The Fetch

by Robert Holdstock

  ‘A dog?’ she whispered hoarsely.

  ‘What’s left of it.’ He found a tuft of fur, some glistening white cartilage and two further pieces of red-raw bone.

  ‘This will seem like a silly question,’ Jenny whispered, ‘but does this make any sort of sense at all?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No human being did this …’

  ‘No. I know …’

  There were other oddities in the earthfall, and he lifted them from the mound. ‘Look at this …’

  Jenny came closer, hand still covering her mouth, and peered over Richard’s shoulder.

  ‘Wood?’

  ‘It’s wicker. A fragment of wicker.’ Now that he looked he could see several fragments of the wood and he reached for them, piling them up.

  ‘There’s chalk too …’ Jenny said. ‘Christ, that smell!’

  Richard picked up the chalk object, a ball, a block of chalk that looked as if it had been smoothed off. There were no marks on it that he could discern. He picked up two or three shards of flint and cast them aside. More bits of wood, and a second chalk ball …

  Suddenly frightened, he stepped back from the earth and brushed his hands, as if to remove the taint of the haunting. He was shaking violently. Jenny was watching him through eyes that registered no emotion, only blankness. A sort of helplessness.

  ‘Thanks for coming over,’ Richard said in a dull voice. ‘I didn’t want to send for our neighbours … they’d make too much fuss …

  Jenny shrugged impatiently. Then she shook her head, despairing as she surveyed the chaos.

  ‘I mean, what did this?’

  He looked up through the open ceiling. ‘This has always been such a happy house. My family has lived here for two generations. Nothing sinister has occurred here. Not in our time.’

  ‘And before your time? How old is the place? A hundred and fifty years?’

  He shook his head. ‘Not that old. Late Victorian.’

  She was thoughtful. ‘And what was here before the house?’

  ‘A field, I imagine.’ He caught her drift and tried to smile wryly, but his face remained an impassive, shocked mask. ‘No, it’s not built on the site of a Celtic burial ground. Or a Roman cemetery. Or a Druid’s temple. I wish it was. Digging the garden would be more fun.’

  ‘What about the tump?’

  ‘The tumulus? That’s just a Bronze Age grassy knoll now. There’s nothing left in it. Cleared out years ago. Spirits and all. And I’ve seen maps of this area before the house was built. There’s nothing below the foundations.’

  She came up to him and took his arm, a determined look on her ashen features. ‘There’s something in the house, Richard. Poltergeist, psychic power, call it what you like. There’s something here and it’s malicious. It’s raw. If it’s Michael’s birth-mother, then she’s powerful. And vicious. You have to find out if it’s her. If it’s the house, then something happened here and you can take steps to rid the house of the energy. You need help. You need expert help …’

  ‘Exorcism, you mean. Bell, book and bullshit.’

  ‘Not necessarily exorcism. Not even that. Just someone … someone who knows about these things.’

  ‘I can’t think for the moment, Jenny. I’ve got to get Susan and Michael out of here. I’ve got to clean up this mess. Dump this dirt somewhere, the chalk pit … that’s going to take hours … I can’t think for the moment …’

  But Jenny was insistent. ‘You’ve got to think. Both of you, Susan too. You’re being attacked. Psychically. And Michael’s life is in jeopardy. Perhaps yours too. You’ve got to get out of here, Richard. Work on the cause from the outside.’

  Even as she said the words the house seemed to shift, to flex inwards, crowding down upon him dizzyingly and with alarming consequences. He felt immediately panicky, stepping back from the earthfall, overwhelmed by its smell and the aliveness of it. There was furtive movement on its surface, and grains of drying soil slipped down the mound, disturbed by the worm-life below. The room seemed to be oppressing him, stifling him, and he laboured for breath, feeling his heart pounding painfully, his skin breaking into an icy, unpleasant sweat.

  Jenny tugged his sleeve, and he responded to her sudden concern with a hug.

