The Cold Calling

Chemicals. Most neurologists were agreed that this was brain chemicals, the more optimistic of them suggesting there was obviously some shutdown mechanism in the brain that was triggered by the death process. The brain turning on the soft lights and sweet music. Departure lounge stuff.

And when they came out of it, the world could seem, for a short while, a hard, bright and fairly brutal place — maybe Bobby’s slushy, February streets had covered that aspect.

And yet, for almost all of them, there was this lingering memory of the glorious light, something they’d hold on to the rest of their lives. More than a hope … a certainty. That everything, in the end, would be very much OK.

While this guy, who’d had more opportunity than any of them to bask in the paradise vision …

‘Bobby, are you religious at all?’

‘Well …’ He thought about it. ‘Kind of knocks it out of you, being in the Job.’

‘Was it ever there?’

He did it again with his hands, palms squashed into the eyes. Must surely hurt him to do that. Maybe that was what he wanted.

Pulling his hands away, he looked like a child waking up in the middle of the night and finding itself not in its cosy room but on some bare hillside.

‘I was never that scared of death. Scared of dying, maybe. But that’s how most people are I suppose.’

‘Dying’s usually no that bad, these days,’ Andy said. ‘Any nurse’ll tell you that.’

‘I am now.’

‘What?’

‘Scared. Shit-scared. Don’t know where the hell you go, but I’m buggered if I’m going back. I mean, OK, I realize one day, but … Oh, shit. ‘

The tremble was so prolonged it was like his skin rippled.

‘Bobby, let me get this right …’

Andy felt cold just looking at him. Got the feeling it was only the separateness, caused by the slight brain damage, that was stopping him from turning into a basket case.

‘… this has left you with a fear of death?’

His face was so white, his bad eye was like a target in the snow.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I don’t even want to think about it.’

VI

Marcus couldn’t face going back to the Castle, breaking the news to Mrs Willis, so he walked. Walking the rage out of his system, each step grinding Falconer’s smug face into the tarmac, all the way to Ewyas Harold, damn near six miles.

Mrs Willis wouldn’t be worried when he didn’t turn up for breakfast. Used to his ways. Perhaps she’d go back to bed. Hope so.

On the way back, fatigue dragged Marcus into a field and he sat down under a tree, wiping the rain and sweat from his nose and his glasses, watching the clouds leak.

Malcolm wandered around, picking up the ghost trails of rabbits and foxes and badgers. Marcus leaned his head against the tree trunk. Nobody would understand what it would mean to him, not being able to walk to the Knoll, along that very obvious ley line from the Castle, to watch the sun rise over the distant Malverns. Feeling there a sense of home that he’d never experienced before, throughout his career as an English teacher in four different schools, Hartlepool to Truro. All through his marriage.

Not that there’d been anything wrong with that. Only wished there’d been more of it. But Celia had died not three years after Sally, following a bloody hysterectomy, and nobody would convince Marcus that one death hadn’t led directly to the other. It should not have been fucking incurable.

Bloody doctors.

And bloody priests. And bloody politicians and professional academics. And bloody lawyers and judges and television pundits and all would-be shapers and organizers of other people’s bloody lives.

And teachers? Yes, all right, bloody teachers too. When they’d offered early retirement, he’d snatched the money and run with it. Run away. Ending up, faintly bewildered, in Herefordshire, where he was born. Thinking there was still, in theory, time to do something, to push back the boundaries of life.

And yet depressingly aware that his life had actually shrunk.

After no more than a month, this melancholic and aimless existence in a rented cottage had been interrupted by news of the sudden death of the latest proprietor of The Phenomenologist. Putting the venerable periodical once more on the market.

Seemed like a sign. God knows, he needed one.

Been a contributor to The Phenomenologist for years. Smudgy, ill-printed rag, following him around the country, arriving four times a year, familiar hand-addressed buff envelope, like pornography. Editorial pages entirely self-generating, with unpaid correspondents submitting garbled accounts of mystical and paranormal events in their particular towns and villages. Appallingly written, most of them; but after thirty years as an English teacher, he’d sort that out.

Envisaging a new Phenomenologist. Better layout. Certain literary style. On sale in newsagents and bookshops.

Only after he’d bought the century-old title for a suspiciously reasonable four thousand seven hundred quid had Marcus discovered that contributors and subscribers were, broadly speaking, the same people. If you rejected or even rewrote some piece of crap, its author would immediately cancel his or her subscription.

Bloody nightmare. Only way to keep it going was to print every blasted thing and never ask questions. Very little of it bore serious scrutiny. You would never, for instance, have imagined so many elderly English spinsters manifesting stigmata.

And the circulation dropped as they died off.

But struggling with the magazine had, for a time, given him a purpose. Also a solid excuse to indulge his long-suppressed passion for the Unexplained. If he heard of a poltergeist-infested house or the sighting of baffling lights in the sky, he could wander along and investigate, presenting his credentials. No-one had ever heard of The Phenomenologist, of course, but it did sound rather impressive and few people would shut their doors in your face.

Marcus Bacton: crusader for the curious, defender of the irrational.

And Annie Davies had been his Bernadette, his Joan of Arc, Marcus realizing, from his own researches, that the circumstances of Annie’s vision were remarkably similar to those of several famous sightings of the Virgin, notably at Fatima in Portugal in 1917 and Medjugorje in Yugoslavia, as recently as the 1980s.

He also subscribed to the theory that many so-called burial chambers, oriented as they were to the midsummer or midwinter sunrise, were not only Neolithic calendars but initiation chambers for the priests and shamans. They’d spend the night in meditation inside the chamber … and then dawn’s first rays would enter like molten gold through a slit in the carefully positioned portal-stones. Out of the darkness, into the light. A supremely transcendent experience.

A time for visions. A time for miracles.

Should’ve been Saint Annie.

It was an obsession. And when the decrepit Castle Farm, the old home of Annie Davies, arrived on the market, it seemed like another sign. To buy it, Marcus Bacton had cleaned out his bank account and sold his car. At least it had a little cottage attached, which he could let out for holidays, enabling him to afford a series of cleaners, who had found him so exasperating that none lasted more than six months. Until, just over two years ago, the one who became a live-in housekeeper: the extraordinary Mrs Willis.

All a bit hand-to-mouth. But he’d always known that one day he’d raise the money to buy the Knoll, and he’d have a display case behind glass so that visitors would be able to read the story of Annie Davies and the vision which the Church denied.