The Cold Calling cc-1

by Phil Rickman

  It seems likely that the Barber-Surgeon was involved in a medieval assault on the stones at the instigation of the Christian Church, attempting to stamp out pagan rituals still carried on there.

  Tragically — ha — he appeared to have died when the stone toppled upon him.

  This is possible. There are many tales of foolhardy country people who tried to dig up ancient menhirs provoking thunderstorms, even being struck by lightning.

  During his dream below the pines last night, the Green Man learned the truth: that the Barber-Surgeon had been abducted by the guardians of the stones and given in sacrifice. Bludgeoned to death and placed beneath the stone.

  In his dream, the Green Man was kneeling under the pines in a dense mist which sliced off the tops of the trees. He had held out his hands and into them was placed something grey and misty but quite heavy.

  When he awoke, he found, not fifteen yards from where he’d slept, a single stone, about eight inches long and three to four inches wide.

  This dawn arrives wearing a mist as fine as lace, the sun tossed carelessly in its loose folds.

  Too bright. He will have to thicken the mist.

  This is quite easy. Most people can learn to do it. However, most people would do it in reverse; they teach themselves to shift clouds and dissolve them by pure concentration. A simple example of the way human consciousness can learn to interact with nature. With practice, the clouds can almost be blown away in seconds. Pffft!

  Actually, producing clouds, adding density to the atmosphere, is more interesting and far more powerful.

  Close the eyes, imagine (create!) cold in the body. This is done, initially, through the feet, the cold drawn up from the dark places of the earth (best achieved when standing on stone) and sent to the base of the spine to form an icy ball around the spinal chakra. Slowly, the cold is drawn — through breathing — into each of the body’s seven power-centres, and then projected into the aura. Finally, often in a fit of shivering, the command is given.

  It is easier at dawn, when the sun is vulnerable and unsure of itself. From the pines, he watches it fade. The Earth senses the commitment and he feels radiant in Her trust.

  The stand of pines, on its small hill, is surely as old as the great stones three miles to the south. This can be felt. These trees and generations of their ancestors, sturdy and aloof, taller than many a church steeple.

  But the power of this site is probably unknown. Except to the Green Man.

  They have been priming the place, he and the Earth, through the hours of the night, he lying supine under the harvest stars or sitting cross-legged and straight-backed in meditation among the needles and the brittle cones. The weight of anticipation kept him awake, the certainty that someone would be sent. And, of course, the special energy of the site itself. Once, there was sex: his penis summoned aloft by the thrusting pines, Earthen lips exquisitely cold around it.

  And then came the dream. The dream of the Barber-Surgeon. The dream sent to him from the great stones of Avebury in their agony.

  The one who has been sent comes in a straight line (of course) through the mist, following the green road between the fields.

  It is almost nine o’clock, later than the Green Man expected.

  Still, the longer the wait, the greater the accumulation of energy. He feels Her moving close to him and his whole body hardens as he stands, legs apart, among the ancient pines.

  Actually, this person is not quite what he expected. He was envisaging a New Age traveller. Or two. Two would be a challenge, although not much of one when one takes into consideration that element of surprise.

  The man wears a waterproof jacket, flat cap and new-looking walking boots. He has a small backpack, carries a pair of rubber-covered binoculars and an Ordnance Survey map in a plastic sleeve.

  He looks very respectable, fairly intelligent. Not the sort of person you would expect to deface an ancient monument.

  Not your decision … Not your place to question …

  No. Of course not.

  ‘Good morning,’ the man says cheerfully. Panting slightly as he reaches the top of the little hill and turns to make a theatrical point of admiring the half-misted view. ‘Wonderful!’

  They share a smile. The Green Man wonders if he should tell the newcomer what is to happen. This would be even more powerful. Especially if he was able to understand the complexity of it. And be proud.

  ‘You are with our lot, aren’t you?’ The man chuckles. ‘Thought everybody was having a bit of a lie-in. After last night. By Jove, it doesn’t take prisoners, that real ale, does it? Mind you, I find this is the best way to clear your head. Make yourself get out of bed. Let the country air get at it. Beats aspirin, does country air.’

  ‘Our lot?’

