(This little lady is wonderful. But Michael’s a sensitive child. We
must
pay more attention to him.
(I don’t like him, Sue. He gives me the creeps. I don’t like him.
(He’s your son. He’s your adopted son … Make an effort, for God’s sake …
(He gives me the creeps. There’s something not right about him. All that shit with the earth. He’s haunted, Sue. And that frightens me. I keep wondering … I keep wondering—
(What?
(I keep wondering what will happen next.
(Nothing’s happened for a long time. It’s all passed. He frightens me too, Rick. He gives me the creeps too. Sometimes I can’t bear to have him in the same room as me, not alone. That’s why it’s so good to have Carol. But we have to
try
!
(Where is he now? Keep your voice down. He might be able to hear …)
YESYESYESYESYESYES.
I
can
hear!
I
am
here!
Here I am!
‘… and so the brave Knight knelt before the pale and ageing King.
‘ “Good King, there is only one way for you to save the Kingdom. I must quest far and abroad, I must fight great monsters, and evil Black Knights,
and find the Grail, and bring that Grail to you. And how I do these things, what dangers, hardships, maidens and adventures I shall encounter … these stories are for another night, and another tale-telling, because it’s nine o’clock, and young Ginger-Haired Knights should be asleep by now.”’
He lay in the darkness, his heart beating fast, more content, now, than he could remember feeling in his life, happier than he had known for years. His father’s sudden affection embraced him like a warm and welcome hug. His mind was filled with the story, with the sound of his father’s words, the images from the voice that had spoken so softly to him, with such humour and with such affection. It made him chuckle. The laugh came from nowhere he could identify. He just felt like chuckling, staring out through the window to the glow of moonlight on the scudding clouds.
The bad images scattered. The raised, harsh voices faded. Memory shifted and stirred, slipping away into darker regions, and instead he felt the warm glow of sun, the smells of a picnic, and an odd and eerie memory of his mother, bending towards him, making sounds. He dreamed that she was reaching to pick him up. Her words:
Can you hear me, Michael? It’s time to go home …
He
did
feel at home, now. It was such an
exhilarating
feeling. Yes. He truly felt at home.
Unable to sleep, he climbed out of bed and ran to the window, staring towards the pit where Chalk Boy was resting. Michael wished Chalk Boy could leave the pit, could
really
come and play with him in the bedroom. He had only been dreaming about him the other night, and in his dream he had run around and disturbed things. But Chalk Boy was bound by the ancient sea, trapped by it, or so it seemed. Michael drew
tunnels to let him through, but he never came further than the exit. Perhaps he was afraid to leave the rush and swirl of the ocean, and the shifting, scorching sands of the wild shore where he lived, so close to the great creatures whose cries filled the night, and whose movement through the chalk sea cast such giant, frightening shadows.
‘Chalk Boy …’ Michael whispered to the night, and at once a shadow seemed to wrap itself around him, startling him. He stepped quickly back from the window. Dull moonlight reflected on the dual imprints of his hands against the glass. His head started to spin. Michael realized he was dripping with fever-sweat. His heart was racing, beginning to hurt inside his chest. He bounded to the bed and buried his face in the pillow, rubbing his skin to dry it. Turning on to his back he lay gasping, feeling the fever-heat surge and flow through his body, but then ebb away, like a wolf slinking slowly back to its woodland cover.
Sitting up in bed he experienced a transient dizziness, but whatever it was, whatever had suddenly surged into him, almost possessing him, had gone. He found his tiny torch and switched it on, using it to locate paper and crayons on his bedroom table.
He drew a circle within a circle, then began to spiral the inner circle tightly, to draw the tunnel close.
‘Chalk Boy … ?’
But if Chalk Boy
had
been close to him, he had gone now, and this tunnel was merely a swirl of black crayon, without power. It didn’t touch the sea. There was none of the usual sound of waves. There was no heat and stench of seaweed.
The passing shock of a few moments ago had not overly disturbed Michael. He was still too high on the pleasures of the story, and the look of comfort and contentment in his father’s ringed and ravaged eyes.
