The Fetch

by Robert Holdstock

‘She’s in the room. Go!’ he shouted, but Susan was already on her feet and racing for the door to the hall. Flashlight on, camera ready, Richard went swiftly out through the French windows and into the garden, locking the doors behind him. He pounded round the garden to the lawn below their bedroom. He looked up, but when he saw that the window was closed he shouted his confusion, stunned and startled by what he could not see when he had so desperately hoped to see it! He flashed the torch around the garden. He ran to the trees, searched their branches, shone the light to right and left. The brilliant yellow beam picked out all the shadows and nooks of the small orchard, the woodshed and tool sheds, and the high fence.

  Turning back to the house he played the beam off the back wall, illuminating each window, each ledge, each length of drainpipe and gutter. There was nothing to be seen.

  Susan appeared in the window of the room. The light picked her out, a ghostly figure standing there, holding the child, shaking her head, her face a mask of despair and fear. Tears gleamed on pale cheeks.

  Richard went back into the house and up to the bedroom. He could smell the fresh earth even before he reached the stairs, the same heavy odour of newly excavated soil that had been haunting this house for five days now.

  Susan watched him in silence as he entered the dark room. He turned on the light and Michael turned his face away, then began to cry. Richard stepped over the dirt-spattered floor. He photographed the room from every angle.

  The main concentration of the loose earth was in the middle of the cot. The dirt was dry, this time, and quite light in colour. It had small fragments of stone in it, and some dry leaf and twig.

  There was no mark on the ceiling above the bed, and when Richard inspected the wire grille over the window there was no sign or trace of earth that would suggest it had been thrown from the outside with the window open. Exasperated, aware that Susan was close to the edge of despair as she silently held the boy, Richard crouched down and started to scoop up the mess into a waste bin.

  At a glance it seemed that someone had stood at the bottom of the cot and tipped or shaken a bucketful of dry dirt down on to the baby’s body. The soil had scattered in a circle around the bed.

  And this was for the third night running!

  There was a difference, though. Last night the earth had been red-tinged and dry, like the soil in Devon. And the night before it had been wet and foul-smelling, alive with worms, odd, massive and green-pink in colour, some of them cut through as if a knife had been taken to them.

  ‘Every door is locked. Every window. If someone was in this room, they’re still in the house.’

  He searched upstairs first, looking under beds, in cupboards, in clothes chests, and finally behind the panelling on the bath. Downstairs, he double-checked that all the doors were locked, then ran quickly from room to room, even opening the chest freezer in the cellar. The cellar was small and cramped, damp and unpleasant, a junk room of old crates, bicycles, boxes of mouldering books and magazines, and fading furniture. He examined every inch of the place, finally prodding an iron rod into the coal in the bunker. The access doors to the cellar were both locked.

  Returning to the bedroom he found Susan calmer. She was tearful and very pale, but she seemed more in control of herself. ‘What about the attic?’ she whispered. ‘Could she have gone up there?’

  Richard went out on the landing and looked up at the small hatch to the roof-space. Surely nobody could have scrambled through that small opening in the few seconds before Susan had arrived upstairs after the earthfall?

  Even so, he pulled the stepladder from its storage place and climbed to the hatch, opening it and turning on the light.

  It was cool up here, and dry; he moved at a stoop through the stacked boxes and under the supporting beams of the heavily tiled roof. Water gurgled in one of the large tanks. From below the eaves came the restless movement of birds, disturbed by the sudden light.

  The attic was otherwise lifeless.

  He climbed down to the landing and called for Susan. As he put the ladder away he called again and was puzzled at the lack of response from her. She had gone downstairs, he imagined, taking Michael with her.

  The silence suddenly unnerved him. He followed down, glanced into the kitchen, then into the sitting room. Susan was standing by the fireplace, Michael cradled to her chest, her gaze on her husband. Her face was ashen, but she seemed more annoyed than shocked.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘The doors,’ she said angrily. ‘The bloody doors!’

