Crybbe (AKA Curfew) Read online

Fay crashed the phone down.

  Arnold lay at her feet, an ungainly black and white thing with monster ears and big, expressive eyes.

  The only dog in Crybbe.

  This morning, Fay had gone out soon after dawn into intermittent drizzle. She'd followed a milkman, at whom no dogs had barked no matter how carelessly he clanked his bottles. She'd followed a postman, whose trousers were unfrayed and who whistled as he walked up garden paths to drop letters through letter-boxes and on to doormats, where they lay unmolested by dogs.

  She'd walked down by the river, where there was a small stretch of parkland with swings for the children and no signs warning dog owners not to allow their non-existent pets to foul the play area.

  Finally, at around 8.15, she'd approached a group of teenagers waiting for the bus to take them to the secondary school nine miles away.

  'Does any of you have a dog?'

  The kids looked at each other. Some of them grinned, some shrugged and some just looked stupid.

  'You know me, I'm a reporter. I work for Offa's Dyke Radio. I need to borrow a dog for an item I'm doing. Can any of you help me?'

  'What kind of dog you want?'

  'Any kind of dog. Doberman . . . Chihuahua . . . Giant wire-haired poodle.'

  'My sister, she had a dog once.'

  'What happened to it?'

  'Ran away, I think.'

  'We 'ad a dog, we did.'

  'Where's it now?"

  'Ran off.'

  'I was your dog, I'd run off,' another kid said and the first kid punched him on the shoulder.

  'Listen, what about farm dogs? Mr Preece, has he got a sheepdog?'

  'Got one of them Bobcats.'

  'What?'

  'Like a little go-kart thing with four-wheel drive. Goes over hills. You got one of them, you don't need no sheepdog.'

  'Yes,' Fay had said. 'I think I see.'

  She didn't see at all.

  Powys left Crybbe before seven and was back before ten, a changed man.

  He wore a suit which was relatively uncreased. His shoes were polished, his hair brushed. He was freshly shaven.

  He parked his nine-year-old Mini well out of sight, in the old cattle market behind the square, and walked across to the Cock, carrying a plausible-looking black folder under his arm. Taking Rachel's advice.

  'Don't let him see you like that. You have to meet his image of J. M. Powys, so if you can't look older, at least look smarter. Don't let him see the car, he mustn't think you need the money - he's always suspicious of people who aren't rich. And you don't know anything about his plans.'

  'Isn't Humble, the New Age minder, going to tell him he caught me nosing around?'

  'I think not.'

  He entered the low-ceilinged lobby of the Cock, where all the furniture was varnished so thickly that you could hardly tell one piece from another. It was like sitting in a tray of dark chocolates left on a radiator. Powys wedged himself into what he assumed to be an oak settle, to wait for Rachel.

  Guy Morrison would be here, she'd told him, starting work on a documentary. He'd once worked with Guy on a series of three-minute silly-season items on Ancient Mysteries of the West for a Bristol-based regional magazine programme - J. M. Powys hired as the regular 'expert interviewee'. His clearest memory was of the day he'd suggested they look beyond the obvious. Taking Guy down to Dartmoor to see a newly discovered stone row believed to be orientated to the rising moon. He remembered the TV reporter looking down with disdain at the ragged line of stones, none more than eighteen inches high, barely below the level of his hand-stitched hiking boots. 'Let's move on,' Guy had said, affronted. Tm not doing a piece to camera in front of that.'

  Presently, the Cock's taciturn licensee, Denzil George emerged from some sanctum and glanced across. He displayed no sign of recognition. Still been in bed, presumably, when Powys was sliding out of a side door into the alley just after six-thirty this morning.

  '. . .do for you?" Denzil said heavily. Powys thought of some shambling medieval innkeeper, black-jowled, scowling, lumpen-browed.

  'Nothing at all, thanks, mate. I'm waiting for . . . ah, this lady, I think.'

  Rachel had appeared on the stairs, sleek in a dark-blue business suit. 'Mr Powys?'

  'Good morning. Am I too early?'

  'Only a little. We're terribly glad you were able to make it. Mr George, I'm taking Mr Powys along to the Court, so if Mr Goff calls in, tell him we've gone on ahead, will you? And lunch as arranged, OK?'

