Phil Rickman - Crybbe aka Curfew

A trapdoor had been constructed in the attic floor, originally to dispose of bodies after execution by dropping them into a narrow, windowless, well-like chamber directly underneath.

In later years, more squeamish owners of the house had boarded over the trapdoor space, but the floor remained weak at this point, the boards had rotted, there were cracks. When Andy Boulton-Trow stood on the beam, nearly two feet thick, from which the executees – and Sir Michael himself – had taken a final step, he could see a few jagged black holes below his feet.

First, he had taken off his shoes and his trousers, so that he stood naked now in the candlelight with the noose loosely around his neck.

For the purposes of magical projection, a modification of the short-drop method was the most appropriate. That it had worked, to a significant extent, for Michael had been amply demonstrated to Andy tonight. Andy, who had spent twice as many years as Michael in study and preparation, was warm after his sprint through the wood, still angry at the damage to the stone and the debacle in the square. But the night was churning with chaos, and out of chaos…

There was little time to waste. He was hot inside, with excitement and anticipation.

To make sure everything was still in working order, he and Humble had once hanged a fisherman Humble had chanced upon, casting alone into the upper reaches of the river. It had not really been necessary, but Humble had enjoyed it.

Just as Humble would enjoy watching Andy hang. So why wasn't he here?

Perhaps he was. Humble could be quite discreet.

Andy put both hands behind his head and tightened and adjusted the noose under his chin. It was so easy to make a mistake.

He stood on the floor-joist in the candlelight and began to visualize, to bring himself to the necessary state of arousal.

He visualized the woman who'd looked at him across the square, telling him with her eyes that she was slipping out of the enchantment. Andy smiled; he would return for her one night, quite soon perhaps.

A small wind drifted through the holes in the slates; there was no wind tonight.

'Good evening, Michael,' Andy said. 'Again.'

He closed his eyes, and Michael was within him once more – a now familiar sensation. In his solar plexus he felt a stillness which was also a stirring, and there was the familiar small tug at the base of his spine.

In time, the walls of the Court evaporated, and he saw the town at his feet. He held back, and the vapours rose within him. He felt the blazing chaos that was Crybbe, the dissolution of barriers, the merging of the layers, one with another, the lower levels open to the higher levels, the atmosphere awash with spirit.

He felt his destination.

And when the time was right, he stepped lightly from the beam.

There was a bright light, a widening carpet of light, and something rolling along it, towards him.

This was the first thing he was really aware of after he stepped into space and the noose tightened above his Adam's apple.

There was no pain, only darkness and then the carpet of night and the thing that was rolling.

Rolling very slowly at first, but its momentum was increasing. And then he was staring into the face of Michael Wort.

The eyes had gone. The lips had gone. There was some hair, but not much; most of the beard had disappeared. There were gaps in the ghastly brown and yellow grin; few people in Michael's day had kept their teeth beyond middle age.

'Michael,' he said eventually.

The noose was still around his neck but it was slack. There was no pain in speech.

Behind the lamp, he saw a pair of sneakers and legs in muddy jeans.

'He came with me,' Joe Powys said. 'He couldn't manage the steps on his own.'

Andy had smashed through the floor, spinning and twisting. He'd screamed once, but it had sounded more like triumph than terror, suggesting he was unaware of anything having gone wrong.

Well, you wouldn't be, if this was the first time you'd hanged yourself.

The way he was lying in the centre of the windowless, stone chamber was bent, unnatural. Powys said, with little concern, 'Can you move?'

'I don't know,' Andy said, his feelings sheathed. 'What did you do?'

'I saved your life.'

'Thanks,' Andy said. 'You fucker.'

Powys said nothing. He was shaking.

'Humble,' Andy said, after a while. 'He was supposed to have killed you.'

'Yeah?'

'He will.'

'Can't see it,' Powys said, 'somehow.'

He had the feeling both of them were in shock. He put a hand out to the wall; it was dry again, and dusty. The Court was a dead place again. The room was narrow enough for there to be an enforced intimacy, and yet there was a distance, too, because the Court was dead.

'I nearly killed myself, though,' he said, still appalled enough at what might have happened to want to hear himself talk about it. 'Seems absolutely bloody insane when I look back, but I had this idea that the only way I could straighten this out was to take the head up to the prospect chamber and hurl us both out. I couldn't have been thinking straight. Well, obviously. But you don't, do you, in these situations?'

'And what stopped you,' Andy asked him, 'from killing yourself?'

Powys smiled weakly. 'Couldn't get in. The door in the alcove was locked, and there was a sign that said: Danger. Keep Out.'

The final bitter irony. Rachel had saved his life. He'd stood outside the door, on the greasy stairs, and felt her there again, cool and silvery. You really can do better than this, J.M.

'So then I saw the light in the attic. Thought maybe you were up there, but there was only one rope. Hate nooses. Went back outside and broke into the stable-block, through window, with a brick. I pinched a bread knife. Brought it up to the attic and sawed through most of the rope until it was just hanging together by a few threads. Where I'd cut it, I covered it up with the coils of the noose.'

He saw that Andy was thinking very hard, the muscles in his face working.

'I figured it out,' Powys said. 'It came clear. When I saw the noose. You were going to do' – he pointed a foot at the head – 'what he did. On the four-hundredth anniversary of his death. I couldn't believe it at first. I can't understand that level of obsession.'

'Of course you can't.' Andy glanced up at him, eyes heavy with contempt. 'You puny little cunt.'

'We're talking sex magic, aren't we? I was once at a signing session for Golden Land . Some regional book fair, and one of the other writers there was this retired pathologist. He said, apropos of something, that a remarkable number of hangings which look like suicide are actually accidents. Blokes – or teenage kids in a lot of cases – trying for this uniquely mind-blowing sexual buzz you're supposed to get from hanging by the neck.

Like, when the rope jerks, you jerk off down there, too. That it?'

Andy said nothing. Powys could see him trying surreptitiously to move different muscles.

'And with sex magic, you use the build up of sexual tension to harden and focus your will. And then, at the moment of orgasm… whoosh. Max Goff used to play about with it. Who taught him? You?'

Andy was stretching his neck, easing it from side to side.

'Sex and death. Hell of a powerful combination. This was how Black Michael pro…'

'Don't call him that,' Andy snapped.

'This was how Sir Michael Wort…' Bloody hell, Joe Powys always does what he's told… 'This was how Black fucking Michael projected himself into Crybbe, fused his spirit with the spirit of the town so that the town is the man is the town is the…'

Andy stopped trying to flex muscles and stared at Powys in the electric lamplight, and his eyes were so strange that Powys wasn't sure any more which of them he was talking to, Andy or Michael. But, clearly, the stage Andy had been striving to reach was something that went beyond personalities.