The Cold Calling

And it was suddenly incredible. The map was alive. Green hills flexing like muscles, bulging into brown. Roads and rivers wriggling. Black symbols translating themselves into groups of houses and telephone boxes and stone churches and Collen Hall in its neat square of tamed countryside.

A pale glow around it. Like the glow around caer, carn, standing stone, church, the pencil line joining them replaced by a taut wire of white neon.

He was tingling.

‘This guy would feel … connected? Right? Wired.’

‘Go on,’ Cindy said.

‘I mean, he would feel that because he knows this secret countryside of glowing … glowing things, he’s … What am I trying to say?’

‘In touch with the spirit countryside,’ Marcus said.

‘Which is what?’

‘A can of worms. But if you imagine another layer of existence … a numinous landscape both within and around the one we can see. If you imagine Lewis’s hypothetical assassin feeling himself to be somehow moving around in that separate country.’

‘As the shaman does,’ Cindy said.

Marcus groaned.

‘But this is what the shaman does,’ Cindy insisted. ‘He or she …’

‘Or in your case both.’

‘… can move along the spirit-paths. Shamanic flight.’

‘Fuelled, no doubt, by a mug or two of magic-mush-room tea,’ Marcus said.

Cindy ignored him. ‘This is what you are doing now, Bobby, in a limited way. You’re looking at the map and putting yourself into the landscape. But the map is not the real landscape, the map is a pattern of symbols your mind is able to use to create a landscape. Which may be even more vivid than what we call the real one. Does this make sense?’

‘In a way.’

The glow around Collen Hall was twice as intense as the others because it marked the confluence of two lines.

‘This may be a naive question,’ Maiden said. ‘But why can’t he just enjoy the buzz? Why does he need to kill people?’

‘A policeman is asking this?’ Cindy was running his hands over the bookshelves.

‘I suppose what I’m looking for is something more meaningful. If this guy’s educated enough to research history and folklore and what have you … he’s not just a slasher, is he?’

‘See what you mean.’ Marcus sat astride an arm of the sofa. ‘Well, these are ritual sites. Most of them, at some time or another, have seen sacrifices, human or otherwise. Blood sacrifices. Blood is the life-force. Blood was shed to fertilize the land. Goes way back in most societies.’

‘We’re looking for an educated, primitive savage?’

Savage.

Took a blade to her. Em. Went in, in the dark, and she’s probably thinking it’s me. Perhaps he climbs into bed with her. Whispering the odd endearment. A little heavy breathing. Finds her throat with his fingers … slashes … and again and again again … until her head’s almost off. And then … what? Pulls back the bedclothes, because there’s blood everywhere by now and he can’t see what he’s doing. Sticks the knife into her exposed abdomen and rips upwards. Takes it out, puts it back and rips downwards, all the way to her-

‘Stop it, Bobby, you can’t change it.’ Cindy placed a book on the desk. Black. No dust jacket. Golden embossed title.

Pagan Images.

‘I said you were close to him, Bobby. Look at his face.’

Cindy opened the book.

XXXVII

It occurred to Grayle, as she waited on the forecourt at the University of the Earth, that she was going to have to come clean with Adrian.

Problem with this wedding was that the bride and groom both knew whose sister she was; no way it wouldn’t get mentioned before or after whatever kind of ceremony this turned out to be.

At least there wouldn’t be the embarrassment of having to admit to Roger Falconer that she would not be doing any kind of article on his project. Adrian had invited her in for coffee, but she said she wanted to get to Rollright in good time, get an idea of what kind of clothes people were wearing.

Now he came bounding out of Cefn-y-bedd, still in his army sweater. Looking like the son of the house, some young officer, played in the movie by — yeah, yeah — Hugh Grant. Only a little beefier and with Redford’s hair. He was carrying his stuff in this ridiculous, sausage-shaped leather bag.

‘What the hell is that?’

‘It’s a cricket bag,’ Adrian said, and she started to laugh, because this guy would just have to carry his suit in a goddamn cricket bag.

Suddenly feeling better than she had since she arrived here. Adrian … well, he might be into dreaming on stones and recording EVP messages and all that Holy Grayle stuff, but he did it in this big-schoolboy way that was kind of infectious. Maybe the whole scene would be healthier if there were fewer stoned, wild-eyed beardies and more straight-up guys like this.

Reversing on the forecourt, she glanced in the driver’s mirror and saw someone watching them from the porch. Falconer, with his ponytail and his denim shirt and his tight jeans. Some guy on the Courier had once said a ponytail was just a swinging dick you were allowed to wear outside your pants. Watching Falconer watching her, as she swung the little car out through the gates, she just knew that, at some stage of the game, this man had fucked Ersula.

No big deal, unless he also fucked her mind.

‘The foliate face,’ Cindy said. ‘The Green Man. You saw one on St Mary’s church yesterday and it frightened you.’

Maiden leaned over the book, hands flat on the desk. ‘This is a different face.’

‘Oh, they’re all different. But substantially the same. An image which is half man, half vegetation. A woodland sprite, he is, or a fearsome giant, with leaves and twigs sprouting from every orifice. A personification of nature, with enormous energy and fecundity and … an absolutely ferocious life-force. He is a guardian of the earth, Bobby. A god of ecology, powerful and forbidding.’

Maiden closed the book. ‘He doesn’t look the kind of guy who helps old ladies with their gardens.’

‘Looks inexplicably malevolent. Usually seen as a kind of mediator between man and nature who fertilizes the earth, but a woman called Kathleen Basford, who’s written a study of the chap, suggests he’s also a symbol of death.’

‘Violent death?’

Cindy looked up. ‘Aggressive enough for it, isn’t he?’

Poured himself a glass of spring water, and Maiden saw how tired he was looking. Up all night too, and he was not so young. There were cracks in the face make-up, the bangles hung from knobbly wrists.

‘Bobby, I asked if you’d seen the face in one of your unfortunate dreams and I don’t think you replied.’

Wasn’t sure if it was a dream or not. Couldn’t remember. I can now.’

H. W. Worthy’s funeral parlour at the bottom of Elham high street. A wreath on a mock grave. A sombre, dark-leaved wreath.

‘You know how you see things from a certain angle, and you sometimes make out a face. Clouds, coals in the fire, knots on the back of a door. I suppose, if you see a face in a wreath, it’s going to look like this.’

Remembering when he saw the face in the wreath, what had happened to take his mind off the grotesque illusion.