The Cold Calling

One last attempt to get close to whatever Ersula’s become.

‘Any way I can help …’ Adrian spread his arms. He looked simple and healthy, the least complicated of them.

‘Is there some kind of ancient site locally where I could maybe get a feel for the kind of thing you do?’

‘Oh. Nothing spectacular. Nothing like the Rollrights. There’s the Knoll, of course. Sort of collapsed cromlech. Shall I take you?’

‘No, please … I already took up too much of your time. Also, I’d kind of like to take in the atmosphere, make some notes. If you could just, like, point me in the right direction?’

‘Perhaps we could have dinner some time,’ Adrian said. ‘Just, you know, the two of us.’

Cindy heard Marcus hiss, at nobody in particular,

‘… fuck’s he doing here?’

A lean man with a greying ponytail peeled himself away from a tweedy clot of local-looking people in the churchyard and clapped Marcus on the arm. ‘Had to come, Marcus. Had to pay tribute to a remarkable lady.’

Cindy recognized Roger Falconer, respected television archaeologist and the educated, mature woman’s hunk. Even if he hadn’t known who it was, he would have realized that this was a TV personality. They had a way of projecting themselves from the crowd that was almost mystical; they made themselves shine.

‘You never even met her!’ Marcus clearly thrown off balance.

‘To my eternal regret I didn’t. But there are several people in this village who’ve testified to her remarkable abilities.’

‘Oh bollocks, Falconer. Anybody who’s read any of your crappy books knows you don’t give a toss for spiritual healing.’

Falconer smiled. ‘There’s a difference, I think, between spiritual healing and natural healing and Mrs Willis appears to have had an instinctive gift for plucking cures literally out of the hedgerows. My young colleague Adrian, for instance … We were kidding him about his psoriasis, saying he couldn’t possibly be seen on telly like that, and so he came, without even telling me, to see Mrs Willis and … gone. Gone in under a week. Flaked clean away. Now that’s remarkable.’

Falconer was speaking loudly, in his television voice. As if they were filming him. He wanted the entire village, Cindy thought, to know what a magnanimous person he was, not one to bear a grudge. And it sounded not in the least patronizing. Oh, a clever man.

Unlike Marcus, reddening.

‘Potent to the end, obviously.’ Falconer’s smile opening up two deep grooves in his lean, mobile face, from the edges of the eyes down to the wide mouth. ‘Sliced through my fence without much trouble.’

‘I’ll pay for it,’ Marcus growled, backing away.

‘I didn’t mean that, old chap. I realize she had a great affinity with Black Knoll, and it was wrong of me-’

‘High Knoll.’

‘Sorry, sorry!’ Falconer held up his hands in mock defence against a shorter, fatter, older man with glasses. ‘Look, Marcus … I know this isn’t the best time to go into all this … or maybe it is, I don’t know … but things have been said that perhaps both of us regret.’

‘Speak for your bloody self…’

‘What I want to say …’ Falconer squeezed his chin, apparently reaching a decision. ‘In cutting that fence — her last act — Mrs Willis was making a point that I’m … well, that I’m ready to take on board. I shouldn’t have installed the bloody thing. It was a stupid … high-handed gesture. No ancient monument should be considered private property. They belong to all of us. Anyway, it’s all gone now, the fence, the wire, everything. So’ — spading a hand through the air — ‘go up there whenever you like. If it stands as a kind of shrine to Mrs Willis …’

A small crowd had gathered. Marcus’s face was plum-coloured now.

‘Another thing,’ Falconer said. ‘We may be approaching the same subjects from different angles and we’re never going to agree fully, any more than I agree with young Adrian and his cronies. But we do have a common cause. Which is human enlightenment.’

Marcus spluttered something that even the good churchgoing folk of St Mary’s would discern as fucking hell.

‘I do recognize, Marcus — and Adrian certainly does — your vast knowledge of the unexplained, your passion for the paranormal. Your perhaps eccentric, rural mysticism. And so I’d like to talk … just talk … about the possibility … of your giving the odd lecture to our students at Cefn-y- bedd. Fee negotiable, of course.’

Marcus’s lips moved; no words passed between them.

‘All right,’ Falconer said. ‘I’m not going to push my luck. Just give it some thought.’ He opened a long hand towards the church door. ‘After you, chum …’

Under a very faint rain, Grayle picked up the track above what Adrian said was the helicopter shed, noticing how straight the path was, following a direct line into the shelf of low mountains.

She tried to see it as Ersula might have seen it: an ancient land, a portal to the past. Could this be a traditional English Old Straight Track connecting a string of prehistoric sites? To the Ersula she knew, that idea would be a turn-off. Ersula always maintained there was no evidence at all for the existence of ley lines. Ley lines were Grayle-stuff.

But all this was before the University of the Earth.

Grayle went on following the track to the end of the field. She found a stile there. Hesitated. Should she? The sky was a deep, shiny, all-over grey. She was wearing a light sweatshirt, jeans and sneakers. The blond clumps shoved into a baseball cap, the Eye of Horus earrings in her pocket.

She’d conceived this stupid, New Age idea of sitting by the old stones, closing her eyes and willing Ersula to come through to her. Ersula looking cross. You asshole, Grayle, this is the last time I do this, right?

Grayle forced a grin, climbed over the stile.

The church was even smaller than it looked from the outside. Mellow stone, quite cosy. And easily filled. But even so …

Packed, it was. More than packed. People were standing in the aisles, in the porch, some still outside, perhaps, in the rain. Stoical locals in their well-worn funeral-wear.

For an outsider? A woman who had been merely employed here, and for quite a short time? All right, a healer. But she hadn’t healed them all, had she?

Mrs Willis lay in her coffin on a wooden-framed bier pointed at the altar rails.

This was no outsider.

Cindy sat with Marcus on a front-row pew under dusty red and blue rays from a stained glass window showing Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane. It was all quite extraordinarily obvious.

Little Annie Davies, this was.

And they knew. They all knew.

But why had Marcus never said? For heaven’s sake, what was going on here? Cindy scanned the faces, and they told him nothing, absolutely nothing. A shadow of sorrow over some of them, but mostly it was the famous British funeral face, and it told you nothing.

Cindy stared at the coffin. Annie Davies, the unsung visionary of St Mary’s. Who had returned, most discreetly, to die. Who had quietly proved, by demonstrating the gift of healing, the validity of her experience. And who had surrendered her life-force at High Knoll, now a grim and tainted place again.

He felt a profound sadness now, an aching regret that he had not known Annie Davies while she was alive. The things she could have told him!

When the congregation rose for the first hymn, Cindy went into the Silence and, feeling suddenly quite inadequate for the occasion, called softly and tentatively, from the underside of his mind.

Annie.

Before they left for the church, he had found his way to what Marcus called the Healing Room and stood amidst the bottles and jars. In order to communicate with the spirit, the shaman must find the Sanctuary of the Essence. Why was it not here, among the remedies, in the room where Mrs Willis had healed and meditated upon