The Cold Calling Part 26

'Do you know why it's called Black Knoll?'

'Local name for it.'

'But why exactly?'

'Some b.o.l.l.o.c.ks. It's irrelevant.'

'You going to tell me?'

'Just have a drink,' Marcus said.

'Missing?' this Cindy said. 'What do you mean, missing?'

'I mean she never came home. Or, if she did, she didn't make contact. Either way, that's missing, isn't it? Like, she's missing out of my life.'

It wasn't alcohol making her talk; Grayle was drinking c.o.ke, or something that pa.s.sed for it. Just she was getting past the stage of keeping quiet about who she was and what she was doing here. How many woman tourists travelled alone anyway?

The strange old dame dressed like out of Agatha Christie, only more glitter took in everything she said. Spoke in this light, flippant voice with a bizarre up-and-down accent and yet struck Grayle as being kind of heavy underneath.

What did I walk into here? Did she find me or did I find her?

Grayle swallowed an ice cube from the bottom of her c.o.ke. Told this Cindy all about the dreaming. After a while, they bought more drinks and took them to a table at the back of the bar, and Grayle pulled out the sheaf of airmail paper.

'See, my sister, she's intense and hard-nosed, not easily fooled. But the dream thing had become like a personal obsession.'

'Yes,' Cindy said after she read the letter, except for the pages Grayle always held back. 'No matter how a.n.a.lytical you are, experiments with the subconscious can be rather like putting a needle into a vein. The subconscious demands more. Ancient-site-dreaming is dangerously addictive.'

Grayle looked into Cindy's still, green eyes. 'How do you know this?'

'Ah.' Cindy sighed. 'Ten, fifteen years ago, before it was fashionable, I decided to spend a night on the fabled slopes of Cader Idris.'

'Cader ... ? What is that?'

'It's a mountain in North Wales where there's a legend that if you spend a whole night there you will wake up either a poet or mad.'

'Sounds kind of like Greenwich Village.'

Cindy smiled. 'Gave me the taste for it. I slept around. Once dreamed for seven nights, either side of the full moon, under one of the trilithons at Stonehenge that was in the days when you were still allowed inside. Oh yes, positively promiscuous, I was.'

'Wow,' Grayle said faintly.

'It does change you. Most of my dreams became lucid dreams the ones where you know you're dreaming. Where you seem to have an element of control.'

'Sure. Dream control. I did a column on it.'

'And, of course, that's when it becomes risky. You think you're in control, but in fact your subconscious mind is starting to influence your conscious mind to an alarming degree. You think you're drawing inspiration from G.o.d, or the Earth Mother, the mind of Gaia, depending on your religious or your scientific persuasion.'

'Like with acid trips.'

'Indeed. And it can send you quite mad. I wasn't happy about it, so I stopped doing it. A shaman must, above all, have discipline. Be able to count on precision.'

Cindy smiled regretfully. Grayle sat back in her chair, against the ancient, grimy panelling. Through the brown, smoky air, she examined the weird old broad, from the purple hair to the chiffon scarf to the tweed skirt and the black-stockinged legs.

'Hold on just one moment,' Grayle said. 'You said shaman?'

'The tribal shaman was the witch doctor, the priest, the counsellor, the psychiatrist, the one who interceded with the spirit world.'

'Yeah, we have them. Collect Native American hand drums and feathers. Supervise sweat-lodges for overweight executives.'

'We all have to make a living, Grayle. An actor, I am, by profession. Not a terribly successful one, but I've had my moments. Quite well known, I was at one time, on children's television. Straight man to the more famous Kelvyn Kite. We never crossed the Atlantic, sadly. But, then, perhaps a four-foot-tall, talking bird of prey would have been a little esoteric for the American market.'

Holy Jesus, Grayle thought. Would somebody wake me up?

'Always good with animals, I was,' Cindy said wistfully. 'Made Kelvyn myself, I did.'

'So you ... You're a shaman, right? An English shaman.'

'Celtic shaman, if you don't mind. Our oral tradition goes back to Taliesin, the bard, in the sixth century. And, further, to the builders of the dolmens and the stone circles. As for me, I trained for three years, on and off, with Dilwyn Fychan, of Machynlleth, and other individuals too private to be mentioned. It was a calling. Some of us are called. Some of us are aware, from an early age, that we are ... different.'

Cindy crossed his legs.

