Crybbe aka Curfew

by Phil Rickman

  Fay.

  Picturing her standing in the field overlooking Crybbe, the blue cagoule streaming from under her arm, her rainbow eye watering in the wind.

  It made him so sad, this image, that he had a wild urge to dump the box and race out of the Court – filthy, clammy, raddled old hag – and run back to Crybbe to find Fay and hold her, even if they only had a few minutes before…

  Before whatever was to happen, happened.

  He wore his sense of foreboding like the black bag over a condemned man's head. Yet he was still half-amazed at what he was planning to do: black comedy, a bizarre piece of alternative theatre. Verdict: took his own life while the balance of mind was disturbed.

  The voice of the police inspector, Hughes, landed in his head. Are you sure he didn't say anything to you, Mrs Morrison, by way of suicide note, so to speak? Or did he assume, do you think, that his method of taking his own life would be self-explanatory?

  Well, he was a crank, wasn't he? You only had to read his book.

  He wondered if the day would ever come when an inquest would concede that the balance of mind might be affected by prevailing psychic conditions.

  Bloody New Age crap.

  There was a stench of rancid fat. He felt sick.

  It would be good, in a way, to be out in the fresh air.

  As Col turned the corner of the back street linking the town hall with the churchyard, there was an enormous splintering roar and a belch that shook the ground. And then – as if massive furnace doors had been flung wide – huge, muscular arms of flame reached out for the heavens.

  'Go easy,' Col said. 'I think the church roof's collapsed.'

  There were about twenty men with him, the youngest and strongest of them. Bill Davies, the butcher, was there, and the three burly Gwatkin brothers.

  'God preserve us,' one of them said and then turned away, embarrassed, his face already reddened in the glare from the church.

  'It's down to you now,' Col said. He hoped to God the stone walls of the church would contain the fire so that it wouldn't spread into the town, but the heat was unbelievable; anything could happen. Crackling splinters – in fact, great burning brands – were being thrown off, and every so often there'd be a chaotic clanging of the bells.

  'What we're going to do…' Col said. 'All over the churchyard, you'll see pieces of wood ablaze. I want six of you to get the ones you can handle at one end and bring them out. This is bloody dangerous, so be damned careful, but we've got to have light where we're going.'

  'Why can't we just go 'ome and get torches?' a young lad of seventeen or eighteen, said.

  'Do as he says, boy,' Bill Davies grunted. 'Nobody goes out of this street. You step into that square, you'll wish you'd stayed and burned.'

  As a handful of men climbed over the churchyard wall, Bill Davies took Col aside. 'I'm not wrong, am I, Colonel?'

  'Look, be a good chap…'

  'Tell me. Colonel. I 'ave to know, see. Is it… in that square… Oh hell, is it the year 1593 over there, or is it an illusion? Is this town living an illusion, do you know?'

  Joe Powys went up the stairs, past a small landing with an oak door four inches thick, which was open, revealing the stairs up to the attic.

  Walking up the steps, towards the death-chamber of Michael Wort with what he believed to be the head of Michael Wort in a wooden box under his arm.

  People like me would no more come up here alone, he remembered thinking, than pop into a working abattoir to shelter from the rain.

  But you aren't alone, are you?

  The box was heavy.

  Trying to avoid touching the walls because the stone was slick with something that felt like mucous. Suspecting that if he switched off the lamp, it would glow on the stones, luminous.

  And so he came, at last, to the alcove leading to the prospect chamber.

  When he put down the box to open the door, he felt Rachel was standing at his side. Remembering being here with her. How two wafers of light from holes in the roof had crossed just above her head and he'd recalled her standing by the window of the room at the Cock, naked and pale and ethereal.

  Now he could almost see her calm, silvery shade; they'd go hand in hand into the prospect chamber.

  This… is the only part of the house I really like.

  And together they'd take the head of Michael Wort back into the night.

  He turned the metal handle and put his shoulder to the old, oak door.

  New Age Heaven.

  Blissful, blissful, blissful.

  'I want to touch him,' the woman next to her cried. 'I want to bathe in him.'

