The Cold Calling

XXVII

Cindy’s vague sense of unease about the funeral was reflected in the brittle smile of the vicar, who greeted Marcus with a perfunctory handshake.

Big and red-faced, the vicar was the country-parson type you rarely seemed to find any more; you imagined him drinking copious amounts of port, going off hunting with the nobs.

This vicar would like it here. A nice, discreet little church. Set back from the centre of the village on a small, grassy mound, possibly prehistoric, it had a strong, ancient resonance in its rusty pink stone, its squat tower glistening in the slow rain. You wouldn’t prise this vicar out of here; any guilty feeling that he really ought to be helping to rehabilitate drug addicts in Brixton would be very firmly sat on.

Marcus looked ill at ease in a creased grey suit and a floppy black bow tie. And Bobby …

Bobby was turned away from the mourners under their umbrellas. Bobby was gazing up at some sort of gargoyle set into the gable of the church porch. There was a sudden heaviness around him. He was very still.

A strange boy. Two things apparent: he was not the nephew of Marcus Bacton. And he was, or had been, connected with the police.

Cindy, who had replaced his red beret with a black one and wore a black suede jacket buttoned over the lambs on his jumper, wandered over and followed the boy’s gaze. At once, his unease became solid; breath piled into his chest so hard he choked.

‘Sorry.’ Pulling a handkerchief from his sleeve. Oh lord. Oh heavens. Chipped and pockmarked he might be, but there was no mistaking him. Old foliage-face himself.

‘What’s that, Cindy?’

‘A Green Man, Bobby. It’s a Green Man.’

‘Which is …’ His voice cracked. ‘… what?’

‘He isn’t anybody in particular. Simply the Green Man. A symbol often found on ancient churches. No-one knows what he signifies. Fertility, perhaps. Quite … quite terrifying, isn’t he? Why does he bother you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘But you’ve seen him before.’

He breathed out, didn’t reply.

‘In a dream, perhaps? In one of your dreams?’

He closed his eyes. He shook. His face was grey. He looked as if he might pass out. Several of the thirty or so mourners had noticed his discomfort. The locals. The ones with farmer-faces, red-veined and weathered.

The mourners began to filter into the church, a few likely relatives pausing to speak to Marcus, the locals avoiding him as you would a cranky old bull.

‘Go home, Bobby,’ Cindy said gently. ‘Not your day for a funeral. You’ll only upset people.’

Roger Falconer had apologized that he had a commitment this afternoon. Anxious, however, that Grayle’s article should be a true reflection of his work and his ideas, he’d invited her to dinner.

Grayle had thought uh-oh. Thanked him but pointed out she had some people to see tonight. Maybe some other time …

‘Wise decision, probably,’ Adrian said, seeing her out. ‘Bit of a ladies’ man, old Roger. I mean, not that … you know …’

Grayle smiled. Adrian was just about the most English person she’d ever met. He’d shown her round the centre, which essentially was confined to the outbuildings and Portakabins. She’d seen the Geiger counters and magnetometers they used to measure radiation and electro-magnetism in old stones, the infrared cameras and video equipment for capturing anomalous light effects and related phenomena.

‘I will admit,’ Adrian said, ‘that it’s become rather an obsession with me to show that our so-called primitive ancestors had an instinctive grasp of scientific principles our society is only just starting to reach. And to show that, compared with Neolithic people, we’re hardly alive any more. We’re just not in touch with our surroundings. Roger understands this very well, he just likes to play devil’s advocate.’

‘I’m just glad he agreed to speak to me without an appointment,’ Grayle said now.

‘That’s because he overheard your accent. He’s very keen on attracting Americans to the courses. They’re more open-minded and they often leave donations as well. Oh, gosh, I keep forgetting who I’m talking to … you won’t use this, will you?’

‘Adrian, most American tabloids aren’t at all like your British tabloids. I’m a, you know, a very straight person.’

‘Oh. Right. That’s all right then. Sorry to seem, you know …’

But he’d given her an opening and Grayle moved into it. ‘Though I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t kind of hoping for an American angle. When my paper called, they spoke to an Ersula … Underhill?’

‘Oh. Yes.’

