‘If my own parents weren’t on holiday, they’d be here too. But this is just …’ Richard raised his glass, tapped it against Susan’s, and waited for Susan to say:
‘Here’s to you two: about to be grandparents for the second time!’
Doug’s reaction was typical of the man. ‘Well, I’ll be buggered!’ He drained his champagne glass, stood awkwardly, leaned to kiss Susan on the head, then ran to the rope swing, making childlike cries of delight. He leapt on it and swung four times in a shallow arc.
Susan laughed, then noticed her mother’s frown.
‘I thought …’ Gwen started to say, and her frown deepened.
‘You thought we couldn’t have a natural child? So did we. Apparently this is very common. You adopt a child and something, some maternal change occurs, and the next thing you know …’
‘You’ve got your own child …’ Richard said lightly, and instantly turned away, furious with himself. ‘Damn!’
Susan was on her feet, blazing. ‘Don’t say that! You stupid man! You stupid man!’
‘I’m sorry, Sue …’ He stood awkwardly and took her by the shoulders. His eyes had filled with tears. ‘I didn’t mean it that way. I didn’t mean that. You surely know I didn’t …’
‘Michael’s your own child! Like it or not, Rick, you’re already a real parent!’
‘I didn’t mean it …’
‘You always mean it!’ Susan bit off the words, folded her arms and looked down. She was shaking with anger.
Doug drifted gently on the rope swing, then let himself down and came over to the picnic party, where tension hung silent and deadly in the air.
Michael was watching them. There was a light breeze, now, and his ginger locks were being blown about. The leaves around his feet were disturbed, as if being kicked by little feet.
‘Take the words away from me,’ Richard said quietly, but his eyes suddenly shone with need. Susan watched him, her fury dissipating but her concern growing.
‘It’s OK, Rick. It’s done. Forgotten.’
‘Take the words away …’
Now she looked suddenly frightened. ‘It’s not necessary. It’s over. Just … Just …’ she punched him on the chest, her mouth grim. ‘Just bloody well be careful what you say. And if you ever do think like that, then for God’s sake talk to me about it …’
But Richard was too angry, too mortified to be pacified. His face was ashen. Doug watched him in alarm, while Gwen kept an eye on Michael.
Richard said loudly, ‘Use the doll. Take the words away. Michael might have heard me …’
‘Don’t take family superstition too far,’ Gwen murmured as she realized what the man was asking. Irritably, Richard tried to reach into the pocket of Susan’s skirt. ‘Use the doll,’ he said, his voice rising.
‘Why do you think I’ve got a doll?’
‘I know you have. You’ll have brought one with you to make the link. Please, take the words away from me. Use the doll.’
Again he reached into her pocket, grasped the small clay figurine, and struggled with Susan, forcing her grip from his wrist as he wrenched the object from her clothing.
‘Give it back!’
‘Use it!’
‘No! I can’t! I’m pregnant! I can’t use it. Stop this, Rick. Stop it now!’
Richard swept his arm round, holding the crude figure towards Gwen. ‘You do it, then. You do it.’
Gwen very calmly slapped the man’s face, not hard, just very purposefully. Without a flicker of emotion on her face she said, grimly, ‘I didn’t make the doll. Susan can’t use it. And you don’t need it. Why don’t you listen to what she says? You’re behaving like a damned fool.’
There were tears in his eyes, and Susan reached out and touched his shoulder. He shook his head, then raised the doll to his lips and whispered, ‘Take those words from me. Take them from me. I love Michael. I love Michael. I love Michael …’
And then with a roar of anguish, he flung the object far into the distance. It vanished into the fern and leaf mould at the base of the earth wall.
In the sudden silence, all they could hear was a strange wind in the branches of the trees above and around them, and the sound of someone scrabbling through the bracken.
They turned towards Michael and all four of them started to run. The boy was halfway up the slope, crawling and dragging himself up and away from the enclosure as if being hauled by a rope. He ascended the earth bank in seconds, stood tottering at the top, his arms stretched to the sides as he faced into the distance, a moment only, a moment in which he was silhouetted against the green brightness of sun through leaves …
Then he was gone.
Richard reached the top of the earth wall first. Michael had rolled down the far slope and now was up and running again, through the crowded saplings, through the yellow and green light. He was clutching the back of his head with both hands, but making no sound.
‘He’s been stung. A bee sting!’
Richard slipped down the steeper bank, and raced the few yards to Michael’s staggering shape. He reached towards the child, reached to sweep him up into secure arms.
The wood around him erupted, an explosion of wind that uprooted saplings, flung dirt, leaves and clumps of fern at him. The great trees swayed and bent, their branches waving frantically against the flickering brilliance of the sky.
Michael had fallen once more, but again was running. Richard staggered after him through the shadows and light, pistol-whipped by the lashing saplings, calling for the screaming infant who seemed to move with impossible speed through the dense leaf mould and waving ferns. Leaves, earth and chunks of wood swirled around the two of them like a tornado. The wind boomed and groaned, and the taller beeches cracked and screamed as their wood was torn and they bent against the hurricane.
