Crybbe

'Knowledge,' said Jean, 'isn't evil.'

'And what about what happened on the square? What about the killing of Max Goff? What about…?'

'You know, as I do, my dear, that there are some very misguided and unbalanced people in Crybbe, and there always have been. People Michael was trying to help.'

'I didn't know,' Fay said, 'that you knew so much about Michael Wort.'

'You didn't ask,' said Jean. Her short grey hair shone like a helmet in the street light.

'Fay…' Joe said.

'Joe's trying to tell you to come away,' Jean said. 'He doesn't want to end what he began.'

'Which is?'

'The Bottle Stone,' Jean said gently. 'Come and see the Bottle Stone.'

'No!' Joe backed away.

'He blames it for everything,' Jean said. 'For all his problems, all his failed relationships. The deaths of his women.'

'Fay.' Joe sounded suddenly alarmed. 'I don't know what she's doing, but don't fall for it. I meant to tell you. Jean and Andy are in this together. She sent me up to the Tump tonight, she set me up for Humble…'

'Did he tell you,' said Jean, 'how the Bottle Stone followed him here?'

'Yes,' Fay said, her throat suddenly quite dry. 'He told me that.'

'Come and see the Bottle Stone, Fay. Come on.'

'Fay.'

'Come along,' said Jean.

She rose from the wall and picked her way carefully to the gate of the cottage. 'Come on.'

Fay glanced at Joe. 'Don't,' he said quietly. 'Please.'

I meant to tell you.

She turned and followed Jean Wendle.

They went around the side of the cottage and across the damp lawn to the piece of land at the rear. Jean had produced a small torch and they followed its thin beam. Fay could hear the river idly fumbling at its banks. Jean stopped. She directed the beam a short way across the grass until it found the thick, grey base of a standing stone. Then Jean casually flipped the torch up so that they could see the top of the stone.

'It doesnae look awfully like a bottle, does it?' Jean said.

The stone appeared no more than three and half feet tall. It was fairly wide, but slim, like a blade.

Fay said, 'It doesn't look anything like a bottle.'

Andy Boulton-Trow lay on his back, holding the head above him with both hands. The hands didn't ache now.

'Michael,' he said, 'forgive me. It was a shambles. I was using weak, stupid people. I failed you.'

In the doorway, the candle was burning very low. He'd thought he could hear sirens a while back. He couldn't hear anything now.

Joe Powys hadn't rung for an ambulance.

Joe Powys had lied.

CHAPTER V

'One more, I make it,' Gomer said, a short trail of recumbent stones in his destructive wake. 'Then that's the lot.'

'You know, Gomer,' Minnie Seagrove said, sitting quite placidly next to him in the cab, the three-legged dog on her lap. 'You've surprised me tonight.'

'Surprised myself,' Gomer said gruffly. 'I'll be very surprised if I collect a penny for all this.'

'No, what I mean is… Well, I'd come to the conclusion – and I'm sorry if this sounds insulting – I'd come to the conclusion that there weren't any really decent men in Crybbe. Like, men we used to say would do anything for you. Nothing too much trouble, sort of thing… if it was the right thing.'

'Done a few bloody wrong things tonight, Minnie, my love,'

Gomer said, plunging the digger halfway down the riverbank. 'That's for certain.'

'No they weren't. They weren't wrong things at all. You've saved me from being arrested for murder, you're working overtime at a minute's notice to help that poor old chap who looks like he's on his last legs. And you've been no end of help to young Joe…'

Gomer ploughed through an unstable-looking fence and up into the field that served as a narrow flood-plain for the river.

'I got no regrets about gettin' you out of a bit o' bother,' he said. 'An' I'd stand up in court an' say so. But that Joe – well, I'd like to think that young feller'll keep 'is mouth shut, see, that's all. You know much about 'im?'

'Not a lot,' said Minnie. 'But I'm sure he's all right.'

'It's rather sad, really,' Jean said. 'They're all bottle stones to Joe.'

Fay started to feel faint. To pull herself together, she said – screamed it out inside her head, like biting on something hard, to fight extreme pain,

MY FATHER IS DEAD.

And wondered if Jean knew about that yet. Jean who'd given him a new lease of life. Which he'd expended in whst appeared at this moment to be a distressingly futile way.

Fay felt sick.

'I don't know precisely what happened,' Jean was saying. 'Over this girl of Joe's, Rose, I mean. Whether it was an accident or suicide or…'

'Murder,' Fay said.

Jean put a hand on Fay's arm. Look, my dear, it's over. It's all in the past. Whatever happened, there's nothing we can change now. Nobody we can bring back to life.'

'No,' Fay said numbly.

Something white in places caught her eye, over to the right of the Bottle Stone. Joe Powys's muddy T-shirt. He was standing on the other side if the perimeter wall, watching them silently, like an abandoned scarecrow.

'About Andy,' Jean said. 'Andy's not a bad boy. A little wild, perhaps, in his younger days, a little headstrong. His lineage is not a direct one to Michael, but he developed a very strong interest in the Tradition from his early teens. And, give him his due. he didn't deviate in his resolve to discover things for himself.'

'And the Bottle Stone ritual?'

'Exists not at all,' said Jean sadly, 'outside the head of J. M. Powys."

'He showed me the field," Fay said. 'Where it happened.'

'And was there a Bottle Stone there? And a fairy mound? With a fairy on it?'

'What about Henry Kettle? He was there too. There was nothing wrong with Henry Kettle.'

'Oh? Henry told you, did he? He said he was there?'

A police car howled a long way away.

'No,' Fay said bleakly.

'Oh, my dear…'

Fay was bent over, gripping her thighs with both hands. She felt a stabbing stomach-cramp coming on.

'Oh God,' she breathed. 'Oh God.'

And as Andy's breathing, shallow as it was, began to regulate, he looked into the dark sockets and saw within them pinpricks of distant light.

He watched the lights as they came closer – or, rather, as he moved closer to them, his consciousness was focused and drawn into the sockets, now as wide as caverns.

He felt the familiar tug at the base of his spine, and never before had it felt so good, so strong, so positive, so indicative of freedom. For, while imprisoned within his twisted body, Andy could no longer feel anything at all at the base of his spine.

When it happened – and he'd been far from certain that it would under such conditions – there was an enormous burst of raw energy (O Michael! O Mother!) and he was out of his body and soaring towards the lights.

'It's a shame about Crybbe,' Jean said. 'But it's no different in any of these places. You ask the ordinary man in the street in Glastonbury how he feels about the Holy Grail. How many miracles he's seen. They're not the least bit interested and indeed often quite antagonistic'

Looking beyond the stone. Fay could no longer see Joe. Perhaps he'd crept away.

'So you can imagine how they reacted in Crybbe,' Jean went on. 'A place so remote and yet so conducive to psychic activity. Can one blame the peasantry? I don't know. The knowledge has always been for the Few. Not everyone has the spiritual metabolism to absorb it. Not everyone has the will to see through the dark barriers to the light.'

All at once, as if to illustrate Jean's point, the stone which bore no resemblance at all to a bottle was lit up from its grassy base to its sharp, fanglike tip.