The dogfox had said some interesting things, though it took me a while to make sense of many of them. Sitting there, on Ashmore Common, by the weird yellow light of the hunter’s moon, with Caterina by my side grooming the last viscous traces of the dream out of her fur, it had seemed edgy and strange to be in conversation with the great russet creature. To an onlooker we must have appeared a bizarre group, much like two mice listening to the counsels of an owl; or lambs curled close beside a wolf. For all his care, I never was able to forget that he was a potentially dangerous predator who might turn upon the two of us like a dog: that long jaw was made for cracking bones, I found myself thinking more than once, he’d snap through a cat’s neck with a single bite. Yet he showed no sign of such intent. All he did was offer his advice, rather than his teeth, and for that I was grateful – he was a wise beast and experienced in the odder ways of the world. He certainly had the years for it and the eyes, too, deepset, pale and penetrating: eyes that had seen too much. I found I could not look away from them, however much I might have wanted to, and the advice he gave me while I was held by that unwavering tawny gaze, though cryptic, haunted me for days.
‘Look to your own,’ Loves A Dustbin had said. ‘The threat is close to home.’
But when I questioned him further all he would say was, ‘It’s coming back, Orlando. Quarter your own ground; check your own territory. Go to all four corners of the knot and take the path that gyres. Dig deep; then deeper still. Seek it out and run it down. We’re none of us safe until you do; least of all the ones you care most for, the ones who are already adrift.’
He fixed me with that unsettling gaze, then he grinned: quick and sly. Those sharp white teeth glimmered for an instant in the starlight and a moment later he was gone, loping silently into the tangle of nettles and bramble runners from which he had emerged.
*
‘What did he mean by that stuff about “quartering your own ground”?’ Caterina asked me distractedly as we padded back to the house. She was limping, her injured foot held bobbing in front of her, but she appeared determined not to complain. Sometimes she tried so hard to be grown-up that it made my heart ache.
I shook my head. ‘I can only take it literally.’
Neither of us knew what he meant by ‘the path that gyres’ and I had not liked to ask.
We walked in silence for a time. It was a still night and scents hung heavy on the air, but I was too preoccupied to pay them much heed. The fox’s mention of my sister had ambushed me, coming as it had out of nowhere. Vita. My nestmate, my fellow orphan, my poor, despised, neglected sister. I had not been very nice to her when I thought myself an important dreamcatcher’s apprentice and she was nothing but a silly kitten, forever tagging around after me in the hope of some game or another. I felt guilty that she had been lost on the wild roads in her attempt to impress me. Millie had left me in little doubt as to that.
‘So where is this “white, cobwebby place” where you saw my sister, the tabby cat?’ I asked yet again.
Cat sighed. ‘I don’t know. I sort of fell into it when I was following the dream thing. One minute I was chasing it down what looked like the Long Corridor, the next—’ She stopped, frowning.
‘What?’
‘It all went… freaky.’
‘How?’
‘The house. It looked… the same, but different. It was sort of light and… fuzzy, and it smelled… foul…’
‘Foul? In what way?’
Cat gave me a melancholy look. ‘Stop asking me. I don’t know.’
‘Bad? Rotten?’ I persisted.
‘Oh, I can’t remember. Uncle Orlando. Dusty and old. And some sort of nasty human smell, all salty, like blood.’
We were both quiet after that. At last we turned into the lane that led up to the gates of Nonesuch and threaded ourselves beneath them. We made our way up the long, soft lawn, skirting the rhododendrons, and headed for the dark kitchen.
Caterina said no more till we arrived at the cat door. This she sniffed with interest. ‘Mum’s back,’ she declared and, butting the flap open with her head, manoeuvred her injured paw, and then the rest of her, carefully into the house.
