The Fetch

by Robert Holdstock

  The Fish Lizards? Did you see the Fish Lizards?’

  That’s what Mikey said it was … It was huge, but it didn’t attack me.’

  ‘What about the Sea Dragons? Did you see those too?’

  Carol frowned. ‘He didn’t mention the Sea Dragons. And I wasn’t looking. I was running.’

  ‘What about the forests of the Wealden?’

  ‘Didn’t say anything about the forests.’

  Now Richard too was intrigued. He stared into the dead fire, struggling to recollect something that Michael had read to him. Those words: they’re familiar. Did Michael use them?’

  ‘Yes,’ Françoise said. ‘To begin any fetching he has to cross the beach. When I asked him about the beach … well, hear for yourself. I taped our little conversation. Do you remember? That time you brought Michael to London?’

  She placed the small recorder on the coffee table and switched it on. They listened to Françoise and Michael singing, then Michael’s voice, a dreamy, sleepy voice, almost a whisper:

  ‘… the Fish Lizards hide in the waves and strike suddenly on to the shore. Their jaws have a formidable array of fang-like teeth. The Sea Dragons are as long as their contemporaries … Very quietly and gradually the forest and plains, the tall trees and hideous reptiles of the Wealden passed away—’

  Richard remembered suddenly. ‘The book! Grandad’s old book about dinosaurs … of course!’ He went up to Michael’s room, hating the cold feel, the sense of endless space that inhabited the room, as if this was a passage to infinity, without soul or presence. But he found the book, the old leather-bound volume called The World in the Past. It had been published by Frederick Warne & Co. in 1926, and time and reading had reduced it to a tattered collection of sheets and illustrations, still loosely held inside the red cover with its faded golden image of a Stegosaurus. He knew nothing of the author, B. Webster Smith, but remembered being entranced by the language and the enthusiasm of the writing, the sense of pure wonder that the descriptions of coral, and urchins, and ancient seas, and ancient geology had evoked in him as a child.

  And there they were, the words that Michael had spoken, descriptions of Icthyosaurs (the Fish Lizards) and Plesiosaurs (the Sea Dragons), accounts of the Wealden forest, the chalk downs, the sandstone cliffs. All of it was here. Françoise read the passages with delight. The volume sat between them, opened, like a gate into another world: Chalk Boy’s world. Richard understood at once.

  ‘Then his beach is a construct. Images from this book, shaped into the hinterland, the perilous place to be crossed before the Grail is reached.’

  ‘We call it Received Image Reconstruction.’

  ‘Do you remember those drawings he used to make, Sue? The monstrous mouths? The cliffs?’ He must have first seen and read this book when he was a toddler. I wondered how it had come to be on his shelves.’

  ‘So that’s where he hides,’ Susan whispered, her face pale as she looked at the bleak photograph of a red sandstone cliff in Utah.

  ‘It’s very wet and stinky,’ Carol added.

  ‘It’s a real place,’ murmured Françoise. ‘I’ve met this talent before. The beach exists. Like the walls in the castle, like the sounds of anger from these wooden idols in your garden, it’s a real place. And like you, I believe it is remote from us in time. We must be very careful.’

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Françoise woke suddenly, her body racking with pain. She reached for Carol but her hand closed on empty air, and she twisted from the sofa, gagging and struggling for breath. She managed to articulate the beginning of the girl’s name, but that was all. She was vaguely aware that a stark light was beginning to brighten the room. It was dawn. She had slept for hours.

  ‘Carol!’ she managed again, but then the pressure of winds and screams and pain and chanting and mocking laughter drove her back into a curled ball, her legs working like an hysterical child’s, her hands over her ears.

  Suddenly she was calm.

  ‘Wake up! Wake up!’

  The girl was with her, a small, cold hand on her face, eyes wide and anxious behind the gleaming lenses. The glasses were askew, one frame higher than the other and Carol fiddled with them for a moment.

  ‘I’ve got food for Michael. He needs me—’

  ‘Don’t leave me. Please. Don’t leave me!’

  Françoise was suddenly aware of desperation. She swallowed hard, sat up and ran hands through dishevelled hair. Her mouth tasted foul and she licked self-consciously over her teeth. The girl was watching her in a fever of indecision and concern.

