'All my life!' she heard a woman (probably that loopy Jopson woman) cry in ecstasy. 'All my life I've waited for you…!'
'Michael,' a man – the Teacher – said. Simply that, nothing more.
And a woman said, 'Yes, Michael. The Archangel Michael, slayer of dragons.'
No, Fay thought, confused, not him… that's wrong…
But what did it matter?
Couldn't very well contradict them, could she, not all of them, everybody shouting in unison now, a great chant.
'Michael… Michael… MICHAEL… MICHAEL!'
The Being of Light was responding to the summons, the filaments forming into a complexity of vibrating muscles, pipes and organs, rippling into arms and legs, and between the legs – bloody hell. Fay thought…
Realizing she was chanting, too.
'Michael… Michael…'
The bells erupted again, a huge joyful clangour, cracking the night into splinters. The sound of bells in a blazing church.
The rational explanation. Col Croston thought, was that the flames had been funnelled into the tower, creating a huge jet which exploded into the belfry.
He stood in the town-hall doorway and peered into the street. Above him the night sky was frying. If Jimmy Preece was indeed dead, this made him the First Citizen of Crybbe. An auspicious start to his year of office; at this rate he'd be mayor of a burned-out ghost-town before morning.
He looked for Alex, but the end of the street still dropped off the edge of the world, and Alex was gone and Col's sorrowful feeling was that he would never see the old man again.
CHAPTER XXI
Before, the last and only time he'd been inside Crybbe Court, it had been very much Henry's dead place; now it was repellently alive.
It had been cold and dry; now it was warm and moist, and going into it was disturbingly, perversely sexual. The Court was a very old woman, grotesquely aroused, and she wanted him.
The main door had not been locked. He ventured quietly in, the box under his arm. Stone floor, low ceiling and slits of windows set high in the walls. And the walls leaked.
Joe Powys ran a cautious finger along the stone and found it warm and slimy. Under the light, he saw dead insects on the walls, all of them quite recently dead, not husks. Moths, flies and bluebottles trapped in a layer of… fat, it smelled like fat.
Or tallow maybe, grease from candles made of animal fat.
Crybbe Court was alive and sweating.
He moved towards the stone stairs, thinking, inevitably, of Rachel. What had it taken to make her so hot and feverish and desperate to get out of here that…?
But you don't know what happened, you don't know.
Though you'll soon find out, as you retrace her steps up these stone steps, butcher's shop slippery now, like the walls.
Coming to the first floor – the big family living-room and the bedchambers off. In one of these, Fay had told him, Tiddles the mummified cat had slept, most recently, in a chest that was not very old. Tiddles had come down from the rafters, but had never left the house, presumably, until she and Rachel had been hurled out of the prospect chamber.
Fay.
Picturing her standing in the field overlooking Crybbe, the blue cagoule streaming from under her arm, her rainbow eye watering in the wind.
It made him so sad, this image, that he had a wild urge to dump the box and race out of the Court – filthy, clammy, raddled old hag – and run back to Crybbe to find Fay and hold her, even if they only had a few minutes before…
Before whatever was to happen, happened.
He wore his sense of foreboding like the black bag over a condemned man's head. Yet he was still half-amazed at what he was planning to do: black comedy, a bizarre piece of alternative theatre. Verdict: took his own life while the balance of mind was disturbed.
The voice of the police inspector, Hughes, landed in his head. Are you sure he didn't say anything to you, Mrs Morrison, by way of suicide note, so to speak? Or did he assume, do you think, that his method of taking his own life would be self-explanatory?
Well, he was a crank, wasn't he? You only had to read his book.
He wondered if the day would ever come when an inquest would concede that the balance of mind might be affected by prevailing psychic conditions.
Bloody New Age crap.
There was a stench of rancid fat. He felt sick.
It would be good, in a way, to be out in the fresh air.
As Col turned the corner of the back street linking the town hall with the churchyard, there was an enormous splintering roar and a belch that shook the ground. And then – as if massive furnace doors had been flung wide – huge, muscular arms of flame reached out for the heavens.
'Go easy,' Col said. 'I think the church roof's collapsed.'
There were about twenty men with him, the youngest and strongest of them. Bill Davies, the butcher, was there, and the three burly Gwatkin brothers.
'God preserve us,' one of them said and then turned away, embarrassed, his face already reddened in the glare from the church.
'It's down to you now,' Col said. He hoped to God the stone walls of the church would contain the fire so that it wouldn't spread into the town, but the heat was unbelievable; anything could happen. Crackling splinters – in fact, great burning brands – were being thrown off, and every so often there'd be a chaotic clanging of the bells.
'What we're going to do…' Col said. 'All over the churchyard, you'll see pieces of wood ablaze. I want six of you to get the ones you can handle at one end and bring them out. This is bloody dangerous, so be damned careful, but we've got to have light where we're going.'
'Why can't we just go 'ome and get torches?' a young lad of seventeen or eighteen, said.
'Do as he says, boy,' Bill Davies grunted. 'Nobody goes out of this street. You step into that square, you'll wish you'd stayed and burned.'
As a handful of men climbed over the churchyard wall, Bill Davies took Col aside. 'I'm not wrong, am I, Colonel?'
'Look, be a good chap…'
'Tell me. Colonel. I 'ave to know, see. Is it… in that square… Oh hell, is it the year 1593 over there, or is it an illusion? Is this town living an illusion, do you know?'
Joe Powys went up the stairs, past a small landing with an oak door four inches thick, which was open, revealing the stairs up to the attic.
Walking up the steps, towards the death-chamber of Michael Wort with what he believed to be the head of Michael Wort in a wooden box under his arm.
People like me would no more come up here alone, he remembered thinking, than pop into a working abattoir to shelter from the rain.
But you aren't alone, are you?
The box was heavy.
Trying to avoid touching the walls because the stone was slick with something that felt like mucous. Suspecting that if he switched off the lamp, it would glow on the stones, luminous.
And so he came, at last, to the alcove leading to the prospect chamber.
When he put down the box to open the door, he felt Rachel was standing at his side. Remembering being here with her. How two wafers of light from holes in the roof had crossed just above her head and he'd recalled her standing by the window of the room at the Cock, naked and pale and ethereal.
Now he could almost see her calm, silvery shade; they'd go hand in hand into the prospect chamber.
This… is the only part of the house I really like.
And together they'd take the head of Michael Wort back into the night.
He turned the metal handle and put his shoulder to the old, oak door.
New Age Heaven.