Susan came back into the hall with a mallet. Sobbing, she smashed the creature’s skull before running up the stairs, pushing past Richard to get to her daughter’s room.
The girl was in bed, the covers drawn over her head. Hanging against the window was a bird in slow flight, but like the tiny doll in the wood by the quarry, this was no more than stitched-together wings and legs, an obscenity of bleeding, ragged tissues, bones and feathers, the heads of three rooks, beaks torn open wide, slung crudely in the middle of the rotting mass.
It was not flying. It was suspended from the curtain rail by a thin length of gut, swaying like a pendulum at the end of its life.
To Richard it seemed unthreatening, and he opened the window on impulse, tearing the gut rope and depositing the cruel tease on the lawn below.
That is for show. Not power. He doesn’t want to attack Carol. Good …
Susan sat with the girl, hugging her, fulfilling many needs. Richard went downstairs again and peered more closely through the front door at the monstrous wooden effigy that now stood there.
With the lights off he could define its
shape more clearly, a tall, manlike structure, a wooden figure, built from thin branches, its legs wide, its arms stretched horizontal. The tiny head was carved with no features at all, save for the horizontal slash of a mouth. Where its breath would have touched the glass, had it been possessed of such life, ice was forming, spreading rapidly in a pattern of frost that began to obscure vision.
On impulse, Richard tried to open the door, determined to break whatever seal Michael had established. But as his hand reached for the latch his fingers began to freeze, curling painfully into his palms. The eyeless, gaping face seemed to mock him.
Michael’s odd laugh sounded from his study. Without hesitation, but terrified, Richard returned to the darkened room. An uncanny and heavy silence greeted him and he turned on the light. The door to Susan’s studio was just closing. He ran to the workroom, peered in, aware of frantic movement and the gleam of the white death-mask on the window.
The shelves had been stripped bare. The air was full of dolls, flung and flying as if storm-tossed, as a pale shadow spun and screamed in the centre of the room, arms outstretched, hair flying.
For a moment Richard saw the vague outline of his son in a swirling tumult of dolls; a second later a deer’s head was flung against him, the antlers catching on the frame of the door. A great spray of hot blood caked his face and chest. The creature’s face worked, the tongue licking hideously between stretched jaws. It stank of fur, heat and sweat, a heavy animal stench. Its eyes rolled in the sockets, but then the lids closed. Richard cried out in horror, scratching at the stickiness on his face, aware of the bright decoration on the antlers; the ribbons, the leather, the feathers, the painted patterns on the face, around its eyes – and the glittering of glassy stones, strung between the inner tines of
each antler.
A present for Daddy … Pretty … Pretty …
He couldn’t get past the monstrous sacrifice. He took the head by its horn, dragged it to the hall, but couldn’t approach the front door. He pulled it to the entrance to the cellar and flung it down the steps, slamming the door closed.
A trail of fresh blood gleamed on the polished wood of the hallway.
‘Susan! He’s upstairs again!’
Richard could hear the sudden movement of the boy above him. Carol shouted something, and a door was banged closed. Then laughter. Mocking Boy’s laughter.
Is it Michael? It just doesn’t sound like him …
To Richard’s astonishment, the door of his study was flung wide. It stopped his heart for a second, but he launched himself into the room, switching on the light, staring through the swirl of frost-laden mist at the cluttered bookshelves.
Above him came the sound of someone running heavily on the spot, a dance, an exercise …
The ceiling seemed to shake, the light fixtures trembling. The temperature dropped further, and the chill began to numb Richard’s skin.
The ceiling exploded downwards!
He flung himself away from the huge column of painted wood that crashed through the plaster and paint, descending into the room. It slid down heavily at an angle, crushing his desk chair and denting the floorboards but not breaking them. Dust swirled around the monstrous effigy, and wood smoke filled the air …
And the echo of a cry! Such a strange sensation, that echo! Like voices raised in fear, but only glimpsed, a faint reflection of a moment of horror in another time
.
And wood smoke, sweet and heavy, like cedar!
