Crybbe aka Curfew

'Joe,' she said.

He looked terrible, bags under hopeless eyes, hair like cigarette ash.

They had to let me go,' he said, insufficient evidence.'

Fay said nothing.

'Can we talk?'

'Maybe it's not a good time,' Fay heard herself say. 'I don't think you killed Rachel, let's just leave it at that for now.'

Which was the last thing she wanted to do. She bit her upper lip.

'They had you in, presumably,' he said.

'Yes.'

'And they told you about Rose.'

'Yes.'

'And that's why you don't want to talk about it.'

'Look,' Fay said. 'I've lost the only real friend I had in this town, I desperately want to talk about it, I just…'

'It wasn't an accident,' Powys said.

'What?'

'It wasn't an accident. After she fell, something else came out.'

'What are you saving?

'A cat.'

Fay looked at him. There was something seriously abnormal about all this. About Joe Powys, too.

'I don't mean a live cat. This one's been dead for centuries.'

'Tiddles,' Fay said faintly, getting a picture of black eye-sockets and long sabre-teeth

And her. She was becoming abnormal. She had to get out of here.

'Cats that've been dead for hundreds of years don't hurl themselves three storeys to the ground while somebody puts on a light-show under the eaves.'

'Hallucination,' Fay said.

'No.'

Fay thought about Jean Wendle and the energy anomalies, about Grace, about the curfew and the howling and the town with no dogs.

Joe said, 'Can you spare the rest of the day?'

No! she wanted to shriek and then to push past him and run away down the street and keep running.

'I might have a job. I have to go home and talk to my father and check the answering machine.'

'If it turns out you're free, can I pick you up? Say, twenty minutes?'

Would that be entirely safe? she wanted to ask. Am I going to be all right as long as I stay away from open windows?

'All right, 'she said.

CHAPTER V

They said, Don't, leave town. Or words to that effect.'

Joe Powys floored the accelerator.

'Fuck them,' he said.

Fay tried to smile.

They'd left Crybbe on a road she wasn't too familiar with, the road into Wales by way of Radnor Forest, which didn't seem to be a forest at all but a range of hills.

He hadn't said where they were going.

She didn't care. She felt apart from it all, in a listless kind of dream state. She was watching a movie about a woman who was out for a drive with a murderer. But in films like this, the woman had no reason to suspect the man was a murderer, only the viewers knew that; they'd seen him kill, she hadn't. The woman in this particular movie had a black and white three-legged dog on her knee. Must be one of those experimental, surrealist epics.

The car moved out of an avenue of trees into a spread of open, sheep-strewn hills with steep, wooded sides and hardly any houses.

Before they left she'd written a note for her dad, fed the cats and listened to the answering machine, which said, 'Hi, Fay, this is James Barlow from Offa's Dyke. Just to say we understand Max Goff's coming back to Crybbe and he'll probably be holding a press conference around four this afternoon, following this Rachel Wade business. But don't worry about it, Gavin says to tell you he'll be going over there himself…'

So I'm free. Fay thought bitterly. Free as a bloody bird.

As if he were watching the same movie, Powys said, 'If I killed her, why would I report it?'

'Why did you?'

'Had to get an ambulance. There might have been a chance.

'Did she…? Oh God, did she die instantly?'

'I heard it, you know, snap. Her neck.'

She thought his voice was going to snap too and tried not to react. 'What were you doing there, anyway? How come you happened to be under the window when she fell?'

'Still don't know how much of that was coincidence. Don't know if she saw me. If she was trying to attract my attention and fell against the bar. But she didn't call out to me. She just screamed. As if she was screaming at something inside the house.'

'And couldn't she get out? The house was locked up with her in it?'

'It was locked when I tried the doors. It wasn't when the police got there. So they say. Work that one out.'

'So she was killed by somebody in the house… If she was killed. Humble?'

'Well, they didn't like each other. But that doesn't explain the light. Doesn't really explain the cat either.'

'Maybe Rachel was holding the cat, for some reason, and it took longer to reach the ground because there was no weight left in it. Joe, I have to ask you this… What exactly were you doing at the Court?'

'Told the cops I was looking for Rachel. I think I was really looking for Andy. Oh God…' He sighed. 'What happened was he'd planted a stone outside the cottage, an exact replica of a thing that's been hanging over me for years.'

'A stone?'

'The Bottle Stone. Do you want to know this? It'll be the first time I've talked about it to anybody. Apart from the people there.'

'Do you want to tell me?'

'I don't know… OK. Yeah."

He fell silent.

'What do you want?" Fay said. 'A drum roll?'

'Sorry. OK. It goes back over twelve years. To the Moot.'

'The Moot," Fay said solemnly.

'It's organized every year by The Ley-Hunter magazine. It's a gathering of earth-mysteries freaks from all over the place. We meet every year in a different town to discuss the latest theories and walk the local leys.'

'I bet you all have dowsing rods and woolly hats.'

'You've been to one?'

Fay laughed. It sounded very strange, laughter, today.

'This particular year,' Powys said, 'it was in Hereford. Birthplace of Alfred Watkins. Everybody was amazed there wasn't a statue – nothing at all in the town to commemorate him, which is how I came to establish Trackways a couple of years later. But, anyway, all the big names in earth mysteries were there. And we were all there too. Rose and me. Andy. Ben Corby, who was at college with us, bit of a wheeler-dealer, the guy who actually managed to sell Golden Land to a publisher. And Henry Kettle, of course. We knew there was a deal coming through, and on the Monday morning after the Moot, before we all set off for home, Ben rang the publishers and learned they'd flogged the paperback rights for ten thousand quid.'

Powys smiled. 'Bloody fortune. Well, it was a nice day, so we decided, Rose and I, to invite the others – the people who'd been in on the book from the beginning – to come out for a celebratory picnic. We wondered where we could go within reach of Hereford. Then Andy said, "Listen," he said, "I know this place…'

She looked out through the side window of the Mini. She didn't recognize the country. One hill made a kind of plateau. She counted along the top – like tiny ornaments on a green baize mantelpiece – three mounds, little tumps. A thin river was woven into the wide valley bottom.

Powys was dizzily swivelling his head. 'Somewhere here…'

The third mound had a cleft in it, like an upturned vulva.

'Yes,' he said. 'Yes.' He hit the brakes, pulled into the side of the road. 'It was down there.'

'The Bottle Stone?'

Powys nodded.

'Let me get this right,' Fay said. 'This… legend, whatever it was…'

'It's a common enough ritual, I've found out since. It can be a stone or a statue or even a tree – yew trees are favourites for it. You walk around it, usually anticlockwise, a specific number of times – thirteen isn't uncommon. And then you have an experience, a vision or whatever. There's a church in south Herefordshire where, if you do it, you're supposed to see the Devil.'

'But you didn't see anything like that?'

'No, just this sensation of plunging into a pit and becoming… impaled. And there was nothing ethereal about it, I can feel it now, ripping through the tissue, blood spurting out…'