Phil Rickman - Crybbe

Powys smiled. She was loving it. He wondered if she remembered killing Edgar Humble, or if she still half-thought that was all a dream, no more real now than Frank, her dead husband.

'Hold it a minute, Gomer, we've got…'

Gomer backed up, raised the shovel. Powys slid under it, lumps of earth falling on him from its great metal teeth.

'Minnie, can you pass me the hand-lamp?'

It looked like an opening. No more than five feet in, and they could be into some kind of tunnel. He shone the light inside and he could see a roof of solid stone, like the capstone of a dolmen.

'Gomer, we've cracked it.'

'Course we 'ave, boy. Want me to widen the 'ole?'

'OK.'

He stepped back and the shovel adjusted itself then went in again.

He couldn't believe this. They'd gone in at precisely the spot where Arnold had been sitting (sitting – a leg short and he was sitting) and after no more than twenty minutes they were into the heart of this thing.

Powys looked up towards the sky, black and starless.

'Henry?' he said, 'is this you, you old bugger?'

Fay moved among them, listening, but speaking to no one.

It was obvious by now that Col Croston was not coming back to her. Perhaps, like Hereward, he'd gone to try and find a way out of the square.

'We're not in a different time zone,' Graham Jarrett was saying. 'It's not as simplistic as that. We're in what you might call a timeless zone. A place where the past and present exist in the same continuum.'

'What he was saying, about the town centre,' Adam Ivory said. 'I think that's literally central to this experience. The town centre's this kind of energy vortex…'

Fay moved on. They were creating a dream within a dream, the way New Age people tended to do, moving around scattering meaningless jargon, making themselves comfortable inside the experience.

But Jean Wendle, the most experienced of them all, was not here.

Or was she?

Fay moved around in the darkness, almost floating, coming to sense the nearness of other bodies and the emotions emanating from them: fear and exhilaration in equal quantities now. But she doubled there was one of them who would not prefer this experience in retrospect, returning to the square by daylight:

Yes, this was where it happened, just about here, yes, you can still feel the essence of it, yes, it'll never be the same again for me, this place, always be special, yes, it was like an initiation, becoming a part of this town. And now I feel I can tap into it whenever I want to, and I can really work here effectively now because I belong, because I've felt the Spirit of Crybbe.

Fay moved on. Through the radio world.

And now he was inside the Tump.

He'd been inside them before – burial chambers, passage graves. It was suggested that many of the stone dolmens cromlechs around the country had once been covered over, like this, with earth.

The passageway was perhaps three and a half feet wide, and was low, and he had to walk painfully bent over. He directed the beam at the walls and the ceiling; the structure appeared to be a series of cromlechs joined up, like vertebrae, wide slabs of grey-brown stone overhead, a floor of close-packed earth.

He turned around, with difficulty, and he couldn't see the entrance any more. He wasn't naturally claustrophobic, but he shuddered briefly at the thought of the opening being sealed behind him, great bucket-loads of earth dumped back and rubble from the wall heaped across so that nobody would ever know there was a passageway, so that he slowly suffocated in here and became one more well-preserved pile of bones in forgotten Bronze Age burial chamber.

He stopped.

His chest tightened.

Gomer. Could he really trust Gomer Parry?

So many old allegiances, never spoken of, in Crybbe. And new ones, too. Could you ever know exactly who belonged to whom?

Maybe he should have asked Gomer to come with him, but he couldn't leave Mrs Seagrove outside on her own.

Look, don't think about it, OK. Too much at stake to go back now. Concentrate on where you are, what it can tell you.

Keep going…

It would probably be an actual Bronze Age grave, although he doubted he was the first person since then to enter this mound. You couldn't excavate a prehistoric burial chamber in under an hour.

But was he the first to get inside since Michael Wort?

Abruptly it ended.

Out of the passage and into the chamber itself, wider, maybe eight feet in diameter, but not quite circular any more. It was cold in here; the air smelled old and rank.

In the centre of the chamber was a single flat stone.

On the stone was a wooden box.

Powys stopped at the entrance to the chamber, put the lamp on the ground, stood blocking the entrance, head bowed.

They didn't have boxes in the Bronze Age, not carved oak boxes anyway, with iron bands and locks.

He stood staring at the box in the lamp's beam, and his breathing tightened. The box was about twelve inches deep and eighteen inches square. It sang to him, and it sang of ancient evil.

Oh, come on…

He walked across the chamber to the box, and found he couldn't touch it.

There is no evil, only degrees of negativity.

Powys started to laugh, and then, quite deliberately, he bent down and switched off the lamp.

What is this about?

Well, he couldn't see the box any more, or the inside of the stone chamber; he could be anywhere, no visual images, no impressions coming in now.

Just me. And it. This is a real fairy hill, and I'm in the middle of it, and I've come here of my own free will and there's no Andy and no Jean and I'm scared. I've put out the light to induce a state of fear, and the nerve-ends are bristling with it and I'm ready.

I'm ready.

'Hereward?'

'Yes.'

'Thank God.'

'Why? Why are you thanking God?'

'Because I thought… I thought you weren't going to come back. Hereward, I'm so desperately sorry. I was only trying to get away. All I've ever wanted is to get away from here.'

'And you thought Guy Morrison would take you away?'

'No… yes… Oh God, I don't know what I thought, I was just so lonely and messed up. He – Guy – was passing through, he wasn't part of Crybbe, he was going somewhere and I was stuck fast. I was like someone just dashing outside and thumbing a lift. And he stopped. I'm sorry, that's all mixed up, I'm not very clear tonight, not very articulate.'

'Don't cry.'

'I'm sorry. I'm sorry about the picture, too, but you don't know what pictures can do.'

'Oh, I do.'

'I'm not talking about aesthetics.'

'I know.'

'Do you?'

'Pictures are doorways.'

'Yes.'

'Artists put elements of themselves into pictures, and also elements of other things. The man in that picture of Tessa's, he's her teacher, you know. He has a studio in the woods, and she's been going down there and he's been teaching her how to paint. And what to paint. How to make a picture into doorway.'

'How do you know that?'

'Because, in the picture, he's standing in a doorway, like The Light of the World, in reverse, because he's so dark. But darkness and light, it's all the same when you can't see, isn't it?'

'I don't…'

'I'm going through the doorway, Jocasta.'

'Hereward?'

'It really is the only way out of here, through the doorway. The only way out for me, anyway.'

'Hereward, I'm getting very scared.'

'There's no need to be scared. Come here, darling. There.'

'No. No, please.'

'There… there…'

'Aaaugh.'

'There.'

Hereward felt the woman go limp, and his hands fell away from her throat. He felt himself smiling into the dark as he walked away.

The lamp was alight, and the door was ajar. When he pushed, it swung open at once, and Hereward found himself in the comfortingly familiar setting of his own workshop next to The Gallery.