The Cold Calling

book, is it?’

She looked up from her book. She looked momentarily scared. Big eyes.

‘Ley lines?’ Cindy said. ‘You believe in all that? Come to the right place, you have. Old Alfred Watkins of Hereford, he used to walk these hills, spotting how the stones aligned with the mounds and the old churches.’

‘I, uh, I only just started it.’ An American accent. ‘I bought it on the way here. I don’t know much about ley lines and stuff. We, uh, we don’t have them in New York.’

‘As far as you know,’ Cindy said mysteriously. ‘As far as you know.’

‘Well, uh, we have like straight roads. But I guess straight roads don’t qualify by virtue of just being, uh, straight.’

‘Well.’ Cindy put on his famous twinkle. ‘There are, I hear, many strange energies in New York. Who knows how many new leys might have been created?’

‘You think that’s possible?’

‘Anything,’ said Cindy, ‘is possible. It’s a very strange world.’

‘Gee,’ the girl said. ‘Do all you people talk like this?’

Cindy laughed. ‘Sadly, very few of us talk like this. Can I buy you a drink? Cindy, my name. Cindy Mars- Lewis.’

‘Grayle. Underhill.’

‘Grail? How interesting. As in …?’

‘Kind of,’ she said.

You died. And you came back. And what the holy fuck are you doing about it?

Marcus’s outraged voice asked the question in Maiden’s head at least a couple of times a day.

I’m trying to forget about it, that’s what I’m doing, Marcus.

‘What did you say?’ Marcus threw a log on the stove.

‘Nothing.’

It seemed to Maiden that, unless he managed to push the experience right to the back of his mind, he was never going to have a normal life. There’d be no pressure to go back to work. Maybe he could crawl back to Elham General in a few days’ time and persuade some specialist that the brain damage was irreparable and would affect his equilibrium in some problematic fashion demanding early, early retirement. And making him, to the satisfaction of Riggs, a very unreliable witness. Would Riggs feel safe, then? Would Maiden feel safe?

Safe to go to art college, finally? Did he even want to do that any more?

Marcus sat down with his whisky. ‘You’ll be there tomorrow, Maiden?’

‘Sure.’

‘Don’t have to, you know. If there’s a problem.’

‘I can’t avoid death for ever, can I? Besides, I was there when she …’

‘Yes.’ Marcus swallowed some whisky. ‘I’ve been thinking about that. Thinking back to when Mrs Willis was lying on the stone and you said, Take her down, get her down. Why did you say that?’

‘I don’t know.’

And the statement scared him because it was so completely true. There was an area of himself that he really didn’t know. It was like carrying around a locked briefcase to which you didn’t have the key, and you couldn’t put it down because there might be a bomb inside.

‘Perhaps something’s reaching you, Maiden. When Anderson brought you back from the dead, she was imagining on the Knoll at sunrise. That sets up a connection. Not only between her and you but between you and the Knoll. Now don’t look at me like that, you cynical bastard!’

Maiden shook his head. He wasn’t going for this.

‘Did you know that burial chamber is a serious misnomer?’ Marcus said. ‘They were really initiation chambers. Yes, all right, the remains of the dead — funerary urns and things — were put in there, but that was part of it. The trainee shaman or whoever would spend the night inside the chamber and then, when the light came through, directly through the slit at midsummer, they would literally be enlightened, their consciousness raised.’

‘Andy told me.’

‘Did she also tell you how similar that was to the near-death experience? Hmm? The shaft of light out of complete darkness? That’s what they see, isn’t it?’

‘Not me, Marcus.’

‘Quite. If you saw only darkness and you felt only cold, that would account for your reaction to the Knoll, wouldn’t it?’

‘Possibly. I’m not qualified-’

‘Not long before she died, the old girl told me she was seeing black lights up there.’

‘Can you have black lights?’

‘Like to talk in metaphors, your psychics. She was saying something’s gone wrong. Perhaps Falconer’s fucked it up with his bloody experiments. Perhaps the light that came into you from the Knoll was black light.’

‘Don’t do this to me, Marcus.’

‘I’m trying to help you, you ungrateful bastard. Have a drink, you look completely shot at.’

‘Do you know why it’s called Black Knoll?’

‘Local name for it.’

‘But why exactly?’

‘Some bollocks. It’s irrelevant.’

‘You going to tell me?’

‘Just have a drink,’ Marcus said.

‘Missing?’ this Cindy said. ‘What do you mean, missing?’

‘I mean she never came home. Or, if she did, she didn’t make contact. Either way, that’s missing, isn’t it? Like, she’s missing out of my life.’

It wasn’t alcohol making her talk; Grayle was drinking Coke, or something that passed for it. Just she was getting past the stage of keeping quiet about who she was and what she was doing here. How many woman tourists travelled alone anyway?

The strange old dame — dressed like out of Agatha Christie, only more glitter — took in everything she said. Spoke in this light, flippant voice with a bizarre up-and-down accent and yet struck Grayle as being kind of heavy underneath.

What did I walk into here? Did she find me or did I find her?

Grayle swallowed an ice cube from the bottom of her Coke. Told this Cindy all about the dreaming. After a while, they bought more drinks and took them to a table at the back of the bar, and Grayle pulled out the sheaf of airmail paper.

‘See, my sister, she’s intense and hard-nosed, not easily fooled. But the dream thing had become like a personal obsession.’

‘Yes,’ Cindy said after she read the letter, except for the pages Grayle always held back. ‘No matter how analytical you are, experiments with the subconscious can be rather like putting a needle into a vein. The subconscious demands more. Ancient-site-dreaming is dangerously addictive.’

Grayle looked into Cindy’s still, green eyes. ‘How do you know this?’

‘Ah.’ Cindy sighed. ‘Ten, fifteen years ago, before it was fashionable, I decided to spend a night on the fabled slopes of Cader Idris.’

‘Cader …? What is that?’

‘It’s a mountain in North Wales where there’s a legend that if you spend a whole night there you will wake up either a poet or mad.’

‘Sounds kind of like Greenwich Village.’

Cindy smiled. ‘Gave me the taste for it. I slept around. Once dreamed for seven nights, either side of the full moon, under one of the trilithons at Stonehenge — that was in the days when you were still allowed inside. Oh yes, positively promiscuous, I was.’