The Fetch

by Robert Holdstock

  She drained her mug and stepped back into the house. ‘Perhaps I should have been firmer before. I should have told you that in my world we learn very fast to depend on nothing beyond the five senses that we all share in common.’

  Susan had followed Françoise into the kitchen. ‘What did you mean by transformed? You said your talent had transformed.’

  ‘When I was a girl I had a very strange power. Very frightening. Forgive me if I say no more than that. But when I was ten, it changed into what I can do now; listen to stones. Listen to bones. I have had some good encounters, though.’

  ‘And Michael might do something similar?’

  With a sympathetic smile, Françoise shrugged. ‘Who knows? It is a rare event. You must start to get used to the fact. Michael is an ordinary boy now. Love him for what he is, not what he brings.’

  ‘You have a way of getting my back up, Françoise,’ Susan said sharply.

  ‘Good.’

  TWENTY-ONE

  On the last day of the Christmas term the heating in Michael’s school failed and classes ended half an hour early. The children gathered in the main hall, a restless, noisy mob, excited at the prospect of holidays and the impending snow.

  Michael stood apart from the other children, peering out into the lamplit darkness of the frosty afternoon. Many parents were already in the school grounds, collecting their charges, but there was no sign of his mother, and that meant he would have to wait … The thought made him apprehensive. If he waited around too long, Tony Hanson would almost certainly start to pick on him.

  A teacher came past, called to him, ‘Are you all right, Michael? Is someone collecting you?’

  Michael stared up at Mr Hallam and nodded. ‘I think so. Mummy usually comes in the car.’

  ‘Would you like me to make a phone call?’

  The main hall was beginning to chill. He had a scarf round his neck, and mittens on, but as the heat dissipated rapidly so his breath began to frost.

  ‘Yes please,’ he said. Mr Hallam walked away, stopping briefly with some of the other children, before disappearing into the corridor to the staff room.

  ‘Roman coin! Roman coin!’

  The voice chanted derisorily from across the hall. Several children laughed, several grouped tightly together, as Tony Hanson ran across to where Michael was standing. The boy’s eyes were wide and wild. He pushed Michael hard against the cooling radiator by the window.

  ‘You said you were going to get me another coin. Where is it?’

  ‘I couldn’t find one,’ Michael said, and gasped as the other boy pushed him in the chest again. The assembly hall was emptying fast. Two other boys came over and stood behind Tony as he bullied Michael. They were breathing hard.

  Michael had brought a Roman coin to school, late in the summer term, as part of a project where every pupil talked about an object or a book that interested them. After the class, set upon by Tony and his friends, he had given the coin to the older boy to save himself from being beaten. He lied about where he had found the sestertius, pretending that he knew where there was a secret Roman stash. That, naturally, had been the wrong thing to do, and a form of blackmail had begun. He had been able to buy his way out of a fight in early September using a tiny, jade-green cat, but then Chalk Boy had started to play games with him, hiding from him, laughing at him, taunting him, and sending him to fetch only mummified corpses.

  At school, and at home, a terrible tension had begun to develop.

  Mr Hallam called across the hall. ‘Michael? Your mother’s on her way. Tony, leave Michael alone. If I see you push him again you’ll be for the high jump. Do you hear me?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Hallam,’ Tony called with a sour smile, and with a final vicious shove at Michael, he walked away.

  Michael went quickly out into the school yard, shivering and shaking, his eyes watering with the cold and with anguish.

  He was almost the last child to leave the school. An oppressive silence had enveloped the playground yard, relieved only by the spill of light from the main hall and some of the classrooms where cleaners were at work. When his mother’s car pulled up at the kerb outside the school gates, Michael ran for it gratefully. He climbed into the front seat and looked quickly away from the hard face of the woman who sat there.

  ‘Why are you off so early?’ she asked, pulling out on to the road.

  ‘Heating broke down. It was freezing in the classrooms.’

  ‘Put your seat belt on.’

  He twisted to obey, then settled back in the seat.

  The drive home was conducted in silence.