He had looked so tired, like
that comedian on the TV, whose face puffed and reddened while he made his jokes. His father looked so crinkled, these days, and he often smelled of sweat and the sharp odour of whisky. But this evening, all of that had softened. His breath had been sweet. His eyes had sparkled, like the golden wolf-girl. The ghost had gone, and the harshness with it.
Something in Michael had known all along that it would just be a matter of time.
He had dreamed hard about it for so many years, determined to make the dream come true, determined to stop his father’s distress and anger. And at last he had succeeded.
It gave him a good feeling, and he snuggled down again below the blankets and closed his eyes.
Deeper in the house, in her own room, Carol woke and started to cry; the door of his parents’ bedroom opened and there was the sound of someone moving across the landing. A second door opened and closed, and Carol’s wailing faded away.
And with it, Michael’s consciousness as he slipped into a dream filled with shadows, sea and the thunder of waves.
The day after his
eighth birthday, Michael woke suddenly, aware of Chalk Boy’s call. It was just before dawn.
There was something new in the pit … something for him to fetch!
He stumbled through the darkness at the edge of the quarry, entering the gate, feeling for the familiar markers of the pathway that wound inwards to the place where he could see into Limbo.
Everything seemed the same, the undergrowth, the bushes, the stones on the path.
But something was wrong!
He ran, then hesitated, crouching between the scrubby trees and thorns. He fumbled for the shaped chalk blocks, the cold iron fragments, the cleverly positioned knots of rag with their twiggy limbs and painted features, the guiding spirits that he had positioned at each invisible gate through each invisible wall of Castle Limbo.
They were all intact. They all allowed him to pass through. He wound his way through the streets of the castle, watching dawn light spread on the high wall of chalk, on the sinister arms of the black trees that surmounted the wall. He pushed through the spiky gorse and brushwood that filled the heart of the pit and approached the place where the tunnel opened.
Here, he stooped and marked
out patterns on the dirt-encrusted chalk, using his fingers, shaping the tunnels, sketching in the shadows blindly, calling for the sea and for Chalk Boy.
It came quite suddenly, opening in his conscious dream, startling him …
He felt giddy as the passage stretched away from him, and the surge and rush of sea deafened his senses. The salty smell overpowered him. He squinted against the bright yellow light that flooded from the farther end of the tunnel, illuminating the patterns on the round wall.
He stepped tentatively forward, looking for the bright thing, the gleaming focus that would normally start to form here, but he saw nothing. He edged further into the cold passage through the rock, his feet slipping. Spray touched his face, icy, sharp, and he licked the salt from his lips.
There was a child’s laughter, somewhere in the intense yellow light ahead of him.
He tried to call, but his voice rasped hoarsely, through fear, perhaps, or the strange atmosphere.
A shadow passed through the light. It was utterly black and fleeting in its movement. Michael beckoned to it, but all he saw was the surging column of water as a monstrous wave broke on the beach, somewhere ahead, crashing against the red cliffs.
Then the shadow again, hovering for a moment, enticing.
Michael looked around him, sensing the presence of an object, drawing close to it, but he could focus on nothing.
So he stepped further down the passage, further than he had ventured before.
Space opened!
He turned and stepped into the smoky room. Light streamed from a hole in the roof and children screamed.
The pretty thing was before him, hanging from a wooden beam, and he reached towards it, reached for the green glitter of jewels …
A dog barked savagely.
His fingers seemed to thicken, to become heavy. A red face peered into his and shouted. Something hard passed through him, drawing the wind with it, making the grey smoke from the fire curl and gust …
And
closed
on the jewelled figure.
Fetched
it!
Dragged it
.
He was suddenly flung back on to the chalk, rolling into a prickly patch of gorse, yelling.
Chalk Boy was laughing! Chalk Boy was amused by something …
He covered his face as wood and hot ashes rained down upon him in the half-light. The choking smell of smoke filled his lungs for a moment and he coughed violently.
