The Fetch

by Robert Holdstock

  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.

  Susan came back into the hall with a mallet. Sobbing, she smashed the creature’s skull before running up the stairs, pushing past Richard to get to her daughter’s room.

  The girl was in bed, the covers drawn over her head. Hanging against the window was a bird in slow flight, but like the tiny doll in the wood by the quarry, this was no more than stitched-together wings and legs, an obscenity of bleeding, ragged tissues, bones and feathers, the heads of three rooks, beaks torn open wide, slung crudely in the middle of the rotting mass.

  It was not flying. It was suspended from the curtain rail by a thin length of gut, swaying like a pendulum at the end of its life.

  To Richard it seemed unthreatening, and he opened the window on impulse, tearing the gut rope and depositing the cruel tease on the lawn below.

  That is for show. Not power. He doesn’t want to attack Carol. Good …

  Susan sat with the girl, hugging her, fulfilling many needs. Richard went downstairs again and peered more closely through the front door at the monstrous wooden effigy that now stood there.

  With the lights off he could define its shape more clearly, a tall, manlike structure, a wooden figure, built from thin branches, its legs wide, its arms stretched horizontal. The tiny head was carved with no features at all, save for the horizontal slash of a mouth. Where its breath would have touched the glass, had it been possessed of such life, ice was forming, spreading rapidly in a pattern of frost that began to obscure vision.

  On impulse, Richard tried to open the door, determined to break whatever seal Michael had established. But as his hand reached for the latch his fingers began to freeze, curling painfully into his palms. The eyeless, gaping face seemed to mock him.

  Michael’s odd laugh sounded from his study. Without hesitation, but terrified, Richard returned to the darkened room. An uncanny and heavy silence greeted him and he turned on the light. The door to Susan’s studio was just closing. He ran to the workroom, peered in, aware of frantic movement and the gleam of the white death-mask on the window.

  The shelves had been stripped bare. The air was full of dolls, flung and flying as if storm-tossed, as a pale shadow spun and screamed in the centre of the room, arms outstretched, hair flying.

  For a moment Richard saw the vague outline of his son in a swirling tumult of dolls; a second later a deer’s head was flung against him, the antlers catching on the frame of the door. A great spray of hot blood caked his face and chest. The creature’s face worked, the tongue licking hideously between stretched jaws. It stank of fur, heat and sweat, a heavy animal stench. Its eyes rolled in the sockets, but then the lids closed. Richard cried out in horror, scratching at the stickiness on his face, aware of the bright decoration on the antlers; the ribbons, the leather, the feathers, the painted patterns on the face, around its eyes – and the glittering of glassy stones, strung between the inner tines of each antler.

  A present for Daddy … Pretty … Pretty …

  He couldn’t get past the monstrous sacrifice. He took the head by its horn, dragged it to the hall, but couldn’t approach the front door. He pulled it to the entrance to the cellar and flung it down the steps, slamming the door closed.

  A trail of fresh blood gleamed on the polished wood of the hallway.

  ‘Susan! He’s upstairs again!’

  Richard could hear the sudden movement of the boy above him. Carol shouted something, and a door was banged closed. Then laughter. Mocking Boy’s laughter.

  Is it Michael? It just doesn’t sound like him …

  To Richard’s astonishment, the door of his study was flung wide. It stopped his heart for a second, but he launched himself into the room, switching on the light, staring through the swirl of frost-laden mist at the cluttered bookshelves.

  Above him came the sound of someone running heavily on the spot, a dance, an exercise …

  The ceiling seemed to shake, the light fixtures trembling. The temperature dropped further, and the chill began to numb Richard’s skin.

  The ceiling exploded downwards!

  He flung himself away from the huge column of painted wood that crashed through the plaster and paint, descending into the room. It slid down heavily at an angle, crushing his desk chair and denting the floorboards but not breaking them. Dust swirled around the monstrous effigy, and wood smoke filled the air …

  And the echo of a cry! Such a strange sensation, that echo! Like voices raised in fear, but only glimpsed, a faint reflection of a moment of horror in another time.

