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  The Cold Calling

  ( Cold calling - 1 )

  Phil Rickman

  Phil Rickman

  The Cold Calling

  Prologue

  Sacrifice should not be equated with our modern attitude to murder.

  Aubrey Burl, Rites of the Gods.

  I

  He is invisible in the greenery.

  The Green Man.

  The very oldest Guardian of the Earth, whose face one sees carved in stone above church doorways, his hair luxuriant with leaves, the leaves bearing fruit — stone nuts and stone berries. More leaves sprouting whole from the grinning mouth, foliage gripped between stone teeth. The grin that says, I am the Earth.

  The Green Man, who stands — or crouches, or squats — for the Old Energy which once sprang from hill to holy hilltop across a shimmering land — a force which could make the fields breathe visibly and bring the oldest and coldest of stones to squirming life and…

  Stop. Listen. Watch.

  This day, the Green Man, our Green Man, knows he is perceptible only as foliage — roots and branches, fungi and moss. He is of the Earth.

  Utterly, utterly still, he listens to the Earth, his mother, his sister, his wife … her heart beating faster and fainter nowadays … most people have never heard it, will not leave their cars to walk on anything more responsive than tarmac or concrete.

  And these people …

  Even they, who consider themselves defenders of the land and Her creatures, are unaware of the Green Man as they slouch in the clearing, filling their senses with cigarette smoke, plotting.

  ‘Hear what he said?’

  The bearded man in the khaki anorak unknowingly crosses the energy line as he speaks.

  ‘When they come out the pub, this colonel-type guy says, Oh, they won’t show up today, Jeremy, it’s raining. No fun in the rain. Haw haw. Arrogant bastard. They think we got no staying power.’

  ‘Be a lovely surprise for them.’

  The female.

  She is about thirty. Could be quite pretty if she let her hair grow, took a few of the rings out of her nose. The rings imply some tribal affiliation. What utter nonsense. These people have no ethnic roots; they are outcasts.

  The other two are shaven-haired teenage boys, possibly twins. They grin a lot and kick mindlessly at the Earth…

  Kick at Her!

  The Green Man hopes that one of these boys will be separated from the others and will cross the line alone at an opportune time.

  As that first rabbit did. And the squirrels, and the fox. And once — at night — a badger. Whump! Speeding down the line, the Earth swelling with the energy of blood.

  ‘OK,’ the bearded man says. ‘Here’s how it works. I’ll go to the top of the mound and when I see them leave the road I’ll wave both hands. Like this, yeah? So you keep an eye on that mound, ‘cause I’m not gonna get the chance to do it twice without one of ‘em sees me. So when I wave … Maria, if you can count to thirty, then give a little toot.’

  From the pocket of her waterproof jacket, the female pulls a hunting horn and shakes it. ‘Hope it bloody works this time.’ She gives a smoker’s snort of laughter.

  ‘Well don’t fucking try it now. All right. Shaun, if you and Gary go down the dingle now, and open the metal gate … Idea is, the hounds’ll come tearing this way and when they’re through the gate, you shut it bloody fast and piss off quick ‘cause they’ll know what’s happening by then and they’ll be bloody mad enough to do you an injury.’

  ‘See ‘em try,’ one of the boys mutters mutinously.

  ‘You won’t. You’ll disappear, soon as that gate’s shut. We’re not here for aggro, this is about saving life.’

  Listen to them.

  Mindless, disconnected vermin. The badger was worth more. At least the badger knew the rules.

  They think that by breaking the natural cycle they are saving life. They want to sit in their eleventh-floor flats watching the foxes and badgers scamper innocently on the neat, square lawns.

  But foxes kill.

  Badgers kill.

  The Earth kills.

  And so life goes on. The faint spark of life that flits from the small body is drawn back into the greater organism. Blood-fed, the Earth breathes more deeply … and She feeds us.

  Because, you see, once, we all killed. Isn’t it obvious? It is as natural as eating and sleeping. And as important. It invigorates and enhances us. It renews us.

  And hunting … the very act of hunting … all the senses streamlined, focused, combined into a single electric impulse. In hunting, we are more aware, more open to revelation. Was not John Aubrey out hunting when, in 1648, he realized the significance of the great stones of Avebury?

