Phil Rickman - Crybbe aka Curfew

'God in heaven,' Col Croston was saying. 'Don't come in, Mrs Newsome."

The face, Powys saw with short-lived relief, was only in a very large painting – Andy dressed in the kind of sombre clothing Michael Wort might have worn, standing by a door meaningfully ajar. Powys remembered Andy talking about the girl, the artist, who could 'create doorways'. With that in mind he didn't look at it again. But what was beneath it was worse

The unframed canvas was hanging on the wall above a wooden workbench with sections of frames strewn across it and fastened to the side, a large wood-vice with a metal handle and wooden jaws.

The vice would hold a piece of soft timber firmly, without damaging it, unless you really leaned on the handle, in which case it would probably squash anything softer than iron.

Powys nearly choked. He didn't go in. Blood was still dripping to the sawdusted floor and there were deltas down the walls made by high-pressure crimson jets.

The dead man was on his knees, the jaws of the vice clamped like the hands of a faith-healer either side of this giant red pepper, his head, once.

Powys's stomach lurched like a car doing an emergency stop.

Col Croston emerged expressionless, pulling the door closed behind him. 'Mrs Newsome… Let's get some air, shall we?'

Her face began to warp. Col Croston took her arm and steered her into the square. Powys quickly closed the door behind them and stood with his back to it; he didn't want to hear this.

'What's in there?' Fay said from far away.

'A body.'

'Is it Hereward? Hereward Newsome?'

'Hard to say, he's been… damaged. And I don't know him. And if I did, it wouldn't help. Look, Fay, can we…?'

'Warren Preece,' Fay said, as if this explained everything. 'I expect Warren Preece did it.'

She took a last disbelieving look at her dad and watched Powys flick off the lights. She didn't move. He took her hand and towed her into the street. She went with him easily, like one of those toy dogs on wheels. From down the hill, across the river, blue emergency beacons were strobing towards the town with a warble of sirens.

Powys pulled Fay into a side-street. 'It'd be a bit daft to leave town, but I'd rather not be the first in line to make a police statement, would you?'

'Where shall we go?'

'My cottage?' They were in a street of narrow terraces and no lights. 'Or your house?'

'I suppose it is my house now,' Fay said, still sounding completely disconnected. 'Unless Dad's left it to some mysterious totty. I mean… I don't want it. I'll take the cats, but I'm not having Grace. Can you give a house to charity?'

He took hold of her upper arms, gently. 'Fay, please.'

She looked at him in mild enquiry, her green eyes calm as rock pools at low tide.

'I need you,' Powys said, and he hadn't meant to say that.

Fay said, 'Do vou?' from several miles away.

He nodded. They seemed to have been through years of experience together in about two days.

He'd tried to explain briefly what had happened. About the Tump, the head in the box. About Andy. Not about Jean Wendle; it wasn't the time.

What he wanted to tell her now was that something had been resolved. He wanted to say reassuring things about her dad.

But as he reached out for her he felt his body breaking up into awful, seismic shivers. It's not over – the words squeezed into his brain like the fragmented skull of the man in the vice - it's not over.

Joe had left the candle behind.

Taken the lamp but brought the candle down from the attic and left it on the floor in the open doorway, well out of the reach of Andy Boulton-Trow.

The candlelight would guide the paramedics with their stretcher to the room where Andy lay, feeling no pain, only frigid fury which he knew he had to contain if he were to preserve the legacy.

Andy fancied he could hear distant sirens; didn't have much time. He picked up the head of Michael Wort and held it above him – oh, yes, he could use his arms, he'd lied about that. But not his legs; he couldn't feel his legs or his lower body, only the bubbling acid of rage which he would have to control and channel.

'Michael,' he hissed, and his lungs fell very small and also oddly detached, as though they were part of some ancillary organism.

The head of Michael Won had no eyes, his remaining teeth were bare, its skin reduced to pickled brown flakes. But the skull was hard.

Andy looked deep into the dark sockets and summoned the spirit of the man who, four hundred years ago this night, had dared to seize the Infinite.

' Dewch,' he whispered, 'Tyrd i lawr , Michael.' He lay back and – balancing the head on his solar plexus – closed his eyes, slowed his breathing, began to visualise with an intensity he'd never known. 'Tyrd I lawr.'

The first police car arrived as they approached the bridge. Joe didn't want to cross at first, in case they were stopped. Joe was a worrier. Fay didn't see any problem.

And the car didn't stop.

As the police car warbled away, she remembered something. 'Where's Arnold?'

'Mrs Seagrove's looking after him. He's… Well, I'll tell you. Some time.'

Some time? Fay looked at him curiously. Then said to herself, My father's dead. Every time she thought of something else, she was going to make herself repeat this, with emphasis.

What she wanted was to be suddenly overcome with immeasurable grief, to sob bitterly, throw a wobbly in the street.

No parents at all any more. No barrier. In the firing line now. Stand up, Fay Morrison. Bang.

Bang.

Bang !

Fay stopped. MY DAD'S DEAD.

Yes. But that wasn't the whole point. This was Crybbe. In Crybbe, death wasn't necessarily the worst thing that could happen to you. He'd looked peaceful under the gallery spotlights, with the paintings. But was he at peace, or was he going to bang around, like Grace, as some kind of psychic detritus?

Was this the destiny of the dead of Crybbe, to moulder on, like the town?

'Psychic pollution,' she said suddenly. 'What can you do about psychic pollution?'

She peered over the bridge parapet, down to where the dark water loitered indolently around the stone buttresses.

'Nuclear waste you can just about bury,' she said. 'Hundreds of feet underground in immovable granite. And, maybe, after four hundred years…'She straightened up. 'You know, I really underestimated the… the toxicity of this town.'

Joe was staring at her. I need you , he'd said, the words sounding strange. Probably because nobody had actually said that to her before. Not her dad, not Offa's Dyke Radio, not even her old boss at Radio Four. Certainly not Guy. (We could be good for each other, Fay.) No. Nobody.

She looked at Joe in the light of the streetlamp at the end of the bridge. She thought he was a nice guy. She could, in better circumstances, be quite seriously attracted to him.

He still looked sort of wary, though.

'Maybe they were right,' he was saying, 'with their curfew and their Crybbe mentality. Maybe it was the best they could do. Maybe they just hadn't got the knowledge or the resources to handle it.'

'Handle what exactly, Joe?'

'I don't know. I don't suppose we'll ever know. Whatever… properties it has. To amplify things. The Old Golden Land. Where psychic doorways are easy to open.'

'And pretty near impossible to close.'

'John Dee knew it,' Joe said. 'Wort knew it. Just goes a lot deeper than either of them probably imagined. When you think about it, the great Michael Wort was probably just another loony. Like Andy. He didn't know what the fuck he was doing either.'

They were approaching the cottage which overlooked the river.