'The shaman, traditionally, has a foot in two worlds. Flits about. Pa.s.ses from one sphere of existence to another. A condition usually reflected in his personal life and mode of dress. Neither one thing nor the other.'

Cindy smiled. Grayle stared.

'Oh,' she said. 'You're, uh ... like, a guy, right?'

'Prehistoric sites were often misused,' Marcus said. 'Still are satanic rites and all that nonsense. But this was nothing like that. This was a social thing. Ultimate degradation for an executed criminal. Making an example.'

Maiden drank some whisky, his first since the last night of his old life.

'Used to do something similar with highwaymen,' Marcus said. 'Gibbets by the roadside. Nothing so romantic on the Welsh border. These were sheep-thieves. Or domestic murderers. Chap comes home drunk, clobbers his wife with a bottle. Seedy stuff. That's what makes it worse, really shows a contempt for the site.'

'So what did they do?'

'You all right, Maiden?'

'Just ... carry on. Go on.'

'There's a fairly honourable tradition a prehistoric tradition known as excarnation. Laying out of corpses on some hillside to free the spirit to the natural elements. This was different, obviously. You cold, Maiden? You're shivering.'

Marcus gathered up a log, opened the door of the wood-stove. Orange splinters flew up when he tossed in the new log. Maiden didn't feel any warmer.

'They laid the body of the executed criminal on its back on the capstone. For the crows and buzzards to pick clean. The foxes to plunder the bones.'

'When was this?'

'I don't know when it started. It went on, amazingly, until early in the nineteenth century. This was a harsh place, Maiden.'

Maiden drained his gla.s.s, reached for the bottle, but Marcus took it.

'That's what Black Knoll recalls. I hated it. That's why they all rejected Annie's vision. Because it was a place of the rotting dead.'

'Marcus-'

'But she purified it, Maiden. What happened to her restored the sacredness. The locals had been desecrating it for centuries. It was a bad place, a diseased place, somewhere you didn't go, that parents warned their children about. And this child ... she restored this ancient site to what it was intended to be. A place of light.'

'Marcus, don't make too much of this, but I think I dreamt about it.'

'What?' Marcus shook back his heavy, grey hair, pushed his gla.s.ses into place. 'When?'

'Hospital. I thought I was waking up, but it was another dream. It was like an open tomb. I was the corpse. Decaying. I had no eyes. I could feel the birds plucking ... Oh, s.h.i.t, Marcus, I don't-'

Marcus took Maiden's gla.s.s and poured him more whisky.

XXIV.

Around midnight, the bulb in the bedside lamp began to sing. Close to one a.m., it blew, leaving Cindy to sit in the darkness, in his dressing gown, and ponder the vexed question of whether or not he was, as Kelvyn Kite had often stated, simply a stupid old tart.

The American girl had made an excuse and fled fairly rapidly after discovering that the person to whom she had unburdened herself was not only old enough to be her mother but also old enough to be her father, as it were.

He hadn't meant to startle her; he wanted to help her. What if her poor sister had been ... No! Don't even think of it!

What if? All those what ifs?

What if the good and patient Chief Inspector Peter Hatch had been right all along, and there were simply several common or garden, sad, uncomplicated killers out there, rather than one person harbouring a warped and lethal obsession with earth-magic?

What if his own exercise in pendulum dowsing over the maps and the journals had been as spurious as the 'shamanic powers' of which he was so pathetically proud?

What if tonight's paranormal 'experience' at the High Knoll burial chamber was no more than a perverse and futile combination of paranoia and wishful thinking?

What if Sydney Mars-Lewis was no more than an old humbug of the most ludicrous kind, trying to make something significant out of his s.e.xual ambivalence and social inadequacy, unable to face up to his reduced status as a failed actor relegated to the end of the pier with a stuffed bird?

Well, these were hardly new questions. Indeed, one night, in a dressing room in Scarborough, about seven years ago, he had almost given way to an impulse to hang himself by his dressing-gown cord from an overhead heating pipe.

Wearily, he climbed out of bed and switched on the central light, which was half smothered by grimy beams.

'An old manic-depressive, you are, boy. That's the only certainty.'

