The Cold Calling Part 10

'It doesn't matter? '

This was how she'd been for nearly a week. Not bothered about anything. Pale, listless. Dried up. Etiolated. No-one who saw her now would even recognize the bustling widow who'd turned up at the door, having come by bus and walked over a mile after his advertis.e.m.e.nt for a cleaner.

Cleaner. Ha. Much later, Marcus had discovered that the crafty old soul had made a few inquiries about him, discovered that here was a retired man with no practical skills to speak of but an undying interest in the Mysterious. And a house that was far too big for him: lots of room for jars and potions.

'Don't do this to me, old love,' Marcus said. 'You know it matters like h.e.l.l that you won't be able to go to the Knoll.'

Remembering how unutterably moved he'd been when he'd introduced her to the Knoll. When she'd stood by the burial chamber in silence, taking several long, slow breaths before declaring that he was right, it was special, it had a healing air. And, by G.o.d, she knew how to use it. How to focus it and channel it and pa.s.s it on. Look at the Anderson woman ...

'I never told you,' Mrs Willis said in that dreamy way she sometimes had. 'But I saw a black light.'

'You saw what? '

What remained of the English teacher in him restrained itself from pointing out that you couldn't actually have a black light. This was no time for b.l.o.o.d.y semantics.

'Tell me, old love,' he said. 'When was this?'

'What's that?'

'When? When did you see this ...?'

'Last Thursday night, would it be?'

'You went at night? You shouldn't be going out at b.l.o.o.d.y night! I didn't see you go.'

Mrs Willis smiled the old sweet smile. 'You're a sound sleeper, boy.'

'At night? I don't understand.' Bewilderment and panic jostling one another in his chest. 'What's going on? b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l, Mrs Willis, that's why you've been off colour, is it?'

'Not been much of a housekeeper, have I?'

'Forget that. Jesus Christ-'

'Marcus!'

'Sorry. Look. Just tell me. This black light. What d'you mean a "black light"? How can you see a black light at night? What are we talking about here? Was it some premonition about Falconer? Why did you see Fraser-Hale? What did he tell you? What's going on?'

Mrs Willis just sat there with her back to the matchboard wall and the rickety shelves supporting the old lady's herbs and potions in jam jars and ancient Marmite pots.

'Falling apart,' said Mrs Willis wryly, following his eyes.

'What did you do for young Fraser-Hale?'

'What's that?'

'Fraser-Hale. Falconer's lad.'

'That boy? I said I'd make him some ointment. I advised hot baths in Epsom salts and told him to boil his meat first. It's only a rash.'

'Pity you can't poison his b.l.o.o.d.y boss.'

'Never say that,' Mrs Willis said sternly. 'It'll come back on you, boy.'

'I'd swing for that man.'

She observed him shrewdly through her pebble gla.s.ses. 'You're saying I shouldn't treat that boy because he works for a man you don't like? I would treat Mr Falconer himself, if he was in need.'

'You're a b.l.o.o.d.y saint, Mrs Willis. And unfortunately I'm never going to reach your stage of spiritual development. I'd push the b.a.s.t.a.r.d off a cliff I mean, why is he doing this to us? Is it just b.l.o.o.d.y spite, because I've been slagging him off in a little sodding rag n.o.body ever reads?'

'Perhaps you should be grateful to him for fencing it off.'

'What's that mean? What d'you mean by a black light? A sense of evil? For Christ's sake, old love, that's what the Church tried to say when the child had her vision. I've spent years trying to knock all that on the head. Is that what you mean?'

'I'm tired.' Mrs Willis picked up her People's Friend. 'I think I shall finish my story.'

VII.

The minute she reached home, Grayle dived at the answering machine, as she did every night, in case there should be a message from Ersula.

G.o.d, Grayle, I'm so sorry. Time just goes so fast when you're absorbed in research. I looked at the calendar and I just couldn't believe it was six whole weeks since I wrote ... Can you forgive me?

This never happened.

The only message tonight was a fax from her sometimes-friend, Rosita, New York's number one New Age public-relations consultant, scrawled around an invitation to the opening of a new store called The Crystals Cave ...

