There were big, fat tyre-marks across the middle of the stone. Gomer accelerated past Keeper's Cottage with a disparaging sideways glance. That could do with knocking down, too.
There was the merest tremor in Trow's gaze; enough for her to pull her eyes away. Turned to her father and found that Hilary Ivory on the other side, had also turned her face, with faint confusion, towards the old man in the Kate Bush T-shirt.
Alex tried to smile. He couldn't speak.
Hilary looked at Fay, her eyes troubled. She didn't understand. The first step to recovery – the moment when, quite suddenly, you don't understand.
But Alex's hands were warm.
Dad?
A deep warmth seeped into Fay's right hand and rippled up her arm and into her breast. She could feel her heart drumming.
Alex's eyes were vibrantly blue. They made the fire in the sky look cheap and lurid. He turned his head towards Hilary lvory and she started to smile, like people smile when they're coming out of anaesthetic.
Alex's hand tightened around Fay's.
Fay grinned.
'You old bugger,' she said, quite easily.
On the other side, Larry Ember, recipient of the warmth from her own left hand, demanded gruffly, 'What the bleedin' hell's this?'
Alex's lips were white. Almost as white as the beard around them. First they tried to smile, then they were trying to shape a word.
'C…'
His hands hot now, but his lips were white.
'Dad?'
Fay squeezed his hand, almost too hot to hold.
She felt strong enough to risk a glance to the centre of the square where Trow was no longer still, but moving within his own darkness. Squirming.
Trow screamed once,
'Michael!'
The cello grotesquely off-key.
Alex found his word.
'Colonel?' he said mildly, and the piercing blue faded from his eyes; clouds were in them now. He dropped Hilary's hand, held on to Fay's for an extra moment and then let that go too.
There was a gap now between Fay and her dad, a clear gap in the circle, and the backcloth, the screen of false reality, was torn away and the flames in the sky were no longer phantasmal but a source of savage heat and acrid fumes.
'Now.' Col Croston's crisp voice, and the Crybbe hordes poured through the gap, bearing their flaming torches, farmers in tweed trousers and sleeveless body-warmers over their vests, Bill Davies, incongruously clad in his butcher's apron, Wynford Wiley ludicrously wielding his truncheon. Faces she'd seen on the streets – 'Ow're you, 'ow're you' – now hard with determination below the blazing brands. The circle in disarray.
Lights appearing in windows. From somewhere in the innards of the Cock, the sound of a generator starting up.
Col Croston, bringing up the rear, scanning the square.
'Over there! That's the man. The Sheriff! Don't let him
…'
The Sheriff?
'Right!' Fav was screaming. 'The Sheriff! He's in the cen…'
But she couldn't, in fact, see the man they were looking for. Andy Boulton-Trow had gone from the square.
He's taken his darkness back into the night.
'Larry! Camera!'
Guy was in a mess. He'd lost his jacket, lost his cool, lost his hair. 'Larry, we have to get this…'
'Piss off, Guy,' Larry Ember shouted happily, from somewhere.
Fay found she was giggling. Hysterics. Absurd.
'Dad?'
Alex managed a smile.
'Dad… We did it! You did it.'
Alex touched her arm, stumbled. Sat down quietly on the cobbles. Fay went down beside him, taking his hand.
Which was not so hot any more, not very hot at all. The blue in his eyes had drifted away. Far away. Gently and discreetly, Alex slid over on to his side. He was breading. Just. Hilary Ivory crouched down next to Fay. 'Is he OK? I used be a… a nurse… Well, sort of alternative nurse, really.'
Fay didn't reply. She pulled off her cotton top, rolled it into a ball, slid it between Alex's head and the cobbles.
'Dad?' Softly.
Fairly sure he couldn't hear her.
She picked up his hand; very little warmth remained. Alex's lips moved and she put an ear to his mouth. One word came out intact.
'Deal,' he said.
Alex's breathing ended almost imperceptibly.
Fay sat for a long time on the cobbles holding her father's cooling hand under the hot red sky.
CHAPTER II
A single candle burned in the attic at Crybbe Court. It was two inches thick and sat in a blackened pewter candle-holder with a tray, laid on the topmost stone step. It was a tallow candle and it stank; it filled the roofspace with a pungent organic stench; it reeked, somehow, of death.
Or perhaps this was because of the wan and waxy aura it gave to the rope.
The old, frayed rope which had hung from the central joist in the attic was gone. Its replacement was probably just as old, but was oily and strong. An inch thick, it dangled four feet from the apex of the roof, and at the end was a noose, a very traditional hangman's noose secured with ten rings of rope. It was into this noose that Andy Boulton-Trow fitted his head.
He had, it would emerge, studied hanging.
The original short-drop method, with the rope only a few feet long and the condemned person's feet almost touching the ground, resulted in a rather prolonged death by slow strangulation. Whereas the long-drop system, introduced in Britain in the late nineteenth century, by which the subject fell about ten feet, perhaps through a trapdoor, brought about a swifter and more merciful death by fracturing neck vertebrae. In the sixteenth century, it appeared. Sir Michael Wort had experimented with both techniques and others besides.
A trapdoor had been constructed in the attic floor, originally to dispose of bodies after execution by dropping them into a narrow, windowless, well-like chamber directly underneath.
In later years, more squeamish owners of the house had boarded over the trapdoor space, but the floor remained weak at this point, the boards had rotted, there were cracks. When Andy Boulton-Trow stood on the beam, nearly two feet thick, from which the executees – and Sir Michael himself – had taken a final step, he could see a few jagged black holes below his feet.
First, he had taken off his shoes and his trousers, so that he stood naked now in the candlelight with the noose loosely around his neck.
For the purposes of magical projection, a modification of the short-drop method was the most appropriate. That it had worked, to a significant extent, for Michael had been amply demonstrated to Andy tonight. Andy, who had spent twice as many years as Michael in study and preparation, was warm after his sprint through the wood, still angry at the damage to the stone and the debacle in the square. But the night was churning with chaos, and out of chaos…
There was little time to waste. He was hot inside, with excitement and anticipation.
To make sure everything was still in working order, he and Humble had once hanged a fisherman Humble had chanced upon, casting alone into the upper reaches of the river. It had not really been necessary, but Humble had enjoyed it.
Just as Humble would enjoy watching Andy hang. So why wasn't he here?
Perhaps he was. Humble could be quite discreet.
Andy put both hands behind his head and tightened and adjusted the noose under his chin. It was so easy to make a mistake.
He stood on the floor-joist in the candlelight and began to visualize, to bring himself to the necessary state of arousal.
He visualized the woman who'd looked at him across the square, telling him with her eyes that she was slipping out of the enchantment. Andy smiled; he would return for her one night, quite soon perhaps.
A small wind drifted through the holes in the slates; there was no wind tonight.
'Good evening, Michael,' Andy said. 'Again.'
He closed his eyes, and Michael was within him once more – a now familiar sensation. In his solar plexus he felt a stillness which was also a stirring, and there was the familiar small tug at the base of his spine.