  Michael, Michael, MICHAEL, MICHAEL!

  The Being of Light lifted his head and spread his arms to embrace his town. Bright people were gathering around him, both sexes, shimmering, all shapes and sizes, from the large, smiling man in the incandescent white suit to the tiny little lady, mouth opening in delight to reveal small, sharp white teeth, like a fish's, like… like…

  Couldn't remember.

  But she didn't want to remember. She'd never fell so warm and yet so free. She saw herself soaring above Crybbe, and the town was decked out in ribbons of soft, coloured light anchored by ice-bright, luminescent standing stones. Floating over square, she saw the old buildings in a lambent Christmas-card glow. But some of them were not so old, their timbers looked sturdy and neatly dovetailed, especially the inn, which had a simple strength and a sign with a large, rough beast upon it, and indeed, there were farm animals in the square around a cart with wooden wheels and sacks of grain on it. There was a cow, three horses, a pig. And a dog! Black and white like… like…

  Couldn't remember.

  'Fay.'

  Who was Fay?

  'Listen to me.'

  'Yes,' she sang. 'Yes, yes, yes, I'm listening.'

  But she had no intention of listening; this was the wrong voice. It didn't sound like a cello, it sounded old and frail, an ancient banjo, cracked and out of tune.

  She laughed.

  Everyone was laughing.

  New Age Heaven.

  'Fay,' Alex said into her ear. 'Listen to me, please.'

  'Yes, yes, yes,' she sang. 'But you'll have to come with me. Can you float? Can you float like me?'

  She wasn't floating. She was part of a group of thirty or forty people, hands linked, slowly and gloomily moving around in an untidy, irregular circle.

  Alex could see most of them now, in the spluttering amber of the blazing church.

  In the centre of the square, where, in many towns, there was a cross, a man stood. A tall man, stripped to the waist. He had dark, close-shaven hair and a black beard. His eyes were closed. He was sweating. His arms hung by his side but slightly apart from his body, the palms of his hands upturned. The ragged circle of people moved around him, anticlockwise.

  The old buildings seemed to be leaning out of their foundations and into the firelight, like starved tramps at a brazier. The buildings had never looked more decrepit or as close to collapse.

  Similarly, the people. Alex followed Fay around, walking behind her, peering into the faces of the men and women in the circle, horrified at how weak and drained they looked, some of them obviously ill. On one side of his daughter was a stocky man with a sagging belly and one eye badly bloodshot. He was moaning faintly and saliva dribbled down his chin. Fay's other hand lay limply in a flabby hand full of rings, obviously not very expensive ones, for they looked tarnished now and the joints of the fingers were swollen around them. The woman's hair was in wild, white corkscrews; her lips were drawn back into a frozen rictus; she was breathing in spurts through clenched teeth.

  Diametrically opposite this woman, Alex saw Fay's ex-husband Guy Morrison, his blond hair matt-flat, exposing a large, white bald patch; his mouth down-turned, forming pouches of slack skin from his cheek to his once-proud jawline. Next to him a fat girl was sobbing inconsolably to herself as she moved sluggishly over the cobbles. On the other side of this girl, a thin woman wit
h shorn hair was breathing with difficulty, in snorts, blood sparkling on her upper lip and around her nose, from which a small ring hung messily from a torn flap of skin, and every time she took a breath part of the ring disappeared into a nostril. She didn't seem aware of her physical distress; nor did any of the others.

  'Fay,' Alex whispered.

  Fay's skin was taut and pallid, her green eyes frozen open, her lips stretched in anguish, which made the words issuing from them all the more pathetic.

  'Flying away, high, into the light. Can't keep up with me, can you?'

  He didn't even try. He stood in the shadows and watched her drift away.

  He'd had to stop himself from pulling her out of the circle. He had the awful feeling that he would simply detach her body, that her mind would remain in the ring and she would never get it back, would be a vegetable.

  Which was the very worst thing of all; Alex knew this.