  Richard walked over to the French doors and tried them. Unexpectedly, they swung in, revealing the cool night again.

  ‘But I locked them. I know I locked them.’ He closed the doors and went over to the empty fire.

  Susan’s look changed from anger to frustration. In a tearful whisper she said, ‘It’s how she got away. Oh God, Rick – she’s so clever. She hides in the house and confuses us. Moves around behind us. Watches us. She might even have made herself a set of keys … Oh Christ!’

  Her own set of keys! It would have been easy enough for her to have copied Susan’s keys during the first days after they had brought Michael home, when Susan had not been on her guard.

  If she had been here, this evening, she had hidden outside, waiting for her opportunity. Seeing Michael’s new parents alone, downstairs, she had slipped in through the back doors, thrown the dirt at the infant, then hidden somewhere upstairs until she could make her way – unseen – back to the sitting room, there to let herself out again.

  Richard was certain he had locked the doors when he had come back in from the garden.

  And yet …

  The thought did not escape him that in his haste he might have thought he had locked the doors. Or perhaps he had turned the key without first fully engaging it.

  ‘I don’t know. I just don’t know …’

  ‘Well, I do,’ Susan said, and now her voice was like a snarling animal’s. Her eyes were hard. Michael struggled in her suddenly over-protective grip. ‘She’s been here. She’s laughing at us. She’s making a fool of us.’

  ‘But why? Why would she do this?’

  ‘Because she’s angry! Because she hates herself!’ Richard was confused. ‘Why is she angry? Why does she hate herself? I don’t understand.’

  Susan shouted at him: ‘Because she’s given up her child, you fool. And she can’t live with the knowledge of that fact!’

  ‘But she agreed. She was happy to give the child up.’

  ‘Was she? Was she?’ Susan’s face flushed red with rage. ‘How do you know? You didn’t see her. You weren’t there. I saw her, Richard. I saw the look in her eyes. I know what she was going through … Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus God. You never had your heart in this adoption. You let me do it all. Have you ever thought about anything other than your own selfish feelings? Imagine what it must have been like for that woman! Just imagine.’

  The raised voices, naturally enough, upset Michael and he started to cry. Susan rocked him in her arms. There was still some dry dirt on his face and she brushed it off, making soothing sounds and soothing actions.

  Richard hugged them both, his arms stretching round mother and child. The tension eased slightly, and the anger passed away.

  ‘I said some harsh things. I’m sorry.’

  Richard touched the tear-stained face of the infant. ‘No. You were right to say them. There are things that should have been said long ago. We’ll have to talk them through. But not now. Now’s not the time.’

  Susan’s laugh was distinctly pointed, but then she shook her head. ‘I’m sorry. Sorry, Rick. I just can’t stand it – this limbo – this attack. Not knowing what it means …’

  ‘I know, I know.’ He tugged Michael’s blanket to make it more secure around the child’s tiny body. ‘What shall we do about the weekend? Cancel?’

  Susan shook her head. ‘We can’t. Too many people. It’s too late in the day.’

  ‘It’s only a party, for heaven’s sake. I ca
n get up early and ring around all morning.’

  She sighed and leaned against him, weary and ready to drop. ‘And waste all that lamb?’

  He smiled, then laughed, and Susan looked up and smiled too.

  ‘What an idiot you are. Roast lamb for a crowd that size. You’ll be cooking all day.’

  He looked puzzled, then shook his head. ‘I’m not going to roast it. I’m going to barbecue it. That’s why I dug the pit. For God’s sake, can you imagine roasting seven legs of lamb in the oven?’

  ‘Ah …’

  Susan nodded, smiling thinly. ‘I must admit, you had me worried.’

  Susan went to bed; Michael slept soundly in the cot next to her. Richard prowled restlessly around the house for an hour, finally sitting for a while in his study, a small, dark room, lined with books, his own photographs and racks of magazines. He turned the pages of an article he was writing for Archaeological News, but didn’t register the words.

