Hello, who's this?
Oh, Grace, look, it's young Murray.
No, don't get up, old chap.
Well, er… it's a lovely night, isn't it?
Yes. Indeed.
What's that?
Cain and Abel?
I'm sorry… I'm not quite getting your drift. What you're saying is, Abel killed Cain?
Well, not in my version, old son, but I suppose you modernists have your own ideas.
Abel killed Cain, eh?
Well, if you say so, Murray, if you say so.
Arnold was not at all happy about being left in the Mini. Joe Powys had pushed back the slide-opening driver's window several inches to give him plenty of air, and he stood up on the seat and pressed his head through the gap and whined frantically.
'I can't take you,' Powys said. 'Please, Arnold.' He'd left the dog a saucer of water on the back shelf. Poured from a bottle he kept in the boot because the radiator had been known to boil dry.
Knowing full well that he was doing all this just in case, for some unknowable reason, he didn't get back.
'Good boy,' he said. 'Good boy.'
He locked the car and moved quickly, uncomfortably away. He didn't want to be here. He felt he was in the wrong place, but he didn't trust his own feelings. He trusted Jean Wendle's feelings because Jean was an experienced psychic and a Wise Woman, and he was just a writer; and when it came to dealing with real life, writers didn't know shit.
The Mini was tightly parked in a semi-concealed position behind the stable-block. Powys carried a hand-lamp with a beam projecting a good fifty yards in front of him. It was probably a mistake; he should be more surreptitious. What was he going to do – stand amid the ruins of the wall, pinning Andy in the powerful beam as he cavorted naked in the maelstrom of black energy?
'It all sounds,' he said aloud into the night, 'so bloody stupid.'
Earth mysteries.
Book your seats for a magical, mind-expanding excursion to the Old Golden Land.
A fun-filled New Age afternoon. A book of half-baked pseudo-mystical musings on your knee as you picnic by a sacred standing stone, around it a glowing aura of fascinating legend. As he moved uncertainly across the field towards the Tump, it struck him that it was past ten o'clock and there'd been no curfew. Well, it was late last night, too. Took old Preece longer to make it to the belfry.
But he still thought, that's where I should be. Or with Fay.
Not here.
Or am I just trying to put it off again, the confrontation – afraid my reasoning's all to cock and this man, with his precise, laid-back logic and his superior knowledge of the arcane, is going to hold up another dark mirror.
As was usual with these things, he didn't notice it happening until it had been happening for quite some time.
Climbing easily over the ruins of the wall, where somebody had taken a bulldozer for a midnight joy-ride, the rhythm of his breath began to change so that it was a separate thing from what he was doing, which was labouring up the side of the mound. Normally, to do this, he would be jerking the breath in like a fireman on a steam train shovelling more and more coal on, breath as fuel. But he was conscious, in an unconcerned dreamlike way, of the climb being quite effortless and the breathing fuelling something else, some inner mechanism.
Each breath was a marathon breath, long, long, long, but not at all painful. When you discovered that you, after all, possessed a vast inner strength, it was a deeply pleasurable thing.
He followed what he thought was the beam from the lamp until he realized the lamp had gone out but the beam had not… as though he was throwing a shadow, a negative shadow, which made it a shadow of light.
Out of the tufted grass and into the bushes, moving with ease, watching his legs doing the work, as legs were meant to do, tearing through the undergrowth in their eagerness to take him to the summit of the mound.
The source.
Each breath seeming to take minutes, breathing in not only air, but colours, all the colours of the night, which were colours not normally visible to undeveloped human sight.
Moving up the side of the Tump, between bushes and tree trunks and moving effortlessly. Effortlessly as the last time. goes round… thrice… goes round…
CHAPTER VII
Nobody panicked.
Well, they wouldn't, would they? Not in Crybbe. They'd be quite used to this by now. Part of everyday life. Everynight life, anyway.
So there were no screams, no scrambles for the door. Guy Morrison knew this because he was standing only yards from the exit where the fat policeman, Wiley, was doubtless still at his post.
'Only a matter of time, wasn't it?' Col Croston called out. 'Don't worry, it often happens during council meetings. Mrs By ford's gone to switch on the generator.'
It was a bloody mercy, in Guy's opinion.
The woman was completely and utterly insane.
For the first time, Guy was profoundly thankful he and Fay had never had children.
He hoped that by the time the lights came on she'd have had the decency to make herself scarce. The sheer embarrassment of it!
'Guy?'
Somebody snuggled against his chest.
'Just as well it is me,' he whispered, and she giggled and kissed his neck.
A worrying thought struck him.
'You're not wearing lipstick, are you, Catrin?'
'Not any more,' Catrin Jones said, and Guy plunged a hand into his jacket pocket, searching frantically for a handkerchief.
'No, I'm not,' Catrin said. 'Honest. I'm sorry.'
'Shut up then,' he hissed, conscious of the fact that nobody else appeared to be talking.
'Won't be long now,' Col Croston shouted cheerfully. At least, Guy thought, it would be an opportunity for him to pretend the five minutes before the power cut had never happened.
He became aware that somebody had drawn back the curtains at the windows, and what little light remained in the sky showed him a scene like the old black and white photographs he'd seen of the insides of air-raid shelters in the blitz, only even more overcrowded. All it needed was someone with rampant claustrophobia to start floundering about and there'd be total chaos.
But nobody moved and nobody spoke and it was quite uncanny. He felt Catrin's hand moving like a mouse in one of his hip pockets. When they got back to Cardiff he'd suggest she should be transferred. Something she couldn't very well refuse – six months' attachment as an assistant trainee radio producer, or anything else that sounded vaguely like promotion.
As his eyes adjusted, Guy was able to make out individual faces. A fat farmer who hadn't taken off his cap. That cocky little radio chap trying vainly to see his watch. Jocasta Newsome and her husband – strange that she wasn't talking; perhaps they'd had a row.
The radio bloke – at least this outfit had had the good sense not to have Fay covering the meeting – was on his feet and moving to the door.
'Just a minute,' Guy heard Wiley say officiously. 'Where do you think you're goin'?'
'Look, I've got an urgent news report to go down. Gavin Ashpole, Offa's Dyke Radio.'
'Well, you can 'ang on yere. Studio won't be workin' if there's no power, is it?'
'Then I'll do it by phone. Do you mind?'
'I'm not bein' offensive, sir, but you might 'ave lifted somebody's wallet in there and be makin' off with the proceeds.'
'Oh, for… Look, pal, I've got an expensive tape recorder on the floor under the chairman's table. You can hold it to for ransom if I don't come back. Now, please.'
'Lucky I recognizes your voice, Mr Ashpole,' Wynford Wiley said genially, and Guy heard a bolt go back.
'Thanks.'
Guy heard the door grinding open, but he didn't hear it close again. He didn't hear anything.
Had he been looking through the viewfinder of a camera, it would have seemed at first like a smear on the lens.