Crybbe aka Curfew

by Phil Rickman

  Rachel Wade shrugged. Fay crossed to the window which left only a smear of light across the top of the chest. Obviously not Elizabethan, this chest; it had black lettering stamped across its lid and was carelessly bound with green-painted metal strips.

  Fay lifted the lid and lowered the candle.

  She recoiled at once. 'Oh,' she said.

  'Sorry.'

  'What is it?'

  Its eye-sockets were black and two upper teeth were thin and curved. A small cobweb hung between them. The mouth was stretched wide in a fossilized shriek.

  'It's a cat, isn't it? A mummified cat?'

  'Tiddles. Max calls it Tiddles.'

  'Cute,' Fay said and shuddered.

  'Not very. It was found in the rafters. It may have been walled up there alive.'

  'God.'

  'Practical geomancy,' Rachel said. 'The spirit of the cat acts apparently, as a guardian. They found half a horse behind the kitchen wall. Come on, let's go.

  CHAPTER VII

  Asleep in his armchair, Canon Alex Peters dreamed he was asleep in his armchair. Tucked up in a soft blanket of sunbeams, he awoke in time to watch the wall dissolve.

  It began with the fireplace. He was aware that Grace's dreadful see-through clock and the gilt-framed mirror were fading, while the black, sooty hole of the fireplace itself was getting bigger.

  Gradually, the hole took over, becoming darker and wider and then spreading up through the mantelpiece, almost as far as the ceiling, until the whole chimney breast dissolved into a black passageway.

  There formed a filigree of yellowish light, and then, dimly at first, Grace appeared in the passageway. Standing there, quite still.

  'What happened to your wheelchair?' Alex asked. He was glad, of course, to see her back on her feet.

  'No you're not,' Grace said. Her lips did not move when she spoke but her body became brighter, as if the spider web of lights was inside her, like glowing veins. 'You were glad when I died, and you'll be glad to know I'm still dead.'

  'That's not true,' protested Alex. But you couldn't lie to the dead, and he knew it.

  Grace turned her back on him and began to walk away along the passage. Alex struggled to get up, desperate to explain.

  But the chair wouldn't let him. He shouted to the spindly, diminishing figure. 'Grace, look, don't go, give me a hand, would you?'

  The chair held him in a leathery grip.

  'Grace!' Alex screamed. 'Grace, don't go! I want to explain!'

  Just once, Grace glanced back at him over her shoulder, and there was a pitying smile on her face, with perhaps a shadow of malice.

  Goff did not, of course, have any immediate plans to live in Crybbe Court itself, Rachel Wade said. Good God, no.

  Well, perhaps one day. When it was fully restored.

  'You mean,' Fay said as they walked out into the sunlight, restored to what it would've been like if the Elizabethans had had full central heating and ten-speaker stereos.'

  'You're getting the general picture,' Rachel confirmed, and showed her the place where Max actually would be living within the next week or so.

  It was an L-shaped stone stable-block behind the house. It already had been gutted, plumbed and wired and a giant plate-glass window had been inserted into a solid stone wall to open up a new and spectacular view of the hills from what would be the living-room.

  At least, the view would have been spectacular if it hadn't been semi-obscured by a green mound, like an inverted pudding basin or a giant helmet.

  'His beloved Tump,' Rachel said. And there wasn't much affection there, Fay thought, either for the mound or for Max Goff.

  'Is it a burial mound or a – what d'you call it – castle mound… motte?'

  'Probably both. Either way it's pretty unsightly, like an overgrown spoil-heap. And decidedly creepy by moonlight. I mean, who wants to stare out at a grave? Whoever built this place had the right idea, I think, by putting a blank stable wall in front so it wouldn't frighten the horses.'

  Fay realized the Court itself was built in a hollow, and the Tump was on slightly higher ground, so that it seemed, from here, higher than it actually was. It loomed. The stone wall which surrounded it had partly fallen down on this side, revealing the mesh of dense bushes and brambles at the base of the mound.

  'Poor Mr Kettle,' Fay said, reminded by the wall.

