The Cold Calling

it should be, but also rather frightening. It meant that Cindy no longer had a measure of control. He prayed for assistance, without knowing quite to whom the prayer was addressed.

Earth is dark.

Earth is cold.

Earth is grave.

Earth is grave.

Earth is dark is cold is grave.

Bobby stopped chanting. He was utterly still, did not even appear to be breathing. Face as pale as his T- shirt.

Cindy heard a humming. Not heard exactly, he was aware of a humming. It was coming not from Bobby but from the King Stone. The stone blurred before his eyes and seemed to swell, then came into sharp focus; despite the paucity of light, he could see every smear of mould and liver-spot of lichen.

Bobby Maiden’s lips parted, as if to resume the chant, but all that came out was a hiss, a sibilance, a rustling, in more than one tone. As though one hiss was communicating with another, a whispered conversation.

A whispered conversation between huddled figures. Identifying the location.

Cindy shook him, yelling in his face. ‘Stop. Get up. Get up!’

They could have got through this. It could have been over.

But then, just as Charlie came to that routine stuff about how if anyone knew of any just cause or impediment why these two fine young people should not, right this minute, be declared man and wife, then …

… then, in the east, over towards the city of Oxford, came a small but vivid flaring in the sky.

Christ.

Pushing people’s hands apart, Grayle ran out towards the altar. Reaching it about half a second before the distant punch of thunder.

‘Listen, I’m sorry … I’m sorry …’

The Reverend Charlie broke off, half turned to her. Another faraway fan of lightning briefly lit up his creased surplice.

‘Grayle?’

‘Charlie, listen to me, we have a problem. No sweat, but we need to suspend this ceremony. Until the storm passes. We have to get all these people out of here.’

Laid-back old Charlie, a dope-haze over his senses, he just looked at Grayle, kind of curious. But Matthew Lyall — a bulge in his top pocket that anyone could see was a ring box — was cold-sober and angry.

‘Who says?’

‘Me. I say. Please. You saw the lightning. That’s bad news, Matthew. That is very seriously bad news. See, I was hoping it was gonna pass, but it didn’t, and that’s real bad news, I’m sorry.’

‘Grayle, what on earth are you trying to do? This is our wedding.’

‘I, uh … Listen, I got a bad feeling about this whole thing. I’m a very sensitive person, Matthew, OK? Holy … Holy Grayle, right? In the States people listen to me. You should listen to me.’

‘I’ll listen to you as long as you like when Janny and I are married. Which would probably have been by now, if you hadn’t-’

‘You saw that lightning? Up in the sky? It’s gonna come closer. My feeling … I get feelings, OK, you should listen to my feelings … and my, er, strong, deep-down psychic feeling is you should not be getting married in a storm. It’s bad luck. It will overshadow your whole married life. Cause instability, and in … uh … infertility. Your marriage will be barren.’

In the third, slightly brighter flash, Janny Oates’s face crumpled like a paper bag, and Grayle felt like a piece of shit.

The slow, rolling thunder seemed to set off mutterings everywhere. ‘Who the hell is this woman?’ demanded some deeply offended, deeply Oxford-English man’s voice among the congregation. ‘She on drugs?’

A fourth flash lit a stone which was knotted and eroded — good Christ — into the shape of a hunched-up, grinning, winged demon, with a long neck and a bony crest on top of its head. Jesus, it was just a stone. They were all just stones. Like Adrian Fraser-Hale was just a guy.

‘I’m someone who knows,’ Grayle cried, ‘OK?’

XLVIII

Maiden moved quickly but circuitously across the field. Don’t use the path, Cindy had warned. It’s too straight. And don’t, whatever you do, put yourself between the circle and the Knights.

The Whispering Knights.

The Whispering Knights was the name given to another collapsed dolmen, once a kind of High Knoll-type structure, but taller, and the stones had folded in on one another, and now they were like giants conspiring.

The monument was in a fairly vast, open field on the opposite side of the road from the King Stone and about a quarter of a mile from the Rollright circle.

You can’t miss them, Bobby; there’s nothing else in that field.

Only a sprinkle of trees on the horizon, a line of hedge marking a field boundary — all briefly shown to him by the sheet lightning, some miles away yet, but closing.

And, unfortunately, anyone inside those stones, they can’t miss you.

When the lightning came again, like a revolving searchlight, Maiden dropped into the short grass. The image of the Knights burned into his mind. They were surrounded by railings, like the King Stone but far bigger, more like big birds than men, black hooded crows, huddled.

Rising.

Earth release me.

Clouds cushion me.

Sky receive me.

Cindy felt himself looking down on the bone-hard Cotswold Ridge, imagining his body growing lighter than the clouds, in all senses of the word, his cloak of feathers coming alive, becoming wings. And the wings, when he spread them, all aglow.

The Fychans had taught him this. The Fychans, father and son; there had been a grandfather, too, and two more generations before him, taking the family tradition back into the eighteenth century. And farther back, to the days when the family house of rubble was a house of skins. The word shaman never used, no specific Welsh word for shaman. Dynion hysbys, they called the Fychans. The Men who Know. When a Christmas show in Llandudno had been abandoned following a fire at the theatre, Cindy had wandered south into the mountains around Cader Idris, happened to stop at the Fychan farmhouse for a night’s bed and breakfast, which turned into two nights, then three weeks and several years, on and off — the Fychans forever saying, in their sly, North Walian way, that he’d never make a proper dyn hysbys, not being born to the Welsh language.

But he would be … well, something.

It was an inner way, a discipline; it did not exclude Christian ethics, it harnessed the imagination in a practical way. Now Cindy made himself go walking in the unstable sky, into the nervous system of the storm, imagining every charcoal cloud he touched being softened by his incandescence.

When lightning came at him, he opened himself to it and the electricity hit him in a great, sizzling spasm of agony, but he walked on, playing with the storm, taunting it like a lion-tamer with a whip.

Only it wasn’t a whip, not really; Cindy suspected that it was no more than a piece of string, that he was not a great and powerful shaman but very possibly an ageing sham.

Less than thirty yards from the Whispering Knights now, and Bobby Maiden was wriggling along the ground on his stomach, because there was nothing in that flat, spacious field but him and the Knights. And anything which the Knights might enclose.