The Cold Calling

We’re mad, Marcus thought, still amazed at himself for going along with this bollocks. Mad.

Standing here like relatives around a bloody deathbed.

Insane. Or will be by morning.

Supposed it was the remains of the bloody teacher in him, but he liked a certain level of order. Liked his anarchy to be structured. Which was what The Phenomenologist was supposed to be all about: bunch of tweedy old academics and retired surgeons and vicars and bank managers whose hero was the immortal Charles Fort, collector of yarns about black rain and toads that fell from the sky. All right, it’d been taken over by the biddies now but it was still respectable people … breaking out of their social strait-jackets, daring to consider the absurd.

To consider. Not to be bloody part of it, for Christ’s sake!

Maiden lay on the foam-rubber mattress from Marcus’s backpack. The capstone, a little above chest height to Marcus, was on a slight incline, so that Maiden’s head was higher than his feet. There was a small cushion under his head and they covered him with a travelling rug.

‘All right there, lovely?’

‘Fine,’ he said dully. Poor bugger was half out of it. Staked out on the tomb like an offering — Lewis blatantly exposing him to the dark side of the Knoll. Maiden too low, too beaten down, to care. And was he a killer? Was he lying to them, to himself? Was he a killer?

And where the hell was this nonsense going to get them? Falconer’s dreaming experiment was designed to find out if human consciousness was affected in any quantifiable fashion by the location and composition of ancient sacred monuments. Whereas Lewis seemed to think Maiden’s dreams could solve everything. Lewis ought to take over the damned magazine. Get on well with the biddies.

The first candle had burned three-quarters down and Cindy the bloody Shaman, in his ritual cloak, blew it out and Marcus heard him ramming another one down the lantern.

‘We’ll watch him in ninety-minute shifts, all right? You know what you are doing, Marcus?’

‘Every few minutes, I check his eyes for REM.’

‘And then you give him a few minutes more — no more than three, because the action in a dream happens very quickly.’

‘Then I wake him up, poor sod.’

‘Very gently. You want him talking about the dream almost before he is out of it. He may fall asleep again and awake with no memory of having spoken to you. We have to be able to play his dream back to him, make him face up to it. How is the recorder?’

‘You have to shake it, hope the bloody light comes on. Haven’t used it in years.’

‘Hardly needs to be broadcast quality, Marcus. Switch on just before you wake him. Can you hear me, Bobby? Very tired, you are, yes? Now, I want you to empty your mind. I don’t want you lying there thinking about what happened tonight. Just make yourself quiet inside. Watch the sky.’

Lewis lit the new candle.

Another two hours, it would be dawn. The miraculous dawn at High Knoll. Marcus was freezing, wished he had a bloody cloak of feathers. During Lewis’s shift, he’d managed to doze intermittently, for about two minutes at a time, before the cold razored through his duffel coat.

He realized Malcolm had moved away, leaving another large cold patch. Aware of the dog standing a few yards away, growling uncertainly, and the voice of Cindy the bloody Shaman.

‘Perhaps you could assist me, Marcus?’

Opening his eyes fully to see Lewis leaning over the stone like some Victorian granite angel over a grave.

‘‘S wrong?’

Marcus stumbled to his feet and approached the stones.

The lantern showed the sleeping Maiden’s visible eyelid behaving like a moth trapped in a jar.

‘Oh. That all?’

During his own shift, Marcus had spent too long leaning over the capstone, persuading Maiden to spill some irrelevant nonsense about a woman under a streetlamp, while Lewis sat on the groundsheet, legs folded under him, meditating or whatever they did. Not even coming out of it when Maiden had begun to weep, Marcus feeling obliged to take off his eyepatch to let the tears out, endless bloody tears, crying himself back to sleep, poor bastard. Marcus fighting tears, too, because all the worst nights of his life had involved females dying: Celia in hospital, Sally at home, Mrs Willis here at the Knoll. His adult life a series of bridges over rivers of death.

‘No. That’s not quite all, Marcus. Thing is … a little resistant, he is now, to awakening.’

‘You can’t wake him? Well, that’s all we bloody need, isn’t it?’

‘And your cassette recorder is malfunctioning.’

The recorder lay on the capstone. Marcus snatched it up and hit it with the side of his hand. The red light wavered on then went out.

Maiden’s face had that frozen effigy look. Still in REM, and thank Christ for that because if his unpatched eye wasn’t moving you could think he was …

‘Don’t like the look of him. Come on, man, snap out of it.’

‘Softly!’

‘Bugger softly. Man’s got bloody brain damage. Could be that stuff you filched out of the Healing Room. I did warn you.’

‘Bobby.’ Lewis shook Maiden’s shoulder. The rug over him moved and Lewis pulled back, holding the candle high when one of Maiden’s arms came out as if he was going to grab it.

‘Bobby? Can you hear me?’

Maiden’s hand went instead to his throat, dragging the rug away. His head started rolling from side to side. He began to cough.

‘Come on now, Bobby.’

A dry, rasping cough. His head still rolling until it dislodged the cushion, which fell off the capstone and then his head was rolling on the bloody stone, you could hear it, and it must be hurting and even that didn’t bring him out of it.

‘Don’t think I like this, Lewis. To put it mildly.’

Chest heaved weakly and the cough softened into a kind of hoarse breathing, as though there was something he wanted to bring up, but he was too weak.

‘What if he bloody dies?’

‘Again?’

‘Yes, again. Except, Lewis, that this time there’ll be no whitecoats, no crash team, no oxygen mask, no Scottish nurse with healing hands. Only a silly old sod who should know better and a lunatic in a bird-suit with a lot of bloody explaining to do. Maiden … wake the fuck up!’

Marcus pulled the rug away. Maiden’s chest was throbbing weakly, like a sparrow’s when it’s been hit by a car and you know it’s only seconds away from expiring.

‘Oh,’ the madman Lewis said. ‘Oh dear.’

‘Oh fucking dear, indeed! He wanted to go to the police station. He begged you to take him to the fucking police station … but you had to be clever.’

‘Because the police — fair play to them — would have been no help at all. Because, if that girl is dead, they’ll never know why.’

‘And you will?’

‘I do, Marcus. I want Bobby to know. It’s important Bobby knows.’

‘It’s more important he bloody lives.’

Maiden was making a sort of whooping noise in the back of his throat, as though there was some ghastly blockage there. He gagged. His fingers clenched. Back arched. Whole body tightened up, clenched, went rigid, his