‘I figured maybe we could nose off the piece on her, but, uh, Magda said she’d gone.’

‘Yes. She’s gone. Some weeks ago.’

‘Would you know where? Maybe I could catch up with her, talk about the stuff she did here.’

‘No, I’m sorry.’ Adrian shook his head. ‘I don’t know really where she’s gone. She left in rather a hurry. I think. We all assumed she’d gone back home to the States.’

‘Did she say she was going home? I mean, you know, I don’t want to cause any trouble. Like, if she was fired or something-’

Adrian looked shocked. ‘Oh, no. People don’t get sacked. Ersula was just a temporary person, anyway. She was studying the subject and so it was convenient for all of us.’

‘It’s just …’ Grayle figured she could go further with Adrian than she’d have dared to with Falconer, without arousing suspicions. ‘… just that Ersula Underhill was building quite a reputation in the States as an archaeologist and when our guy spoke to her on the phone, she seemed so blown away by what was happening here.’

‘Blown away?’ Adrian frowned. ‘I don’t really think she was that type. In our debates she tended to take Roger’s side.’

‘Right.’ Grayle took a deep breath. ‘Maybe it was Roger?’

‘Roger?’

‘That she was blown away with? He’s a … charismatic guy.’

‘Oh, now, look.’ Adrian’s shoulders went back; he looked stern. ‘It’s not going to be that sort of article, is it? When the People came, they were sort of sniffing around, you know, whether Roger was sleeping with his students, that sort of thing. Really not on.’

Grayle assured him again that she didn’t write that kind of stuff and swiftly spread some balm by telling him about the real nice people she’d met at the Rollright Stones.

‘Oh, they’re awfully good news,’ Adrian said earnestly. ‘Matthew and Janny are just the sort of people I’d like to see more of on the courses. Committed. Absolutely.’

‘Got to be committed if they’re even getting married in the stones.’

‘This weekend, in fact! Are you going? I am. I think it’s a really positive thing to do. All the times they’ve slept in that circle, committing their inner selves to the Earth. That’s what a wedding should be … a joining of a man and a woman with the Earth.’

And that was the moment — man … woman … Earth — when Grayle got the feeling. Like she’d swallowed a whole ice cube.

Adrian’s face shone with honest fervour. She thought, These guys have no real idea what they’re messing with. It’s like Cindy and his shamanic stuff; these stones are magnetic, all right, they attract airheads and fruitcakes like iron filings.

‘Well, thanks,’ she said. ‘You’ve been real helpful. Perhaps I will go.’

It’d be lovely if you could come, if you’re still around, Janny had said. We did invite Ersula, but…

‘To the wedding? Terrific!’ Adrian said. ‘We could go together.’

‘Yeah … well … maybe. Just one thing before I leave here …’

One last attempt to get close to whatever Ersula’s become.

‘Any way I can help …’ Adrian spread his arms. He looked simple and healthy, the least complicated of them.

‘Is there some kind of ancient site locally where I could maybe get a feel for the kind of thing you do?’

‘Oh. Nothing spectacular. Nothing like the Rollrights. There’s the Knoll, of course. Sort of collapsed cromlech. Shall I take you?’

‘No, please … I already took up too much of your time. Also, I’d kind of like to take in the atmosphere, make some notes. If you could just, like, point me in the right direction?’

‘Perhaps we could have dinner some time,’ Adrian said. ‘Just, you know, the two of us.’

Cindy heard Marcus hiss, at nobody in particular,

‘… fuck’s he doing here?’

A lean man with a greying ponytail peeled himself away from a tweedy clot of local-looking people in the churchyard and clapped Marcus on the arm. ‘Had to come, Marcus. Had to pay tribute to a remarkable lady.’

Cindy recognized Roger Falconer, respected television archaeologist and the educated, mature woman’s hunk. Even if he hadn’t known who it was, he would have realized that this was a TV personality. They had a way of projecting themselves from the crowd that was almost mystical; they made themselves shine.

‘You never even met her!’ Marcus clearly thrown off balance.

‘To my eternal regret I didn’t. But there are several people in this village who’ve testified to her remarkable abilities.’

‘Oh bollocks, Falconer. Anybody who’s read any of your crappy books knows you don’t give a toss for spiritual healing.’

