Authors: Phil Rickman
Andy dropped back into the room, looked down at the watch on her breast pocket: 2.25 a.m. She’d call Marcus when she came off shift, before Bobby could get around to it.
She dunked her ciggy in the sink, went to take a look at Mr Trilling on the ward.
‘
SO NOW WE KNOW
,’
GRAYLE SAID
.
Laying on the cynicism like mayonnaise because she really didn’t want Marcus to think she believed any of this stuff.
The study looked tired and bleary. The fire in the stove was down to a bed of ash. Marcus put on a small log from the depleted basket and hauled his chair closer.
‘Great story, though,’ Grayle said, not allowing herself to think about it. She yawned and lay full length on the sofa, kicking off her shoes.
Around half-past midnight Callard had elected to return to the dairy, maybe realizing that Marcus and Grayle would have a lot to discuss. Standing by the bulkhead light, Marcus had watched her cross the yard under the shadows of the ruins. He’d looked tired, weak, hopeless.
‘It’s late, Marcus, and you’re sick.’ Grayle pulled a cushion under her head. ‘Go get some sleep.’
‘Not tired. Or rather, I am, but…’
‘You want some cocoa?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘What
do
you want?’
‘I want to know what you really think about this.’
‘Me? You’re asking the help?’
‘Don’t piss about, Underhill.’
‘Let’s talk about this tomorrow.’
‘I want to bloody talk about it
now,
’ Marcus thundered, snatching off his glasses, mopping his eyes and nose, thrusting the glasses back on.
‘You really don’t.’
‘You mean
you
don’t.’
‘OK.’ Grayle sighed. ‘Whatever.’ Swung her feet to the floor and sat up, hands clasping on her knees like in prayer. ‘Let’s lay this thing out.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Me?’
‘I want your opinion, dammit!’
Grayle shrugged. ‘OK. Well … essence of it is, after like fifteen years as this cool, fashionable, high-society psychic, Ms Persephone Callard can’t cut it any more on account of, whenever she tries to do a seance, only one spirit comes through and this is a bad spirit and it’s real close, closer than anything she ever experienced before and she’s like … soiled and full of fear, and the next day she’s debilitated, feels like shit. How’m I doing?’
‘Go on.’ Marcus opened the stove, put on a second log to produce flames.
‘What do you want me to add? All of this goes back to a particular night at the home of this former MP, Sir Barber, who’s paid out big money for no good reason.’
‘So you didn’t find it convincing.’
Grayle didn’t reply. Callard’s evocation of the scene had thrown her a full and clear picture of this Barber’s sumptuous drawing room on an extraordinary night. A movie, with sounds: voices and a music track.
And a smell. Callard describing how several people in the room had picked it up simultaneously – distaste on women’s faces. Then the drop in temperature, as though the heating had cut out, the same women reaching for jackets, cardigans, evening shawls.
Persephone had looked up and seen a man sitting there, at the back of the room, clear as Marcus was now, she said.
The man gazing impassively into her eyes.
And
his
eyes were cold and cloudy and almost white, and seemed to lead nowhere. And while Callard had been describing it, Grayle was
seeing it and feeling it. Deeply, deeply chilled, a cold worm in the spine, but doing her damnedest not to let it show.
As she looked into the empty space suggested by the near-white eyes, she realized she was seeing into a space where the man had been. And then Callard had felt his freaking hands on her freaking face – moist, precise, surgical hands.
Her voice cool, precise and clinical as she described it, but Grayle knew that same worm was also deep into Seffi’s spine.
So. Why couldn’t she just have lost the trance-state, dropped out of it? A medium does not become possessed; the medium remains in control. The essence, the spirit, is dependent upon the medium for energy. Whereas this …
This was so close and clear and impressively defined that even Callard had been in thrall to it. Although she knew it was entirely negative, it had an incredible … a compelling physicality, and some sick, greedy part of her didn’t want to let it go.
Grayle shuddered now and tried to smother it by leaning forward and hugging Malcolm, who, now they were alone, had sidled into the room. ‘You didn’t like her, did you, honey? Freaked you out, right?’ Dogs almost invariably picked up disturbance, whether psychic or psychological.
‘OK, what spooked me’, she said to Marcus, ‘was the way she was able to describe the face. But then I’m thinking, if you were trying to dream up a really evil face it would look something like that.’
A dark face. Thin-featured.
Callard shaking her head in a swirl of lamp-lustred hair.