  He stood and watched her for two more circuits of the square. A lurid flaring of amber from the dying church picked out that woman from The Gallery, ugly blue bruises around her throat, dried vomit on her chin, coughing weakly; couldn't see her husband.

  Very gently he separated Fay's fingers from those of the woman next to her and slipped her small, cold right hand into his left. With his right hand he found the damp, fleshy finger of the white-haired woman.

  And so Alex slipped into the circle and began to move slowly round.

  He realized at once that he'd made a terrible, terrible mistake.

  His legs began to feel heavy and cumbersome. At first he felt as if he'd stepped into a pair of Wellingtons several sizes too big and was wading in them through thick, muddy water, and then the weight spread up to his thighs – he was in the middle of a river in cumbersome waders – and finally it was as though both legs had been set in concrete; how he managed to move he didn't know, but he kept on, at funereal pace, his arms feeling limp as though the blood were draining away into the other hands, his life energy passed along the chain.

  Progressive torpor. This was how it happened. Initiation ceremony. They were always saying, the newcomers, how much they wanted to fit in, become part of the community.

  Now here they were, all these bright, clever, New Age folk, achieving overnight what some people waited years to attain.

  All moving at last to the rhythm of Crybbe.

  PART NINE

  In actuality, of course, dowsing as an activity is no more

  spiritual than riding a bicycle: spirituality is in the

  person… Compared to this rich matrix of mystery the

  New Age 'energy' ideas are conceptually bankrupt.

  PAUL DEVEREUX

  Earth Memory – the Holistic

  Earth Mysteries Approach to

  Decoding Ancient Sacred Sites

  CHAPTER 1

  THE digger was crunching through the wood like a rhino on heat, Gomer Parry at the wheel, grinning like a maniac, dead cigarette, burned to the filter, clenched between his teeth. Minnie Seagrove holding on to the makeshift passenger seat, which didn't have a working safety-belt, a three-legged black and white dog balancing, just about, on her knee and glaring out of the window, barking away.

  This had all come about after they arrived back at Minnie's bungalow and Gomer, spotting the flames coming out of the town, reckoning it had to be the church, raced to Minnie's phone to summon the fire brigade and found the bloody old phone lines were down or something.

  Anyway, the phone was off and so was the one in the kiosk by the layby.

  'Something bloody funny yere.'

  They'd climbed back into the digger, Gomer heading back towards the town, foot down, headlight blasting at the night and then – 'Oh my God, Gomer, look out!'

  Bloody great wall of metal, Minnie's hands over her eyes, the dog going berserk and Gomer flattening the brakes and damn near wrenching the ole wheel out of its socket.

  Flaming great articulated lorry had jack-knifed across the road at – precisely – the spot Gomer himself went adrift earlier on. Was this a coincidence? Like hell it was.

  No sign of the driver, no blood in the cab, couldn't have been hurt, must've buggered off for help. So Gomer did this dynamite three-point turn and they were thundering off again.

  'Gonna find out what the bloody 'ell's afoot, 'ang on to your knickers – sorry, Minnie, but I've 'ad enough o' this mystery. You can push Gomer Parry just so far, see.'

  'Where are we going, Gomer?'

  'Back way into Crybbe. Tradesman's entrance. Never done it all the way on four wheels before.'

  And Gomer lit up a ciggy one-handed and spun the digger off the road and into the field, keeping well away from the Tump this lime, although he could tell it'd taken a hammering tonight, that ole thing, not got the power it had, see, just massive great lump of ole horseshit now, sorry Minnie.

  So it was round the back of the Tump, back to the Court and into the wood.

  'Ole bridle path, see.'

  'But we can't get through here, Gomer.' Minnie no doubt wondering, by this time, why he didn't drop her off home. But it wasn't safe for a woman alone tonight. Besides, he liked an audience, did Gomer Parry. Not been the same since the wife snuffed it.

  'If a 'orse can make it up here,' he told Minnie, 'Gomer Parry can do it in the best one-off, customized digger ever built.'

  So now the digger was flattening bushes either side and ripping off branches. 'Five minutes gets us out the back, bottom end of the churchyard, and we can see what the score is…'

  'Fuckin' Nora, what the 'ell's this?'

