The Fetch (11 page)

‘Your interest in him has cheered him up. He’s almost a changed lad.’

‘It’s
him
who usually doesn’t talk to
me
.’

Susan’s laugh was a cutting declaration of her disbelief that he could lie so blatantly. ‘Talking is a two-way process, Rick. The boy misses you!’

She walked on quickly. Richard ambled after her, hands in pockets, wolf-girl in right hand, comforting, one question in his head, nagging.

The gruesome remains of the dog had come from the earth-mass which had tried to kill Michael. That earth-mass had come from
somewhere
, and Michael had been its focus. It had been a part of a haunting that seemed, now, to have disappeared.

The dog had been there, though. Could Michael, as an infant, have been aware of the dead hound?

And even if
that
was true …

Who was Chalk Boy?

Chalk Boy
usually played with him in the pit, but he was in the room now, darting through the darkness and laughing.

Michael laughed too, but the sound was nervous. He felt slightly scared as he sat up towards the top of his bed, and drew his feet below him. He folded his arms and leaned forward, shivering slightly despite his pyjamas. The chalk-painted shape danced and ran about the shelves.

‘Look at that. Oh, look at that!’

Excited at finding picture books. Flipping the pages rapidly, then stopping in the darkness and gasping with sheer delight. ‘Oh, look at this. Look at this.’

Michael could see the chalk streaks, like slices of moonlight. Through the eerie white, though, the darkness of Chalk Boy was that same scary black, the depthlessness, the void where the boy should have been. It was something that Michael didn’t like. He didn’t like looking into that emptiness. It made him dizzy. Chalk Boy had no eyes, not that Michael had ever seen. He was just a shadow shape. He watched from the beach where he lived, staring from the tunnel, then playing, and calling for his dog.

He shouldn’t be in the bedroom. He should be in the castle by the sea, at the end of the tunnel.

Again, Michael laughed nervously, and watched as Chalk Boy rifled through the drawers
of his clothes chest, finding fossils. ‘Look at this! Oh, look at this!’

Fossils, books, photographs, toys, dolls, colourful shirts, Chalk Boy found them, marvelled at them, discarded them, moving fleetly around the room, sometimes coming close to Michael, stopping, like an elf, like a creature from the sea, coming close, then pausing to look. The stink of sea was strong. Salt stink, seaweedy.

‘Look at this! Look at this!’ Chalk Boy thrilled. He had found a pile of comics, turning through the pages so fast that they seemed a blur.

Michael eased himself off the bed and went to the door, opening it and peering out into the darkness of the landing. Chalk Boy hovered behind him.

‘Look at that! Oh, look at
that!
’ Chalk Boy had found the small, red-clay doll that his mother had given him for his second birthday. Hungarian magic, she had said, and protection against night spirits.

‘Sssh!’ Michael closed the door again, turned and raised a finger to his lips. It was three in the morning according to the clock on the landing. Chalk Boy peered into the house, but then darted back into the room, rifling pages, tossing toys, gasping with his strange pleasure.

The door of his room opened suddenly and the light went on. Michael jumped, coming quickly awake, shocked as he stood in the middle of the chaos in his room, staring up at his father. He was still holding a pair of shoes, about to toss them. In a disorientating blur he realized he had only been dreaming of Chalk Boy.

‘What on earth are you doing? What’s all this yelling?’

Parental eyes surveyed the untidiness. Sleepy gaze focused angrily. ‘You woke us up.’

‘It wasn’t me.’

Michael looked around. There was no sign of Chalk Boy. Comics and books were strewn around, clothes were draped over shelves and the
desk, even the lamp by the bed.

‘Go to bed, Michael!’

The words were angry. His father watched him until he was below the covers, then turned off the light, adding, ‘I’ll expect this mess to be straightened before you come down to breakfast. Do you understand?’

‘Yes,’ Michael said, confused.

‘And no more noise!’

‘Chalk Boy?’ Michael hissed when he was alone again, in silence. But the room had nothing but shadows now.

The shadows were filled with voices, old voices from another time. They stalked around him, like ghosts, like the apparition of Chalk Boy, come to taunt him, come from tearful years gone by. Michael leapt into bed and buried his head below the pillow.