Somewhere, Susan’s voice was a cry of despair, but Richard was half-blind with the leaf matter that smacked at his face and clogged his mouth and eyes.
The boy was running faster than him!
He pursued. The gale swept around them, moving with them.
They crossed the damp stream. Spouts of muddy water streaked high above him, briefly taking on the shape of trees before shattering, spinning and swirling down to drench the man as he fell to his knees, scrambling to dry land.
As quickly as the storm had come, so it vanished. Michael was wailing, face down, half buried in leaves. Richard crawled towards him, vaguely aware that Susan was splashing through the stream behind him, and that his father in-law was shouting encouragement from further back.
His head straining up above the leaf mould, his eyes closed, his mouth open, Michael shrieked his pain. When his father picked him up he kept crying but curled up into a ball, clinging to the man’s chest.
His face was cut, a nasty slash above the right eye, two inches long. A beech leaf had stuck to the flow of blood, and Richard pulled it away. He looked at the back of the child’s neck, but saw no sign of a sting.
The others had followed through the line of devastation, shocked and frightened by the gale-force wind that had struck so suddenly in this summer wood. Susan’s eyes were haunted as she reached for Michael, staring all the time at her husband.
‘Dear God,’ she whispered. ‘Oh, Dear God … she’s back …’
Richard said nothing for the moment, but shook his head. He reached to touch the cut on his son’s face. What had done this?
And as if the thought drew his attention to the implement of attack, he saw the glitter of metal from the corner of his eye. He took two steps away from Susan and stooped to brush aside the leaves and broken ferns.
It was a fragment of bronze, once part of a broad spearhead. Michael’s blood still glistened freshly on the sharp side that remained. It had been leaf-shaped, four inches long, and still had a part of the wooden haft attached. The metal seemed to have been chopped, cleanly cut from the whole as if by a guillotine.
Bronze.
Blooded.
The
fragment of haft, of clean, smoothed alder, was not yet stained by time. It was bright wood, fresh wood, seasoned but newly carved to fit the blade.
Richard’s hands shook as he stared at this weapon shard. He could visualize clearly two identical spearheads, both in the museums where he had recently worked, and where there were authentic replicas of the ancient weapons on display for the sort of ‘touch and feel’ experience that schools were beginning to demand these days.
He was aware suddenly that Susan was beside him, staring at the sharp-edged piece of metal.
‘Is that what cut him?’
Richard fingered the blood on the edge and nodded. ‘A replica, but a good one. The edge is razor-sharp.’
Susan closed her eyes and stifled panic. ‘It’s starting again,’ she whispered. ‘Oh God, she’s starting on us again. I thought she’d gone away.’
‘It’s not his mother. Sue, calm down. It’s not his mother.’
But Susan started to cry softly. Richard put his free arm around her.
‘She’s evil. She’s terrifying … Oh God, Rick. I can’t stand this …’
Richard kissed the top of her head, staring into the middle distance while Michael lay quiet in his arm. ‘It’s not her, Sue. It’s not his mother. It never was. Not her. Not the house. Not a poltergeist. Not any sort of ghost in the outside world.’
She drew back and looked at him, her face white, her dark hair dishevelled and falling over tear-stained eyes. Her lips trembled.
‘What then?’
‘Michael himself. It’s in Michael himself. It’s the boy who’s doing this.’
There was a long silence. Gwen and Doug stood holding each other, a few yards distant, watching and waiting.
Then Susan said, ‘And if I asked you why you said that? How you know?’
‘I’d have to say I don’t. I just feel it. I think I’ve known it from the day of his christening. He’s doing it himself. He’s haunted inside …’
‘And if that’s right,’ Susan murmured, her body beginning to shake so badly that Richard reached out to steady her. ‘If that’s right … where do we go from here?
What do we do? Who can help us?’
Richard said nothing. He led the way back to the car in silence, while Doug returned to the earthworks to gather up the scattered picnic.
EIGHT
He returned to Ruckinghurst the next day, shortly after dawn, driving past Eastwell House to an access road that led to the field and the disused quarry. Here he unloaded from the car the tools he would need for the excavation: sheets of polythene, a trowel and scraper, two sieves and several light, wooden boxes. He carried this simple equipment across the field and round into the L-shaped pit, to the pile of earth by the high, far wall that he had systematically tipped into the quarry a year and a half ago. He laid his bits and pieces out in an orderly and careful way, then returned to the car for a table, notebooks, pens, pencils, specimen bags and labels. And of course, his lunch box.
‘Should have done this before,’ he muttered to himself as he began to trowel through the soil. ‘Should have damned well thought about this before!’
It was not exactly an excavation. There was no point in recording the position of objects, or their relation to each other, or in plotting levels. This was a sieve-through, and as such could progress fast. But like every sieve-through of the waste soil of excavations, the point was to find the tiny objects, not just the large.
Trowel by trowel, he searched the damp earth.
By midday he had processed half the soil, which now was piled on the several sheets of polythene. His back ached and his right arm was sore from the repetitive operation of scraping a kitchen spatula across the wire-mesh sieves.
