The Fetch (34 page)

He called for Michael, but his cry disturbed
nothing. Not even birds in the trees, and that sense of avian silence drew attention to itself. He looked up and around, shouted again, then listened.

He heard utter silence only. There was no bird life here at all.

On the air he could smell sea; and he could also smell frost.

He walked round the quarry’s edge, and slid and skidded down the grassy slope to the bottom of the scarp. As so often before, he walked between the carved gates of the quarry, stepping cautiously into the confining walls, and following the uneven ground towards the main excavation area. But before he could even turn into the deep pit, he felt that frost again, an icy wind that stung his eyes and ears.

Above him, the summer sky was lowering towards dusk; the clouds, fleecy and still, had orange rims, and the sky was iridescent blue.

But in the pit there was the smell of winter by the sea.

He called for his son again. From the corner of his eye he thought he saw movement amongst the trees that grew here, but he could focus on nothing. When he took a few steps forward he felt a cold so intense that it stopped him.

His voice, when he shouted, echoed strangely. He had the feeling that he was in a mine-shaft, or some deep, barren amphitheatre, not this bush-filled chalk working. In the distance he could see the high, white wall where Michael stored the rubbish of his apportation, but as Richard walked towards it, so the wall seemed to shift in position.

Richard began to feel afraid. He was aware of the broken nodules of gleaming marcasite that were scattered around, and the fossilized urchins and shells, all placed in a pattern, he remembered Michael telling him, although the nature of the pattern was
not discernible …

Again: ‘Michael! Come home, son. Come back to the house. It’s for your own good!’

Why would he believe me? What reason does he have to trust me? Shit! Just give me a couple of hours. Two hours to let him breathe air that is clean again. Come back to me, Mikey – give me two hours to take the first step with you again …

‘Michael!’

The silence suddenly engendered a real fear in Richard, but not, now, for the boy’s sake. The whole quarry seemed to watch him. There was no movement here, yet there was movement in his mind. He was walking through space that flowed about his body, not thin air and the smell of dusk. He was being dragged towards a sea whose sharp odour flushed through the space around him in regular waves, like the crashing of surf on a beach.

Time to go home, I think! This boy is just too angry!

The cold had started to seep through to his bones. He turned and ran. The quarry was frozen, cold like the spirit of his son. The quarry
was
his son. The understanding was almost natural. This was Michael’s castle. The place was the shadow and soul of the adopted boy. As Richard ran so these thoughts shouted at him, nagged at him like a pestering bird and he fled back to the open farmland, scrambling up the scarp to the cornfield and sight of his house in the distance.

On impulse he returned along the quarry’s edge, back to the trunk of the leaning elm. He peered into the pit for the second time, and again felt the frost and the raw
anger
that emanated from below. In the tree next to him a bird fluttered, startling him so that he nearly slipped. He straightened up and glanced round, and saw the black, feathered shape on a low branch. But it was no bird.

He grimaced as he noticed the stitched
bones, the black rags and feathers woven between them, and the grim little human skull, its lower jaw missing, that watched from a hood of black cloth. He tried to open his mouth to shout to Michael, but his jaw wouldn’t work. Panicking he wrenched his hands at his cheeks, but his mouth wouldn’t open.

The empty eyes of the tiny skull watched him, and from the pit below came a distant, gentle laughter. Even the sounds Richard tried to make seemed to throttle somewhere in his lungs.

He grabbed a broken stick and struck the dummy from the tree. It shattered and scattered and his jaw – aching and twisted – opened. He gasped for air, swore softly, then walked stiffly and with growing terror back to the house.

Carol’s distress took an hour to deal with. She was anxious for her brother, whom she believed had locked himself into his imaginary castle and would now need food. She felt she would be letting him down if she didn’t take supplies to him.

Richard reassured her as best he could, and at the girl’s insistence promised to return to the quarry and lower down a carrier bag of sandwiches and milk later that evening. The promise was solemnly made, but the eight-year-old watched her father with such a look of suspicion and disbelief that Richard felt like crying.

With the girl tucked up in bed, he returned to the front room and joined Susan, staring out into the dark night. There was a glow over the quarry, but that was just moonlight reflecting on the distant English Channel.