I sat outside for a little while to collect my thoughts. Liddy had returned, of her own accord, it seemed, though I had searched for her assiduously up and down the village. Then I had quartered the ground, as the fox put it, the physical ground of Ashmore. I had run back and forth along the lanes, skirted the main road, sniffed my way between every tombstone in the churchyard. Had she watched me, I wondered, sheltering behind the yew, or perched upon a roof, and said nothing? Had she even laughed at my anxious efforts? She had called me a fool and worse, and all the while she had been gone I had been plagued by the sense that she had withdrawn herself from me as a form of punishment for my failings. So it was with some apprehension that I insinuated myself inside the cat door, braced for a confrontation. Instead, I was greeted by a tableau of almost excessive domesticity. In the warmest spot in the kitchen – directly in front of the Aga – was Lydia, submitting like a weary empress to the ministrations of her attendants. She lay there with her head tilted back, golden eyes reduced to hazed slits of pleasure, as Millefleur licked carefully around her ears and neck, and two of her daughters applied themselves to her feet and tail.
No one even looked up as I entered.
‘So,’ Lydia was saying to her audience, ‘then it started to rain and you know how much I hate that, so I ran along the road till I found a likely refuge. Of course, I went straight past all those rather dilapidated council houses on the hill – you could hardly trust the people in them, could you? – until I came to that imposing place on the junction with Pond Lane; you know, the one with the ivy and the shutters, and I jumped straight up on to the windowsill and looked in. Such a smart drawing room; they even had a fire burning, which I always think is such a good sign, don’t you? So I tapped on the window; not too hard, I didn’t want to look too indigent, you know, and their little girl – smartly dressed, no jeans – came straight to the front door and held it open for me. Polished wood in the hall; very clean, and in the drawing room three big white sofas – gold fur always looks so good against white – and those lovely silk rugs that you can really get your claws into. I knew I should like the inhabitants right away. I could just see myself there. Do you know what I mean?’
She leaned her head back to look up at Millie, but the tabby and white gave her a flat-eyed look and stopped grooming. ‘I thought you said you’d had a nightmarish time,’ she accused.
‘Oh, but I did,’ Lydia cried. ‘Do you know, they had no proper cat food in the house at all? I ended up having to eat salmon straight out of the tin…
By the time she had recounted how they had made her up a bed of mohair sweaters spread in a wicker wash basket; how she had been fed properly from then on – fish boiled just so, with a little butter – and how she had met the extremely handsome and well-to-do cat next door, whose name was Tarquin and who had the most exquisite duelling scars around his ears, I could take no more.
I left the room, as unregarded by Lydia as I had been when I arrived. Millie flicked me a glance, then got to her feet and followed me out.
‘So have you had a lovely vacation from Nonesuch as well?’ I asked waspishly.
‘Take no notice of Lydia, she’s just enjoying boasting to us of how she’s won herself a whole new cast of admirers,’ Millie replied mildly. ‘You know how she is: she loves being the centre of attention. For all her arrogance, she’s really quite insecure, you know.’
I could hardly believe my ears. ‘Insecure? Lydia? She’s got more self-regard than a peacock!’ I did not add and no wonder. I could not help looking past Millie and through the open door into the kitchen. Seeing Lydia lying there still, the buttery light of the kitchen lamp infusing her fur with subtle brilliance, made the blood run like fire through my veins. I felt suddenly dizzy with longing…
When my focus came back again, Millie was watching me, her eyes bright with hurt intelligence. Her chin came up and she looked me squarely in the face. ‘As for me. I’ve been travelling around to see where best I might live.’
I stared at her stupidly. ‘What do you mean?’
Millie dropped her head and began to clean a perfectly dirt-free paw. ‘It’s time I moved on,’ she said simply. ‘I can’t just hang around here like a sort of surrogate mother. I want kittens of my own and I’m getting no younger.’
I sat down with a thud, as if someone had just sliced the sinews in my legs. ‘Leave Nonesuch?’ My voice sounded as if it were coming from someone else, someone far away down the tunnel of a long wild road, fighting against an icy compass wind.
‘Leave Ashmore entirely. I thought of going south, actually, towards the coast; maybe even as far as Cornwall. I’ve heard it’s nice there. A fishing port, perhaps. Eat fresh mackerel off the harbour wall—’
‘Millie, you can’t!’ Now I sounded agonised.