  He was certain that he had locked the doors to the garden when he had come back in from searching outside. And he had locked them between leaving the house and returning. Why wouldn’t he have done? That had been the whole point of tonight’s exercise: to make sure that no one could get in or out at the time of the attack on Michael.

  So perhaps Susan herself had opened them. But why? She had no reason to try to deceive her husband.

  Someone had thrown raw earth at Michael on each of the last four nights, and perhaps during a day as well, when Susan had been alone with the boy. Someone in the house. Someone who could not be found. Not him, not Susan (they were each other’s alibis). So: Michael’s natural mother.

  How had she done it? She had followed them here and cut herself a set of keys. Now she hid outside all day, but could enter the house and move about in absolute silence, leaving no trace of her feet in the wide scatter of dirt on the floor that she flung – abusively – at her natural offspring.

  Richard gave that idea one out of a hundred when it came to likelihood. Susan had been obsessed with the mother since the day of the adoption, at the clinic. Her belief that the other woman was perpetrating these attacks was quite irrational – a transference of guilt or anxiety, perhaps.

  Something else, then.

  The house was a hundred years old. It had been in the family for two generations, and Richard had grown up here. There were family traditions, family stories, strong memories of bad winters, family tragedies and war-time damage, mostly from flying-bombs. But there were no stories of ghosts. To the best of his knowledge the house simply wasn’t haunted.

  He finally reached for a pencil and wrote the word ‘poltergeist’ on the bottom of the last page of his article. He had only a vague idea of the concept behind the word. He knew that poltergeists were reputedly generated from disturbed minds, minds that were usually female and adolescent.

  A poltergeist in the house?

  But it was too late in the evening; he was too tired; there was too much to think about for the christening party tomorrow; he wasn’t ready to start thinking seriously about psychic phenomena.

  He underlined the word though, then closed the article, before creeping gently into bed beside Susan. She was breathing deeply and slowly, but he saw a glimmer of light reflected from her half-opened eyes.

  Early in the morning Susan crept out of bed and went to the downstairs telephone. Shaking badly, she dialled Dr Wilson’s private number. He sounded tired and distinctly fraught when he answered, and was not pleased when Susan began to press him for the telephone number of Michael’s birth-mother.

  ‘I explained the situation. Total confidentiality. And she does not want contact with you.’

  ‘I think she’s making contact with me. Did you give her our address?’

  ‘Certainly not!’

  ‘Dr Wilson, please!’ Susan’s eyes stung and she blinked back the tears. She realized she was becoming anxious again, and took two or three very deep breaths. ‘Dr Wilson … All I want to do is talk to her. Just to ask her to leave us alone.’

  There was silence for a moment. Wilson was puzzled.

  ‘I’m sure you’re wrong, Susan. She can’t know where you are. The arrangements we made were quite definite. And I don’t need to remind you that we have stepped outside the law. Now please. Don’t press me. Michael’s mother does not want to be in touch with you. In fact, I happen to know that she’s abroad at the moment …’

  Susan sat down heavily. Abroad? Or is that what she had told Wilson? A ruse?

  She replaced the receiver and sat, silent and shaky, until Richard came down.

  FOUR

  The party was very successful, although it had been a tense and gloomy morning of preparation and a frantic dash to the church for the ceremony. Richard began to relax.

  He was pleased to see Susan laughing as well. She spent most of her time in the sitting room with Michael and her friend Jenny, but trusted Jenny enough to leave Michael in her care while she took various children to her studio room and showed them her collection of odd and ancient dolls.

  But in the way of these things, the party took over, an entity unto itself, and a form of chaos ruled the middle of the afternoon. At four o’clock Richard had lost touch with reality. It came as something of a relief. He had been fighting hard to keep a semblance of dignity and decorum in the festivities, but social entropy in the form of active children and equally active adults had finally taken its toll.

  His own family was bad enough. But Susan’s was something else …

  And their mutual friends were the worst of all! It was a case of ‘any excuse to have a party’, and party they had. With a vengeance.

