The Cold Calling

XXIII

Amy Jenkins, whose name was over the door of the Ram’s Head, was very neat, very dark and very Valleys — Cindy could tell by the little black Juliette Greco dress and all the gold bangles and necklaces. So he shook out his own bangles and stripped down to his glittery high-necked top, and it was as if they’d known each other years.

‘Quaker’s Yard, I am, born and bred,’ Amy said.

‘Abercynon,’ Cindy lied.

‘Never! Don’t know Dusty Morgan, do you? He haven’t lived there, mind, for thirty years, poor old Dusty. Tegwyn Bogart? Well, that wasn’t his real name, but he could curl his lip brilliant, Tegwyn could …’

And it went on like this, in the not-very-busy saloon bar of the Tup, as it was known, Cindy having played enough of the South Wales clubs to busk it. Needing this … needing to be frivolously female for an hour or so to clean out his system after the dark green, malodorous, male evil of the Knoll.

He learned that Amy Jenkins had been in St Mary’s less than two years, after half a lifetime in the licensing trade around Merthyr and nearly half a lifetime being married to someone called That Bastard. Always wanted a little country pub, she had, and she was going to turn this place into something more like it, soon as her Settlement came through.

Cindy adjusted scatter-cushions on the old oak settle, feeling a little calmer after a couple of rum and peps.

‘Come across Marcus Bacton, have you?’

‘Marcus?’ said Amy. ‘You know Marcus?’

‘Friend of a friend,’ said Cindy. ‘Said I’d look him up, see. Only I didn’t like to just walk in, things being as they are. The bereavement.’

‘Terrible!’ Amy shook her head, vigorously polishing a pint glass. ‘A wonderful lady, Mrs Willis. Wonderful. ‘ She leaned over the bar, whispered loud enough to be heard in the street. ‘Had the gift. ‘

‘Clairvoyance?’ Cindy said innocently.

‘Healing. Two years ago, had a rash, I did. On my back. Too much sunbathing, see — well, you never think that’s going to happen, do you? Doctors gave me up for Cheltenham, so I went to see Mrs Willis — because you hear things, running a pub. She says, I’ll promise nothing, Mrs Jenkins. Well!’

‘Cured?’

‘Not a speck.’

‘Remarkable,’ said Cindy. ‘And she was his housekeeper?’

‘Well … you know.’ Amy did the big whisper again. ‘There was something strange there. Some folk said she was his mother. Well, no family resemblance at all, from where I stood, but she obviously meant something to Marcus. More than a housekeeper. More than that.’

Cindy, having been aware for a minute or so of being listened to, half turned on his barstool and saw a pretty, blonde girl sitting alone in the very corner of the bar, her head bent over a book. But she wasn’t reading; she was listening to every word they said.

Amy was talking about Marcus Bacton’s feud with the famous archaeologist, Professor Falconer. ‘Wouldn’t kick him out of my trench, but him and Marcus … daggers drawn … worse, it is, since Falconer bought some more land, and now he owns the ancient monument up on Black Knoll.’

‘He’s bought the Knoll?’

‘And he didn’t want Marcus keep messing about up there, so he fenced it off, see. And then Mrs Willis, poor old thing … Pint of Tankard, is it, Colin?’

Cindy noticed the book the blonde girl was reading. It was a new copy of Lines on the Landscape by Devereux and Pennick. Well, well, what was this? He looked pointedly at the girl. ‘Good book, is it?’

She looked up from her book. She looked momentarily scared. Big eyes.

‘Ley lines?’ Cindy said. ‘You believe in all that? Come to the right place, you have. Old Alfred Watkins of Hereford, he used to walk these hills, spotting how the stones aligned with the mounds and the old churches.’

‘I, uh, I only just started it.’ An American accent. ‘I bought it on the way here. I don’t know much about ley lines and stuff. We, uh, we don’t have them in New York.’

‘As far as you know,’ Cindy said mysteriously. ‘As far as you know.’

‘Well, uh, we have like straight roads. But I guess straight roads don’t qualify by virtue of just being, uh, straight.’

‘Well.’ Cindy put on his famous twinkle. ‘There are, I hear, many strange energies in New York. Who knows how many new leys might have been created?’

‘You think that’s possible?’

‘Anything,’ said Cindy, ‘is possible. It’s a very strange world.’

‘Gee,’ the girl said. ‘Do all you people talk like this?’

Cindy laughed. ‘Sadly, very few of us talk like this. Can I buy you a drink? Cindy, my name. Cindy Mars-Lewis.’

‘Grayle. Underhill.’

‘Grail? How interesting. As in …?’

‘Kind of,’ she said.

You died. And you came back. And what the holy fuck are you doing about it?

Marcus’s outraged voice asked the question in Maiden’s head at least a couple of times a day.