  ‘The t-Oh.’ He peers at the Green Man. ‘Bloody hell, you’re not, are you? Sorry, sorry. Many apologies. There’s a collection of us, you see, from clubs in the north Midlands. Twitchers — birdwatchers. Every year, we go to a different county for a long weekend. Only, the first night it always gets a bit convivial. Demob-happy, you see.’

  A birdwatcher!

  And one with the garrulous self-importance of a minor local autocrat — council official, bank manager or some such. A birdwatcher. No guts for the kill. He’s not meant to know, he would never understand. He’s crass, an idiot, unworthy of the honour of knowledge.

  ‘Super day, though.’ The birdwatcher sets down his pack and sits on it. ‘Been camping?’

  Also, a poor specimen. Not very big, not very young, not very fit and depressingly unaware.

  ‘Used to go in for camping when I was younger. My wife and I, that is. Couldn’t get her into a tent nowadays. Don’t mean she wouldn’t fit, although there’d not be much room for anyone else, I have to say. It’s just …’

  He takes off his cap, smooths down his hair, replaces the cap.

  ‘… just that women seem to get older younger than we do, if you see what I mean. Lose their instinct for adventure. No spirit. On holiday, are you? Know the area well?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He sniffs. ‘Call ourselves birdwatchers. Just an excuse really. To get away from the wives, get some fresh air, have a few pints in peace. Ah, well. ‘

  He breathes deeply and closes his eyes. Sitting on his pack with his knees together, his hands clasped around them. And at that moment, the sun finds a hole in the mist and lays a white beam up to his feet.

  Yes.

  Feel it. Feel it rise through the soles of the feet, up the backs of the braced legs into the spine, out to the shoulders, rippling down the arms, the wrists, the gloved hands behind the back, gripping the stone.

  ‘So what do you do,’ the Green Man asks mildly, ‘when you’re not birdwatching?’

  The eyes tip open. ‘You’ll laugh. I run a small chain of ladies’ hairdressers in Wolverhampton. ‘

  And the Green Man does laugh, with the sheer joy of the revelation, the fitting of the last segment of a perfect circle.

  He sees a first flicker of uncertainty in the birdwatcher’s colourless eyes as the little man attempts to rise, before the stone crunches his nose, like a red pepper. His eyes flicker rapidly through an amazing range of emotions: outrage, disbelief, terror … and, finally, pleading. He opens his mouth and the Green Man stops his scream with the stone, and the birdwatcher gags on blood and smashed teeth. Soon there is a quite terrific amount of blood, mixed with vomit, and it forms a warm delta between the exposed roots of the tallest pine.

  IX

  He woke up in a dark panic. Or didn’t. Didn’t wake up …

  … woke down.

  Dreams bunched and knotted behind his shuttered eyes, and he couldn’t open them. Couldn’t move, couldn’t scream. I’m paralysed.

  A whizzing, a flittering, snipping tearing.

  As he awoke again, into the cold.

  Lying on his back, the sky above him alive with dark wings. Tried to hurl himself away, muscles wouldn’t respond. Locked. Everything in
side him got behind a scream, but his throat wouldn’t process it. No lubrication. All congealed inside, all the liquids in him had clotted and dried when the blood stopped flowing.

  Like a corpse. Like a corpse. Muscles rotted through. Torn. Shredded bits of him pecked away, ripped away, chewed away, blown away … and no eyes to see any of it. Couldn’t open his eyes because there weren’t any eyes. You couldn’t open bone.

  Whimpering. He heard whimpering, and it was his own. Whimpering and the clatter of a morning trolley. A morning was happening somewhere out there, but he wasn’t part of it. He was out of it. He was two days dead.

  He turned his head on the sweat-damp pillow and opened his eyes. Third awakening. Always three; never trust the first two.

  God help me.

  ‘Tea, Mr Maiden. Bobby?’

  ‘Andy?’

  He was fogged, muffled.

  ‘No, it’s Sister Andy’s day off. I’ll leave it on the side here. Then you can have another sleep, if you like, before breakfast.’

  He sat up in panic.

  The words another sleep terrified him.

  No Sister Andy.

  Who’d saved his life.

  The African doctor, Jonathan, had told him. How they were all ready to give up and she’d stood there holding his head, demanding they keep going with the defibrillator. Jonathan describing it all so gleefully that Maiden was sure he could remember them coming in like the Drug Squad on a dawn raid.