  ‘I’ll be all right,’ Françoise said. ‘You’re my shield. I didn’t mean to sound angry.’

  Carol leaned forward and whispered something. Françoise, not ready for the instruction, made her start again, listening more carefully. The girl sang: ‘Watching-man comes out of the ground, watching-man comes out of the wood, watching-man can see me here, but can’t harm me if I watch him good …’

  That’s a funny song. Is it a charm?’

  ‘Sing it. It’ll keep you safe. Probably,’ she added, with a nervous glance.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I have to go.’

  Françoise tugged at her. ‘You mustn’t. Michael will be fine. We have to break the totem field first. Michael will be fine. Please don’t go!’

  Carol looked desperate. The shadow of a totem was across her pale face. She struggled physically and in her mind, clearly torn. ‘Men are hunting him. I have to go. The Grail is there and I have to fetch it back for him. He’s asked me to. I must go.’

  Astonished, Françoise fought for clarity of thinking. ‘Have you seen the Grail? Have you really seen it?’

  ‘Only Mikey’s drawings. But he’s found it now. He says it’s beautiful. It will make everything right again if I can bring it back. Everything will be lovely. The anger will go away, all the anger. Everyone will be free at last. I have to help him. He’s my big brother.’ The girl became even more conspiratorial. ‘He frightens me and hurts me, but I think that’s the other side of him. It’s not Michael at all. It’s Chalk Boy. Chalk Boy lives in a cave near the beach and if I can get the Grail for Mikey, Chalk Boy will never get off the beach again. He’ll be stuck there. That’s what I think anyway. Chalk Boy was killed in a shrine. Thousands of years ago. Men chased him and killed him, his dog too. Then they hid the Grail in the shrine. I had a dream about it in the pit. Michael has found the Grail in the shrine, and I have to get it. He can’t touch it because Chalk Boy is hanging on to him, strangling him, making him unhappy. Chalk Boy is very bad. Very bad. Michael isn’t really as angry as he seems …’

  ‘Too much,’ Françoise said, dizzy with the breathless flow of the girl’s words. ‘Too much to take in. Too early. I need you to say all this to me again. But I need coffee. Is there coffee?’

  ‘I have to go.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘I have to. Sing the song and the watching-man won’t hurt you.’

  ‘Please don’t leave me. It hurts, Carol—’

  But the girl shook her head, hiding her eyes from the woman. She picked up her plastic bag and ran from the room.

  Mikey’s drawings. Mikey’s drawings of the Grail …

  Pain! Screaming! Françoise curled up on the sofa again, face twisting with agony, mind trying to hold on to the thought of Michael’s drawings, Michael’s drawings of the Holy Grail…

  Watching-man comes from the ground, watching-man comes from the wood …

  Release. A sense of calm …

  Mikey’s drawings of the Grail … Chalk Boy is hanging on to him, strangling him, making him unhappy.

  Determinedly, if shakily, she went upstairs and sang vigorously at each of the fetishes, marking a clear space through the house, a corridor of psychic cease-fire. In the boy’s room she found the desk, opened the lid, leafed through the sheets of white paper. She found images of the Grail, and they reminded her of the simple drawing of a simple child, naive, rough and ready, every feature eit
her exaggerated or reduced. From her bag she took out the drawing of his castle, the picture he had given to her years before, the circles and walls, the gates and the bizarre and unflattering figures – herself especially! She smoothed the drawing out and sat at the desk, letting Michael’s imagination, his creativity, start to seep into the turmoil of feelings and images that comprised her own mind at the moment…

  Terrified, Carol walked through the quarry. She was suddenly cold. She clutched the bag of food to her chest, ducking through the thorns, gritting her teeth as she edged through the gorse. The pit was eerily silent.

  When she entered the place where a rise in the ground marked the site of the disposal of the earthfall from years ago, she felt like crying out, but managed to stay silent as she stared at the sad, hunched shape of the body that crouched there. The man seemed to be bowing to the East. He was kneeling with his head tucked down, squashed up as if hiding, face to the chalk wall. His head was very bloody. There was a spatter of blood on the chalk.