  For the second time in ten minutes, Gomer was on top of the brakes and Minnie was pulling her nails off on the lumpy vinyl passenger seat.

  The headlight'd found a bloody great stone right in the middle of the flaming road.

  'Who the… put that thing there?' Gomer was out of his cab sizing up the stone, seven or eight feet tall but not too thick. Arnold, out of the cab, too, standing next to Gomer barking at the stone, looking up at Gomer, barking at the stone again.

  'What you reckon to this then, boy?'

  Woof, Arnold went. Smart dog.

  'Dead right, boy,' said Gomer, looking up at the bright orange sky, like an early dawn 'cept for the sparks. 'Dead right.'

  Back in the cab, Gomer lit up another ciggy, grinned like a potentially violent mental patient, and started to lower the big shovel.

  And Fay, soaring above the town, far above the opalescent stones and the soft, pastel ribbons, felt a momentary lurch of nausea as the tallest, the brightest of the stones shivered, its radiance shaken, its magnesium-white core dying back to a feebly palpitating yellow.

  The yellow of…

  '… Fay…'

  The yellow of…

  'Please, F…'

  The yellow of disease.

  The yellow of embalming fluid.

  The yellow of pus from an infected wound.

  The yellow of Grace Legge.

  '… Fay?'

  'Dad?'

  She turned and saw his face, and his skin looked as white as his hair and his beard. She saw him against what looked like the flames of hell, and his old blue eyes were full of so much mute pleading that they were almost shouting down this sick, dreadful chant.

  Michael…

  Michael…

  MICHAEL…

  MICHAEL!!!

  screamed the

  poor, stricken, gullible bastards in the circle, and she could see them now. She could see them. She was gripping her dad's hand, and she could see them all in the light of Hell, and hell was what they looked like.

  Hell also was what Fay felt like.

  Her lips were like parchment and when she tried to wet them she found her tongue was a lump of asbestos.

  Michael, she wanted to say. It's Michael Wort.

  But she couldn't even make it to a croak

  Her eyes found the centre of the square, where the Being of Light was formed, pulsing with vibrant, liquid life energy, platinum-whi
te.

  Pulsing with energy, all right – their energy – but it was the very darkest thing she had ever seen in all of her life.

  Andy Boulton-Trow, a tall, bearded man, just an ordinary man – once – had been fitted for a black halo; it shimmered around him like the sun in a monochrome photo negative.

  The halo was the shadow of Black Michael. There were pinpoints of it in Trow's eyes which had flicked open and were looking steadily, curiously into hers.

  She put all the strength she had into squeezing her dad's hand. It felt as cold as her own.

  Trow did not move, his gaze like black velvet. Playing with her.

  Who are you? the eyes were asking. Have we met?

  The complete, charismatic, black evangelist.

  Somehow, Fay had milked a little strength from her poor father, enough to observe and to make simple deductions.

  You've had us all going around your Bottle Stone, haven't you? Children of the New Age. Follow anybody, won't they? Look at them now. Look at the Jopson woman, led by the ring in her nose and then – gentle tweak – you tear through her flesh, and she doesn't know or care. Look at bloody Guy – show him his own reflection in a mirror shaped like a TV screen and watch him slash his wrists. Look at Graham Jarrett, away in the ultimate hypnotic trance, lost his toupee and his nose needs wiping. Look at them. Look at what you've done.

  Arteriosclerotic dementia.

  You have good days. Sometimes you have two or three good days together and you realize what a hopeless old bugger you were the other day when the lift failed to make it to the penthouse.

  And then, one night, along comes a very cunning lady with an amorphous Chinese blob on a lead (which, as you thought, does not exist, but why else would she be trailing a lead?) And all the time you're with her, you're fine, you're wonderful, you're on top of the situation.

  Until it becomes apparent that the lady is a prominent member of the Opposition, planning a startling little coup in this dead-end backwater where surely nothing that happens can be of any significance in the Great Scheme of Things.