Phil Rickman - Crybbe

'Arnold!' Powys shouted. 'Come on!'

The dog trotted down to the foot of the mound and ambled across. Powys bent down and the dog snuffled up at him and licked his hands. Gently, Powys slid one hand underneath, he could actually feel the stitching.

Arnold squirmed free and made off, back across the field towards the Tump, looking back at Powys every few yards and barking.

'He's found something,' Minnie Seagrove said. 'He wants to show you something.'

I can't believe this, Powys thought. This is seriously weird. He isn't even limping.

Arnold's tail started to wave when he saw Powys was following him. He ran a few yards up the side of the Tump and then sat down.

He sat down.

The dog with only one back leg sat down.

Arnold barked. He turned around and put his nose into the side of the Tump and snuffled about. Then he turned round again and started to bark at Powys.

Powys thought – the words springing into his mind in Henry Kettle's voice – he's a dowser's dog.

He wandered back to the digger, rubbing his forehead. 'Gomer, what are the chances of you doing a spot of excavation?'

'What?' Gomer said, in there?'

'Be a public service,' Powys said. 'That Tump's a liability. If it wasn't for that Tump, Henry Kettle would be alive today and locating wells.'

'Protected Ancient Monument, though, isn't it?' Gomer said. 'That's an offence, unauthorized excavation of a Protected Ancient Monument.'

'Certainly is,' said Powys.

'That's all right, then,' said Gomer, glasses twinkling. 'Where you want the 'ole?'

The acoustic in the square was tight and intimate, like a studio, and the voice was deep and resonant: strong and melancholy music. Wonderful broadcasting voice, Fay thought, trying to be cynical. Radio Three, FM.

'When you think about it,' the voice said, 'any town centre's an intensely powerful place; it's where energy gathers from all directions, thoughts and feelings pouring in. It's where we go to tap into a town, to feel its life rhythm.'

Pure radio, Fay thought. The purest radio of all, because we can't see anything. No distractions. He can design his pictures in our minds.

'The town centre is where the centuries are stored,' Andy said. 'Smell them. Smell the centuries.'

All I can smell, Fay thought, is shit. Four hundred years of shit. And all I can hear is bullshit. Had to keep telling herself that. This was Andy Boulton-Trow, of Bottle Stone farm. Descendant of Sheriff Wort, scourge of Crybbe, black magician, the most hated man in

…

'What you can smell,' Andy Boulton-Trow said (and she felt, most uncomfortably, that he was speaking directly to her), 'is many centuries of human life. There haven't always been sewerage systems and hot water and fresh vegetables. This town lived on the border of two often hostile countries, and it had to live within itself. It ground its own flour, killed its own meat and kept its own counsel.'

He paused. 'And its secrets. It kept its secrets.'

Fay thought, drab secrets densely woven into a faded, dim old tapestry.

Boulton-Trow's voice was the only sound in the square. The only sound in the world – for this square was the world. None of them could leave it, except – perhaps – by dying.

Should have been a terrifying thought. Wasn't.

She couldn't remember, for the moment, quite what he looked like, this Boulton-Trow. Only that he was tall and dark and bearded. Like Christ; that was how people saw Him.

But she couldn't see Boulton-Trow. She couldn't see anybody. You'd have thought your eyes would have adjusted by now, so that you'd be able to make our at least the shapes of men and women. But unless they were very close to you, you could see nothing. This darkness was unnatural.

Not, however, to Andy. She could feel that. He knew his way around the darkness. If anybody could lead them out of here it would be him, and that would be comforting to these people.

Perhaps it was comforting to her.

But there was no immediate comfort in Andy's message.

'And now you come here, and you want Crybbe to give up its secrets to you. To lay open its soul to you. You want to feel its spirit inside you. Isn't that right?'

'We want to help it rediscover its own spirit,' someone said 'Surely that's what this is about, this experiment.'

'This experiment.' Andy laughed. 'And who's the subject of this experiment? Is it Crybbe? Or is it us? Maybe we're here to let the town experiment on us. It's an interesting idea, isn't it? Maybe Crybbe can work its own alchemy if you're prepared to put yourselves into the crucible. Perhaps what you're experiencing now is a taster. Can you handle this? Are you strong enough?'

Talk about a captive audience. Fay thought. It was an uneasy thought. She was a captive, too. Would she not also go along with anything this man suggested if he could lead her out of here, back into where there were lights.

'Sense of place,' Andy said. 'You want to feel that sense of place that finds an echo in your own hearts. You want to belong. You want to lay yourself down in a field on a summer's evening and you want the mysteries to come to you, whispered in your ears, drifting on the air and smelling of honeysuckle.'

'Yes,' a woman said faintly. 'Yes.'

Andy paused and the night held its breath.

Thai's not how it works,' he said. 'You know that really, don't you? This is how it works. This is Sense of Place. Feel it. Smell it. Secrets come out like babies, writhing and covered in blood and slime. And all of us genteel New Age people, we turn up our noses and we start to scream. Let me out of here! I can't bear it! Give me my picturesque half-timbered cottage and my chintzy sofa and my books. Give me my incense and my crystals and my immersion tank. Give me my illusions back. Yeah?'

Nobody spoke.

'I can't give you your illusions back,' Andy said gently.

The silence was total.

Radio, Fay thought desperately. It's only radio. You know the techniques, you know the tricks. He's standing there at the mixing desk, the Presenter and also the Engineer, playing with the effects, adjusting the atmos.

'But if you trust me,' Andy said, 'I can give you the true secrets of Crybbe. Think about this. I'll be back.'

And the voice was gone.

'Andy!' Jarrett shouted into the pungent night. 'Don't go!'

'He can't go,' Oona Jopson said. 'Can he?'

'Stop!' Powys shouted.

The mechanical digger groaned.

Arnold barked.

'Take it slowly, OK. We could be coming to something.

Gomer's customized digger had an extra spotlight, mounted on the cab. It wasn't as strong as the single headlight, but least you could focus it on the target.

Powys had been worried the wall would be a problem, but Gomer had done some skilled manoeuvring, putting on a show, riding the digger like a trick-cyclist, plant-hire choreographer, tapping the wall with the edge of the shovel in exactly the right places, until the stones crumbled apart like breezeblocks. Powys asking him, 'Out of interest, how long would it have taken you to take this wall apart with the bulldozer?'

Gomer had leaned out of his cab, his cigarette pointing upwards from his mouth so the red end was reflected in his glasses. 'You what, Joe? This ole wall? Gimme hour or so you'd never know there'd been a wall yere. Tell you what, it bloody hurt me, that did, havin' to say I couldn't 'andle 'it without a bigger 'dozer.'

Afterwards, it had just been a question of removing enough rubble to get the digger to the Tump. And after that…'

'Piece o' piss,' Gomer said. 'Sorry, Minnie.'

Mrs Seagrove sat on a broken section of the wall, dust all over her kilt, Arnold lying across her knees, watchful, both of them watching the action.

'Isn't he good, though, Joe?' she said as Gomer went into the Tump like a surgeon. 'Isn't he a marvel?'