the flagstones. And Warren.

  Best not to think about Warren.

  And a silence in the belfry.

  No!

  In a rage, Mr Preece snatched out his dentures, thrust them down into a pocket of his old tweed jacket, forced some air into his broken bellows of a chest and made it up two more steps.

  He'd do it. He'd be late but he'd do it. Never been so important that he should do it.

  He saw the light above him and the ropes. Never more important, now the wall around the Tump had been breached and something was in the Court.

  As had been shown by the death of that woman.

  But it had never been in the church. It couldn't get into church.

  No, it couldn't.

  But it wasn't Andy Boulton-Trow, waiting by the stone.

  It was a woman. Well, a girl.

  And naked now.

  She stood with her back to the stone, as if sculpted from it, her eyes closed and her mouth open, and the night sang around her.

  Jesus God, Powys whispered, the voyeur behind the oak tree, stunned into immobility.

  The pupil!

  It was one of those nights when the thoughts were so deep you couldn't remember getting home or putting the car away. Some small thing brought you back into your body - like the tiny grind of metal in metal as your Yale key penetrated the front-door lock.

  Fay could just about read her watch in what remained of the light and the glow from neighbouring windows; she couldn't believe how rapidly the days had been shortening since Midsummer Day.

  Mr Preece was already a couple of minutes late with the curfew. She imagined him toiling up all those steps to the belfry, poor old sod.

  Obsessive behaviour. Did he really think the family might lose Percy Weale's sixteenth-century bequest if the curfew remained unrung for a single night because of a dire family crisis? Had to be more than that. Joe Powys would find out.

  Oh, God, Powys, where are you?

  One thing was sure: Jack Preece wouldn't be ringing the curfew for a long, long time - if ever again.

  What does it mean, Joe?

  She ought to have gone with him, even if this was something crazy between him and Boulton-Trow, something that went back twelve years or more.

  It was so easy at night to believe in the other side of things, that there was another side. That Rachel - and Rose - had died because of a magic with its roots four centuries deep . . . or perhaps deeper, perhaps as old as the stones.

  With Arnold tucked, not without some effort, under her arm, Fay went into the house. It was far too late now to send the tape for the morning news. The late-duty engineer at Offa's Dyke would be long gone. She'd have to go into the studio early in the morning again, having rung Hereford General to find out Jack's condition.

  She lowered the dog to the doormat.

  'I wish I could trust you, Arnold,' Fay said, not quite knowing what she meant. His tail was well down; he looked no happier than she was. Jonathon Preece had set out to kill him and had died in the river. Arnold had lost a leg, so might Jack Preece by now . . .

  If this was the seventeenth century she'd have been hanged as a witch, Arnold stoned to death as her familiar.

  Stop it, you stupid bitch.

  She clenched her fists and felt her nails piercing the palms of her hands. Everyone around her seemed to be carrying a burden of possibly misplaced guilt. Powys for Rose and Rachel. Her dad for Grace and for her mother. She herself. . .

  Fay went down on her knees in the hall, the front door open to the street behind her. She buried her head in Arnold's fur. Arnold who looked no more evil than . . . than Joe Powys. As she began quietly to sob, all the lights went out in the neighbouring homes.

  Bloody electricity company. How could this keep happening?

  Fay choked a sob in bitter anger and punched at the wall until her knuckles hurt. Oh God, God, God, God, God.

  She stood up shakily.

  'Dad?'

  There was no response.

  She closed the front door behind her. He'd either gone to bed or he was still over at Jean Wendle's having his treatment. Or his end away if he'd got lucky. Fay sniffed and smiled She'd once asked the local doctor what the Canon's condition meant libido-wise. 'He'll be less inhibited,' the doctor had said, 'By which I mean he'll talk about it more often.'

  The Canon wasn't back.

  But - Arnold whimpering - somebody was.

  As Fay stiffened in the darkness of the hallway, she saw vague yellowish light under the door of the office.

  Very slowly the office door began to open.

  Fay caught her breath.

  It did not creak; she only knew it was opening because the wedge of yellow light was widening, and it was not the soft and welcoming, mellow yellow of a warm parlour at suppertime.

  This was the yellow of congealing fat, the yellow of illness.

  The hallway was very cold. It was a cold she remembered.

  'Grace?' Fay heard herself say in a voice she didn't recognize, a voice that seemed to come from someone else.

  She felt her lips stretch tight with fear. She kicked the office door open.

  'Did she speak?' Jean Wendle had asked.

  'Not a word'

  Grace Legge wore a nightdress. Or a shroud. Was this what shrouds looked like?

  'And she didn't move?'

  'No.'

  Grace was standing by the window, very straight, a hand on a hip, half-turned towards Fay. She was haloed in yellow light. The yellow of diseased flesh. The yellow of embalming fluid.

  She was hovering six inches off the floor.

  'Harmless, then.'

  'Grace,' Fay said slowly. 'Go away, Grace.'

  But Grace did not go away. She began to move towards Fay, not walking because her feet were bound in the shroud, which faded into vapour.

  Fay backed away into the hall.

  Dead eyes that were fixed, burning like small, still lamps. Burning like phosphorous.