‘I only came back to tell you my plans… and—’
‘Yes?’
She lifted her head from her grooming and held me with her amber gaze. It was an honest look. It pierced me to the heart and suddenly I knew what I had always known, what I had tried so hard to forget ever since that night when she had first accompanied me on to the highways and made me catch a dream for her. That night when she had offered herself to me, without games or duplicity: a generous gift which I had rudely spurned, obsessed with Lydia as I had been. As I still was. Despite it all, I had hoped we would be friends for ever, that we could all stay in our cosy group here at Nonesuch, watching Lydia’s kittens grow to adulthood, sharing their education, unruffled by jealousies and passions.
‘And to say goodbye,’ she finished sadly.
‘Ah,’ I said inadequately, shocked into incoherence.
For a moment there I had been sure that she was going to ask me to go with her to this seaside paradise. An image – as bright as a butterfly – had flickered through my mind’s eye: the two of us asleep in a pool of sunlight in the crook of a granite wall patched with orange lichen, seagulls wheeling overhead against an endless blue sky, a greasy newspaper pushed to one side – two or three gleaming crumbs of battered fish still adhering to it – a long line of sparkling surf marking the margin between land and sea…
But you have never even seen the sea, came a voice in my head.
It was true: I hadn’t, except in others’ dreams and Millie’s descriptions of the places she had visited on her journeys down the wild roads. Besides, that grim, sensible voice went on, you have your duties here; you cannot just up and leave like some gypsy cat with no cares or responsibilities.
And I realised that of all cats, Millefleur knew the enormity of a dreamcatcher’s task and would never ask such a thing of me. She was just telling me her intentions; not asking me to join her, or even to dissuade her. I felt as if my world had suddenly folded in on itself.
*
We didn’t speak much to one another over the course of the next few days. I watched her with Lydia and the girls, as friendly and as gentle as if nothing had changed; and for them, I suppose it had not. Millie was at best an itinerant visitor in their lives, a bearer of news and teller of stories, and to Belly, Cat and Letty she was exactly what she had described herself as: a surrogate mother. They would miss her, I thought. But not half so much as I would.
This realisation came to me one afternoon as I lay upstairs in one of the unused rooms, trying to keep out of everyone’s way. The baby had been tormenting me till I had grown tired of her insistent proddings and pokings; the builders were hammering away downstairs and there was dust everywhere. The girls kept squabbling and Liddy had snapped at me when I had tried to intervene, so here I was, feeling rather sorry for myself as I lay stretched out on the floorboards. There was a perfectly good rug on the floor beyond me, but somehow the bare wood against my limbs felt more appropriate, as if my internal discomfort should be echoed by my body being uncomfortable, too. Why was Millie leaving? I kept asking myself. Wasn’t she happy here at Nonesuch? It was a large house and the food was good, the people, for the most part, attentive and friendly. Lydia – well, Liddy was Liddy: self-centred and greedy, beautiful and charming and chilly in equal measure. Everyone who knew Lydia knew this about her and accepted her as she was; even I had got used to the unpredictability and mood swings. I knew Millefleur loved the girls; she was so good with them, especially when their mother was oblivious or otherwise occupied, which was much of the time. But they were nearly full-grown cats now and less inclined to listen to others. Perhaps Millie was feeling superfluous here. The Great Cat knew I did, much of the time, when I was not hunting the dreams. I mused upon this unsatisfactory problem for a time, until I felt my eyes get heavy and my head grow soft. I was just drifting off into a listless doze when I heard footsteps in the corridor outside.
It was Anna. I could tell by the sound of her footfall. I heard her walk into the next room and cross to the window. A rattling noise meant she was fiddling with the window and a few moments later her footsteps came back out on to the landing. She entered the room in which I lay, shoes clacking first on the bare wood, then cushioned by the old rug. I pretended to sleep while she wandered about, examining the few dusty items left in the desk – books and papers, pens and oddments – and a few moments later, almost against my will, I found myself sliding into a dream.
