Phil Rickman - The Cold Calling

In contrast to some of the ruined stone circles she’d seen in pictures, the Rollrights looked like a true circle. Almost too complete, the stones packed in tight, so it was like a wall in places. Matthew’s girlfriend, Janny Oates, said it was part of the folklore of the site that if you counted the stones, you would never get the same number twice.

‘The circle’s known as the King’s Men,’ Matthew said. ‘That stone over there is the King Stone, and across there is a group of stones that used to be a burial chamber, only it’s caved in, and that’s called the Whispering Knights.’

The stones were weird. The King Stone was like a twisted tree stump, and there were metal railings around it, like it might break out. The smaller stones, in the circle, were eroded, like lumps of rotting cheese.

This site should have been surrounded by miles of forest and swamps and stuff, and yet here it was, among well-tended fields, barely a half-hour out of Oxford.

‘Ersula was here?’ she said.

‘We wanted her to spend the night,’ Matthew said. ‘In the stones. I said I’d be her therapeute.’

‘But she wouldn’t,’ Janny said.

‘Which we thought was unusual,’ Matthew said, ‘considering how enthusiastic she’d been, you know, in the end, about the whole experiment.’

Janny and Matthew were kind of cute. They were very early twenties and engaged. Both scrubbed and shiny, real childhood sweetheart types. They wore identical Shetland sweaters and finished off one another’s sentences as if they’d been married for years.

‘When was this?’ Grayle asked. ‘When was she here? When did you last see her?’

They’d both been on a University of the Earth course when Ersula was there. Now they were working weekends with something called the Dragon Project, which was a long-term inquiry into anomalous levels of radiation and electromagnetism at selected ancient sites. The Rollrights was its main base, which was fine for Janny and Matthew, who lived nearby, in the town of Chipping Camden.

‘Three weeks.’ Janny flicked back her fine, light-brown hair. ‘Where did she say she was going then, Matthew?’

‘Actually,’ Matthew said, ‘she seemed a little confused. I think she’d had what my father would call a mind-blowing experience. That was back at Cefn-y-bedd. When we first met her, Ersula was very much the scientist, and she was sort of pooh-poohing all this stuff about earth-energies that Janny and I knew existed.’

‘Because we’d spent all our holidays going to hundreds of sites, and you can just tell after a while. You just walk into a circle and … and …’

‘Whoosh,’ Grayle said sadly.

‘Absolutely. That’s exactly it, isn’t it, Matthew? I think — well, I’m certain — that Ersula came round to our way of thinking. And that can be quite a shock to the system when you start off by not believing.’

‘She was sort of wandering around the stones,’ Matthew said. ‘Looking a bit starved.’

‘As though she had a cold coming on, or a chill. I offered her some tea from our flask, but she shook her head. She was wearing this enormous parka, with the hood up, though it wasn’t a bad day, was it?’

‘Not like today,’ Matthew said. ‘I don’t think we’ll be sleeping out tonight, Jan.’

Grayle thought, Jeez, I sure wouldn’t like to sleep here.

She stepped out of the circle, turned away. Just being near these grim, broken stones solidified all her fears for Ersula. It was clear she hadn’t told anyone on the course about her awful dream at Black Knoll, the full details of which she couldn’t even tell her own sister.

‘Look.’ Matthew patted her arm. ‘I wouldn’t worry about her, you know. I mean, compared with … well, some of the people involved in earth-mysteries are a bit bonkers, to be honest. But Ersula really had her feet on the ground.’

Grayle’s father had said, Be careful .

Not what she’d expected. She’d imagined something like, I never openly said this to you, Grayle, but I hated that column. I found it gross. It gives me enormous pleasure that you outgrew it finally .

No, nothing like that. Dr Erlend Underhill had never once mentioned the column. He’d copied out the addresses and phone numbers of two professors he knew, history guys in Oxford, said he would call them to put them in the picture, tell them she was on her way. Grayle said, Why? Because, right now, prehistoric studies in England was attracting a large number of crazies, her father said; you needed some back-up, a point of reference.

‘Dad, I’m an official, badge-wearing weirdo. I can bond with crazies.’

‘Humour me,’ her father said humourlessly. And insisted on giving her five thousand dollars for airfares and accommodation. ‘This is family business. Keep me informed.’

Next, she’d gone to tough it out with the editor. Who, to her dismay, seemed entirely undisturbed at his unique New Age columnist’s wanting to quit. ‘Yeah,’ he said nonchalantly. ‘I agree the column’s been a mite tired of late.’ ( What? ) ‘We can handle it in-house, maybe. I got a couple new kids in the city room, maybe we can give it a new slant.’ He meant save money. Asshole.

All right, she hadn’t expected Burton to plead, but it still wasn’t the exit she’d imagined. So she’d had her last doughnut with Lyndon (you were right, maybe I peaked), held back the tears, and took the first daytime flight out of JFK with a small suitcase and a strange lightness in the head.

The next night she was in Woodstock, the one Jimi Hendrix never played, outside of Oxford, at the home of her father’s one-time associate, a sixty-year-old ancient history professor called Duncan Murphy, and his Australian partner, Nancy Chad, a poet.

‘Oh yes, we know Roger Falconer,’ Duncan Murphy said. ‘People tend to sneer these days because he’s big on the box and making the most of it, but that’s us Brits for you. Can’t stand other people’s success. Of course, we’d all be doing pretty much the same in his place and he knows it. And he does actually know his stuff. These rather lucrative courses he runs, he may have let the ley-liners in, but that doesn’t mean he accepts what they have to say. He listens , that’s all. On the box, and during the courses too, no doubt, he appears more liberal than he actually is, which tends to be the best policy, long-term-careerwise, I’ve found.’

Grayle remembered the issue of The Phenomenologist , the almost unreadably dense journal which Ersula had enclosed with her last letter. The one with the front-page editorial which read: Professor Falconer boasts of his ‘open-minded’ approach to the paranormal. In fact, all his books show him to be a sneering sceptic, and the ‘exciting new venture’ at Cefn-y-bedd promises to be merely a cynical exploitation of genuine seekers — people who, unlike Falconer, are unafraid to venture into battle without their academic armour.

‘I was at a dinner party with him a couple of years ago,’ Nancy Chad said, ‘and that actually wasn’t my impression. I thought he had a great passion for prehistoric people. That seems a strange way of putting it, but I can’t think of a better one. He’ll talk at length about the abilities we’ve lost that they possessed in abundance. He’s quite magnetic when he gets going. I reckon he’s closer to the ley-liners than he admits.’

How close to Ersula? Grayle wondered. Ersula, for whom knowledge could also be a great passion. Unlike me, I just get crushes .

‘Women always claim to know him better,’ Duncan Murphy said disapprovingly. ‘Anyway, you can judge for yourself. I got you a videotape of a couple of his programmes. You won’t mind if we don’t watch it tonight?’