  Rachel tossed a brilliant smile at the licensee, and Denzil stumped back into his lair, where Powys imagined him breakfasting on a whole loaf of bread without slicing it.

  'Very svelte,' said Rachel, surveying Powys on the steps outside.

  'You're surprised, aren't you? You thought I probably hadn't worn a suit since the seventies. You thought it was going to be the wide lapels and the kipper tie.'

  'Had a momentary fear of flares, then decided you were too young,' Rachel said flatteringly. 'Come along, J.M.'

  A few minutes later he was admiring her thighs pistoning in and out of the dark skirt, as she drove the Range Rover, impatiently pumping the clutch, long fingers carelessly crooked around the wheel.

  'We're going to the Court?'

  'Couple of hours before they all arrive. I thought you'd like to see the set-up, or lack of one.'

  She drove directly across the square and then thrust the vehicle into a narrow fork beside the church. Powys remembered coming out of this lane last night in the same seat, nursing his nose, feeling foolish.

  The nose still hurt. But this morning, he thought, with a kind of wonder, he was feeling more . . . well, more focused than he had in years.

  And he wanted to know more about Rachel.

  She swung the Range Rover between stone gateposts, briefing him about today's lunch. 'Informal gathering of the people at the core of the venture. New Age luminaries. A few supportive locals - newcomers, mostly. And Max's advisers.'

  'Andy Boulton-Trow?'

  Rachel parked in the courtyard. 'Of course, you know him.'

  'All earth-mysteries people know each other. Andy - we were at an college together, which is where The Old Golden Land started. Both got into mystical landscapes. Auras around stone circles, Samuel Palmer moons over burial mounds on the Downs. Andy was a mature student, he'd already been to university.'

  'He seems a very deep guy. Laid-back.'

  'I suppose so,' said Powys.

  Rachel parked outside the stable-block. 'Max says Boulton-Trow's knowledge of stones and prehistoric shamanic rituals is second to none.'

  'Yeah, possibly.'

  'But you wrote the book,' Rachel said.

  Powys smiled. 'Andy professes to despise commercial books on earth mysteries. Comes from not needing the money.'

  'Private income?'

  'Inherited wealth. Something like that. Never discussed it.'

  Rachel said, 'And who's Rose Hart?'

  'She took the pictures for the book,' Powys said quietly.

  Rachel made no move to get out of the vehicle.

  'There were four of us,' Powys said, looking straight through the windscreen. 'Sometimes five. Andy and me and Rose, who was studying photography, and Ben Corby, who thought of the title - comes from an old Incredible String Band song - and flogged the idea to a publisher.'

  He paused. 'Rose was my girlfriend. She's dead.'

  'Don't talk about it if you don't want to,' Rachel said. 'Come and look at the crumbling pile before the others arrive.'

  Rachel had keys to the Court. One was so big it made her bag bulge, 'watch where you're stepping when we go in. It's dark.'

  Not too dark to find Rachel's lips.

  'Thanks,' he said quietly.

  Rachel didn't move. The house was silent around them.

  Back from the town, around mid-morning, Fay came in quietly through the kitchen door; Arnold didn't bark. He was shut in the kitchen with Rasputin, who was glaring at him from a chair. Arnold seemed gl
ad to see her; he wagged his tail and planted his front paws on her sweater.

  'Good boy,' Fay said.

  Then she heard the wailing. A sound which clutched at her like pleading fingers.

  Dad?

  'Stay there,' she hissed. 'Stay.'

  Wailing. The only word for it. Not the sound of a man in physical pain, not illness, not injury.

  She moved quietly into the hallway. The office door, two yards away, was ajar. Little was visible through the gap; the curtains were drawn, as they might be, she thought, in a room where a corpse is laid out.

  Her movements stiff with dread, Fay removed her shoes, padded to the door, and peeped in.

  In the office, in the dead woman's sitting-room, the drawn curtains screening him from the street. Canon Alex Peters was sobbing his old heart out.

  He was on his knees, bent over the slender wooden arm of the fireside chair in which Grace Legge had seemed to materialize. His head was bowed in his arms and his ample shoulders trembled like a clifftop before an avalanche.

