Phil Rickman - The Cold Calling

‘Right,’ Maiden said. ‘The bent-copper nonsense.’

Some contract-psycho. Maybe the same inept out-of-town hardmen he and Vic encounted in the flat. In which case they’d better be well out of town when the news got back to Tony Parker. One way or another, they were going down, all the way down. There’d be another bloodbath.

And Riggs?

The trail of blood would make a big circle all around Mr Riggs, and he’d stand there in the centre, perfectly still and perfectly dry. As ever.

Into the circle of light came the bird of prey.

‘Bloody hell,’ Marcus said.

‘Been consulting my guides, I have.’ It hung over Maiden, wings spread wide.

‘Dear God,’ Marcus said cynically.

It was a full-length cloak made of some rough material like sacking with rows of feathers sprouting out of it.

Cindy also carried a drum. And a large bird made of some black and red fabric, with a curved beak and big, globular, spiteful eyes.

‘Off-the-peg shamanic-wear,’ Marcus explained to Maiden, with heavy ennui. ‘The feathers are especially meaningful for Lewis. Kite’s his totem-creature. Once wrote a piece for The Phenomenologist about spending three days and nights fasting in the Cambrian mountains, and on the last night, the great red kite flew down in a dream. The red kite, at the time, being almost extinct in Britain and more or less confined to that particular part of mid-Wales.’

‘What a memory you have, Marcus.’

‘Kelvyn Kite.’ Maiden awakening to an old, fogged memory. ‘That’s Kelvyn Kite.’

Marcus looked up, but the bird said nothing.

‘Kelvyn Kite. This big talking hawk. On telly when I was a kid.’

‘You must be older than you look, Bobby,’ Cindy said, sitting down, arranging the cloak.

A single, hollow drumbeat.

‘This place is a special place. The lights down there are the little lights of England. The darkness behind us is the darkness of Wales. Above us, heaven. Below us, Earth. Duality. The Black Mountains: a sacred frontier.’

Cindy paused.

‘Four leys cross here. From stone to tumulus to holy hill and ancient church. Lines of spirit. Soul-paths.’

Maiden saw that Cindy was holding the flat drum between his knees. Looked so much bigger in the cloak of feathers and yet less substantial. Shimmering in the unsteady light. But then, nothing seemed entirely solid seen through a single eye blurred with tears, drugs, fatigue.

‘And, behind me, the stones themselves, set to the midsummer sunrise. Stones of light.’

On the drum, Cindy’s hands had found a slow rhythm, regular as a hall clock ticking, and Maiden became aware of his heart beating, in time to the drum.

‘And stones of darkness. Because, when times grew harsh and the land itself darkened into war and strife, the religion of the Celtic priesthood, the Druids, degenerated into blood ritual, animal sacrifice, human sacrifice. And the shaman no longer waited in the chamber for the blessing of the sunrise but stood, with sickle raised, under the full moon, and blood gushed over the capstone and trickled in rivulets down the fissures in the stone and so to the earth.’

Maiden flinched. The drumbeats speeded up; he thought of the thrumming of blood through veins. Oh, Em, oh God, I’m sorry, I’m sorry you ever had to know me .

‘And so the Knoll became a place of fear and death.’ Cindy’s voice matching the rise-and-fall rhythm, acquiring the timbre of a chapel preacher. ‘High Knoll, in effect, became Black Knoll.’

Bang on the drum.

‘ High Knoll.’

Bang.

‘ Black Knoll.’

Bang.

‘Du-al-it-y!’

Bang-bang-bang.

‘Think on it, children. Think on it, as we call upon the guardian of this site to yield to us the images lodged in the soul of our friend Bobby. Ready, are we, Bobby?’

‘What’s going to happen?’ Token question; he didn’t give a shit.

‘We take you back,’ Cindy said. ‘To the minutes of your death.’

‘And you leave me there. No need to bring me out of it.’

We’re mad, Marcus thought, still amazed at himself for going along with this bollocks. Mad .

Standing here like relatives around a bloody deathbed.

Insane. Or will be by morning.

Supposed it was the remains of the bloody teacher in him, but he liked a certain level of order . Liked his anarchy to be structured . Which was what The Phenomenologist was supposed to be all about: bunch of tweedy old academics and retired surgeons and vicars and bank managers whose hero was the immortal Charles Fort, collector of yarns about black rain and toads that fell from the sky. All right, it’d been taken over by the biddies now but it was still respectable people … breaking out of their social strait-jackets, daring to consider the absurd.

To consider . Not to be bloody part of it, for Christ’s sake!

Maiden lay on the foam-rubber mattress from Marcus’s backpack. The capstone, a little above chest height to Marcus, was on a slight incline, so that Maiden’s head was higher than his feet. There was a small cushion under his head and they covered him with a travelling rug.

‘All right there, lovely?’

‘Fine,’ he said dully. Poor bugger was half out of it. Staked out on the tomb like an offering — Lewis blatantly exposing him to the dark side of the Knoll. Maiden too low, too beaten down, to care. And was he a killer? Was he lying to them, to himself? Was he a killer?

And where the hell was this nonsense going to get them? Falconer’s dreaming experiment was designed to find out if human consciousness was affected in any quantifiable fashion by the location and composition of ancient sacred monuments. Whereas Lewis seemed to think Maiden’s dreams could solve everything. Lewis ought to take over the damned magazine. Get on well with the biddies.

The first candle had burned three-quarters down and Cindy the bloody Shaman, in his ritual cloak, blew it out and Marcus heard him ramming another one down the lantern.

‘We’ll watch him in ninety-minute shifts, all right? You know what you are doing, Marcus?’

‘Every few minutes, I check his eyes for REM.’

‘And then you give him a few minutes more — no more than three, because the action in a dream happens very quickly.’

‘Then I wake him up, poor sod.’

‘Very gently. You want him talking about the dream almost before he is out of it. He may fall asleep again and awake with no memory of having spoken to you. We have to be able to play his dream back to him, make him face up to it. How is the recorder?’

‘You have to shake it, hope the bloody light comes on. Haven’t used it in years.’

‘Hardly needs to be broadcast quality, Marcus. Switch on just before you wake him. Can you hear me, Bobby? Very tired, you are, yes? Now, I want you to empty your mind. I don’t want you lying there thinking about what happened tonight. Just make yourself quiet inside. Watch the sky.’

Lewis lit the new candle.

Another two hours, it would be dawn. The miraculous dawn at High Knoll. Marcus was freezing, wished he had a bloody cloak of feathers. During Lewis’s shift, he’d managed to doze intermittently, for about two minutes at a time, before the cold razored through his duffel coat.

He realized Malcolm had moved away, leaving another large cold patch. Aware of the dog standing a few yards away, growling uncertainly, and the voice of Cindy the bloody Shaman.

‘Perhaps you could assist me, Marcus?’

Opening his eyes fully to see Lewis leaning over the stone like some Victorian granite angel over a grave.