Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (52 page)

   
Ludicrous. A grotesque self-delusion.
But that was what it felt like. Flickerings of things. Presences in the
shadows. The smell itself was like the house's own foul breath.

   
She began to breathe hard herself.
Broke out in a coughing fit. Then tried to breathe slowly and selectively,
keeping her mouth closed, because the air was so rancid that when she took it in,
there gathered at the back of her throat a richly cloying, raw-meat taste like
sweating, sweet salami. Rachel - suffocating, closing her mouth, closing her
eyes, trying to close down all her senses; trying, above all, not to hear -
thought, I need air. I need light. I need to walk up these few steps.

   
I need the prospect chamber.

   
Soft, fresh evening air. Gentle
evening light.

   
The prospect chamber. Eight,
ten steps away.

   
But I can't move from here. I
can't move because of . . .

   
. . . those taunting sounds
from the darkness above.

   
Sometimes soft, rustling like
satin. Sometimes loud as a foundry overhead. And then stopping for a period of
tense, luminous quiet - until it begins again, louder and closer. Then distant
again. I am here. I am there, I can be anywhere I choose in an instant because
I'm not hu . . .

   
Shut up! Shut up!

   
It's what he
wants
you to think.

   
Creaks. Thrustings. What might
have been hollow footsteps on wood, flat footsteps on stone. On stone steps.
   
He's
coming down!

   
Stopping just before the bend,
not six feet away from where he crouched, holding her arms around herself, beginning
to shiver.

   
Pull yourself together Someone
is trying to terrify you. It's only another person. You can handle people; you
always could, you are cool and controlled; you can be remote, haughty, offhand,
intimidating. You are flexible. You can be dominant, or compliant, at will.

   
All you have to do is stride up
there and face whoever it is.
   
Yes, but
that's
what he wants.

   
And what if you go up there and
there's . . .
   
Nothing.

   
Nothing but the dark.

   
'Help me!' Rachel was screaming
out seconds later, her voice, always so calm and deep, now parched and bitter
with anger and despair. 'Hum . . . ble! Andy! Anybody! Please!'

   
Then, in a soft and aching
whisper, she said, 'J.M.?'

   
And her eyes filled uncontrollably
with tears. When I get out of here, I'm going to get us both away. Tonight.
That's a promise.

   
If I get out of here. If I ever
get to breathe the sweet night air.

   
God help me, Rachel thought,
but I'm not going to scream any more. When she'd screamed, the scream had come
up from her stomach, like bile.

   
When she looked down at herself
she saw that her Barbour's waxy surface gleamed sickly yellow like the walls.
She wanted to take it off, but she didn't like the cold. She'd never liked the
cold.

   
She wanted to remove her shoes,
so as to move more quietly up the stairs towards the prospect chamber, but the
thought of that ooze between her toes.

   
She closed her eyes. Closed her
eyes and opened them, and rose, picking up the cardboard box containing the
dead cat guardian.

   
'Come on, Tiddles,' Rachel
said, wiping the tears away.

She wished the appalling sounds would begin again, if only to muffle her
footsteps.

   
They did not. Silence woven as
thick as a tapestry hung over the stairs, which were visible only because of
the phosphorescence which seemed to move with her, not so much lighting the way
as holding her close, in a thick and stifling miasma.

   
When she looked back there was
merely an oily blackness behind her, in the place near the door where she had
crouched.

   
Rachel couldn't remember a
nightmare this bad. She was sweating in the clammy Barbour which seemed to have
become part of this place, as if the yellow light steaming from the walls was
re-vaporizing on the wax of the coat in clusters of tiny bubbles.

   
She came to the bend in the
stairs.
   
All she had to do was follow the
spiral.

   
To her left would be the alcove
concealing the door to the prospect chamber. Above her - how far above her she
couldn't tell because there was no light and she could not remember - would be
the attic.

   
Better not to think about the
attic. Shut it out.

   
I don't go into the attics. I'm not superstitious, I just don't go into
the attics . . .

   
Two steps.

   
Two steps to the alcove and the
prospect chamber and light and air. She could stand in the opening and shout
and scream and
somebody
would have to
hear her.

   
Oh, please. Please don't let
the door be locked.

   
Rachel made it to the second
step and was about to fall into the alcove, throw herself at the door to the
prospect chamber . . .

   
This is the only part of the house I like.

   
. . . when - to a shattering
chorus of harsh clangs and grinding, strangled creaks, a malfunctioning
clock-mechanism amplified a thousand times - the greasy darkness shredded before
her like a rotting curtain, revealing the attic all lit up in bilious yellow, except
for the quivering shadow of the rope hanging from the apex of the roof, turning
slowly, stretched taut.

   
By something palely shining,
the source of all the light, noosed and squirming.

