The Fetch of Mardy Watt. Charles Butler

it. Who exactly am I meant to think was responsible? Did a burglar come and slob in front of the TV half the afternoon? Has the house been visited by sweet-toothed aliens?”

      “It’s not impossible…”

      “Or has my daughter simply mistaken the living room for a doss-house? Well, Mardy? Well? Look at me!”

      Mardy looked at her. The sequence was always the same with her mother. Quiet first, then sarcastic – and then there was a point where the sarcasm swelled like a toad’s throat and out came a flood of anger no one could control. Mardy could only wait and hope it would go no further. But even as she groped for the right, calming words, questions were burning in her own head: Who did this? And where are they now?

      At that moment, the floorboard above their heads creaked, just the way it did when Mardy walked from her bedroom door to her desk. She and her mother looked up at the same time, so it couldn’t have been imagination.

      “Did you hear that?” Mardy said quickly, sidestepping her mother and making a dash for the door. “There’s someone upstairs.”

      “You will not run out of the room when I’m talking to you!” screamed Mrs Watt. “I won’t have it!”

      But Mardy had already gone – and she was shaking so much as she climbed the stairs that she had to grab the banister to keep from stumbling. The thought of what might be waiting in her bedroom frightened her, but her mother’s voice did so no less. She had always been scared of that voice. It could hold her just as tightly as any magic dreamed up in Uraniborg, and cut as deeply too. But she had to see what was in her room …

      The door was open. No lights were on, but even by the dim, snow-reflected glow of the street she perceived the outline of a girl sitting in the chair at her desk. She didn’t recognise her at first. Mardy had never seen herself from behind. But the Fetch had undoubtedly heard her come in, for it turned slowly in the chair, placing its hands on its knees. With its grey, dead eyes, it was looking directly at her.

      “Hello Mardy,” it said with Mardy’s voice. It smiled Mardy’s smile, as if it were about to share a deep, delicious secret, just between the two of them. “I’m you.”

4 LOSING WEIGHT

      MARDY STARED. IT was herself. Perfect as a mirror’s reflection. But where a mirror would have shown the horror now growing in her own face, the Fetch’s expression did not falter. The Fetch laughed and shook its hair back over its shoulder, just as Mardy did forty times a day. And these actions, so familiar and instinctive as to be part of her, made it more alien than any stranger’s face could be. Mardy screamed. She shut her eyes, opened her mouth and let the scream block everything: the Fetch in front of her, her mother coming up the stairs behind. It all became light-headed blindness, white noise, a tingling in her fingertips and toes, and then the relief of her own conscious mind buckling under these things and – gratefully – nothing at all.