Phil Rickman - The Cold Calling

She wanted to cry.

This was it? She crossed an ocean for this? Like, she was supposed to believe the stark, ruined shell held some kind of key to the transformation of Ersula?

It was nothing. It had no grandeur at all. Maybe it was impressive at sunrise but now, on this damp, cooling October afternoon under low, spongy cloud, it was just… derelict… meaningless.

She strained to see the green and yellow in the grass, the pink in the soil and the little plants growing on the small stones of the passageway.

The Offa’s Dyke Path which more or less marks the boundary between England and Wales is close … I can sense a converging of separate energies .

Energies?

This place just sapped you.

Was that the path, that bare track behind the bushes? Was this the boundary? Between waking and dreaming, the known and the unknown, sanity and madness?

Scary fun, Grayle?

Was she missing something?

She tried to picture Ersula, in her sky-blue ski-jacket, making notes on a clipboard, lining up a picture with her Canon Sureshot — no sky on it, no flowers, no people; all Ersula’s pictures were for reference only — Oh, Grayle, what is the point of piling up pictures of people you see every day?

For when they’re not there, Ersula. When they’re not there any more.

A curtain of rain separated her from the big stones. She told herself, If I go through that fine curtain, she’ll be there. She’ll be waiting for me .

‘Aw come on! ‘ she howled aloud. ‘You’re fucking crazy!’

Crazy as Cindy the goddamned Celtic shaman. Crazy as Adrian Fraser-Hale with his cassette tapes of the number one Neolithic rap band. Like, what the hell are you doing here? You know where Ersula is? She’s back home with some guy, is where. You read stuff into her letters that was never there. You created a mystery because you’re still Holy Grayle and you’re never gonna change!

She sobbed. She looked at her watch. It was nearly three p.m. She would go back to the crappy hotel and she would call up her father and he would say, Sure she’s back in town, hell, your planes probably passed each other over the Atlantic. Hey, never mind, Grayle, at least it pushed you out of that cruddy little tabloid job .

She stared at the wet, grey stones and she sobbed again, and soon the air was full of sobs, heavy and soggy like the goddamned English clouds. She felt weak and walked through the curtain of rain to sit on one of the flat stones; she couldn’t get any wetter.

Which was when she realized they weren’t her sobs. That she wasn’t alone up here.

This figure was coming towards her off the stones, a figure in blue. ‘Ersula?’ she whispered, in spite of herself, although she knew it couldn’t be.

And yet she had to know. She tried to move forward but it was as if her sneakers were stuck in the red mud. ‘ Ersula! ‘ she screamed into the rain.

And then — ohmygod — the girl was running towards her, in a skimpy cotton dress with blue flowers on it. The girl had braided hair and she was running hard, although the distance between Grayle and the stones was no more than a couple of yards, so it was as though the girl was running on a treadmill and the stones were some kind of back-projection.

Which was not possible, and Grayle was disbelieving and confused and then scared, more scared than she’d ever been in her whole life, and she started to hyperventilate.

A vivid distress vibrating in the grey air. The girl was a blur of threshing, graceless child-limbs. Running hard at Grayle.

Yet not reaching her. Never quite reaching her, but always coming on in a bumpy, flashing pattern, like those picture books you flipped through quickly with your thumb and the picture moved, only sometimes you flipped several pages at once and the image jerked. Rushing in tears through the rain. In the rain; the girl was part of the rain, like a rainbow, but only dowdy colours: the faded blue flowers on the dress, the dry, mousy brown of the plaited hair. And she was flinging out her arms to Grayle, blown towards her, light as the husk of a dead flower, her face in flux, forming and reforming, each time a little closer until Grayle could see her sagging, flaccid lips and her eyes, white and wet and dead.

‘Oh God,’ Grayle whispered. ‘Oh … God . ‘

Nobody said a word; that was the odd thing. No murmurings, no rustlings, no echoes from the rafters. The village was letting him have his say.

‘Nothing’s changed, has it?’ Marcus stormed. ‘Nothing’s bloody changed in nearly eighty years!’

Cindy sat and watched him explode like a series of firecrackers. Powerless to stop it, not sure he ought to try. Falconer watched too, a tiny smile plucking at a corner of his wide, professional mouth.

Leaning out of the pew, Marcus was, a wave of grey hair banging against his forehead, glasses misted, so he couldn’t, probably, even see the vicar. Who was just standing there, lips set into a typically ecclesiastical, turning-the-other-cheek pout. He knew what this was about; they all knew; they’d probably inherited the silence from their parents and grandparents.

‘Are you all bloody dumb?’ Marcus whirled on the congregation. ‘Is it really possible to sit on something for the best part of a frigging century? You really are a bunch of medieval bastards. She’d have had a better bloody deal growing up in the fucking East End!’

His voice bounced back at him off the stones. Nobody spoke, but Cindy saw compassion on the face of Amy Jenkins, an outsider who was clearly in the know. He’d persuade the truth out of her later.

‘I did say,’ the vicar said in the nearest he could manage to an undertone, ‘that you might be better advised burying her elsewhere.’

‘Oh yes, that’s a classic Anglican tactic,’ Marcus roared. ‘If in doubt, don’t get involved.’

The undertakers moved imperturbably into position around the coffin on its wooden bier.

‘You’re a very offensive man,’ observed the vicar. ‘I can tolerate only so much of this in the House of God.’

‘Before what? ‘ Marcus lunged out of the pew as if he was about to grab the vicar by the surplice and bang his head on the side of his oak pulpit.

‘Marcus …’ Cindy murmured.

‘You just stay out of this, Lewis …’

‘Come on. Let’s get some air. You’re upsetting Mrs Willis.’

‘And that,’ said Marcus, ‘is the sort of bloody thing you would say.’

As they followed the coffin and the vicar out of the church, Cindy could almost hear a communal sigh of relief and a closing of frayed curtains over the St Mary’s Silence.

She was soaked, hair matted to her face, and when Bobby Maiden found her she was stumbling around the castle walls like someone coming down from a bad acid trip or maybe a mugging. Maybe even a rape.

‘God damn it,’ she said, ‘can’t anybody around here answer a simple question?’

‘Sorry,’ Maiden said. ‘You’re about a mile and a half out of St Mary’s.’

‘Am I anywhere near, uh, Cefn-y-bedd? I say that right?’

‘That’s the University of the Earth place?’

‘Uh huh.’ She snatched off her baseball cap and shook her hair like a dog. It was blond and it came down in a wet heap.

‘I don’t know,’ Maiden said. ‘I’ve never been.’

‘Terrific.’

‘You’re on a course there?’

‘Visiting. I took a walk over …’ She shuddered and it turned into a shiver that looked like it wasn’t going to stop. ‘See, I must’ve come down the wrong way. I saw the rooftop, figured this must be Cefn-y-bedd. And then … is this some kind of castle?’