  Richard wandered through the orchard at the bottom of his garden. A girl of mature looks but dressed in doll-like clothes breezed across the lawn, arms outstretched, golden hair flowing, an Isadora Duncan of mischief, heading for the hidden places of the garden, where childish screams told Richard that the medieval stonework of the old church at Ruckinghurst had been found – a few pieces only, which he had acquired from an antique shop and which he intended to make into a garden feature. The stones were now objects of fantasy and fantasizing. He heard a cry of, ‘There might be bones in the stones, the bones of giants.’ He left the excavation, confident that any giants’ bones in the sandstone would resist attempts to remove them.

  In the kitchen the talk was of cricket, socialist politics and immunology. In the corner of the room a friend of Susan’s sat slumped in a chair, talking loudly about the trouble he was having with his publishers, using his reeking cigarette to emphasize each point. He hadn’t eaten and the champagne had gone to his head. His only audience was a child of about two who sat playing with bricks close by, watching the man with total bemusement.

  The sink was full of bottles.

  There was broken glass on the floor which Richard quickly swept up, despite being nearly bowled over by a gang of children playing a form of chase. The rule seemed to be: ‘If I catch you, you shapechange into something evil, but I won’t know what it is unless I catch you again and torture you.’

  He sighed. In his own day they had called it ‘chains’. Torture had never been mentioned.

  ‘Can we dig the monster from the grave?’

  Framed in the doorway from the garden were the Pre-Raphaelite girl and a three-foot-tall, freckled, red-haired, sullen little bruiser called Tony. He was a nephew of Susan’s. His fingers were caked in earth, grass, and human blood (his own).

  Richard shook his head firmly. ‘I don’t want you to leave the garden, and I don’t want you digging in that mound. Is that understood? It’s a protected monument. You’re not allowed by law.’

  Tony hid his hands behind his back.

  ‘If you want to hear the story of what was once buried there you can come into the study and I’ll show you some pictures and tell you about it.’

  The blankness of their faces told him that this was an unsatisfactory alternative to digging.

  ‘Have you got pictures of the
giant?’ the girl asked.

  ‘He wasn’t a giant. He was a Bronze Age prince, buried with his horse, his weapons, and several huge joints of meat.’

  Tony stared darkly through his freckles (but what a fine and intense light glowed from the small figure’s face), then growled huskily, ‘Want to see his bones.’

  ‘His bones aren’t there any more.’

  Ah, the disappointment! Richard almost laughed out loud.

  Then the growl again. ‘Where’s the bones now?’

  A chance to draw order from the chaos: ‘If you want to see the bones you’ll have to sit quietly on the lawn for an hour, then I’ll show you some really spooky pictures. Can you do that? To see the bones?’

  Even as he spoke the words, he realized mournfully that as a child psychologist he made a good train driver.

  There was the briefest of pauses. Tony’s brow furrowed and he stared at Richard steadily and contemptuously. Then he stuck two fingers up and fled from the doorway, the girl in hot pursuit.

  Richard walked into the sitting room expecting to find Michael there, supervised by Jenny, but there were only several aunts sitting in armchairs talking together around the remains of the sherry. His heart racing, he went quickly upstairs to the bedroom, then the bathroom, but finally found the child asleep, in his study downstairs. Jenny was there, leafing through the pages of one of his archaeological photograph albums. Two pieces of the christening cake were on the desk, next to a cup of coffee that now had a skin of cold milk on its surface.

  As Richard entered the room, she looked up from the album and smiled. ‘I hope you don’t mind me looking at your work.’

  ‘Not at all. Which album is it?’

  ‘The Roman farm at Hollingbourne. Nice photographs. Some of them are really eerie.’

  ‘Just special effects.’

  Michael, in his cradle, was sleeping noisily.

  ‘Giving you a hard time, I see.’

  ‘He was getting restless. Too many “Hungarian aunts”. Susan suggested we brought him through here for a snooze.’

  ‘Good God, he snores.’