Phil Rickman - Crybbe

Heard a rattling noise inside, the hand battering the side of the box.

It don't wanner go back in the ground.

It's done what it came for.

Now it wants to go back in the chimney.

And, sure enough, when Warren picked up the box the rattling stopped, and so he ran, holding it out in front of him like a precious gift, down from field to field until he reached the farm, where nobody else lived now, except for him and the Hand of Glory.

In the end, the curfew did come, a strained and hesitant clatter at first, and then the bell was pounding the wood like a huge, shiny axe, slicing up the night, and the girl was gone.

Joe Powys wandered blindly through the undergrowth, repeatedly smashing a fist into an open palm.

The night shimmered with images.

The bell pealed and Rose, in a pure white nightdress, threw herself from a third-floor window, fluttering hopelessly in the air like a moth with its wings stuck together, falling in slow motion, and he was falling after her, reaching out for her.

In the spiny dampness of the wood, Powys cried out, just once, and the curfew bell released, at last, his agony.

He staggered among the stricken, twisted trees and wept uncontrollably. He didn't want to control it. He wanted the tears to flow for ever. He wanted the curfew bell to peal for ever, each clang comet-bright in the shivering night.

The bell pealed on, and with that high, wild cry Rachel tumbled into the air, and then Rose and Rachel were falling together, intertwined.

A needle of light, like the filament of a low-wattage electric bulb zig-zagged across the eaves.

Silently, in slow-motion, the rusty spike pierced the white nightdress and a geyser of hot blood sprayed into his weeping eyes.

Max awoke to find himself alone, damp and smouldering, like a bonfire in the rain. The cold deluge had been the curfew. When the curfew was gone, he realized at last, the town would be free.

He got up and shambled to the big window, wrapped in the black duvet. It was too dark to see the Tump; it didn't matter, he could feel the Tump. It was like the stables and maybe even the Court itself hid been absorbed by the mound, so that he was, in essence, inside it.

No going back now, Max.

Feeling very nearly crazy, his face and hands slashed by boughs and bushes, Powys followed a dead straight line back into Crybbe.

As if the path was lit up for him. Which perhaps it was – the bell strokes landing at his feet like bars of light. All he did was lurch towards the belt, each stroke laid on the landscape, heavy as a gold ingot. And when he emerged from the wood into the churchyard, scratched and bleeding from many cuts, he just collapsed on the first grave he came to.

Its stone was of new black marble, with white lettering, and when he saw whose grave it was he started to laugh, slightly hysterically.

Beloved wife of

Canon A. L. Peters

And that was all.

Powys scrambled to his feet; from what he knew of Grace, she would take a dim view of somebody's dirty, battered body sprawled over her nice, clean grave.

He walked stiffly through the graveyard, out of the lychgate, into the deserted square, his plodding footsteps marking sluggish time between peals of the curfew.

The power was off. Hardly a surprise. In four or five townhouse windows he could see the sallow light of paraffin lamps. Then, with a noise like a lawnmower puttering across the square, a generator cranked into action, bringing a pale-blue fluorescent flickering into the grimy windows of the old pub, the Cock.

Yes, Powys thought. I could use a drink. Quite badly.

It occurred to him he hadn't eaten since pushing down a polystyrene sandwich in this very pub before setting off to find his old mate, Andy Boulton-Trow. He didn't feel hungry, though. A drink was all he wanted, that illusory warmth in the gut. And then he'd decide where to go, whose night to spoil next, whose peace of mind to perforate.

He clambered up the steps and pushed open the single, scuffed swing-door to the public bar.

It was full. Faces swam out of the smoke haze, pallid in the stuttering fluorescence. The air was weighed down, it seemed to Powys, with leaden, dull dialogue and no merriment. He felt removed from it all, as though he'd fallen asleep when he walked in, and being here was a dream.

'Brandy, please,' he told Denzil, the Neanderthal landlord 'A single.'

Denzil didn't react at all to whatever kind of mess the wood had made of Powys's face. He didn't smile.

So where was the smile coming from? He knew somebody was smiling at him; you could feel a smile, especially when wasn't meant to be friendly.

'Thanks,' he said, and paid.

He saw the smile through the bottom of his glass. It was a small smile in a big face. It might have been chiselled neatly into the centre of a whole round cheese.

Police Sergeant Wynford Wiley had sat there wearing this same tiny smile last night and early this morning while his colleagues from CID had been trying to persuade J. M. Powys to confess to the murder of his girlfriend.

'Been in a fight, is it, Mr Powys?'

Wiley looked more than half-drunk. He was sitting in a group of middle-aged men in faded tweeds or sleeveless, quilted body-warmers. Summer casual wear, Crybbe-style.

'You want the truth?' Powys swallowed some brandy but still didn't feel any warmth.

'All I ever wants is the truth, Mr Powys.' Wynford was wearing an old blue police shirt over what looked like police trousers.

'Amateur dramatics,' Powys said wearily. 'I've been auditioning for the Crybbe Amateur Dramatic Society. Banquo's Ghost. What do you think of the make-up?'

Wynford Wiley stopped smiling. He stood up at once, rather unsteadily. Planted himself between Powys and the door. And came out with that famous indictment of intruders from Off, those few words which Powys suddenly found so evocative of the quintessential Crybbe.

'We don't like clever people.' Wynford stifled a burp. 'Round yere.'

There was that thrilled hush which the first spark of confrontation always brings to rural pubs.

Powys said, 'Maybe that's why this town's dead on its feet.' He finished his brandy. 'Now' – placing his glass carefully on the bar-top – 'why don't you piss off and stop bothering me, you fat bastard.'

He listened to himself saying this, as if from afar. Listened with what ought to have been a certain horrified awe. He'd done it now. Thrown down a direct public challenge to the authority of the senior representative for what passed for the law in this town. In order to retain his authority and his public credibility, Sergeant Wiley would be obliged to take prompt and decisive action.

And Sergeant Wiley was drunk.

And Powys didn't care because tonight he'd seen the appalling thing that was known locally as Black Michael's Hound and witnessed the dark conflagration of its union with a young woman, and in terms of total black menace, Wynford Wiley just didn't figure.

'Let's slip outside, shall we, Mr Powys?'

Wynford held open the door. To get out of here, Powys would have to step under his arm, and as soon as he was outside the door the arm would descend. He was likely to wind up in a cell. If he resisted he would wind up hurt in a cell. If he ran away the town would soon be teeming with coppers. Anyway, he was too knackered to run anywhere, even if there'd been anywhere to run.

'Don't make a fuss, Mr Powys. I only wanner know 'ow you got that face.'

Powys couldn't think of a way out. He stepped under Wynford's arm and the arm, predictably, came down.

Somebody held open the door for Wynford and the big policeman followed him out, hand gripping his elbow. At that moment, as if to make things easier for the forces of the law, the power came back on, or so it seemed, and Wynford's face shone like a full moon.