Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (19 page)

Mr J. Powys,

The Alfred Watkins Centre,
Hereford.

   
Handwritten, not too steadily.
Inside, a single sheet of lined blue notepaper.

Cwm Draenog,
Titley,
Kington

   
     
Dear Mr Powys,

         
         
If you have
not already heard I am sorry to have to
   
     
inform
you of the death of my neighbour Mr H. Kettle.

         
What . . . ?

   
     
         
He was killed in a road accident in Crybbe where he was
   
     
working
and did not suffer.

         
Jesus Christ!

         
         
Mr Kettle
left an envelope with me to be opened after his
   
     
death
in which he stated what he wanted to happen to his
   
     
possessions
as he did not trust solicitors. The house and all the
   
     
contents
is to be sold and the money sent to his daughter in
   
     
Canada
but he wants you to have his papers and his dowsing
   
     
rods.
If you would like to come to the house I am in most of
   
     
the
time and will let you into Mr Kettle's house.

                  
         
Yours
faithfully,

                  
         
Gwen
Whitney (Mrs)

   
J. M. Powys put down the letter.
He ought to have opened the shop ten minutes ago. The Sodalite crystals (for emotional
stability and the treatment stress-related conditions) began to dribble through
his fingers and roll across the wooden counter.

CHAPTER II

Rachel noticed that Denzil George, licensee of the Cock, had several
shaving cuts this morning. He'd obviously overslept, unused, no doubt, to
rising early to prepare an 8 a.m. breakfast for his guests. What a torpid town
this was.

   
'Parcel come for you,' the
licensee said, placing a small package by Max's elbow.
   
'Thanks.' Max tossed it to Rachel.

   
'No stamp,' Rachel noticed.
'Obviously delivered by hand.'

   
'Better open it,' Max said, digging
into some of the muesli he'd had delivered to the pub.

   
Rachel uncovered a tape cassette
and a note. 'Who's Warren Preece?'

   
Max looked up.

   
'He's sent you a tape of his
band.'

   
'Delivered by hand, huh?' Max
put down his spoon thoughtfully. 'I dunno any Warren Preece, but the surname
has a certain familiar ring. Maybe you should find out more, Rach.'

   
'Yes,' Rachel said, pushing
back her chair. 'I'll ask the landlord.'

The Anglicans'
Book of Common Prayer
had nothing to say about exorcising spirits of the dead.

   
The Revd Murray Beech knew this
and was grateful for it. But he was leafing through the prayer book anyway,
seeking inspiration.

   
Murray was following the advice
of Alex Peters and attempting to compile for himself a convincing prayer to
deliver in an allegedly haunted house.

   
He came across the words,

'Peace be to this house and to all that dwell in it.'

   
This actually appeared under
the order for The Visitation of the Sick, but Murray made a note of it anyway.
Surely with an alleged 'haunting' - Murray recoiled from the word with embarrassment
- what you were supposedly dealing with was a sick property, contaminated by
some form of so-called 'psychic' radiation, although, in
his
'exorcism' - Oh, God - the prayer would be aimed at the
troubled souls of the living. In his view the health of a property could be
affected only by the attitude and the state of mind of the current inhabitants,
not
by any residual guilt or distress
from, ah, previous residents.

   
He looked around his own room.
The neat bookshelves, the filing cabinets, the office desk with metal legs at
which he sat, the clean, white walls - feeling a twinge of pain as he remembered
the walls being painted by Kirsty exactly a fortnight before she'd said, 'I'm
sorry, Murray. This isn't what I want.' Murray looked quickly back at the
prayer book, turned over a page, came upon the following entreaty:

         
         
'Oh Lord,
look down from heaven, behold, visit and
   
     
relieve
this thy servant. . . defend him from the danger of
   
     
the
enemy.'

   
He breathed heavily down his
nose. He abhorred words like 'enemy'. The duty of the Church was to teach not
opposition but understanding.

   
He was equally uncomfortable
with the next and final paragraph of the prayer book before the psalms began.

A COMMINATION
or

Denouncing of God's Anger and Judgements
against Sinners.

   
The first page ended on an
uncompromising note.

                  
'Cursed are the unmerciful, fornicators and
adulterers

                  
covetous persons, idolaters, slanderers, drunkards
and
                  
extortioners.'

   
'Not many of us left
un
cursed,' Murray muttered.

   
The curse of the modern minister's
life, in his opinion, was the video-hire shop. Infinitely more alluring to teenagers
than the church. And full of lurid epics in which members of the clergy in
bloodied cassocks wielded metal crucifixes with which
 
they combat scaly entities from Hell.

   
One result of this was that a
few people seemed to think they should summon the vicar in the same way they'd
call in Rentokil to deal with their dampness and their rats.