I’m trying to forget about it, that’s what I’m doing, Marcus.

‘What did you say?’ Marcus threw a log on the stove.

‘Nothing.’

It seemed to Maiden that, unless he managed to push the experience right to the back of his mind, he was never going to have a normal life. There’d be no pressure to go back to work. Maybe he could crawl back to Elham General in a few days’ time and persuade some specialist that the brain damage was irreparable and would affect his equilibrium in some problematic fashion demanding early, early retirement. And making him, to the satisfaction of Riggs, a very unreliable witness. Would Riggs feel safe, then? Would Maiden feel safe?

Safe to go to art college, finally? Did he even want to do that any more?

Marcus sat down with his whisky. ‘You’ll be there tomorrow, Maiden?’

‘Sure.’

‘Don’t have to, you know. If there’s a problem.’

‘I can’t avoid death for ever, can I? Besides, I was there when she …’

‘Yes.’ Marcus swallowed some whisky. ‘I’ve been thinking about that. Thinking back to when Mrs Willis was lying on the stone and you said, Take her down, get her down. Why did you say that?’

‘I don’t know.’

And the statement scared him because it was so completely true. There was an area of himself that he really didn’t know. It was like carrying around a locked briefcase to which you didn’t have the key, and you couldn’t put it down because there might be a bomb inside.

‘Perhaps something’s reaching you, Maiden. When Anderson brought you back from the dead, she was imagining on the Knoll at sunrise. That sets up a connection. Not only between her and you but between you and the Knoll. Now don’t look at me like that, you cynical bastard!’

Maiden shook his head. He wasn’t going for this.

‘Did you know that burial chamber is a serious misnomer?’ Marcus said. ‘They were really initiation chambers. Yes, all right, the remains of the dead — funerary urns and things — were put in there, but that was part of it. The trainee shaman or whoever would spend the night inside the chamber and then, when the light came through, directly through the slit at midsummer, they would literally be enlightened, their consciousness raised.’

‘Andy told me.’

‘Did she also tell you how similar that was to the near-death experience? Hmm? The shaft of light out of complete darkness? That’s what they see, isn’t it?’

‘Not me, Marcus.’

‘Quite. If you saw only darkness and you felt only cold, that would account for your reaction to the Knoll, wouldn’t it?’

‘Possibly. I’m not qualified-’

‘Not long before she died, the old girl told me she was seeing black lights up there.’

‘Can you have black lights?’

‘Like to talk in metaphors, your psychics. She was saying something’s gone wrong. Perhaps Falconer’s fucked it up with his bloody experiments. Perhaps the light that came into you from the Knoll was black light.’

‘Don’t do this to me, Marcus.’

‘I’m trying to help you, you ungrateful bastard. Have a drink, you look completely shot at.’

‘Do you know why it’s called Black Knoll?’

‘Local name for it.’

‘But why exactly?’

‘Some bollocks. It’s irrelevant.’

‘You going to tell me?’

‘Just have a drink,’ Marcus said.

‘Missing?’ this Cindy said. ‘What do you mean, missing?’

‘I mean she never came home. Or, if she did, she didn’t make contact. Either way, that’s missing, isn’t it? Like, she’s missing out of my life.’

It wasn’t alcohol making her talk; Grayle was drinking Coke, or something that passed for it. Just she was getting past the stage of keeping quiet about who she was and what she was doing here. How many woman tourists travelled alone anyway?

The strange old dame — dressed like out of Agatha Christie, only more glitter — took in everything she said. Spoke in this light, flippant voice with a bizarre up-and-down accent and yet struck Grayle as being kind of heavy underneath.

What did I walk into here? Did she find me or did I find her?

Grayle swallowed an ice cube from the bottom of her Coke. Told this Cindy all about the dreaming. After a while, they bought more drinks and took them to a table at the back of the bar, and Grayle pulled out the sheaf of airmail paper.

‘See, my sister, she’s intense and hard-nosed, not easily fooled. But the dream thing had become like a personal obsession.’

‘Yes,’ Cindy said after she read the letter, except for the pages Grayle always held back. ‘No matter how analytical you are, experiments with the subconscious can be rather like putting a needle into a vein. The subconscious demands more. Ancient-site-dreaming is dangerously addictive.’

Grayle looked into Cindy’s still, green eyes. ‘How do you know this?’

‘Ah.’ Cindy sighed. ‘Ten, fifteen years ago, before it was fashionable, I decided to spend a night on the fabled slopes of Cader Idris.’

‘Cader …? What is that?’

‘It’s a mountain in North Wales where there’s a legend that if you spend a whole night there you will wake up either a poet or mad.’

‘Sounds kind of like Greenwich Village.’

Cindy smiled. ‘Gave me the taste for it. I slept around. Once dreamed for seven nights, either side of the full moon, under one of the trilithons at Stonehenge — that was in the days when you were still allowed inside. Oh yes, positively promiscuous, I was.’