  ‘You’re right,’ he whispered. ‘Get me out of here …’

  Susan came downstairs, carrying Michael. Jenny went over to her and took her case. ‘Ready when you are.’

  ‘I’d better take my dolls,’ Susan murmured. ‘I think I’m going to need something to do.’

  She went into the workroom and reappeared with a carrier bag. Richard had packed a small case of his own things from the wardrobe and drawers in the spare room. He had intended to turn off the electricity in the house, but in his sudden haste to escape the place he forgot. He practically ran from the front door, returning only to lock it.

  The sound of the car’s engine, revving up, was welcome, and he almost flung himself into the front seat, closing his eyes as Jenny drove swiftly away from Eastwell.

  He returned to the house a day later, shortly after dawn, entering by the front door and standing for a while in the heavy, oppressive stillness. When he entered the sitting room he began to shake again, feeling haunted by the silence, by the familiarity of the surroundings. It was as if the room was tainted, as if he was being watched. He knew this to be in his mind, but he couldn’t help the unconscious response of fear that accompanied him as he stepped round the mound of earth.

  The upstairs light was still on, its dim illumination spilling down on to the brooding mound. The earth, which had been so alive and vibrant, was dead now, the worms burrowed deep. When he touched it, it was cold; no colder, probably, than when it had fallen, but cold in a different way. It was drying out. It was settling. It was quite simply … dead.

  He rubbed dirt between his fingers, sniffed it, then brushed it away. Then he took up the two chalk balls and carried them from the room, opening the back door and stepping out into the grey light.

  The land was swathed in a heavy ground mist and the air felt cold as well as damp. There was no sound in this new day, save for the distant, melancholy calling of a single rook, out in the grey fog that clung to the trees around the disused chalk quarry.

  He walked over the field, now, and through the trees to the rusting wire fencing that protected animals and children from the pit. He was able to pull the fence down and tread out a path, through the dog’s-mercury and fern, to the sheer edge of the chalk where it dropped away into the dense tangle of undergrowth and rubble below.

  It would be hard work, getting the earthfall here, but he wanted it away from him, away from the house, as far away as possible.

  Resigning himself to a long and aching day, he walked back to the garden and fetched the wheelbarrow and spade.

  In the sitting room, he began to dig.

  SEVEN

  Eighteen months later …

  Michael sat in the corner of the kitchen, a sheet of white paper on the linoleum floor in front of him, bricks, wooden cars and crayons scattered in abundance. He was using the red crayon to fashion loops on the paper, winding one loop inside another, keeping a continuous form emerging as he listened to the excitement in the house.

  The voices were high-pitched and happy. The movement around him was frantic, random, making breezes as it passed.

  As he fashioned the spirals he kept his eyes on the white paper, glancing only at the feet that passed by in his peripheral vision: sometimes the green slippers of his mother; sometimes the muddy boots of his father; occasionally the shoes of people he knew only slightly.

  The paper filled with his drawing.

  As the buzz of voices and activity grew loud and near, so he drew more vigorously. When the storm passed deeper into the house, away from him, he slowed, letting the crayon idle in his fingers, the tip crawling like a snail over the paper.

  He heard his name, and the word ‘picnic’, which made him smile with anticipated pleasure. And some
times the tone and the words he knew combined to give an impression of what was happening, so that as the shadows of the giants swept past him, looming briefly at the edge of vision, sweeping through, closing and opening doors, gathering food, gathering bottles, packing, preparing, throwing together boots and raincoats and all the familiar items of ‘picnics’, so he began to understand that there was something special about today.

  He filled in the gaps between the loops with other loops, then reached for the black crayon and drew in the shadows that walked these tunnels. He used the green crayon for his mother, and the brown crayon for his father, but placed their images outside the swirl of circles.

  The fainter shadows in the house clustered and scurried about him, silent and curious. They mixed and mingled with the bulky vibrancy of the giants. They hovered and quivered, just out of sight. He sketched them all. Drew every one of them that he could imagine. They were nothing but blobs, with the extensions that were arms, and the extensions that were legs, and the slashes in their faces that were mouths. And all the time he drew on the paper he listened for his name, and for the mood, and for the feel of what was being said in the noise of the giants, the words that he knew were words, but could still only partly understand.