‘There’s been a change,’ he said after a while. Susan looked round at him, her face a sad reflection
of pain and fatigue.

‘What sort of change?’

‘I think he’s focusing better. He brought a fetish, some sort of bone doll, brought it out of God knows where but actually
sent
it into the woods. It was on a branch, watching me. It locked my jaw and my vocal cords. It was a tease. A violent tease, but Christ, it was effective!’

‘A fetish?’ Susan’s tone told Richard that despair was again creeping into her heart.

‘It was almost alive. It had a soul of its own. Something … magic. Something powerful in the object itself. It blocked me for a moment. It frightened the life out of me. I thought I was going to choke to death.’

Susan was silent for a minute, watching the night. ‘Why is he so angry
now
? What happened to make him
do
this? Your coming home?’

The thought occurred to them simultaneously. ‘The gold disc! He must have seen us looking at the disc. He must have thought …’ Susan covered her mouth for a moment, eyes closed in shock. ‘Perhaps he thought we were going to use him again.’

She remembered Françoise’s phone call then. The woman had rung to ask if Michael had fetched anything recently, and Susan had been cautious in her response. It only occurred to her now that she had asked about stones and wood. In particular, a black stone, shaped at one side.

‘Where’s the rock that struck me? What did you do with it?’

‘It’s still in the greenhouse. Why?’

Susan shivered, glanced at the garden again. ‘Françoise knew. She
knew
. She rang me this morning … hours before it happened …’

How had she known?
Perhaps, with her own talents, she had sensed that Michael was changing the direction of his focus, that he was reaching for different artefacts now, for objects imbued with power of their own.

But how had she known about
the stone?

‘Fetch it for me. From the greenhouse. Please? I’m going to ring Françoise …’

She went to phone and punched in a number. Richard found a torch, then opened the French windows carefully and stepped into the night. Behind him he heard Susan swear, and put the receiver down.

‘She’s not answering. What’s that smell?’

He looked apprehensively down the garden. Sea spray touched his face, a cold caress.

On impulse he called, ‘Come home, Michael. Come and talk.’

Something was moving across the field, coming towards the house, away from the quarry. It was hard to see …

He ran to the dark greenhouse, flashing the beam of the torch nervously around. The tomato plant where the gold was hidden was leaning awkwardly. It was clear it had been interfered with, and he felt a nagging regret that he and Susan had touched the hiding place.

The heavy, black rock was under a trellis table. He picked it up and shone the torch across it. Part of the ball had been shaped deliberately to make an angled surface, just right for pounding, or crushing.

Again his mind switched to the pot of gold. Should he take the disc into the house for safety? Again, his better reason dictated that he should not. But as he stared hungrily at the hidden treasure, he glimpsed movement across the lawn, a fleeting shape seen dimly through the dirty windows and the darkening night.

‘Michael?’

He started to run from the greenhouse, but an instinct made him duck, just as glass shattered spectacularly above him. He flung himself down, arms raised protectively as whitewashed shards scattered across the plants and ledges. A heavy object fell with metallic clangour a foot or so away from where he crouched. He flashed the torch across
the mass of curved, rusting iron that had descended through the glass, flung from a distance. The compacted metal was wet and stinking with river mud. He leaned closer, then drew back as pain lanced through his arms and chest, a slashing, cutting pain. He gasped for breath, and waved an arm protectively across his body, as if warding off a sword blow. For a second he had felt himself being whipped by an icy wind, then imagined himself drowning in a fast flowing flood. The flash of conscious dream was stunning in its power. His heart rate had leapt with shock, and his whole body had panicked as water seemed to be pouring into his lungs.

Staggering to his feet he looked again at the iron mass, and confirmed what he had already suspected. The iron shapes were swords, bent, broken, fused together by time and corrosion. He had seen such ‘votive offerings’ from river and peat bog sites all over Europe. The Thames at Battersea had given them up, and at Flag Fen, in Cambridgeshire, this sort of broken, ritual offering was commonplace.

Only now, though, did he realize that the swords had been sacrificial weapons.