  Rachel fingered a strand of pale hair, the nearest she'd come in Fay's presence, to a nervous gesture. 'The bitter irony is that Max plans to move that wall. He calls it a nineteenth-century abomination. Some experts think it's older than that and should be preserved, but he'll get his way, of course, in the end.'

  Rachel stepped on a piece of soft plaster and ground it in the newly boarded floor.

  'He always does,' she said.

  It was clear now to Fay that this was not the same Rachel Wade who, a week ago, had briskly swept her down the steps of the Cock with vague promises of an interview with Goff

  when his plans were in shape. Sure, on that occasion, she'd had a tape recorder over her shoulder. But even if she'd carried one today, she felt, Rachel's attitude would not have been markedly different.

  Something had changed.

  Fay said cautiously, 'So when is he going to talk to me? On tape.'

  'Leave it with me,' Rachel said. 'I'll fix it.' She spread her arms to usher Fay back towards the wooden framework evidently destined to be a doorway.

  'I hate having to ask this sort of question.' Fay stopped at the entrance. 'But he isn't going to be talking to anyone else, is he, first?'

  'Not if I can help it. Listen, we've been walking around this place for the last forty-five minutes and I've forgotten your name.'

  'Fay. Fay Morrison.'

  'Would you like a job, Fay?'

  'Huh?'

  'Quite ludicrous salary. Seductively fast company car. Lots of foreign travel.'

  Fay stared at her.

  'Silly expenses,' Rachel said. 'Untold fringe benefits.' She'd turned her back on the big window. From the far end of the room, the hills had been squeezed out of the picture; the window was full of Tump.

  'How long have you been doing this?' Fay asked. 'As Goff's PA.'

  'Nearly four years now. I think I've done rather well on the whole. Although the physical demands are not too arduous, Max's bisexuality goes in alternating phases. During his DC periods he can leave you alone for months.'

  The grey eyes were calm and candid.

  'Jesus Christ,' Fay said.

  'Oh, don't get me wrong – I don't mind that. I almost became an actress, anyway. And with Max, there's rarely anything terribly tiring. And never anything particularly bizarre. Well, except for the crystals, and he only ever tried that once. And anyway, one always has to weigh these things against the benefits. No, it's just…'

  Rachel dug her fists deep into the pockets of her Barbour until Fay could see the knuckles outlined in the shiny, waxed fabric.

  '.. It's just I don't think I can go through with it here,' Rachel said. 'Do you know what I mean?'

  Grace Legge came here to die. Dad came to go slowly loopy, and I came to watch.

  'Yes,' Fay said bleakly, 'I know exactly what you mean. I'm beginning to realize how hard it is to get anything positive to take off here.'

  She'd read somewhere that nobody could say for certain where the name Crybbe came from. It was obviously a corruption of the Welsh, and there were two possible derivations:

  crib – the crest of a hill (which seemed topographically unlikely, because the town was in a valley).

  or

  crybachu – to wither.

  It appeals to him, you know,' Rachel said. 'The fact that failure is so deeply ingrained here. Brings out the crusader him. He's going to free the place from centuries of bucolic apathy.'

  'The first story Offa's Dyke got me to cover,' Fay remembered, 'was the opening of a new factory on the industrial estate. Quite a lively little set-up producing chunky coloured sandals – in fact I'm wea
ring a pair, see? They were providing eight local jobs and the Marches Development Board were predicting it'd be twenty before the end of the year.'

  'Closed down, didn't it? Was it last week?'

  'I'd have ordered another pair if I'd known,' Fay said.

  They stared at each other, almost comically glum, then Rachel tossed back her ash-blonde hair and strode determinedly through to the room which would soon be a kitchen.

  'Come on, let's get out of here, he'll be back soon.' She picked up two tumblers from the draining surface next to the new sink, and Fay followed her outside, where she dug a bottle

  of sparkling wine from the silt in the bottom of an old sheep trough – 'My private cellar.'

  And then they collected a grateful Arnold from the Range Rover and wandered off across the field, down the valley to the river, where you could sit on the bank fifty yards from the three-arched bridge and probably not see the Court any more nor even the Tump.

  On the way down the field Fay looked over her shoulder to watch the Tump disappearing and saw a man among the trees on its summit. He was quite still, obviously watching them.

  'Rachel, who's that?'

  'Where?'