In it, I had taken Anna’s place and was myself walking the corridors of the house, lonely and alone. It was twilight; or maybe the hour just before dawn. The light was undependable, a sort of glassy grey that slicked off the surface of things but gave back little illumination or comfort. I had the sense that I was looking for something, but what that thing could be eluded all my mind’s attempts to corner it. Anxiety burned cold at the back of my neck. I thought someone might be following me, but whenever I turned round there was no tangible sign of another presence, although little eddies of dust, transfixed by the grey light, swirled up behind me. No sign – except a smell.
There it was again: suddenly a strong whiff.
Something old and powerful, old and sad…
My eyes snapped open. Anna was standing with her back to me, facing the broken chair and the wooden thing that lay upon it. I was sure, without having any understanding of how I knew this, that some part of whatever it was that had smelled so strong to me in the dream was now in her hand, close to her face. In a minute she would turn and I would see what it was she had found, and I knew then with absolute certainty that I did not want to see it at all. A convulsion of disgust shook me, a ripple of reaction that ran from the crown of my head to the tip of my tail. Before she could move, I got to my feet and quickly padded out of the room, aware that if I were to look back over my shoulder, I would see Anna staring after me, the object held wonderingly in her hand.
I did not look back. Instead, I ran down the corridor, fled down the stairs and hurtled into the kitchen, where I surprised whichever occupant was in residence. There was a flurry of activity, then a small blue shape leapt past me and on to the table.
‘What’s the matter, Uncle O?’
I looked up. It was Caterina. She was sitting on a pile of cookbooks, her tail curled over the edge, her left paw, which was clearly on the mend, set tentatively before her on the table. Her eyes were round with surprise.
‘Hello, Squash.’
At the sound of her pet name she grinned at me and relaxed. ‘Your fur went funny,’ she said. ‘It was all spiky. I thought you were getting chased by something.’ She paused, uncertain of her ground. ‘A… dog, or something.’
I laughed. ‘No dogs here. Squash.’
‘Then what was it?’ Trust Caterina to be so insistent.
I looked around to make sure we were not overheard. ‘A smell.’ It sounded ridiculous even as I said it, but Cat looked unperturbed. ‘A musty smell,’ I went on, ‘musty, and… perished.’ I stopped. That wasn’t it; not quite. ‘But somehow still alive,’ I finished inadequately.
Cat looked at me oddly. ‘Foul,’ she supplied.
I stared at her. ‘Dusty and old, and with a tang of human to it.’
We both shivered.
*
In the middle of the storm that afternoon, the two men who looked like one came back. Something about them – their sharp eyes, their quiet voices, their intent expressions; or maybe just their identical smell – made me uneasy; and not just me, for an hour or two later I heard Anna’s voice raised against them and the angry sound of her quick heels on the wooden floor. Even when they had gone, pulling away down the drive in the huge silver machine that growled like a great beast, their presence seemed to linger in the house. There was some tension between Anna and John after that: the air appeared to crackle with it like the aftermath of the lightning I had watched from the scullery window. In the next couple of days this edginess seemed to insinuate itself into all the other occupants of the house. Scraps broke out between Belly and Letty, then between Letty and Cat, who had foolishly tried to intervene. The baby wailed and grizzled through the night, causing Anna to have to get up and tend to her, though it seemed that no matter what she did, Ellie would not be appeased. Dreams came thick and fast on the wild roads around the house, and I wore myself thin with exhaustion hunting them down and despatching every last one.
One night, disturbed by Eleanor’s incessant howling, I watched John take his reluctant turn with the baby, and marvelled at how a child that had for hours been little more than a writhing, shrieking thing that would not be picked up and comforted by its mother could so abruptly become still and tranquil in the presence of its father. All he had to do, evidently, was to speak to her softly, then pick her up and she became as pliant as a kitten. They sat together on the chair by the cot, John looking out through the uncurtained window into the mysterious shadows of the garden and Ellie resting with her head over his shoulder, half asleep and half not, the moonlight making silver snail trails of the path of her tears. I sat there for a few moments more, soothed by the sudden welcome silence, and applied myself to removing an annoying burr that had lodged itself in the tangle of fur under my left haunch. I had just got the elusive thing between my teeth and was starting to prise its little hasps clear, when there was a movement in the room behind me.