Their power had been retained. He had glimpsed the pain in the old blades, the remembered agony. Michael was reaching with very different and definite purpose now!

Holding the heavy stone, Richard stepped round the sword-mass. As he fled back across the garden he heard, rather than saw, movement among the trees. Beyond the gate, close to the flattened tumulus, a tall, motionless shape had appeared. It had the night attributes of a scarecrow, but was taller and thinner, although it was swathed in ragged clothes, which were blowing in a breeze that Richard couldn’t feel.

Above him there was a wing beat, and at the house the sound of a window banging shut. Susan’s voice was a sudden scream, quickly controlled. Then
his name was called with increasing urgency. Glass shattered at the front of the house and as Richard started to run again, so he heard doors banging and Carol’s frightened voice calling urgently from her room.

The lights in the sitting room went off suddenly. He stopped on the lawn for a moment, shocked, then felt movement beside him that startled him. A second later he was flung to one side by a pulse of air that seemed to make the world go dead. He was deafened, blinded, lungless and powerless, struck hard in the solar plexus, struggling for breath. Then he was conscious again and breathing for his life!

The smell of dust and decay …

A small, shrouded figure lay sprawled beside him, arms cracked and twisted, legs drawn up at the knee, like someone sunbathing. The stink that came from the corpse was overpowering. The rags moved and flexed, animated from within. Richard heard the sounds of small creatures, but there was a life in this dead thing that seemed unnatural. He stepped heavily through its rotten chest as he stumbled to the doors, then kicked off the tainted shoe, flinging it out into the garden.

Susan was still calling for him, almost hysterically. He found her in the hallway, huddled and shaken, her face pale, tears streaming.

‘What’s happening? Oh Christ, Richard … what’s happening to us?’

‘I don’t know. What
has
happened?’

‘In my studio. In my
studio
…’

He looked at her blankly and she screamed angrily, ‘Don’t just stand there! Go and get rid of it!’

He walked quickly through his office and into the long workroom with its shelves of dolls. Before he even turned the light on he could see the moon-white face inside the window.

Approaching slowly through the darkness
he met the dead gaze, chilled and sick to his stomach.

It was a mask, the face the soft, dead features of a corpse, the mouth gaping, but it was fringed with thin shards of bone, not human bone, he thought, more like the slender bones of a large bird. Everything gleamed white. It was fixed to the window by ice, and even as he watched, the ice was spreading in a jack-frost pattern, holding the object more firmly to the glass.

The door to the playroom slammed shut! He heard someone clambering up the metal staircase.

‘Carol?’ he called, puzzled for a second, then alarmed. He crossed to the door and opened it—

And recoiled with a gasp at the sickening stench that flooded from the playroom.

A boy laughed, distantly. Richard dragged the door closed again, trying not to see the grinning stone statue that blocked his way, its face dripping with red, its eyes bulging, ram’s horns curling from its temples. It was a crouched shape, a Lucifer Stone, and it mocked him as it blocked him.

‘Susan!’ he screamed. ‘He’s in the house! Get Carol! He’s back in the house!’

The ceiling was pounded as someone ran across the landing. Richard raced back to the hall to find Susan leaning against the wall, covering her face, except for her eyes, which watched him through tears.

‘Don’t just stand there!’ he shouted.

She pointed to the front door.

Through the glass he could see a dark shape, motionless, pressed close and watching. He swore, then reached for reassurance to Susan’s arm. The woman nearly jumped out of her skin.

‘What’s happening?’ she whispered again, and began to collapse into Richard’s arms.

Upstairs, Carol screamed. Somewhere, Michael laughed, his voice a strangely echoing sound, not
really like Michael at all.

‘Oh, Christ!’

A window smashed in the sitting room. A bird screeched, and came winging into the hall, beating round Susan’s head as she ran, her voice a series of punctuated screams. The bird had a broken wing –
broken when it was fetched!
– and trailed coloured ribbons from its neck and legs as it fell heavily to the floor. It was enormous: an eagle, wing-tips white, neck feathers green, its beak a brilliant yellow, now opening and closing as it gasped for life. Its dying eyes blinked and watched Richard as he stood frozen on the stairs.