From his suitcase, he took the fax he'd received, just before leaving the caravan, from Gareth Milburn at Crucible, the pagan magazine. He'd asked the boy for information about the readers' letters he didn't print. (Modern pagans, ever anxious to promote a positive image of their faith as a pure and caring nature-religion, would almost invariably reject the propaganda received from the darker pract.i.tioners.) Gareth's fax said: We get fairly regular letters from something called the Black Temple of Set, with a Milton Keynes postmark, accusing us of being wimps who are scared to discover where the 'real power' lies. There's a crank who just calls himself the Green Man postmarks from all over the country, so it could actually be a bunch of people who reckons the Pagan Federation lost its way when it turned its back on blood sacrifice, and claims blood sports are a vital part of our heritage. There's also this is really sick a woman with an Omen fixation offering to have babies for use in satanic rites at very compet.i.tive rates. If I can find any on the spike, I'll fax them.

The Green Man was the one which lingered. There must be a dozen black temples of Set; their adherents also attended heavy metal concerts. The Green Man's enthusiasm for blood sports unfashionable, reactionary and anathema to modern pagans would certainly provide a motive for the ritual killing of Maria Capaldi.

And motive, Cindy thought, was important here. These were not entirely psychotic killings; behind them was a belief structure, however warped. Gareth's theory that the Green Man might be a group of people was interesting. This would account for the different methods of slaughter.

The Green Man seemed promising from the start. And that was the problem: the Green Man had been in Cindy's thoughts from the moment he left home to drive across Wales to the Black Mountains. The image of the archetypal gargoyle, with foliage foaming from his mouth and nose and sap in his veins, had nested in Cindy's mind.

Which would explain, for sure, the dark and frightening image he had seen on the periphery of his vision at the height of his shamanic ritual at the Knoll. He had conjured in his head the smoky form. A thought-form, nothing more. A message from himself to himself. Utterly terrifying, but completely unreliable.

There came a tapping at the door. Cindy jumped in alarm and dropped the fax paper.

'Who is it?' Shocked at the elderly quaver in his shrunken voice.

'Cindy?' An even smaller voice. 'It's me. Grayle. I saw the light under your door. Tell me to go away if this is inconvenient.'

Cindy smiled in relief and went to open the door. 'No, my love. An old insomniac, I am.'

The American girl stood there in jeans and an overlong sweatshirt. With her hair loose, she looked all of nineteen and somewhat waif-like. A mistake, it was, to a.s.sume that all Americans were br.i.m.m.i.n.g with self-confidence.

'I'm sorry,' she said. 'All that shaman stuff, and then finding out you were a guy and all, it kind of ... fazed me out.'

'No, me, it is, who should be sorry. Just an old misfit, I am, really. But I do have a kettle. Would you care for a cup of tea?'

Grayle found a grin from somewhere. Also, a small sheaf of folded airmail paper.

'I thought about what you said about dreams and ancient sites turning people crazy. This, uh, this is the rest of the letter from my sister. The part I don't show people.'

Maiden awoke not breathing.

His mouth was full of solid, gritty darkness. When he tried to breathe, the air couldn't get through; his throat was also tight-packed and bulging and when he tried to cough he just took more of it into his lungs, and there was a meagre wheezing sound.

Fighting for the cough tautened his muscles and made his body curl and jerk, as if he was struggling inside a straitjacket, but the cough wouldn't come out, just built up and locked, and he went into a blind panic and rolled out of bed, over and over on the floor, numbed fingers tearing at his throat.

Cindy made some tea on the dressing table and, while it was brewing, read the last pages from Ersula Underhill, in which the girl described her dream of lying on the stone, shoulder to shoulder with a decaying body. Scary fun, Grayle? Oh dear.

Grayle sat at the foot of the bed, hands clasped between her knees, clearly unsure of quite how seriously to take all this. Reading the letter had told Cindy a lot about the two sisters, how they differed in their beliefs and perceptions. Grayle was the insecure one, the scatty one; it must have taken a great deal of determination for her to come here. And a deal of anxiety, too.

She looked up at him. 'I met some people ... at the Rollright Stones?'

'Oh yes?'

'This guy, he said sometimes you would encounter in your dreams what he called guardians. Is that what I think it is?'

'The genius loci. Sometimes. But many guardians have been created by people using these places for worship. Elemental spirits. Ritual stones are like computers. Spiritual ent.i.ties are stored there. For centuries sometimes, even millennia, to deter robbers and vandals.'

'Right.'

'And so anyone sleeping at an ancient site should not be surprised to encounter one. The deliberate act of dreaming is an invasion, and the guardian would be programmed, as it were, to react. The guardian, by nature, is a fearsome apparition which can be dangerous. Strong nerves are called for.'