  'On the Tump. I don't think it's Goff.'

  Rachel turned round and made no pretence of not staring.

  'It's Humble,' she said. 'Max's minder. He loves it here. He used to be a gamekeeper. He prowls the woods all the time, supposedly organizing security. I think he snares rabbits and

  things.'

  'Very Green, I must say,' Fay said.

  'Max's principles tend to get overlooked where Humble's concerned. I think he sometimes serves the need that occasionally arises in Max for, er, rough boys.'

  'I think I'm sorry I asked,' said Fay.

  Alex awoke.

  There was pressure on his chest. When he was able to open his eyes just a little, with considerable difficulty, he looked into blackness.

  Oh lord, he thought, I've actually entered the dark place, I'm in there with Grace.

  Yet he was still in the armchair. The chair was refusing to let go of him. It had closed around him like an iron lung or something. He was a prisoner in the chair and in the dark and there was a pressure on his chest.

  'Grace?' he said feebly. 'Grace?'

  The darkness moved. The darkness was making a soft, rhythmic noise, like a motor boat in the distance.

  Alex opened his eyes fully and stared into luminous amber-green, watchful eyes. He chuckled; the darkness was only a big, black cat.

  'Ras… Ras…' he whispered weakly, trying to think of the creature's name.

  The cat stood up on his chest.

  'Rastus!' Alex said triumphantly. 'Hullo, Rastus. You know, for a minute, I thought… Oh, never mind, you wouldn't understand.'

  He wondered if it was teatime yet. The clock said… what? Couldn't make out if it was four o'clock or five. Around four, Grace always liked a pot of tea and perhaps a small slice of Dundee cake. She'd be most annoyed if he'd slept through teatime.

  Fay, on the other hand, preferred a late meal. Women were so contrary. It generally saved a lot of argument if he ate with them both.

  Alex chuckled again. No wonder he was getting fat.

  Rachel put the bottle in the river and took off her Barbour. 'I'll be thirty-six in January.'

  'Happens to us all,' Fay said.

  'I was… very much on top of the situation when I took the job. Nothing could touch me, you know? I was chief Press Officer at Virgin, and he head-hunted me. He said, you’re your price, so I doubled my salary and he said, OK, it's yours – can you believe that?'

  She handed Fay the glasses, pulled the bottle out of the water and shot the cork at the bridge. It fell short and they watched it bobbing downstream. 'Does that count as pollution?' Rachel wondered.

  'Why was Goff so attracted to Crybbe?'

  Rachel poured wine until it fizzed to the brim of both tumblers. 'Magic'

  'Magic?' Fay repeated in a flat voice.

  'Earth magic.'

  'You mean ley-lines?'

  'You know what all that's about? I mean, don't be ashamed, it's all speculation anyway.'

  'Tell me what it means in the Crybbe context.'

  'OK, well, presumably you know about Alfred Watkins who came up with the theory back in the 1920s. Lived in Hereford and did most of his research in these hills. Had the notion, and set out to prove it, that prehistoric sacred monuments – standing stones, stone circles, burial mounds, all this – were arranged in straight lines. Just route markers, he thought originally, on straight roads.'

  'I've got his book. The Old Straight Track.'

  'Right. So you know that where four or five sites fell into a straight line, he'd call it a ley, apparently because a lot of the places where these configurations occurred had names ending in l-e-y, OK?'

  'Like Crybbe?'

  Rachel grinned. 'Well, he didn't know about Crybbe, or he'd probably have called them Crybbe-lines. You read through Watkins's book, you won't find a single mention of Crybbe.'

  'I know. I looked. I was quite disappointed.'

  'Because, apart from the Tump, there's nothing to see. However, it seems there used to be bloody dozens of standing stones and things around here at one time, which disappeared over the centuries. Farmers used to rip them out because they got in the way of ploughing and whatever else farmers do.'

  Rachel waved a dismissive hand to emphasize the general tedium of agriculture. 'Anyway, there are places in Britain where lots of ley-lines converge, ancient sacred sites shooting off in all directions. Which, obviously, suggests these places were of some great sacred significance, or places of power.'

  'Stonehenge?'

