Phil Rickman - The Cold Calling

Love wins. In the darkness, he kicked away his jeans.

A wafer of moonlight lit Em’s hair on the pillow as he slid between the posts and into the bed.

All right. This is a bed. It isn’t a tomb. The mattress is soft. The four posts are not stones. The carpet is not earth. The smell is in your head; ignore it. You can love her, you can do it.

He slipped a hand under the nightdress, around a breast. Slid it down over a thigh, where she was wet.

‘Em? Can I talk to you?’

She didn’t reply.

‘Em?’

Where she was too wet.

And cold.

He leapt out of bed and across the room and slapped on all the lights.

Smears on the switch as the lights came on.

And on his hands: dark wine-red.

On his chest, his arms. A trail of blotchy footprints from the bed to the switch.

The bed itself … like a waterbed which had burst.

Dark water.

The Morris Minor took a bend on what felt like two wheels, Cindy grinding the arthritic gearbox to get out onto the main road ahead of a container lorry.

Marcus closed his eyes. ‘Do you want to kill us both, Lewis?’

Cindy said. ‘Do you want to tell me the truth about our friend Bobby?’

As Cindy was coming through the door, the phone had rung and Marcus had said, ‘Maiden? Maiden, is that you?’ a couple of times, before shaking his head and handing over to Cindy. ‘Can’t make make out what the hell he’s saying.’ And Cindy had listened gravely, for a long time, to a man sounding like someone teetering on the very edge of the abyss.

Asked Bobby precisely where he was, which sounded from his garbled description like Glangrwynne, between Abergavenny and Crickhowell. There was a bridge there, over the river, and Cindy had very calmly told Bobby to wait there, by the pub, and they would come and pick him up.

‘All right,’ Marcus said, resigned, as they crossed the Welsh border. ‘Name’s Maiden. Police detective. Got knocked down by a car in Elham. Died in hospital. Dragged back into the picture by a friend of mine. Anderson. Nursing sister.’

‘Friend?’

‘And, ah, spiritual healer. Initiated, as it were, by Mrs Willis.’

‘Really?’

‘At the Knoll,’ Marcus said reluctantly. ‘Anderson says she used the holy light to raise the boy’s, ah, dormant spirit. They had one of those crash things going on Maiden’s chest. Anderson threw the light into him at the same time.’

‘Fusion of science and the Holy Spirit. Also the shamanic art of soul-retrieval, where the shaman takes a trip to-’

‘Yes, yes!’

‘Marcus, how experienced is she?’

‘She’s a nurse.’

‘I didn’t mean professionally. Could she have let something else in?’

‘I don’t know. How would I know that?’

‘See, what we have here is a young man left with a terrible fear of death and prey to images which leave him — and me — feeling extremely cold. Fair play to the boy, he’s only a copper, not going to give us a dissertation on site-specific negative atmosphere, is he? But he’s sensitive. He’s been telling us, pure and simple, what he feels. Been telling people ever since, I’d guess.’

‘First time I met him,’ Marcus said, ‘was at the Knoll. As Mrs Willis lay dying. Kept urging us to take her down from the stone. I asked him why. Said he didn’t know why.’

‘Well, of course he didn’t. Had a very negative death experience. Not wonderful for everyone, as you know. The nice ones are the only ones people like to talk about, feeling the others tend to reflect badly on what kind of life they must have led thus far.’

‘Hieronymus Bosch demons clinging to their toes. Examined it in The Phenomenologist , couple of years ago. Several biddies complained.’

‘No wonder he was in a state. He’d never been to the Knoll in his life before, but some part of him knew the place … intimately. And it was a place without happy memories.’

‘You could be right,’ Marcus said grudgingly. ‘Had a head injury. Perceptions dulled ever since.’

‘Plus, whatever he encountered during the minutes of his death was so traumatizing that he’s blocking it. His subconscious erected a barrier. Made even more dense, as you say, by the effects of the head injury … which is also filtering ordinary, everyday sensory input to his brain. His whole experience of life is diminished. Like looking down a telescope from the wrong end. He feels he’s in a murky dream. Desperate to wake up, he behaves … erratically.’

There was a short silence, apart from the choking noises emitted by the car.

‘Erratically?’ Marcus said warily.

Cindy sighed. ‘Perhaps our friend Grayle’s outburst was closer to the truth than she imagined. The virus in the stone seems to inflame dark emotions. I should tell you …’

‘Yes. Perhaps you could tell me why we’re picking them up.’

‘Not them . He’s alone. I wish I had known what he was doing. What he was proposing for tonight.’

‘Merely proposing to get his end away, far as I could see.’

‘Because the situation, I am afraid, is that Bobby seems to think he may have murdered the girl.’

In this dismal room in the Ram’s Head, even in the dark, Grayle was finding it hard to relax, drift off. Too much had happened. All of it scary. And the worst thing kept rearing.

Ersula dead.

She’d never let herself even contemplate it.

Outside the window, in a village out of time, the wooden pub sign creaked on its pole. Grayle rolled over on the mattress which was surely no more comfortable than the top of some frigging burial chamber.

You never like to think of yourself as a religious person — spiritual , maybe, sensitive , sure — but religion, in the end, is what it came down to: I’m religous; I need something to lean on. I come over here to lose Holy Grayle and who do I find but Holy fucking Grayle?

She realized she was lying here in the dark, mentally cutting up fragments of Ersula’s letter and fabricating that long conversation she’d been planning to have with her when they met up here in England. This made her feel even more lonely.

Believe it, Grayle .

I told you. I do believe it. I’m a half-ass, gullible, New Age goofball, I …

I mean, take it seriously, for the sake of all that’s holy …

Ersula throwing back the hood of her dark parka and putting her face right up to Grayle’s, her eyes burning with urgency.

‘Jesus!’

Grayle’s whole body lurched. She blinked in terror. The inn sign crashed back in a gust of nightwind.

… all that’s holy … Ersula’s voice echoing in the room.

Ersula, who didn’t believe in holy. Who didn’t believe in ghosts.

Who hadn’t written, in her letter, half of the stuff Grayle just heard her say.

Eyes stretched wide, Grayle gathered the sheets and the eiderdown around her and shivered herself into dream-sodden sleep.

They found him, as arranged, a few miles north of Abergavenny, where the road narrowed into a clutter of white and stone cottages and a pub that was closed. He came shambling up from the darkness of the riverbank, head bowed, unsteady, looking like a man who’d been dragged by muggers into some alleyway and had the stuffing kicked out of him.

‘All right.’ Cindy throwing open the passenger door. ‘Get in the back, Marcus. Bobby and I have to talk.’

Cindy plucked at a sleeve of Bobby’s jacket as he got in, then inspected his fingers.

‘Blood.’

Bobby did not respond; he sat silently, wrists crossed over his knees, as though they were already in handcuffs. He looked like a man who could imagine no future.