Mean Spirit by Will Kingdom Read Free Book Online Page A

connected, showed her he understood what it was like having psychic ability – although he had none himself. The bond between them had been formed that night, and Grayle was no kind of substitute.
    Callard poked at the fire again. ‘Flu, you said.’
    ‘Marcus has this theory that men get it worse than women. He’s real low. But he was flattered, I guess, when you wrote to the magazine, trying to reach him. He’s been feeling a touch insecure.’
    ‘Marcus Bacton insecure?’
    ‘In his way,’ Grayle said. ‘Feels he wasted too much of his life not doing what he wanted to do … investigating the Big Mysteries, showing people that the world was so much wilder than the scientists and the politicians wanted them to think. And now he’s past sixty, running this small-time magazine that the right people don’t read, and he doesn’t think he’s ever gonna get where he wants to be.’
    Callard rose unsteadily. It didn’t show in her voice, but she must already have drunk plenty today. Reaching that stage where it no longer made you happier, just kept the fires of hell tamped down. But now she’d stopped drinking and the alcohol in the glass didn’t seem to be tempting her.
    ‘And what do you do exactly, Grayle?’
    ‘Oh, I … came over from the States for … personal reasons, and I met Marcus and I started helping him with the magazine. Which was seriously rundown. And like now we’ve changed the name and it’s starting to make this very small profit, which I thought would make him happy. But perhaps he feels it’s being taken out of his hands. Or losing its peculiar integrity. I don’t know. He’s a complex individual.’
    ‘And where is this?’ Callard moved to the window, pulled thick,dark curtains across. ‘Apart from on the Welsh border?’
    ‘He has this farmhouse inside the ruins of a medieval castle. Which sounds grander than it is. But it’s Marcus’s fortress against the cold, rational world.’
    ‘Nothing’s changed then.’
    ‘I guess.’
    ‘He was a hero to me at the time.’ Callard sat down again. ‘When they threw me out of the school and my father was advised to hire a private tutor, I wanted it to be Mr Bacton. I’ve never been entirely sure whether he turned down the job or my father lied about offering it to him. My father was … diffident … about the psychic world. He’d worked in the Diplomatic Service in too many strange places to dismiss it entirely, but he didn’t want anything to do with it.’
    ‘Your father was still working abroad?’
    ‘No, Foreign Office. When he married my mother he came back, bought Mysleton.’
    ‘Your mother died, right?’
    ‘My mother died when I was four. I don’t think she could stand the cold and the drabness and stiffness. A black woman in the Cotswolds, even then …’ A match flared. Callard applied it to a candle on the mantelpiece. ‘They said she died of cancer, but I think she withered.’
    ‘Withered?’
    ‘Like an exotic flower,’ Callard said heavily.
    ‘You remember her?’
    ‘I remember her essence.’
    ‘Right.’
    Callard slumped back into the sofa, said snappishly, ‘When people keep saying “right”, it usually means they haven’t understood anything and don’t propose to.’
    The candle sat crookedly in a pewter tray. It looked warmer than the fire.
    ‘I don’t think you want to tell me what this is about, do you?’ Grayle said.
    ‘I don’t know you. I don’t trust journalists. I might be reading about it in the New York Courier next week.’
    ‘You might be reading about it in The Vision. ’
    Callard smiled. ‘ That I could cope with.’

    Grayle thought, Me too. I could just about cope with this if it was gonna make a feature for The Vision. She’d never even dared suggest that to Marcus, but yeah, it had been at the back of her mind.
    ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I didn’t want to come here. You contact a guy after twenty years, no way are you gonna want to talk to the help. I came because