Hooked nose. Hair flat, slicked back. When he first appeared, he was looking away from me, looking to the side, and I thought he was wearing glasses, and then he turned slowly, to face me. And then he smiled … he
smiled
at me. And when his face crinkled, I saw that it wasn’t glasses, it was a scar. Almost encircling one eye and running all the way back to his ear.
Marcus asking,
How far away was he from you?
I should think, ten, fifteen feet
…
Yet he was able to … you thought he was somehow touching you with his hands.
How fast does a thought travel?
Hmm. What was he wearing?
A grey suit. Three button, all the buttons fastened. Neat.
‘I mean, a scar?’ Grayle said to Marcus. ‘A goddamn
scar
?’
‘Be interesting to talk to someone who was at the party,’ Marcus said. ‘Someone else who saw … saw it.’
Someone who saw what happened when Callard twisted out of her chair. Someone who heard the loud crack in the air, like a gunshot. Who witnessed the dislodging of a large Chinese vase from a niche in a corner of the room where nobody was sitting – shards of it everywhere, panic, people leaping up and running for cover, as though they imagined everything in the room was going to start exploding.
For Callard, it must, at first, have been a merciful release of energy.
…
and then, being thrown, jerked, out of trance like that, I immediately experienced a wave of self-disgust. It was as though I’d been a willing participant in some ghastly sexual violence, some perverse crime. I felt like … I don’t know … Myra Hindley or somebody.
Grayle recalled how she’d lost her lustre as she talked, had been hunched up into a corner of the sofa, her arms around her knees. Hell of an actress, if she was making this up.
What did you do? What did you do then
?
I got out of there, Marcus. In the middle of the chaos, I slipped away and into the lift. I caught a taxi in Cheltenham and had him take me directly home … not to the hotel, all the way back to Mysleton.
‘And also, how come Sir Barber didn’t follow this up?’ Grayle demanded now. ‘Apart from to send the cheque … like, he actually
sent the cheque.’
‘Perhaps they’d had what they wanted out of her,’ Marcus said. ‘A few moments of paranormal excitement. Something for them to gossip about for weeks.’
Grayle wrinkled her nose in disbelief.
‘And anyway’, Marcus said, ‘she sent it back. Tainted money.’
‘Tainted career. Let me get this right – in the following ten days or so, she tries two other sittings, one for this regular circle she holds in London – rich matrons and like that – and no sooner does she hit trance than …’
‘The inference being that whatever came to her in Cheltenham, she
took it away with her. Like a disease. A virus.’
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, but … and you know this is unlike me, Marcus, to go looking for the psychological answer … but could we not be getting a mental projection of this woman’s own increasing negativity? She admitted that when she came out of it she felt a wave of self-disgust, right?’
‘Yes, but, Underhill—’
‘Marcus, you have a good hard think about this before you blow me out the sky. Could not that scarred, evil face be an image of her own soiled inner being? A realization of herself as a psychic trickster preying on the sick and the lonely and the frightened and the bereaved?’
‘Good God, Underhill!’
She spread her hands. ‘I just throw this in, Marcus, for the sake of argument.’
And for the sake of a night’s sleep.
‘Curious that it all comes to a head the night she takes a pile of money – against even her own better judgement – for putting on a psychic sideshow.’
‘And the smell?’
‘Like a dirty dick? Interesting to think what
that
might be saying, hmmm?’
‘And the cold? And the Chinese vase?’
‘Look, I’m not gonna deny she may have psycho-kinetic powers. Sure, it could be coincidence, but let’s not argue about that. Think about the central issue – what do we have? We have a big karma crisis. Nervous exhaustion resulting from a major guilt trip. Of
course
it went with her when she left the party. It’s a part of her – an ugly reflection of her dark side. And every time she sits down to contact her friends, the dead folks, out it comes again.
Wooh, gross!’
Marcus started to say something and dried up. She heard him breathing like an old steam train in an echoey station yard. Then he came heavily to his feet.
‘She really has nobody to turn to, you know, Underhill. Her father’s abroad. She has no siblings. She isn’t in a relationship. No friends she can count on. She doesn’t even trust her own agent. And now this physical assault …’
‘She still puts on an act. Like when I first found her, you’d’ve thought she was an alcoholic, the way the place stank of booze. But is she drinking that way now? Uh-huh. See, I guess that was because
she thought you were gonna come in person, and you’d be like,
Oh my God, Persephone, how did it come to this? How can I help? What can I do to save you from this degradation?
You want my opinion, Marcus, I think there’s still major stuff she isn’t telling us. Too many things that just don’t meet in the middle. But right now I’m not thinking too hard about the big mysteries. All I want is my car back out of Justin’s garage and for Justin, whatever kind of bastard he is, to still have a face, you know?’