The totem-tree settled. Its grinning, staring
faces, painted in garish reds, greens and blues, seemed to die a little. Richard picked himself up and met the eyes of otters, eagles, owls, deer, wolves and men. The wood was old, scored and cracked, parting along its flaws. The faces were twisted, riddled with the pecking holes of birds and the scouring trails of beetles. Fungal growth filled the crevices.
And yet everything about the monolith was fresh! It was new! It had been recently used.
It sang at him, driving him from the room as it settled to a time when the fires were cold and the dancers were dead, its memories new, but fading with the sounds and scents of the world from which Michael had wrenched its massive bulk.
A face peered in through the study window, a white face: grinning. It waved a mass of rattling, raggy objects, round-faced, rouged lips, false hair, pressed them against the window, then fled. Richard was vaguely aware of the figure shrieking with delight, triumphal, passing away into the darkness, dragging his haul behind him.
He stepped round the totem and went into Susan’s studio, staring at the empty shelves, the dolls purloined, taken hostage. A few shards of doll-corpse were scattered here and there, half a head, an arm, a foot, a tear of cloth. The blood from the severed head of the stag had spread everywhere. It had spattered the walls, the work-bench, the pictures, even the window and the pale mask that watched him from the ice that still held it to the glass.
He had taken Susan’s dolls! But why?
He couldn’t leave the
house. Each door was denied him, turning him back either with fear, or cold, or some intangible barrier that made his legs go weak, then stop functioning.
But he could look. He could still see out into the night, although frost and ice were creeping over every window.
From the sitting room, from the French windows, he surveyed the night and the garden, with its new crop of totems, poles and statues of all sizes, some quite vertical, others leaning or collapsed, a forest of animal and woodland energy, formed like an orchard around the house, silent, sensuous, sinister guardians.
The last thing he saw, before ice covered the glass completely, was the white shape of a naked boy, moving quickly through the night, down towards the gate and the cornfield. The pale figure merged with the hedges, then reappeared. After a moment there was a dull pulse of air, an implosion, and an immense tree appeared, standing by the gate, beginning to lean, its lower branches lopped away, the upper limbs bare of leaves and shaped into the profiles of wolves and birds. Fire licked up the dark trunk, bringing momentary sight of faces and bodies cut into the bark. The white shadow of the boy ran round the burning totem, illuminated eerily for a second or two, yellow fire on white skin. Then the flames died and the shadowy movement passed away, back across the field, back to the chalk pit and the strange summer night.
They were trapped in the house. They froze if they tried to open the door at the front. At the back, nausea overwhelmed them, emanating from the squatting idol that grinned from grass. Behind it, a massive totem tree cast a faint moon-shadow across the kitchen floor. It was old, this tree, blackened and cracked, carved with crude eyes and sinuous, snake-like shapes. It had been burned in antiquity, but someone had daubed ochres on to the charred features, giving sinister life to the black guardian.
In the cellar, two wicker shapes guarded the exit to the garden. They were stitched and rough, slumping scarecrows, the hair made spiky, the faces white, the bodies stuffed with some black material. They screamed at Richard when he tried to enter the cellar, driving him back in pain. Susan, at the top of the stairs, heard nothing, but when she also tried to enter the cramped space, the eerie shrieks terrified her too.
In Susan’s studio, the
goose-bone mask stared blindly from the window. To approach it, now, was to feel a constriction in the throat, a terrible strangulation that stifled breath and movement. Beyond, in the playroom, a ragged dress made of skin had been crudely nailed to the outer door. This was decorated with stick figures and half-skulls dripping with dull beads, slashed by knives, ragged and torn at its hem, and Richard recognized something similar to a ghost-dance cloak. To approach it was to feel drowned in cold, muddy water, head pressed by hands, lungs filling …
It was the worst defence. It was the most powerful.
Upstairs, the windows grinned with dolls. There was no way out of them. Richard had a fear of falling from heights, and the sensation of plummeting when he reached for the window handles was sickening. Susan was less vertiginous, but even so she couldn’t open the panes. Her body went weak with the sense of falling miles down a vertical cliff.
Michael had imprisoned them as effectively as if he had closed and locked the bars of a cage.
