Phil Rickman - The Cold Calling

Maiden drank some whisky, his first since the last night of his old life.

‘Used to do something similar with highwaymen,’ Marcus said. ‘Gibbets by the roadside. Nothing so romantic on the Welsh border. These were sheep-thieves. Or domestic murderers. Chap comes home drunk, clobbers his wife with a bottle. Seedy stuff. That’s what makes it worse, really — shows a contempt for the site.’

‘So what did they do?’

‘You all right, Maiden?’

‘Just … carry on. Go on.’

‘There’s a fairly honourable tradition — a prehistoric tradition — known as excarnation. Laying out of corpses on some hillside to free the spirit to the natural elements. This was different, obviously. You cold, Maiden? You’re shivering.’

Marcus gathered up a log, opened the door of the wood-stove. Orange splinters flew up when he tossed in the new log. Maiden didn’t feel any warmer.

‘They laid the body of the executed criminal on its back on the capstone. For the crows and buzzards to pick clean. The foxes to plunder the bones.’

‘When was this?’

‘I don’t know when it started. It went on, amazingly, until early in the nineteenth century. This was a harsh place, Maiden.’

Maiden drained his glass, reached for the bottle, but Marcus took it.

‘That’s what Black Knoll recalls. I hated it. That’s why they all rejected Annie’s vision. Because it was a place of the rotting dead.’

‘Marcus-’

‘But she purified it, Maiden. What happened to her restored the sacredness. The locals had been desecrating it for centuries. It was a bad place, a diseased place, somewhere you didn’t go, that parents warned their children about. And this child … she restored this ancient site to what it was intended to be. A place of light.’

‘Marcus, don’t make too much of this, but I think I dreamt about it.’

‘What?’ Marcus shook back his heavy, grey hair, pushed his glasses into place. ‘When?’

‘Hospital. I thought I was waking up, but it was another dream. It was like an open tomb. I was the corpse. Decaying. I had no eyes. I could feel the birds plucking … Oh, shit, Marcus, I don’t-’

Marcus took Maiden’s glass and poured him more whisky.

Around midnight, the bulb in the bedside lamp began to sing. Close to one a.m., it blew, leaving Cindy to sit in the darkness, in his dressing gown, and ponder the vexed question of whether or not he was, as Kelvyn Kite had often stated, simply a stupid old tart.

The American girl had made an excuse and fled fairly rapidly after discovering that the person to whom she had unburdened herself was not only old enough to be her mother but also old enough to be her father, as it were.

He hadn’t meant to startle her; he wanted to help her. What if her poor sister had been … No! Don’t even think of it!

What if? All those what ifs ?

What if the good and patient Chief Inspector Peter Hatch had been right all along, and there were simply several common or garden, sad, uncomplicated killers out there, rather than one person harbouring a warped and lethal obsession with earth-magic?

What if his own exercise in pendulum dowsing over the maps and the journals had been as spurious as the ‘shamanic powers’ of which he was so pathetically proud?

What if tonight’s paranormal ‘experience’ at the High Knoll burial chamber was no more than a perverse and futile combination of paranoia and wishful thinking?

What if Sydney Mars-Lewis was no more than an old humbug of the most ludicrous kind, trying to make something significant out of his sexual ambivalence and social inadequacy, unable to face up to his reduced status as a failed actor relegated to the end of the pier with a stuffed bird?

Well, these were hardly new questions. Indeed, one night, in a dressing room in Scarborough, about seven years ago, he had almost given way to an impulse to hang himself by his dressing-gown cord from an overhead heating pipe.

Wearily, he climbed out of bed and switched on the central light, which was half smothered by grimy beams.

‘An old manic-depressive, you are, boy. That’s the only certainty.’

From his suitcase, he took the fax he’d received, just before leaving the caravan, from Gareth Milburn at Crucible , the pagan magazine. He’d asked the boy for information about the readers’ letters he didn’t print. (Modern pagans, ever anxious to promote a positive image of their faith as a pure and caring nature-religion, would almost invariably reject the propaganda received from the darker practitioners.)

Gareth’s fax said: We get fairly regular letters from something called the Black Temple of Set, with a Milton Keynes postmark, accusing us of being wimps who are scared to discover where the ‘real power’ lies. There’s a crank who just calls himself the Green Man — postmarks from all over the country, so it could actually be a bunch of people — who reckons the Pagan Federation lost its way when it turned its back on blood sacrifice, and claims blood sports are a vital part of our heritage. There’s also — this is really sick — a woman with an Omen fixation offering to have babies for use in satanic rites at very competitive rates. If I can find any on the spike, I’ll fax them .

The Green Man was the one which lingered. There must be a dozen black temples of Set; their adherents also attended heavy metal concerts. The Green Man’s enthusiasm for blood sports — unfashionable, reactionary and anathema to modern pagans — would certainly provide a motive for the ritual killing of Maria Capaldi.

And motive, Cindy thought, was important here. These were not entirely psychotic killings; behind them was a belief structure, however warped. Gareth’s theory that the Green Man might be a group of people was interesting. This would account for the different methods of slaughter.

The Green Man seemed promising from the start. And that was the problem: the Green Man had been in Cindy’s thoughts from the moment he left home to drive across Wales to the Black Mountains. The image of the archetypal gargoyle, with foliage foaming from his mouth and nose and sap in his veins, had nested in Cindy’s mind.

Which would explain, for sure, the dark and frightening image he had seen on the periphery of his vision at the height of his shamanic ritual at the Knoll. He had conjured in his head the smoky form. A thought-form, nothing more. A message from himself to himself. Utterly terrifying, but completely unreliable.

There came a tapping at the door. Cindy jumped in alarm and dropped the fax paper.

‘Who is it?’ Shocked at the elderly quaver in his shrunken voice.

‘Cindy?’ An even smaller voice. ‘It’s me. Grayle. I saw the light under your door. Tell me to go away if this is inconvenient.’

Cindy smiled in relief and went to open the door. ‘No, my love. An old insomniac, I am.’

The American girl stood there in jeans and an overlong sweatshirt. With her hair loose, she looked all of nineteen and somewhat waif-like. A mistake, it was, to assume that all Americans were brimming with self-confidence.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘All that shaman stuff, and then finding out you were a guy and all, it kind of … fazed me out.’

‘No, me, it is, who should be sorry. Just an old misfit, I am, really. But I do have a kettle. Would you care for a cup of tea?’

Grayle found a grin from somewhere. Also, a small sheaf of folded airmail paper.

‘I thought about what you said about dreams and ancient sites turning people crazy. This, uh, this is the rest of the letter from my sister. The part I don’t show people.’

Maiden awoke not breathing.

His mouth was full of solid, gritty darkness. When he tried to breathe, the air couldn’t get through; his throat was also tight-packed and bulging and when he tried to cough he just took more of it into his lungs, and there was a meagre wheezing sound.