  He ate tea with Carol, who, full of cold, was sneezing loudly. She had been off school for this last week. Susan busied herself with work. The phone rang a few times and Michael listened to his mother’s voice, the edge in it, the strain.

  ‘Daddy’s home already,’ Carol said, squeezing her nose with a tissue. Her eyes, watery, could not conceal their discomfort at the thought of what she had just announced. Michael looked down at his plate of beans, apprehension clawing at his chest.

  When he had finished eating he put on his coat again and walked down the garden, to the chalk pit. The wooden walls of the fun castle were broken now, but the rope ladder was still strong enough to bear his weight. As he crunched through the crisp undergrowth in the winter copse, approaching the hardboard walls of the defence, he heard a sound from the quarry below.

  Cautiously he peered over the edge, and drew back sharply as he saw the torchlit shape of his father. The man was sweeping through the bushes, searching. Michael could hear the angry muttering in his voice. The mound where the dog was buried had been dug over, fresh chalk and earth showing together. Peering over the edge again, Michael saw his father creep into the tool-housing and clatter about inside the deep passage.

  ‘There must be something,’ came the man’s voice. ‘Damn!’

  His father came out holding his head and looking at his hand for signs of blood. ‘Damn and blast!’

  He moved away from the wall into the heart of the quarry, searching under bushes, kicking around at the bases of the trees. At one point he stopped and looked sharply up at the mock turrets where Michael crouched. Michael drew back quickly and waited a full two minutes before he dared peer down again into the torch-illuminated darkness.

  His father had disappeared, although the darting beam of light told of his movement towards the entrance.

  Michael had wanted to go down into the cold castle and call again for Chalk Boy, but now he felt too frightened. He returned to the house, running, saw his mother in the window of her extended studio, and crept in and up to his bedroom, closing the door behind him.

  Later, his father entered the house. Michael huddled in a corner and listened to the sounds downstairs. After a while the phone went and he crept to the door to listen. There was an angry conversation.

  His father was saying, ‘Damn it, Jack. There’s nothing I can do about it …’

  A silence, and then, ‘Yes, I know. I know they need the money … but what can I do? He’s dried up. Christmas is over before it’s even begun. There’s nothing for me to give you …’

  Again, a tension in the silence, with his mother, now in the kitchen, talking softly to Carol.

  ‘Jack, for God’s sake. Put them off. I told you the supply would be unpredictable. It’s your damn fault if you made too many promises …

  ‘I can’t, Jack, I just can’t…

  ‘You shouldn’t have promised …

  ‘What am I supposed to do?

  ‘The boy’s supply has dried. It’s a bugger, I know. But there’s been nothing for months, now.

  ‘Let me think about it. If that’s the only solution, then we’ll just have to do it. I know. I accept that. But as a last resort!’

  And then, with a last angry shout, ‘Get off my back, Jack! They’ll just have to wait for their cash! I don’t have it now, and I don’t know when I’ll get it. But I’m damned if I’ll be blackmailed by them. Or b
y you, for that matter!’

  The phone was slammed down. Michael heard the sound of a table being kicked, and a door banged shut.

  Carol started to cry, and his mother’s voice soothed her.

  There had been a time when the sound of his father’s steps on the stairs, moving towards his room, had thrilled Michael. He would huddle under the blankets, waiting for the knock, for the smiling face that would peer round the door, for the pillow fight, the mug of chocolate, the story, the long, complicated story before the kiss goodnight – and then the dreams. It was such a simple pleasure, and he missed it desperately. For those few years he had felt that his soul was back inside his body. But now he remembered again how his shadow stalked the world outside, only occasionally slipping back into his head and his heart. He was a boy without a soul. And now that Chalk Boy had left him, his father and mother couldn’t see him properly any more.

  What they saw was a ‘wrong Michael’, a false-boy, and that was why they were so angry with him all the time. They wanted the pretty things, but they couldn’t understand that without his shadow he was a false-boy. He couldn’t touch the places where the pretty things were hidden.