  All this down to Sister Andy. Left to me, man, Jonathan had said, with a frightening shrug, they’d be putting you in the ground today.

  Recalling the words now with a sense of deep horror, he could clearly see himself from above, still and bluish, eyes closed against the earth coming down on him in spadefuls, the first particles of grit drumming on his screened eyeballs. Closing his mouth against it … but suddenly his eyes were opening into a brutal, hurting hail of soil and stones.

  He could still taste the soil in the back of his throat; he drank all the tea and then two glasses of water from the carafe.

  Lay back, breathing heavily, remembering what Andy had said about the patients who returned. The soft warmth and the gardens, the angelic voices, fountains. Well, yeah, you read all that stuff, saw people talking about it on TV, faces uplifted to the lights. All very comforting.

  And all crap. It ended with the grave. That was the truth. Burial. In the earth. And death wielding the spade. You saw the face of death through fibres and roots and decaying matter and worms.

  Still tasting it.

  And, oh God, he needed to talk to Andy. You heard it said that saving someone’s life created a bond, a mutual responsibility. Something was reaching out to this grim-faced Glaswegian nurse as if she was his long-lost mother. No, that wasn’t exactly it. Close, though. Close.

  Where was she? Jonathan might know but he wasn’t here either. There was a different doctor in the unit, the tight-mouthed, officious kind, patrolling the beds like a rogue traffic warden, peering into the side ward and rasping over his clipboard, as though the guy lying there was deaf, mute and backward.

  ‘Nurse, explain to me, would you … why is this patient still here?’

  Nobody could explain it, and so, after breakfast, they pulled Bobby Maiden out of the sometimes-comforting chaos of Casualty and dumped him in Lower Severn Ward.

  If the side ward in A and E was limbo, Lower Severn was authentic hell: continuous daytime TV — colours cranked up to lurid-plus — playing to two rows of probably nice enough guys with drips and tubes, one bloke pre-op and nervy, one post-op and demob-happy, one who read the Sporting Life and kept trying to persuade the nurses to place his bets, one who sat on the side of his bed and farted like a moped.

  All these guys, Maiden saw them in cold, rubbery shades of grey, their faces squashed into stocking masks, a layer of dense depression banked over the beds like industrial smoke. Sunshine streamed through long windows, but the whole place was full of February, and there might never be a March.

  According to the book, according to Andy, he should be feeling real joy, able to spread some comfort. Sitting up in bed and glowing with this kind of smug benevolence. Having died, he ought to have been reborn. His spirit pulled out of his body and washed clean.

  It felt soiled.

  Soiled. Literally. All he experienced was a very tainted kind of relief every time he awoke. A temporary relief, because one day he’d have to die again, and death was a sour grave. There was an old man in a corner bed they kept pulling the curtains round — the Sporting Life reader shaking his head, saying, ‘Can’t be long now.’ And Maiden wanting to leap out of bed and scream at the old man, For Christ’s sake, hold on to every last, fucking second …

  The rest of life was going to be tainted by the acrid taste of the grave.

  Meanwhile, Riggs was coming.

  Boss’ll be in to see you.

  Vaguely remembering, from when he first came round, someone leaning over the pillow with sanitized, spearmint breath.

  Just give us a name. Somebody we can pull. A name, Bobby.

  Don’t remember anything. Remember going home, latish. Nothing after that. Sorry, Mike. Sorry.

  Mike. Mike Beattie.

  Maiden instinctively lying to Beattie — Riggs’s man. Of course he remembered. Even in and out of consciousness, he remembered about black-eyed Suzanne and the pictures and the offer. And Parker and Riggs and the filigree of corruption stitched so tightly into the fabric of the town that undoing it would leave the fabric itself in shreds.

  Parker and Riggs. Or was it, in fact, Riggs and Parker? Had Riggs simply sat back and thought about it and decided reliable old Tony was, on balance, the best man to handle drugs and other essential service industries in Elham? Was Riggs, in some way, the contractor?

  Whatever, Maiden seemed to have been offered a ticket for the gravy train on a climb aboard or be found dead on the tracks basis.

