… TEN…
Below you, the tiny figure running around the stone.
Widdershins… all wrong.
Below. The stone and the running figure.
Widdershins.
All wrong.
…ELEVEN…
And the ball of light rising up hard, bright, glowing, pulsing… into the chest.
Widdershins.
Engulfing your heart, but it's no longer warm, and it's bursting, with a shocking rush into your head, where it's…
WIDDERSHINS!
He was inside the running figure now, pounding across the bridge and into the short gravel drive of the little black and white riverside cottage.
Powys flung himself en to the long-unmown lawn, soft and damp and full of buttercups and dandelions.
He lay on his stomach with his face into the grass, his eyes closed and the cool vegetation pressed into the sockets. Kept rubbing it in until it was a green mush and not so cool any more.
'You're going back,' Annie had said.
Back to the Old Golden Land. Back – he'd told himself – to find out what had happened to Henry Kettle. Back – they said behind his back – to find redemption.
The cold in his stomach told him he was back, but that there was no redemption to be found here.
He opened his eyes and blinked and then the screaming started to come out of him like aural vomit, for at the top edge of the little ridge on which the cottage stood, something black and alien thrust out of the grass.
The stone was only five feet tall but looked taller because of the prominence of its position.
Its base was fat and solidly planted in.he earth. It maintained its girth until, three feet above the ground, it tapered into a neck, presenting the illusion of a large black beer-bottle
CHAPTER VIII
Previously, the cardboard box had contained a new kind of foot-massaging sandal from Germany which Max was trying out on the advice of his reflexologist. As a coffin it was not entirely satisfactory.
She'd found the box in Max's bedroom, which was built into the eaves over the far end of the long room where his desk stood. The four-poster bed, facing the mound, had deep-grey drapes. Max had not spent a single night here yet, but it seemed to Rachel that the atmosphere in the room was already foetid with tension and a lingering sense of suffocated longing. Rachel thought of the nights of the Great Beast and the Scarlet Woman, and was sickened and ashamed. She'd snatched the shoe-box and fled.
The box was necessary. There was no way she could carry Tiddles's chest up to the attic on her own. As she knelt in the yard by the rubbish pile, she was worried the mummified cat would come apart or disintegrate while being transferred from the chest. He fell as light as wads of dust under an old sofa.
'Poor little devil,' Rachel said. 'You certainly haven't much energy left to put into Max's project.'
Returning Tiddles to his sentry post in the Court would, she decided, be her last meaningful task in Crybbe.
And she didn't want witnesses.
For over an hour Tiddles lay in his box on the kitchen table in the stables while Rachel waited for the workmen to finish clearing the Court. It was gone 7 p.m.; still she could hear them inside, while a van waited in the courtyard.
At nearly 8 p.m., she threw on her Barbour, picked up the shoe-box, marched purposefully across to the Court's main entrance and hauled open the dusty oak door.
There was a clang from above. A thump. The sound of a large piece of furniture being hurled to the floor.
What were they doing up there? And who exactly were they?
Not – judging by the quality of the stuff they'd tossed out – a knowledgeable antique dealer among them. Rachel decided it was time to throw them out.
Or time, at least, to establish the identity of the smart-arse who was deciding so arbitrarily which items of furniture to discard.
With the shoe-box under her arm, she went in.
'Hello… Excuse me!'
Her voice seemed to go nowhere, as if she was shouting into a wind-tunnel.
The Court was so full of noise. Ceiling-shaking bangs and crashes, as if the entire building was being torn apart. Yet no one had come out of here in at least a couple of hours and the rubbish pile was no higher than it had been when she'd found the cat's wooden chest.
'HELLO!'
She looked around. Half-light floated feebly through the nigh-level slits and barely reached the stone floor.
Rachel followed the sounds and stormed up the spiral stone stair case.
'Excuse me.' Calling out as she neared the first floor. 'I need to lock this place up for the night, so if you could give me some idea how long you're going to be…'
She stepped out into the main chamber, where families had lived and where the Hanging Sheriff, Sir Michael Wort, had held out against the rebel hordes.
'Oh,' Rachel said.
She was alone.
The weak evening light washed through two mullioned windows, but the shadows were taking over now.
Well, she certainly wasn't going to play hide-and-seek with a bunch of silly buggers getting paid well over the odds to clean the place out before morning. She had half a mind to lock them in. Except the keys were in her bag, in the stables.
There was a double crash from above and the sound of glass shattering.
'What the hell…?'
Rachel bounded angrily up the next spiral. Didn't they know how easily they could kill themselves up there, or bring half the ceiling down? Had nobody warned them about the state of the floor?
The heavy door to the attics was ajar. They'd been given keys, then. That bastard Max must have had another set made without even telling her. She thrust through the arched doorway, past the alcove concealing the entrance to the prospect chamber. Up towards the attics.
It was only when she was halfway up the steps that it occurred to her that among the bangs and the crashes there'd been no laughter, none of the usual banter of men working together, no shouted directions, no oaths, no…
No voices at all.
And now she was standing here, on the last stairway, far above her blades of light through broken slates, and it was absolutely silent.
'What,' Rachel demanded, 'is going on?'
What was more disquieting than this sudden inexplicable cessation of bangs and crashes was the hairline crack she detected in her own voice. She cleared her throat and gave it more vehemence.
'Come on, I haven't got all night. Where are you?'
Rachel did not remember ever being superstitious. She did not believe in good luck, bad luck, heaven, hell, psychic forces or the secret power of ley-lines. She found the whole New Age concept not only essentially unsound but, for the most part, very tedious indeed.
Yet – and for the first time – she found the place not just gloomy in a sad, uncared-for kind of way, but in the sense of being oppressive. And yes, OK, eerie. She admitted to herself that she didn't want to go so far into the attic that she might see the rope hanging from the ceiling, even though she knew it could not be a very old rope.
But this was a side issue. Something to be acknowledged and perhaps examined later with a raising of eyebrows and glass of whisky beside the Jotul stove in J.M. Powys's riverside retreat.
For here and for now, there was only one serious, legitimate fear: a fear of the kind of men who, on hearing a woman calling out to them and coming up the stairs, would stop what they were doing, slide into the shadows and keep very, very quiet.
Until this woman appeared at the top of the steps, with nothing to defend her except a dead cat in a shoe-box.
So no way was she going all the way to the top.
Rachel steadied her breathing, set her lips in a firm line, tossed back her hair and began to descend the spiral stairway. If the men in the attic were unaware of the instability of the floor and the danger to themselves, that was their business. They were presumably well-insured.