The Cold Calling

day here. Look … OK …’ Grayle focused on Cindy over the rim of her white teacup. ‘You know why I’m here. Why are you here?’

‘Ah.’ Cindy needed time to think. ‘It would take too long. We’ll talk tomorrow. After I see Mr Bacton.’

‘Oh. OK.’ Grayle put her cup on the floor. ‘Uh, this … guardian … trace-image, whatever. I mean, they can’t harm you, these things, can they?’

‘Not … not physically. No. Probably not physically.’

‘But they can fuck up your head?’

‘I suppose … Yes, as you so charmingly put it, I suppose they can fuck up your head.’

But that’s not what really worries you, is it?

Cindy lay in bed again, with the light out. It would be dawn soon. No matter; he didn’t need much sleep these days.

The Green Man.

The oldest guardian. Stern defender of the Earth. Just talking it out with Grayle Underhill had made it so much clearer in his mind. He could almost feel the Green Man writhing there.

And Grayle’s sister was missing.

Am I quite mad? Cindy wondered before sleep consented to take him. Please God, let me be mad.

XXV

This is how it goes, Grayle thought, struggling with the zipper on her jeans. This is how it happens.

Outside the window, morning rinsed the pink stone of the village.

So you do something rash and you wind up in a strange place. You’re lonely and anxious and it all seems so futile. This is when you’re at your most vulnerable. This is how rich, empty widows wind up backing half-assed business deals and homeless kids get sucked into fruitcake religious sects.

Somebody is kind to you, is how it starts. Deep into the night, somebody wants to listen.

Just that, by daylight, the whole idea of a cross-dressing actor-ventriloquist who believed he was into a mystical tradition with a direct line to the megalith-builders seemed a whole lot less convincing than it had last night.

Plus, why should Cindy suddenly pick up on her in a bar? What was he doing here anyway and why had he not wanted to tell her last night? If he was looking up his old friend Marcus Bacton, why was he staying at the inn, and why was he alone?

Grayle felt calmer and stronger this morning. She would investigate the University of the Earth. She would do it objectively and efficiently. She would find out what it was that had so seduced Ersula, but she would resist its allure. And Cindy’s.

Get wise. Grayle moved down the dark, twisty stairs to chase up a small breakfast before seeking out Cefn- y-bedd. Put some distance.

‘What’s up with you, Maiden?’ Marcus dangerously dug a fork into the toaster to retrieve a fractured slice. ‘I mean, what the bloody hell is up? You look like you haven’t slept.’

‘That’s because I haven’t slept.’

‘Oh … shit!’ Marcus held the toaster upside down and a million dry crumbs came out on the stone worktop. At the sight of the blackened heap, Maiden erupted into dry coughs and stumbled to his feet to run himself a glass of water. Marcus brushed the debris to the floor and carried the toast to the table on the end of a fork.

‘That’s it.’ He sat down. ‘That is fucking it. ‘

Malcolm, the dog, ambled over, checked out the ancient crumbs, sniffed and turned away. Maiden drank the water slowly.

‘Had a piece for the magazine yesterday.’ Marcus unwrapped a pack of hard, chilled butter. ‘Woman in Norfolk claims actual fairies have been performing scenes from A Midsummer-Night’s Dream in her bloody greenhouse. Been a subscriber since 1962. What do I do with that?’

‘Offer her the editorship?’

Marcus stared at him. ‘You may be right. I’ll bury Mrs Willis today, full honours, be as nice as I can to the relatives, if any turn up. And then-’

‘She have any children?’

‘Niece in Hay. Another in Allensmore. One of them, I can’t remember which, thinks she might make it to the funeral.’

‘But if Mrs Willis was Annie Davies …’

‘Then there’ll be a few cousins and second cousins in the village. But did they know? And if they did, will they admit it? Old prejudices die hard, places like this. I’ll bury her, and then that’s it.’

‘What is?’

‘Get out. Piss off. Surrender The Phenomenologist to the mad biddies. Put this place on the market. Must be some appeal in a castle, even if the house is disintegrating.’

Maiden filled the kettle, set it down on the stove. ‘Maybe Falconer would buy it.’

‘Thank you, Maiden. Over my dead, fucking body. Rather flog it as an outward-bound centre for your ten- year-old car-thieves.’

Marcus was suddenly sunk into profound misery, bloodhound eyes blurring behind his glasses.

‘Went into the bloody Healing Room late last night. Core of the house for the past year. All those bottles and jars, with Mrs Willis around, they were full of mystery. Potions and elixirs. All drawing energy from her. Full of a sort of condensed life-force. And at the same time you’d feel this overwhelming peace and calm in there. Now it’s just old bottles full of dead and rotting gunge. Have to put them all in bin bags, take them to the tip.’

‘I’ll do it, if you like.’

Marcus shook his head, splattering butter on a fragment of brittle toast. ‘If there’s a message in those bottles, Maiden, it’s for me. I look at my life … I mean is that fucking it? Standing in a desert, surrounded by graves. Celia. Little Sally. Mrs Willis. Possibility of seeing them again’s about all there is to look forward to, you get to my age.’

‘You’re sixty,’ Maiden protested.

‘Unless, of course, your own version of the Other Side is the truth of it,’ Marcus said. ‘In which case we’re all stuffed, aren’t we?’

There was the sound of tyres on the forecourt. Marcus dropped his burnt toast.

Maiden saw someone getting out of a very old but beautifully polished black Morris Minor. ‘Woman. Late middle-age, mauvy hair? Tweed skirt, kind of mohair sweater with white woolly lambs on the front. Gold earrings, necklaces, bangles.’

‘Sounds hellish,’ Marcus said. ‘If we keep quiet maybe it’ll go away.’

‘Might be one of Mrs Willis’s nieces.’

It certainly wasn’t a policeman, so Maiden made for the front door and dragged it open before the woman had time to knock. It was a strange moment. She just stood there looking at him for several seconds. She was as tall as he was. She had the small, glittering eyes of a bird of prey.

‘Well,’ she said at last. ‘You’re not Marcus Bacton, are you, lovely?’

A long, flat-topped hill. Like a bed, with a pillow of trees at one end. Grayle headed toward the trees, as directed by Amy Jenkins, the landlady. Remembering what Ersula had written about the curious magic of this place.

She came to a plain farm gate and it was open. Walked through, and suddenly — like … wow — there was, below her, this unbelievably beautiful, rambling, mellow stone house spread out like a sleeping lion. The kind of country house they tried to clone in Beverly Hills and failed because the result was just too movie-set perfect. High walls suggested gardens with fishpools and stuff.

Typically — because the house was irrelevant to what went on there — Ersula had never referred to it, except as ‘the center’. It looked more of a home than an educational establishment, which explained why Ersula and the others had had apartments over the stables, and why folks on the courses needed accommodation in the