Sea spray, stinking of weed, and the eerie cries of monsters, black shapes that thrashed hugely in the surf, close to the beach, preying on the shadows that lived there
…
Suddenly, breathlessly, she was in open country, looking up a hill through driving, miserable rain at the sagging shape of a crude hut. There were poles outside the hut, with bits of limp rag hanging from them. The roof seemed to be made of grass. Mud streamed in the drumming rain from where the door had been churned up by people walking in and out.
She was cold. The rain saturated her, running down her face, through her clothes, down her legs. Michael’s chalk began to smear, and as the white ran from his face so the black paint was revealed beneath. His
grey-green eyes raged at her, urgent.
‘Go and get the Grail. It’s inside. Please. Go and fetch it.’
‘Where are we? Where are we, Michael? I’m scared.’
‘This is where our house used to be. Over there. It’s all different now. Go into the shrine. Go!’
He danced a wild dance, a dance of frustration, a wet boy shifting urgently from side to side, running in front of her, bullying, pleading, rain dripping from nose and ears, running down his body and carrying away his skin.
Saturated and frightened, Carol stooped below the wooden lintel and entered the stinking hut. Light came in through two narrow windows. Rags hung everywhere. There was a smell of animal dung and damp. Water was dripping through the sagging roof on to two balls of chalk that she vaguely recognized from her father’s study.
‘Hurry! Hurry!’ screamed Chalk Boy from outside. She glanced back through the door and saw him stooping to peer at her, then he was running again, left and right, ducking and weaving in his impatience. ‘Hurry! He’s coming. At any moment! Get me out! Get me out!’
She didn’t understand his words, but was disturbed by them. As she stepped through the twin bands of light, through the cold drip from the roof, she saw the Grail.
‘Is it there? Can you see it?’
His voice was distant, soaked up by the drum of rain.
‘It’s glass.’
‘That’s it! That’s it! Get it, Carol. He’ll be here at any moment!’
‘Who will?’ she shouted.
‘Michael! Bring it out now!’
She could see the face watching her. The Grail was not a chalice, more like a glass container, with
a lid. It was full of liquid. She stepped closer and realized that the face was not carved, not inscribed. The face of the fish was inside.
With a jolt of shock she recognized the thing that floated there, and started to cry uncontrollably, running back into the rain, banging her head on the lintel as she struggled, sobbing, from the collapsing shrine.
‘Where is it? Where is it?’ Michael screamed, furious and raging, dancing in the rain, pink now, washed clean, exposed.
Through tears, through her racking grief, she said, ‘It’s a little baby. It’s just a little baby. It’s all dead and drowned. It’s a little baby.’
He was in front of her in a second, lifting her by her clothes. Heat came from him, pouring from below the black stain with which he had covered his face.
His voice was a snake’s hiss, not Michael’s voice at all as it spat at the girl: ‘Then get the little baby for little baby’s brother! Get him NOW!’
He flung her back into the shrine. She emerged a moment later, clutching the specimen jar, still weeping. The foetus turned and twisted with the motion, its dead eyes bulging, its outstretched hands raised almost in a gesture of submission. Michael watched the face, his own eyes huge. He backed away from the girl, beckoning. ‘Come on. Come on. He’s coming towards us. I can feel him. He’ll be here at any moment. Come to little baby’s brother. Bring him to me …’
Carol walked stiffly, sadly forward, her tears lost in the rain, only the wretched grimace of grief on her face telling, in the relentless downpour, that she was crying.
Behind her the shrine exploded, a great burst of muddy earth, turf and wood, rising in uncanny slow motion into the air, then vanishing, sucked into nowhere, releasing a blast of air that knocked
Carol forward.
She clutched the Grail, not dropping it. Michael stared up at the earth that fell around them, then at the excavation in the Downs, into the deep pit where the temple had stood a moment ago. Most of it was scattered about them, but he knew that a central part had gone to the castle, and he laughed as he thought of his father struggling through that mud, searching for a baby boy.
‘I did that!’ he cried. ‘That’s me. I did that!’
And he had the Grail!
His brother was safely in his sister’s arms!
‘Come to Mikey,’ he whispered.