  Fay just stood there. She ought to know what to do, how to react, but she didn't. She'd never known her dad cry before.

  When he'd displayed emotions, they were always healthy, masculine emotions. Bluff, strong, kindly stuff.

  In fact, not emotions at all really. Because, most of the time Alex, like many clergymen, was an actor in a lot of little one-man playlets put on for the sick, the bereaved and the hopeless.

  He'd be mortified if he thought she'd seen him like this.

  Fay crept back across the hall. It was so unbearably sad. So sad and so crazy.

  So unhealthy.

  So desperately wrong.

  She moved silently back into the kitchen and attached Arnold's clothes-line to his collar. 'Let's go for a walk,' she whispered. 'Come back in an hour and make a lot of noise.'

  As she slowly turned the back-door handle, a trailing moan echoed from the office.

  'I will,' Alex sobbed. 'I'll get rid of her. I'll make her go.'

  His quavering voice rose and swelled and seemed to fill the whole house. A voice that, if heard in church, would freeze a congregation to its pews, cried out, 'Just - please - don't hurt her!'

  Fay walked away from this, quickly.

  CHAPTER II

  This really was a rope dangling from the steepest part of the roof. Powys could just about reach its frayed end. 'Careful,' Rachel warned. 'You'll fall into the pit.'

  The rope felt dry and stiff. 'This is a touch of black humour?'

  'Well, it's obviously not the original rope, J.M. Somebody probably put it there to hold on to, while doing repairs or something. Creepy up here, though, isn't it?'

  The attic was vast. There were small stabs of blinding daylight here and there, signifying holes in the roof or missing slates. Underfoot, jagged gaps through which you could see the boarded floor of the room beneath.

  'I don't know why I brought you up here, really.' Rachel said, 'I usually avoid this bit - not that I'm superstitious.'

  She was spotlit by two thin beams from roof-gaps. He remembered her standing next to him, naked, in the window last night, pale, slim, silvery. She'd brought a small flashlight, and he shone it to the upper extremity of the rope, where it was tied around a beam.

  'How many poor bastards did the Hanging Sheriff dispose of up here?'

  'Hard to say, he was only sheriff for a year. But you could be hanged for most things in those days. Stealing cattle or sheep, picking your nose in church . . .'

  That's how Wort got his rocks off, do you think? Watching people dangle?'

  Rachel wrinkled her nose in distaste. 'They say he was obsessed with what you might call the mechanics of mortality, what happens the moment the spirit leaves the body. Him and his friend, John Dee.'

  'Not the John Dee?'

  'The guy who was Elizabeth I's astrologer. His old family home's along the valley.'

  'Of course it is,' said Powys, remembering. 'It's a farm now. I went over there when 1 was doing Golden Land. Somebody told me Dee had been into ancient sites and dowsing.'

  'Well, he must have been into hanging, too.' Rachel said. 'If he was a mate of Michael Wort's.'

  A jet of wind flew across the attic with a thin whine like a distant baby crying. The rope started to sway, very slowly.

  Powys said, 'He was certainly into magic, but back in the sixteenth century magic and science were filed in the same drawer.'

  He put out a hand to stop the rope swinging. He didn't like this rope with its dangling strands - somehow more disturbing than if there'd been an actual noose on the end. A sense of something recently severed.

  'Anyway,' said Rachel, 'the last hanging up here was Wort's own. There was some sort of peasants' revolt in the town, and one night they all gathered outside wielding flaming torches and threatening to burn the place down unless he came out.'

  'We know you're in there . . .' Powys said flippantly, still holding the rope, not feeling at all flippant.

  'So he shuffled up here and topped himself. That's one story. Another says there was a secret tunnel linking this place with Crybbe church and he escaped.'

  'Where was he buried?'

  'I don't know,' Rachel said. 'I never really thought about it. Probably at some crossroads with a stake through his heart, wouldn't you think? Naturally, they say he haunts the place - or rather his dog does.'

  'This place?'

  The town. The outskirts. The quiet lanes at sunset. Over the years, according to Max, people have claimed to come face to face with this big black dog with glowing eyes. And then they die, of course. Like in The Hound of the Baskervilles.'

