'I'll get out yere.'
'Mr Preece…'
The old man scrambled out. Started to walk stiffly away. Then turned and tried to shout, voice cracking up like old brown parchment.
'You leave it alone, see…' He started to cough. 'Leave it alone, you…'
Mr Preece hawked and spat into the gutter.
'… stupid bitch,' he said roughly, biting off the words as if he was trying to choke back more phlegm and a different emotion. And then, leaving the passenger door for her to close, he was off across the cobbles, limping and stumbling towards the church.
He's going to ring the curfew. Fay thought suddenly.
His son's just been mangled within an inch of his life in a terrible accident and all he can think about is ringing the curfew.
Jonathon had been saying for months – years even – that it was time they got rid of that old tractor.
Probably this wasn't what he'd had in mind, Warren thought, standing in Top Meadow, alone with the wreckage of the thing that had crippled his Old Man, all the coppers and the firemen gone now.
The Old Man had been working on that tractor all day, giving himself something to concentrate on, take his mind off Jonathon and his problem of having nobody to hand over the farm to when he was too old and clapped out. Then he'd mumbled something about testing the bugger and lumbered off in it, up the top field, silly old bastard.
Testing it. Bloody tested it all right.
Warren had to laugh.
With the last of the light, he could more or less see what had happened, the tractor climbing towards the highest point and not making it, sliding back in the mud, out of control and tipping over, the Old Man going down with it, disappearing underneath as the bloody old antique came apart.
But Warren still couldn't figure how he'd let it happen, all the times he'd been up here on that bloody old tractor. At least, he couldn't see rationally, like, how it had happened.
It was the unrational answer, the weird option, glittering in his head like cold stars, that wouldn't let him go home.
He followed the big tracks through the mud by the field gate, up the pitch to the point where the tractor had started rolling back prior to keeling over. He followed the tracks to the very top of the rise, to where the tractor had been headed, glancing behind him and seeing the trees moving on top of the old Tump half a mile away.
By the time he was on top of the pitch, he was near burning up with excitement. It hadn't seemed like the right part of the field at all, but that was because he'd come in by a different, gate, looking at it from a different angle.
Warren hesitated a moment and then dashed back down to the tractor. Somebody had left behind a shovel they'd been using to shift the mud so the firemen could get their cutting gear to the Old Man. He snatched up the shovel, carried it back up the pitch, prised away the top sod – knowing instinctively exactly where to dig – threw off a few shovelfuls of earth, and there it was, the old box.
The jagged thrill that went through him was like white-hot electric wire. 'Oh, fuck, oh fuck.' Blinded by his power. 'I done it. Me.'
His fingers were rigid with excitement as he opened the box, just to make sure, and he almost cried out with the euphoria of the moment.
He couldn't see proper, but it was like the hand of bones, the Hand of Glory in the box had bent over and become a fist.
It was curled around the Stanley knife, gripping it, and the blade was out.
Warren shivered violently in horror and pleasure – the combination making him feel so alive it was like he was a knife himself, sharp and savage, steely and invulnerable.
The only indestructible Preece.
CHAPTER XI
At first, the figure was dressed in dark clothes so that when it filtered through the twilit trees only the soft footsteps and the rustlings told Powys anyone was coming.
He moved behind his oak tree, sure it was going to be Andy. Holding himself still, packing away the anger and the grief – an unstable mixture – because, for once, he intended to have the advantage.
What he had to do was break this guy's habitual cool. To raise the vibration rate until the bass-cello voice distorted and the lotus position collapsed in a muscular spasm.
He'd never seen Andy anything but laid-back. This, he realized, was the most impenetrable of all screens. Laid-back people were not evil. Laid-back people were wise. Evil people ranted like Hitler.
They weren't people you'd known half your life. And they were never called Andy.
But then, Powys thought, watching the figure enter the clearing and move towards the stone, the stench from a rotten egg was only apparent when the perfectly rounded, smooth, white shell was cracked.
The stone gleamed pearly grey, collecting what light remained, a ghostly obelisk. Powys watched and tried to slow his breathing. Not yet time; to get a stake into Dracula, you had to wait for daylight.
Or, in this case, until the curfew was over. The curfew was central to the Crybbe experience. The curfew was pivotal. Whatever had been building up – tension, fear, excitement – climaxed and then died with the curfew.
He'd experienced it twice, in radically different ways. The first night with Rachel, when they'd wound up in bed at the Cock so fast they hadn't even been aware of the chemical interacting until the chemicals had fully interacted. And then by the river, when he'd found the shotgun in his hands and come within a twitch of blowing Jonathon Preece in half.
He lifted the sleeve of his sweatshirt to expose his watch; it was too dark to be certain, but he was sure it must be ten o'clock.
Ten o'clock and no curfew?
Staggering into the church, Jimmy Preece was faced with its silent, solitary occupant, a wooden arrow pointing at the altar rails.
He stood gasping in the doorway, and there was Jonathon's smooth, mahogany coffin shining like a taunt, a pale gleam of polish in the dimness.
Mr Preece couldn't find his breath, his legs felt like wet straw, and the urge to pray had never been as strong.
Please, God, protect us, he wanted to cry out until the words leapt into every corner of the rafters and came back at him with the illusion of strength.
And illusion was all it would be. He remembered the trouble there'd been when the old vicar was ill and the diocese had sent a replacement who'd turned out to be one of these Charismatics, some new movement in the church, this chap spouting about something he called Dynamic Prayer, shouting and quivering and making them all sing like darkies and hug each other.
No end of disturbance, until a phone call to the bishop had got rid of him. Not the border way, they told him. Not the Crybbe way.
Oh, Jonathon, Jonathon… Mr Preece felt his chest quake in agony, and he turned away, groping for the narrow, wooden door to the belfry.
The old routine, making his painful way to the steps. But, for the first time, the routine resisted him and his foot failed to find the bottom step. Twenty-seven years he'd done it, without a break, until Jack started to take over, and now Jimmy Preece had come back and he couldn't find the blessed step.
Mr Preece squeezed his eyes shut, dug his nails into his cheeks, raised his other foot and felt the step's worn edge slide under his shoe.
What time was it? Was he late?
His chest pumping weakly like these old brass fire-bellows his wife still kept, although the leather was holed and withered. His foot slipped on the edge of the second step.
Come on, come on, you hopeless old bugger.
He set off up the narrow stone steps, some no more than two foot wide.
Used to be… when he was ringing the old bell every night
… that… these steps was… never a problem… even when he'd been working… solid on the lambing or the haymaking and was
… bone tired… because…
Mr Preece paused to catch a breath, six steps up.