  'Sure. And Glastonbury Tor. And Avebury. St Michael's Mount in Cornwall. And other places you've probably never heard of.'

  'But not Crybbe. You're really not going to tell me Crybbe was ever sacred to anybody.'

  Rachel swallowed a mouthful of wine and wiped her mouth with a deliberately graceless gesture before topping up her glass. Down on your knees, woman, I'm afraid you're on holy ground.'

  The bridge carried the main road into town and behind it Fay could see chimneys and the church tower. Wooded hills – mixture of broadleaf and conifer – tumbled down on three

  sides. From anywhere at a distance, Crybbe looked quite picturesque. And that was all.

  'So how come there aren't bus-loads of pilgrims clogging the roads, then? How come this is close to being Britain's ultimate backwater?'

  'Because the inhabitants are a bunch of hicks who can't recognize a good tourist gimmick when they get one on a plate, I mean, they did rip out the bloody stones in the first place, that's why Max brought in Henry Kettle. He had to know where the stones used to be.'

  'Henry divines the spots?'

  'Sure. He pinpoints the location, then what you do is stick pole in the ground at the exact spot. And if you're as rich and self-indulgent as Max Goff, what you do next is have lots of lovely new stones cut to size and planted out in the fields, prehistoric landscape-gardening on a grand scale.'

  'Gosh.' Fay was picturing a huge, wild rock-garden, with daffodils growing around the standing stones in the spring. Crybbe suddenly a little town in a magic circle. 'I think that sounds rather a nice thing to do… don't you? I mean, bizarre, but nice, somehow.'

  'Except it's not quite as easy as it sounds,' Rachel said. 'And it's going to cause trouble. Within a couple of weeks Kettle'd discovered the probable sites of nearly thirty prehistoric stones, a couple of burial mounds, not to mention a holy well.'

  'Wow.'

  'And fewer than a quarter of the sites are on the eight and a half acres of land which Max bought with the Court, so he's going to restore Stone Age Crybbe he's got to negotiate with a lot of farmers.'

  'Ah. Mercenary devils, farmers.'

  'And awkward sods, in many cases.'

  'True. So how's he going to handle it?'

  'He wants to hold a big public meeti
ng to tell the people how he plans to revitalize their town. I mean, obviously you've got the considerable economic benefits of tourism – look how many foreign trippers flock to Avebury. But also – unwisely in my view – he's going to explain all the esoteric stuff. What ley lines are really all about, and what they can do for the town.'

  'Energy lines,' Fay said. 'I've also read that other book, The Old Golden Land.'

  'By J. M. Powys, distant descendant of the great mystical writer, John Cowper Powys. Max loves that book. Coincidentally – or not, perhaps – he's just bought the company which published it. So he owns it now, and he likes to think he owns J. M. Powys… for whom He Has Plans.'

  'He's coming here?'

  'If he knows what's good for him. He'll have plenty of like-minded idiots for company. There are already nine New Age people living in the town in properties craftily acquired by Max over the past few months. Alternative healers, herbalists, astrologers.'

  'Can't say I've noticed them,' Fay admitted.

  'That's because some of them look quite normal. Only they know they are the human transmitters of the New Energy about to flow into Crybbe.'

  The idea being that ley-lines mark out some kind of force field, channels of energy, which Bronze Age people knew how tap into. Is that right?'

  'The Great Life Force, Fay. And so, naturally, re-siting the stones will bring new life flowing back into Crybbe. Max reckons – well, he hasn't worked it out for himself, he's been told by lots of so-called experts – that Crybbe is only in the depressed state it is today because all the stones have gone. So if you put them back, it'll be like connecting the town for the first time to the national grid. The whole place will sort of light up.'

  Fay thought about this. 'It sounds rather wonderful'

  'If you like that kind of fairy-tale.'

  'Is it?'

  'Oh, well, sure, what does it matter if it's true or not, it'll bring in the crowds, be an economic boost, a psychological panacea, create a few jobs. But you see, Fay, I know this guy.'

  Rachel held up the bottle, but Fay shook her head and Rachel poured what remained into her tumbler. 'I don't think I can stand to watch him being baronial at Crybbe Court, with his entourage of fringe scientists and magicians and minstrels and sundry jesters.'