The Cold Calling

very long time ago.

‘Been talking about you, we have, Bobby.’ Cindy gazed beyond the small circle of light. ‘On the basis that you know more than you have been able to tell us. More than you know you know, if I am making myself clear.’

Maiden hadn’t realized until he sat down how tired he was. His head nodded, although he knew there was some reason he shouldn’t sleep.

‘Bobby!’ Cindy’s hands clapping his face. ‘Not yet, lovely. Listen. Listen to me. We’re going to take a leaf out of Professor Falconer’s book.’

‘Bastard borrowed the bloody book, anyway,’ Marcus said.

‘Sister Anderson told you, did she not, how she brought into play the light of High Knoll in the moments before your heart was restarted, yes? We believe that you were exposed, in those moments, to what we might call the night side of these stones. And something lodged in what, to avoid a more contentious word, I will call your subconscious mind. What I want to do now is take you back, using the dream techniques employed by the professor and his people. Are you familiar?’

Maiden shook his head.

Cindy explained simply.

‘Whatever,’ Maiden said, long past caring. ‘Whatever.’

Cindy nodded, stood up, grabbed the suitcase from the plastic sheet and strode off into the darkness.

After a while, Malcolm howled suddenly, once, his wedge-shaped head inclined to the starry sky.

Marcus patted him. ‘Settle down, old son. He’s just a bloody old ham.’

‘Where’s he gone?’ Maiden wondered.

‘Fuck knows.’

Behind them, the chamber was a primeval altar on fat legs. It had cracks and fissures, filled with black shadow now, where the wan candlelight could not penetrate. Maiden put out a hand and touched the stone for the first time and recoiled. It really wasn’t that cold. As though blood was pumping through it.

‘Maiden, you-’

‘Sorry, Marcus?’

‘You couldn’t have hallucinated the whole thing, could you? I mean, this woman. This … butchery.’

‘Due to brain damage? And lack of sleep? And she’s really still alive?’

Marcus said nothing.

‘And the blood?’

‘Sorry.’ Marcus rubbed his eyes. ‘Never had anything to do with anything like this before. Who do you think …?’

‘It was a kind of accident, Marcus. It was supposed to be me.’

In the blackness of his heart of hearts, even he wants you popped now … Killed, then. Killed. All right?

‘Not this bent-copper nonsense?’

‘Right,’ Maiden said. ‘The bent-copper nonsense.’

Some contract-psycho. Maybe the same inept out-of-town hardmen he and Vic encounted in the flat. In which case they’d better be well out of town when the news got back to Tony Parker. One way or another, they were going down, all the way down. There’d be another bloodbath.

And Riggs?

The trail of blood would make a big circle all around Mr Riggs, and he’d stand there in the centre, perfectly still and perfectly dry. As ever.

Into the circle of light came the bird of prey.

‘Bloody hell,’ Marcus said.

‘Been consulting my guides, I have.’ It hung over Maiden, wings spread wide.

‘Dear God,’ Marcus said cynically.

It was a full-length cloak made of some rough material like sacking with rows of feathers sprouting out of it.

Cindy also carried a drum. And a large bird made of some black and red fabric, with a curved beak and big, globular, spiteful eyes.

‘Off-the-peg shamanic-wear,’ Marcus explained to Maiden, with heavy ennui. ‘The feathers are especially meaningful for Lewis. Kite’s his totem-creature. Once wrote a piece for The Phenomenologist about spending three days and nights fasting in the Cambrian mountains, and on the last night, the great red kite flew down in a dream. The red kite, at the time, being almost extinct in Britain and more or less confined to that particular part of mid-Wales.’

‘What a memory you have, Marcus.’

‘Kelvyn Kite.’ Maiden awakening to an old, fogged memory. ‘That’s Kelvyn Kite.’

Marcus looked up, but the bird said nothing.

‘Kelvyn Kite. This big talking hawk. On telly when I was a kid.’

‘You must be older than you look, Bobby,’ Cindy said, sitting down, arranging the cloak.

A single, hollow drumbeat.

‘This place is a special place. The lights down there are the little lights of England. The darkness behind us is the darkness of Wales. Above us, heaven. Below us, Earth. Duality. The Black Mountains: a sacred frontier.’

Cindy paused.

‘Four leys cross here. From stone to tumulus to holy hill and ancient church. Lines of spirit. Soul-paths.’

Maiden saw that Cindy was holding the flat drum between his knees. Looked so much bigger in the cloak of feathers and yet less substantial. Shimmering in the unsteady light. But then, nothing seemed entirely solid seen through a single eye blurred with tears, drugs, fatigue.

‘And, behind me, the stones themselves, set to the midsummer sunrise. Stones of light.’

On the drum, Cindy’s hands had found a slow rhythm, regular as a hall clock ticking, and Maiden became aware of his heart beating, in time to the drum.

‘And stones of darkness. Because, when times grew harsh and the land itself darkened into war and strife, the religion of the Celtic priesthood, the Druids, degenerated into blood ritual, animal sacrifice, human sacrifice. And the shaman no longer waited in the chamber for the blessing of the sunrise but stood, with sickle raised, under the full moon, and blood gushed over the capstone and trickled in rivulets down the fissures in the stone and so to the earth.’

Maiden flinched. The drumbeats speeded up; he thought of the thrumming of blood through veins. Oh, Em, oh God, I’m sorry, I’m sorry you ever had to know me.

‘And so the Knoll became a place of fear and death.’ Cindy’s voice matching the rise-and-fall rhythm, acquiring the timbre of a chapel preacher. ‘High Knoll, in effect, became Black Knoll.’

Bang on the drum.

‘High Knoll.’

Bang.

‘Black Knoll.’

Bang.

‘Du-al-it-y!’

Bang-bang-bang.

‘Think on it, children. Think on it, as we call upon the guardian of this site to yield to us the images lodged in the soul of our friend Bobby. Ready, are we, Bobby?’

‘What’s going to happen?’ Token question; he didn’t give a shit.

‘We take you back,’ Cindy said. ‘To the minutes of your death.’

‘And you leave me there. No need to bring me out of it.’

XXXIII