Phil Rickman - The Cold Calling

Meeting place .

Here the sky .

Here the earth .

Here the mountain ,

Here the valley .

Here Albion ,

Here Cymru .

Meeting place .

Time passed. The chant died. Cindy listened to the evening breeze, to the birds in the distance (the only birds were distant), to the waving of the grass.

He felt the weight of the capstone on the uprights and the strength of the Earth which bore the stones.

He collected all the sounds inside himself, in his head and in his breast and in his solar plexus. He breathed the sounds into his chakras, carried them around his inner circuit and let them go. And began another chant.

Here the sky .

Here the earth .

Here the mountain ,

Here the valley .

Here Cindy .

Here Annie?

Here … Mrs Willis?

Time passed. Cindy was aware only of a faraway longing and an ache in his stomach. When his eyes opened again, for an agonizing second the sky was very nearly black and the stones were the colour of candlewax.

He didn’t move. He took it calmly at first. It had happened before, a whole scene changing into a photographic negative, clouds becoming smoke, muddy rivers running like double cream, green grass turning pink as watered blood.

It had happened before. But never with a smell.

The smell was rank and feral. Of pond slime and decayed leaves with a smear of faeces. Cindy was deeply shaken. His hands felt as if they’d been in cold water. The woman in him felt violated. Holiness, a tender and vulnerable quality, could also be negated, reversed. All too easily. All too easily.

Beside the stone, three yards away, a figure stood in green-black smoke and looked down on Cindy, whose fingers fell from the drum, who sprang up in fear.

Stumbling away down the side of the Knoll, coughing into a handkerchief soaked this morning in lavender water.

Fleeing in terror from High Knoll, where little Annie Davies had been granted a vision of the highest female divinity.

High Knoll was a feminine place! A goddess site!

Was …

Amy Jenkins, whose name was over the door of the Ram’s Head, was very neat, very dark and very Valleys — Cindy could tell by the little black Juliette Greco dress and all the gold bangles and necklaces. So he shook out his own bangles and stripped down to his glittery high-necked top, and it was as if they’d known each other years.

‘Quaker’s Yard, I am, born and bred,’ Amy said.

‘Abercynon,’ Cindy lied.

‘Never! Don’t know Dusty Morgan, do you? He haven’t lived there, mind, for thirty years, poor old Dusty. Tegwyn Bogart? Well, that wasn’t his real name, but he could curl his lip brilliant, Tegwyn could …’

And it went on like this, in the not-very-busy saloon bar of the Tup, as it was known, Cindy having played enough of the South Wales clubs to busk it. Needing this … needing to be frivolously female for an hour or so to clean out his system after the dark green, malodorous, male evil of the Knoll.

He learned that Amy Jenkins had been in St Mary’s less than two years, after half a lifetime in the licensing trade around Merthyr and nearly half a lifetime being married to someone called That Bastard . Always wanted a little country pub, she had, and she was going to turn this place into something more like it, soon as her Settlement came through.

Cindy adjusted scatter-cushions on the old oak settle, feeling a little calmer after a couple of rum and peps.

‘Come across Marcus Bacton, have you?’

‘Marcus?’ said Amy. ‘You know Marcus?’

‘Friend of a friend,’ said Cindy. ‘Said I’d look him up, see. Only I didn’t like to just walk in, things being as they are. The bereavement.’

‘ Terrible !’ Amy shook her head, vigorously polishing a pint glass. ‘A wonderful lady, Mrs Willis. Wonderful . ‘ She leaned over the bar, whispered loud enough to be heard in the street. ‘Had the gift . ‘

‘Clairvoyance?’ Cindy said innocently.

‘Healing. Two years ago, had a rash, I did. On my back. Too much sunbathing, see — well, you never think that’s going to happen, do you? Doctors gave me up for Cheltenham, so I went to see Mrs Willis — because you hear things, running a pub. She says, I’ll promise nothing, Mrs Jenkins. Well!’

‘Cured?’

‘Not a speck.’

‘Remarkable,’ said Cindy. ‘And she was his housekeeper?’

‘Well … you know.’ Amy did the big whisper again. ‘There was something strange there. Some folk said she was his mother. Well, no family resemblance at all, from where I stood, but she obviously meant something to Marcus. More than a housekeeper. More than that.’

Cindy, having been aware for a minute or so of being listened to, half turned on his barstool and saw a pretty, blonde girl sitting alone in the very corner of the bar, her head bent over a book. But she wasn’t reading; she was listening to every word they said.

Amy was talking about Marcus Bacton’s feud with the famous archaeologist, Professor Falconer. ‘Wouldn’t kick him out of my trench, but him and Marcus … daggers drawn … worse, it is, since Falconer bought some more land, and now he owns the ancient monument up on Black Knoll.’

‘He’s bought the Knoll ?’

‘And he didn’t want Marcus keep messing about up there, so he fenced it off, see. And then Mrs Willis, poor old thing … Pint of Tankard, is it, Colin?’

Cindy noticed the book the blonde girl was reading. It was a new copy of Lines on the Landscape by Devereux and Pennick. Well, well, what was this? He looked pointedly at the girl. ‘Good book, is it?’

She looked up from her book. She looked momentarily scared. Big eyes.

‘Ley lines?’ Cindy said. ‘You believe in all that? Come to the right place, you have. Old Alfred Watkins of Hereford, he used to walk these hills, spotting how the stones aligned with the mounds and the old churches.’

‘I, uh, I only just started it.’ An American accent. ‘I bought it on the way here. I don’t know much about ley lines and stuff. We, uh, we don’t have them in New York.’

‘As far as you know,’ Cindy said mysteriously. ‘As far as you know.’

‘Well, uh, we have like straight roads. But I guess straight roads don’t qualify by virtue of just being, uh, straight.’

‘Well.’ Cindy put on his famous twinkle. ‘There are, I hear, many strange energies in New York. Who knows how many new leys might have been created?’

‘You think that’s possible?’

‘Anything,’ said Cindy, ‘is possible. It’s a very strange world.’

‘Gee,’ the girl said. ‘Do all you people talk like this?’

Cindy laughed. ‘Sadly, very few of us talk like this. Can I buy you a drink? Cindy, my name. Cindy Mars-Lewis.’

‘Grayle. Underhill.’

‘Grail? How interesting. As in …?’

‘Kind of,’ she said.

You died. And you came back. And what the holy fuck are you doing about it?

Marcus’s outraged voice asked the question in Maiden’s head at least a couple of times a day.

I’m trying to forget about it, that’s what I’m doing, Marcus.

‘What did you say?’ Marcus threw a log on the stove.

‘Nothing.’

It seemed to Maiden that, unless he managed to push the experience right to the back of his mind, he was never going to have a normal life. There’d be no pressure to go back to work. Maybe he could crawl back to Elham General in a few days’ time and persuade some specialist that the brain damage was irreparable and would affect his equilibrium in some problematic fashion demanding early, early retirement. And making him, to the satisfaction of Riggs, a very unreliable witness. Would Riggs feel safe, then? Would Maiden feel safe?