The Fetch

by Robert Holdstock

  Something moved through the passage, a gentle, cool wind, stirring his hair, making Carol blink. Michael turned sharply and flashed the pen-light into the cramped gloom. The rags on the mummified cat were crisp. When Michael crawled forward his hand descended on the creature’s remains and crushed them to dust.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Carol hissed.

  ‘Deeper,’ Michael said.

  There was a place at the far end of the tunnel where the chalk entrance was narrow and hidden behind some pieces of wood. His father hadn’t seen this entrance to the deepest of the caves, where Michael had kept Chalk Boy’s unpleasant surprises of last summer.

  The wind was stronger. Carol was talking behind him, but her words washed over him.

  Chalk Boy … ?

  He felt the hair on his neck prickle and rise. Then there was the feeling of pressure, as of hands gripping his shoulders, crushing down on his back and neck.

  ‘I can see the sea …’ Carol said, her voice muffled by the rock.

  Michael was gasping for breath. He was half through the narrow slot that widened into the deeper cave. His arm before him, he flashed the light around the wood and stone that was discarded here. He could hear the sound of a third person’s breathing, and for a second – just a second – there was the smell of the ocean.

  ‘I can see the seaside!’ Carol said, more loudly, and then laughed, almost delightedly.

  The pressure went from Michael’s back, the hands withdrew, the moment’s touch of Chalk Boy faded. Again Michael felt deserted by the ghost that had been his friend for so long.

  His shadow was outside of him again. He felt empty inside, and eased his way back to his sister.

  Carol sat in the darkness, her pale face aglow with pleasure. She was holding a small doll. It was made of china and dressed in red clothes, with a red bonnet over golden hair. It was very small, and two fingers from its left hand were broken.

  ‘Where did that come from?’ Michael asked quietly.

  ‘I found it. It was just here after the ceiling opened to the beach.’

  She was staring up at the ragged roof of filthy chalk. Michael stared after her. Carol put out her arm and pointed. ‘Just there, through there. I saw the beach at the end of a tunnel. There was a little boy and he gave something to me. I think it was the doll. It’s pretty. Look at it …’

  Grimly, Michael took the figurine and stared at it.

  What was Chalk Boy playing at now?

  TWENTY-THREE

  The house was empty, as usual. Michael let himself in through the back door and took off his heavy school coat. It was the end of March. The weather was still cold, but he could smell the new season on the air and it was good to be home before the evening set in. There would be time to visit the pit, time to explore the garden, time to walk to the shop in the village and buy a bar of chocolate.

  The house felt very hollow. The noisy heating was just coming on. The oven made creaking noises as the evening meal began to cook, ignited under its own instruction. There was no note, no plate of sandwiches for his tea. Just an empty, silent building, surrounded by rain clouds.

  He went up to his room and idled for a while with his comics, his models and his thoughts. From his window he could see the cornfield beginning to mist over. The quarry was in gathering gloom. Somewhere in the house there was a sudden movement.

  Puzzled, he peered into Carol’s tiny, tidy chamber, but it was quite empty. He checked the bathroom and toilet, then the guest room with its stale smell of old blankets and furniture. Finally he opened the door to his parents’ bedroom, scuffed through the deep pile carpet, ran his hands over the velvet curtains on the window, opened the closet.

  It was so strange to be here, a room where he had not been welcomed, nor taken, for years. His mother’s clothes had a heavy feel and smell about them. She wore a lot of corduroy. Belts hung from hangers, and silk scarves too. On shelves below the dresses were black and brown leather boots, sports shoes, and packs of unopened tights.

  He opened the drawers to her dressing-table and looked at the scatter of objects, from hairbrushes, curlers, tubes of ‘guck’, cotton buds, elastic bands, empty photograph holders, bunches of real hair (from all the family) for doll-making, shards of china, wooden and porcelain limbs, knitting patterns. He ran his fingers through these, his mother’s private things.

  Closing the drawer he felt a thrill – it was like being a spy entering the house of a suspect.

