Phil Rickman - Crybbe

Not raining now, but it probably would before nightfall, the clouds moving in together like a street gang, heavy with menace.

It was only since coming to Crybbe that Fay had begun to regard intangibles like the sky, the atmosphere, climatic changes as. .. what? Manifestations of the earth's mood?

Or something more personal. Like when a mist seemed to cling to you, throwing out nebulous tentacles, as if you and it… as if it knew you.

And the atmosphere hereabouts – threatening or blandly indifferent – was not an expression of the earth's mood so much as.. . She stopped and stared across the darkening river at the huddle of Crybbe.

Not the earth's mood, but… the town's mood.

This thought came at the same moment as the shot.

Fay whirled.

The riverside field was empty, the clouds united overhead, thick and solid as a gravestone. There were no more shots and no echo, as if the atmosphere had absorbed the shock, like a cushion.

Everything still, the field unruffled, except for a patch of black and white – and now red – that pulsed and throbbed maybe twenty yards from Fay.

'Arnold?' she said faintly. 'Arnold?'

From where Rachel was standing. Max Goff, arms folded, resembled an enormous white mushroom on the Tump.

In tones which, roughed by the speakers, didn't sound as reverent as they were perhaps intended to, Goff paid a brief tribute to Henry Kettle, said to be among the three finest dowsers in the country, killed when his car crashed into the obscene Victorian wall built around this very mound.

'No way we can know what went through Mr Kettle's head in those final moments. But I guess there was a kind of tragic poetry to his death.'

Rachel closed her eyes in anguish.

'And his death… began a minor but significant preliminary task which I intend to complete today.'

Max paused, looked down at his feet, looked up again. The cameraman could be seen zooming in tight on his face.

'The Victorians had scant respect for their heritage. They regarded our most ancient burial mounds as unsightly heaps which could be plundered at will in search of treasure. And to emphasize what they believed to be their dominance over the landscape and over history itself, they liked to build walls around things. Maybe they had a sense of the awesome terrestrial energy accumulating here. Maybe they felt threatened. Maybe they wanted to contain it.'

Or maybe they didn't fool themselves it even existed, Rachel thought cynically.

'But whatever their intention.' Goff began to raise his voice. 'This wall remains a denial. A denial of the Earth Spirit.'

He lifted an arm, fist clenched.

'And this wall has to come down as a first symbolic act in the regeneration of Crybbe.'

People clapped. That is, Rachel noticed, members of the New Age community clapped, raggedly.

'Only it won't be coming down today,' Humble said.

Rachel's eyes snapped open.

'We got a problem, Rachel. This is Mr Parry. The bulldozer man.'

A little man in wire-rimmed glasses stuck out a speckled brown hand. 'Gomer Parry' Plant Hire.'

'How do you do,' said Rachel suspiciously. 'Shouldn't you be down there with your machine?'

'Ah, well. Bit of a miscalculation, see,' said Gomer Parry. 'What it needs is a bigger bulldozer. See, even if I hits him high as I can reach, that wall, he'll crash back on me, sure to. Dangerous, see.'

'Dangerous,' Rachel repeated, unbelieving.

'Oh hell, aye.'

'OK. So if it needs a bigger bulldozer,' Rachel said carefully, 'then get a bigger bulldozer.'

'That,' said Gomer Parry, 'is, I'm afraid, the biggest one I got. Other thing is I got no insurance to cover all these people watchin'.'

Rachel said, very slowly, 'Oh.., shit.'

'Well, nobody said it was goin' to be a bloody circus,' said Gomer Parry.

Goff stood there, on the top of the Tump, still and white; monarch of the Old Golden Land.

He was waiting.

He came across the field in loose, easy strides, the twelve- bore under his arm, barrel pointing down. He wore a brown waterproof jacket and green Wellingtons.

It was darker now. Still a while from sundown, but the sun hadn't figured much around here in a long time.

'Sorry, miss.' Cursory as a traffic warden who'd just handed you a ticket. 'Shouldn't 'ave let 'im chase sheep, should you?'

'What?'

It was only afterwards she realized what he'd said. Fay, on her knees, blood on her jeans, from Arnold.

The dog lay in the grass, bleeding. He whined and twitched and throbbed.

'Move back, miss. Please.'

And she did. Thinking it had all been a horrible mistake and he was going to help her.

But when she shuffled back in the grass, almost overbalancing, he strolled across and stood over the dog, casually levelling his gun at the pulsating heap.

Fay gasped and threw herself forward, on top of Arnold, feeling herself trembling violently, like in a fever, and the dog hot, wet and sticky under her breasts.

'Now don't be silly, miss. 'E's done for, see. Move away, let me finish 'im off.'

'Go away!' Fay screamed. 'Fuck off!' Eyes squeezed closed, lying over Arnold. The dog gave a little cry and a wheeze, like a balloon going down.

'Oh no,' Fay sobbed. 'No, please…'

Lying across the dog, face in the grass, blind anger – hatred – rising.

They both saw the dog fall, not far from the river, a blur of blood. The woman running, collapsing to her knees. Then the man wandering casually across the field.

'The bastard. Who is he?'

'Jonathon Preece,' Mrs Seagrove said, white-faced, clinging to her gate. 'From Court Farm.'

'What the hell's he think he's doing?'

'I wish I could run,' Mrs Seagrove said, her voice quaking with rage and shock. 'I'd have that gun off him. Look…'

She clutched his arm. 'What's he doing now, Joe? He's going to shoot her, he's going to shoot the girl as well!'

Incredibly, it did look like it. She'd thrown herself over the dog. The man was standing over them, the gun pointing downwards.

'Do you know her?'

'Too far away to tell, Joe.' Mrs Seagrove began to wring her hands. 'Oh, I hate them. I hate them. They're primitive. They're a law unto themselves.'

'Right.' Powys was moving towards the field. Common land, he was thinking, common land.

'Shall I call the police?'

"Only if I don't come back,' Powys said, shocked at how this sounded. For real. Jesus.

He slipped and scrambled to his feet with yellow mud on his grey suit. 'Shit.' Called back, 'What did you say his name was?'

'For God's sake, be careful. Preece, Jonathon Preece.'

'Right. You stay there, Mrs Seagrove. Get ready to phone.' Jesus, he thought, realizing he was trembling, what kind of place is this?

Guy Morrison was about to tear his hair. This was a two-camera job and he only had one. How was he supposed to shoot Goff and the destruction of the wall with one camera?

What this needed was a shot of the bulldozer crashing through, with a shower of stone, and a cut-back to Goff's triumphant face as he savoured the moment from his eyrie on the Tump. It would be a meaningful sequence, close to the top of the first programme, maybe even under the titles.

But now was ne supposed to get that with one crew? If he'd known about this beforehand, he'd have hired a local news cameraman as back-up – Griggs, for instance. But he didn't know about it in advance because this arrogant, fat bastard was playing his cards too close to his chest.

At least the delay was a breathing space.

'Which you want to go for, then?' the cameraman, Larry Ember, asked him, pulling his tripod out of the mud close to the summit of the mound.

Guy pushed angry, stiffened fingers through his blond hair. 'Whichever we go for, it'll be wrong,' he said uncharacteristically. 'Look, if we set up next to Goff, how much of the bulldozer stuff do you reckon you can shoot from here?'