  'She can't talk to you, she can't see you; there's no brain activity there . . . Blink a couple of times. . , and she'll be gone.'

  Fay shut her eyes, screwed them tight. Stood frozen in the doorway with her eyes squeezed tight. Stood praying. Praying to her father's God for deliverance. Please make it go away, please, please, please . . .

  She smelled an intimate smell, sickly, soiled perfume, and felt cold breath on her face. She opened her eyes because she was more afraid not to, opened them into a fish-teethed snarl and yellow orbs alight with malice, and spindly, hooked fingers - the whole thing swirling and shimmering and coming for her, rancid and vengeful, filling the room with a rotting, spitting, incandescent yellow haired.

  Fay began to scream.

  CHAPTER XII

  It was fear that drew Minnie Seagrove to the window of her lounge. Fear that if she didn't look for it, it would come looking for her.

  For a short while, there was a large, early moon. It wasn't a full moon, not one of those werewolf moons by any stretch, but it was lurid and bright yellow. It appeared from behind the Tump. Before it became visible, rays had projected through the trees on the top of the mound like the beams you saw seconds before the actual headlights of an oncoming car. The trees on the Tump were waving in the breeze even though the air all around Minnie's bungalow was quite still.

  She'd come to associate this breeze with an appearance of th
e Hound.

  Afterwards, Mrs Seagrove sat with her back to the window in Frank's old Parker Knoll wing chair, feeling its arms around her and hugging a glass of whisky, the remains of Frank's last bottle of Chivas Regal malt.

  Oh Lord, how she wished she hadn't looked tonight.

  'I'm that cold, dear,' she said, pretending she was talking to young Joe Powys or anybody who'd believe her. 'I can't keep a limb still. I don't think I'll ever get warm again.'

  Powys knew it was on its way when the naked girl at the stone began to moan and shiver.

  When the moon rose, he saw that the girl was certainly no more than twenty and might even be significantly younger, which made him uncomfortable. He wondered for a time if she was real and not some kind of vision. What kind of a girl would come alone at night into this appalling place and take off all her clothes?

  Powys was not at all turned on by this.

  He was afraid. Afraid, he rationalized, not only for her but of her.

  Afraid because he suspected she knew what was coming, while he could have no conception, except of ludicrous phosphorous fur, fiery eyes and gnashing fangs, and Basil Rathbone in his deerstalker, with his pistol.

  He found his fingers were tightly entwined into some creeper on the trunk of the oak tree. He squeezed it until it hurt.

  The silence in the neglected wood was absolute. No night birds, no small mammals scurrying and scrabbling. If there was any sound, any indication of movement, of change, it would be the damp chatter of decay.

  Max could not move. His eyes were wide open. He took his breath in savage gulps.

  He lay in awe, couldn't even think.

  He could smell the candles.

  As if in anticipation of a power failure, the room had been ringed with them - Max half-afraid they'd be black. But no, these were ordinary yellow-white candles, of beeswax or tallow, whatever tallow was. They didn't smell too good at first, kind of a rich, fatty smell.

  Now the smell was as intoxicating as the sour red wine.

  The mattress was laid out on the third level of the stable block, so he could lie in the dusk, and take in the Tump filling the window, stealing the evening light, surrounded with candles, like a great altar.

  Max lay under the black duvet, feeling like a virgin, the Great Beast/Scarlet Woman sessions with Rachel a faint and farcical memory.

  For the first time in his adult life, Max was terrified.

  And then, when the dark figure rose over him in the yellow, waxy glow, even more frightened - and shocked rigid, at first - by the intensity of his longing.

  Warren looked up into the sky, at the night billowing in, and he loved the night and the black clouds and the thin wind hissing in the grass, his insides churning, his mind clotted with a rich confusion.

  But the curfew was coming and the box was screaming at him to close the lid.

  He slammed it down.

  Then, bewildered, he started to claw at the earth with his hands, set the box down in the hole.

  Heard a rattling noise inside, the hand battering the side of the box.

  It don't wanner go back in the ground.

  It's done what it came for.

  Now it wants to go back in the chimney.

  And, sure enough, when Warren picked up the box the rattling stopped, and so he ran, holding it out in front of him like a precious gift, down from field to field until he reached the farm, where nobody else lived now, except for him and the Hand of Glory.

  In the end, the curfew did come, a strained and hesitant clatter at first, and then the bell was pounding the wood like a huge, shiny axe, slicing up the night, and the girl was gone.

  Joe Powys wandered blindly through the undergrowth, repeatedly smashing a fist into an open palm.

  The night shimmered with images.

  The bell pealed and Rose, in a pure white nightdress, threw herself from a third-floor window, fluttering hopelessly in the air like a moth with its wings stuck together, falling in slow motion, and he was falling after her, reaching out for her.

  In the spiny dampness of the wood, Powys cried out, just once, and the curfew bell released, at last, his agony.

  He staggered among the stricken, twisted trees and wept uncontrollably. He didn't want to control it. He wanted the tears to flow for ever. He wanted the curfew bell to peal for ever, each clang comet-bright in the shivering night.

