Read Online Crybbe (AKA Curfew) by Unknown - Free Book Online

place. The dead priest would live on as its guardian.
For all time, right?'
        A police sergeant came over,
the same one who'd fetched them from the Cock. Big moon-faced guy, didn't
strike Goff as being all that bright. 'We'd just like you to make a statement if
you would, sir.'
        'Everything Max Goff does is a
Statement,' Goff told him and grinned. 'Who was it wrote that?'
        'Time Out' said Rachel automatically and a little wearily. 'August
1990.'
        The police sergeant didn't get
it. 'You appear to have been the last person to see Mr. Kettle alive, sir.
You'll probably be called to give evidence to that effect at the inquest.'
        'Shit,' Goff said. 'How . .. ?
No, that's OK. That's fine. I'll join you back at the house. Ten minutes,
right?'
        'If you wouldn't mind, sir.'
        'Point I was making,' Goff
said, impatiently turning his back on the departing Plod, 'is that Henry Kettle
was about as close as you could find to a kind of high priest these days. Get in
tune with the earth and its spirit, responding to its deeper impulses. Shamanic,
yeah?' Closing his eyes, he felt the holy light of the solstice on his face. Carried
on talking with his eyes squeezed tightly shut. Talking to himself really,
letting his thoughts unravel, the connections forming.
        'So Henry Kettle - how old was
the guy? Eighty-five? How long did he have to go, anyway? So, OK, we have this
old man, the shaman, homing in, a dead straight line across the field - straight
at the mound, the Tump, right - and . . .'
        Goff opened his eyes suddenly
and fully, and was dazzled by radiant blobs of orange and blue spinning from
the top of the mound.
        '. . . and . . . whoomp!' He
clapped his big hands violently together. Smiling hugely at Rachel Wade.
'Listen, what I'm saying, we're not looking at some bad omen here. It's a
positive thing. Like the high priest going almost willingly to his death, sacrificing
himself all over again to put his life energy into my project. Whoomp!'
        Rachel said, 'That's really sick.
Max.' But Goff was looking up at the mound with a new pride, not listening.
        'I bet if we mark out those
tyre-tracks across that field we'll find they correspond exactly to line B.'
        'Line B?'
        'The fucking ley-line, Rachel.'
    'Max, that's . . .'
        Goff looked hard at Rachel. She
shut up.
        Jesus, she thought.
        Whoomp.
     

CHAPTER III
     
        'Bit for level, Fay.'
    'OK, here we go . . .'
    Mr. Kettle said, '. . . All right then, we know there's got to be
water yereabouts . . .'
        'OK, that's fine, Fay . . . I'm
rolling. Go in five.'
    She wound back, set the tape running
and took the cans off her ears, leaving them around her neck so she'd hear the
engineer call out if he ran into problems.
        Leaning back in the metal-framed
typist's chair, she thought, God, I've been shunted into some seedy sidings in
my time, but this . . .
        . . . was the Crybbe Unattended
Studio.
    Ten feet long and six feet wide. Walls
that closed in on you like the sides of a packing case. A tape-machine on a
metal stand. A square mahogany table with a microphone next to a small console
with buttons that lit up. And the chair. And no windows, just a central light
and two little red lights - one above the door outside to warn people to keep
away in case whoever was inside happened to be broadcasting live to the scattered
homesteads of the Welsh Marches.
        This studio used to be the gents'
lavatories at the back of the Cock, before they'd built new ones inside the
main building. Then some planning wizard at Offa's Dyke Radio had presumably
stuck a plastic marker into the map and said without great enthusiasm: Crybbe -
well, yeah, OK, not much of a place, but it's almost exactly halfway up the
border and within couple miles of the Dyke itself . . . about as central as we
can get.'
        Then they'd have contacted the
Marches