Phil Rickman - Crybbe

But she suspected that, even if it was three o'clock in the morning when she rang, Wynford would claim a prior appointment.

The countryside. Where so many pastimes were sour and furtive. And tolerated.

Arnold trotted in from the garden.

Fay was very tired. She laid out a thick mat under her editing table and folded an old blanket on top it. 'I don't know what you're used to, Arnold, but the management will listen sympathetically to any complaints in the morning.'

Arnold sat quietly next to the mat. Apart from the episode in the square, he hadn't seemed a very demonstrative dog.

Fay brought him a bowl of water. 'I'm going to shut you in, Arnold. Because of the cats. OK?'

She scribbled a note to pin on the door, telling her father not to go into the office, if, as happened occasionally, he couldn't sleep and came down. And don't let any CATS in there!

Then she went to bed.

She never put on the bedroom light; the room looked squalid enough by daylight. It was almost as claustrophobic as the Crybbe Unattended Studio, and its wallpaper had faded to brown. Fay would have redecorated the place, but she wasn't staying, was she?

They weren't staying.

The bathroom had been modernized, with characteristic taste. A bath, shower and washbasin in livid pink and black.

Fay washed.

She looked in the mirror as she wiped the face people had been amazed at Guy Morrison falling for.

Guy used to say she should spell her name F-e-y, because she looked like a naughty elf. It had seemed like a kind of compliment at the time – she used to be naive like that. Especially where Guy was concerned.

And she wasn't going to waste any time speculating about what Guy might want, because the answer was no.

Snapping off the bathroom light, she found her way back to bed by the diffused rays of the midsummer moon – very nearly full, but trapped like a big silver pickled onion in a cloud sandwich.

She lay awake for a long time in her single divan, thinking about the curfew and the furtive figure in the hedge, about Henry Kettle and Arnold and the wall. Splat.

Horrible.

How did it happen? There'd be a post-mortem, forensic tests and an inquest, but only Arnold would ever really know, and he was only a dog.

'… You'll get that dog out of yere… '

Very sympathetic people in Crybbe. Very caring. Wonderful, warm-hearted country folk.

Miserable bastards.

Eventually, Fay fell asleep with the moon in her eyes – she awoke briefly and saw it, all the clouds gone, and she remembered that sleeping with direct moonlight on your face was supposed to send you mad. She giggled at that and went back to sleep and dreamed a midsummer night's dream in which she was lying in bed and Arnold was howling downstairs.

Oh no!

Fay flung the covers aside and sat up in bed.

Arnold's howling seemed to filter up from below, like slivers of light coming up through the cracks in the floorboards. It probably would be even louder from the Canon's bedroom, which was directly over the office.

She got out of bed and crept to the top of the stairs, hissing, 'Shut it, Arnold, for God's sake!'

Bare-footed, Fay moved downstairs. It was bloody chilly for a midsummer's night, especially when you were wearing nothing but a long T-shirt with several holes in it.

At the bottom of the stairs she stopped and turned back, picking up what she hoped was the sound of her dad's snoring. She ran a hand over the wall in search of the light switch, but when she found it and pressed, nothing happened. Everything Hereward Newsome had ever said about those cretins at the electricity company was dead right.

When she opened the office door, Arnold shot out and she caught him and he leapt into her arms and licked her face. 'Don't try and get round me,' she whispered. 'You are not sleeping on my bed.'

But when she carried him back into the office, he whimpered and jumped out of her arms and she went back and found him standing by the front door, ears down, tail down, quivering.

'Oh, Arnold…'

Did dogs have nightmares? Had he been reliving last night: an almighty crunch, an explosion of glass, his master's head in a shower of blood?

'I know, Arnold.' Patting him. 'I know.' His coat felt matted, almost damp. Did dogs sweat?

Christ, he couldn't be bleeding, could he? She picked him up and lugged him back into the office, automatically tipping the light switch by the door.

Damn! Damn! Damn!

'Arnold!' He'd squirmed out of her arms again and run away into the hall.

Fay clutched helplessly at the air. Torch… Candle.. Anything. God, it was cold. Moonlight was sprinkled over the room, like frost. The light twinkled on the twisting testicular mechanism of the clock on the mantelpiece, fingered the mirror's ornate, gilt frame, quietly highlighting everything that was part of then, while the now things, the trestle editing table and the Revox were screened by shadow. As though in another dimension.

Everything was utterly still.

Get me, she thought, out of here. Out of this sad, forsaken house, out of this fossilized town.

Then a sudden, most unearthly sound uncurled from the fireplace. Like a baby's cry of joy, but also, she thought, startled and shivering, also like an owl descending delightedly on its prey.

It came again and it sang with an unholy pleasure and she saw Rasputin sitting massively in the hearth like an Egyptian temple cat on a sarcophagus.

Rasputin's emerald eyes suddenly flared, and he sprang.

Fay gasped and went backwards, clutching at the wall involuntarily closing her eyes against imagined flashing claws.

But the huge cat was not coming at her.

When she looked again, he'd landed solidly in a beam of pallid moonlight on the varnished mahogany arm of the fireside chair, and he was purring.

In the chair Grace Legge sat rigidly, her brittle teeth bared in a dead smile and eyes as white and cold as the moon.

A car's steering wheel, like a dowsing rod, is designed to amplify small movements of the driver's hands; so a reflex twitch in someone who slips unconsciously into a dowsing mode would be enough to send a car travelling at a fair speed into an uncontrollable spin.

Tom Graves,

Needles of Stone

Memory is circling like a silent helicopter over these soft, green fields, strung together with laces of bright river. It's a warm day in June or July, a Friday – the day you heard they'd sold the paperback rights to The Old Golden Land.

Directly below, throwing a shadow like a giant sundial at three clock, is the Bottle Stone.

It's about five feet tall and four thousand years old. Nobody seems to know whether erosion or some damage long ago left it shaped like a beer-bottle, or whether it was always like that.

It seems now – looking down, looking back – to be as black as its shadow. But there's an amber haze – Memory may have created this, or maybe not – around the stone. Also around the people.

Six of them, mostly young, early twenties. They're sharing a very expensive picnic. You paid for it. You led them on a raid to a posh high-street deli, then the wine-shop. And then you all piled into a couple of cars – old Henry Kettle too, although he says he'd rather have a cheese sandwich than all these fancy bits and pieces and you came out here because it was the nearest known ancient site, an obvious place to celebrate.

Memory hovers. It's trying to filter the conversation to find out who started it, who raised the question of the Bottle Stone Legend.

No good. The voices slip and fade like a radio between nations, and it's all too long ago. The first part you really remember is when Andy says… that there's a special chant, known to all the local children.