Phil Rickman - Crybbe

But he still thought, that's where I should be. Or with Fay.

Not here.

Or am I just trying to put it off again, the confrontation – afraid my reasoning's all to cock and this man, with his precise, laid-back logic and his superior knowledge of the arcane, is going to hold up another dark mirror.

As was usual with these things, he didn't notice it happening until it had been happening for quite some time.

Climbing easily over the ruins of the wall, where somebody had taken a bulldozer for a midnight joy-ride, the rhythm of his breath began to change so that it was a separate thing from what he was doing, which was labouring up the side of the mound. Normally, to do this, he would be jerking the breath in like a fireman on a steam train shovelling more and more coal on, breath as fuel. But he was conscious, in an unconcerned dreamlike way, of the climb being quite effortless and the breathing fuelling something else, some inner mechanism.

Each breath was a marathon breath, long, long, long, but not at all painful. When you discovered that you, after all, possessed a vast inner strength, it was a deeply pleasurable thing.

He followed what he thought was the beam from the lamp until he realized the lamp had gone out but the beam had not… as though he was throwing a shadow, a negative shadow, which made it a shadow of light.

Out of the tufted grass and into the bushes, moving with ease, watching his legs doing the work, as legs were meant to do, tearing through the undergrowth in their eagerness to take him to the summit of the mound.

The source.

Each breath seeming to take minutes, breathing in not only air, but colours, all the colours of the night, which were colours not normally visible to undeveloped human sight.

Moving up the side of the Tump, between bushes and tree trunks and moving effortlessly. Effortlessly as the last time. goes round… thrice… goes round…

Nobody panicked.

Well, they wouldn't, would they? Not in Crybbe. They'd be quite used to this by now. Part of everyday life. Everynight life, anyway.

So there were no screams, no scrambles for the door. Guy Morrison knew this because he was standing only yards from the exit where the fat policeman, Wiley, was doubtless still at his post.

'Only a matter of time, wasn't it?' Col Croston called out. 'Don't worry, it often happens during council meetings. Mrs By ford's gone to switch on the generator.'

It was a bloody mercy, in Guy's opinion.

The woman was completely and utterly insane.

For the first time, Guy was profoundly thankful he and Fay had never had children.

He hoped that by the time the lights came on she'd have had the decency to make herself scarce. The sheer embarrassment of it!

'Guy?'

Somebody snuggled against his chest.

'Just as well it is me,' he whispered, and she giggled and kissed his neck.

A worrying thought struck him.

'You're not wearing lipstick, are you, Catrin?'

'Not any more,' Catrin Jones said, and Guy plunged a hand into his jacket pocket, searching frantically for a handkerchief.

'No, I'm not,' Catrin said. 'Honest. I'm sorry.'

'Shut up then,' he hissed, conscious of the fact that nobody else appeared to be talking.

'Won't be long now,' Col Croston shouted cheerfully. At least, Guy thought, it would be an opportunity for him to pretend the five minutes before the power cut had never happened.

He became aware that somebody had drawn back the curtains at the windows, and what little light remained in the sky showed him a scene like the old black and white photographs he'd seen of the insides of air-raid shelters in the blitz, only even more overcrowded. All it needed was someone with rampant claustrophobia to start floundering about and there'd be total chaos.

But nobody moved and nobody spoke and it was quite uncanny. He felt Catrin's hand moving like a mouse in one of his hip pockets. When they got back to Cardiff he'd suggest she should be transferred. Something she couldn't very well refuse – six months' attachment as an assistant trainee radio producer, or anything else that sounded vaguely like promotion.

As his eyes adjusted, Guy was able to make out individual faces. A fat farmer who hadn't taken off his cap. That cocky little radio chap trying vainly to see his watch. Jocasta Newsome and her husband – strange that she wasn't talking; perhaps they'd had a row.

The radio bloke – at least this outfit had had the good sense not to have Fay covering the meeting – was on his feet and moving to the door.

'Just a minute,' Guy heard Wiley say officiously. 'Where do you think you're goin'?'

'Look, I've got an urgent news report to go down. Gavin Ashpole, Offa's Dyke Radio.'

'Well, you can 'ang on yere. Studio won't be workin' if there's no power, is it?'

'Then I'll do it by phone. Do you mind?'

'I'm not bein' offensive, sir, but you might 'ave lifted somebody's wallet in there and be makin' off with the proceeds.'

'Oh, for… Look, pal, I've got an expensive tape recorder on the floor under the chairman's table. You can hold it to for ransom if I don't come back. Now, please.'

'Lucky I recognizes your voice, Mr Ashpole,' Wynford Wiley said genially, and Guy heard a bolt go back.

'Thanks.'

Guy heard the door grinding open, but he didn't hear it close again. He didn't hear anything.

Had he been looking through the viewfinder of a camera, it would have seemed at first like a smear on the lens.

Then it took shape, like a sculpture of smoke, and a figure was standing in the central aisle between the two blocks of chairs. It looked lost. It moved in short steps, almost shuffling, like a Chaplinesque tramp in an old film, but in slow-motion. There was a yellowish tinge to its ill-defined features. It was a man.

His nose was large and bulbous, his eyes were pure white and he was moving down the aisle towards Guy Morrison.

Even without his razor, Guy would have known him anywhere.

Guy screamed.

'No! Get away! Get back.'

Catrin gasped and moved sharply away from him.

But ex – very-ex – Police Sergeant Handel Roberts continued to shuffle onwards as if the room were not illegally overcrowded but empty apart from Guy Morrison and himself.

'Jocasta!' Guy screamed. "Look! It's him. It's him!'

Closing his eyes, throwing an arm across his face, he plunged forward like someone making a desperate dash through flames to the door of a blazing room.

There was a ghastly, tingling moment, a damp and penetrating cold, and then he was on his knee, his head in her lap, his hands clawing at her dress, mumbling incoherently into her thighs. He began to sob. 'Oh God, Jocasta, it's…'

Jocasta Newsome didn't move. When he opened his eyes he saw there were lights on in the room, but different lights, fluorescent bars high on the walls. He looked up at her face and found it harsh and grainy in the new light and frozen into an expression of ultimate disdain.

'You filthy bastard,' the thin, bearded man next to her said.

Moving like a train through the night, the track unrolling before you, a ribbon of light, straight as a torch beam There are deep-green hills on either side – deep green because they are dense with trees – and the silver snaking river, all of this quite clearly visible, for they do not depend on sunlight or moonlight but have their own inner luminescence.

There are no buildings in this landscape, no farms or cottages or barns or stables or sheep-sheds, no cars, no tractors, no gates, no fences, no hedges. In some places, the trees give way, diminishing themselves, become not separate, definite organic entities but a green wash, a watercolourist's view of trees. Then they fade into fields, but with the spirit of the old woodland still colouring their aura.