  Around him, the strange and silent shadows faded suddenly against the bright sunlight that streamed in through the open door to the garden. On impulse he stood, then waddled to the door, to stand at the top of the step. He stared out into the brilliance of the day, across the lawn, the fence, to the blue of the sky above the distant sea.

  He loved the sea. He loved its colour. He loved the sound it made. He loved the stones on the beach, and the crisp sound that came from them when the breakers rushed and rolled across them. He loved that grey-green water. He dreamed of being down below it, waves surging above him. He dreamed great shadows in that water, dark masses moving through the grey-green …

  Would they go to the beach for the picnic? Or to the woodland?

  He started to step down, down across the concrete, down to the garden, his chubby legs quivering as they flexed into a position that his body was not yet ready to accommodate. He was aware only that his body was denying his need, and that his nappy was suddenly warm and sticky as a relief flooded from him. The smell touched his nostrils and he knew what would happen.

  Strong hands whisked him up from the step. His name was spoken loudly, and there was laughter, and amused irritation from the man, his father, and he was on his back. Rough hands stripped him, and he was lifted by the feet as the stickiness was wiped from him.

  Turning his head slightly he could see the white paper sheet in the corner of the room, and the great red loops, and the darting figures of the shadows he had drawn. There was such comfort in the feeling of the way those loops and lines led inwards. He knew it was the entrance to a tunnel. Sometimes he felt the tunnel reach out around him, swallowing him. At the end of the tunnel the sea shifted and surged. Massive shadows moved there and the sun was hot on red cliffs.

  He smiled and chuckled and reached a hand towards the paper. But before he could make the shadows dance again he was once more in strong hands, held aloft, newly clad in fresh nappy, held before his father’s face. The bearded man kissed him, shook him, and bawled words of excitement before passing him to the gentler of his parents …

  They reached Hawkinge Woods just after eleven in the morning, parking close to a bridleway that led in and through the beech woods. It was hot and still, an idyllic late July morning; surprisingly, there was little sign of other visitors to the parkland and forest.

  Half an hour later they were below the trees, kicking through fern and bracken, bathed in the intense, green sunlight that played through the thin woodland canopy.

  ‘This is magnificent!’ Susan’s father murmured. He carried the picnic hamper and trudged through last year’s beech mast, his gaze dazzled by the shifting light.

  The beeches were silent and formed strange animal shapes. Great bulked trunks, produced after ancient pollarding, gave the impression of four or five trees grown together, each pushing out faces or the smooth flanks of bodies drawn into the bark. Light coppicing made walking difficult in places, but the saplings were flexible.

  Richard led the way down a slope through stands of holly and maythorn, to a muddy stream. Several trees had fallen across the wide, dirty water-course. They led to the far bank and the just-visible earthworks of the hidden fort.

  ‘Iron Age?’ Doug asked as they surveyed the rise of land.

  He was right. The beech woods had been cleared more than two thousand years ago, and a ring enclosure, defensive in purpose, built by the local clans. The fort had no known history, and there were no signs of any dramatic event having occurred here. It had been abandoned in late Roman times and the woods had re-established themselves.

  Richard had discovered the place in his childhood, and had a romantic attachment to it. It was his old camp, and as a teenager he had often cycled here with his girlfriends, imagining the ring fort to be his secret and private place. On more than one occasion he had been disturbed during his ‘history’ lesson.

  They had to walk the tightrope, balancing on the fallen trunks to cross the water. Richard went first, Michael held carefully in his arms. The child was quite still and seemed very aware of the light through the branches. Doug, game for anything, made a performance out of the crossing, leaning forward then back, his ruddy face creased with a grin, then shock, causing Susan’s mother, Gwen, to have five forms of fit. But he crossed all right, and Gwen herself, a plump woman clad in tight slacks and pristine white blouse, ran across the tree with an unexpected and applaudable daintiness.