  And even as the Green Man is thinking this, there comes through the trees the distant baying of the hounds, a sound as natural and joyous as birdsong, but, of course, more focused. Hounds hunting in packs. Hounds and horses and men, a tight and yet gloriously ragged combination, a stream of pure, concerted energy.

  As old as England. Older. A communion. Pure instinct. Fusion. The wild sound of the horn on the wind, the primeval bellow, tally ho, the ecstatic blooding after one’s first hunt, licking it off, swallowing it. So much sweeter than human sex.

  ‘They’re away,’ the female says.

  ‘Right.’ The bearded man throws down his cigarette. ‘Let’s do it.’ He grins. ‘Sab, sab, sab.’

  * * *

  Closing his eyes, the Green Man hears the man and the youths stumbling gracelessly between the trees. The swelling heart of the wood — an entity in itself — pounds loudly in his ears.

  Only the female is left in the clearing. With the Green Man and the Earth.

  He feels Her pulsing with anticipation against his groin, stiffening him. Stiffening his resolve. It isn’t a major step, just a question of breaking a small, social convention.

  Ideally, it should be the man, as he stands upon the mound.

  Motte it says on the Ordnance Survey map, signifying an artificial mound where a Norman castle once stood. In fact, many of these castles were built on the so-called ‘burial’ mounds created as far back as the Bronze Age, when all men hunted and were instinctively aware of the needs of the Earth and the subtle patterns of Her energies.

  The female lights another cigarette. It is raining steadily and strands of her short hair are gummed to her face. She waits, smoking.

  When, then?

  Watch. Listen to the Earth.

  He wishes there was some way She could speak directly to him, make Her wishes known. The old shamans would go into trance, make their requests and receive their instructions. He doesn’t have their skills. Not yet. One day, it will all be given to him. In the meantime he must rely on signs and signals.

  The female has taken out the hunting horn. Suddenly, she disgusts him, with her sexless, shorn hair, the rings in her nose, her apathy, her negativity, her hatred and contempt for the upholders of tradition.

  She moves forward to see the mound through the misty rain, and she steps into the line, which he can see clearly now, falling straight as a sunbeam, having travelled half a mile from St Agnes’s Well and crossing another track leading to Salisbury Cathedral.

  The Green Man rises slowly to his feet, parting the bushes. The sounds he makes are small, might be the bustling of nesting birds. And just as the female guides the false horn to her lips, she sees him.

  In his glory.

  Lowers the horn. ‘Who the hell are you?’

  ‘Oh,’ he says dismissively. ‘That doesn’t matter at all to you. It’s what I represent that matters.’

  ‘What? You sabbing, too?’ There’s uncertainty in her eyes.

  ‘Sabbing?’

 
‘Watch my lips. Are You A Hunt Saboteur?’

  He is silent for a moment. Then he says, disappointed, ‘You wouldn’t understand, would you? I’m afraid I’m wasting time.’

  ‘We did say one-thirty at the pub. If you aren’t organized about this you’ll get nowhere.’

  He makes no reply.

  ‘You really stupid or what?’

  He hefts the crossbow to his shoulder.

  Her eyes widen. ‘Shit,’ the female whispers. ‘Oh, God.’

  Emotion! Energy. At last.

  What can he see in her eyes? Fear perhaps. He sees that she’s just a girl.

  ‘You better bugger off. I’ve got mates over there.’

  Her tone is bitter but her rain-bubbled skin is soft and fresh. And there glows within her … a kind of desire. A response from the underlayer of her consciousness — and this layer exists in all of us — which moves and bends to the rhythm of nature. She just doesn’t know of it.

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’ Her face muscles struggle for a contemptuous smile. ‘Those things should be bloody banned,’ says the surface part of her, bravely. But there are hairline cracks in her voice, for contempt swiftly withers in a moment such as this.

  And respect arises.

  The Green Man laughs. ‘Brace yourself,’ he says encouragingly. ‘Let your spirit be released. Fly with it. Don’t look back. Your energy will be redeemed.’

