The Magus of Hay(143)

Gore’s black-booted foot coming back.





65

The darknesses


THE WHISTLING WASN’T constant; you kept losing it, down among the arterial streets Claudia Cornwell had spoken of. Down past the medieval market place where Beryl Bainbridge had walked, entrusted with the old marketplaces.

You could hear the whistling through the Buttermarket’s pillars, no particular tune to it any more, but high and piping, like you imagined faery music, underlaid by the old heartbeat, night-drumming, and the gasp and rumble of sporadic traffic up on the main road.

She’d never been very good at talking to old people until she’d become a vicar and found that, with half the average congregation well over seventy, it was a skill well worth developing. The past was always a good way in. Old people were experts on the past, and this town at night was all past, preserved in warm stone, patches of light, hollows of darknesses… and was that a long coat and a hat, hurrying past the post office and into a side street sloping down?

The old lady who knew that Cherry didn’t do it any more. Whose middle-aged self seemed likely to have known and even cared about the young woman who came down from the Convoy to turn tricks in Hay.

Every old community had a living genius loci, spirit of place, the ambulant mind of the town. In Ledwardine, it had been Lucy Devenish, the folklorist, Jane’s mentor – still there, you felt, sometimes, in the cottage where Lol lived— God, what if he’d called? She’d kept switching her phone off to save the battery, and she hadn’t spoken to him since the night of the M-word. It was like he was part of a different sphere of existence.

Down past the poetry bookshop, past the modern-ish library, through moonlit streets and streets the moon couldn’t reach, and then there was traffic noise and she was out on the bottom road, and behind her was the pointy, gothic tower where the clockface was shining like a coin, like a second moon.

Past the turning to the bridge over the Wye to Radnorshire, down to where the buildings and the lights thinned out in the approach to England, and here was the whistling again, like a trail of bailer twine, unrolling past the hump of ground where the town walls had been.

Maybe this was all pointless, but it was doing something, and Merrily felt her head clearing into an overview. Felt the gathering of ghosts in the town of books. A melding of minds, the atmosphere in certain spots made denser by presences. Unseen.

Well, seldom seen.

Most of the medieval town walls have gone… but still there, the stones taken to build houses and shops, so therefore still in the town. It’s all still here.

Did it work, this transference of mental energy? Did it hold up against the powers of government and big business and the sneers of science?

Vehicles continued to go past, one a dark blue police van. Where were Bliss and Gwyn Arthur Jones? Had they managed to stir it in Gwenda’s Bar, provoke a reaction? Last of the mavericks, off the walls, but what else worked in Hay?

Wouldn’t take much tonight.

Oh God, there she was… a glimmer of movement up ahead, a figure encased in grey from the top of her head to the ground.

She called out.

‘Mrs Villiers…?’

But she wasn’t there. She’d turned off somewhere.

The buildings had become more widely spaced. A wispy breeze came in from the river. A sense of the river was on the air. The river you couldn’t see. Always a river you couldn’t see.

Merrily began to run.

The night was setting around him like concrete. And, Jesus, the fear when he managed to roll over on the tarmac, expecting another kick or a pumping leathered fist, black knuckle coming for his forehead like a killing blow in an abattoir.

A door opened and a carpet of light was unrolled across the alley, a complexity of moving shadows bundled out. Nobody speaking, just an indrawn breath, a gasp, the crack of wood on stone or tarmac.

Robin cringed.

Against the white light falling through the doorway of the Cricket Shop, he saw Jeeter Kapoor wielding the cricket bat that had hung over his cash register, a chain still hanging from it. In a slick of light, Robin saw his faithful stick, with the ram’s head, lying on the tarmac, and he went crawling after it as the bat came down, ineptly, on leather and Gore’s leather hands reached up and grabbed it.

Then there were more hands, Kapoor spinning round.

‘Hey! Get off me!’

As Gore Turrell was back on his feet, and Robin saw Betty running down towards him, and he screamed over his shoulder, through the blood from his lips and nose.

‘Stay there! Call the cops!’

Reaching his stick, propping it up in front of him, and he began to climb it with his hands, a wild agony bounding up his back. When he made it to his feet, he was sobbing with pain, but he still hefted the stick, went back into the fight.