Phil Rickman - Crybbe aka Curfew

Always been able to talk to rivers. Sometimes they even burbled back. Not this one, this being a Crybbe river.

'Must have gone out for a breath of air, wound up in the sodding boneyard, mooning over old Grace's plot. Went for a Jimmy in the woods, came back and could've sworn I found my own body. No – honest to God -I remember tripping over something, about to fall flat on my face and it broke the fall. It wore a dog-collar. And there was blood. Got it on my hands. Fell awfully sticky

'Jolly convincing, really.'

Alex rubbed his hands together and they felt strangely stiff. He held them out and couldn't see them at all.

You're an old humbug, Alex, who was it said that? Not Grace, not Fay, not…

Wendy!

How could he have forgotten Wendy so soon. Only left her house… when? Was it tonight? Or was it last night? Or was it last week?

She said something like, Go back out there and you might start losing your marbles again. But you've got to do it, Alex. Got to go back.

Why? Why had he got to go back?

Because Wendy knows best, Wendy has cool hands.

Actually, he thought suddenly, for the first time, they're quite cold hands. And they all think they know best, don't they? The doctors, your relatives.

Suddenly Alex felt quite angry.

You start to lose your mind and everybody wants a bit. Even if you could get it back, it wouldn't be worth having. Shop-soiled. Messed about.

He said a civil goodnight to the river and began to walk back up the hill towards the square.

Deal with God. Why, after sixty years looking after His best interests, doesn't the bugger ever want to talk business with me ?

The street had been quiet when he was walking down to the river; now he could hear people moving about, up over the brow of the hill, around the square.

Alex came to a house with a paraffin lamp burning in the window. He stopped and held up his hands.

They were covered with dried blood.

'Oh Lord,' Alex said, and it didn't start out as a prayer.

Frightened?

Well, how could you not be? But it was no bad thing, most of the time. The worst thing was a belief that you were in some way protected if you did what somebody else said was right. Like walking into the Humble situation because Jean Wendle had told him he needed to go back to the source.

But he always did what he was told. Max Goff: There's a place for you here – think about it.

Andy Boulton-Trow: I think Joe ought to present himself to the Earth Spirit in the time-honoured fashion.

I mean go round the Bottle Stone. Thirteen times.

Even dear old Henry Kettle: My house is to be left to you. Consider it as a token of my confidence.

Sod them all. But then he thought about Fay, with her rainbow eye.

'No,' he told Minnie Seagrove. 'I'm not frightened.'

And it's too dark to see me shaking.

He was scared, for instance, to set foot on the Tump; even Humble had said you couldn't always trust your reactions up there.

So they'd stay on the ground and, where possible, outside the wall.

He'd briefly considered taking Humble's crossbow. But he didn't know how to work it, and this was no time to learn.

That was another problem: what was he going to do about Humble? There was no way this one could be suicide or an accident. And while the police would never suspect Minnie Seagrove, they'd be hauling Joe Powys in within half an hour of the body being found. Minnie would, of course, explain the circumstances, but circumstances like these would sound more than a little suspect in court.

They began to walk around the perimeter of the Tump towards the light.

'Quietly,' Powys said. 'And slowly.'

The dog wasn't barking any more. If Andy had done anything to Arnold, he'd kill him.

OK, I'm full of shit, but I'm not going to obey instructions any more, not from you, not from Goff. And especially not from Jean.

Jean, of course – it made appalling sense – was not protecting him, she was protecting Andy, and Andy, typically, had wanted him to know that before he died.

Humble had said, I'm empowered to answer just one of your questions… I'll tell you the answer, shall I? Then you can work out the question at your leisure. The answer is – you ready? – the answer is… HIS MOTHER.

He would trace the Wort family tree later, if he ever got out of this. Meanwhile, it had a dispiriting logic, and it cleared up a few questions about Jean that he'd never even thought to ask. The idea of an experienced barrister giving it all up to act as the unpaid, earthly intermediary for Dr Chi had never sounded too likely. Jean's professional life had been built on ambition, power and manipulation: dark magic.

But she's cured people. That can't be dark magic. What about Fay's dad?

Oh, Jesus.

'What's wrong?' Mrs Seagrove whispered.

Fay had started pulling at Jimmy Preece's clothing and slapping at his face and screaming at him through the smoke. 'Please, Mr Preece, please, you can't be …'

Just a sign of life, anything, a blink, a twitch. Where do you keep a pulse in a neck like an old, worn-out concertina?

'Mr Preece!'

She pulled him down from the font and he collapsed onto her, dead-weight, and she had to let him slide to the floor, managing to get both hands under his head before it hit the stone. But she could do no more because the appallingly blackened, smoke-shrouded scarecrow thing was dancing down the aisle, its clothes smouldering and its eyes, all too alight. Her own eyes weeping with the smoke, with pity for Jimmy Preece and with fear for herself, she ran through the porch and began now to wrestle with the bolts, throwing herself, coughing and sobbing against the doors.

When she was out, she didn't look back, but she carried inside her head the image of the blackened monster and the scorched smell of him, knowing that if she stopped to breathe, he would be on her.

She ran gasping through the churchyard and out of the lychgate, her lungs feeling like burst balloons, the bells crashing around her like bombs. She could hear voices in the square and she ran towards them, eyes straining, looking for lights.

But the nearer she got to the square and the louder the voices became, the darker it got, as if there was not only night to contend with, but fog. She thought at first it was her eyes, damaged by the smoke, but quite soon the bells stopped and Fay began to realize there was something about the square that was unaccountably wrong.

First off, anybody got a torch? Yes? No?'

The bells had stopped, and the silence ought to have glistened, Col Croston thought, but it didn't. The silence after the bells was the ominous silence you could hear when the phone rang and you picked it up and there was apparently nobody on the other end but you knew there was.

It was too dark to see who was with him on the square, but he could guess. Or rather, he could guess who was not on the square i.e. anybody born and bred within the precincts of the ancient town of Crybbe.

Graham Jarrett said, 'A torch is not normally considered essential for a public meeting, even in Crybbe. Besides, even when the power's off it's not usually as dark as this.'

'No. Quite.'

The town-hall doors had been slammed and barred behind the last of them and then, minutes later, Col had watched as they were opened again, just briefly, and a bloated figure had emerged, stood grotesquely silhouetted between two men and then tumbled without a word down the six steps to the pavement.

The late Max Goff had rejoined his New Age community, we'll let him lie where he fell; somebody would have to explain this to the police and he didn't see why it had to be him.