  And now his father was angry all the time. Michael felt terrified every time the door opened and the pale face of the man looked in, and the thin lips parted to speak words that Michael often tried not to hear.

  He was coming up the stairs now.

  Michael closed his eyes.

  In his dreams he could still smell the sea, and hear the booming cries of the creatures that swam there; he could sense the heat of the sand on the red beach, and imagine the colours of the strange trees and rocks that grew out of the shore. But he couldn’t touch that place any more, and Chalk Boy, if he was still there in Limbo, would not reveal himself to Michael.

  The footfall seemed to make the house shudder. The air in his room drained away so that Michael’s chest became tight and he gasped for breath.

  The door opened and the pale man stood there, eyes like wet hollows in a tree, somehow sightless, depthless. The door closed and the man swelled in view, towering over the boy. Michael watched the shadow move towards him, crushed himself further into his corner. The smells came, then: of sweat, and chalk, and whisky.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  The sudden words in the silence startled Michael. They struck his head like explosive whispers. Although he heard them, he couldn’t comprehend them. He peered up at the dark shadow with its white face. There was such anger there. Eyes like water. Hair like the wild rushes on the bank of the canal. No smile on the mouth that gaped open, loose, expressionless.

  ‘What are you doing?’ the shadow repeated, and air filled Michael’s lungs.

  ‘Nothing,’ he whispered.

  ‘Why are you huddling in the corner? What’s the matter with you? Are you ill?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then get up. I want to talk to you …’

  Michael stood slowly and followed his father as he prowled around the room. He watched as the man ran his fingers over the pictures of statues, chalices, dishes and golden masks, the decorations on the wall, the enclosing, comforting representations of the sort of bright and precious treasures that Michael had been able to see in his dreams. His father picked up the wooden horseman that Michael had fetched two years ago, its eyes and armour beaten out of thin bronze, its trappings of fine leather and flax still flexible and perfect. It was a favourite piece of Michael’s. He had glimpsed it in a darkly cavernous place. In his fetching dream he had smelled charred flesh and bone and sensed rats scurrying through the rotting mass of clothing that covered the tumble of metal and wooden objects. He had been, in that dream, in a stone place. He remembered his father talking to him of the Bronze Age, and passage tombs, and mortuary houses. But all he had wanted was the story, the story of Knights, the stories of the wasteland, the King, and the search for the source of peace and wisdom: the Grail.

  His head reeled with versions of the Grail legend, with the stories that he had listened to, night after night. If Michael was aware of his father’s strain in telling the tales, it was a minor thing, an insignificant blemish on the backdrop of comfort and joy that had been the tale-telling itself. Contradictions in detail didn’t matter. Michael was well aware that different stories told the same legend in different ways. It was to do with time, and how people took aspects and details and enlarged or changed them to suit their purposes. What was important was the telling. In the telling of the story, the story came close. Each time they talked of the Grail, the Grail had come closer, closer to release from its prison in time and memory.

  It was like a mystery. Tracing through the stories for the vision that was not false. For the True Sight.

  The truth, bright and shining, like the crystal cup that Arthur had sought for so many years of his life.

  The horse was placed down. The brooding man moved round the room, then turned, sat down on the small bed, pale and watery eyes watching the boy.

  ‘Have you heard anything from Chalk Boy?’

  Michael shook his head, watching the way his father’s mouth moved, a pursed, pinched shape, being bitten from the inside.

  ‘Michael …’

  A hand on his shoulder, a squeeze of fingers. Hesitation. The moist fumes of alcohol mixed with the burnt-grass smell of cigarette. Michael tried to pull away, but the man maintained his grip and made the boy stand still.

  ‘Michael, do you remember two years ago when we had that lovely holiday on the big Wall? Hadrian’s Wall?’

  Michael nodded, squirming slightly and trying not to breathe.

