Phil Rickman - Crybbe

'Poor old Murray was quite thrown at first,' Alex said. 'Not every day you're recruited to cast out a malevolent spirit. Anyhow, he came to me for advice, and I said, go along and play it by ear, old boy. Nothing lost. So off he goes to the old Police House. Don't suppose you were around at the time, were you?'

Alex could see a number of people beginning to look worried, not least Wynford Wiley, the copper. 'And where do you think he found the evil spirit, Mrs Byford?'

"E wasn't evil!' Wynford spluttered out. "E was…'

'Where do you think he found this malignant entity?'

Her back arched. 'Stop this, you go no right to…'

'You know, don't you?'

'Keep calm, woman,' an old man said from behind. 'You got to keep calm, isn't it.'

Alex stood up. 'He found the evil, Mrs Byford… He found it in her eyes. Ironic, isn't it?'

Mrs Byford's hands, half-clawed, began to tremble. She stumbled into the aisle and stood there, shaking.

'Now…' Alex sat down. 'No, please, Mrs Byford, I'm not trying to bully you. Look, sit in one of the empty chairs on the other side. Thank you. Right, now, did that gentleman mention the necessity of keeping calm? Keeping the low profile? Avoiding direct confrontation? Let's discuss this – but very quickly, please, time's running out. Ah. Mr Davies.'

'What can we do?' The butcher. Bill Davies, had left his post by the door and was approaching the platform, a big man with a sparse sprinkling of grey curls. 'We got lo live yere, isn't it.'

'The Mayor,' said Paul Gwatkin. 'Where's the Mayor?'

'He's probably dead,' Col Croston said flatly.

'You don't know that,' said Wynford Wiley.

'And the church is on fire,' Col said. 'Don't suppose you know that.'

'Aye, we know that,' the clerk's husband, little Billy Byford said tiredly, and sighed. His wife gave him a glance like a harpoon.

'These yere hippy types,' said Bill Davies. 'This Goff. If they 'adn't arrived, with their experimentin' and their meddlin'… They think it's a wonderful game, see. They think the countryside's a great big adventure playground. Do what you like, long as you shuts the odd gate. They wouldn't think of strollin' across their motorways, climbin' all over their power stations. Oh no, you 'andles all that with care and if you' don't know nothin' about it, you stays out of it'

'Sit down, Mr Davies,' said Mrs Byford. 'There's nothing to explain.'

'I'm gonna say this, Nettie. City-type dangers is something they takes for granted – never questions it. But they never thinks there might be risks in the country, too, as they don't understand. Well, we don't understand 'em properly neither but at least… at least we knows there's risks.'

'The inference being,' said Col, 'that Crybbe is an area with a particularly high risk-factor.'

'You live yere,' said Bill Davies, 'you learn there's things you can do and things you can't do. Maybe some people's more careful than others, maybe some people takes it more serious like. But that's same as with a lot o' things, anywhere you goes, isn't it?'

'Mr Davies, we don't have to explain nothing,' Mrs Byford said.

Bill Davies ignored her. 'And it's not like you can get 'elp neither. Can't write to your MP about it, can you? You 'as to live with it, just like your parents and your grandparents, and you accepts the constraints, like.'

The butcher sat down two seats away from Mrs Byford, to the left of the central aisle and crossed his legs defiantly.

'Thank you,' said Col. 'I'm very' grateful to you, Bill. Canon?'

'Yes, indeed. I think Mr Davies has put his finger on it. I can understand entirely that there are certain prevailing phenomena in this particular town which the residents have long felt unable to discuss with outsiders. Problems which, I suspect, first, er, materialized during the reign of James I, when anyone found displaying an interest in matters of a… a shall we say, supernormal nature. .. was in serious danger of being strung up for witchcraft.'

He looked down at the blood-spattered blotter, saw that nothing at all had changed. Outside, the church was burning and a gullible crowd was suspended in the thrall of something even the devil-fearing James I would have been hard-pressed to envisage.

'And one can see,' said Alex, 'how this quite-understandable reticence would, given the comparative remoteness of the town become, in tune, more or less endemic. Yes, I can understand why it's been allowed to fester.

'But, by God,' Alex stood up, his hands either side of the bloodstained blotter, summoning the flames, 'if you don't take some action tonight you'll regret it for the rest of your small little lives.'

The box was making a strange noise, a rolling, creaking sound, suggesting that the item inside had been dislodged from whatever secured it.

'Not a chance,' Joe Powys said aloud, attempting to sound confident, in control. But for whose benefit?

The box lay in the centre of the courtyard, the lamp on topo f it, its beam directed at the Court, no more the derelict warehouse, the disused factory without echoes of laughter or the residue of sorrow.

Periodically, Powys would look up towards the eaves, but there were no flickerings any more, no ignition sparks. The Court was fully alive now and crackling and hissing at him.

The appalling temptation, of course, was to break open the box to confirm that it did in fact contain what he suspected, which was the mummified head of Sir Michael Wort, or at least a head.

But Powys was scared to look into the eyes of Black Michael, even if only the sockets remained. There was too much heavy magic here; Andy, the shaman, the heir, was projecting himself at will along the spirit path, able to manifest a disembodied presence in the Tump and probably elsewhere, while his physical body was… where?

The old ley-line, which progressed from the Tump to the square and beyond had been reopened, a dark artery to the heart of Crybbe. Reopened for the ancestor, Black Michael.

Whose head now lay in an oak box at Powys's feet. The head was a crucial part of the process and as long as he had the head he was part of it, too, until the pressure became unbearable.

So what am I going to do with it?

He thought, as he'd thought so many times, I could out of this situation, I could leave the box lying on the ground, leap into the car and accelerate back into what passes for the Real World. I could simply stop believing in all of this. Because if you don't invite it into your life it simply doesn't occur. |

Blessed are the sceptics.

For they shall… they shall… die with a broken neck on a convenient rubbish heap.

Powys closed his eyes to ambush renegade tears. You daft bastard, this is Crybbe, where normal rules don't apply. Where once you're in the game, you have to go on playing.

Because Fay is down there in that sick little town with Jean Wendle and probably Andy Trow, and the twisted essence of something four centuries old at the door, and Fay could go snap! – like Rachel, like Rose. But you wouldn't die, Powys – you'd go on living with the knowledge of what you failed prevent – even though you were fully aware, at last, of what was happening – because you were scared and because you thought it expedient, at this stage of the game, to take the sceptic's way out.

All right, all right. I'll play. Deal me in.

He tried to envisage the layout. The Tump was the head, the church was the centre of the breast, the town square was the solar plexus and the Cock was the genitalia.

He realized he must be standing on Black Michael's throat, (the throat chakra, influencing the nervous system, controlling stress, anxiety).

There came another noise from the box, like the head rolling from side to side, and his eyes were wrenched open, the breath catching in his chest like a stone.