  It was Brown Leather Jacket, as Michael called him. By the body lay the shield that had killed him, the shield that once Michael had described to her, tall and thin, painted green, with the silvered shape of two hares drawn on the face. It was part of the armour of a king, and had been kept beside the watching-man where Daddy had been digging, up in the North, up in a peat wasteland in Scotland.

  The shield had been summoned at last. Carol edged past it, seeing how sharp it was, how bloody it was down the side where its edge had sliced through the evil man.

  Michael was suddenly behind her and she dropped the bag of food in shock. She bent down to pick it up then looked anxiously at her naked, white-skinned brother. He had painted himself with chalk again, except for his eyes which were black. And now, too, round his neck he wore three small, shrivelled creatures on a piece of leather.

  ‘What have you got for me?’ he asked suddenly.

  Carol clutched the bag harder. She could smell something nasty in the air, and half realized that it was coming from the dead man behind her.

  ‘Did you kill him?’ she whispered.

  ‘Sort of. The others ran away like rabbits.’

  ‘Did you kill him with the shield?’

  Michael grinned, then did a little dance. ‘Fetched it. Fetched shield. It came like a discus. Sliced head. I didn’t even touch it. Daddy will be proud of me. Daddy went to where I fetched it. Daddy dug. Daddy knew.’

  Again, the hungry look, then in his normal voice, ‘What have you got? I’m starving.’

  ‘There wasn’t any pickle left,’ she said nervously.

  Michael looked angry. ‘So what have you got for me?’

  ‘Some cornflakes. A tin of tomatoes. I’ve got the can opener too. And some ginger biscuits, but they’re a bit soft.’

  He watched her furiously. She shook in her trainers, holding the bag to her chest harder, not liking the anger she could sense in the starving body of her white-skinned brother. ‘It’s all they had …’ she said, close to tears. ‘There’s no food left. Everything’s rotten in the freezer … everything else has been eaten.’

  He snatched the bag from her hands and peered inside. ‘Brown sauce? No brown sauce?’

  ‘All gone. We made soup with it last night.’

  He threw the bag away. ‘Wasn’t hungry anyway.’

  Still shuddering with tears, Carol said, ‘Françoise is in the house. She’s very frightened. Can’t you tell … please tell Michael to forgive them … Please let them out.’

  He hesitated, then reached up and clutched her face, drawing her close. She resisted slightly, but was too overpowered by the presence of her brother, by his anger, to struggle. She thought: Don’t hurt me … but the words stayed inside.

  He said, ‘Listen to me. Are you listening?’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘Will you take the Grail home for me?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said in a slight voice. ‘But I’m frightened of the Fish Lizards.’

  ‘Listen to me. Do what I say. When you follow me, close your eyes! Trust me. When you smell the sea, run. If you trust me, nothing can harm you. If you trust me, you can bring me home. You can carry me home. You can take me back to where I belong.’

  After a brief, frightened moment, Carol nodded. Using her blouse to clean her glasses, she looked apprehensively at the wall of chalk through which, in a moment, Michael would lead her. She had hardly returned the frames to her eyes when Michael grabbed her and her world dissolved.

  Sea spray, stinking of weed, and the eerie cries of monsters, black shapes that thrashed hugely in the surf, close to the beach, preying on the shadows that lived there …

  Suddenly, breathlessly, she was in open country, looking up a hill through driving, miserable rain at the sagging shape of a crude hut. There were poles outside the hut, with bits of limp rag hanging from them. The roof seemed to be made of grass. Mud streamed in the drumming rain from where the door had been churned up by people walking in and out.

  She was cold. The rain saturated her, running down her face, through her clothes, down her legs. Michael’s chalk began to smear, and as the white ran from his face so the black paint was revealed beneath. His grey-green eyes raged at her, urgent.

  ‘Go and get the Grail. It’s inside. Please. Go and fetch it.’

  ‘Where are we? Where are we, Michael? I’m scared.’

  ‘This is where our house used to be. Over there. It’s all different now. Go into the shrine. Go!’

  He danced a wild dance, a dance of frustration, a wet boy shifting urgently from side to side, running in front of her, bullying, pleading, rain dripping from nose and ears, running down his body and carrying away his skin.