‘Shall we go and see Orlando?’
I heard John say something which involved my name, then he was moving up and away from the chair, and the baby was awake and watching me with those wide green eyes of hers. I observed them come towards me – a creature with two heads that moved quietly through the dark. Stilled by surprise, one paw poised between rest and flight, suddenly I found I could not move.
John knelt beside me and set Ellie down on her feet. She gleamed at me, then reached out with one hand.
‘That’s right,’ John said. ‘Pat him nicely.’
The baby lurched at me. Something cold banged down painfully into the top of my skull, then rattled away on to the floor. As I spun round to see what it was that had hit me there burst from behind me a monstrous giggle.
‘Bad girl,’ I heard John say. ‘Naughty Ellie. Didn’t you want your toy?’
On the floor before me lay a complicated shiny black thing. Part of it had sprung apart as if broken, and from inside it a handful of dark stuff had scattered across the bare boards like a grotesque collection of spiders’ legs. I sniffed at the strange bundle, then jumped back, sneezing. It had a reek to it: musty but still vigorous, still imprinted with its own clear signature. Whatever it was had certainly once been alive. But it had nothing to do with spiders.
I knew the smell of it, but I could not place it. It haunted me for the rest of the day, but by dawn the next morning I knew only too well what it was and wished I did not.
*
That night I completed my first excursion around the village’s highways, having dealt with a number of small and relatively harmless dreams. Most of them were children’s nightmares, in which nebulous monsters loomed out of the golden dream sacs, then dissipated to nothing at the first bite; but some had been more serious. In one, a man had stood in the path of a thundering beast, bigger than a car by far, all hot metal and screeching and burning oil. He had remained there, unable to move, time and again as it had come for him. Time and again he went down in its tracks and turned to see the same event occurring from another angle, from his blind side, from behind, spinning to meet it face to face. It was a hard dream to catch and harder still to swallow. The metal beast, though it dwindled as soon as the sac was opened, tasted foul and bitter; and the man fought me as he passed. The ghosts of his screams haunted my inner ear for hours, even though I knew the dreamer whose nightmare I had swallowed now lay quietly in his bed, snoring in untroubled sleep. In another, a woman knelt before a tall, fully dressed man and began to divest herself of her clothes, her gaze never leaving his face. Off came her coat and her shirt, and the thin, strappy thing she wore underneath. Her breasts were large and golden-white, the nipples like flower buds. Through her eyes I watched him looking at her, calm and dispassionate, unmoved by her vulnerable pale flesh. She cupped her breasts in her hands and offered them up to him, but all he did was to blink and frown as if puzzled, then take a step backwards. With a moan, she pulled at the skin till blood came; then she reached inside the cavity she had opened and held out her hands to him. They were red and wet, and full of something that beat and twitched. He stared at it for a moment, then shrugged and turned away. I swallowed him first and he tasted of nothing at all.
After that, the wild roads had been quiet and I had returned home. All the lights were out and the moon was high over the house, gliding over the tall chimneys. It was just past waxing point, a strong three-quarter moon, and it lit my way as clearly as a winter sun. So when Grizelda leapt out at me from the cover of the rhododendrons I was not taken by surprise, much to her dismay. ‘Hello, Griz,’ I said, before she had even had time to hiss at me.
‘Oh,’ she grumbled, ‘you’re no fun.’
I grinned. Griz was a big cat and older than me by some years, but she was attractive all the same, with her slanting golden eyes and soft belly. ‘Sorry.’
‘On your own again, are you?’
I looked at her. ‘Just me and my shadow.’
‘Fancy some company?’ She winked at me, her meaning suddenly clear.
‘I can’t,’ I spluttered, suddenly as embarrassed as a yearling boy. ‘I’m on duty…’
She roared with laughter so that her brindled coat jounced and gleamed. ‘Chasing moonbeams again, are you?’
