Phil Rickman - Crybbe

Mr Kettle left an envelope with me to be opened after his death in which he stated what he wanted to happen to his possessions as he did not trust solicitors. The house and all the contents is to be sold and the money sent to his daughter in

Canada but he wants you to have his papers and his dowsing rods. If you would like to come to the house I am in most of the time and will let you into Mr Kettle's house.

Yours faithfully,

Gwen Whitney (Mrs)

J. M. Powys put down the letter. He ought to have opened the shop ten minutes ago. The Sodalite crystals (for emotional stability and the treatment stress-related conditions) began to dribble through his fingers and roll across the wooden counter.

Rachel noticed that Denzil George, licensee of the Cock, had several shaving cuts this morning. He'd obviously overslept, unused, no doubt, to rising early to prepare an 8 a.m. breakfast for his guests. What a torpid town this was.

'Parcel come for you,' the licensee said, placing a small package by Max's elbow.

'Thanks.' Max tossed it to Rachel.

'No stamp,' Rachel noticed. 'Obviously delivered by hand.'

'Better open it,' Max said, digging into some of the muesli he'd had delivered to the pub.

Rachel uncovered a tape cassette and a note. 'Who's Warren Preece?'

Max looked up.

'He's sent you a tape of his band.'

'Delivered by hand, huh?' Max put down his spoon thoughtfully. 'I dunno any Warren Preece, but the surname has a certain familiar ring. Maybe you should find out more, Rach.'

'Yes,' Rachel said, pushing back her chair. 'I'll ask the landlord.'

The Anglicans' Book of Common Prayer had nothing to say about exorcising spirits of the dead.

The Revd Murray Beech knew this and was grateful for it. But he was leafing through the prayer book anyway, seeking inspiration.

Murray was following the advice of Alex Peters and attempting to compile for himself a convincing prayer to deliver in an allegedly haunted house.

He came across the words,

'Peace be to this house and to all that dwell in it.'

This actually appeared under the order for The Visitation of the Sick, but Murray made a note of it anyway. Surely with an alleged 'haunting' – Murray recoiled from the word with embarrassment – what you were supposedly dealing with was a sick property, contaminated by some form of so-called 'psychic' radiation, although, in his 'exorcism' – Oh, God – the prayer would be aimed at the troubled souls of the living. In his view the health of a property could be affected only by the attitude and the state of mind of the current inhabitants, not by any residual guilt or distress from, ah, previous residents.

He looked around his own room. The neat bookshelves, the filing cabinets, the office desk with metal legs at which he sat, the clean, white walls – feeling a twinge of pain as he remembered the walls being painted by Kirsty exactly a fortnight before she'd said, 'I'm sorry, Murray. This isn't what I want.' Murray looked quickly back at the prayer book, turned over a page, came upon the following entreaty:

'Oh Lord, look down from heaven, behold, visit and relieve this thy servant… defend him from the danger of the enemy.'

He breathed heavily down his nose. He abhorred words like 'enemy'. The duty of the Church was to teach not opposition but understanding.

He was equally uncomfortable with the next and final paragraph of the prayer book before the psalms began.

or

Denouncing of God's Anger and Judgements against Sinners.

The first page ended on an uncompromising note.

'Cursed are the unmerciful, fornicators and adulterers covetous persons, idolaters, slanderers, drunkards and extortioners.'

'Not many of us left uncursed,' Murray muttered.

The curse of the modern minister's life, in his opinion, was the video-hire shop. Infinitely more alluring to teenagers than the church. And full of lurid epics in which members of the clergy in bloodied cassocks wielded metal crucifixes with which they combat scaly entities from Hell.

One result of this was that a few people seemed to think they should summon the vicar in the same way they'd call in Rentokil to deal with their dampness and their rats.

The telephone bleeped. 'I'll ring you when they're out,' she'd told him. He hadn't replied. At the time, he was considering going to her grandparents and explaining his dilemma. But he'd concluded this would not only be a cop-out, it would be wrong. Because she'd come to him in confidence and she was no longer a minor. She was eighteen and would be leaving school in two or three weeks.

Murray closed The Book of Common Prayer and picked up the phone. 'Vicarage.'

'They're out,' Tessa said.

Barry, the overweight osteopath from upstairs, was between patients, eating a sandwich – herbal pate on whole-wheat.

'I've been taken over by Max Goff,' said Powys, disconsolate.

'Dolmen has, yeah, I read that. He can't do you any harm, though, can he? You're out of print, aren't you?'

'Between impressions,' Powys corrected him. 'Barry, are you really proposing to realign somebody's slipped disc with hands covered in soya margarine?'

'Beats olive oil. And cheaper. Hey, Mandy says she saw you coming out of McDonald's this morning.'

'Couldn't have been me.'

'That's what I thought,' Barry said dubiously.

'Anyway,' Powys said, 'Goff wants to see me. In Crybbe.'

'I thought you were going to say "in the nude" for a minute,' said Barry, wiping his hands on his smock. 'No, from what I hear he's surrounding himself with people sharing his own deep commitment to the New Age movement. If it's this lunch in Crybbe on Friday, several people I know have been invited and nobody's turning him down, because if he likes you, he invites you to join his Crybbe community, which means – listen to this – that you get offered a place to live, on very advantageous terms. And all kinds of fringe benefits.'

'Why aren't you there, then?'

'Bastard's already got an osteopath,' Barry said. 'Gerry Moffat. You believe that? He could have had me, but he went for Moffat. Moffat!'

'Who else?'

'Dan Osborne, the homeopath, he's moved in already, Superior bastard. Paula Stirling. Robin Holland. Oh, and this little French aromatherapist who was in Bromvard, remember her?'

'I can still smell her. Listen, do these people know who Max Goff is?'

'Used to be, Joe. Used to be. This is the new user-friendly ozone-fresh Max Goff. Play your cards right and he'll let you feel his aura.'

'I wouldn't feel his aura with asbestos gloves,' said Powys.

'And he's got some pretty heavy mystical types as well,' said Barry. 'Jean Wendle, the spiritual healer, some guy who's reckoned to be Britain's biggest tarot hotshot and Andy Boulton-Trow. All converging on the New Age Mecca.'

'Andy?' Powys said. 'Andy's involved in this?'

'And there's a single kid,' says Andy, 'moving round the stone, very slowly at first, while all the other kids are sitting in a circle, clapping their hands, doing the chant. And by the time they finish the chant he's back where he started. Got to be a "he", it doesn't work for girls.'

Andy Boulton-Trow, lean and languid, lying back in the grass, spearing a quail's egg from the jar beside him. His voice is deep and lazy, like a stroked cello.

'And then he goes round again… only this time it's just ever-so-slightly faster…'

Johnny goes round the Bottle Stone

… and he goes round TWICE.

'And they keep on repeating it. And it gets faster and faster, building up the momentum, and the kid's got to move faster each time to maintain the pace.'

'And how long do they keep it up?' Rose asks. She's looking radiantly happy today (this memory is agony). 'How many times…?'