  She isn’t listening. He sees a fever boiling in her eyes, which flick frantically from side to side as she thrusts the hunting horn between her lips.

  He shoots her then, with great calm, great precision, through the throat.

  The spontaneous surge of pure energy is utterly magnificent and brings him to his knees and then to his face on the forest floor. His heart is full, his head afloat on golden light, the forest around him brilliantly lit as the female also falls to her knees, as though in prayer, her fingers at her throat, the blood jetting down her wrists and into the sleeves of her waterproof coat, her attempt at a scream turning to gurgling liquid.

  Her eyes, at last, showing love. The earth-spirit in her has fallen in love with the bearer of such a fine death.

  Her hands reach for him. Small, white fingers, imploring.

  She cannot turn her head to follow him as he moves around her, fitting another bolt into the bow before shooting her — decently, he thinks — in the back of the neck and prodding her with a foot between the shoulder blades so that she topples forward and gives up her blood, at last, to the Earth.

  Shivering with energy now, head filling with white light, he summons her newly released spirit, imagining her shade beside him, free now, liberated from its bitterness and constriction, its feeble pity for the hunted fox. Fulfilled now. Appreciative of her small role in the great rehabilitation.

  Raising his arms to welcome the rain, dripping from his body to the Earth, he knows he has never felt so utterly alive. An almost blinding joy fills him as he raises the female’s horn to his lips, tasting the rain and the blood on the mouthpiece, and blows a long, euphoric blast and falls to his knees, laughing.

  But he dare not stop, and he dismantles the crossbow as he glides, slippery as an elf, through the slick greenery. He will drive fifteen miles to bury the bow in a badger’s sett at the base of a tumulus called Alfred’s Grave, and then climb to the top of the tumulus and stand beneath a broken pine, shedding his shirt and lifting his arms to the rain, feeling the glory.

  Having broken the convention.

  And wasn’t it easy?

  II

  ‘Look at you,’ said Kelvyn. ‘Coming apart, you are. Your jawline’s gone, your cheeks are caving in …’

  Cindy peered in the mirror. The blasted bird wasn’t entirely wrong.

  ‘As for your legs …’ Kelvyn cackled. ‘Well, no wonder you have to wear black stockings. It’ll be bloody surgical stockings before long, you mark my words, lovely, you mark my words.’

  ‘Shut it,’ Cindy snapped, ‘or I’ll bang down the lid on your neck and leave your head hanging out all night again.’

  ‘You wouldn’t.’

  ‘Try me, bach, you try me.’

  ‘Becoming a nasty old bag, you are. Not getting enough, is it?’

  ‘Enough what?’

  ‘You know what I mean. Laughs.’

  ‘That’s it,’ snarled Cindy. ‘Back in the case. And think yourself lucky. You know what the props boy said to me this morning? He said, Here, Mr Mars, why do you have to keep carrying that thing back and-’

  ‘Thing?’

  ‘His precise word.’

  ‘He’s a dead man.’

  ‘… why do you keep carrying that thing back and forth, back and forth? Why don’t you leave it in the dressing room? Nobody’ll mess with it.’

  ‘That’s what they said in Blackpool, and next morning I’m dangling off the end of a flagpole with a pair of knickers in my beak.’

  ‘What are you moaning about? Got your picture in the Daily Mirror.’

  ‘It was humiliating.’

  ‘No publicity is humiliating. Come on … off we go, back to the digs.’

  With no ceremony but perhaps the dregs of affection, Cindy dumped Kelvyn in his imitation-crocodile suitcase, the bird still rambling on in his muffled way as Cindy lugged the case to. the dressing room door. ‘Don’t know why we can’t get decent digs any more. I remember, I do, when we had a three-room suite in …’

  ‘Oh,’ Cindy said. ‘Good evening, ladies.’

  The two cleaners giggled. Margot and Sarah. Been outside the door listening for a good five minutes. Cindy gave them a free show after the matinee every Friday. On a long summer season, it was important, for your general health, to keep the cleaners on your side.

  ‘He’s a card, isn’t he, Mr Mars?’

  ‘Irrepressible.’

  ‘Does he sleep in your bedroom?’