   
The telephone bleeped. 'I'll
ring you when they're out,' she'd told him. He hadn't replied. At the time, he
was considering going to her grandparents and explaining his dilemma. But he'd
concluded this would not only be a cop-out, it would be wrong. Because she'd
come to him in confidence and she was no longer a minor. She was eighteen and
would be leaving school in two or three weeks.

   
Murray closed
The Book of Common Prayer
and picked up
the phone. 'Vicarage.'

   
'They're out,' Tessa said.

Barry, the overweight osteopath from upstairs, was between patients,
eating a sandwich - herbal pate on whole-wheat.

   
'I've been taken over by Max
Goff,' said Powys, disconsolate.

   
'Dolmen has, yeah, I read that.
He can't do you any harm, though, can he? You're out of print, aren't you?'

   
'Between impressions,' Powys
corrected him. 'Barry, are you really proposing to realign somebody's slipped
disc with hands covered in soya margarine?'

   
'Beats olive oil. And cheaper.
Hey, Mandy says she saw you coming out of McDonald's this morning.'

   
'Couldn't have been me.'

   
'That's what I thought,' Barry
said dubiously.

   
'Anyway,' Powys said, 'Goff
wants to see me. In Crybbe.'

   
'I thought you were going to say
"in the nude" for a minute,' said Barry, wiping his hands on his
smock. 'No, from what I hear he's surrounding himself with people sharing his
own deep commitment to the New Age movement. If it's this lunch in Crybbe on Friday,
several people I know have been invited and nobody's turning him down, because
if he likes you, he invites you to join his Crybbe community, which means -
listen to this - that you get offered a place to live, on very advantageous
terms. And all kinds of fringe benefits.'
   
'Why aren't you there, then?'

   
'Bastard's already got an
osteopath,' Barry said. 'Gerry Moffat. You believe that? He could have had me,
but he went for Moffat. Moffat!'

   
'Who else?'

   
'Dan Osborne, the homeopath,
he's moved in already, Superior bastard. Paula Stirling. Robin Holland. Oh, and
this little French aromatherapist who was in Bromvard, remember her?'

   
'I can still smell her. Listen,
do these people know who Max Goff
is
?'

   
'Used to be, Joe. Used to be.
This is the new user-friendly ozone-fresh Max Goff. Play your cards right and
he'll let you feel his aura.'

   
'I wouldn't feel his aura with
asbestos gloves,' said Powys.

   
'And he's got some pretty heavy
mystical types as well,' said Barry. 'Jean Wendle, the spiritual healer, some
guy who's reckoned to be Britain's biggest tarot hotshot and Andy Boulton-Trow.
All converging on the New Age Mecca.'

   
'Andy?' Powys said. 'Andy's
involved in this?'

'And there's a single kid,'
says Andy, 'moving round the stone, very slowly at first, while all the other
kids are sitting in a circle, clapping their hands, doing the chant. And by the
time they finish the chant he's back where he started. Got to be a
"he", it doesn't work for girls.'

   
Andy Boulton-Trow, lean and languid, lying back in the grass,
spearing a quail's egg from the jar beside him. His voice is deep and lazy,
like a stroked cello.

   
'And then he goes round again . . . only this time it's just
ever-so-slightly faster . . .'

                  
Johnny goes round the Bottle Stone
                  
. . . and he goes round
TWICE.

   
'And they keep on repeating it. And it gets faster and faster,
building up the momentum, and the kid's got to move faster each time to
maintain the pace.'

                  
Johnny goes round the Bottle Stone
                  
. . . and he goes round
THRICE.

                  
. . . goes round FOUR times.

                  
. . . FIVE times.

   
'And how long do they keep it up?' Rose asks. She's looking
radiantly happy today (this memory is agony). 'How many times . . . ?'

   
'Oh' There's a gleam in Andy's eye. 'Thirteen. Thirteen times.'

   
'Must be jolly dizzy by then: one of the others says - Ben Corby's
girlfriend, Fiona Something.

   
'Ex-act-ly,' Andy drags out the word for emphasis. 'The kid's
completely confused. He's not thinking properly. And it's then that his mates
all leap on him and, before he knows what's happening, they hustle him across
to the fairy hill. Over there . . . see it?'

   
'Not much of a hill,' Rose observes.

   
'Fairies are not very big,' you tell her. 'You could fit a couple
of dozen on there.'

   
Andy says, 'So they lie him face-down on the fairy hill. . . and that's
when it happens.'

   
'What?' you ask. 'What happens?'

   
'Whatever happens,' says Henry Kettle, searching in the cardboard
picnic box for something uncomplicated and British, 'it's all in the mind, and
it don't do anybody any good, meddling with that old nonsense.'