Crybbe

'Oh yes. Murray Beech, the vicar.'

'The vicar?'

'Stabbed to death. Lying in the churchyard. And the church is on fire. Look…'

Col looked up from the blackness of the square and this vague shapes of roofs, and saw the sky blooming red and orange.

And you know the strangest thing?' said Alex. 'Nobody'd come out to watch.'

'You've rung the fire brigade I take it.'

'No.'

'Good God, man, it might burn down.'

'It might. But if the fire brigade come, they'll have to go in through the square, won't they, and they might just mow down a lot of innocent people who didn't appear to see them coming, or not be able to get through. I don't know. Don't know what could happen. But I think, on balance, that it's safest to let it burn, don't you? Only a bloody church.'

The old chap looked gloomy, but, Col noted, entirely in command of his faculties. The word around town had been that Canon Peters was losing his marbles.

'I think,' the Canon said, 'that we're in the middle of what used to be known technically as A Crybbe Matter. However, on this occasion, there's been outside interference and the locals are seriously out of their depth. That's my feeling.'

'Can we help?'

'That's a very interesting question,' Alex Peters said.

Silly children's game. Fay thought, Hilary Ivory on one side of her, the cameraman, Larry Ember on the other. Or perhaps only their voices. Their voices and their hands.

Silly children's game, New Age nonsense, where's the harm?

No harm.

'We're all going to pool our energy,' Andy's voice making soft chords in the night air. 'We're going to bring down the night.'

Silly children's game. No harm in it. Make a circle, everybody hold hands, dance gaily, stop, hold out hands to the sky as if in welcome. Wasn't there something like this at the end of Close Encounters? And something else. Wasn't it in something else?

Very silly.

'Got him?'

'Just about. Bit stiff. Bit of rigor."

Col heaved the corpse across his shoulder, fireman's lift job.

Behind him, flames were coming through the church roof.

He followed Alex, the body over his shoulder. I am here. I'm walking through a churchyard with a dead vicar over my shoulder and the church is on fire.

This is not like Belfast, after a bomb blast. There are no spectators, no fire brigade, no police, no Army. Only the huge flames chewing up the night.

'I trust,' Alex said, 'that when we get to the town hall, you'll have no difficulty getting us in.'

'Count on it,' Col Croston said through gritted teeth.

The box became unaccountably heavy and Joe Powys had to put it down in the courtyard.

Open it?

The Mini was still parked up by the stable-block. It had been his intention to load the box into the boot and then drive it out of Crybbe, but there was some uncertainty. What did you do with these things?

Open it.

You could take in into a church – a real, functioning church outside of Crybbe, and place it on the altar. But you never knew, with churches in the border country, what other forces might be at work, what damage you might be inflicting on some other quiet and vulnerable community while the people slept.

Or open it.

Or you could throw it into a deep lake. This had been done in numerous legends to calm an excitable spirit, in a ceremony normally involving about twelve priests.

He didn't have twelve priests to hand. Also this was not a whole unquiet spirit.

Not the whole thing. But unquiet, yes. Walking back to the Court, holding the box with both hands, the lamp balanced on top, he'd had the illusion of something moving inside.

Open it,'

Psychological trickery. Mind games. I'm not listening.

OPEN IT! CHAPTER XIX

Somehow they had formed a circle in the dark. When you moved around in this formation, you couldn't, of course, see the individual people comprising the circle, but soon you began to see the collective thing, the movement, the circle itself.

'A ring of pure golden light,' Hilary- Ivory breathed, isn't it beautiful? And we've made it ourselves. We've made it.'

Yes, Fay thought remotely, it is rather beautiful. But it's not quite golden. More a darkish yellow. The yellow of… of what?

Hilary held her right hand, Larry Ember her left. Hilary breathed and sighed, as if she was making love, while Larry chuckled to himself, not in a cynical or ironic way, but a chuckle of pleasure. Pleasure in self-discovery.

Round and round they went in a slow circle, mindlessly, innocently round and round, like children in the schoolyard.

The air was still pungent, but the pungency was fortifying and compelling now. Tobacco could seem noxious and nauseous the first time you inhaled it, but when you were accustomed to it, it was deeply satisfying.

So it was with the scent of shit and blood and rotting vegetables, as the human circle revolved, quite slowly at first, anticlockwise, in the opposite direction to the sun, which was

OK, Fay reasoned dreamily, because there was no sun, anyway, at night.

Every face was blue-lit, anxious and staring bleakly at Alex without enmity but without any hope either. A quarantine situation; nobody was to go outside, nobody from outside was to come in because of what else might enter.

But Col Croston had got them into the hall, without too much difficulty. He knew both men on the rear door – Paul Gwatkin, one of the three Gwatkin brothers who, between them, farmed Upper Cwm and Lower Cwm, and Bill Davies, the butcher. Decent chaps, both of them.

'Paul,' Col had said, very reasonably, 'it's essential that my friend the Canon and I come in, and I have to tell you if you don't get out of the way I may hurt you quite badly. Problem is, I was never trained to hurt people only slightly. You see my problem.'

'And I hope, Colonel,' said Bill Davies, standing aside, 'that you might be startin' to see ours.'

Col had laid a sympathetic hand on the butcher's should 'We're here to help, Bill.'

'Wastin' your time, I'm afraid. Colonel, it's…'

'I know,' Col said. 'A Crybbe matter.'

Now, standing on the platform with its table and two empty chairs, Alex addressed the assembly, quite cordially.

'Good evening. Some of you know me, some of you don't, some of you might have seen me around. Peters, my name. For what it's worth, I appear to be the only living priest in town. And you, I take it, are what one might call the backbone of Crybbe.'

He looked carefully at his audience, perhaps three hundred of them, men outnumbering women by about two to one, the majority of them older people, over fifty anyway – such was the age-ratio in Crybbe. The scene reminded him of the works of some painter. Was it Stanley Spencer, those air-raid shelter scenes, people like half-wrapped mummies?

'Strange sort of evening,' Alex said, 'I expect you've noticed that, otherwise what are you all doing penned up like sheep overnight in the market? Hmm?'

No response. Nobody did anything to dispel the general ambience of the stock-room as a mortuary. The blue-faced, refrigerated dead.

What would it take to move these people? And, more to the point, had he got it?

As Alex stood there and watched them, he saw himself as they must be seeing him. Bumbling old cleric. Woolly haired and woolly headed; mind known to be increasingly on the blink.

But he'd made a Deal, if only with his inner self. He thought about the possible implications of the Deal, and a suitably dramatic quote occurred to him, from the Book of Revelations.

His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow; and his eyes were as a flame of fire.

'Right,' Alex said, stoking the fire, summoning it into his eyes, 'if that's the way you want it. Colonel, would you ask Murray to step inside?'