Then everything became calm and he looked for the doll, which had fallen from his fingers and was now crushed against the chalk wall. He picked it up and grimaced as he smelled the rottenness of whatever existed below the ragged fabric of its clothing. The expression on its face was truly horrible. The eyes were not brilliant and exciting like the green jewel he had found a few days before. They were dull and glassy, protruding from the wooden face, hideously ugly. The body felt soft, unpleasantly pliable, and each time he squeezed it the stench was worse.
Disgusted, and feeling sick, he carried it gingerly around the chalk pit to the gorse scrub that covered the castle’s dungeon. Forcing his way through the bushes he found the metal grille that covered the outermost of the deep passages, where so much rusting machinery was still to be found. He reached an arm through, holding the doll by its legs. The smell
that wafted from the dungeon was overpowering and he thought of some of the other things he had hidden here, some of the horrors he had fetched instead of the pretty gifts he valued.
A flick of his small wrist and the doll was consigned to its cell. It thudded among the rocks, wood and bone of the hidden place.
It
was
all a fantasy, then. An imaginary game.
From the quarry’s edge, Richard watched his son in the grey light, listened to the boy crashing through the underbrush, calling for his friend, laughing, then inventing sounds and words, making the crashing sounds of waves. In his pyjamas, Michael was just visible below. He was clutching something, a rag doll, maybe, or just a thick twig wrapped with a scarf. In the dull light it was hard indeed to distinguish any detail.
Richard had heard the boy leave the house and had followed after a while, intrigued by the game that Michael played, anxious to know whether or not the boy
did
meet a friend in the quarry.
An imaginary friend, then. Mind games. And there was no sign of the boy digging or excavating for hidden valuables. Only the smell of wood smoke was an intriguing intrusion into the normality of the quarry.
Michael disappeared for a moment and his father stood, walking round the quarry’s edge to see what was happening. The loose soil and exposed roots at the rim of the pit made walking dangerous and he had to step away from the edge for a few paces, before returning to look down into the gloom, leaning on the trunk of a young beech.
In that time Michael had begun to leave his fairy castle, weaving in a strange way, making the noise of gates opening, closing them behind him, calling out to the Watch that ‘All is well. One more to the
Dungeon.’
All just games. It had taken Richard a year to feel convinced of this.
So where had the gold figure and the emerald brooch come from? And the more recent ‘gifts’?
Richard followed his son home across the dark field, and into the house. He entered his study and took out the two treasures, staring at them as he thought about wealth, and a wealth of strange talent.
Later in the morning, after Michael had gone to school, he went back to the quarry and searched the chalk cliff for the raggy doll-thing that he had seen his son carrying a few hours before. He found nothing, and eventually left the pit in some discomfort when he started to smell the unmistakable odour of some dead creature, rotting down among the gorse.
A week later, clutching her painting book and crayons, Carol walked along the driveway to the front door of her house, chattering on to Jenny, who listened with patient good humour to the stream of dialogue, thoughts, half-jokes and observations that characterized the six-year-old’s conversation.
‘Doesn’t look as if there’s anyone home,’ Jenny said, and Carol shivered slightly.
Her voice grim she said, ‘Mikey’s home.’
‘But not on his own … surely …’
‘Sometimes,’ Carol whispered.
Jenny sighed with irritation. ‘Well, I’ll come in and keep you company until Susan comes back. Shall I?’
Carol nodded, but her apprehension didn’t pass away.
In the event, the house was silent. Jenny opened the front door and called out ‘Anyone home? Michael?’
The two of them went into the kitchen. Jenny made coffee while Carol sat at the table, with lemonade, a sandwich and her paints. At one point there seemed to
be movement upstairs, but when Jenny went to inspect the bedroom she found it empty.
She felt irritated that neither Susan nor Richard had told her that they would be late. The arrangement was always that any delay should be communicated to the Hansons.
This was not the first time this irritating abuse of an arrangement had occurred.
The back door opened suddenly and Richard Whitlock stepped inside. His hands were chalky and muddy, and he seemed surprised, then embarrassed, to see the woman. ‘Oh, Christ. I’m sorry …’ checking his watch. ‘Jesus, I’m really sorry. I was doing some digging …’