‘I’ve got work to do,’ I said carefully. ‘Dream-catching.’ She looked at me askance and I knew she didn’t believe a word of it. Like many of the cats we’d rescued she’d been bred in the laboratory and knew next to nothing about the world outside. ‘Making sure the dreams don’t damage the highways. It’s my task, as the Dreamcatcher of Ashmore,’ I finished lamely. I sounded pompous even to myself.
‘You should be concerning yourself with more than dreams, my lad,’ she said, and her tail flicked with impatience. ‘Fine fellow like you and no kittens to your name.’
I stared at her.
‘Well, anyone with half an eye can tell that them little blue girlies ain’t nothing to do with you,’ she carried on cheerfully. ‘Seen a lot of strange things in my time, but never a blue kitten come from an orange father. It wouldn’t be natural, would it?’
I regarded her warily. ‘So you know who their father is, then?’
‘Oh, yes. We all do, the girls out here and me. Her ladyship’ – she cocked her head at the house – ‘may give herself airs and pretend she’s the cream on the milk, but some of us know different. Bred her to the Russian, she did, the witch.’
‘The Russian?’
‘Big blue chap. Witch’s best stud beast. Handsome in his way. Wouldn’t have said no myself, in different circumstances, if you know what I mean. But not like that.’ She shuddered.
I found myself trembling. ‘Didn’t she have any choice, then?’
The big cat gave a short laugh. ‘Not the first time, she didn’t.’
I looked at her stupidly. ‘The first time?’ I echoed. ‘She went to him more than once?’
‘She didn’t take the first time. And, silly girl, suddenly all she wanted was kittens. So she offered to go in Fig’s place the next time the witch came. Persuaded Fig to feign illness, then wailed and sang like she was on fire. She didn’t know what the woman did to them, you see, the kittens, I mean.’ Griz’s face hardened at the memory. ‘She soon lost her eagerness when she found out. Too late by then, of course, or it would have been if you hadn’t come and rescued us.’
I remembered the cold room crammed with cages; the reek of urine and fear, the dull eyes of the prisoners. All those cats; all those lost kittens…
‘What did the witch do to them?’ I asked then, though I hadn’t meant to. I didn’t even want to know.
Grizelda’s golden eyes were glazed now. She was staring at a point above my head and suddenly I could see the toll her experiences had taken on her. She was older than I had thought, for there was grey around her ears and the fur was thinning on her forelegs. ‘She took three broods from me and four from Evie, before she died. Brood after brood after brood and no way out of it. I still hear my lot, each voice distinct, crying for me as she took them away. Never saw any of them again.’
I could think of nothing to say. A pause fell between us, lengthened, became uncomfortable. A night bird flew overhead, the moonlight making of its wings a silver cowl. I watched it circle the garden silently, then slip away over the dark yew hedge and into the woods beyond, and wished I too could soar up and away from the dark places of the world…
‘Boiled them, she did.’ Griz’s voice cracked through my reverie and for a moment I thought I had misheard her, but when I dropped my gaze from the night I found her watching me with an intense focus, her eyes glittering as if rain had suddenly fallen from a clear sky. ‘That evil woman. She boiled them, my first kits. Three of them, there were: a little girl same colour as me and two dark boys. She took them from me after their first feed. You could hear…’ She stopped and after a moment I could hear her trying hard to stifle a sob.
I hung my head. I knew how the man had felt now, the one in the dream rooted to the spot as the machine bore down on him again and again. Something in me had known this – if not in the appalling detail revealed by Grizelda, then in the rough shape of things – something visceral in me, something without words, had recognised disaster when it chanced upon it, there in that grim courtyard. I stared at the ground and found myself selfishly wishing I had not come this way home, that I had skirted the lawn and run up along the orchard wall, and maintained my foolish ignorance. But even as I thought it, I felt the shame rise in me, that I could try to avoid this truth simply by not thinking about it, when Griz and Liddy and the other cats in the laboratory had lived through it and gone on living with the knowledge and, in Lydia’s case, the results of the experiment. That took a great deal more courage than I had in me, I suspected.