At two in the morning the
house began to freeze. The family dressed in overcoats and scarves as the temperature dropped rapidly. The central heating pumped hard but the flames in the boiler didn’t seem to heat the water in the radiators. Nor did the oven work. They found two electric fan heaters but the air that was emitted was icy, even when set for high temperature.
Quickly, Richard laid a fire, but this too was frustrated: as he struck the paper alight a stinking breeze blew down the chimney and extinguished the flames. The smell was sulphurous and acrid. When he shone a torch up the chimney shaft he could see a bulging, ebony face and dangling ribbons, something wedged across the airway, staring downwards.
Carol was awake again now, and warmly wrapped. She was very quiet as she sat, huddled in blankets, on the sofa. Breath frosting she sang a song to herself, staring all the time through the French windows to where the outline of the totem could just be seen.
Susan tried phoning Françoise again, but there was no reply. She called Jenny but the number was permanently engaged, the phone off the hook perhaps, or Michael interfering with the line. When she tried a neighbour she found the same problem. She dialled numbers at random, working through her address book.
Only the number for Françoise Jeury’s home worked.
‘He’s cut us off. Except for Françoise. He’s freezing us out. Except for his friend. But she’s not there …’
Carol sang her song, a simple nursery rhyme tune. After a while Susan listened a little more attentively to the barely audible words that emerged from the huddled, frozen child.
‘Watching-man comes out of the ground, watching-man comes out of the wood, watching-man can see me here, but can’t harm me if I watch him good …’
‘Are you making that up?’ Susan asked as she cuddled closer to her daughter.
‘It’s Michael’s song,’ Carol whispered. ‘He said he wouldn’t hurt me and he wouldn’t let Chalk Boy hurt me. He taught me the song in case Chalk
Boy tried to trap me.’
Richard was by the window, staring through the frost into the winter’s night. He smiled as he listened to Carol talk, then said, ‘I think we’d all better learn to sing the song of the watching-man …’
At dawn the ice began to melt and the house warmed up. As
the frost faded from the glass, the pale sun cast the long shadows of totems across the sitting-room floor. The kitchen was similarly darkened by shadow, and the family moved tentatively upstairs to Carol’s room, the only space where they felt unwatched and unthreatened.
Michael was in the room again. Carol sat up slowly, drawing the blankets round her shoulders. A grey dawn light made the room seem cold. Over by the wardrobe was an area of darkness, and Michael was lurking there.
The room was warm. It also smelled sweetly of summer flowers. Carol watched the patch of darkness, aware that the whole house was murmuring around her.
‘Michael?’
The darkness shifted.
Something scurried across the floor, too fast for her to see it, and the curtains closed over the window, blocking out the encroaching day. In total darkness, she felt the small, bony hand on her shoulder. The bed shifted as a weight moved on to the mattress. Her hair was ruffled, the lobe of her ear tweaked.
‘Michael … don’t tease …’
‘Not Michael.’
The voice was the winter voice. It was cold air on her ears, and frost to her nose. The words were rasped from the invisible thing, and again the lobe of her ear
was tugged between tiny, bony fingers.
‘I know who you are. You’re pretending to be Chalk Boy. But you’re Michael.’
‘Not Michael!’
Her ear was pinched, and she stifled the yell, but slapped at the tiny tormentor. ‘Watcher-man, off you go, or out of the window your wood I’ll throw!’
Laughter from the fetch. It dropped off the bed and lurked again in darkness. She could hear its movement, sense its single, open eye (the other was quite blind. She had established that the night before by shining a torch at it).
Hissing: ‘Not the watching-man. Can’t frighten me.’
‘You can’t frighten me either. You’re Michael. You want food. I’ll bring it when I can …’
‘Food now. Food now.’
‘When I can. Now go away.’
‘NOW!’ breathed the fetch.
Carol picked up a book from her bedside table and threw it at the elemental.
‘When are you going to let Mummy and Daddy out of the house? It’s time you stopped being angry.’
‘Food!’ said the wooden thing.
‘I’ll bring it when I can. How do I get out of the house? You’ve blocked us in. And there isn’t much food anyway. We’re eating it all. There’s not much for you.
Or
Chalk Boy. Why don’t you eat chalk?’