‘Yes.’ Marcus bent and shut the woodstove. ‘Think I’ll go to bed.’
‘Good.’
Grayle awoke under a woollen rug on the sofa, listening to the wind in the eaves and Malcolm snoring.
A cold, silky moonbeam filigreed the books on the high shelves.
She turned her head and saw by the darkness that the stove was out. She felt the weight of all the books on the walls. All that knowledge. All that speculation. You couldn’t trust anything in a book. You couldn’t trust your own memory, your own eyes, your own ears.
She’d woken up thinking,
Maybe I said it out loud. Maybe I actually spoke the words.
THE BITCH IS MAKING THIS UP
.
Maybe she’d said it under her breath and Callard’s hearing was incredibly acute. Whatever, twice now, the first time at Mysleton Lodge, the woman had seemed to repeat to her her own thoughts.
God-damn.
Grayle thought,
We need you out of here, Ms Callard. You’re an unhappy presence. A poltergeist. Marcus can’t help you with your problems. And me – I need my car back and you out of here.
Throw that one back at me.
UNDER AN OYSTER-SHELL SKY, GRAYLE APPROACHED THE STONES
through stiff, yellow grass.
A big vista from up here. Over to the east you could see the Malvern Hills, a line of small bumps. But there was no sunrise. No big, red, rolling ball today.
‘So, OK, what happened … one morning – it was midsummer – a young girl called Annie Davies came up here from Castle Farm. This was about 1920 and I think it was her birthday. She would be thirteen, and I guess all her hormones were churning up like the inside of a washing machine, so maybe she was ready for anything.’
Grayle laid a hand on the collapsed capstone.
‘This monument is about four thousand years old and was oriented, we think, to the midsummer sunrise. A shaft of first light would pass through a slit in the stones and into the chamber. Though with the capstone collapsed, it’s hard to see precisely how that worked now, but you get the idea.’
Persephone Callard nodded. Perhaps faintly bemused about why Grayle had insisted on bringing her up here, banging on the dairy door in the morning mist.
Bemused – that was no bad thing.
‘So Annie Davies is up here – we don’t know whether she was standing on top of the capstone, which was already partly collapsed by then, or if she was inside. It’s still possible to get inside, if you’re small.’
‘Like you,’ Callard said.
‘Yeah, I did it, once. It was … strange. A strange experience. Anyhow, this is where she had the vision. On midsummer morning the sun came down in a giant red ball and settled on the ground and it rolls towards her along the hills, and out of the sun strolls this … lady. It’s hard to get a picture of it on a dull day in the wrong season, but—’
‘It isn’t hard at all.’ Callard wore jeans and a black, hooded sweatshirt. No time for make-up and her hair was still loose. ‘These places were very carefully sited according to the landscape and the heavens and the effects they have on you. Can we see Castle Farm from here?’
‘Down behind those trees. You can see the village over there, St Mary’s … the church … Uh, the legend of High Knoll is not too well known on account of the villagers, for all kinds of reasons, covered it up about Annie Davies. The Border temperament: play it down, don’t draw attention. No way did they want another Bernadette. Plus, the Anglican Church was apparently suggesting the kid was either lying or evil.’
‘Typical.’
‘Yeah. And when Marcus heard about it, he was … well … You know Marcus.’
‘Furious.’ Callard looking amused now. The wind blew her tobacco hair across her face.
‘See, for Marcus, this story … these stones, symbolized a whole lot of things about how it all went wrong. About people closing their eyes to the miraculous – turning a blind eye to the Big Mysteries. The establishment clamping down on whatever it can’t fit between its own cramped parameters.’
‘’Twas ever thus, Grayle.’
‘He hasn’t had a lot of luck, Persephone. His wife and his little daughter both died; there was some talk of medical negligence, which is how come he hates doctors. Doctors and lawyers and politicians and scientists and … teachers.’
‘Yes. A teacher who hated teachers. I remember.’
‘So when
The Phenomenologist
came up for sale … and also Castle Farm, which at the time was even more rundown … Marcus grabbed the chance to get out of formal education and into … into finding
out
stuff, undermining received wisdom, spreading a sense of
wonder. He
likes
to be called a crank, an anarchist, an old curmudgeon. And maybe … maybe a crank is a fine thing to be, you know?’
Persephone Callard pulled the hair out of her face. Her amber eyes glittered. ‘Let me try and analyse what you’re saying, Grayle. Why you brought me here.’