  Susan managed to slip, went up to her calf in water and mud. She was barefoot, though, and found the accident more amusing than irritating. She used handfuls of fresh fern to scrape the mud from her feet and from the hem of her summer skirt.

  Inside the ring they found the signs of previous visitors, charred patches of ground, pits, and stones piled to make fire-shelters. A rope swing hung from one of the thicker branches of a beech; Doug tested it for strength, yanking the frayed rope hard, then took a courageous leap on to the horizontal wooden bar which formed the swing itself. A man of fifty, he yelled like a kid and swayed back and forward until his strength gave out and he fell, and stumbled down to the soft ground. His normally red face was now flushed and almost purple, and Gwen had short, sharp words to say to him. He ignored her, breathlessly proclaiming his continued youth.

  Richard spread out the picnic mat while Susan unpacked the hamper. Michael waddled towards the inner rise of the earthwork, fell flat, eased himself up and continued his journey. Above him the massive beeches reached protective limbs across him. The earthwork ring was topped by thirty or forty of these vast trees, an odd palisade but one which gave the inner area a feeling of being isolated from the rest of the wood.

  The conversation was light, in keeping with the lightness and the stillness of the day. Michael was complimented on being an advanced child for his eighteen months. The drawings he made were more in keeping with a three-year-old’s, and Gwen was particularly struck by the infant’s precocious talent in drawing rudimentary faces. (Richard doubted that they were faces, rather than just other swirls, but Gwen was insistent.) His alertness was commented on too. But this made Richard and Susan feel less comfortable, and they exchanged a glance.

  Michael was sometimes too alert. They had half-heartedly joked about The Omen, about children who see the world with the eyes of mature evil. Sometimes Michael’s silent staring and sudden quizzical expressions alarmed Susan so much that she felt unable to hold the boy. But he seemed happy enough, on the whole, and sat in his corners (a favoured corner in every room) and covered sheets of drawing paper with circular lines and little black shapes that often had faces. He ate comfortably, cried little, slept well, and in the year or more that the family had lived away from Eastwell House, there had been no further incidents with earthfalling.

 
; They had come up with a simple answer to the problem of the house. They had swapped with Jenny and Geoff. The arrangement was not intended as anything permanent, it was just to get away from the haunting for a while, to allow Michael to grow, to hope that whatever non-natural element had been attacking him would go away. In Jenny’s house the Whitlocks had less space, and less garden, but they lived comfortably enough, sharing a study room. Richard’s photographic work took him away for days at a time to remote and weather-battered locations; Susan used the crèche in the polytechnic at Maidstone; and the Hansons, in their suddenly larger domain, had filled it wonderfully with their two children, their two dogs, and their collections of books and model ships.

  In all the time that the families had ‘swapped’, there had been no phenomena that could be called ‘occult’ or ‘supernatural’. Jenny had been quite disappointed at first, since she had hoped to track down the source of the psychic attack. But all things had been quite silent.

  Even when the Whitlocks had visited their old home, which they had done with increasing frequency, nothing untoward had occurred.

  At the end of the summer the families were thinking of changing back. They had not become complacent about the gritty events at the time of Michael’s home-coming, but Susan acknowledged that she felt a ‘sense of peace’. Perhaps the mother had gone away; removed her spirit from the house; closed down her anger. Perhaps she had at last given Michael up to the Whitlocks.

  There was another, more practical reason for thinking about returning to the bigger house, though.

  With appetites satisfied, Richard opened the terracotta wine cooler and produced a bottle of champagne. It was a cheap one, but the family never used champagne seriously, only for fun.

  Gwen and Doug watched quietly, half aware of the news that would be announced. Susan glanced at Michael, who was standing below a root-mass from one of the trees that had begun to grow out of the earthen bank. He was staring down at the ground, quite motionless, quite safe, as if listening to something.