Phil Rickman - Crybbe aka Curfew

She asked bravely, 'Are we going up to the attic, then?'

'Certainly not,' Rachel said firmly. 'For one thing, it's not terribly safe. The floor's pretty badly rotted away up there and Max isn't insured against people breaking their necks. Unless they've been hanged.'

Fay shivered and smiled and looked around. 'Well,' she said. It could be wonderful, I suppose. If it was done up.'

'With a million pounds or so spent on it, perhaps.' Rachel prodded with a shoe and sent a piece of plaster skating across

the dusty wooden floor, 'I can think of better things you could do with a million pounds.'

'Has it been like this since – you know – Tudor times?'

'Good God, no. At various times… I mean, in the past century alone, it's been a private school, a hotel… even an actual dwelling place again. If we had a torch you'd see bits of wiring and the ruins of bathrooms. But nothing's ever lasted long. It was built as an Elizabethan house, and that, in essence, is what it keeps reverting to.'

'And now?'

'No big secret. Max is a New Age billionaire with a Dream.'

'You don't sound very impressed.'

Rachel stood in the centre of the room and spread her hands. 'Oh God… He wants to be King Arthur. He wants to set up his Round Table with all kinds of dowsers and geomancers and spiritual healers and other ghastly cranks. He's been quietly infiltrating them into the town over the past year. And there'll be some kind of Max Goff Foundation, on a drip-feed from Epidemic, hopefully with the blessing of the Charity Commissioners. And people will get ludicrous grants to go off an search for their own pet Holy Grails.'

'Sounds quite exciting,' said Fay, but Rachel looked gloomy and rolled her eyes, her hands sunk deep into the pockets of her Barbour.

'Money down the drain,' she said.

'What's a… a geomancer?'

'It's some sort of spiritual chartered surveyor. Someone who works out where it's best to live to stay in harmony with the Earth Spirit, whatever that is, to protect yourself and your

family against Evil Forces. Need I go on?'

There were passages leading off the big room and Fay took one and found herself in a dark little bedchamber. It was the first room she'd seen that was actually furnished. There was an old chest under the pathetically inadequate window and a very small four-poster bed.

'Like a four-poster cot, isn't it?' Rachel had drifted in after her. 'People were smaller in those days.'

It was no more than five feet high and not much longer with very thick posts and an oak headboard with a recessed ledge. On the ledge was a pewter candle-holder with a candle stub in it. The drapes were some kind of cumbersome brocade thick as tarpaulin and heavy with grease.

'It seems they'd leap into bed,' Rachel said, 'and draw all the curtains tight. And then blow out their candle. Having first read a passage from the Bible – you see there's space on the ledge for a Bible. Because they just knew that on the other side of the curtains, the evil spirits would be hovering en masse. Cosy, isn't it?'

'Claustrophobic' Fay had never liked four-posters.

'However, if you want a real scare…' Rachel held out a box of matches,'… light the candle and look in the chest.'

She stood there holding the matchbox, not much more than another shadow in the dim, grimy bedchamber, only a crease of her Barbour at the elbow catching the light. The coat's dull waxen surface looked right for the period, and Fay had the alarming sensation that the dingy room was dragging them back into its own dark era. Was Rachel smiling? Fay couldn't see her face.

She found herself accepting the matchbox.

'Go on,' Rachel said. 'Light the candle.'

'OK.' She tried not to sound hesitant, asking herself. You aren't nervous , are you, Fay?

No, she decided. Just bloody cold. It might have occurred to me to wonder why she was wearing a Barbour on Midsummer Day. And she might have warned me about the temperature in this place.

She reached beyond the post at the bedhead and pulled the candle-holder from the recess. Struck a match. Saw the candle-tray was full of dead flies and bluebottles. Turned it upside down, but not all of them fell out.

Yuk. Fay lit the candle.

Shadows bounced.

'The chest under the window?'

She could see Rachel Wade's face now, in the candle-light, and it wasn't smiling. 'Look,' Rachel said, 'forget it. Come on. I was only joking.'

'No you weren't.' Fay smelled wax, from the candle and from Rachel's coat perhaps. 'I'd better open the blasted thing before this candle burns away.'

Rachel Wade shrugged. Fay crossed to the window which left only a smear of light across the top of the chest. Obviously not Elizabethan, this chest; it had black lettering stamped across its lid and was carelessly bound with green-painted metal strips.

Fay lifted the lid and lowered the candle.

She recoiled at once. 'Oh,' she said.

'Sorry.'

'What is it?'

Its eye-sockets were black and two upper teeth were thin and curved. A small cobweb hung between them. The mouth was stretched wide in a fossilized shriek.

'It's a cat, isn't it? A mummified cat?'

'Tiddles. Max calls it Tiddles.'

'Cute,' Fay said and shuddered.

'Not very. It was found in the rafters. It may have been walled up there alive.'

'God.'

'Practical geomancy,' Rachel said. 'The spirit of the cat acts apparently, as a guardian. They found half a horse behind the kitchen wall. Come on, let's go.

Asleep in his armchair, Canon Alex Peters dreamed he was asleep in his armchair. Tucked up in a soft blanket of sunbeams, he awoke in time to watch the wall dissolve.

It began with the fireplace. He was aware that Grace's dreadful see-through clock and the gilt-framed mirror were fading, while the black, sooty hole of the fireplace itself was getting bigger.

Gradually, the hole took over, becoming darker and wider and then spreading up through the mantelpiece, almost as far as the ceiling, until the whole chimney breast dissolved into a black passageway.

There formed a filigree of yellowish light, and then, dimly at first, Grace appeared in the passageway. Standing there, quite still.

'What happened to your wheelchair?' Alex asked. He was glad, of course, to see her back on her feet.

'No you're not,' Grace said. Her lips did not move when she spoke but her body became brighter, as if the spider web of lights was inside her, like glowing veins. 'You were glad when I died, and you'll be glad to know I'm still dead.'

'That's not true,' protested Alex. But you couldn't lie to the dead, and he knew it.

Grace turned her back on him and began to walk away along the passage. Alex struggled to get up, desperate to explain.

But the chair wouldn't let him. He shouted to the spindly, diminishing figure. 'Grace, look, don't go, give me a hand, would you?'

The chair held him in a leathery grip.

'Grace!' Alex screamed. 'Grace, don't go! I want to explain!'

Just once, Grace glanced back at him over her shoulder, and there was a pitying smile on her face, with perhaps a shadow of malice.

Goff did not, of course, have any immediate plans to live in Crybbe Court itself, Rachel Wade said. Good God , no.

Well, perhaps one day. When it was fully restored.

'You mean,' Fay said as they walked out into the sunlight, restored to what it would've been like if the Elizabethans had had full central heating and ten-speaker stereos.'

'You're getting the general picture,' Rachel confirmed, and showed her the place where Max actually would be living within the next week or so.

It was an L-shaped stone stable-block behind the house. It already had been gutted, plumbed and wired and a giant plate-glass window had been inserted into a solid stone wall to open up a new and spectacular view of the hills from what would be the living-room.