Phil Rickman - The Cold Calling

After no more than a month, this melancholic and aimless existence in a rented cottage had been interrupted by news of the sudden death of the latest proprietor of The Phenomenologist . Putting the venerable periodical once more on the market.

Seemed like a sign. God knows, he needed one.

Been a contributor to The Phenomenologist for years. Smudgy, ill-printed rag, following him around the country, arriving four times a year, familiar hand-addressed buff envelope, like pornography. Editorial pages entirely self-generating, with unpaid correspondents submitting garbled accounts of mystical and paranormal events in their particular towns and villages. Appallingly written, most of them; but after thirty years as an English teacher, he’d sort that out.

Envisaging a new Phenomenologist . Better layout. Certain literary style. On sale in newsagents and bookshops.

Only after he’d bought the century-old title for a suspiciously reasonable four thousand seven hundred quid had Marcus discovered that contributors and subscribers were, broadly speaking, the same people. If you rejected or even rewrote some piece of crap, its author would immediately cancel his or her subscription.

Bloody nightmare. Only way to keep it going was to print every blasted thing and never ask questions. Very little of it bore serious scrutiny. You would never, for instance, have imagined so many elderly English spinsters manifesting stigmata.

And the circulation dropped as they died off.

But struggling with the magazine had, for a time, given him a purpose. Also a solid excuse to indulge his long-suppressed passion for the Unexplained. If he heard of a poltergeist-infested house or the sighting of baffling lights in the sky, he could wander along and investigate, presenting his credentials. No-one had ever heard of The Phenomenologist , of course, but it did sound rather impressive and few people would shut their doors in your face.

Marcus Bacton: crusader for the curious, defender of the irrational.

And Annie Davies had been his Bernadette, his Joan of Arc, Marcus realizing, from his own researches, that the circumstances of Annie’s vision were remarkably similar to those of several famous sightings of the Virgin, notably at Fatima in Portugal in 1917 and Medjugorje in Yugoslavia, as recently as the 1980s.

He also subscribed to the theory that many so-called burial chambers, oriented as they were to the midsummer or midwinter sunrise, were not only Neolithic calendars but initiation chambers for the priests and shamans. They’d spend the night in meditation inside the chamber … and then dawn’s first rays would enter like molten gold through a slit in the carefully positioned portal-stones. Out of the darkness, into the light. A supremely transcendent experience.

A time for visions. A time for miracles.

Should’ve been Saint Annie.

It was an obsession. And when the decrepit Castle Farm, the old home of Annie Davies, arrived on the market, it seemed like another sign. To buy it, Marcus Bacton had cleaned out his bank account and sold his car. At least it had a little cottage attached, which he could let out for holidays, enabling him to afford a series of cleaners, who had found him so exasperating that none lasted more than six months. Until, just over two years ago, the one who became a live-in housekeeper: the extraordinary Mrs Willis.

All a bit hand-to-mouth. But he’d always known that one day he’d raise the money to buy the Knoll, and he’d have a display case behind glass so that visitors would be able to read the story of Annie Davies and the vision which the Church denied.

Fucking Falconer.

Marcus smacked a fist into the ground and badly grazed a knuckle on a protruding tree root. His eyes watered. He bound the hand with his handkerchief, called Malcolm and trudged back to the Castle through the thickening rain.

The grey-pink ruins were draped around the farmhouse, which was built on the edge of the original motte. Half of a tower stood next to the house, like a smashed grain silo.

Most of the castles in the area were reduced to this. No great kudos to owning one, unless you were an outrageous self-publicist like Falconer. The Listed Buildings people were always on your back … and the tourists, idiots who simply couldn’t believe that there could be medieval castle ruins not open to the public.

So when Marcus saw, from a distance, the vehicle parked in the shadow of the outer curtain wall, his hackles rose faster than Malcolm’s. He was in no mood to explain to some cretinous family that no, there wasn’t a bloody ice cream stand.

However, the vehicle under the wall turned out to be a Land Rover, which suggested a local person. Possibly a patient. The Castle was remote enough from the village for most of Mrs Willis’s patients to come by car.

Or it could be the doctor. Well, God knows, he had no time for these bloody state-registered drug-dealers, especially after their fumbling failure to save Celia. But the local fellow was less offensive than most and, after all, you didn’t have to go along with what they prescribed.

Perhaps Mrs Willis had seen the sense of it. Healer, heal thyself wasn’t always the best philosophy.

Stepping into the hall, he heard voices from the Healing Room. Must be a patient; Mrs Willis wouldn’t embarrass the doctor by having him examine her amidst her pots and jars of natural potions. Dammit, she wasn’t fit to see patients. But what could you do? What could you do with Mrs Willis?

Marcus tramped into the kitchen, dumped the kettle on the Rayburn. She’d laid out his mail in a neat pile on the old pine table. He hooked out a wooden chair with his foot. Phone bill and two letters from Phenomenologist correspondents. He recognized the cramped handwriting of Miss Pinder, the crazed spiritualist from Chiswick. The other was a foolscap envelope, postmarked Pembrokeshire. Sure he knew the writing, but he couldn’t quite place it. He sighed and slit the envelope with a butter knife. Dear Mr Bacton,Well, it’s been some months since you’ve heard from me, but I’ve been away. I trust you are staying out of trouble with the Ancient Monuments people over the state of your castle. Perhaps I shall see it one day. Now, I know you are a busy man, so I shall contain my Celtic urge to gabble on, and come straight to the point. There is a pressing matter with which I hope you may be able to assist me. We have a murderer in our midst .

What the bloody hell …? Now, there’s melodramatic, isn’t it?But before you dismiss it, in that delightfully brusque way of yours, as delusion, please peruse the enclosed cutting .

Oh God. Marcus closed and opened his eyes. Cindy the bloody Shaman.

Reached for a mug with his left hand, holding the shelf in place with his right.

Insane theatrical biddy who lived in a caravan in Pembrokeshire.

Only the word delusion kept him reading. Falconer had used deluded in connection with the blessed Annie Davies. Hate to think that anyone — even Cindy the bloody Shaman — might have cause to consider Marcus Bacton as small-minded as Falconer.… and so, naturally, I was most distressed by young Maria’s death and would have been only too relieved if the police had identified some local yob as the perpetrator of the crime. Yet it was clear to me from the first that it was not going to be so easy. I could not stop thinking about the death of William Rufus, as explained so well by Dr Margaret Murray in her wonderful book, which I am sure you have on your shelves…

Of course. Classic work. Murray had identified William as the Divine Victim. A king dying for his country. The ultimate human sacrifice. But only Cindy the Shaman could equate the historic slaying with the murder of a hunt saboteur some eight hundred years later.… here, I felt, was a killer with a strong sense of earth-ritual, and the only proof I required — for myself — was evidence that this person had struck again. I began to monitor the newspapers, searching for any death that could be strongly linked to its location … crimes committed in places of ancient significance. Wherever I travelled, I scoured the local papers for details that the national press would not have the space to include. I came across the attached report in the west Wales edition of the Western Mail.