Phil Rickman - The Cold Calling

Marcus spluttered something that even the good churchgoing folk of St Mary’s would discern as fucking hell .

‘I do recognize, Marcus — and Adrian certainly does — your vast knowledge of the unexplained, your passion for the paranormal. Your perhaps eccentric, rural mysticism. And so I’d like to talk … just talk … about the possibility … of your giving the odd lecture to our students at Cefn-y-bedd. Fee negotiable, of course.’

Marcus’s lips moved; no words passed between them.

‘All right,’ Falconer said. ‘I’m not going to push my luck. Just give it some thought.’ He opened a long hand towards the church door. ‘After you, chum …’

Under a very faint rain, Grayle picked up the track above what Adrian said was the helicopter shed, noticing how straight the path was, following a direct line into the shelf of low mountains.

She tried to see it as Ersula might have seen it: an ancient land, a portal to the past. Could this be a traditional English Old Straight Track connecting a string of prehistoric sites? To the Ersula she knew, that idea would be a turn-off. Ersula always maintained there was no evidence at all for the existence of ley lines. Ley lines were Grayle-stuff.

But all this was before the University of the Earth.

Grayle went on following the track to the end of the field. She found a stile there. Hesitated. Should she? The sky was a deep, shiny, all-over grey. She was wearing a light sweatshirt, jeans and sneakers. The blond clumps shoved into a baseball cap, the Eye of Horus earrings in her pocket.

She’d conceived this stupid, New Age idea of sitting by the old stones, closing her eyes and willing Ersula to come through to her. Ersula looking cross. You asshole, Grayle, this is the last time I do this, right?

Grayle forced a grin, climbed over the stile.

The church was even smaller than it looked from the outside. Mellow stone, quite cosy. And easily filled. But even so …

Packed, it was. More than packed. People were standing in the aisles, in the porch, some still outside, perhaps, in the rain. Stoical locals in their well-worn funeral-wear.

For an outsider? A woman who had been merely employed here, and for quite a short time? All right, a healer. But she hadn’t healed them all, had she?

Mrs Willis lay in her coffin on a wooden-framed bier pointed at the altar rails.

This was no outsider.

Cindy sat with Marcus on a front-row pew under dusty red and blue rays from a stained glass window showing Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane. It was all quite extraordinarily obvious.

Little Annie Davies, this was.

And they knew. They all knew .

But why had Marcus never said? For heaven’s sake, what was going on here? Cindy scanned the faces, and they told him nothing, absolutely nothing. A shadow of sorrow over some of them, but mostly it was the famous British funeral face, and it told you nothing.

Cindy stared at the coffin. Annie Davies, the unsung visionary of St Mary’s. Who had returned, most discreetly, to die. Who had quietly proved, by demonstrating the gift of healing, the validity of her experience. And who had surrendered her life-force at High Knoll, now a grim and tainted place again.

He felt a profound sadness now, an aching regret that he had not known Annie Davies while she was alive. The things she could have told him!

When the congregation rose for the first hymn, Cindy went into the Silence and, feeling suddenly quite inadequate for the occasion, called softly and tentatively, from the underside of his mind.

Annie .

Before they left for the church, he had found his way to what Marcus called the Healing Room and stood amidst the bottles and jars. In order to communicate with the spirit, the shaman must find the Sanctuary of the Essence. Why was it not here, among the remedies, in the room where Mrs Willis had healed and meditated upon her experiences?

Or indeed, despite the enormous congregation, here in the church? For there was no response from within the oaken casket or from the damp, steaming atmosphere in the little nave. As the congregation began to sing, the hymn underpinned by tuneless baritones and frilled by elderly, fractured sopranos, Cindy tried again.

Where are you?

A sudden, sharp breeze made the rain rattle on the stained glass.

Out there?

No audible, tangible, or in any way perceptible answer.

Why won’t you come in?

Cindy looked at Marcus, singing quietly and out of tune, Marcus whose public humiliation had been accomplished with consummate, professional skill, leaving him looking peevish and curmudgeonly and Falconer tolerant and generous.

The hymn ended; the congregation sat. Cindy spotted Falconer across the aisle, between two village ladies, Women’s Institute types, who kept glancing at him with undisguised awe.

What a vindictive man he must be. Here he was, with his wealth, his fame and his academic credibility, going to the trouble of attending a small, village funeral for, it would appear, the sole purpose of publicly crushing an elderly nobody who had dared to question his motives in a publication he’d probably never previously even heard of.

Ah, there was more to it. There had to be more to it.

‘It was a long life,’ the red-faced vicar said, his voice rising and falling as if he was still leading prayers, ‘and, in the most traditional sense, a good life. And although most of it was spent away from here, although most of us only knew Joan when she was already advanced in years, I’m sure I speak for the village when I say …’

And so went the eloquent but mindless eulogy to Mrs Willis. How popular she had been in the village. How she’d belonged to the WI, supported local charitable events, was caring towards the sick, always cheerful when you met her, had — quite remarkably — continued to work into her ninetieth year.

Ninety? She was as old as that?

Well, of course she would be.

And caring towards the sick? Surely, even if her true identity was not revealed, the man was going to mention the healing?

But the vicar’s high, fruity voice intoned not a word to suggest that Mrs Willis had been any more than an averagely dedicated parishioner. He expressed sympathy for her nieces, named, and for her employer, unnamed.

And suddenly Cindy saw the interior of the church as perhaps Bobby might have seen it: the rose-tinted wall hardening to a flinty grey and the members of the congregation rigid as stones. A conspiracy of silence.

The stained glass rattled with rain. In his phoney, bloated baritone, the vicar said, ‘And so, before we go into the churchyard for the interment … we will sing hymn number …’

A shuffling of hymn books. But Marcus Bacton was on his feet ahead of the rest of the congregation.

Oh no. ‘ Marcus! ‘ Cindy hissed.

Marcus’s shoulders were shaking with rage, his hands gripped the prayer-book shelf until his knuckles blanched, and when he spoke it was in a voice rather louder and certainly more resonant than the vicar’s.

‘You hypocritical fuck! ‘

Black Knoll.

Jesus .

An avenue of stones no more than two or three feet high on either side. An open passageway, curving towards the caved-in chamber.

There was a fine, discreet English rain which very politely soaked you to the skin inside a couple of minutes. I could shelter, Grayle thought. I could shelter under the big stone.

And then she thought, Are you kidding?

Standing, dismayed, at the entrance to what had once been a covered passageway, the whole thing once concealed inside an earthmound, but now bleakly exposed, like the abandoned skeleton of a whale.