'She was called Grace Legge The house we live in was hers. She died last year. I saw her last week.'
'Bloody hell, Fay."
'I'd never seen one before. You know how it is – you've read about ghosts, you've seen the films, you've interviewed people who swear they've seen one. But you don't… quite… believe they exist.'
'Except in people's minds,' he said.
'Yes.' Fay ran her fingers deep into Arnold's warm fur. 'I don't recommend the experience. You know what they say – about the flesh creeping? The spine feeling chilled? Grace was ghastly, dead. What's the time?'
'Ten past five.'
'We haven't eaten,' Fay remembered. 'No wonder I'm shooting my mouth off. Light-headed. You coming in for something, Powys? Omelette? Sandwich? I'm afraid Dad'll be there', so forget everything I said about Grace.'
'Thanks, but I ought to find Rachel.'
Powys pulled up at the bottom of Bell Street, took out the keys and passed them to Fay.
Arnold tried to stand up on Fay's knee. 'Hang on,' Powys said. He went round to open Fay's door and she handed Arnold to him while she got out and shook off the dog hairs.
As Powys handed Arnold back, as gently as he could, Fay looked him hard in the eyes. Serious, almost severe.
'If you've got any sense, Joe Powys,' she said, 'you'll piss off out of Crybbe pronto and take Rachel with you. She's gold. She's the only person I know around here who's got her act together. Come on, Arnie, I'm afraid we're home.'
'What about you? Strikes me you need to get out more urgently than any of us.'
'Why? Because I'm losing my marbles like Dad?'
And like me? he wondered, walking down the street towards the river.
And immediately twelve years fell away and he was going around the stone again.
Round and round. Mesmeric. Tribal.
Widdershins, widdershins… against the sun, against nature
…
… And he goes round SEVEN times…
Powys stood on the bridge and threw up his hands, warding it off, wiping it away, but the atmosphere was thick with it. He could feel Memory's helicopter beating the air above his head with great sweeping, buffeting strokes. It had never been so powerful. He was standing upright on the bridge, but his mind was ducking and crouching, cowering. He looked around for somewhere to run to, but it was all around him.
…EIGHT times…
Fluidity of movement, breathing changing rhythm. Something else breathing for you, running beside you… widdershins, widdershins… and doing your breathing.
… NINE…
Can't stop. Can't stop.
Out of your hands now.
Widdershins, widdershins.
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…
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.