It was not far off 10 p.m., the night sidling in, when Powys drove the
Mini between the gateposts of the Court and became instantly aware of the Tump
behind the house.

   
He could not see the Tump, but
he saw for the first time that the trees towering over the Court from behind
were the trees growing out of its summit.

   
Once you knew this you could
almost see the shadow of the great mound outlined in the Elizabethan stonework
of the Court itself; the Tump and house fused into a single . . .
   
. . . entity.

   
Even as he had that thought,
something flared in the house and then went out, like a light-bulb which
explodes the second it's switched on. He saw a momentary afterglow in one of
the small windows immediately below the eaves.

   
Maybe Andy's in there. Maybe I can wait behind the door until he comes
out. And then I'll start hitting him.

   
Powys accelerated, drove around
the house to the courtyard, parked in front of the stable-block, next to the
Range Rover - felt a pang of gratitude when he spotted that, longing to see Rachel
again.

   
The stable door was unlocked;
he went in.
   
'Rachel?'

   
The place was dim; although it
probably faced west, there was little light left in the sky. From here, at the
top of the long room, now sectionalized, you looked down towards the big picture-window
and the grey and smoky Tump.

   
'Rachel, luv, you in there?'

   
Maybe the light, way up in the
house, had been her, with a torch.
I
don't like that. It may not frighten her up there, but it scares the crap out
of me.

   
And why had the torch gone out?

   
'Rachel!'

   
He looked around for light switches,
found a panel of them behind the door, pressed everything. Concealed lighting
came on everywhere without a blink.

   
On the kitchen table was a
scattering of magazines. New Age stuff. And a black leather bag, open. Rachel's
bag.

   
He went outside again, anxiety
setting in with the dusk. He looked across at the Court. Soon the sky and the
stone would meld and the house would be an amorphous thing balanced on the edge
of the night.

   
Powys moved to the rear
entrance, trying not to crunch gravel. He pushed the door, but it didn't give.
Locked.

   
He didn't waste time with it,
but followed the walls of the house around to the front and almost cried out when
something big and black reared up in his path.

   
It didn't move. It was a massive
rubbish pile, except many of the items on it didn't look like rubbish to Powys,
even in his light. Near the top of the heap was an enormous double wardrobe,
Victorian Gothic, its top corner projecting sharply out of the pile, as if in
protest.

   
This time Powys tried the front
door, and found that it too was locked.

   
He looked back along the dead straight
drive into the wood, straining to the silence. No birds left to sing.

   
Directly above him, he knew,
would be the prospect chamber, set into the highest eaves, the house's only
orifice when the doors were locked and barred.

   
Powys stepped back from the
door and shouted as loud as he could up in the direction of the chamber's
hidden maw.

   
'Rachel!'

   
A moment in a void.
   
Then he saw a glowing filament of
sporadic pale-yellow zig-zagging the length of the eaves, like very feeble
lightning.
   
He heard a scream so high and wild it
might have been an animal on the brink of violent death in the woods.

   
And then a chasm opened under
all his senses.

You land with a
breathtaking thump on the fairy mound, not hearing the laughter, only aware of
the pit beneath you, an endless lift shaft. You're falling, down and down and down,
faster and faster, a tiny point of white light far below you ... a point of
light, which gets no larger the further you fall because what it is. . . is the
light reflecting from a spearhead, dirty and speckled with rust, as you can see
quite clearly in the long moments before you feel the tearing agony, watching
the spear's shaft disappearing into your stomach in in explosion of blood.

Noooooooooo!'

   
He staggered frantically but
uselessly about, trying to position himself below her, as she plummeted from
the prospect chamber like a shot bird, the Barbour billowing out, waxy wings
against the leaden sky.

   
But she crashed down in the
only place he could not hope to throw himself in her path, and he actually
heard her neck break as it connected with the projecting corner of a Victorian
Gothic wardrobe of old, dark wood.

   
Something came after her - a
small, grey-brown wisp of a thing.

PART SIX

... In many such cases it has been suspected
that there
was an unconscious human medium, commonly an
emotionally disturbed adolescent, at the root of the
manifestations. If these effects can be produced
unconsciously, it is reasonable to suppose that people can
learn to produce them by will. Indeed, in traditional
societies young people who have evident talents for
promoting outbreaks of psychical phenomena are marked
out as future shamans . . .

JOHN MICHELL,
The New View Over Atlantis

CHAPTER I

Monday morning and, over the dregs of an early breakfast, Fay finally
found out the truth about her father, Grace and the house. And wound up
wishing, in a way, that she'd remained ignorant, for in ignorance there was
always hope.

   
It was not unknown for Alex to
be up for an early breakfast - on one best-forgotten occasion five or six weeks
ago he'd been clanking around in the kitchen at 5 a.m. and, when his
swollen-eyed daughter had appeared in the doorway, had admonished her for going
out and not leaving him any supper.