Alex couldn't speak. Slowly he backed out of the lamplight and, with very little hope, into the darkness.
CHAPTER III
The Crybbe dusk settled around them like sediment on the bottom of an old medicine bottle.
'Thank you, Denzil,' Powys said to the closed door of the Cock. 'That was just what we needed. Of course it's not crap. Can't you feel it?'
He started to grin ruefully, thinking of New Age ladies in ankle-length, hand-dyed, cheesecloth dresses. Can't you feel that energy?
Not energy. Not life energy, anyway.
'Fay, where can we go? Quickly?'
He was aware of a picture forming in his head. Glowing oil colours on top of the drab turpentine strokes of rough sketching and underpainting. Everything starting to fit together. Coming together by design – someone else's design.
'Studio,' Fay said, opening her bag, searching for the keys.
'Right.'
He didn't need the gavel. Didn't need even to call for silence, in fact, he rather wished he could call for noise – few murmurs, coughs, bit of shifting about in seats.
Nothing. Not a shuffle, not even a passing 'Ow're you' between neighbours. Put him in mind of a remembrance service for the dead, the only difference being that when you cast an eye over this lot you could believe the dead themselves had been brought out for the occasion.
Been like this since Goff and his people had come in and the cameraman had left: bloody quiet. Sergeant Wynford Wiley, in uniform, on guard by the door as if he was expecting trouble.
No such luck, Col Croston thought. Not the Crybbe way. No wonder the cunning old devil had stuck this one on him.
Thanks a lot, Mr Mayor.
Gavin Ashpole's Uher tape recorder and its microphone lay at the front of the room, half under the chairman's table and a good sixty feet from where Gavin himself sat at the rear of the hall. The stupid, paranoid yokels had refused to accept that if he kept the machine at his feet he would not surreptitiously switch it on and record their meeting.
He saw a man from the Hereford Times and that snooty bastard Guy Morrison. Nobody else he recognized, and Gavin knew all the national paper reporters who covered this area.
There was no sign of Fay Morrison.
Bitch.
The Newsomes sat side by side, but there might have been a brick wall between them, with broken glass along the top.
Hereward had planned to come alone to the meeting, but Jocasta had got into the car with him without a word. The inference was that she did not want to remain alone in the house after this alleged experience (about which Hereward was more than slightly dubious). But he suspected the real reason she'd come was that she hoped to see her lover.
With this in mind, Hereward had subjected each man entering the hall to unobtrusive scrutiny and was also watching for reactions from his wife. The appalling thought occurred to him that he might be the only person in the hall who did not know the identity of the Other Man.
He could be a laughing stock. Or she a liar.
Col looked at the wall-clock which the caretaker had obligingly plugged in for the occasion. Five minutes past eight. Off we go then.
'Well,' he said. 'Thank you all for coming. I, er… I don't think… that we can underestimate the importance of tonight.'
Why did he say that? Wasn't what he'd meant to say. The idea was to be essentially informal, take any heat out of the situation.
'Let me say, straight off, that no decisions will be made tonight. That's not what this meeting's about. It's simply an attempt to remove some of the mystery and some of the myths, about developments here in Crybbe. Developments which are transpiring with what might seem to some of us to be rather, er, rather bewildering speed.'
Bloody bewildering speed, by Crybbe standards.
'And let me say, first of all, that, apart from minor planning matters, the changes, the developments, introduced to Crybbe by Mr Max Goff, are, for the most part, outside the remit of local government and require no special permission whatsoever.'
'What we doin' yere, then?' a lone voice demanded. A man's voice, but so high-pitched that it was like a sudden owl hoot in silent barn.
Nobody turned to look whose it was. Obviously the voice spoke for all of Crybbe.
Col looked up and saw Hereward New-some staring at him. He smiled. Hereward did not.
'Can I say, from the outset,' Col said, 'that from here on in, only questions directed through the chair will be dealt with, however – what are we doing here? This – as it happens – was the point I was about to move on to. What are we doing here?'
Col tried to look at everyone in the room; only those in the New Age quarter, to his right, looked back.
'We're here tonight… at the instigation of Mr Max Goff himself. We're here because Mr Goff is aware that aspects of his project may appear somewhat curious – even disturbing – to a number of people. What's he doing erecting large stones in fields, even if they do happen to be his own fields? Why is he keen to purchase property for sale in the locality?'
Col paused.
'What is this New Age business really all about?'
On a single page of The Ley-Hunter's Diary 1993, with a fibre-tipped pen and a none-too-steady hand, Powys had drawn the rough outline of a man with his arms spread.
Fay thought it looked like one of those chalk-marks homicide cops drew around corpses in American films.
'The Cock,' Powys said breathlessly. 'Why do they call it the Cock? It's self-explanatory.'
'This is going to be rather tasteless, isn't it?'
'Look.' Powys turned the diary around on the studio desk to face her. He marked a cross on the head of the man. 'This is the Tump.'
He made another cross in the centre of the man's throat. Crybbe Court.'
He traced a straight line downwards and put in a third cross. The Church.' It was in the middle of the chest.
'And finally…'
Where the man's legs joined he drew in a final cross.
'The Cock,' he said. 'Or more precisely, I'd guess, the alleyway and perhaps this studio.'
She looked at him uncertainly, his face soft focus in the diffused studio lighting. 'I don't understand.'
The Cock, which used to be called the Bull, occurs precisely on the genitalia. If we want to get down to details, this studio would cover the testicles, and the erect… er, organ would project into the square very much as the pub itself leans. I remember when I spent the night there with Rachel I was thinking the upper storey hung over the square like a beer gut. Close, but… Anyway, we were in the room which is directly over the passage, the alley, and we're on that same line now.'
'Joe, this is ridiculous.'
'Not really. You ever do yoga, anything like that?'
'I never had the time.'
'OK, well, Eastern mysticism – and Western magic – suggests there are various points in the human body where physical and spiritual energy gathers, and from where it can be transmitted. The chakras.'
'I've heard of them. I think.'
'So what we could be looking at here are some of the key chakras – the centre of the forehead – mental power; the throat, controlling nervous impulses; the centre of the breast, affecting emotions. And the sex glands, responding more or less to what you'd expect.'
Fay leaned back against the tape-machine. 'I'm still not getting this, Joe, you're going to have to spell it out. Like simply.'
'The town… is the man. Is the town.'
'Oh shit… What man?'
'Wort. Black Michael. In essence he's never gone away. He's fused his energy system, his spirit, with the town. I'm not putting this very well.'