  Again: the sound of movement somewhere close by.

  ‘Who’s there?’ he called out.

  The response was the sudden sound of footsteps on the stairs. He raced to the bedroom door, stood panting excitedly on the landing. But again silence had descended.

  ‘Chalk Boy?’

  He peered over the banister at the hall below.

  ‘Chalk Boy?’

  The house creaked as heating flowed and the oven settled down to its cooking.

  Downstairs: the sitting room was in darkness now, a cold place, full of shadows spilling from the hall. He entered his father’s study and ran his left hand across the cold, leather books; through further to the long studio where his mother’s dolls lined the walls. There was a sharp smell here, like candle wax. He crossed the room, opened the door to the extension and stepped into the place where he and Carol had once played games, where boxes of toys stood by the walls, where pictures were pinned, the crude pictures painted by them. The family’s bicycles were here, too, his own still with its thick tyres flat after he had punctured them the previous summer.

  A box was moved above him, something thumped gently on the floor.

  The upstairs part of this silent extension was reached by spiral, metal stairs at the far end. There was nothing in the dark room, save for a few jars of preserves, boxes of magazines, some empty shelving, and a pine table that his father was renovating.

  Michael stood in this heavy stillness staring through the window at the slim moon over the trees. Then a figure moved furtively through the shadows in the cold room, and quickly he switched on the light.

  Carol yelled, and cowered back, drawing her school anorak tightly around her.

  ‘I didn’t want to give it to him!’ she said loudly, and her face creased into tears. ’

  ‘Give what? What’s the matter?’

  Standing at the top of the stairwell, gripping the cold rail, Michael was alarmed at the fear and anguish spilling from his sister.

  ‘The shell,’ the girl said in a small voice. ‘The horse shell. But Daddy took it. He said we all had to make sacrifices. He said it was valuable and would have to be given away.’

  For a moment Michael didn’t know what she was talking about, then he remembered the shell with its carvings, the present he had given his sister two years ago. It didn’t upset him. He had just thought she would find the shell pretty.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ll find you a fossil in the pit.’

  But then a thought occurred to him, and his vision reddened. He raced down the stairs, crossed the playroom and flung open the door to his mother’s studio. Anxiously he scanned the shelves of dolls, then smiled with relief.

  The Mocking Cross doll, his special present for his mother, was still there, in pride of place above her work-bench.

  An hour later he heard his parents come home. He was at his desk doing his homework, and there he stayed, uneasy with the feeling of the welcome silence broken by sudden activity. There was movement on the landing, doors opened and shut, food smells surfaced, voices chattered, sounding strained. The telephone rang, then rang again.

  After a while he was called to supper. He ate quietly, conscious that his father was in a grim mood and his mother was pale and tired. He kept trying to get her to look at him, but she wouldn’t. From frequent experiences he knew this probably meant trouble was brewing.

  After they’d eaten he went into the sitting room and watched television. His parents went to their separate studios to work, but after
a while he heard raised voices and he blocked his ears against the argument. He turned the TV up loudly, sitting grimly watching a comedy, until the door opened and his father shouted, ‘Turn that bloody thing down!’

  Immediately after that, the front door was slammed shut and his father’s new car skidded on the gravel drive as it was driven furiously on to the village road.

  Carol was called to bed, and the girl went reluctantly. She was still upset about the shell. Michael had given her a fossil sea-urchin from his small collection, but the new gift had not pacified her.

  Standing at the bottom of the stairs Michael heard his mother’s murmuring voice, reading to Carol from one of the story books. He went back to the TV and turned the volume up again, then kicked fiercely at the armchair where his father usually sat, jumping on the cushions and aiming his blows at where the man’s head would usually have been.

  The sudden jarring ring of the telephone made him jump, catching him in mid-savagery. He stepped down from the armchair and picked up the receiver. He felt like shouting, something along the lines of ‘Leave us alone!’ Instead he just held the receiver to his ear and listened above the laughter on the TV.