‘You’re not Mikey,’ she said quietly, yet still she walked towards him, out of the rain, back towards the beach, and the pit and the world she knew best …
He had drawn glass, he had drawn the face on the glass. The fish … so like the fishy thing that had appeared in her room, the Fisher King, pulsing in and out of the features that belonged to Michael Whitlock, the handsome boy with his sad expression.
It wasn’t a fish!
Realization came with horror. And with realization came understanding, and a recognition of Michael’s terrible danger. It had been there, so obvious, so clear, transparent like the glass itself. And like the revelation of the meaning of a crossword-clue – so impenetrable when you struggled with it, so obvious when you knew it – she understood that Carol had to be stopped.
Her cry woke the house.
Her fear shattered the totem field. Richard, when he saw her, when he heard the primal shriek of comprehension, when he was aroused and affected by Françoise Jeury’s insight, became a man possessed. He screamed for his daughter. He grasped the Mocking Cross and broke through the back door. He
passed the great totem. The earth shuddered for a moment, then was still, but Richard was already running towards the bluff, to the grassy slope that led to the entrance to the quarry.
From the landing window Susan watched him go. She had heard the sudden chaos, woken from a deep sleep in which her dream had been of walking on a high hill on a cold day, and come into Michael’s room in time to hear a part of Françoise’s garbled, almost incoherent desperation. She followed the other woman into the sitting room and watched as Françoise dressed more completely, murmuring the words ‘watching-man …’ all the time.
Dazed and confused, Susan said, ‘Are you going to tell me too?’
Françoise showed her the drawing that had finally resolved itself under her lingering, careful gaze. ‘Michael’s drawings of the Fisher King were of a foetus. When his spirit appeared in my office it was shape-shifting between Michael and this face, the face of a dead, unborn child.’
‘Chalk Boy?’
Françoise stared at her, her face puzzled, then shook her head. ‘You might try ringing your Dr Wilson. I think Chalk Boy is Michael’s brother. Michael may have been his mother’s second attempt. The spirit of the dead boy has been adrift in time, in its strange Limbo, but has been
haunting
Michael. Carol said it this morning: Chalk Boy is hanging on to him, strangling him, making him unhappy. I think Chalk Boy is trying to get full possession of Michael’s body—’
‘Oh, Christ! How?’
‘Translocation of spirit. If the foetal remains can be brought out of Limbo – Carol carrying them, I imagine Michael’s body can’t – the link with time will have been broken and there might well be an instantaneous
flow of spirit between the two bodies. Only Michael is hardly in control at all now. He’s almost buried and helpless in his own body. He’ll be banished into the foetus and die at once. Chalk Boy will have Michael’s body all to himself. Susan, I think Chalk Boy has been trying to achieve this for years, a desperate effort to return from Limbo. He has clung and clung to life by clinging to his living brother and
using
him. But I don’t understand how he managed to make the link. Unless …’
She gazed hard at Susan, then seemed shocked.
‘What is it?’
‘Why don’t you try calling Dr Wilson? I think he’s probably expecting you. I think he might have an answer for you. And for me too. Or perhaps Michael’s mother does. Try calling him now …’
The phone line was working again. Susan dialled the number for Dr Wilson. When he answered, after a few seconds, she almost sighed with relief. Without preliminaries, she said, ‘Michael’s mother rang us. But she hung up. You
must
let me speak to her. You
must
tell me her number.’
The voice at the other end of the line was quiet, tense and charged with anger.
‘Is this Mrs Whitlock?’
‘Of course it is!’
There was silence for a moment, then a breath was drawn. Wilson spoke in a furious whisper: ‘Do you know what she did? Did you know she came here? Destroyed everything! Did you know that? Are you aware of that?
Are you?
’
Shocked by the sudden fury, Susan couldn’t think. She went ahead blindly: ‘What do you mean? What do you mean she was there?’
He was shouting, now. ‘She stole the body of her other son. She came here and
stole
it. She destroyed my office in order to get the specimen. How dare she? How
dare
you
!’