‘Well, I’ve come to realize what part you played in all this, is all.’ Grayle turned away, watching a buzzard wheel and mew. ‘You were his first big breakthrough. Incontrovertible evidence of the world being a bigger place. Marcus’s Philosopher’s Stone. If Annie Davies was the legend and the inspiration, you were the proof. And maybe, all the time he was scraping together the money, he was holding you in front of him, just as much as Annie.’
‘Whereas
you
know I’m just spoiled and neurotic.’
‘Aw, look, I never …’ Grayle tugged her hair into bunches. ‘I’m not a sceptical person. I’m a
gullible
person. Holy Grayle, remember? Mind so wide open you could store a Freightliner in there. Underneath, I wanna believe what you’re saying, what you represent, just as much as he does.’
‘Oh, sure.’ Callard walked around the burial chamber until she was facing Grayle across the capstone. ‘But you also want to protect him. Because suppose Callard’s lying. Or fooling herself. Or become a psychiatric case? Or always was? Suppose she’s not a Big Mystery at all, just a medical anomaly? What’s that going to do to poor old Marcus – finding out that everything he cares about is founded on angel dust?’
Grayle bent and rested her cheek on the cold stone. She felt suddenly near to tears. It sometimes happened at High Knoll.
Callard said, more softly, ‘There’s something else about this place, isn’t there? It means something to you.’
‘It …’ Grayle sighed. ‘This was also the place Ersula – my sister – came. When she was a research archaeologist at Cefn-y-bedd. The University of the Earth?’
She straightened up, folded her arms on top of the stone.
‘They had a research programme into the effects of ancient monuments on human consciousness, which involved sleeping out at places like this and recording your dreams. It was how she got killed.’
Callard stepped back from the stones. ‘Here?’
‘I don’t think she was killed here. They found her body in a shallow grave, a co-worker at the centre and a police detective, Bobby Maiden … But that’s all over, the killer dealt with and all. You read about it. Everybody read about it.’
‘But this is why you came back here, to work? To be near …?’
‘Or in spite of being near. I’d got to know Marcus, I liked what he believed in …’
‘Until now?’
‘I don’t know.’
Callard said, ‘You want me to leave.’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know that he can help you. He has a lot of books and a lot of contacts. He’ll find out if any other mediums ever got stuck with a … presence … they couldn’t lose. He’ll find out how they handled it. But in the end, I—. Look, you don’t need to involve Marcus. He’s sick. Why can’t
I
help you?’
Callard blinked. ‘How?’
‘Practical stuff. Seems to me if there’s an immediate problem it relates to you and me and what happened the other night. Like, personally, I’m not gonna be able to rest until I find out what that was all about and what I did to that guy … who he was, all of that.’
‘Don’t go thinking that’s
your
problem. It isn’t.’
‘It is now,’ Grayle insisted. ‘Also, on the most basic level, I need to get my car back. So … what I figured … maybe you could take me over there this morning, while Marcus is poring over his files and phoning his mediums. And then when we get the car or … or we deal with that in some way … we could go over to Cheltenham, see this Barber …’
‘He’s in France.’
‘Oh.’
‘And I wouldn’t want to go back there.’
‘Isn’t that just the place you
oughta
go? He has to know stuff that could help you. Like suppose his apartment was like haunted – infested with this … this presence? How do you know he didn’t
plan
to unload the shit on you? Seffi, however you look at it, that bastard was holding out.’
‘And what do I do? Offer to give it back to him? No. It was a bad place. I couldn’t go back.’
‘Bad place? What’s that mean?’
‘Oppressive. I don’t know.’ Across the big, flat stone, Callard looked vague. ‘I’m just a receiver, a monitor. I’m not the whole computer.’
She turned her back on the stones, walked away to the new stile and the pathway down the hill.
Grayle followed, pausing to pat the capstone. ‘Wait there, OK?’
It was Marcus’s long-term plan, if
The Vision
ever made real money, to try and buy this scrubby field and this monument and then erect a pedestal with a glass case on top to relate the story of Annie Davies and the day the sun rolled across the hill.
The former dairy had four small rooms, including a kitchen with a hotplate and grill and a refrigerator. The living area was basic, with a pine-framed sofa like a child’s cot with the side down, a chair and a low table. Apparently, Marcus’s friend Andy Anderson, the nurse, had fixed this place up for him as a source of extra income. It was done out in her favourite colour: hospital white, bright and sterile, halogen wall lights reflecting the dazzling whitewashed stones back at each other.
The door to the bedroom was ajar. From the chair, Grayle could see Callard’s suitcase open on the floor; she hadn’t even properly unpacked.
‘I do expect a bill for the use of this place’, Callard said from the kitchen, ‘before I leave. You have sugar in your tea?’