  And wood smoke, sweet and heavy, like cedar!

  The totem-tree settled. Its grinning, staring faces, painted in garish reds, greens and blues, seemed to die a little. Richard picked himself up and met the eyes of otters, eagles, owls, deer, wolves and men. The wood was old, scored and cracked, parting along its flaws. The faces were twisted, riddled with the pecking holes of birds and the scouring trails of beetles. Fungal growth filled the crevices.

  And yet everything about the monolith was fresh! It was new! It had been recently used.

  It sang at him, driving him from the room as it settled to a time when the fires were cold and the dancers were dead, its memories new, but fading with the sounds and scents of the world from which Michael had wrenched its massive bulk.

  A face peered in through the study window, a white face: grinning. It waved a mass of rattling, raggy objects, round-faced, rouged lips, false hair, pressed them against the window, then fled. Richard was vaguely aware of the figure shrieking with delight, triumphal, passing away into the darkness, dragging his haul behind him.

  He stepped round the totem and went into Susan’s studio, staring at the empty shelves, the dolls purloined, taken hostage. A few shards of doll-corpse were scattered here and there, half a head, an arm, a foot, a tear of cloth. The blood from the severed head of the stag had spread everywhere. It had spattered the walls, the work-bench, the pictures, even the window and the pale mask that watched him from the ice that still held it to the glass.

  He had taken Susan’s dolls! But why?

  He couldn’t leave the house. Each door was denied him, turning him back either with fear, or cold, or some intangible barrier that made his legs go weak, then stop functioning.

  But he could look. He could still see out into the night, although frost and ice were creeping over every window.

  From the sitting room, from the French windows, he sur
veyed the night and the garden, with its new crop of totems, poles and statues of all sizes, some quite vertical, others leaning or collapsed, a forest of animal and woodland energy, formed like an orchard around the house, silent, sensuous, sinister guardians.

  The last thing he saw, before ice covered the glass completely, was the white shape of a naked boy, moving quickly through the night, down towards the gate and the cornfield. The pale figure merged with the hedges, then reappeared. After a moment there was a dull pulse of air, an implosion, and an immense tree appeared, standing by the gate, beginning to lean, its lower branches lopped away, the upper limbs bare of leaves and shaped into the profiles of wolves and birds. Fire licked up the dark trunk, bringing momentary sight of faces and bodies cut into the bark. The white shadow of the boy ran round the burning totem, illuminated eerily for a second or two, yellow fire on white skin. Then the flames died and the shadowy movement passed away, back across the field, back to the chalk pit and the strange summer night.

  They were trapped in the house. They froze if they tried to open the door at the front. At the back, nausea overwhelmed them, emanating from the squatting idol that grinned from grass. Behind it, a massive totem tree cast a faint moon-shadow across the kitchen floor. It was old, this tree, blackened and cracked, carved with crude eyes and sinuous, snake-like shapes. It had been burned in antiquity, but someone had daubed ochres on to the charred features, giving sinister life to the black guardian.

  In the cellar, two wicker shapes guarded the exit to the garden. They were stitched and rough, slumping scarecrows, the hair made spiky, the faces white, the bodies stuffed with some black material. They screamed at Richard when he tried to enter the cellar, driving him back in pain. Susan, at the top of the stairs, heard nothing, but when she also tried to enter the cramped space, the eerie shrieks terrified her too.

  In Susan’s studio, the goose-bone mask stared blindly from the window. To approach it, now, was to feel a constriction in the throat, a terrible strangulation that stifled breath and movement. Beyond, in the playroom, a ragged dress made of skin had been crudely nailed to the outer door. This was decorated with stick figures and half-skulls dripping with dull beads, slashed by knives, ragged and torn at its hem, and Richard recognized something similar to a ghost-dance cloak. To approach it was to feel drowned in cold, muddy water, head pressed by hands, lungs filling …