‘Wow,’ Grayle said faintly.

‘It does change you. Most of my dreams became lucid dreams — the ones where you know you’re dreaming. Where you seem to have an element of control.’

‘Sure. Dream control. I did a column on it.’

‘And, of course, that’s when it becomes risky. You think you’re in control, but in fact your subconscious mind is starting to influence your conscious mind to an alarming degree. You think you’re drawing inspiration from God, or the Earth Mother, the mind of Gaia, depending on your religious or your scientific persuasion.’

‘Like with acid trips.’

‘Indeed. And it can send you quite mad. I wasn’t happy about it, so I stopped doing it. A shaman must, above all, have discipline. Be able to count on precision.’

Cindy smiled regretfully. Grayle sat back in her chair, against the ancient, grimy panelling. Through the brown, smoky air, she examined the weird old broad, from the purple hair to the chiffon scarf to the tweed skirt and the black-stockinged legs.

‘Hold on just one moment,’ Grayle said. ‘You said shaman?’

‘The tribal shaman was the witch doctor, the priest, the counsellor, the psychiatrist, the one who interceded with the spirit world.’

‘Yeah, we have them. Collect Native American hand drums and feathers. Supervise sweat-lodges for overweight executives.’

‘We all have to make a living, Grayle. An actor, I am, by profession. Not a terribly successful one, but I’ve had my moments. Quite well known, I was at one time, on children’s television. Straight man to the more famous Kelvyn Kite. We never crossed the Atlantic, sadly. But, then, perhaps a four-foot-tall, talking bird of prey would have been a little esoteric for the American market.’

Holy Jesus, Grayle thought. Would somebody wake me up?

‘Always good with animals, I was,’ Cindy said wistfully. ‘Made Kelvyn myself, I did.’

‘So you … You’re a shaman, right? An English shaman.’

‘Celtic shaman, if you don’t mind. Our oral tradition goes back to Taliesin, the bard, in the sixth century. And, further, to the builders of the dolmens and the stone circles. As for me, I trained for three years, on and off, with Dilwyn Fychan, of Machynlleth, and other individuals too private to be mentioned. It was a calling. Some of us are called. Some of us are aware, from an early age, that we are … different.’

Cindy crossed his legs.

‘The shaman, traditionally, has a foot in two worlds. Flits about. Passes from one sphere of existence to another. A condition usually reflected in his personal life and mode of dress. Neither one thing nor the other.’

Cindy smiled. Grayle stared.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘You’re, uh … like, a guy, right?’

‘Prehistoric sites were often misused,’ Marcus said. ‘Still are — satanic rites and all that nonsense. But this was nothing like that. This was a social thing. Ultimate degradation for an executed criminal. Making an example.’

Maiden drank some whisky, his first since the last night of his old life.

‘Used to do something similar with highwaymen,’ Marcus said. ‘Gibbets by the roadside. Nothing so romantic on the Welsh border. These were sheep-thieves. Or domestic murderers. Chap comes home drunk, clobbers his wife with a bottle. Seedy stuff. That’s what makes it worse, really — shows a contempt for the site.’

‘So what did they do?’

‘You all right, Maiden?’

‘Just … carry on. Go on.’

‘There’s a fairly honourable tradition — a prehistoric tradition — known as excarnation. Laying out of corpses on some hillside to free the spirit to the natural elements. This was different, obviously. You cold, Maiden? You’re shivering.’

Marcus gathered up a log, opened the door of the wood-stove. Orange splinters flew up when he tossed in the new log. Maiden didn’t feel any warmer.

‘They laid the body of the executed criminal on its back on the capstone. For the crows and buzzards to pick clean. The foxes to plunder the bones.’

‘When was this?’

‘I don’t know when it started. It went on, amazingly, until early in the nineteenth century. This was a harsh place, Maiden.’

Maiden drained his glass, reached for the bottle, but Marcus took it.

‘That’s what Black Knoll recalls. I hated it. That’s why they all rejected Annie’s vision. Because it was a place of the rotting dead.’

‘Marcus-’

‘But she purified it, Maiden. What happened to her restored the sacredness. The locals had been desecrating it for centuries. It was a bad place, a diseased place, somewhere you didn’t go, that parents warned their children about. And this child … she restored this ancient site to what it was intended to be. A place of light.’

‘Marcus, don’t make too much of this, but I think I dreamt about it.’

‘What?’ Marcus shook back his heavy, grey hair, pushed his glasses into place. ‘When?’

‘Hospital. I thought I was waking up, but it was another dream. It was like an open tomb. I was the corpse. Decaying. I had no eyes. I could feel the birds plucking … Oh, shit, Marcus, I don’t-’

Marcus took Maiden’s glass and poured him more whisky.