The Fetch Read Online Free PDF Page A

mother and child. The tension eased slightly, and the anger passed away.
    ‘I said some harsh things. I’m sorry.’
    Richard touched the tear-stained face of the infant. ‘No. You were right to say them. There are things that should have been said long ago. We’ll have to talk them through. But not now. Now’s not the time.’
    Susan’s laugh was distinctly pointed, but then she shook her head. ‘I’m sorry. Sorry, Rick. I just can’t stand it – this
limbo –
this
attack
. Not knowing what it means …’
    ‘I know, I know.’ He tugged Michael’s blanket to make it more secure around the child’s tiny body. ‘What shall we do about the weekend? Cancel?’
    Susan shook her head. ‘We can’t. Too many people. It’s too late in the day.’
    ‘It’s only a party, for heaven’s sake. I can get up early and ring around all morning.’
    She sighed and leaned against him, weary and ready to drop. ‘And waste all that lamb?’
    He smiled, then laughed, and Susan looked up and smiled too.
    ‘What an idiot you are. Roast lamb for a crowd that size. You’ll be cooking all day.’
    He looked puzzled, then shook his head. ‘I’m not going to roast it. I’m going to barbecue it. That’s why I dug the pit. For God’s sake, can you imagine roasting seven legs of lamb in the oven?’
    ‘Ah …’
    Susan nodded,smiling thinly. ‘I must admit, you had me worried.’

    Susan went to bed; Michael slept soundly in the cot next to her. Richard prowled restlessly around the house for an hour, finally sitting for a while in his study, a small, dark room, lined with books, his own photographs and racks of magazines. He turned the pages of an article he was writing for
Archaeological News
, but didn’t register the words.
    He was
certain
that he had locked the doors to the garden when he had come back in from searching outside.
And
he had locked them between leaving the house and returning. Why wouldn’t he have done? That had been the whole point of tonight’s exercise: to make sure that no one could get in or out at the time of the attack on Michael.
    So perhaps Susan herself had opened them. But why? She had no reason to try to deceive her husband.
    Someone had thrown raw earth at Michael on each of the last four nights, and perhaps during a day as well, when Susan had been alone with the boy. Someone in the house. Someone who could not be found. Not him, not Susan (they were each other’s alibis). So: Michael’s natural mother.
    How had she done it? She had followed them here and cut herself a set of keys. Now she hid outside all day, but could enter the house and move about in absolute silence, leaving no trace of her feet in the wide scatter of dirt on the floor that she flung – abusively – at her natural offspring.
    Richard gave that idea one out of a hundred when it came to likelihood. Susan had been obsessed with the mother since the day of the adoption, at the clinic. Her belief that the other woman was perpetrating these attacks was quite irrational – a transference of guilt or anxiety, perhaps.
    Somethingelse, then.
    The house was a hundred years old. It had been in the family for two generations, and Richard had grown up here. There were family traditions, family stories, strong memories of bad winters, family tragedies and war-time damage, mostly from flying-bombs. But there were no stories of ghosts. To the best of his knowledge the house simply wasn’t haunted.
    He finally reached for a pencil and wrote the word ‘poltergeist’ on the bottom of the last page of his article. He had only a vague idea of the concept behind the word. He knew that poltergeists were reputedly generated from disturbed minds, minds that were usually female and adolescent.
    A poltergeist in the house?
    But it was too late in the evening; he was too tired; there was too much to think about for the christening party tomorrow; he wasn’t ready to start thinking seriously about psychic phenomena.
    He underlined the word