Ice cold, eyes closed, harsh realization making her smile, Susan said, ‘
That’s
what you were hiding! What a bastard you are, Dr Wilson. What a bastard. I sat in your office, begging you to help me, and Michael’s dead brother was there, right by me, watching me from the glass jar. I couldn’t bear to look at those specimens. You knew that. Did that amuse you? Did you wink at the dead child when you walked behind me? You’re a sick man, Dr Wilson.’
‘Don’t be a fool. You only asked me about Michael, remember? Michael wasn’t harmed. I culled the twin—’
‘
Culled
the twin?
Culled
it?’
‘His
mother
insisted on it. And I told you truthfully: Michael wasn’t touched. I didn’t lie to you about that. There was and is nothing wrong with Michael. The injection was administered only through the amnion of the smaller child.’
Almost too shocked, too sick to speak, Susan said, ‘Why did you keep the corpse?’
‘The chemicals had an odd effect. For a few hours after its death it transformed slightly, a form of structural regression. It was of interest to me.’
‘It was of interest to you …’
‘Yes. It was of
interest
to me. It had become a specimen. I don’t throw specimens away. It was worth preserving. The thing was dead. Why fuss about it now? I didn’t label the jar. No one but I would have known.
Why do you interfere?
’
‘Because
Michael
knew. Because
Chalk Boy
knew. The shade of the dead boy
knew
. That’s why he got Michael to fetch it. Eventually.’
‘What
are
you talking about?’
‘The mother knew too. Michael’s mother. She must have been in agony. All these years. Poor woman. Poor lonely woman. But it was
of
interest
to you. So glad. I’m so glad. Science has been served!’
‘She shouldn’t have taken it.’
‘She didn’t take it. Chalk Boy took it.’
‘Who the hell is Chalk Boy?’
The product of your
culling
, Dr Wilson. My son’s shadow. A little boy who clung to life after Dr Wilson’s needle had thrust through the
amnion
and penetrated his heart, changing him from child to
specimen
. Perhaps if you hadn’t “preserved the specimen” … who knows … who knows what peace there might have been.’
She drifted, gaze taking in the totems outside the window, skin registering the deathly cold. She put the receiver down, ignoring the bluster still coming down the line. She looked again at the sketch of the Fisher King that Michael had made and there were tears in her eyes as she focused on the wound, clearly shown not in the ‘thigh’, as in the story, but in the breast, above the heart.
Where the cocktail had been administered …
The death of the prince.
‘What a bastard you are to be sure, Dr Wilson. Dear God, strike the man down … strike him down now!’
Richard stopped suddenly before the great chalk giant that partly blocked the entrance to the quarry, startled and terrified by the sight of the monstrous effigy. Cloud movement made the statue’s muscles flex. It seemed to be rising. He didn’t want to see the face that might be revealed. He tried to edge past it but his legs began to shake. Heart racing, he stood for a long while, indecisive.
Then Françoise Jeury ran past him and passed the statue without hesitation. She glanced round and shouted sharply to him, ‘Come on! This is dead. It’s a joke. It has no power. It’s just Michael’s joke.’
Her confidence broke the spell – he had been paralysed by his own apprehension, not by magic. He ran after the woman.
Deeper in the pit, Françoise was
more tense.
She could feel the walls of the castle. She could feel the pain coming from the sacrificed dolls, torn out of time and slung on the blackthorn. They found the body of a man, and Richard went cold, imagining the inquest, and the years of difficulty that this particular act of murder would probably entail.
Françoise was more interested in the castle itself. She had no time to worry about dead men. She had to stop Carol bringing back the corpse of Michael’s brother.
‘I can feel the walls. I can feel the way he has designed the place. But I can’t feel the entrance to his Limbo beach.’
She unfolded the drawing Michael had given her years before, when she had first visited. There had been a smile on his face when he had waved goodbye from his window. She had realized, quickly, that he had given her the plan of the route that led to the deeper tunnels. She smiled at the irony. She had thought it had been part of the game he played with her, a little tease. In fact he had been showing her almost everything she needed to know. Desperately she tried to penetrate the images of the drawing, scanning the circles and spirals, following the paths. But she kept focusing on the picture of herself, outlined in heavy black pen, a bloated, red-haired figure … all bust and bustle.