... where our experts will unite you with the mystic gemstone that's been waiting for YOU, and YOU ALONE, since the beginning of time.

Grayle crumpled it.

There were crystals on the bookshelves, a crystal on the TV, two crystals by the phone. Quartz and amethyst for opening the psychic centres. Tiger's eye for confidence in health. Onyx for concentration.

There was the tree-of-life wallchart above the sofa, a poster of the Great Pyramid at sunset behind the TV. A small Buddha served as a doorstop. And under the window, a three-foot-tall plaster statue of the Egyptian dog-G.o.d Anubis wore a diamante poodle collar.

Hey, just because you believe in this stuff, Grayle would tell visitors, you don't have to be too serious about it. The principle difference between Grayle and Ersula, five years and several epochs apart.

Tonight the crystals looked dull, there was a chip out of the Buddha she hadn't noticed before. Also, Anubis looked so resentful in his poodle collar that she took it off.

Detective Olsen. Well screw him.

Grayle finished off half a bottle of Californian sparkling wine which had gone flat in the refrigerator, drinking it from the bottle, like beer. Figuring that, by now, the entire NYPD must have been officially notified that Holy Grayle Underhill was a doped-up neurotic who should be handled with iron tongs.

So the prime theory here, Ms Underhill, is that your sister's been kidnapped. Do we have any kind of ransom communication? No?

OK, let's consider the other option. Murder. Do we have a body? Let me, in the first instance, ease your mind on this score. I persuaded my lieutenant to allow me to call up three police forces around the area you say your sister was last seen. I faxed them all a description, plus the photograph you gave us, and none of them appears to have a Jane Doe bearing any physical resemblance whatsoever to this person.

So where does that leave us? It leaves us with a highly educated, independent and apparently headstrong twenty-five-year-old woman who, for reasons unknown, has failed to communicate with her family for a period of just over one month. Ms Underhill, do you have any idea how many women in this city have been on the missing persons register for over one year...?

What Grayle, in her desperation, had done next, had been to show Detective Olsen the letter. Even the final pages, which Lyndon had not seen.

Big mistake.

Let me get this right. What we are suggesting now is that your sister has succ.u.mbed to an insidious, mind-possessing force emanating from some Stone Age burial chamber. Do I have this right, Ms Underhill? Tell me, have you discussed this with a priest? Have you attempted to contact your sister telepathically? Or, maybe, enlist the a.s.sistance of some of the people you're always writing about and like beam down into her next dream, tell her to come back home at once? Have you tried that, Ms Underhill?

In the refrigerator, Grayle found another bottle quarter full of stale sparkling wine and she drank that too.

On the old wine crate she used as a coffee table lay Ersula's last letter, creased up and stained with doughnut jam from Guardi's. Except for the last pages, which Lyndon hadn't handled.

... Grayle, do you have smells in dreams?

Perhaps you do. Perhaps the olfactory element is commonplace in the dreams of others. I just know I do not recall ever being aware of a smell before. Certainly nothing so horribly powerful as this stench, this nauseous, all-pervading stench of corruption that made my insides contract until I was sure I was going to throw up. Can you throw up in dreams? Probably. I didn't. I sure sweated, though...

Grayle sighed. In all fairness, what else was the guy supposed to say about this? In a city drowning in drugs, a homicide every hour on the hour, he has to get the woman who disappeared into a dream. Even if he believed in this stuff, taking it any further would be putting his precinct credibility so far on the line as to seriously damage his career prospects for years to come.

It occurred to her that if she were an ordinary member of the public the next person she would probably turn to for advice would be the city's premier mystical agony aunt, Holy Grayle Underhill.

Just as, in a way, Ersula had done.

The events of the past few weeks have given me, I suppose, an insight into your continued need to explore the phenomena of the New Age.

I still believe in psychological answers, that the truth lies not Out There, as they say on your beloved X-Files, but In Here. But I confess that my belief system has been sorely tested on this trip. I keep telling myself how glad I am that you are not here, but the truth is I often wish that you were. I suspect that none of this would faze you. I recall how, some five years ago, both rather drunk, we watched some stupid old late-night Dracula movie together, and I saw an all too human sickness in it and was repulsed. While you just shrieked with laughter at the gorier excesses and delighted in the possibility of someone actually being Undead.