  Saturated and frightened, Carol stooped below the wooden lintel and entered the stinking hut. Light came in through two narrow windows. Rags hung everywhere. There was a smell of animal dung and damp. Water was dripping through the sagging roof on to two balls of chalk that she vaguely recognized from her father’s study.

  ‘Hurry! Hurry!’ screamed Chalk Boy from outside. She glanced back through the door and saw him stooping to peer at her, then he was running again, left and right, ducking and weaving in his impatience. ‘Hurry! He’s coming. At any moment! Get me out! Get me out!’

  She didn’t understand his words, but was disturbed by them. As she stepped through the twin bands of light, through the cold drip from the roof, she saw the Grail.

  ‘Is it there? Can you see it?’

  His voice was distant, soaked up by the drum of rain.

  ‘It’s glass.’

  ‘That’s it! That’s it! Get it, Carol. He’ll be here at any moment!’

  ‘Who will?’ she shouted.

  ‘Michael! Bring it out now!’

  She could see the face watching her. The Grail was not a chalice, more like a glass container, with a lid. It was full of liquid. She stepped closer and realized that the face was not carved, not inscribed. The face of the fish was inside.

  With a jolt of shock she recognized the thing that floated there, and started to cry uncontrollably, running back into the rain, banging her head on the lintel as she struggled, sobbing, from the collapsing shrine.

  ‘Where is it? Where is it?’ Michael screamed, furious and raging, dancing in the rain, pink now, washed clean, exposed.

  Through tears, through her racking grief, she said, ‘It’s a little baby. It’s just a little baby. It’s all dead and drowned. It’s a little baby.’

  He was in front of her in a second, lifting her by her clothes. Heat came from him, pouring from below the black stain with which he had covered his face.

  His voice was a snake’s hiss, not Michael’s voice at all as it spat at the girl: ‘Then get the little baby for little baby’s brother! Get him NOW!’

  He flung her back into the shrine. She emerged a moment later, clutching the specimen jar, still weeping. The foetus turned and twisted with the motion, its dead eyes bulging, its outstretched hands raised almost in
a gesture of submission. Michael watched the face, his own eyes huge. He backed away from the girl, beckoning. ‘Come on. Come on. He’s coming towards us. I can feel him. He’ll be here at any moment. Come to little baby’s brother. Bring him to me …’

  Carol walked stiffly, sadly forward, her tears lost in the rain, only the wretched grimace of grief on her face telling, in the relentless downpour, that she was crying.

  Behind her the shrine exploded, a great burst of muddy earth, turf and wood, rising in uncanny slow motion into the air, then vanishing, sucked into nowhere, releasing a blast of air that knocked Carol forward.

  She clutched the Grail, not dropping it. Michael stared up at the earth that fell around them, then at the excavation in the Downs, into the deep pit where the temple had stood a moment ago. Most of it was scattered about them, but he knew that a central part had gone to the castle, and he laughed as he thought of his father struggling through that mud, searching for a baby boy.

  ‘I did that!’ he cried. ‘That’s me. I did that!’

  And he had the Grail!

  His brother was safely in his sister’s arms!

  ‘Come to Mikey,’ he whispered.

  ‘You’re not Mikey,’ she said quietly, yet still she walked towards him, out of the rain, back towards the beach, and the pit and the world she knew best …

  He had drawn glass, he had drawn the face on the glass. The fish … so like the fishy thing that had appeared in her room, the Fisher King, pulsing in and out of the features that belonged to Michael Whitlock, the handsome boy with his sad expression.

  It wasn’t a fish!

  Realization came with horror. And with realization came understanding, and a recognition of Michael’s terrible danger. It had been there, so obvious, so clear, transparent like the glass itself. And like the revelation of the meaning of a crossword-clue – so impenetrable when you struggled with it, so obvious when you knew it – she understood that Carol had to be stopped.

  Her cry woke the house.

  Her fear shattered the totem field. Richard, when he saw her, when he heard the primal shriek of comprehension, when he was aroused and affected by Françoise Jeury’s insight, became a man possessed. He screamed for his daughter. He grasped the Mocking Cross and broke through the back door. He passed the great totem. The earth shuddered for a moment, then was still, but Richard was already running towards the bluff, to the grassy slope that led to the entrance to the quarry.