Falconer smiled. ‘There’s a difference, I think, between spiritual healing and natural healing and Mrs Willis appears to have had an instinctive gift for plucking cures literally out of the hedgerows. My young colleague Adrian, for instance … We were kidding him about his psoriasis, saying he couldn’t possibly be seen on telly like that, and so he came, without even telling me, to see Mrs Willis and … gone. Gone in under a week. Flaked clean away. Now that’s remarkable.’

Falconer was speaking loudly, in his television voice. As if they were filming him. He wanted the entire village, Cindy thought, to know what a magnanimous person he was, not one to bear a grudge. And it sounded not in the least patronizing. Oh, a clever man.

Unlike Marcus, reddening.

‘Potent to the end, obviously.’ Falconer’s smile opening up two deep grooves in his lean, mobile face, from the edges of the eyes down to the wide mouth. ‘Sliced through my fence without much trouble.’

‘I’ll pay for it,’ Marcus growled, backing away.

‘I didn’t mean that, old chap. I realize she had a great affinity with Black Knoll, and it was wrong of me-’

‘High Knoll.’

‘Sorry, sorry!’ Falconer held up his hands in mock defence against a shorter, fatter, older man with glasses. ‘Look, Marcus … I know this isn’t the best time to go into all this … or maybe it is, I don’t know … but things have been said that perhaps both of us regret.’

‘Speak for your bloody self…’

‘What I want to say …’ Falconer squeezed his chin, apparently reaching a decision. ‘In cutting that fence — her last act — Mrs Willis was making a point that I’m … well, that I’m ready to take on board. I shouldn’t have installed the bloody thing. It was a stupid … high-handed gesture. No ancient monument should be considered private property. They belong to all of us. Anyway, it’s all gone now, the fence, the wire, everything. So’ — spading a hand through the air — ‘go up there whenever you like. If it stands as a kind of shrine to Mrs Willis …’

A small crowd had gathered. Marcus’s face was plum-coloured now.

‘Another thing,’ Falconer said. ‘We may be approaching the same subjects from different angles and we’re never going to agree fully, any more than I agree with young Adrian and his cronies. But we do have a common cause. Which is human enlightenment.’

Marcus spluttered something that even the good churchgoing folk of St Mary’s would discern as fucking hell.

‘I do recognize, Marcus — and Adrian certainly does — your vast knowledge of the unexplained, your passion for the paranormal. Your perhaps eccentric, rural mysticism. And so I’d like to talk … just talk … about the possibility … of your giving the odd lecture to our students at Cefn-y-bedd. Fee negotiable, of course.’

Marcus’s lips moved; no words passed between them.

‘All right,’ Falconer said. ‘I’m not going to push my luck. Just give it some thought.’ He opened a long hand towards the church door. ‘After you, chum …’

Under a very faint rain, Grayle picked up the track above what Adrian said was the helicopter shed, noticing how straight the path was, following a direct line into the shelf of low mountains.

She tried to see it as Ersula might have seen it: an ancient land, a portal to the past. Could this be a traditional English Old Straight Track connecting a string of prehistoric sites? To the Ersula she knew, that idea would be a turn-off. Ersula always maintained there was no evidence at all for the existence of ley lines. Ley lines were Grayle-stuff.

But all this was before the University of the Earth.

Grayle went on following the track to the end of the field. She found a stile there. Hesitated. Should she? The sky was a deep, shiny, all-over grey. She was wearing a light sweatshirt, jeans and sneakers. The blond clumps shoved into a baseball cap, the Eye of Horus earrings in her pocket.

She’d conceived this stupid, New Age idea of sitting by the old stones, closing her eyes and willing Ersula to come through to her. Ersula looking cross. You asshole, Grayle, this is the last time I do this, right?

Grayle forced a grin, climbed over the stile.

The church was even smaller than it looked from the outside. Mellow stone, quite cosy. And easily filled. But even so …

Packed, it was. More than packed. People were standing in the aisles, in the porch, some still outside, perhaps, in the rain. Stoical locals in their well-worn funeral-wear.

For an outsider? A woman who had been merely employed here, and for quite a short time? All right, a healer. But she hadn’t healed them all, had she?