Sober by then, we argued well into the night about the validity and the morality of horror movies, most of which you kept insisting were scary fun but also basically religious. Well, I still do not believe in Dracula, or the possibility of being Undead. Only in the power of the Unconscious.

And you know something? That scares me a whole lot more.

The dream experiments both excite and terrify me because, while I am prepared to accept and be fired by the possibility that the abnormally high incidence of lucid dreaming at ancient sites may, in some part, be caused by external geophysical stimuli, I know that the substance of those dreams still comes from within, and that is what makes me afraid. I am afraid of what the Unconscious can make us do. I am afraid of liberating aspects of ourselves that we are unable to control...

Grayle shivered in the damp heat of a September night in New York City and thought about Dracula. Sure, vampires were scary fun which also held out the promise of some kind OK, a very degraded kind of immortality. Like werewolf stories ill.u.s.trated the possibility of human transformation. I swear on my mother's grave he has to shave twice ... three times...

So many people who believed this stuff believed Grayle Underhill had a hot line to the source. Seventy-three letters last week. Grayle read them all; a few would always lead to stories.

Stories. Scary fun.

Maybe this reflected her level of spiritual development: keep an open mind, don't go too deep, have scary fun.

Grayle drained the bottle. Turned to the next page.

We're instructed not to discuss our dreams, for very sound, scientific reasons. All the recorded dream experiences, thousands of them, are being fed into a central database for future a.n.a.lysis. Only then will any correlations be considered. It is crucial to the experiment that any influences should be as a result of the geophysical properties of the sites themselves and not from each other's dreams.

As the place where this experience occurred was not one of the specific sites earmarked for the project, I approached Prof. Falconer and asked if I could discuss it with him. He was reluctant he said a dream symbol could spread like a virus if not controlled but eventually he agreed and we discussed it over dinner at a local pub. I was disappointed with his response but appreciated his reasoning. He said that because I went alone to the site no therapeute the experience was inadmissible. He also seemed angry that I had checked out the history of the site with a local historian (Marcus Bacton I sent you a copy of his magazine) without his permission.

Nevertheless, I regard this dream as the most significant so far and have enclosed my description of it. As a connoisseur of Scary Fun, you will no doubt appreciate it, although rest a.s.sured that if it comes to my notice that any reference to this has made an appearance in your scurrilous column, I will toss sibling tolerance to the winds and sue your a.s.s.

OK. What is remarkable about this dream is that it is the first which, for its entire duration, directly concerns the site itself.

The site is Black Knoll (also known as High Knoll) in the Black Mountains, just under a mile from the center. It is a Neolithic burial chamber in a modestly spectacular setting atop a promontory affording a wide view all the way to the Malvern Hills where the composer Elgar found his inspiration.

The only person recorded as having found inspiration here at Black Knoll, about three-quarters of a century ago, was a teenage girl called Annie Davies who claimed to have had a vision of the Virgin Mary. This vision accords with the published accounts of such experiences (see Seward: The Dancing Sun, 1993) in which the sun itself appears to gyrate or, in this case, to descend and resolve itself into a robed, female figure. The story was recounted to me by the aforementioned Marcus Bacton, publisher of that obscure journal The Phenomenologist, who lives at Ms Davies's former home, Castle Farm, and is in some respects a most alarming person.

However, I had found the tale of the unsophisticated country girl charming (I was surprised to hear that it had not been well received by the local people at the time) and determined to spend a night at Black Knoll, if possible, alone for I have found that, having done this so many times, I now awake with a total recall of the dream experience.

I waited until two a.m., when the center was silent. Adrian, Magda and I the scouts and guides as Roger somewhat patronizingly refers to us sleep in small rooms converted out of the lofts above the old stables, so it was easy for me to creep out of the center and make my way along the ancient trackway to Black Knoll.

It was a three-quarter moon, so there was light enough, and I felt a pleasant sense of adventure as I approached the monument; it seemed more awesome by night, but I was not afraid, finding myself, as usual, attracted by the silence and loneliness of it. I wished, more than ever, to know its mysteries. It seemed to me that an obviously pagan site which could inspire a fundamentally Christian vision was a weighty argument for the theory that the hallucinatory experience was directly influenced by the geophysical nature of the site itself.