  The bell pealed on, and with that high, wild cry Rachel tumbled into the air, and then Rose and Rachel were falling together, intertwined.

  A needle of light, like the filament of a low-wattage electric bulb zig-zagged across the eaves.

  Silently, in slow-motion, the rusty spike pierced the white nightdress and a geyser of hot blood sprayed into his weeping eyes.

  CHAPTER XIII

  Max awoke to find himself alone, damp and smouldering, like a bonfire in the rain. The cold deluge had been the curfew. When the curfew was gone, he realized at last, the town would be free.

  He got up and shambled to the big window, wrapped in the black duvet. It was too dark to see the Tump; it didn't matter, he could feel the Tump. It was like the stables and maybe even the Court itself hid been absorbed by the mound, so that he was, in essence, inside it.

  No going back now, Max.

  Feeling very nearly crazy, his face and hands slashed by boughs and bushes, Powys followed a dead straight line back into Crybbe.

  As if the path was lit up for him. Which perhaps it was - the bell strokes landing at his feet like bars of light. All he did was lurch towards the belt, each stroke laid on the landscape, heavy as a gold ingot. And when he emerged from the wood into the churchyard, scratched and bleeding from many cuts, he just collapsed on the first grave he came to.

  Its stone was of new black marble, with white lettering, and when he saw whose grave it was he started to laugh, slightly hysterically.

  GRACE PETERS

  1928-1992

  Beloved wife of

  Canon A. L. Peters

  And that was all.

  Powys scrambled to his feet; from what he knew of Grace, she would take a dim view of somebody's dirty, battered body sprawled over her nice, clean grave.

  He walked stiffly through the graveyard, out of the lychgate, into the deserted square, his plodding footsteps marking sluggish time between peals of the curfew.

  The power was off. Hardly a surprise. In four or five townhouse windows he could see the sallow light of paraffin lamps. Then, with a noise like a lawnmower puttering across the square, a generator cranked into action, bringing a pale-blue fluorescent flickering into the grimy windows of the old pub, the Cock.

  Yes, Powys thought. I could use a drink. Quite badly.

  It occurred to him he hadn't eaten since pushing down a polystyrene sandwich in this very pub before setting off to find his old mate, Andy Boulton-Trow. He didn't feel hungry, though. A drink was all he wanted, that illusory warmth in the gut. And then he'd decide where to go, whose night to spoil next, whose peace of mind to perforate.

  He clambered up the steps and pushed open the single, scuffed swing-door to the public bar.

  It was full. Faces swam out of the smoke haze, pallid in the stuttering fluorescence. The air was weighed down, it seemed to Powys, with leaden, dull dialogue and no merriment. He felt removed from it all, as though he'd fallen asleep when he walked in, and being here was a dream.

  'Brandy, please,' he told Denzil, the Neanderthal landlord 'A single.'

  Denzil didn't react at all to whatever kind of mess the wood had made of Powys's face. He didn't smile.

  So where was the smile coming from? He knew somebody was smiling at him; you could feel a smile, especially when wasn't meant to be friendly.

  'Thanks,' he said, and paid.

  He saw the smile through the bottom of his glass. It was a small smile in a big face. It might have been chiselled neatly into the centre of a whole round cheese.

  Police Sergeant Wynford Wiley had sat there wearing this same tiny smile last ni
ght and early this morning while his colleagues from CID had been trying to persuade J. M. Powys to confess to the murder of his girlfriend.

  'Been in a fight, is it, Mr Powys?'

  Wiley looked more than half-drunk. He was sitting in a group of middle-aged men in faded tweeds or sleeveless, quilted body-warmers. Summer casual wear, Crybbe-style.

  'You want the truth?' Powys swallowed some brandy but still didn't feel any warmth.

  'All I ever wants is the truth, Mr Powys.' Wynford was wearing an old blue police shirt over what looked like police trousers.

  'Amateur dramatics,' Powys said wearily. 'I've been auditioning for the Crybbe Amateur Dramatic Society. Banquo's Ghost. What do you think of the make-up?'

  Wynford Wiley stopped smiling. He stood up at once, rather unsteadily. Planted himself between Powys and the door. And came out with that famous indictment of intruders from Off, those few words which Powys suddenly found so evocative of the quintessential Crybbe.

  'We don't like clever people.' Wynford stifled a burp. 'Round yere.'

  There was that thrilled hush which the first spark of confrontation always brings to rural pubs.

  Powys said, 'Maybe that's why this town's dead on its feet.' He finished his brandy. 'Now' - placing his glass carefully on the bar-top - 'why don't you piss off and stop bothering me, you fat bastard.'

  He listened to himself saying this, as if from afar. Listened with what ought to have been a certain horrified awe. He'd done it now. Thrown down a direct public challenge to the authority of the senior representative for what passed for the law in this town. In order to retain his authority and his public credibility, Sergeant Wiley would be obliged to take prompt and decisive action.

  And Sergeant Wiley was drunk.

  And Powys didn't care because tonight he'd seen the appalling thing that was known locally as Black Michael's Hound and witnessed the dark conflagration of its union with a young woman, and in terms of total black menace, Wynford Wiley just didn't figure.