Phil Rickman - The Cold Calling

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s a castle, Bobby. Did I no tell you he lived in a castle?’

Something huge and tubular was pushing out of a bushy mound into the charcoal-grey pre-dawn. Half of a stone tower.

‘Well, he lives in it inasmuch as the walls are all round the house,’ Andy said. ‘More a liability than anything, with the upkeep and the official inspections.’

Behind the ruins, the headlights had found a low house, heavy with oak timbers, small, irregular black windows. Andy parked about fifty yards away. ‘We’ll bide here a while. Don’t want to set the dog off. Marcus’ll be about soon enough.’

‘Get some air, I think.’ Maiden pulled down his eyepatch, levered himself out of the car. It was chilly, the darkness rattling and squeaking. His body aching. There were no visible lights, apart from a fading moon and a single star.

Andy joined him. ‘How you feeling?’

‘OK.’

‘ I bet.’

‘No, really. Better.’

‘You’ll sleep fine here. Air’s like rough cider. Listen. I have a thought. This may be stupid.’

‘Go on.’

‘It’ll take us no more than twenty minutes to walk to the Knoll.’

‘You don’t think that’s stupid at all,’ Maiden said. ‘You’ve been planning it all along.’

Only a barn owl shrieked in reply. He found himself losing touch with the reality of it, the scene receding into a small screen of pebble-glass, the kind you saw in front of vintage TV sets from the 1950s.

He saw a sliver of gold in the east. In the west, behind the castle’s bush-bristled mound, dark hills.

* * *

Halfway up the rise, he turned to look back into the east. Saw the dawn like an estuary in the sky: flat banks of cool sand and spreading turquoise pools. But he knew there was something wrong: it was just a pretty picture, he wasn’t feeling it.

‘You OK, Bobby?’ Andy moving briskly through the dew-damp field, looking back at him. He was out of breath; she wasn’t.

‘I’m OK.’ He could feel the excitement in her. Couldn’t believe that she believed his survival was down to some kind of prehistoric magic.

Andy shook her head over the view. ‘Will you look at that?’ She had on a blue nylon jacket, pink jeans and a pair of walking boots she kept in the car. She looked loosened up, very much at home here. ‘I mean, isn’t that just amazing?’

‘It’s very nice.’

‘Very nice?’ She stared at him. ‘Jesus, Bobby, I thought you were supposed to be an artist. You’re talking like a guy with no poetry in him.’

‘Sorry.’

‘You think I’m mad, don’t you? I mean, come on, if you think I’m out of it, you bloody well say so.’

‘I think you’re an optimist,’ he said.

‘Let’s just try it, huh? You stand on the Knoll and you let the sun rise over you, and if you think it’s still February … Just try it, huh?’

Ahead of them, in the west, the land rose steeply towards what were either high hills or low mountains, hard to separate them from the still-night sky. Andy tugged at the sprung bar on a metal gate.

‘Not far. Just we’ll need to go careful. Don’t wanny get arrested for trespass. Guy who owns the land — this TV archaeologist, Falconer?’

‘ He owns this land?’

‘He does now. He and Marcus are, ah …’ Andy dragged the gate across the tufted grass. ‘… not over-friendly. He’s apparently fenced off the Knoll. If he found Marcus climbing over the wire, he’d be pressing charges. We’d probably get off wi’ a warning, but he’s no gonny see us anyway, this early.’ She lowered her voice. With any luck.’

Andy closed the gate behind them and crackled confidently through a patch of dry bracken. Did she really imagine she was going to have him skipping back down the hillside, praising God, the Virgin Mary, the Mother Goddess?

‘What happened to the girl who had the vision?’

‘Aw, it becomes less inspiring. Child tells her mother, gets the strap for being late to school. And lying. When she keeps on about it, Ma summons the vicar. No friend of the Roman Church. Plus the local people are saying any vision at a pagan site has got to be the work of the evil one. They kind of ostracized her.’

‘Christians,’ Maiden said.

‘Cause celebre for The Phenomenologist and Marcus. Hates religious prejudice, though, God knows, he has enough of his own. Look …’

She stopped, took his arm. About a hundred yards away, at the summit of the slope, something squatted like a massive, stone toad.

‘Most people find them kind of weird, these old sites, wouldnae want to go up alone. Now it’s like … approaching a cathedral.’

She turned her face into the dawn. There were channels of crimson under the lightening sandscape in the sky, chips of glittering cloud. Andy’s skin was ambered in the morning glow, her eyes shining, red hair alight.

‘Supposed to be a chambered tomb, that’s what the books say, but this … this is no to do with death . Jesus, how can you ever turn your face into the sunrise and contemplate dying?’

Maiden looked down at the dirty yellow grass. He felt cold.

‘These people,’ Andy said. ‘The old guys. They positioned it to grab the earliest daylight. So it’s all about rebirth. New life, healing the body, healing the mind, healing the spirit. It’s everything we’ve forgotten. As a race, y’know? Like … Hey … you OK?’

‘Nothing.’ His mouth dry. ‘Someone walking over my grave.’

He looked down at his hands, saw they were trembling. Never before, in his whole life, could he remember his hands trembling.

‘You’ve gone pale, Bobby.’

The stone toad crouched over him.

‘OK, listen to me.’ Andy put her hands on his shoulders. ‘C’mon now, what are you feeling? Right this second.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Yes you do. Give me a word.’

‘All right, dread.’

‘Dread? Son, this place saved your life.’

‘You saved my life.’

‘Aw.’ Andy dropped her arms, walked away from him, shaking her head.

‘Sorry. Wrong thing to say, huh?’

‘Bobby, everything you say’s wrong. Walked on your grave. You said grave. This is no to do with graves .’

‘You’re taking it personally.’

‘Damn right I am. All the way down here I’m thinking this was gonny bring you out of it. Out of all this grey stuff, this fear of death, all this February shite.’

‘It doesn’t change what you did. You wanted to think it was linked to your own recovery and whatever happened to you up here. I don’t know why you don’t just accept that it was you … your instincts, your experience …’

He risked another look up at the stone toad on the mound, vaguely hoping it might have acquired a halo, turned to gold.

He shuddered. He could almost smell it. Like the worst smell he’d ever known: when he was with the Met, called out to this house in Islington, this well-to-do suicide couple sitting naked on the sofa, holding hands, dead for three weeks, their heads fallen together. Pills and whisky and hundreds of flies and, on the coffee table, a photo album full of pictures of naked children.

He turned his back on High Knoll. The colours of the eastern sky were flat as a fresco; the dawn didn’t want him.

‘All seemed so meant , Bobby.’

Maiden hated himself. For her, the place was sacred. Why couldn’t he feel it?

But she wasn’t even looking at him any more.

‘Jesus God.’

A short, plump man was shambling and flapping towards them, down the Knoll.

‘Anderson?’ The man slipped and stumbled to his knees. ‘Is it you ?’ He was grey-haired, late middle-age. Blinking up through heavy spectacles and a film of sweat. ‘It really is you?’