The Fetch

It begins with a scatter of earth, thrown over the infant by unseen hands, a haunting attack that is repeated day after day, culminating with an explosive fall of mud that nearly kills the boy. And found in those tons of raw, wet earth: flints, chalk artefacts, the remains of a primitive shrine and the dismembered carcass of a hunting dog.

The Whitlock’s house, in the Kentish Weald, stands near a chalk-pit, and it is here that their son, Michael creates his peculiar imaginary world, making his camp by the pile of grave-earth from that early attack. Unaware of what is happening to him, the boy touches and uses the strange force that now ebbs and flows in the pit. And when the haunting returns, this time it is more subtle, almost wonderful in its seductive nature.

Torn between a fear of the supernatural and greed for the results of Michael’s power, his adoptive parents are helpless. It is left to Francoise Jeury, a psychic investigator, to piece together the bizarre truth of the pit and the shrine and the oddly silent boy.