Mrs Willis lay in her coffin on a wooden-framed bier pointed at the altar rails.

This was no outsider.

Cindy sat with Marcus on a front-row pew under dusty red and blue rays from a stained glass window showing Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane. It was all quite extraordinarily obvious.

Little Annie Davies, this was.

And they knew. They all knew.

But why had Marcus never said? For heaven’s sake, what was going on here? Cindy scanned the faces, and they told him nothing, absolutely nothing. A shadow of sorrow over some of them, but mostly it was the famous British funeral face, and it told you nothing.

Cindy stared at the coffin. Annie Davies, the unsung visionary of St Mary’s. Who had returned, most discreetly, to die. Who had quietly proved, by demonstrating the gift of healing, the validity of her experience. And who had surrendered her life-force at High Knoll, now a grim and tainted place again.

He felt a profound sadness now, an aching regret that he had not known Annie Davies while she was alive. The things she could have told him!

When the congregation rose for the first hymn, Cindy went into the Silence and, feeling suddenly quite inadequate for the occasion, called softly and tentatively, from the underside of his mind.

Annie.

Before they left for the church, he had found his way to what Marcus called the Healing Room and stood amidst the bottles and jars. In order to communicate with the spirit, the shaman must find the Sanctuary of the Essence. Why was it not here, among the remedies, in the room where Mrs Willis had healed and meditated upon her experiences?

Or indeed, despite the enormous congregation, here in the church? For there was no response from within the oaken casket or from the damp, steaming atmosphere in the little nave. As the congregation began to sing, the hymn underpinned by tuneless baritones and frilled by elderly, fractured sopranos, Cindy tried again.

Where are you?

A sudden, sharp breeze made the rain rattle on the stained glass.

Out there?

No audible, tangible, or in any way perceptible answer.

Why won’t you come in?

Cindy looked at Marcus, singing quietly and out of tune, Marcus whose public humiliation had been accomplished with consummate, professional skill, leaving him looking peevish and curmudgeonly and Falconer tolerant and generous.

The hymn ended; the congregation sat. Cindy spotted Falconer across the aisle, between two village ladies, Women’s Institute types, who kept glancing at him with undisguised awe.

What a vindictive man he must be. Here he was, with his wealth, his fame and his academic credibility, going to the trouble of attending a small, village funeral for, it would appear, the sole purpose of publicly crushing an elderly nobody who had dared to question his motives in a publication he’d probably never previously even heard of.

Ah, there was more to it. There had to be more to it.

‘It was a long life,’ the red-faced vicar said, his voice rising and falling as if he was still leading prayers, ‘and, in the most traditional sense, a good life. And although most of it was spent away from here, although most of us only knew Joan when she was already advanced in years, I’m sure I speak for the village when I say …’

And so went the eloquent but mindless eulogy to Mrs Willis. How popular she had been in the village. How she’d belonged to the WI, supported local charitable events, was caring towards the sick, always cheerful when you met her, had — quite remarkably — continued to work into her ninetieth year.

Ninety? She was as old as that?

Well, of course she would be.

And caring towards the sick? Surely, even if her true identity was not revealed, the man was going to mention the healing?

But the vicar’s high, fruity voice intoned not a word to suggest that Mrs Willis had been any more than an averagely dedicated parishioner. He expressed sympathy for her nieces, named, and for her employer, unnamed.

And suddenly Cindy saw the interior of the church as perhaps Bobby might have seen it: the rose-tinted wall hardening to a flinty grey and the members of the congregation rigid as stones. A conspiracy of silence.

The stained glass rattled with rain. In his phoney, bloated baritone, the vicar said, ‘And so, before we go into the churchyard for the interment … we will sing hymn number …’

A shuffling of hymn books. But Marcus Bacton was on his feet ahead of the rest of the congregation.

Oh no. ‘Marcus! ‘ Cindy hissed.

Marcus’s shoulders were shaking with rage, his hands gripped the prayer-book shelf until his knuckles blanched, and when he spoke it was in a voice rather louder and certainly more resonant than the vicar’s.

‘You hypocritical fuck! ‘

Black Knoll.

Jesus.

