Crybbe

'I think…'

'You mention doctors or hospitals again, Joe, I'll never sleep with you again.'

Fay grinned, which was the wrong thing to do because it pulled on the skin around her bruised eye.

She had to go back into the office to answer the phone. It looked, as it always did in the mornings, far too boring to be haunted.

The call was from her father, sounding wonderfully bright and happy. Last night, while she was sitting by the sink, Joe trying to bathe her eye, the phone had rung and Jean's message, amplified by the answering machine, had been relayed across the hall.

'I can't believe it,' Alex said now. 'I feel tremendous. I feel about… oh, sixty-five. Do you think I'm too old to become a New Age person?'

'You going to stay at Jean's for awhile, Dad?'

'I'll probably drift back in the course of the day. Don't want to lose touch with old Doc Chi at this stage.'

'Dad's shed a quarter of a century overnight,' Fay told Powys. 'No woman is safe.'

'Well, keep him away from the Cock.'

'Why?'

'It seems to have aphrodisiac properties. It turns people on.'

'I don't follow you.'

He told her, at last, about getting beaten up by Humble, and Rachel taking him to hers and Goff's room. What had happened then, the sudden inevitability of it. It was the right time, coming up to curfew time. I mean, Rachel was not… promiscuous. Nor me, come to that. I mean, lonely, sex-starved, but not… Anyway, I just don't think we'd ever have got together… if it hadn't been for the time. And the place.'

'I don't understand.'

'All right, think about the condoms. All those used condoms in the alley, up by the studio. In a town surrounded by open fields, doesn't it strike you as odd that so many couples should want to do it standing up in an alley?'

'I never really thought about it. Not that way.'

'And last night again at the Cock, again in the hour before the curfew, your ex-husband was suddenly overwhelmed with, lust for his production assistant and whisked her upstairs.'

'Catrin? Guy and Catrin?'

Powys nodded. 'Why do they call it the Cock?' He was buttering more toast; it was, she reckoned, his fifth slice. How long since he last ate? 'Is that what it's really called?'

'It certainly hasn't got a sign to that effect,' Fay said.

'What do you know about Denzil the landlord? Got many kids, for instance?'

'I don't know. He isn't married, I don't think. Somebody once told me he put it about a bit, but I mean… You're getting carried away, Joe.'

'I'm a loony. I'm allowed.' He spread the toast with about half a pot of thick-cut marmalade. 'Sorry, look, I haven't got this worked out yet. Whatever I say's going to make you think I'm even more of a loony.'

'No – hang on – Joe, I…' Fay clasped her hands together tightly, squeezing them. 'I'm sorry about yesterday. I had no right to dispute your story. Town full of ghosts, no dogs… I mean, Christ

… I'm sorry.'

He put a hand over both of hers. Sighed.

Tell me,' Fay said.

So he told her. He told her about the cottage and the magical Filofax and the art studio.

'Blood?' Fay touched her temple, winced. 'Urine? What does it mean?'

'I don't really know. But I wouldn't have one of those paintings on my wall.'

And then he told her about the girl at the stone, and the apparition.

'You saw it? You saw Black Michael's Hound?'

'I don't know what it was. Maybe the hound is something it suggests. Whatever it is, it's feeding off the energy which starts to build up in this town, probably at dusk. And it comes in a straight line, from the Tump, through the Court and on towards the church. It's evil, it's… cold as the grave.'

Fay shivered inside her robe. 'And this girl was… getting off on it?'

'Something like that. When the curfew began, she'd gone. She'd done this before, knew the score.'

'What does that tell us about the curfew?'

'That the curfew was established to ward something off. I think we're talking about Black Michael. Look…' He took from his jacket a slim black paperback, Elizabethan Magic by

Robert Turner. 'I found this in the bread-oven with the Filofax and I nicked it. There's a couple of chapters on Dee, but what I was really interested in was this. The page was marked.'

He opened the book at a chapter headed 'Simon Foreman, Physician, Astrologer and Necromancer (1552-1611)'. There was a picture of Foreman, who had a dense beard and piercing eyes.

'The book talks of a manuscript in Foreman's handwriting, evidently something he copied out, much as Andy did in his Filofax. It's the record of an attempt to summon a spirit, and… look… this bit.'

He cast out much fire and kept up a wonderful ado; but we could not bring him to human form; he was seen like a great black dog and troubled the folk in the house much and feared them.

'So what it's suggesting,' Powys said, 'is that the black dog image is some kind of intermediary state in the manifestation of an evil spirit. In this case, the spirit's furious at not being able to get any further, so he's coming on with the whole poltergeist bit. There's a famous legend in Herefordshire where a dozen vicars get together to bind this spirit and all that's appeared since is a big black dog.'

'So when we talk about Black Michael's Hound…'

'We're probably talking about the ghost of Michael himself. We know from these notes of Andy's – which I'm attributing to John Dee, for want of a more suitable candidate – that Michael Wort, while alive, appeared to have taught himself to leave his body and manifest elsewhere… travelling on the "olde road", which is presumably a reference to ley-lines. Spirit paths. And then there's this legend about him escaping by some secret passage when the peasantry arrived to lynch him. Dee, or whoever, records that Wort's body was brought out after he hanged himself, to prove he was indeed dead. So maybe he escaped out of his body… along the "olde road", maybe his ghost was seen – bringing a lot of black energy with it – and they managed to contain it… to reduce it to the black dog stage… by some ritual which has at its heart the curfew.'

'How does that stop it?'

'Well, making a lot of noise – banging things, bells, tin-cans, whatever – was popularly supposed to be a way of frightening spirits off. Maybe by altering the vibration rate; I'm not really qualified to say.'

'This is…' Fay held on to his hand, 'seriously eerie. I mean, you're the expert, you've been here before, but Christ, it scares the hell out of me.'

'No, I'm not,' he said. 'I'm not any kind of expert. I wrote a daft, speculative book. I'm not as qualified as most of these New Age luminaries. All I know is that Andy Boulton-Trow, with or without Goff's knowledge, is experimenting with what we have to call dark forces. He's probably been doing it for years… since… Well, never mind. Now we know why Henry Kettle was getting the bad vibes.'

'Boulton-Trow put Goff on to this place?'

'Probably. Something else occurred to me, too. I don't know how much to make of it, but… try spelling Trow backwards.'

'Tr…?' Her eyes widened. 'Jesus.'

'I mean, it could be pure coincidence.'

'There are too many coincidences in Crybbe, Fay said. She stood up. 'OK, what are we going to do about this?'

'I think… we need to get everything we can, and quickly, on Michael Wort. Any local historians you know?'

Fay smiled, in Crybbe, Joe, an historian is somebody who can remember what it said in last week's paper.'

'What about the local-authority archives? Where, for instance, would we find the transactions of the Radnorshire Society?'

'County Library, I suppose. But that's in Llandrindod Wells.'

'How far?'

'Twenty-five, thirty miles.'

'Let's get over there.' He started to get up. 'Oh God.' Sat down again. 'I can't. I have to go to Hereford Crematorium. It's Henry Kettle's funeral.'