Phil Rickman - The Cold Calling

Grayle found it more chilling each time she read it.

What was worst was that you would expect Ersula to offer a scientific explanation involving hypnagogic hallucinations or some such — Ersula’s predictable answer to stories about people who woke up and saw ghosts in their bedrooms. There was no attempt to explain this away; its effect on her had been too corrosive.

Grayle picked up the copy of The Phenomenologist Ersula had sent. What a rag. Badly printed, cheap paper, no layouts to speak of. No wonder it was entirely unknown even to Holy Grayle.

Still, there had to be a phone number in there somewhere. She’d call up this Marcus Backhouse or whatever he was called.

When she was sober.

Wiltshire

The Holy of Holies .

Defiled .

Yesterday evening, the Green Man stood before a six-foot sarsen as it was being examined by people from the National Trust, a dozen or so tourists and villagers looking on in horror and disgust .

He’d been alerted to the atrocity by the lunchtime radio news and driven at once to Wiltshire, the county of his birth. He drove between the fields where he’d hunted, learned to shoot, snare and gut. Where he’d learned, also, about the lines of ancient energy which gridded the fields, making Wiltshire probably the only county in England where all the ground was sacred .

But the holiest ground of all was Avebury .

Perhaps because he grew up in its shadow, Stonehenge never had the same power for him as the henge-village in the Kennet valley, encircled — except for the church — by a ditch and the remains of the greatest Stone Age temple in the world .

The stones of Avebury were shaped by the Earth Herself. Each is an individual organism — here a lion, here a human head, a fist, a gnarled penis, a woman’s pocked and scarred torso and upper thighs with a tightly clenched vulva. One can almost see them all flexing, pulsing, breathing, and he wanted immediately to offer a sacrifice. However, the problem with Avebury is the modern community at its heart. And the tourists. With their children, dogs, cameras, ice creams .

Always people. Their vulgarity and their ignorance. Even at dead of night, when this act of sacrilege was, presumably, carried out .

The affected stones had been covered ignominiously in sacking by the National Trust people .

To hide the abomination .

Dozens of disgusting, pseudo-cabalistic symbols had been scrawled over two of the outlying sarsens, in white emulsion and black bitumen paint. The megaliths defaced from top to bottom, so that when the paint was cleaned off, the sensitive skin of mosses and lichens would also be scrubbed away, leaving the stones flayed and aching, as bald as housebricks .

Who was responsible?

So-called New Age travellers, perhaps, the itinerant vagrants who live on social security and consider ancient shrines to be their inheritance .

He was reminded yesterday of the eighteenth-century farmer who went around massacring megaliths and rejoiced — literally rejoiced — in the name ‘Stonekiller’ Robinson. The Green Man does not know how the stonekiller had died but he hopes it was a long and exceedingly painful death .

Through the sacking, he heard the stones calling out to him in their pain and, from beneath his feet, the Earth shrieking for revenge .

Knowing then that he had been sent for, that he was to be the instrument .

Parking his car for the night on the outskirts of Marlborough, he walked to the Ridgeway and joined a line from the Avebury circle and walked on until he found the place .

They always turn out to be marked in some way, these sacred sites, but sometimes the marker is far from obvious and takes time to discover. It might be a small stone hidden in a wood or obscured by tufts of moorland grass. Or lost among buildings, because sometimes the place will be in the middle of a village, even a large town .

For instance, earlier this year, the Green Man slept in a hollow in the ramparts around an Iron Age fort contoured into the summit of a holy hill. There were pine trees here, as well, and through his dreams galloped the spectral figure of the Knight of Swords, from the Tarot. The Knight was riding down from a hill with stark pines upon it. His sword was raised. He was on a mission of vengeance .

There was no denying the command .

At first light this day, the Green man followed an obvious alignment from the hill to a church steeple in the centre of the town below. The church was locked, the churchyard deserted. He walked on. The town was empty, there was very little traffic. Following the line, he arrived at the stump of an old market cross, a familiar marker. The line followed a paved, pedestrianized area into a small shopping arcade, where the frontage of one shop jutted out beyond its neighbours into the middle of the line .

The shop was … an ironmonger’s .

The first sign .

In its doorway was a large cardboard box. Inside it was a young vagrant .

The box was not quite long enough to accommodate him, so he had protected his feet from the cold by encasing them in another, smaller box. On it was a line-drawing of a carving knife and one stencilled word .

MEATMASTER

All the confirmation the Green Man needed. Putting down his rucksack in the silent, newly cobbled arcade, he located the serrated-edged sheath knife he sometimes used to skin rabbits .

He remembers how the vagrant awoke with half his throat open, that soundless liquid scream again .

The remains of the Barber-Surgeon are on display in Avebury’s small museum .

The skeleton was found under Stone Number Nine in the henge circle .

His profession was suggested by the implements discovered on the body — scissors and what was believed to be a medical probe. The dates on the coins he carried suggested he died in the early 1320s. Surgeons, in those days, needed no more qualifications than those required for cutting hair .

It seems likely that the Barber-Surgeon was involved in a medieval assault on the stones at the instigation of the Christian Church, attempting to stamp out pagan rituals still carried on there .

Tragically — ha — he appeared to have died when the stone toppled upon him .

This is possible. There are many tales of foolhardy country people who tried to dig up ancient menhirs provoking thunderstorms, even being struck by lightning .

During his dream below the pines last night, the Green Man learned the truth: that the Barber-Surgeon had been abducted by the guardians of the stones and given in sacrifice. Bludgeoned to death and placed beneath the stone .

In his dream, the Green Man was kneeling under the pines in a dense mist which sliced off the tops of the trees. He had held out his hands and into them was placed something grey and misty but quite heavy .

When he awoke, he found, not fifteen yards from where he’d slept, a single stone, about eight inches long and three to four inches wide .

This dawn arrives wearing a mist as fine as lace, the sun tossed carelessly in its loose folds .

Too bright. He will have to thicken the mist .

This is quite easy. Most people can learn to do it. However, most people would do it in reverse; they teach themselves to shift clouds and dissolve them by pure concentration. A simple example of the way human consciousness can learn to interact with nature. With practice, the clouds can almost be blown away in seconds. Pffft!