Phil Rickman - Crybbe

'Oh' There's a gleam in Andy's eye. 'Thirteen. Thirteen times.'

'Must be jolly dizzy by then: one of the others says – Ben Corby's girlfriend, Fiona Something.

'Ex-act-ly,' Andy drags out the word for emphasis. 'The kid's completely confused. He's not thinking properly. And it's then that his mates all leap on him and, before he knows what's happening, they hustle him across to the fairy hill. Over there… see it?'

'Not much of a hill,' Rose observes.

'Fairies are not very big,' you tell her. 'You could fit a couple of dozen on there.'

Andy says, 'So they lie him face-down on the fairy hill… and that's when it happens.'

'What?' you ask. 'What happens?'

'Whatever happens,' says Henry Kettle, searching in the cardboard picnic box for something uncomplicated and British, 'it's all in the mind, and it don't do anybody any good, meddling with that old nonsense.'

'Oh yeah,' Barry, the osteopath, said. 'Andy's right at the centre of things. As was old Henry Kettle. I suppose you heard about that.'

'Just now,' Powys said. He hadn't planned to mention Henry. 'I had a letter from his neighbour to say he was dead. I don't know what happened, do you?'

'Have to wait for the Hereford Times for the full story, but apparently it said on the local radio that his car went off the road and ploughed into a wall around Crybbe Tump. I don't know that area too well, but…'

'Crybbe Tump? He hit the wall around Crybbe Tump?'

'Killed instantly. Bloody shame, I liked old Henry. He helped you with the book, didn't he?'

Powys nodded.

'The buzz is,' said Barry, 'that Henry was doing some dowsing for Max Goff.'

'Dowsing what?'

Barry shrugged. 'Whatever he'd been doing, he was on his way home when it happened. There was a power cut at the time, don't know whether the streetlamps were off, that may have thrown him. Bloody shame.'

'A power cut,' said Powys.

That significant?'

'Just a thought.' Powys shook his head, his mind whizzing off at a peculiar tangent, like a faulty firework

Fay awoke late. She'd lain awake until dawn, eyes open to the bedroom ceiling, Arnold a lump of solid heat alongside her on the bed.

It was nearly nine before she came downstairs. Outside it was raining. The rain on the window was the only sound. There was no mail on the mat, no sign of the Canon.

The door to the office was closed, as she'd left it last night. The note to her father still pinned to it. And don't let any CATS in there!

Rasputin.

He must still be in the office.

She opened the door but did not go in.

'Rasputin,' she called. A morning croak in her voice – that all it was. Really.

But she could not bring herself to go back into that room, not yet, though Arnold didn't seem worried. She left the door ajar, went through to the kitchen, let the dog out in the back garden.

When she turned back to the kitchen, Rasputin and Pushkin were both in the opposite corner, waiting by their bowls. Fay opened a can of Felix. The two cats looked plump and harmless. Perhaps it really had been just a horrific dream, conditioned by her own desperation.

She forked out a heap of cat food, straightened up.

'Right,' she said decisively and marched out of the kitchen and into the hall, where she tore the note off the office door and hit the door with the flat of her hand so that it was thrown wide.

She walked in, eyes sweeping the room like searchlights. She saw the Revox, two spools leaning against it. Her desk-diary open. Her father's note, about Guy's phone call. She raised her eyes to the H-shaped fireplace and the mantelpiece, to the see-through clock with the mechanism like a pair of bails still jerking obscenely from side to side.

The fireside chair was empty, its scatter cushions plumped out. If someone had been sitting in it the cushions would have been flattened.

Unless, of course, that person had tidily shaken them out and

…

Oh, come on!

She made herself cross to the mirror and look into it at her own face.

The first shock was the incredible childlike fear she saw in her eyes.

The second was the other face. She whirled around in alarm.

The Canon was standing in the doorway. He wore pyjamas. His feet were bare. His hair was standing up in spikes, his beard sprayed out in all directions, like a snowstorm. His bewildered blue eyes were wide and unfocused.

He stared at Fay as if she were an intruder. Then the eyes relaxed into recognition.

'Morning, Grace,' he said.

While Max drove, Rachel took the cassette box from shoulder bag.

'OK?'

'Go ahead,' Max said.

Rachel slipped the tape into the player and studied the plastic box. The band's name was typed in capitals across the plain label: FATAL ACCIDENT. She wrinkled her nose.

Drums and bass guitar blundered out of the speakers. Rachel lowered the volume a little. By the time the first track was over, they were parked at the back of the Court, next to the stable-block, where builders were busy.

Rain slashed the windscreen.

Max turned up the sound to compensate. He was smiling faintly. They sat in the Range Rover for two more tracks. The only words Rachel could make out on the last one were 'goin' down on me', repeated what seemed like a few dozen times. She consulted the inside of the label; the song was called 'Goin' Down on Me'.

'That's the lot,' she said neutrally. There're only three numbers.' Remembering where the Max Goff Story had begun, in the punk-rock era of the mid-seventies, she didn't add 'thankfully'.

Max began to laugh.

Rachel ejected the tape, saying nothing.

Jeez,' Max said. 'Was that shit, or was that shit?'

Rachel breathed out. For a couple of minutes there, watching him smiling, she'd thought he might actually be enjoying it.

'You want me to post it down to Tommy, get him to send it back in a fortnight with the customary slip?'

What…?' Max twisted to face her. 'You want us to give the official piss-off to Mayor Preece's flaming grandson?'

'But if you tell him it's good you'll have to do something with it, won't you?'

Max shrugged. 'So be it. One single… not on Epidemic, of course. Coupla grand written off against tax.

Then he thumped the top of the dashboard. 'No, hey, listen, I'll tell you what we do – you send this kid a letter saying we think the band has promise, we think it's a… an interesting sound, right? But we're not sure any of these three tracks is quite strong enough to release as a debut single, so can we hear a few more? That'll buy some time – maybe the band'll split before they can get the material together. How's that sound to you?'

'It sounds devious,' Rachel said.

'Of course it does, Rach. Do it tonight. I mean, shit, don't get me wrong – they're no worse than say, The Damned, in '77. But it was fresh then, iconoclastic.'

'It was shit then, too.'

'Yeah, maybe,' Max conceded. 'But it was necessary. It blew away the sterile pretensions from when the seventies went bad. But now we're picking up from the sixties and we won't make the same mistakes.'

'No,' Rachel said, in neutral again.

A heavy tipper-lorry crunched in beside them. The rain had washed a layer of thick, grey dust from the door of the cab and Rachel could make out the words '… aendy Quarry, New Radnor.'

'Hey…' Max said slowly. 'If this is what I think it is. ..'

He threw his door open, stepped down into the rain in his white suit and was back inside a minute, excited, raindrops twinkling in his beard.

'It is, Rach. The first stones have arrived. The Old Stones of Crybbe, Mark Two.'

'Oh,' said Rachel, pulling up the collar of her Barbour for the run to the stables. 'Good.'

But Goff, Panama hat jammed over his ears, made her watch while the stones were unloaded, pointing out things.