  Powys took his hand away from the rope, and it began to swing again, very gently.

  'Rachel, luv,' he said, 'can you hear voices?'

  'Shit.' Rachel moved to the stairs. 'Nobody was supposed to be here for another hour.'

  She went swiftly down the steps, Powys following, not wanting to be left alone up here, where Rachel believed the only danger was the unstable floor. Blessed are the sceptics. For they shall be oblivious of the numinous layers, largely unaffected by the dreary density of places, unbowed by the dead-weight of ancient horror.

  While people like me, he thought, would no more come up here alone than pop into a working abattoir to shelter from the rain.

  Only a short way down the stairs, Rachel disappeared.

  Powys shone the torch down the twisting stone steps. The beam just reached to the great oak door at the bottom.

  'Rachel!' He felt panic in his throat, like sandpaper. There was a creak to his left; he spun round and the beam found a shadowed alcove he hadn't noticed on the way up here.

  Suddenly, white light blasted him and he hid his eyes behind an arm.

  'This,' Rachel said, from somewhere, 'is the only part of the house I really like.'

  'What's known as a prospect chamber.'

  The window directly facing them, almost floor to ceiling, was without glass. In fact, it wasn't really a window, simply a gap between two ivy-matted gables. A rusting iron bar was

  cemented into the gap at chest-height.

  The prospect chamber was tiny, too small for any furniture. But it had a view.

  Powys's eyes widened.

  He saw they were directly above the cobbled forecourt. Then there were the two gateposts and then the straight road through the wood. Over the tops of the trees he could see the weathercock on the church tower.

  Without the wood, the town would be at his feet.

  And everything - the gateway, the road, the church - was in a dead straight line.

  He'd seen this view before.

  In fact, if he turned and looked over his shoulder. . .

  He did turn and looked only into blackness.

  But if he could see through the walls of the house, what he would see behind him, following the same dead straight line . . . would be the Tump.

  'Is this opening as old as the house?'

  'I presume so,' Rachel said.
'Spectacular, isn't it?'

  'Which means Wort had it built. Maybe this is why John Dee came here, nothing to do with the bloody hangings. Rachel, have you ever actually seen a ley-line?"

  'This?'

  'It's textbook. In fact . . .' He leaned across the iron bar, not pushing it because it didn't look too steady. This is the strongest evidence I've seen that the ley system was recognized in Elizabethan times. We know that John Dee occasionally came back to his old home and during those times he studied dowsing and investigated old churches and castle sites. He called it, in his records and his letters, treasure hunting. But what kind of treasure, Rachel? You know, what I think . .

  He stopped. There were the voices again.

  'Humble,' Rachel said. 'And somebody else.'

  Powys's stomach contracted painfully.

  'I don't think Humble actually got round to apologizing to you, did he?' said Rachel.

  'l owe him one.'

  'Don't even contemplate it. He's a very nasty person. Ah, they were waiting for Max.'

  The black Ferrari hit the gravel with an emphatic crunch. Humble stepped out and opened the driver's door. Andy Boulton-Trow was with him.

  'I don't like the company he keeps either,' Powys said.

  'Humble? Or Boulton-Trow?'

  'Either.'

  Rachel said, 'Is there something I don't know about you and Boulton-Trow?'

  Joey goes round the Bottle Stone,

  The Bottle Stone, the Bottle Stone,

  Joey goes round the Bottle Stone,

  Ana he goes round . . .

  'Hold it!'

  They all look at Andy.

  'It's widdershins,' he says.

  'What?' says Ben.

  'Widdershins. Anticlockwise. You're going round the wrong way, Joe.'

  'Why?'

  'Because that's what you have to do. I was watching a bunch of kids. It's traditional. Widdershins, OK?'

  You shrug, but you aren't entirely happy about this. Old Henry Kettle gets up, turns his back and walks off, down towards the river.

  'OK,' Ben says. 'Start again.'

  Sod it. Only a game You start to tramp slowly around the stone. There's a smile on your face because what you're thinking about is how much you love Rose and how glad you are that they managed to get her name on the cover.