As he stopped for a large, cold beer from his cool-box, he surveyed the results of the search so far. He had exhumed nearly a third of a large dog, with dry, coarse fur still clinging to some of the sharp, broken bones. He had collected forty fragments of thin wicker, found three more chalk balls, these the size of billiard balls. When he held the pieces of chalk against the light in different ways and looked for shadows, the tell-tale shadows that would show inscriptions or patterns on their surface, nothing was instantly revealed.
He had also sieved out nearly a hundred flint shards that had been deliberately produced from a single core. He had fitted three of them together and the edges were sharp and clean, the match perfect.
He had not found the implement that had been fashioned from the core, of which these shards were the waste.
There were also several chunks of turf, the grass browned and rotten, but the texture still intact. Although at first he was inclined to dismiss these, he suddenly began to realize their significance.
In the late afternoon, running with sweat and uneasy in this silent, empty quarry, he unearthed the remains of a leather bag. It was split open and two fragments of flint chippings were embedded in it. It was old leather, but still strong, and a gut string had been used to draw it closed. The bag, on closer inspection, seemed to have been torn apart.
Searching in the same area he found two more pieces of hide, the leather of a slightly lighter tone, despite the earth staining, and with a patterning that suggested pigskin, not cowhide like the first. Two bags, then.
Fragments of a clay vessel came to light from the bottom of the mound. He rinsed them off and their slight red colouring showed clearly. There were fifteen fragments, four of which fitted neatly together to reveal part of a shallow dish. There was a trace of pale wax on one shard.
Five boxes, then:
One contained the remains of the dog, and he had already confirmed what he had suspected: the creature had been chopped to pieces by a thin, sharp blade, strong enough – and wielded with sufficient strength – to make a clean cut through the bone on each strike. A second case contained the flint shards, the leather and the chalk. A third contained the narrow wicker twigs; a fourth the larger fragments of wood and several chunks of compacted daub, a hardened mud used to fill the gaps between the wattle of the walls of primitive dwellings. In the fifth box were the decaying lumps of turf, the recognizable remains of rushes, and all the other stones, large seeds, and vegetable matter that had come through with the fall.
And it all added up to … to what? Did it add up to anything at all?
He was sure it did. Or at least, the remains did. How they had got here … what they had been doing in his bedroom at two in the morning eighteen months ago, was another question entirely.
But the remains of the dog, the newly killed dog …
Whoever had killed it had done the deed only minutes before the dismembered creature had come into the Whitlocks’ house. It had been chopped to pieces by an axe, a very heavy axe.
It was a dead dog and had been held in a cage made of wicker. The cage had been in a place which had wattle and daub walls supporting a turf roof: rushes on the floor had made walking easier.
Next to the dead dog in the cage had been placed leather bags containing flint chippings, and five chalk balls which someone had shaped perfectly smooth and round.
And there had been at least one crude clay dish with wax in it, and maybe a flame.
It was obvious to him that the fall of earth had concealed a shrine.
But a shrine to a dead, dismembered dog?
A shrine. Purpose unknown.
A large part of which had been suddenly dumped into his bedroom, out of nowhere, out of the blue, out of thin air.
Michael was sitting in the corner of the kitchen, head down, a sheet of paper on which he was drawing between his chubby legs. Spirals, of course, swirls, and blobs.
Richard stood in the doorway from the garden, watching the boy as he beavered away with his crayons. If Michael was aware that his father was watching him he didn’t show it. Richard stooped and rolled one of the chalk balls towards the child. It came to a stop in front of the boy, and at last Michael looked up.
The plaster on his forehead made him look lopsided, and th
e tint of iodine at its edges gave him a bruised appearance.
‘A little present for you,’ Richard said and rolled the second ball towards his son. Michael watched it strike the first ball and come to a stop by his foot. He reached out and picked up the chalk, then put it straight to his mouth, licking it.
‘That’s not quite what I had in mind,’ Richard said, and walked quickly over to stop the tasting.
Michael returned to his scribbling. When Richard tried to turn the paper round to see the marks, the boy became agitated.
‘Circles and smudges. Circles and smudges.’
Round and round the black crayon went, but Richard noticed that Michael was aware of the chalk balls, his gaze lifting from the paper to stare at the artefacts from the pit.
‘If I clean the dirt and dog from the chalk so you can lick it, I might be tampering with archaeology.’
Michael used a white crayon to smudge in two round objects in the middle of a swirl of black lines.
‘What about a dog? You should put a dog in there. A large dog. Brown and grey.’
The next smudge may have been an attempt at such an animal, but it was hard to be sure.
Susan moved about noisily upstairs, and water began to drain from the bath, rushing down the pipe at the side of the house. At once Michael stood and walked to the back door, peering round to see the water flood into the drain. It was one of his favourite things.
When he came back to his corner Richard picked him up and held the stiff, reluctant lad in his arms.
He said, ‘It’s not your mother. It never was. It’s you. Isn’t it? It’s you. There’s something funny in that brain of yours. Something terrifying and strange. You’re haunting yourself.’
Michael became agitated again, struggling, and Richard placed him down, down into his corner, down to his dark circles. Like an automaton, the boy’s hand reached for a crayon, and without pause or consideration the circles began to flow again. A machine, producing machine art.