Will Kingdom: Mean Spirit

‘No, you’re probably right,’ Callard said. ‘He imagined he was on to a shag. How will you get your car back?’

‘Call him in an hour or two, I guess. I don’t know. He works till seven or eight, he says. What else can I do?’

‘You had him drop you at the house.’ Pronouncing it hice, like Prince Charles. ‘So he knows you were coming here? He knows why? That man knows I’m here?’

‘I’m afraid he does,’ Grayle admitted. ‘I let it out I was coming to meet with you. That was indiscreet. I’m sorry. I have no excuse. Marcus fully apprised me of the situation.’

Persephone Callard found a small smile. Then a clutch of bottles on a table. ‘Vodka, gin, Scotch?’

‘Well, maybe a Scotch … Plenty of water? Thank you. You don’t have a car here?’

‘It’s in one of the garages up at the house.’

Grayle peered out at the walled wilderness. ‘How long you been here?’

‘Just over a week. I don’t want to open up the house.’

‘Too big, I guess.’

‘Too obvious. This is more discreet. Have to be out of here in a couple of weeks, however. From Easter, we let it out as holiday accommodation. Have to be out even sooner now, if your friend Justin shoots his mouth off.’

‘I’m sorry. You’re here all alone?’

‘As I’m sure Marcus Bacton’s told you …’ Persephone Callard’s voice put on a weight of irony ‘… people like me are never entirely alone.’

One time, Grayle had done a piece for the Courier on how many mediums were practising in New York City. She’d established two hundred and thirty-five, which was just over twice as many as there’d apparently been in 1850, when the first boom had been on.

Even in those early days, most of the mediums had been exposed as fakes … inventors of table-rapping devices, experts at pulling strings of muslin ‘ectoplasm’ out their nostrils.

Sure, Justin had been largely right. It was exploitation of the bereaved. About taking the sting out of death, like your loved ones were just a phone call away. Always a ready audience for that.

Some of the working mediums Grayle had talked to were kind of genuine — even though a lot of the information they relayed was inaccurate, they seemed to have contact with something. Just that they usually came over just as gullible as their sad clients, needing to believe they were bonding with the departed. Plus they did tend to be so pious and all knowing, putting on the air of church ministers.

And sure, in those years as a New Age columnist, Grayle had never encountered anyone she could honestly believe was in contact with the dead.

Callard had come to sit on a Victorian sofa on the other side of the fireplace from Grayle’s chair, facing the window. She had a tumbler half-filled with some kind of immoderate Martini mixture.

‘You know why I drink too much?’

Grayle said nothing. It was so dark in here, now, that you didn’t like to move in case you knocked something over. She began to feel cold, edged her chair closer to the underfed fire.

‘Because when I’m pissed I don’t receive.’

‘Right,’ Grayle said uncertainly.

‘Nothing significant gets through alcohol.’

‘That’s interesting.’

‘Don’t feel …’ Callard leaned back, with her head against the wall, maybe observing Grayle for the first time ‘… that you have to fucking patronize me. What did you say your name was?’

‘Grayle Underhill.’

‘Grayle?’

‘Underhill.’ She sipped weak whisky from a glass that felt greasy.

‘Oh my God.’ Callard did this short snort of a laugh. ‘Not that dreadful … You don’t have a column in one of those ghastly American tabloids. Under the name …’

Grayle sighed. ‘Holy Grayle. But not any more.’

‘Holy Grayle.’ Callard threw an arm behind her head and peered at Grayle across the murk. ‘Oh my God. I was in New York doing some television and my agent brought me some copies. You really wrote that drivel?’

‘Don’t feel you have to patronize me,’ Grayle said.

Callard snorted, took a graceless slurp from her glass. She sat up, grabbed a poker, stabbed at the coals until a feeble white flame spurted.

Outside it was getting too close to dark. Time, Grayle figured, to cut to the chase.

‘Ms Callard, why did you write to Marcus?’

‘Did I?’

‘Marcus Bacton.’

In the wan firelight, you could see her navel between the bottom of the cardigan and the top of her dark jeans, then a fold of skin creased over it. She was anorectically thin.

‘Marcus Bacton’, she said, ‘was the only person in my entire fucking life who ever pitied me.’

She dug a bare hand into a bucket and came up with a clutch of small lumps of coal, scattering them over the fire, wiping her hand on her jeans.

‘People are suspicious of me. Or afraid. Or they want a piece of me. But I mean, pity … that was something new, even at the time. I was profoundly offended at first.’

‘Best of all,’ Grayle said, ‘Marcus likes to offend.’

‘When I think about him … I picture him striding up and down the corridors, with his wide shoulders and his little pot belly. Glaring through his glasses and roaring at pupils. Teachers too, sometimes.’

‘Uh huh.’ Grayle finished her whisky, gratefully put down the glass in the hearth. She noticed that Callard’s tumbler remained half-full. She’d drunk hardly any.

‘One night — this is on record … in the books — a big window just exploded in the dormitory. Glass everywhere. I was at the other end of the room, but they knew … the staff knew things happened around me. They actually put me into a room no bigger than a cupboard. Locked the door, as you would with a dangerous mental patient. This was the headmaster and the matron. Didn’t know how else to handle it. Mr Bacton was furious. Came out in his dressing gown, and when they wouldn’t give him the key he kicked the door in and brought me out and we went for a long walk in the grounds. Talking. For hours, it seemed like. He resigned soon after that, and I was taken away from the school. I haven’t seen him since.’

‘What did you talk about?’

Callard didn’t reply. Whatever they’d discussed, that must have been the night Marcus connected, showed her he understood what it was like having psychic ability — although he had none himself. The bond between them had been formed that night, and Grayle was no kind of substitute.

Callard poked at the fire again. ‘Flu, you said.’

‘Marcus has this theory that men get it worse than women. He’s real low. But he was flattered, I guess, when you wrote to the magazine, trying to reach him. He’s been feeling a touch insecure.’

‘Marcus Bacton insecure?’

‘In his way,’ Grayle said. ‘Feels he wasted too much of his life not doing what he wanted to do … investigating the Big Mysteries, showing people that the world was so much wilder than the scientists and the politicians wanted them to think. And now he’s past sixty, running this small-time magazine that the right people don’t read, and he doesn’t think he’s ever gonna get where he wants to be.’

Callard rose unsteadily. It didn’t show in her voice, but she must already have drunk plenty today. Reaching that stage where it no longer made you happier, just kept the fires of hell tamped down. But now she’d stopped drinking and the alcohol in the glass didn’t seem to be tempting her.

‘And what do you do exactly, Grayle?’

‘Oh, I … came over from the States for … personal reasons, and I met Marcus and I started helping him with the magazine. Which was seriously rundown. And like now we’ve changed the name and it’s starting to make this very small profit, which I thought would make him happy. But perhaps he feels it’s being taken out of his hands. Or losing its peculiar integrity. I don’t know. He’s a complex individual.’