Phil Rickman - The Cold Calling

‘Soil, it is,’ Cindy said. ‘Earth.’

Shaking out the last crumbs on Marcus’s desk.

‘I don’t get it,’ Bobby said.

‘This is what came out of you when you vomited on the Knoll.’

He rubbed his empurpled eye, as though he was only now waking up. Which perhaps he was. Awakening, perhaps, into a different world where there were different laws. More crimes in heaven and earth …

Cindy took a soil crystal and rubbed it to powder between finger and thumb. ‘I’m not going to spend hours trying to convince you, lovely. I saw this come from your mouth onto the stone. Marcus saw it too, but Marcus is in denial. There we are.’

‘OK,’ Bobby said slowly. ‘Say I believe it. How?’

‘It seemed to have been in your mouth, your throat. Whether it was ever in your lungs is debatable. But …’ Cindy wondered how to put this. ‘… it was certainly in your mind , Bobby, wasn’t it? Deep, deep down. Because this is grave dirt.’

Bobby’s hand at his throat.

‘Well, yes, all right,’ Cindy said. ‘Dirt is dirt. But for you …’ He leaned back in his chair, hands crossed on his lap. ‘… the grave. Powerful night, see. Powerful place, powerful energies. Some of which were your own. We channelled them. It was a great purging. You feel better?’

‘I feel kind of … white.’

‘There speaks the artist. You’re a blank canvas again. Stunning, isn’t it? Knocks you back?’

‘I don’t want to move. Just absorb. Small things. Textures.’

‘Good. It’s like when a blind man regains his sight, the colours are brighter. You’re seeing through to the levels you could always see, before your perceptions were severely filtered, courtesy of your subconscious. But perhaps those perceptions didn’t fully register before it happened, because you were so used to them. You could become a real artist now, boy. It may never happen again. Relish it.’

‘I can’t.’ Emotions fought each other briefly for control of Bobby’s face. He started to cry again. For as long as it lasted, there would be no inhibitions, no embarrassment, no social pressures.

‘Poor dab,’ Cindy said. ‘How long had you known each other?’

‘Not long. She was in … the car that knocked me down. Old man’s the vice king of Elham. Drugs, prostitution, that kind of thing.’

‘And she knocked you down, this girl. She caused your death?’

‘Indirectly.’

‘Then you are bound together on the wheel of fate,’ Cindy said.

Bobby smiled bitterly through his tears. ‘Mystic Meg, huh?’

‘Yes, an old Mystic Meg, I am. Mark my words. Now. Tell me what happened in the hotel. Why were you not there when she died?’

‘I had a problem.’

‘Kind of problem?’ Cindy said, more brutally than he’d intended.

‘Couldn’t get it up. We talked about it. She was very kind.’

‘Why couldn’t you?’

‘Nerves, maybe. I mean the nervous system. Nerves were damaged.’ He rubbed his eyes again. A moment of self-discovery. ‘I’m lying,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to say it. Not even to myself. Whenever I got close, she … There was a smell of corruption. Decay. Death. Dead people.’

He fell back on the sofa, expelled a great, long breath.

‘Thank you,’ Cindy said. ‘Thank you for that.’

‘It wasn’t from her, was it?’

‘No.’ Cindy bent to the desk and brushed the soil with his fingers back into the white envelope. ‘I don’t imagine it was.’

‘Andy … told me I was carrying my own corpse around.’

‘Yes.’ Cindy put down the envelope. ‘And the rest, Bobby.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Been listening to your dreams again, I have. On the tapes.’

‘Do I get to hear that stuff?’

‘Well, sadly, after you gave up your ghosts, as it were, to Marcus’s old cassette machine, it now seems to have given up its own. Packed in, Bobby. Not a squeak.’

‘I see. But you were there when it was recording.’

‘So were you.’

‘It’s a blank, Cindy.’

‘Ah.’

‘So, you going to tell me?’

‘Well, all a little confused, it is, Bobby. Awakened in the middle of a dream, few people give a fluid and coherent report.’

‘The substance of it?’

‘Well, it … it supports my feeling that you are close to him . You’re the man, Bobby.’

‘You still think-’

Cindy held up both hands. ‘There was a moment … a moment when I thought you were, yes. When I thought you might be him.’

‘Thanks.’

‘I still think you’re the man who can take me to his door. All the people who might have received that night … and it has to be you.’

‘Received?’

‘Oh, Bobby, if only you could see the world as I see it. Look … If the night is criss-crossed by radio waves, satellite transmissions, is it so hard to imagine other levels of communication, unseen media through which thoughts and feelings, passions, longing, curses … essences … are constantly travelling? Just because nobody invented it, it doesn’t mean it wasn’t there already.’

‘And?’

‘Part of him came into you. A policeman.’

‘What a lucky break,’ Maiden said distantly.

‘Wheel of Fate, Bobby. Wheel of Fate.’

‘I’m sorry, love.’ Amy Jenkins wasn’t looking too surprised at Grayle carrying her suitcase into the bar. ‘I never did hold out much hope. If your sister was still here, we’d have known. That’s a fact. A small place, this is. You can’t hide people.’

‘I guess not. Could I pay you now?’ Not too much daylight made it into this bar, but what there was was painful.

‘And what will you do now?’ Amy was wearing another little black dress with a tiny, frilly apron.

‘Play it day by day, I guess. See where the trail leads. I’m looking in on this wedding. In Oxfordshire. Friends of Ersula’s.’

‘Sometimes the strangest people turn up at weddings.’ Amy pushed Grayle’s bill between the beer pumps.

‘Or, maybe, you know, she already went home, ahead of me. Maybe I just wanted a holiday. An experience.’

An experience. The kind that was better looked back on, from across an ocean.

‘You look to me like you need a holiday,’ Amy said frankly.

Grayle looked away. ‘Where’s, uh, Cindy, this morning?’

‘You tell me, my love. Didn’t come back last night. Room hasn’t been slept in. An odd person, that Cindy, I feel.’

‘An enigma. Like the pyramids. Hey, come on, this can’t be right?’

‘Too much?’

‘Come on . In the hotel in Oxford, they charged-’

‘A horrible little room, you had,’ Amy said. ‘I’m trying to do the place up, bit by bit, see. I can hardly for shame to charge you at all.’

Grayle discreetly added another twenty pounds to what it said on the bill and put the money on the bar. In a strange way, she was finding it hard to leave. Probably, she was going to look back at yesterday as the most shockingly awesome day of her entire life. The day her mind blew. The day she learned there was more . The night she called up her own, warped version of Ersula and terrified herself into sleeplessness.

Basically, the kind of memories that would attach her for ever to St Mary’s.

‘Well,’ she said awkwardly to Amy, ‘I hope you, like, get it together. Maybe I’ll come check it out one day.’

‘You be careful,’ Amy said.

And somehow this wasn’t the same as You Take Care Now, which was just another way of saying Have A Nice Day. Jesus, it was just too easy in this place to get into the state of mind that made everything appear sinister. Grayle carried her case to the baby Rover, parked out in the village street.