  ‘Hello? Dr Whitlock?’

  ‘It’s Michael. Daddy isn’t home.’

  ‘Hello, Michael. Is your mother there?’

  Michael thought about this for a moment, then shook his head.

  ‘Hello? Michael?’

  ‘She’s not home either. She’s out at a dance. In Maidstone.’ He smiled and bit his lip, the lie seeming funny and scary at the same time.

  That sounds nice. Is someone shouting there, Michael? It’s hard to hear you.’

  Michael used the remote control to turn down the television. The man said, ‘That’s better. Now, Michael, can I trust you to leave a message for Dr – for your father?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I’d like to speak to him as soon as possible about the Mocking Cross.’

  Michael felt a sudden, intense shock. ‘What Mocking Cross?’ he said.

  Upstairs, Carol laughed loudly and there was a sound of walking about. Michael stared at the ceiling, his face burning.

  ‘It’s the lovely wooden cross with the gold mask that your father sold. I’m the man who bought it and I need to know some details about it. I’m sure he can spare the time. After all, I made him quite a rich man a week ago. Michael?’

  Michael let the telephone receiver fall and dangle. He could hear the man’s voice rising in pitch as he tried to call attention down the line, but all Michael could think of was the Mocking Cross, his gift to his mother, the precious gift of doll and mask that his mother so adored.

  She had promised him she would never sell it. She had promised him.

  It was still in her studio. He had seen it there a few hours ago. It was still in the studio … what was the man on the telephone talking about?

  He walked swiftly into the room where the dolls were shelved and stared up at the glinting gold of the mask.

  Then he looked more closely.

  ‘No!’

  His scream was uncontrollable. His head filled with noise, his eyes with tears. Rage tightened his muscles until he felt he would burst, break, tear open with the pressure of it.

  His howl brought his mother running down the stairs. He was aware of her sobbing cry, ‘Oh, Michael! Oh no, Michael…!’

  But he was already clambering up to the shelf, snatching at the doll. The papier-mâché crumbled in his hands. The cardboard with its gold paint buckled as he crushed it in his fist. The clothes came away, the same clothes he had used before. But they covered nothing, just a copy.

  She had sold the doll!

  She had made Daddy very rich!

  She had betrayed him!

  He ran past her, still screaming abuse. He flung the crushed thing at the tearful woman who reached for him. He felt her hand clutch his arm, trying to pull him to her, and turned and sank his teeth into the fingers, drawing blood, eliciting a howl of pain and anger. She let him go and he ran from the room, from the house. Outside, in the night, he stood and stared at the black sky. He was shaking violently. His mother’s blood tasted strong and sharp in his mouth and he let the taste linger.

  Betrayed!

  But after a while the hot anger became cold and dead. He sat down among the hedges that created the maze in the garden, drawing his body into a tight ball, curling up, crying softly as the night’s cold edged and seeped through his clothing and his mother called for him, and called, and cried, and called …

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Michael’s outrage passed in time, but he woke each morning now with a deep and abiding sense of sadness and anger. His dreams were no more than tormented visions of being alone, of being abandoned, of always looking up at dark figures moving by, shapes that never stopped. And search though he might for a stronger sense of Chalk Boy and the great sea at the end of the Limbo tunnel, he could only glimpse him in the distance, and then only by shadow and echo, not by clear sight.

  The spring term passed. Easter was a miserable affair. His eleventh birthday passed almost without ceremony. His father was away in the North again, working eighteen hours a day to earn money, and his mother maintained a silent, angry distance from him. She spent hours in her studio, writing notes, for lessons and making dolls to sell. She had sold the most valuable items in her collection, although the shelves were still crowded with bland, watching faces and the darker designs of masks and puppets.

  One day, Carol gave her mother the small china doll that she had found in the pit. Michael watched from across his father’s study as the girl parted with the lovely object. He saw how quickly Susan reacted, how the life came back into her.

  ‘Where did you get this? Did Michael get this for you? Where did you get it?’