An avenue of stones no more than two or three feet high on either side. An open passageway, curving towards the caved-in chamber.

There was a fine, discreet English rain which very politely soaked you to the skin inside a couple of minutes. I could shelter, Grayle thought. I could shelter under the big stone.

And then she thought, Are you kidding?

Standing, dismayed, at the entrance to what had once been a covered passageway, the whole thing once concealed inside an earthmound, but now bleakly exposed, like the abandoned skeleton of a whale.

She wanted to cry.

This was it? She crossed an ocean for this? Like, she was supposed to believe the stark, ruined shell held some kind of key to the transformation of Ersula?

It was nothing. It had no grandeur at all. Maybe it was impressive at sunrise but now, on this damp, cooling October afternoon under low, spongy cloud, it was just… derelict… meaningless.

She strained to see the green and yellow in the grass, the pink in the soil and the little plants growing on the small stones of the passageway.

The Offa’s Dyke Path which more or less marks the boundary between England and Wales is close … I can sense a converging of separate energies.

Energies?

This place just sapped you.

Was that the path, that bare track behind the bushes? Was this the boundary? Between waking and dreaming, the known and the unknown, sanity and madness?

Scary fun, Grayle?

Was she missing something?

She tried to picture Ersula, in her sky-blue ski-jacket, making notes on a clipboard, lining up a picture with her Canon Sureshot — no sky on it, no flowers, no people; all Ersula’s pictures were for reference only — Oh, Grayle, what is the point of piling up pictures of people you see every day?

For when they’re not there, Ersula. When they’re not there any more.

A curtain of rain separated her from the big stones. She told herself, If I go through that fine curtain, she’ll be there. She’ll be waiting for me.

‘Aw come on! ‘ she howled aloud. ‘You’re fucking crazy!’

Crazy as Cindy the goddamned Celtic shaman. Crazy as Adrian Fraser-Hale with his cassette tapes of the number one Neolithic rap band. Like, what the hell are you doing here? You know where Ersula is? She’s back home with some guy, is where. You read stuff into her letters that was never there. You created a mystery because you’re still Holy Grayle and you’re never gonna change!

She sobbed. She looked at her watch. It was nearly three p.m. She would go back to the crappy hotel and she would call up her father and he would say, Sure she’s back in town, hell, your planes probably passed each other over the Atlantic. Hey, never mind, Grayle, at least it pushed you out of that cruddy little tabloid job.

She stared at the wet, grey stones and she sobbed again, and soon the air was full of sobs, heavy and soggy like the goddamned English clouds. She felt weak and walked through the curtain of rain to sit on one of the flat stones; she couldn’t get any wetter.

Which was when she realized they weren’t her sobs. That she wasn’t alone up here.

This figure was coming towards her off the stones, a figure in blue. ‘Ersula?’ she whispered, in spite of herself, although she knew it couldn’t be.

And yet she had to know. She tried to move forward but it was as if her sneakers were stuck in the red mud. ‘Ersula! ‘ she screamed into the rain.

And then — ohmygod — the girl was running towards her, in a skimpy cotton dress with blue flowers on it. The girl had braided hair and she was running hard, although the distance between Grayle and the stones was no more than a couple of yards, so it was as though the girl was running on a treadmill and the stones were some kind of back-projection.

Which was not possible, and Grayle was disbelieving and confused and then scared, more scared than she’d ever been in her whole life, and she started to hyperventilate.

A vivid distress vibrating in the grey air. The girl was a blur of threshing, graceless child-limbs. Running hard at Grayle.

Yet not reaching her. Never quite reaching her, but always coming on in a bumpy, flashing pattern, like those picture books you flipped through quickly with your thumb and the picture moved, only sometimes you flipped several pages at once and the image jerked. Rushing in tears through the rain. In the rain; the girl was part of the rain, like a rainbow, but only dowdy colours: the faded blue flowers on the dress, the dry, mousy brown of the plaited hair. And she was flinging out her arms to Grayle, blown towards her, light as the husk of a dead flower, her face in flux, forming and reforming, each time a little closer until Grayle could see her sagging, flaccid lips and her eyes, white and wet and dead.

‘Oh God,’ Grayle whispered. ‘Oh … God. ‘