Phil Rickman - The Cold Calling

Please, Malcolm. Under the table, you cross-eyed bloody idiot, stay quiet until he arrives outside the kitchen door and then he’ll know you’ve been shut in and he’ll simply turn away .

Unless he thinks there’s someone in there with you .

God .

Fifth step.

Two and a half years he’d had Malcolm. Ugliest pup the RSPCA kennels ever took in. Poor old Malcolm.

Six. Bez stopped, listening. He’d see there was a curve ahead; he’d have his gun out in front of him. Marcus backed up the broken wall where the branches of the sycamore tree overhung. Sat on the top of the wall, leaning back into the branches which dipped under his weight. He was breathing hard, his glasses half misted. Braced himself against the biggest branch, holding on to it with both hands. Both feet wedged against the great stone that looked, from the ground, like a single battlement.

The yard was about thirty feet below. Break his bloody neck quite easily if he fell. And he’d rather fall than be shot by a moron.

And so Bez arrived on the seventh step and saw Marcus cowering on the edge of the tower, half into the sycamore tree. He relaxed.

‘All right, pal,’ he said. ‘I’m looking for Maiden.’

‘Sonny,’ Marcus said, through gritted teeth. ‘Be bloody lucky if you can find a maiden over the age of twelve between here and Chepstow.’

Bez didn’t laugh. ‘Funny man, eh?’ Bringing the pistol into view. ‘This oil yer memory, Grandad?’

‘I’ve got an excellent memory, you cocky little bastard.’

‘Good. Yow gonna tell me where Maiden is?’

‘Don’t know what you mean.’

‘Then yow … are fucking dead.’ Bez brought up the pistol. ‘ Old man . ’

Marcus stared into the pistol’s small, black hole and pushed both feet into the battlement stone.

The gun didn’t even go off. It clattered down, from step to step, quicker than Bez as the stone toppled onto his chest and he clutched it to him with both arms as he fell backwards, half spinning. And when his head hit the stone lintel on the curve of the spiral, there was a very delicate, genteel little crack, like the sound of two crown green bowls meeting in the stillness of a summer evening.

Marcus stood on the top step for a moment with both hands over his face.

Then he heard Malcolm yelp and he snatched up his pitchfork and staggered down the steps. At the bottom, his eyes met Bez’s eyes and Bez looked astonished, both eyes wide open, his mouth too.

Bez was dead.

‘Oh lord,’ Marcus said, shocked into moderation. ‘Oh God . ‘

And then stumbled across the dark yard to the house, edging round the building to the rear door, the pitchfork out in front of him.

The light was on in the passage. Doors either side were flung open. In the Healing Room, bottles and jars had been swept from shelves; some were still rolling on the stone floor, and two clicked together, reminding Marcus of the appalling sound of Bez’s skull smashing.

His back to the wall, his pitchfork pointed upwards, he slid round the L in the passage. The kitchen door came into view. It was still closed. From the other side of the panels, the dog growled.

Marcus saw Gallow’s gloved hands around the sawn-off aimed at the kitchen door. As he edged round the bend, trying not to breathe, he saw the whole of bulging-eyed, shaven-headed Gallow, backed up, the shotgun at groin level, the way he must have seen Sylvester Stallone or some other movie oaf doing it. Gallow’s lips were pulled back over his clenched teeth.

‘Come and fucking get it, then!’ Gallow kicked the door.

Which remained shut. There wasn’t room in the passage for anyone to get in a decent kick. As Gallow’s foot came back again, Marcus hurled himself round the corner. ‘ Baaastard! ‘ Pitchfork out in front, aimed at the shotgun.

Gallow spun round and the pitchfork missed. When it connected with the wall at the end of the passage, both its corroded tines fell off.

Marcus stood there, holding a wooden shaft. Looking into a double gun barrel.

‘… the fuck are yow ?’

‘Might ask the same question,’ Marcus said gruffly. ‘My bloody house.’

‘Back up.’

Marcus stood his ground.

‘I said back up, y’ old fuck! ’

‘All right. All right.’

Gallow prodded him back along the passage to the open rear door.

‘Out. Slowly! Don’t turn round.’

As if he could. As if he could take his eyes from those two black holes.

Gallow bawled, ‘Bez!’

Marcus said nothing. Stepped out backwards into the yard. The only sound was Malcolm barking, way back in the kitchen.

‘Yow on your own?’

Marcus raised his eyes to the snarlingly familiar, horribly dangerous face of the Boy with Something to Prove. Gallow was perhaps a couple of years younger than the late Bez, blotches of acne still fighting the stubble on his chin.

‘I said … yow on your own?’

‘Not necessarily,’ Marcus said belligerently, and Gallow’s arms swung out, and several things happened almost simultaneously. With sickening force, the shotgun barrel smacked him in the jaw and left cheek. His glasses fell off. Something crunched into his left leg, just below the knee. He crumpled. The yard blurred up at him.

He couldn’t move.

‘Bez! Where the fuck …?’

He was kicked in the stomach.

‘Where’s my mate?’

He retched and tried to curl into a ball, but his knee wouldn’t bend. He heard the crunch of his glasses becoming powder under the heel of Gallow’s boot. He was wrenched up by the lapels, dragged a few inches in the dirt. Flung back, his head and shoulders meeting stone. The house wall.

He could make out Gallow’s shape against the light. Gallow with his legs splayed, his shaven head like a hard-boiled egg.

‘Yow move a fucking inch, I’ll smash yer eyes out. Got that?’

Couldn’t, if he’d wanted to. Marcus moaned over the sound of Gallow’s feet skidding away.

‘Bez? Don’t shit me, man. Bez!’ The shouts echoing between the house and the castle, fading off.

The world had turned into a dark expressionist painting, full of violent blotches. Marcus gave up trying to focus on it, and consciousness slipped away like an ebb tide on a long beach. Along the beach skipped Sally, following a big, coloured ball, laughing, the laughter echoing.

‘ Bez! ’

Marcus’s one coherent thought was that Maiden and Lewis couldn’t be far away. Maiden knew what these people were like. Only one of them left now, anyway. One man. And a gun.

Out of it again. Footsteps along the sand.

Sally?

Darkness. Then he couldn’t breathe. His nose flattened under a great, flat weight.

‘Dead.’

The weight lifted. He snorted some air.

‘Fucking dead . ‘

The boot came down on his mouth this time. Slowly enough for him to catch a brief, blurred, zigzag flash of rubber.

‘ He’s fucking dead! ‘

Smell of metal. Two endless, black, metal-smelling tunnels under his eyes.

‘And so are yow . ‘

There was a brief moment of total awareness.

An absolute knowledge of who he was, why he was here … why he was here on this Earth.

No pain, only this brilliant crystal clarification of the Big Mystery.

Marcus closed his eyes and never heard the big bang.

He saw two smiling girls running hand in hand across a golden hay meadow. One girl was in sepia, the other in bright, glowing colours.

The King Stone, nearly eight feet tall, was like a caged beast inside its iron, schoolyard-type railings. To Maiden — standing in an open field behind it, now — it seemed like a huge head and neck attached to feet or claws, half sunk into the worn grass, clutching at the ground, as if it was preparing to spring out of there.