  As her voice rose with excitement, Michael clenched his jaw with anger. His mother’s sudden hope was an irritation to him. If she was so keen to have more gifts, why didn’t she ask him? He couldn’t supply them, but she could call him in and ask him.

  Carol said, ‘He gave it to me years ago. I forgot about it. It was under my bed.’

  Michael was astonished, so much so that he withdrew from his watching place and went into the hall.

  Carol hated lying, but she had lied to her mother. He wondered why? Why had she protected him?

  Later, his sister took him by the hand and tugged him outdoors. Shushing him with a finger to her mouth, she ran ahead of him to the quarry and crouched down behind the battered wooden walls of the fun-castle.

  ‘If we can get Mummy some more dolls, she’ll be happier. I dreamed about dolls after the last time we were here.’

  Another dream! Why was she dreaming now, and not him? Michael stared at his sister, then nodded. They slid down the rope ladder and crouched in the dead pit. They waited an hour or so, but nothing happened, and it started to get cold again.

  Carol was disappointed, of course, but she had a sturdy and optimistic constitution and returned to the house more determined than resigned. And indeed, a few weeks later, things changed.

  Sitting again in the cramped tunnel, holding hands and chanting a mumbo-jumbo they had invented, a spell of summoning to try to induce the return of Chalk Boy, Carol suddenly said, ‘I can smell the sea!’

  Instantly, her nose wrinkled and she made a sound of disgust. ‘It stinks!’

  ‘You can smell the sea? Can you hear it too?’

  Frantically, Michael closed his eyes, trying to remember the sound of the sea-shore, to feel the heat, to sense the deep caves in the rock face where Chalk Boy lurked. He heard laughter, and felt a shadow-wind in his mind, something passing him by again, always passing him by.

  Carol’s laugh made him look up. Her own eyes were huge, sparkling, and her lips were parted in an expression of childish wonder.

  ‘What is it?’ he hissed. Her fingers tightened on his own. He felt strange, as if blood was moving between their bodies, through the fingertips and the palms of their h
ands. He tried to detach his grip from hers, but she squeezed more tightly, and laughed again, a sound of delight. She was focusing into nowhere, a million miles away, a million years away.

  ‘Carol!’

  He began to feel weak. In his head there was the noise of wind, stormy, gusting, and now he too could smell the wild, wretched sea. It flowed into him and through him, and – his eyes wide open – he glimpsed a shadow running lightly across bright sands, following the wind, reaching for the girl.

  He grunted and tugged at his sister’s hands, trying to disengage, but she screeched suddenly, ‘No! Keep hold!’

  ‘Carol, let me go!’

  ‘NO!’

  Her yell was angry; her voice sounded odd, rasping, not like the girl at all, despite its childish pitch. Her gaze had focused more on her brother, but her eyes were suddenly narrow. She looked ugly, hard. Her mouth, still gaping, seemed set over a jaw that jutted forward, as if she was clenching her muscles, holding her mouth open so that she could breathe. She looked determined, but feral and frightening.

  The flow from Michael to this savage incarnation of his sister increased, and Michael kicked quickly, his foot shoving against the girl’s stomach.

  At once she released her grip on him, but her hands reached out, as if to catch something. The tunnel thudded, a sound like dull thunder. The wind went from Michael’s body, he felt punched, and he was flung to one side. When he sat up and looked at his sister, by the dim light coming from the quarry, he saw her cradling a child in her arms.

  ‘A present for Mummy,’ Carol said quietly. ‘It’s like a little wrinkled baby.’

  Michael nervously reached for the doll. Carol wouldn’t let it go, but she let him touch the face. It was made of wood, hard and black. It had funny eyes and a funny mouth. The arms were loose and movable below the coarse, dyed clothes, a red and yellow dress made out of an old sack, by its feel. The hair was black and quite long and felt very like real hair. When Carol shook it, the doll rattled. They investigated under the garment and realized that the body was hollow. There was something hard inside it.