Phil Rickman - The Cold Calling

He said nothing. His lips felt dry and cracked. He was cold and without sensation. He thought he’d never felt as much hatred and contempt for anybody as he did for himself tonight.

‘You want to sleep?’

‘ No! I mean … no. No, I don’t want to sleep.’

‘It’s just, when I talked to your friend the Sister, she said head damage, you need a lot of extra sleep to get over it.’

‘What else did she tell you?’

‘Not much. It’s a patient-nurse thing, I expect. How about I make some tea?’

‘Don’t go.’

He held her hard against the full length of his body. His body — but, tragically, not all of it — had gone rigid at the thought of what would happen if sleep swallowed him.

‘All right. I won’t.’ She sounded just a little scared. ‘I won’t go.’

‘Oh God, Em, I …’

‘What?’

He rolled onto her. Inside what was left of his head, buried between her breasts, he begged for help. Silently screaming into the cold void.

‘What were you going to say?’

‘Nothing, really.’

‘Say it.’

‘It’s very much the wrong time.’

‘No, it’s the right time. There’ll never be a better time. Please, Bobby. I’m thirty-three, I’m getting too cynical. Say it to me.’

He closed his eyes on her, and something altered.

Something altered. He imagined her body damp and cold under him like clay, her arms around him knobbly like roots, her breath turned brackish.

And that — oh no, oh, please, no — was when he became suddenly and sickeningly erect.

She said, not moving at all, as if she hadn’t noticed, ‘I love you, Bobby.’

‘No!’

Almost exploding with self-hatred, he rolled out of bed and crawled away, in his shame.

‘What are you trying to say? What are you walking all around on tippy toes trying, God damn it, to say?’

‘We don’t know what we are trying to say,’ Cindy said. ‘We are both of us in the dark. And, when it comes down to any form of remedial action, I am afraid, powerless.’

Grayle said, ‘You’re trying to say my sister is dead.’

‘Of course not,’ Marcus said gruffly.

‘Or maybe she’s insane, right?’ Grayle shrilled. ‘She got taken over by the goddamned Dark Forces of the Stones.’

‘Now see what you’ve bloody done,’ Marcus said to Cindy.

‘See, maybe …’ Grayle standing at the door, waving her arms. ‘… maybe the Ancient Evil of the Stones possesses everyone who sleeps there, right? And they’re cursed for ever, and when they die their spirits hover around the stones and roam the dark hills and it’s all … it’s all Stephen King. Oh, you guys, you sure don’t help a person just had their first psychic experience. Do I need this? Do I need an evening with the goddamned Brothers Grimm?’

She started to cry.

‘I’ll drive you back to the pub,’ Cindy said.

‘Thanks,’ Grayle snuffled.

In the grounds, there was a wooden bench by a stone well-head, capped now, so that you couldn’t see down below a couple of feet. Bobby Maiden sat on the bench beside the well, his leaden head in his damp hands.Bare-chested, barefoot. All he’d grabbed were his jeans.

He lifted his head, looked up with his uncovered eye at the shambling facade of Collen Hall. Mostly dark now, except for a small peachy light, a bedside table light, in a first-floor mullioned window.

Room five.

As he watched, the light went out.

‘No.’

So tell her. Go back and tell her .

Tell her? About the dreams of death? The body, your own body, rotting around you? Tell her about the fear of sleep?

Tell her everything. Tell her what she’d be taking on .

Yes.

Inside the clanky old car, Grayle apologized.

‘Good heavens, child,’ Cindy said, ‘I think you were rather restrained under the circumstances.’

‘All too much. All at once. Plus, with all our preconceptions of England, everybody staid and reserved and bowler hats and stuff.’

‘Underneath it all, my love, we are a horribly weird nation.’

The old car chugged under the castle walls. ‘But I’m gonna find her.’ Grayle tried to settle in the torn and lumpy, sit-up-and-beg passenger seat. ‘I mean it. I won’t leave until I find her.’

‘Leave St Mary’s?’

‘This country. She’s somewhere in this country. See, I’m going to this wedding tomorrow, there’ll be people there who know her. Maybe even … Jesus, maybe she’ll be there. It’s possible.’

‘You are a determined girl.’

‘Don’t patronize me … Shit, I’m sorry, there I go again …’

‘No, I am sorry. You must think we’re all batty. Me, with my shamanic fantasies, my obsessions. Getting old is what it is, Grayle. Getting old and getting nowhere. An old queen in search of a stable throne.’

‘And me? With my ghost fantasy?’

‘Fantasy now, is it?’

‘I couldn’t begin to say. Is it all in the mind? The brain pulling some scam?’

‘Is that what you feel?’

‘No. I feel … I feel it really happened.’

‘In that case, it really happened. You were a witness to the failure of the spirit of Annie Davies to return to the level from which she might go on. It’s quite true what they say. A traumatic death … an unfinishing … a snatching away. Causes a blip. The term “earthbound” …’

‘She … she’s out there …?’

‘She is out there.’

‘That’s scary. And real sad.’

‘Terribly sad, Grayle.’ Cindy pulled in under the sign of the Ram’s Head. ‘Get a good night’s sleep. Enjoy your wedding, regardless. And afterwards … perhaps don’t come back. Marcus will look out for Ersula. Leave your telephone number and your address with Amy. We’ll keep you fully informed. Get on with your life.’

Grayle put a foot out to the kerbside. ‘Aren’t you coming in?’

‘I’m going back. I need to talk to Marcus while Bobby’s out. Some things I haven’t been told. This is no night for secrets.’

‘Just in time, sir.’ The night porter’s keys swinging from a thumb. ‘About to lock up, I was.’

‘Sorry,’ Maiden said. ‘Left something in the car.’

‘Should keep them in your wallet, sir.’ The night porter eyed his bare feet, gravel between the toes, and winked.

‘Right.’ Maiden shuffled a smile.

‘Very good, sir. Good night.’

‘Good night.’

Bobby Maiden set off up the stairs. The thought of warm, firm Em in the bed set off the old stirring, but that was how it had been before. It meant nothing.

All the artificial candle-lanterns had been switched off, except for one at the top of the stairs. Into his thoughts fluttered the image of a woman standing under it, like the woman standing under the streetlamp. Before he died.

He shook his head.

Opened the fire door to the first landing. Perhaps she’d locked him out. Liz, now, Liz, his wife, would have locked the door, attached the security chain and thrown all his clothes out of the window, everything except possibly the car keys.

Stood for a moment outside the door of room five, the honeymoon suite. The light was out. Ran fingers down the jamb; the door was half an inch ajar and a wave of something broke over him and it was something more than gratitude, and he knew that Emma Curtis wasn’t going to be asleep. Felt her grin through the darkness. Life gets complicated, don’t it?

Maiden padded into the room.

You didn’t give in. You didn’t ever bloody well give in. You came back. Whatever you left behind, you had to get that back too. You didn’t let the grave win. You turned a deaf ear to the cold calling. In the end, love wins.