Phil Rickman - The Cold Calling

The video cassette had a picture on the box of a lean, suntanned man in denims and Ray-Bans, his back to the Great Pyramid of Giza.

‘That’s good of you,’ Grayle said. ‘Thanks.’

‘Your father’s done me many favours. He’s very proud of Ersula, you know. I’m sorry, that’s not to say-’

Grayle smiled. ‘How old is Falconer?’

‘Fifty-five going on twenty-five. Keeps himself fit, has to be said. Swims, rides, pilots his own chopper.’

‘Ah yes,’ Nancy Chad said archly. ‘That as well. Some of my friends figure the guy’s biggest claim to fame is the one he can’t keep in his pants for too long.’

Raising the question of casual sex. The Ersula that Grayle knew didn’t do casual anything. For me , she’d say loftily, if unoriginally, the most erogenous zone is the mind . Oh sure, Grayle had said. Until it happens.

‘Look,’ Duncan said. ‘I feel I’m not doing enough.’

‘Oh, hey, come on -’

‘You probably need a more … radical viewpoint than ours. I didn’t know whether to mention this, but some of our neighbours, their son and his girlfriend were on one of Falconer’s courses. They spend most weekends down at the Rollrights, messing about with magnetometers and things. Won’t take you long to get there and it’ll give you a taste of what it’s all about.’

‘You know what I think?’ Janny’s face glowing with the need to be kind. ‘I think she needed to go away by herself and think everything through. Everything that happened to her.’

‘I can see her in some Oxford library,’ Matthew said, ‘hunched up with a laptop computer, feeding everything, puzzling it all out. I can imagine her getting a book out of this.’

‘Not Oxford, Matt. More like Hereford library. I think she’ll have gone back to the Welsh border. She was obsessed with the dolmen at Black Knoll, though, personally, I never thought it had much going for it. Not compared to Avebury and, well, here …’

‘Why did she come here?’ Grayle asked.

‘Oh.’ Janny looked as though she hadn’t given this much thought. ‘Well, I suppose … I mean, she knew we were here most weekends, and we’d said to her, you know, please come over when your next course is finished and you’ve got some free time. She just wanted to hang around and talk, I suppose, sort of loosen up.’

‘The way you described her, she doesn’t sound at all loosened up. She tell you much about her experiences with the dreaming thing?’

‘Well,’ said Matthew, ‘she asked us a lot of questions about our experiences.’

‘Like what?’

‘Whether we’d ever been …’

‘… frightened,’ Janny said. ‘I mean, we weren’t supposed to talk about our dreams or that would defeat the object of the exercise if someone was thinking about another person’s dream and had the same one. The idea is to find out what influence the site has on our subconscious.’

‘And have you?’ Grayle said. ‘Have you ever been scared?’

Matthew folded his arms. ‘Not scared . Some of it’s sort of … challenging.’

‘In what way?’

‘Oh, I can’t tell you without … Should I tell her, Janny? I mean, it’s not as if she …’

‘… is actually involved. Go on, then.’

‘I met the guardian once. That was here. At least I presume it was the guardian. Every site has one, you know. In my dream, I was over by the Whispering Knights, and this old lady was there …’

‘Old … lady? ‘ Janny spluttered.

‘Oh well, a hag. She was pretty revolting, actually. She was wearing a sort of ragged cloak and she had terrible staring eyes, and she … um … smelled pretty awful. Oh, look, I’m not sure I should be telling you this … not here.’

Grayle said, ‘Smelled?’

‘I think it’s OK,’ Janny said. ‘I think she was supposed to be off-putting. Guardians are. You’ve got to demonstrate your resolve, your intensity of purpose, by standing up to them. And you did, didn’t you, Matt?’

Well, I didn’t run away. I just sort of tried to meet her eyes. And then she sort of dissolved, and that was when Janny woke me to get it down on tape.’

‘You still have the tape?’ Grayle said.

‘No, this was a Dragon Project thing. We did a transcript and then … I don’t know where it is.’

‘So what’s the difference between the Dragon Project and Falconer’s stuff?’

Well, the Dragon Project started it off, the national dream survey thing. It’s all going into a computer in California or somewhere, to see if there are any correlations. I suppose Professor Falconer sort of picked up on it.’

‘What happened,’ said Janny, ‘is a chap called Adrian Fraser-Hale, who was involved with the Dragon Project, went to work for Falconer, as an expert on the sort of earth-mysteries stuff…’

‘And Roger thought it was a good idea,’ Matthew said.

‘You mean …’ Grayle said carefully, ‘he thought it would attract people to his courses.’

‘He isn’t like that!’ the kids said almost in unison.

Matthew added, ‘I really think he’s going to be the best thing that ever happened to the earth-mysteries movement. Because he’s part of the Establishment. I mean, in archaeology, he is the Establishment. If people like Adrian can convince him that there’s really another dimension to prehistoric science, it could be the start of changing the whole of human thought.’

‘Right,’ Grayle said. Thinking, I was here before; everyone’s on the point of a major breakthrough. ‘So, uh, what conclusions do you draw from this guardian thing?’

‘Well …’ Matthew looked over his shoulder as though he thought this hag might be eyeing him from the edge of the circle. ‘I suppose this is a bit obvious, but the legend of the Rollrights is about this king — not any specific king, just a sort of regional chief — who encountered the witch who controlled the land and — it’s a bit like Macbeth really — the witch said to him that if he took seven long strides from here …’

At this point, Matthew and Janny looked at each other, held hands, said together, ‘ If Long Compton thou canst see, King of England thou shalt be! ‘ bringing their joined hands up and down to the rhythm.

‘Well,’ Matthew said, ‘the king thought this was going to be a pushover, because he knew the village of Long Compton would come into view as soon as he reached the top of the rise. Only problem was, when he got there, this mound had arisen on the horizon and completely blocked his view.’

‘Screwed, huh?’

‘Turned to stone, actually. The witch turned the king into what is now the King’s Stone, over there, and these are his men.’

Grayle looked around the cheesy circle, planning to smile, but it got overtaken by a shudder.

‘She offer you anything, Matthew?’

‘If she ever did, I hope I wouldn’t be arrogant, like the king. I think, actually, she was telling me — us — that it was OK. Giving us her blessing.’

‘We’re going to be married next week,’ Janny said.

‘Well, uh, congratulations.’ Grayle was suddenly feeling very old.

‘We love it here, as you can imagine. It’s our part of the world. The most mysterious part of our part of the world. Earth-mysteries is about discovering your own heritage, and this is ours. That’s why we’re doing it here.’

‘There’s a church out here?’ Grayle looked around. No village visible, no spire, no tower, but presumably Long Compton was just over the next mound.

‘No, here , silly. In the circle.’

‘Jesus,’ Grayle said. ‘You guys are, like, witches?’

‘Oh, good God, no. We’ve not gone pagan or anything.’