The Cold Calling

‘Huh?’

‘I said, if there’s some way I can help you,’ Lyndon McAffrey said patiently, ‘maybe you could just lay it out for me in moron-speak.’

‘Finish the letter,’ Grayle said. ‘I’m delaying you. Your wife will think you’re having an affair.’

‘Haw,’ said Lyndon. He picked up the second sheet of blue airmail paper and read it with obvious concentration before re-reading the first sheet.

‘Hmm.’ He grunted thoughtfully. ‘I begin to see your point.’At night, you discover, stone is always cold.Sleeping on stone — that’s not natural. You awake time after time, usually uncomfortable as hell and sometimes in a panic simply because of the stone all around you. Well, that’s good — it shouldn’t come easy, not at first. Without a challenge there can be no achievement.Which is just as well because this particular burial chamber, where I slept last night, is fully exposed, the earthmound which once concealed it having long since eroded. It is like a long, low stone table on little, stubby legs. Or maybe a clump of big mushrooms fused together. Kind of weird- looking, but not what you would call spectacular. Indeed, without a large-scale map you would not find it at all except by accident.Well, certainly not at night.Under your head is an old gray stone which you can feel as though there was no sleeping bag there at all. What it makes you think of is those petrified pillows supporting marble effigies on tombs in old churches. Creepy, huh?Hey, come on. This is a scientific experiment.Anyway, like I said, when you sleep on stone, sometimes you awake but you’re not awake, if this makes sense. You know you can’t be, because the stone isn’t cold, nor even hard; you’re sinking into it — so damn grateful it isn’t cold and hard any more that you just let yourself luxuriate in it. And down you go, quite painlessly, into the ground, into the earth. Your subconscious mind that is. Or whatever you want to call the part of you that admits the dreams.You come to realize that the very easiest phase is the letting go. I say easy … it was hard for me at first. I am, as you can guess, the odd one out on this course, most of the others being half-assed pseudo-mystics who are just here for the buzz. (You will notice, Grayle, that I have been at pains not to say ‘people like you’.)They tell you not to think too hard before you go to sleep, so maybe it’s just as well your main concern is to get comfortable. If you go into waking fantasies and your conscious mind influences your dreams, this is a bad thing, obviously.Before you know it, you’ve been gently awoken and the therapeute is whispering, Did you dream? Tell me … describe it to me…You feel wonderful then. You did it. You interacted.The actual interacting, the dreaming, often becomes, well … kind of scary, if you want the truth. Not at all what you’re expecting. Maybe it has occurred to you that this place where you’re sleeping, when it comes down to it, when you get beyond all the screwball stuff about secret energies and the healing powers of Mother Earth…… is a grave.A repository for bodies. Flesh has rotted here, bones have crumbled.The claustrophobia, at this point, can be intense. You start to scream inside. All you want is out of there. But, like I said, you have to stop your conscious mind getting a hold of you. What you are dealing with here is the unconscious and that must be left to find its own route to what you would probably call enlightenment.In relation to this, OK, there is one small problem, I am told.You know how, in nightmares, when you get into a very frightening situation — like, you’re about to fall a thousand feet onto rocks or you turn around to find the psycho with the ax was behind the door all the time — you awake?Well, sleeping in a prehistoric burial chamber, so they tell me, you can’t always count on this happening — implying that under these physical conditions it is possible to reach a deeper level of unconsciousness. This, I am convinced, is the first step to a scientific explanation of so-called prophetic dreaming, as supposedly experienced by Jacob and tribal shamans the world over, and it excites me profoundly.Before you say a word, sure I’ve heard that stuff about how, if you weren’t able to awake from a nightmare, when you got into a terminally tight corner you’d just die.Like I said, it’s important that it isn’t easy. That there are risks. Nothing significant is ever achieved without risk.

‘Your parents seen any of this?’

Lyndon McAffrey solemn now, maybe the old newsman’s antennae starting to vibrate.

Grayle shook her head. ‘Don’t Show the Folks. Pain of death. We used to put it on cards and letters when we were kids.’

‘When you were kids is one thing-’

‘Listen, it’s bad enough we haven’t had a letter or a phone call in five weeks. No, I didn’t show it to them then and I don’t plan to. My father would be acutely embarrassed on his younger child’s behalf and blame it on my mother’s genes, like he does with me. Mom would be spooked all the way to the cocaine cupboard. No, hell, this is down to me. Time for Crazy Grayle to get her shit together.’

‘OK.’ Lyndon leaned back. ‘What are your own personal conclusions here? That Ersula blew out her mind under some old stone and went native? Among the primitive Brits?’

‘I know … you don’t believe, any more than my father would, that my sister could be psychically damaged by any of this. You don’t believe for one second that she’s messing with awesomely powerful cosmic forces. You think more likely she got laid inside a stone circle, fell in love, lost track of time …’

‘OK,’ Lyndon said. ‘What do you plan to do about it?’

‘Well … I already called this University of the Earth summer school. Spoke to a guy who was very helpful. Surprised we hadn’t heard from Ersula, on account of the course ended a month ago and they presumed she’d flown home. He didn’t sound like a fruitcake …’

Lyndon’s expression said he wouldn’t trust Grayle to identify a fruitcake at knife-swinging distance. She averted her eyes.

‘So, I … I called the police department. I guess there’ll be some kind of hook-up with the English cops. But …’

‘The English police are very thorough,’ Lyndon said. ‘If there’s anything wrong here, they’ll find out.’

‘You don’t think I should fly over there?’

‘How would that help?’

‘Well … it would help me, I guess.’

‘Grayle, you yourself admit that Ersula is the balanced one.’

‘And, yeah, she went to Africa, just out of high school, and we didn’t hear from her for close to two months. But that was when the folks split. Her way of coming to terms with all that. This is different. She’s a grown woman. Also she knows that if the very last letter I get from her is as weird as this …’

‘OK,’ Lyndon said. ‘You have a point. See what the cops come up with. They may not be too enthusiastic about finding a grown woman who’s only been missing a few weeks, but being she’s a professor’s daughter and all … Leave it to the cops.’

‘Right.’ Grayle’s voice a little too high. ‘You’re right. That’s sensible.’

Lyndon nodded. He folded the blue airmail letter, tucked it under Grayle’s coffee cup. He hadn’t read the other pages.

Because she hadn’t given them to him.

About Ersula’s dream. The page with the disturbing details of Ersula’s dream lying out on the burial chamber.

So Grayle went home to her windchimes and her crystals and her tree-of-life wallchart. Tried to meditate, gave up and half watched an old John Wayne movie on TV until she fell asleep and dreamed uneasily about dreaming.

III

Around two-thirty a.m., Sister Anderson, scenting smoke, slid quietly into the sluice room. The young Nigerian houseman, Jonathan, bounced off the wall like a scared squirrel, tossed his cigarette out of the window.

When he saw who it was, Jonathan looked no less intimidated. ‘Sorry,’ he muttered. ‘I’m sorry.’ His face no longer black but grey with fatigue in the white lights.

These kids. He’d have been hardly born when Sister Andy, red-haired then and vengeful, had first hunted down wee nurses and sprog docs who’d risked a ciggy in the sluice or the lavvies. Been a good while now since she last chewed the leg off a junior housie — no fun terrorizing some hollow-eyed kid at the end of a sixteen-hour shift. But reputations stuck.

‘Jonathan,’ Andy said wearily. ‘Daft sod y’are, wasnae likely to be the chairman of the bloody hospital trust