The sounds were muffled in his imagination and after a while he started to listen again, straining to hear them, to remember them, lying there, now staring at the ceiling, aware of the heavy pendulum movement of the clock on the landing, recalling the raised voice, and the crying, from the sitting room below.

He closed his eyes and squeezed back tears. But the voice shadows wouldn’t go away, brought on by that flash of anger in his father’s face just a few moments ago, that look that had been such a terror to him for so long, from so long ago …

‘We made a mistake. We have to face it, Sue, we made a big mistake.’

‘You’ve been drinking. You’re disgusting!’

‘Keep your voice down. We don’t want the whole world to know.’

‘We did
not
make a mistake. If you just showed more interest in him. If you just behaved like his father instead of brooding all the time that he
doesn’t have your
genes
…’

‘I can’t relate to him. Don’t you understand that? We’re like chalk and cheese. There’s nothing there. Nothing in there. Do you understand me? It’s a void. His head’s a void. Our relationship is a void!’

‘Keep your voice
down
. The poor little devil is only upstairs. He’ll hear.’

‘We were so hasty. If we’d just waited, Carol would have come anyway … I’m sure of it …’

‘Sometimes I hate you.’

‘I know you do. Sometimes I hate myself. But for Christ’s sake, what pleasure is there in him? One child, we said. That’s all we wanted. One child. A natural child—’

‘And it didn’t happen. And Michael is part of us now.’

‘But he’s
not
. Maybe he is to you. But to me he’s a stranger! He’s cold. I can’t get close to him. It’s the ghost in him, Sue. I’m sure it is. It disturbs me.’

‘Nothing’s happened for ages. The haunting’s gone.’

‘He haunts
me
. He frightens me.’

‘He just wants affection! You don’t bloody well try.’

‘I
do
try. But he’s empty. He’s always watching. It was a mistake.’

‘We can’t give him back, Richard.’

‘Don’t patronize me. I know we can’t. But what am I to do? He’s a stranger in my house. Carol is warm. I can feel her warmth even though she’s only little. She giggles, Sue. She sees me and laughs.’

‘Surprise, surprise.’

‘You know what I mean. We
feel
for each other …’

‘What a bastard you are …’

‘I can’t help it. It’s like living with a ghost. I never felt right about adopting—’

‘You were such a bloody coward. Such a lying coward. If you’d just once expressed
your doubts we could have thought about it, perhaps thought it through more clearly …’

‘You wanted it too much. I didn’t know how to say what I felt without causing you pain.’

‘Terrific.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Me too. But you have to live with our decision, Richard. You can’t just cut the boy out. You have to try. Hard. Harder. Endlessly. He’s not a computer game! You can’t save the score and turn off the machine in the evening, then come back to it as if nothing had changed.’

Pretty. Pretty …

He stared at the ceiling. There was a glimmer in his mind’s eye, something gleaming, something pretty. But it slipped away again, and shadows flexed and shifted in the room, the past still urgent to be remembered – shadows: his father’s shape looming past him as he sat and drew, years ago …

A fine summer’s day. The air was still and heavy with the scent of grass. There had been visitors, and from the kitchen came the sound of washing up, glasses clinking, laughter from his parents.

Michael sat at his table below the apple tree, drawing Castle Limbo and the wide beach. Carol was toddling down the lawn towards her tricycle. Michael raised his face and watched her, then glanced down as his father left the kitchen, ran towards the toddling child and swung her high, pretending to toss her, but not quite letting go.

Carol giggled. The two of them walked down to the hedge maze and vanished for a while.

Michael drew.

He was startled by the sudden
shadow over his shoulder. He had been so absorbed in the drawing of the castle that he hadn’t heard his father come up behind him. He and Carol stood there, dark against the bright sky. Michael felt nervous. He was aware that his drawing was being scrutinized critically.

Carol watched him, one hand tangled in her father’s long hair. She wanted to be put down and her father let her go. The man walked away, a broad shape, clad in jeans and a dark shirt. Michael heard him say, ‘More bloody spirals. Doesn’t he ever draw anything else?’

‘It’s my castle,’ he whispered.

