There was a crack from the logs and something stung her leg. Jocasta screamed and leapt up. A smell of burning – flesh probably – made her beat her hands against her thigh in panic.
She switched on a table-lamp with a green and yellow Tiffany shade and stood next to it, examining her leg.
Nothing visible, except a tiny smudge, Jocasta licked a finger and wiped it away, pulled down her skirt and was swamped by a sudden mud-tide of self-disgust.
From the living-room window she could see the lights of the town through the trees at the end of the paddock. The paddock itself was like a black pond. She fetched from the kitchen the portfolio of drawings brought in by the girl. If the kid was any good at all, she might sell them very cheaply. Not in the gallery itself, of course, but in the small gift section they were setting up in a little room at the side.
Jocasta sat on the sofa and opened the portfolio by the light of the Tiffany lamp.
At first she was simply surprised. She'd expected landscapes and she'd expected an immature hesitancy of touch.
So the things that surprised her were the strength and vigour of the drawing in Indian ink, spatters and blotches used for effect, boldly controlled in the manner of Gerald Scarfe and Ralph Steadman.
And the fact that they were not landscapes, but interiors with figures.
An old man shaving.
The eyes, wide open, magnified in a shaving mirror to alarming effect. The chin tilted, the throat uplifted to the razor.
A tumbler on a window-ledge collecting the blood.
At first she was simply surprised.
Then the shock set in. The realization, with a rush of bile to the throat, of what was depicted in the drawing. She tore her gaze away, covering the drawing, in horror, with her hands.
Then the lights went out.
Through the window, she saw that the lights of the whole town had gone out, too.
Jocasta didn't move. She was sitting there on the sofa staring into the sputtering half-dead logs in the grate, but seeing, swimming in her mind, the image of the thing on her knee, still covered by her hands, an old man cutting his own throat with a razor.
She thought she was sweating at first.
Under her hands the paper felt wet and sticky and, like the sap oozing from the green logs on the open fire, something warm seemed to be fizzing and bubbling between her fingers.
Jocasta let the portfolio fall to the floor and shrivelled back into the sofa, almost sick with revulsion.
J. M. Powys stood by the window, bare feet on bare boards. Looking down on the street, at a few customers emerging from the main entrance of the Cock directly below. The last he saw before all the lights went out was a couple of men stumbling on the steps and clutching at each other, obviously drunk but not conspicuously merry.
He'd been here several times, but never at night. Never heard the curfew before. And now, as if the curfew had been a warning that the town would close down in precisely one hour, somebody had switched off the lights.
Such coincidences were not uncommon on the border.
He remembered manufacturing the phrase The Celtic Twilight Zone as the title for Chapter Six of Golden Land.
The border country – any border country – has a special quality. Two cultures merging, two types of landscape, an atmosphere of change and uncertainty. In such places, it used to be said, the veil between this world and others is especially thin. Border country: a transition zone… a psychic departure lounge…
Rachel returned, slipped out of the robe, joined him at the window, naked. The moon was out now, and her slender body was like a silver statuette.
'You get used to it,' Rachel said, 'living in Crybbe.'
The electricity?'
'It seems we're on the end of a power line, or something. So whenever there's a problem elsewhere it trips a switch and the whole valley goes off. Something like that. It'll be back on in a few minutes, probably.'
Powys put out a hand to her then held back and put the hand on the cool window-ledge. Things to sort out first, before he allowed himself to forget.
'Henry Kettle,' he said. 'His car went out of control and crashed into the wall around the Tump. Freak accident. What did Goff have to say about that?'
Rachel said, 'You don't want to hear that. Come back to bed,
J.M.'
They did go back to bed. But she told him anyway.
'The nearest thing to a Stone Age shaman. I mentioned that.'
She lay in the crook of his arm, his hand cupped under her breast.
Powys said. 'Nobody knows a thing about Stone Age shamans or what they did.'
'Maybe it was Bronze Age.'
'Know bugger all about them either.'
'Max said they would sometimes sacrifice themselves or allow themselves to be sacrificed to honour the Earth Spirit or some such nonsense.'
'Theory,' Powys said.
'He said it must have been like that with Henry Kettle. Getting old. Knew he was on borrowed time. So he… consciously or subconsciously, he decided to end it all and put his life energy into Max's project. Max was standing there looking at the wreckage of Kettle's car. "Whoomp!" he kept saying. "Whoomp!" And clapping his hands.'
'OK, you've convinced me,' Powys said. 'This guy's wanking in the dark, and he has to be stopped before it goes all over everybody. ..'
Arnold whimpered. Fay awoke, feeling the dog trembling against her leg.
Although the bedroom light was out, she knew somehow that all the lights were out.
Knew also that in the office below, the little front room that had been Grace Legge's sitting-room, she was in residence. Pottering about, dusting the china and the clock. The empty grin, eye-sockets of pale light.
And would she see, through those resentful, dead sockets, the hulk of the wrecked Revox and the fragments of its innards sprayed across the room?
Or was that not a part of her twilit existence?
Oh, please… Fay clutched Arnold.
Probably there was nothing down there.
Nothing.
Probably.
PART FOUR
Most of the natives once stood in superstitious awe of the ancient standing stones which are dotted up and down
Radnorshire. Even today there are farmers who prefer to leave the hay uncut which grows round such stones and some people avoid them at night as they would a graveyard.
W. H. Howse,
History of Radnorshire
CHAPTER I
Around mid-morning. Fay picked up the phone and sat there for several minutes, holding it to her ear, staring across the office, at nothing. The scene-of-crime man had just left, a young detective with a metal case. Lots of prints on the Revox and the desk, but they'd probably turn out to be her own and her father's, the SOCO had said cheerfully, fingerprinting them both. Everybody was a bit of a pro these days. He blamed television.
Fay held the phone at arm's length as it started making the continuous whine that told you you'd knocked it off its rest. She looked into the mouthpiece. The SOCO had fingerprinted that as well.
She tapped the button to get the dialling tone back. Could she really make this call?
… And what's the story. Fay?
It's very bizarre, Gavin. The fact is, I've discovered there are no dogs in Crybbe.
No dogs in Crybbe.
None at all. That is, except one.
Just the one.
Yes, mine. That's how I found out.
I see. And how come there are no dogs in Crybbe, Fay?
Because they howl at the curfew bell, Gavin. People don't like that.
That figures. But if there are no dogs in Crybbe, how do you know they howl at the curfew?