  Dead. Been there. Been into the big tunnel, come out the other side. Crawled out, sick and scared. What happens now, back down the slime-trails of downtown Elham?

  After a while, Maiden let the whole mess — Lower Severn Ward, Suzanne, Parker, Riggs and the certainty of the grave — seep sluggishly out of his mind like dirty water down a drain, and went into his black, swampy sleep.

  Awakening unable to move again. Convinced at first that he was on a trolley in the mortuary, his consciousness like a bird caged in his corpse and it would only be free when the electric saw took off his cranium.

  Death again. He could only ever dream about aspects of death. Dead people, dead sheep. Violence. Brutality.

  He actually sobbed with relief when the grey world babbled in.

  ‘So you’re a snooker man, Tom?’ the TV said, some daytime quiz programme. ‘And how many kids? Blimey, Sharon, he must keep his cue well chalked …’

  Maiden jerked in the bed, wrapped the hard hospital pillow around his head.

  ‘So you’re awake, lad.’ The voice coming down like an oak truncheon.

  Maiden opened and closed and opened his eyes.

  ‘Papers said you was in a bad way. Don’t look that bad to me. Bloody sight better than I did, by God, the night I had Harry Skinner and his lads cornered in the old paint warehouse at Wilmslow. Heh. Tell you this much. They di’n’t look so pretty neither, when I’d finished wi’ ‘em.’

  ‘Hello, Dad,’ Maiden said.

  ‘Two trains it took, getting here. Had to change at Shrewsbury.’

  Norman Plod, boots gleaming, fusewire hair Brylcreemed flat, stood in the centre of the ward, glaring up and down the lines of beds as if he was scouring a pub for under-age drinkers.

  ‘Bugger of a place, Shrewsbury,’ said the Sporting Life bloke.

  ‘Had to get hisself transferred down here to get away from me,’ Norman Plod said, dead accurate for once. ‘Not fit to be let out, this lad. Heh. Can’t be trusted to cross the bloody road without getting hisself flattened.’

  As usual, it had taken Norm
an Plod less than a minute to collect an audience. Presence, he used to say. You have to have presence. Halfway to respect.

  ‘Bet you didn’t get his number either, did yer?’

  ‘No, Dad,’ Maiden said wearily. ‘Busy dying. You know how it is.’

  ‘Bloody detective, this,’ Norman Plod told the ward. ‘Bloody detective.’

  He could have been a detective, could Norman. CID had been on their knees to him. But the public didn’t have the same respect for detectives, slinking, nosing and drinking on duty. The public liked a policeman to look like a policeman. To have presence.

  Maiden noted the absence of grapes, sweets, bottles of Lucozade. Not even a newspaper. His old man never saw the point of little gifts for the sick. Their duty to get well, back to work, stop the drip, drip, drip of taxpayers’ money into their arms.

  ‘Nice of you to come all this way, Dad.’

  ‘I’m retired, lad. Garden’s winding down for winter. Nowt else on the go. They got any leads, your clever colleagues? Poor bloody do, you ask me. Got to be a motor somewhere wi’ a busted front end. Listen …’

  Norman leaned in, just the way he’d always done, as if he was about to confide the Secret of Life.

  ‘I don’t know the background, don’t know what villains you’ve put away lately, who’s got a grudge. An’ I don’t want to. I’m retired. All I’m sayin’, word to the wise …’ Tapping his veiny nose. ‘Just don’t, whatever you do, don’t let this one bloody well go. Don’t ever write it off. Make sure the bugger gets nailed to the bloody wall. Eh? Know what I’m sayin’?’

  Maiden said, before he could stop himself, ‘You’re thinking about Mum.’

  ‘I’m thinkin’ nowt!’ Norman lurched back as if his only son had struck him. Amazing to see the old hostility in his eyes, the look that said, You never got the car number then either, did you, lad? Even though Bobby had been not yet three years old when he toddled off the kerb in his pyjamas, seven in the morning, pushing Bonzo, the dog on wheels.

  He stared at his dad. Had Norman ever cried?

  He’d told Maiden once, and once only, what must have happened that day while he was on the early shift and the road at the end of the garden was no more than a country lane — not much traffic, but no excuse for the paper lad or the milkman (although neither would put his hand up to it) to leave the gate open, so that the child could get out.