He drew himself into the picture, a small, yellow-haired figure, and placed his shadow perfectly considering the position of the bright sun at the top corner of the drawing. He drew his mother, standing at the edge of the garden, just outside the zones of his castle. He drew Carol and gave her a big smile, because he always wanted Carol to smile when she felt sad. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, he drew his father. He drew a huge open mouth with teeth around the figure of the man.

After a while, after staring at the page for a few minutes, he found a darker crayon.

And with a quick, angry smile, he closed the monster’s mouth.

Pretty?

He reached for it, but it slipped away. This was the wrong place. He needed Chalk Boy, he needed the sea. He needed to be able to reach through the tunnel, to fetch the pretty glimmering things that sometimes sparkled in the castle, by the sea shore, by the great chalk sea.

Michael stood by his bedroom window and stared out through the summer night, at the dark woods that huddled round the quarry.

Beyond them, a strange light, an
eerie tinge of blue in the darkness, was the ocean, the Channel. It was not the same sea, not the sea that bordered Castle Limbo, but it was a place he could visit, and he hungered for that cold water now, for the pebbles that jarred and jabbed at naked feet, for the rush and swirl, the suck and flow of the ice-cold sea, dragging down into the lost depths of the old land bridge between England and the Continent.

He had read about it all, how below the sea were great mountains of chalk, some of them nearly reaching the surface of the ocean. Millions of years had eroded the chalk hills into these spires and fingers of chalk, part of the downlands. And when land had filled between them, people had walked there, and lived there.

Their bones, their weapons, their spirits still swam in the shallow depths, in the chalk depths.

But it was not the same sea. Not the sea of monsters. Not the sea of screams and cries. Not the sea of shadows that he could touch and smell whenever Chalk Boy came near to him …

It was still too dark to leave the house, but he felt such longing to be in the pit, to smell that ancient ocean.

He wrapped up in his top blanket, curled up on the window sill, staring out through the darkness and over the trees, to the blue glow of the near-dawn.

He sighed.

He listened to the silence in the house.

While Susan
took Michael to school, Richard went out to the chalk quarry, spade and fork carried over his shoulder. He found the boy’s camp, did a superficial survey of the area where he claimed to have found the statuette, then cleared the shrubs and the thin layer of soil. He paid particular attention to the area among and below the tangled, shallow roots of trees.

After an hour he had found nothing. No hoard, no stash, no evidence at all that the gold statuette was part of a concealed haul of stolen goods.

So who
was
Chalk Boy? An imaginary playmate? Then he certainly hadn’t given Michael anything as tangible as fifteen ounces of very high-quality gold, shaped so exquisitely.

A brief visit to their neighbours, the Goulds, had established that Bobby was at a Cub’s meeting during the time that Michael claimed to have been playing with Chalk Boy. And a phone call to Jenny Hanson confirmed the obvious: that her two sons had not been over at Ruckinghurst that afternoon either.

It was pretty. So I fetched it for you
…

Richard kicked around the camp once more, then walked back to the earthfall, staring down at the low mound. No, it was impossible that he had missed such an object during his sift through. He just
wouldn’t
have missed anything so bright, so starkly different to the primitive contents of the
shrine.

Later, he called Jack Goodman at the British Museum, arranged a meeting then drove up to London.

Over coffee in his small office, Goodman examined the statuette, making appreciative sounds. ‘It’s a lovely thing. A lovely copy of an Egyptian statuette. Although – I’m almost inclined to think that it’s
not
a copy. It’s just that it has such a
new
feel …’ Goodman turned the figure again. Light glanced off the solemn wolf-face of the ecstatic dancer.

‘But a copy of what, I wonder?’ Richard said. ‘It’s familiar, but I can’t place it.’

On impulse Goodman rose from his desk and took down four catalogue volumes from his shelves. It took him half an hour of turning the pages, thinking, scratching his head, swearing, flipping forward and back through the huge books, but eventually he found what he was after.

‘Let’s go and see …’

Behind the scenes in the museum the rooms were lined with cupboards, drawers and shelves of artefacts, objects and implements not on display. A curator led them to a drawer of gold from the tomb of a minor Egyptian king of the Fourth Dynasty. The goldwork was inferior for the most part, and had been damaged when stones from the tomb’s ceiling had fallen at some time soon after the tomb had been sealed. As such the pieces were not displayed.