  ‘Perches on the curtain rail, he does,’ said Cindy. ‘Course, he’s awake at first light, the bugger. Chatting up this little gull, he was, at six-thirty this morning. Six-thirty!’

  ‘Gotta get what you can these days, lovely. In Bournemouth, a red kite’s worth ten points among your common seagulls, did you know that? Quite sexy, she was, this one, mind, so you never know how it might turn out. All together now, The bells are ringing, for me and my gull … haw, haw, haw.’

  ‘Shut up, or you won’t get any of Mrs Capaldi’s lasagne.’

  ‘Call that a threat?’

  ‘Oh,’ said the younger cleaner, Sarah, paling.

  ‘Oh God,’ said the older cleaner, Margot.

  They weren’t laughing any more.

  Sarah fiddled with her duster. ‘I didn’t know you were staying with Mrs Capaldi, Mr Mars.’

  ‘We always stay with Mrs Capaldi in Bournemouth. Forget all that posh hotel stuff, Kelvyn lies through his beak.’

  ‘You haven’t seen tonight’s Echo, then?’

  ‘It’s just awful,’ said Margot. ‘Doesn’t bear thinking about. She was a difficult enough girl, heaven knows, but nobody on this earth deserves that. Nobody.’

  Dear God.

  By the time he reached the Bella Vista Guesthouse, Cindy had read the Echo story twice.

  Maria Capaldi? Maria?

  Maria it was who had first called him Cindy, when she was quite small and couldn’t get her lips around Sydney. Uncle Cindy.

  The Echo had a photograph of her, from the days before she’d had her hair cut short, before the nose-rings. The photo from Mrs Capaldi’s mantelpiece, taken on the girl’s eighteenth birthday, when she was due to go to university — from which she would drop out a year later. Mrs Capaldi would have handed it willingly to the press, a beautiful memorial, the last picture of an unsullied, unembittered Maria.

  Cindy had bewildered tears in his eyes as he turned the corner and saw — as if the report needed confirmation — a police car outside Bella Vista and another car behind it, both on the double yellows.

  The VACANCIES sign had been replaced by an ominous
ly crooked NO VACANCIES. The little, square lobby was deserted, the picture postcards hanging limply from their rack alongside the pink and blue poster announcing KELVYN KITE (with Cindy Mars) with a picture of both of them wearing mocking smiles.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, it’s closed.’ A policewoman had pushed through the bead curtain.

  ‘I … er … I’m staying here.’

  ‘What name is it?’

  ‘Mars-Lewis. Sydney Mars-Lewis.’

  The policewoman vanished into the chinking curtain. When she came back, she said, ‘Sorry, Mr Lewis, but you might have been a reporter.’ Lowered her voice. ‘Know what’s happened, do you?’

  Cindy nodded, as there came a wail from within. ‘Let ‘im in! Let ‘im in!’ The policewoman shrugged and held back the beads for him, and Cindy went through into the artificial darkness and the real despair.

  The curtains were drawn tight in the residents’ lounge, a table lamp shone under a picture of Jesus. Mrs Capaldi was a tiny creature in a corner of the four-seater sofa. A teacup shivered in its saucer on her aproned knees. Her greying black hair was in stiff peaks. Fresh make-up plastered over tearstains.

  ‘Cindy …’ She held out both hands, like a drowning woman, and Cindy took one, kneeling on the carpet at the side of the sofa. ‘What I do? What I ever do to anybody to deserve this ‘appen to me?’

  All the times he’d heard her ask this about Maria, alive.

  ‘Mr Lewis.’ A youngish man with thinning hair arose from a deep armchair. ‘Peter Hatch, Detective Chief Inspector. I, er, brought my children to see your show a couple of years ago. Very, er …’

  Cindy moved to shake hands, but Mrs Capaldi held on to him. The detective nodded, smiled briefly, sat down again. He spoke quietly.

  ‘You have much to do with Maria, Mr Lewis?’

  ‘Less lately than at one time,’ Cindy said. ‘Although we did have our discussions about blood sports. Which both of us deplored.’

  ‘So you knew what she was doing in that wood?’

  ‘Shamed me into going with them once, she did.’