The Cold Calling

like … whooosh.’

‘Unlike you,’ Lyndon McAffrey said heavily.

‘Unlike me. Like, Ersula would not eat this doughnut. She doesn’t do comfort-eating. Ersula is very controlled. Has concentration. Focus. All of that.’

‘Dear God,’ said Lyndon. ‘We hired the wrong sister.’

‘Also, as a committed academic, Ersula vaguely despises the inevitable superficiality of journalism.’

Lyndon McAffrey nodded moodily. Twenty-five years ago, he’d become the paper’s first black deputy city editor. Since then there’d been three black city editors and Lyndon … well, he was still number two. He knew all about being vaguely despised.

‘Hey!’ The waitress suddenly screamed. ‘You are! I saw you on TV. You’re Grayle Underhill? Holy Grayle? For Crissakes, this is incredible, this is fate. I was gonna write to you. I need your help.’

The waitress pulled out a chair, flopped into it.

‘See, my boyfriend, who most times is this real sweet guy, every few weeks he comes on kind of mean, and I noticed — this is true, I swear on my mother’s grave — he has to shave twice … three times a day?’

Lyndon looked down at his plate, closed lips strained by an uh-huh kind of smile.

‘Time of the full moon, huh?’ Grayle said without enthusiasm.

‘See, I tell this to people,’ the waitress said, ‘and they’re like … oh, sure. Then I’m reading that thing you wrote about how men, they all have this werewolf element to a degree, and I’m going, Right, shit, yes, this is the woman I have to talk with. And now here you are. You tell me this isn’t, like, karma or something …?’

Grayle said, ‘Listen, uh …’

‘Marcia.’

‘Marcia. Right. OK. The piece I wrote, Marcia, that was like an interview with the author of this book, The Lycanthropic Virus, which examines the effect of the full moon on society and blah, blah, blah. So if you have a problem in this area, the person you need to, uh, approach is the author, D. Harvey Baumer. Maybe if you wrote him through the publisher?’

‘That would take forever,’ Marcia said dubiously. ‘See, the way you wrote the article, it was like you really had a handle on the whole thing.’

‘Yeah, that’s … that’s part of the job, Marcia. Look, all I can suggest is maybe if I was to do an article on your situation.’ Grayle pulled a pen from her bag. ‘So your second name is …?’

‘Uh-uh …’ Marcia was up on her feet and back behind the counter in a couple of seconds. ‘I don’t think so. I think I misunderstood. I mean, you sound like some kind of journalist …’

Lyndon started to chuckle, dusting sugar crystals from his big hands.

‘This is not funny,’ Grayle told him when Marcia, mercifully, had gone to wait on another table. ‘I get this all the time. You write a New Age column, people think you must be a person of, like, higher dimensions.’

‘You write a crime column, they think you’re a sleazeball with Mob connections,’ Lyndon said unsympathetically. ‘What’s your problem?’

‘This is different. This is about spirituality. How do I know I’m not messing up someone’s immortal soul? How do I know how much of what I’m publicizing is true or at least well intentioned and life-enhancing? Crime, you know who the bad guys are, New Age, you can never be quite sure.’

Grayle licked raspberry jam from her fingers. Nearly thirty years separated her and Lyndon, a sweet tooth glued them together. Journalism could be a hostile world, especially when most of your colleagues thought everything you wrote about was a piece of crap.

‘Ersula thinks I just peck around things, like a chicken.’

‘She thinks that, huh?’ Lyndon’s eyes widened. ‘Imagine.’

‘Yeah, yeah. Screw you too. Maybe she’s right. Back when I was in college and she was still in school we were both heavily into New Age. Like, we’d talk about cosmic consciousness and read the Tarot and stuff in my room and have a lot of innocent fun. I should’ve realized that Ersula, even then, she only had serious fun. She would throw herself into something and then emerge the other side, dismissing it all as bullshit. When she was fourteen or fifteen and I was at college I found she’d been, you know … initiated? As a witch?’

‘Eye of newt?’ Lyndon was unfazed. ‘Toe of frog?’

‘As I recall, they were known as the Hermetic Sisterhood of Central Park West. I didn’t look too closely at her altar. I think it was just candles and pentagrams, but she made sure and piled it all in the trash before the folks got home from vacation. It was OK; by then she’d concluded this was all phoney shit anyway. You wanted to get into the real, authentic stuff, you checked out True Ethnic Sources. It was a short hop from there to anthropology and related studies … and to despising her sister, her sister’s crystals, her sister’s amulets … OK, go ahead, read the letter …’

St Mary’s

Herefordshire

England

August 20Dear Grayle,First off, if you want the nice stuff about the accommodation and the scenery and all the wonderful people I’m meeting, you should read Mom’s letter. I’m not doing that crap twice.OK. You may be interested in some of this, but for Christ’s sake, DSF!As I may have indicated, I was frankly skeptical about the University of the Earth summer school. There is a lunatic fringe which has infiltrated archeology here in Britain (people who believe ancient sites were strung out in mystical straight lines, to follow the courses of some mysterious earth-power which they cannot define except to say it can give you a buzz) and I was less than enthusiastic at the thought of working with an organization which seeks to build bridges with these airheads.However, in the absence of a better way of researching prehistoric remains in the British Isles and getting paid for it … here I am, in this tiny, comparatively isolated village on the border of England and Wales.So … OK.The dreaming experiment.The airheads have been suggesting for some time that human consciousness can be altered or infiltrated by the ‘energies’ at ancient burial mounds, stone circles, whatever, and that this occurs most effectively during sleep.Our distant ancestors were people whose day-to-day survival depended upon an intimacy with their environment, an understanding — which we today would consider inexplicably precognitive — of what the Earth was going to do and when. Dreams were considered to be an important way in which useful information was conveyed to them. In the Old Testament, wasn’t it Jacob who slept on a pillow of stone and had prophetic dreams? While in ancient China, the emperor would spend the whole night on stone before making some important decision. You get the idea.The University of the Earth Dream Survey aims to establish whether specific images or motifs occur in the dreams of people sleeping at particular ‘sacred’ sites. Individuals elect to spend the night in a sleeping bag inside a circle or a burial chamber with a helper or therapeute who, while they sleep, stays awake with a tape recorder, watching for the Rapid Eye Movement which will indicate they are dreaming. At which stage the dreamer is awoken and gives a full resume of the dream into the recorder.Off-the-wall? Yeah, I thought so when I was appointed therapeute to a middle-aged woman who talked about meeting fairies with which she frolicked naked under a waterfall! Then Roger suggested I should sleep at a site myself… and my mind was somewhat blown by an extraordinary vivid and lucid dream — one in which I was fully aware of dreaming and able to function on a mental level I would never have imagined possible.I was, you might say, hooked.

Lyndon shook sugar from Ersula’s letter. ‘Looks like she’s headed back your way.’

‘Which is not good, for the reasons I already stated.’

‘Whooosh?’

‘As an academic, Ersula believes nowadays in the power of the mind over the power of the spirit. Well, OK, she has a good mind and I’m stupid, and when you’re stupid all you got to fall back on most of the time is, like, the dream that some kind of spiritual earthquake will come along and get us out of all this shit.’

‘This may be getting too heavy and West Coast for a poor Brooklyn boy,’ Lyndon said.

Grayle stared at the river of blood seeping out of the half-eaten doughnut. For Ersula, nothing was an inexplicable phenomenon any more. So nothing was spiritually threatening.

She looked up, saw her own frustrated face in the mirror across the counter, lumps of blond hair all over the place, the Eye of Horus earrings swinging. Crazy Grayle Underhill, New Age Sub-culture Columnist, widely syndicated.