‘Two. I don’t put on weight, I use nervous energy.’
She was, as yet, unsure about how successful the expedition to High Knoll had been. On the one hand, she was on the way to getting this basket case off Marcus’s back. On the other – disturbingly – she was less sure that Callard was a basket case.
Grayle said, ‘Uh, this may be simplistic, but did you ever think maybe a priest—’
‘God,
no!’ Callard flung back from the kitchen. ‘Not having anybody gleefully wheeling out the bloody bell, book and candle trolley for
me.
’
‘But you wear the cross.’
‘It’s different,’ she said quickly.
‘I guess so.’ Marcus would understand that: the radiant symbol transcending all the dogma and the liturgy and the politics. ‘But
there are other kinds of priests is what I was thinking. Guy we know … he has abilities in this general area. He’s helped people. I guess.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Hard to know how to describe it. But he’s had results.’
‘This is someone Marcus trusts?’
‘Uh …’
bloody prancing pervert, deranged deviant
‘… trust may not be the appropriate word in this instance. I’ll need to think about this. Look, should I tell Marcus we’re driving over to Stroud, or what?’
Callard came in with two mugs of tea. ‘I’m not entirely happy about it, but I can’t see an alternative. We’d have to go carefully.’
‘Naturally.’
‘I …’ Callard hesitated. ‘I’ve been thinking about Barber. And that party. There is another possibility. I’d forgotten about this, but we had a letter from the woman whose son committed suicide. Coral … Coral Hole. Asking if she could see me again. A private consultation.’
‘You didn’t follow up on it?’
‘Nancy sent the usual reply – I’m committed for the foreseeable future, but if she’d care to write again in six months’ time. They never do.’
‘So,’ Grayle drank some sugary tea, ‘if you were to get her address from your agent, maybe we could get some information out of this woman. How this party came to be organized, what was behind it, who was invited and why.’
Callard nodded.
‘So what was the tone of the letter?’ Grayle asked. ‘She mention her husband? I mean … nothing to suggest they might no longer be … together?’
‘She just asked for an appointment. What are you getting at?’
‘Just I was thinking, if my marriage had been broken up by a passing remark from a spiritualist medium … if she’d destroyed my life, set me up for a costly divorce, well, maybe I wouldn’t feel too well disposed towards her.’
‘What are you—?’ Callard’s hand shook slightly, had to put down her mug. ‘You think the husband might be behind the
attack
?’
‘You said he stormed out of the apartment. You said he was an aggressive kind of guy and you were afraid to leave in case he was
waiting for you. Could he have been one of them? One of them spoke. Called you a slag?’
‘That wasn’t him. The accent wasn’t the same.’
‘What about the other one?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘In light of that possibility, would you still be prepared to go see that woman?’
‘I don’t know. I’d need to think.’
‘Let’s put it to Marcus. He should be up and about.’
‘All right. I’ll ring Nancy and get the woman’s address.’
‘Good.’ Grayle stood up. This was practical. This was movement. This was getting Callard and her ghost out of Marcus’s space. Although hard into Grayle’s – and this particular relationship still had some way to go before mutual trust was in sight.
‘Persephone, would you tell me one thing? When we were at the lodge, you seemed to get a … a sense of Ersula.’
Callard sipped her tea, eyes watchful over the mug. ‘Perhaps I was getting a sense of
you.’
‘Please don’t try and deflect this. You were ready to let Ersula come through, right? Why would you do that, knowing that if you went into trance, the bad thing would come up like shit out of a drain? Why would you take that chance?’
‘Because it wasn’t a sitting. It wasn’t formal.’
‘I don’t understand. What’s the difference?’
‘I wouldn’t
expect
you to understand, Grayle. There’s no logic to any of this or, if there is, I can’t see it. I’m a sensitive, yah? Things come. I may wake in the night and something’s there, on the periphery. Or, meeting someone for the first time, I’m aware of
another
someone. But never – thank
Christ
– him. That would be possession, and that’s not what this is. If it was, I’d probably kill myself.’
‘You’re saying it only happens …’ tamping down the incredulity in her voice ‘… when you sit down formally. Play the music, say the words?’
Callard said nothing, didn’t blink.
Always, with this woman, just when you thought you were halfway to connecting, the walls of the old credibility canyon got pushed back again, leaving you with one foot hanging stupidly in space.
* * *
But Marcus looked a little better. Not much colour in his face beyond the raw redness of his nose; his body still sagging, rather than plump. But the will to eat and a little mild walking on the hills would maybe deal with both problems.