Phil Rickman - Crybbe

'All I can suggest is you look the other way, Mrs Ivory, I'm sorry.'

'It's your fault,' Hilary turned furiously on her husband 'You knew it was coming. You should have warned him. What use is a seer who sees and doesn't tell?'

'Me?' Hitherto gloomily silent, Adam Ivory was stunned into speech. 'You didn't want me to say a word, you bloody hypocritical cow!' Halfway out of his seat, gripping his knees 'You didn't want to throw a shadow over things. You didn't want to lose your cosy little flat in your cosy little town in.. in…'

'Just a minute.' Col Croston jumped down from the platform and strode over to where the couple were sitting amidst Jarrett, a bunch of healers, the Newsomes and Larry Ember standing up, smoking a cigarette, his camera held between his ankles.

'What's this about? What are you saying?'

Guy Morrison said wearily, Adam reads tarot cards. He saw disaster looming.'

'Oh,' said Col, disappointed, 'I see.'

'No, you don't,' said Guy. 'Don't knock it, Col. This is a very weird set-up. Guy Morrison used to think he knew everything there was to know about the supernatural, i.e. that the whole thing was a lame excuse for not milking real life for everything one could get.'

Guy made a steeple out of the fingers of both hands and pushed them together, hard. 'But for once,' he said, 'Guy Morrison was wrong.'

'What d'you mean exactly?' Col looked for somewhere to sit down. There wasn't a spare chair, so he squatted, hands on thighs. 'What's the score here, as you see it, Guy? I mean, Christ, I've been around. Been in some pretty odd places, among some pretty primitive people, but, well, we don't notice things under our noses, sometimes. We think it's what you might call… what? Rural eccentricity, I suppose.'

'No. Look…' Guy had taken off his expensive olive leather jacket. He didn't seem to notice it was lying on the floor now, entangled in dusty shoes. 'Which is Mrs Byford? Ask her if she knows her granddaughter's some kind of witch… that girl, the artist. Ask her about the ex-policeman who cut his throat in her bathroom. Go on. Ask her.'

Oh hell, Col Croston thought. Bit barmy. He decided not to tell Guy the girl was here, displaying an anatomical interest in the corpse.

'You think I'm crazy, don't you? Ask her!'

'Shut up,' Jocasta Newsome hissed. 'Just shut up, Guy. Just for once.'

Guy whirled on her, eyes alight. 'You know I'm not crazy, you of all people. You showed me the drawings. You sent me to talk to the bloody girl. You… uuurh.'

Hereward Newsome's thin, sensitive, artistic hands were around his throat. 'You… smooth… self-opinionated… bastard!'

Col Croston leapt up as Guy's chair crashed over into the aisle, the chair's and Guy's legs both in the air, Hereward, teeth clenched, trying to smash Guy's head into the boarded floor.

'No wonder… she wanted you to… open the fucking.. . exhibition.' Col Croston gripping Hereward's shoulder, wrenching him off, as Catrin Jones – 'Guy!' – fell down heavily beside her producer 'Are you all right?' Lifting his head into her lap. 'Guy?' Staring up, appalled, at the madman with the thinning hair and the greying, goatee beard, held back by his collar like a snarling dog, hands clawing at the air.

'He's only been screwing my wife,' the madman spat, and Catrin froze – maybe he was not so mad, after all – allowing Guy's head to fall to the floor with an audible thump.

Larry Ember was cradling his camera, ostensibly to save it from being kicked, the lens pointed casually at the scene before him. 'One for the Christmas tape,' he murmured to Tom, the soundman. 'Got to keep the old spirits up, ain'tcha?' On the same tape were the pictures he'd surreptitiously shot of Max Goff's body, while carrying the camera under his arm at waist level.

'You'll put that thing away!' Sharp-featured Mrs Byford, the council clerk, was on her feet, back arched.

'Wasn't aware it was out, darlin'.' Larry inspecting his trousers.

'Colonel!'

'Come on, old boy, please. Leave the thing under the table, hmm?'

'I don't think so, squire.' Larry raising the camera to his shoulder, aiming it at Col, adjusting the focus.

'Guy, would you mind exerting your…?'

But Guy, still sprawled half-stunned in the aisle, was staring over the Colonel's shoulder, eyes widening. 'She… she's there.. . Jocasta… tell them…'

The girl stood on the edge of the platform. She wore black jeans and a black top. Even her lipstick was black. Her skin, in the blue fluorescence, was like a grim, cloudy day.

A small, grey-faced man, perhaps the husband, snatched ineffectually at Mrs Byford's arm as she stepped out, screeching, 'Tessa! What you doing in yere…? Get out… No,

'Nobody gets out,' Tessa said sweetly.

Guy was up, staggering, one hand massaging the back of his head, the other groping for the cameraman's arm. 'The girl. Shoot her. I want the girl.'

As Larry advanced slowly towards the girl, camera on his shoulder, eye hard to the projecting viewfinder, Mrs Byford launched herself at him from behind, pummelling his back, clawing at his neck.

'Nettie!' the grey-faced man shouted. 'No! Don't cause no.. .'

Col pulled her off with one hand, getting his face scratched. 'Mrs Byford! Guy, can't you stop this stupid bastard before…'

'So…' Guy was panting, 'this is Mrs Byford, is it? Perhaps she can tell us all about Handel Roberts, who topped himself in her bathroom… and yet was in this room tonight?'

'Now listen, Mr Clever TV Man… Guy turned slowly and painfully and looked into tiny, round eyes and a small, fleshy mouth set into a face too big for them.

'Handel Roberts is dead,' said Wynford Wiley.

'Exactly,' said Guy.

Col's feelings about newcomers who tried to take over, assuming a more elevated intellect and an understanding of the rural psyche, were warning him to take it easy. But there was an ice-ball forming in the pit of his stomach.

'Stop it!' Jocasta Newsome, rising like a Fury. 'Stop it, stop it, stop it! What are you all trying to do?'

'Aye,' a man's voice said. "Can't you, none of you, control yourselves?'

'At least we're not brain dead!' – the feminist astrologer with the ring through her nose – 'Look at you all… you're fucking pathetic. Somebody tells you to sit there and don't move again until they tell you you can stand up and leave. A man's been brutally murdered… You don't even react! What kind of fucking morons.. .'

A girl in her twenties, built like Catrin Jones, only more muscular, stamped across the room, 'You'll shut your mouth, lady, or I'm gonner shut it for you.'

'Oh yeah, we'll all shut our mouths and turn a blind eye and ask no questions. And where has that got you all these years? Max Goff was the only promising thing that ever happened to this shithole, and what do you do?,.. you kill him, like… like the bloody savages did to the missionaries. Except they weren't savages really, at least they had this ethnic…'

'Sit down, the pair of you!' Mrs Byford's husband was quaking. 'Can't you see, this is what it wants… Jimmy Preece said, be calm. He knows… it's what it wants… rowing and… and conflict, everybody all worked up, like.'

'Mr Byford is absolutely right,' Col said, wondering what the hell Mr Byford was on about. 'I'm going to go out and find the Mayor, call the police and get this…'

'No you're not, Colonel…'

'Look…'

And then there was a crash from the front of the hall. Larry Ember hadn't exactly dropped his camera – which Col suspected no self-respecting TV cameraman ever did, even if he'd been shot – but he'd certainly put it down quite heavily, and he was stumbling back along the centre aisle, moaning in some distress with both hands over his face.