  ‘Do you remember the funny Roman you saw in your dream? And the lucky charm he gave you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There was no Chalk Boy then. Was there? Do you remember? Chalk Boy was still in the pit. You were in the North, you couldn’t hear him, but you could still …

  The man’s eyes drifted, his right hand fluttered in the air. ‘You could still fly … like a bird … through time and space … like a bird, swooping and flying and seeing ghostly Romans, and cold places, and fires, and bright things … there was no Chalk Boy then. On the Wall. Was there?’

  Michael shook his head.

  ‘So why does Chalk Boy matter? What has happened, Mikey? Why can’t you … fly … why can’t you fly any more? Aren’t there any bright things in your dreams?’

  ‘I can’t see any,’ Michael whispered.

  ‘Do you try? Do you look? Are you trying?’

  Michael felt the fingers on his shoulder clench. His father’s face was ashen. There was an odd intensity in the gaze and Michael’s fear increased. He was suddenly aware that the man’s face was covered by stubble, a dark, ragged growth of beard against the white skin that made him look menacing.

  ‘I can’t dream any more, now that Chalk Boy is hiding.’

  ‘But you don’t need Chalk Boy. You know you don’t.’

  ‘I do!’

  ‘You don’t! Michael, you don’t need him. You can do it on your own. Try. Just try for me. Try for Daddy. Try dreaming, try flying. There must be some wonderful things to see … The shield in the lake. Remember the shield? You haven’t fetched it yet, Mikey. So you can still do it. Can’t you try? Please? For Daddy?’

  The grip hurt. Michael touched a hand to the heavy, pressing fingers, and eased them off his shirt.

  ‘Please, Michael. Try for Daddy?’ came the voice.

  ‘No. I can’t. Chalk Boy is angry with me.’

  Michael was flung back by the violent motion of the man rising to his feet. The air around him felt lashed with his father’s furious obscenity, a word uttered like a whip-crack. He watched the man’s tension wither. His father turned then, softer. He crouched again, breathed out once more and smiled.

  ‘I’m sorry, Michael. It’s been very hard for us these last months. Your mummy and me … we’re very tired, very upset.’

  ‘Why is Mummy upset?’

  ‘Because her boy isn’t he
lping. Because you’re not helping, Mikey. Because she’s worried how we’re going to get through the next years. We’d come to depend on you. You helped us so much. And Uncle Jack needs you too. Uncle Jack is very upset.’

  Uncle Jack! Uncle Jack!

  Michael looked away, feeling a moment’s anger. He hated Uncle Jack. He wasn’t a true uncle, anyway. He just liked to examine the treasures that Michael fetched. He was not a nice man. And Françoise didn’t like him.

  Uncle Jack!

  His father was saying, ‘Uncle Jack is very important to me. I don’t know if you know how important, but he got me a very good job. That’s why we have the lovely holidays. That’s why we can go and stay in nice hotels all over France and Germany and Scotland, because Uncle Jack spoke to important people about me, and I’ve got a wonderful job, looking at ancient things, and photographing them … and without Uncle Jack, none of this would have been possible.’

  Michael said nothing. He didn’t know what to say. His father seemed almost sad at one moment, then bristling, as if he were going to shout.

  ‘I promised Uncle Jack to show him treasures and funny things, and you said … do you remember? When we were telling each other stories? You said you would always give me things to show to Uncle Jack.’

  ‘I remember,’ Michael said.

  ‘But I haven’t been able to show anything to Uncle Jack for a long time. And he’s not very happy. Couldn’t we try and help him out?’

  Gritting his teeth, speaking in an almost inaudible and angry tone, Michael murmured, ‘Don’t give him the golden egg.’

  His father straightened up, then looked sad.

  ‘That would be a shame. But you see… if I haven’t got anything else to give him, I may well have to give him the egg—’

  ‘NO!’ Michael screamed. His vision had reddened. The egg was a special present. It was precious. It was for his father. Uncle Jack mustn’t have the egg.

  ‘NO!’

  Angrily, his father said, ‘Don’t shout at me, Michael. If you can’t give me something else, then the egg must go. If you want the egg to stay, then find something else! Now! Do you hear?’