The Cold Calling

true elixir of life. ‘But you snuffed it, didn’t you?’

‘Apparently.’

‘And dear old Anderson coaxed you back from the Other Place when everybody was ready to pull the plug, have you bagged up and put in a big drawer or whatever they do. Doesn’t that make you think? I mean, you now know that there’s something beyond death. Does that not change your whole life, utterly and completely? Doesn’t it blow your mind? Doesn’t it make you think, here I am, a snivelling little detective getting all worked up about a bunch of bent coppers, when there are real mysteries all around. Mysteries so close, so damned intimate … that most people, especially policemen, never even focus on them. Big mysteries. Don’t you ever feel overwhelmingly excited? Humble, even?’

He didn’t want to answer that. Didn’t want to confess to feeling, in what was supposed to be his soul, a coldness and a bleakness and a complete absence of hope.

Marcus sank a quantity of whisky. ‘I was a teacher, Maiden.’

‘Never have guessed.’

‘Something happened to you. Like the thing that happened to Mrs Willis on High Knoll on her thirteenth birthday. Now, in all of the six decades of my life on Planet Earth, while the way we live has changed and worsened out of all recognition, I have never had anything that could be described as a vaguely mystical or paranormal experience. Which is why I run a spotty little magazine devoted to it. If I had had any kind of experience, I’d be out there living it … doing things, making things happen. But, then, you know what they say about teachers.’

Maiden said, after a barely respectful pause, ‘Them as can do, them as can’t … teach.’

‘Which is why people like you make me sick. You died, Maiden. You died. And you came back. And what the holy fuck are you doing about it? ‘

XXI

Folklore. There was a whole lot of it around the Rollright Stones, Matthew Lyall said, and most of it was pretty sinister stuff.

The circle sure looked sinister today, with a black cloud the shape of a bathtub hanging over it, and these stalky pines; Grayle never had liked pines, they were too aloof, blocked out the sun but never seemed to offer you shelter. Pines didn’t care.

In contrast to some of the ruined stone circles she’d seen in pictures, the Rollrights looked like a true circle. Almost too complete, the stones packed in tight, so it was like a wall in places. Matthew’s girlfriend, Janny Oates, said it was part of the folklore of the site that if you counted the stones, you would never get the same number twice.

‘The circle’s known as the King’s Men,’ Matthew said. ‘That stone over there is the King Stone, and across there is a group of stones that used to be a burial chamber, only it’s caved in, and that’s called the Whispering Knights.’

The stones were weird. The King Stone was like a twisted tree stump, and there were metal railings around it, like it might break out. The smaller stones, in the circle, were eroded, like lumps of rotting cheese.

This site should have been surrounded by miles of forest and swamps and stuff, and yet here it was, among well-tended fields, barely a half-hour out of Oxford.

‘Ersula was here?’ she said.

‘We wanted her to spend the night,’ Matthew said. ‘In the stones. I said I’d be her therapeute.’

‘But she wouldn’t,’ Janny said.

‘Which we thought was unusual,’ Matthew said, ‘considering how enthusiastic she’d been, you know, in the end, about the whole experiment.’

Janny and Matthew were kind of cute. They were very early twenties and engaged. Both scrubbed and shiny, real childhood sweetheart types. They wore identical Shetland sweaters and finished off one another’s sentences as if they’d been married for years.

‘When was this?’ Grayle asked. ‘When was she here? When did you last see her?’

They’d both been on a University of the Earth course when Ersula was there. Now they were working weekends with something called the Dragon Project, which was a long-term inquiry into anomalous levels of radiation and electromagnetism at selected ancient sites. The Rollrights was its main base, which was fine for Janny and Matthew, who lived nearby, in the town of Chipping Camden.

‘Three weeks.’ Janny flicked back her fine, light-brown hair. ‘Where did she say she was going then, Matthew?’

‘Actually,’ Matthew said, ‘she seemed a little confused. I think she’d had what my father would call a mind- blowing experience. That was back at Cefn-y-bedd. When we first met her, Ersula was very much the scientist, and she was sort of pooh-poohing all this stuff about earth-energies that Janny and I knew existed.’

‘Because we’d spent all our holidays going to hundreds of sites, and you can just tell after a while. You just walk into a circle and … and …’

‘Whoosh,’ Grayle said sadly.

‘Absolutely. That’s exactly it, isn’t it, Matthew? I think — well, I’m certain — that Ersula came round to our way of thinking. And that can be quite a shock to the system when you start off by not believing.’

‘She was sort of wandering around the stones,’ Matthew said. ‘Looking a bit starved.’

‘As though she had a cold coming on, or a chill. I offered her some tea from our flask, but she shook her head. She was wearing this enormous parka, with the hood up, though it wasn’t a bad day, was it?’

‘Not like today,’ Matthew said. ‘I don’t think we’ll be sleeping out tonight, Jan.’

Grayle thought, Jeez, I sure wouldn’t like to sleep here.

She stepped out of the circle, turned away. Just being near these grim, broken stones solidified all her fears for Ersula. It was clear she hadn’t told anyone on the course about her awful dream at Black Knoll, the full details of which she couldn’t even tell her own sister.

‘Look.’ Matthew patted her arm. ‘I wouldn’t worry about her, you know. I mean, compared with … well, some of the people involved in earth-mysteries are a bit bonkers, to be honest. But Ersula really had her feet on the ground.’

Grayle’s father had said, Be careful.

Not what she’d expected. She’d imagined something like, I never openly said this to you, Grayle, but I hated that column. I found it gross. It gives me enormous pleasure that you outgrew it finally.

No, nothing like that. Dr Erlend Underhill had never once mentioned the column. He’d copied out the addresses and phone numbers of two professors he knew, history guys in Oxford, said he would call them to put them in the picture, tell them she was on her way. Grayle said, Why? Because, right now, prehistoric studies in England was attracting a large number of crazies, her father said; you needed some back-up, a point of reference.

‘Dad, I’m an official, badge-wearing weirdo. I can bond with crazies.’

‘Humour me,’ her father said humourlessly. And insisted on giving her five thousand dollars for airfares and accommodation. ‘This is family business. Keep me informed.’

Next, she’d gone to tough it out with the editor. Who, to her dismay, seemed entirely undisturbed at his unique New Age columnist’s wanting to quit. ‘Yeah,’ he said nonchalantly. ‘I agree the column’s been a mite tired of late.’ (What?) ‘We can handle it in-house, maybe. I got a couple new kids in the city room, maybe we can give it a new slant.’ He meant save money. Asshole.

All right, she hadn’t expected Burton to plead, but it still wasn’t the exit she’d imagined. So she’d had her last doughnut with Lyndon (you were right, maybe I peaked), held back the tears, and took the first daytime flight out of JFK with a small suitcase and a strange lightness in the head.

The next night she was in Woodstock, the one Jimi Hendrix never played, outside of Oxford, at the home of