Free The Fetch by Robert Holdstock

a third of a large dog, with dry, coarse fur still clinging to some of the sharp, broken bones. He had collected forty fragments of thin wicker, found three more chalk balls, these the size of billiard balls. When he held the pieces of chalk against the light in different ways and looked for shadows, the tell-tale shadows that would show inscriptions or patterns on their surface, nothing was instantly revealed.
    He had also sieved out nearly a hundred flint shards that had been deliberately produced from a single core. He had fitted three of them together and the edges were sharp and clean, the match perfect.
    He had not found the implement that had been fashioned from the core, of which these shards were the waste.
    There were also several chunks of turf, the grass browned and rotten, but the texture still intact. Although at first he was inclined to dismiss these, he suddenly began to realize their significance.
    In the late afternoon, running with sweat and uneasy in this silent, empty quarry, he unearthed the remains of a leather bag. It was split open and two fragments of flint chippings were embedded in it. It was old leather, but still strong, and a gut string had been used to draw it closed. The bag, on closer inspection, seemed to have been torn apart.
    Searching in the same area he found two more pieces of hide, the leather of a slightly lighter tone, despite the earth staining, and with a patterning that suggested pigskin, not cowhide like the first. Two bags, then.
    Fragments of a clay vessel came to light from the bottom of the mound. He rinsed them off and their slight red colouring showed clearly. There were fifteen fragments, four of which fitted neatly together to reveal part of a shallow dish. There wasa trace of pale wax on one shard.
    Five boxes, then:
    One contained the remains of the dog, and he had already confirmed what he had suspected: the creature had been chopped to pieces by a thin, sharp blade, strong enough – and wielded with sufficient strength – to make a clean cut through the bone on each strike. A second case contained the flint shards, the leather and the chalk. A third contained the narrow wicker twigs; a fourth the larger fragments of wood and several chunks of compacted daub, a hardened mud used to fill the gaps between the wattle of the walls of primitive dwellings. In the fifth box were the decaying lumps of turf, the recognizable remains of rushes, and all the other stones, large seeds, and vegetable matter that had come through with the fall.
    And it all added up to … to what? Did it add up to anything at all?
    He was sure it did. Or at least, the remains did. How they had got here … what they had been doing in his bedroom at two in the morning eighteen months ago, was another question entirely.
    But the remains of the dog, the newly killed dog …
    Whoever had killed it had done the deed only minutes before the dismembered creature had come into the Whitlocks’ house. It had been chopped to pieces by an axe, a very heavy axe.
    It was a dead dog and had been held in a cage made of wicker. The cage had been in a place which had wattle and daub walls supporting a turf roof: rushes on the floor had made walking easier.
    Next to the dead dog in the cage had been placed leather bags containing flint chippings,and five chalk balls which someone had shaped perfectly smooth and round.
    And there had been at least one crude clay dish with wax in it, and maybe a flame.
    It was obvious to him that the fall of earth had concealed a shrine.
    But a shrine to a dead, dismembered dog?
    A shrine. Purpose unknown.
    A large part of which had been suddenly dumped into his bedroom, out of nowhere, out of the blue, out of thin air.

    Michael was sitting in the corner of the kitchen, head down, a sheet of paper on which he was drawing between his chubby legs. Spirals, of course, swirls, and blobs.
    Richard stood in the doorway from the garden, watching the boy as he beavered away with his crayons.