The Cold Calling

‘Wow,’ Grayle said faintly.

‘It does change you. Most of my dreams became lucid dreams — the ones where you know you’re dreaming. Where you seem to have an element of control.’

‘Sure. Dream control. I did a column on it.’

‘And, of course, that’s when it becomes risky. You think you’re in control, but in fact your subconscious mind is starting to influence your conscious mind to an alarming degree. You think you’re drawing inspiration from God, or the Earth Mother, the mind of Gaia, depending on your religious or your scientific persuasion.’

‘Like with acid trips.’

‘Indeed. And it can send you quite mad. I wasn’t happy about it, so I stopped doing it. A shaman must, above all, have discipline. Be able to count on precision.’

Cindy smiled regretfully. Grayle sat back in her chair, against the ancient, grimy panelling. Through the brown, smoky air, she examined the weird old broad, from the purple hair to the chiffon scarf to the tweed skirt and the black-stockinged legs.

‘Hold on just one moment,’ Grayle said. ‘You said shaman?’

‘The tribal shaman was the witch doctor, the priest, the counsellor, the psychiatrist, the one who interceded with the spirit world.’

‘Yeah, we have them. Collect Native American hand drums and feathers. Supervise sweat-lodges for overweight executives.’

‘We all have to make a living, Grayle. An actor, I am, by profession. Not a terribly successful one, but I’ve had my moments. Quite well known, I was at one time, on children’s television. Straight man to the more famous Kelvyn Kite. We never crossed the Atlantic, sadly. But, then, perhaps a four-foot-tall, talking bird of prey would have been a little esoteric for the American market.’

Holy Jesus, Grayle thought. Would somebody wake me up?

‘Always good with animals, I was,’ Cindy said wistfully. ‘Made Kelvyn myself, I did.’

‘So you … You’re a shaman, right? An English shaman.’

‘Celtic shaman, if you don’t mind. Our oral tradition goes back to Taliesin, the bard, in the sixth century. And, further, to the builders of the dolmens and the stone circles. As for me, I trained for three years, on and off, with Dilwyn Fychan, of Machynlleth, and other individuals too private to be mentioned. It was a calling. Some of us are called. Some of us are aware, from an early age, that we are … different.’

Cindy crossed his legs.

‘The shaman, traditionally, has a foot in two worlds. Flits about. Passes from one sphere of existence to another. A condition usually reflected in his personal life and mode of dress. Neither one thing nor the other.’

Cindy smiled. Grayle stared.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘You’re, uh … like, a guy, right?’

‘Prehistoric sites were often misused,’ Marcus said. ‘Still are — satanic rites and all that nonsense. But this was nothing like that. This was a social thing. Ultimate degradation for an executed criminal. Making an example.’

Maiden drank some whisky, his first since the last night of his old life.

‘Used to do something similar with highwaymen,’ Marcus said. ‘Gibbets by the roadside. Nothing so romantic on the Welsh border. These were sheep-thieves. Or domestic murderers. Chap comes home drunk, clobbers his wife with a bottle. Seedy stuff. That’s what makes it worse, really — shows a contempt for the site.’

‘So what did they do?’

‘You all right, Maiden?’

‘Just … carry on. Go on.’

‘There’s a fairly honourable tradition — a prehistoric tradition — known as excarnation. Laying out of corpses on some hillside to free the spirit to the natural elements. This was different, obviously. You cold, Maiden? You’re shivering.’

Marcus gathered up a log, opened the door of the wood-stove. Orange splinters flew up when he tossed in the new log. Maiden didn’t feel any warmer.

‘They laid the body of the executed criminal on its back on the capstone. For the crows and buzzards to pick clean. The foxes to plunder the bones.’

‘When was this?’

‘I don’t know when it started. It went on, amazingly, until early in the nineteenth century. This was a harsh place, Maiden.’

Maiden drained his glass, reached for the bottle, but Marcus took it.

‘That’s what Black Knoll recalls. I hated it. That’s why they all rejected Annie’s vision. Because it was a place of the rotting dead.’

‘Marcus-’

‘But she purified it, Maiden. What happened to her restored the sacredness. The locals had been desecrating it for centuries. It was a bad place, a diseased place, somewhere you didn’t go, that parents warned their children about. And this child … she restored this ancient site to what it was intended to be. A place of light.’

‘Marcus, don’t make too much of this, but I think I dreamt about it.’

‘What?’ Marcus shook back his heavy, grey hair, pushed his glasses into place. ‘When?’

‘Hospital. I thought I was waking up, but it was another dream. It was like an open tomb. I was the corpse. Decaying. I had no eyes. I could feel the birds plucking … Oh, shit, Marcus, I don’t-’

Marcus took Maiden’s glass and poured him more whisky.

XXIV

Around midnight, the bulb in the bedside lamp began to sing. Close to one a.m., it blew, leaving Cindy to sit in the darkness, in his dressing gown, and ponder the vexed question of whether or not he was, as Kelvyn Kite had often stated, simply a stupid old tart.

The American girl had made an excuse and fled fairly rapidly after discovering that the person to whom she had unburdened herself was not only old enough to be her mother but also old enough to be her father, as it were.

He hadn’t meant to startle her; he wanted to help her. What if her poor sister had been … No! Don’t even think of it!

What if? All those what ifs?

What if the good and patient Chief Inspector Peter Hatch had been right all along, and there were simply several common or garden, sad, uncomplicated killers out there, rather than one person harbouring a warped and lethal obsession with earth-magic?

What if his own exercise in pendulum dowsing over the maps and the journals had been as spurious as the ‘shamanic powers’ of which he was so pathetically proud?

What if tonight’s paranormal ‘experience’ at the High Knoll burial chamber was no more than a perverse and futile combination of paranoia and wishful thinking?

What if Sydney Mars-Lewis was no more than an old humbug of the most ludicrous kind, trying to make something significant out of his sexual ambivalence and social inadequacy, unable to face up to his reduced status as a failed actor relegated to the end of the pier with a stuffed bird?

Well, these were hardly new questions. Indeed, one night, in a dressing room in Scarborough, about seven years ago, he had almost given way to an impulse to hang himself by his dressing-gown cord from an overhead heating pipe.

Wearily, he climbed out of bed and switched on the central light, which was half smothered by grimy beams.

‘An old manic-depressive, you are, boy. That’s the only certainty.’

From his suitcase, he took the fax he’d received, just before leaving the caravan, from Gareth Milburn at Crucible, the pagan magazine. He’d asked the boy for information about the readers’