What did make my flesh crawl, I confess, was a scuffling beneath the capstone suggestive of rats of which, as you know, I am not overfond. There was no way I was going inside after that probably wouldn't have been able to squeeze in anyhow, the way the middle part of the monument has collapsed so I spread my sleeping bag on top of the capstone. I was used, by now, to sleeping on stone and drifted off quite quickly.

THE DREAM.

I am walking to the Knoll. You have to cross a beautiful hay meadow. It is harvest time now and the bales are stacked in the meadow like small skysc.r.a.pers. As I wander through the stubbly canyons between the stacks of bales and find the footpath which takes me up into the hills, into the spa.r.s.e, ochre moorland gra.s.s, I am aglow with antic.i.p.ation. Will I, too, have a vision of the Holy Mother? My dreamself, I have discovered, is a firm believer; this shedding of normal academic skepticism I find oddly refreshing, like a holiday, like becoming you for a while. Jesus, never thought I'd say that.

Grayle's eyes began to p.r.i.c.kle. It was as if Ersula was reaching out to her.

Automatically, she closed her eyes, pictured Ersula with her efficiently cropped blond hair, more blond, more pure than Grayle's, and her steady, watchful, almost cold blue eyes.

Slowing her breathing, reaching out for Ersula.

Nothing. It never did work, did it? Especially when your senses were swimming in three-quarters of a bottle of stale Californian white wine.

I am not aware of it for a while but the temperature must have started to drop as soon as I left the meadow. Not only that but, in what I would guess was direct proportion to this decline, the colors are fading. Some people only ever dream in black and white. I guess my noticing this means that I have always dreamed in color.

Visibility is also declining because of a thickening mist through which I can see the sun like a pale coin. Familiar clumps of gorse sprout from the otherwise bare hillside. The Offa's d.y.k.e Path which more or less marks the boundary between the countries of England and Wales is close, and, in my dreamstate, I can sense a converging of separate energies; I don't know how else to explain this.

I feel lonely. Suddenly isolated. A strange sensation, considering that the center itself is ten minutes' walk away, that the towns of Abergavenny and Hay-on-Wye and the city of Hereford are all less than thirty minutes by car. And although my waking self relishes solitude, in my dream I wish someone were here with me, even that amiable buffoon Adrian Fraser-Hale, whose enthusiasms tend to be as nonsensical as your own.

Upon the Knoll, encircled by a m.u.f.f of most unseasonal fog, it is alarmingly cold. English summers can be capricious, but this is not the cold of summer. I bend and touch the capstone; it has a patina, like a h.o.a.r frost. I am feeling depressed about this as I know it was on such a summer's day that Annie Davies had her vision and was enveloped in a kind of rosy warmth. There seems little prospect of warmth here now.

I lie down upon the capstone. A curious sensation. Let me try to explain it.

It is as if my dreamself is entering into my corporeal self, two aspects of me fusing together. There is a quite awesome sense of what I can only describe as hyper-reality. For example, when I touch the stone at my side I feel I am touching a living thing or, more exactly, putting my hand into a vortex of swirling, pulsing energy, as though I am being permitted to penetrate the stone's molecular structure. And it mine.

I open (in my dream) my eyes. My dream eyes. Oh yes, I am fully aware that I am dreaming.

The air is hard with cold. I am naked, by the way.

It is now that I sense the smell. It smells as if all the rats or whatever they are under the stone have died and rotted. It is a stench so utterly abhorrent that I push my nose into the crook of an elbow in disgust and revulsion.

Of what I saw, I am still uncertain. Although, as an archeologist, I have been present at the excavation of several graves, some no more than two hundred years old, this is outside my experience and I can hardly bear to think about it.

I wrote it down at once, describing in as much detail as I could what I thought I saw, but when I read it back it seemed stupid and nasty, and quite unbelievable, and I thought, what does this say about me, what kind of credibility would I ever have again? And I thought of you, the way you laughed and took it all so lightly when we were watching that filthy movie.