After a while Griz regained her composure and started to speak again. When I looked up, her eyes were clear and sharp, her jaw set like a tomcat’s ready for a brawl. ‘The boiling didn’t suit her purpose, though, it seems. She never bothered with boiling the rest, though I dare say something equally terrible happened to them. She boiled up something in that room, though, that much I can tell you. I’ll never forget the smell of it, not if I live to be twenty.’
‘The smell of what?’
It was Caterina, ears pricked and face sharp with attention.
Griz turned to face the newcomer with remarkable speed, given her size. ‘Old chicken carcass I chanced upon behind the dustbins. Squash, so full of life that smell was, it could almost walk.’ She laughed quickly; too quickly.
Cat regarded her suspiciously. ‘I’m sure that’s not what you were talking about,’ she said primly. ‘I can tell when adults think they’re being clever in hiding things from me. But if you don’t want to tell me, that’s your business. However’ – she fluffed herself up – ‘I didn’t come here to talk to you; I came to find Orlando, to tell him something important.’
Griz gave Caterina what she would have called ‘a look’, then swished her tail from side to side to show her annoyance and headed back into the depths of the rhododendrons. ‘Remember,’ she called to me over her shoulder, ‘if you need some company, you know where to find me.’
Caterina’s eyelids composed themselves into two straight lines, and beneath them the warm amber eyes turned to hard topaz. I knew that expression from long contemplation of her mother: it was one that spoke of being upstaged, of having lost a carefully fought advantage; of jealousy.
‘What was so important that you had to be rude to old Griz?’ I asked.
Cat glared at me. ‘I thought that since you’re supposed to be our dreamcatcher, you might like to know that there’s a big fiery dream caught in the Long Corridor.’
I looked at her aghast, then gathered my haunches under me and fled up the lawn. I pelted through the cat door so fast I skinned an elbow on the way through, slipped over on the quarry tiles and skidded into the maze of hallways beyond the kitchen. But when I reached the Long Corridor there was no sign of the dream that Cat had reported, or of any other disturbance. The newly plastered walls were bland and unthreatening, now that the rows of old portraits had been removed, and gave back nothing to my questing senses other than the pervasive smell of chemicals and something vaguely faecal, something that reminded me oddly of the fields beyond the canal on the way to Glory Farm where the large black-and-white animals moved slowly across the green, cropping the grass with their big yellow teeth. I was comforted by the smell, for it was not the one I had come to dread, but something more natural and somehow cleaner. And it was a relief to me that the paintings had been taken down. I had always found them disturbing in a way I could not explain – it might have been their age, the way the old surfaces had crazed and yellowed, and then darkened to an almost uniform black-brown so that it was hard to make out any details, as if time itself had deliberately laminated them, trapping the dirt and dust of centuries inside untold layers of grime in order to obscure and withhold the impressions they carried. I was particularly glad that the portrait of the woman with green eyes – which seemed to be the only portrait out of them all that had been regularly cleaned – had been put away; for I could sense that dead gaze on me whenever I walked beneath it, following me with a questioning smile, as if taunting me with a connection I had failed to make.
At the top of the corridor I turned the corner and found myself in the Painted Room. Here, I felt the air shiver as if agitated. A faint scent of char curled around my nose.
I opened my mouth to scent it better and was invaded. Acrid and violent, the smell of smoking hair and burning fur insinuated itself through me, and suddenly I was back in that same room, the girl in the big boots and her man in the leather jacket behind me, and the awful burning upstairs, and I was yowling at the top of my voice that Anna and John were trapped in the chamber with the witch, but the people were being dense and going the wrong way, and the air was thick with smoke, the fumes were in my lungs and my fur was on fire…
‘Get up, get up!’ Cat nosed at me furiously. ‘What are you doing, lying down here, Uncle Orlando? The dream is getting away.’
And just as suddenly I was back in myself again, and the scent of burning was faint and distant: the scorching of a dream globe and no more, reminiscent of the whiff made by melted candlewax, though stronger, more animal. I followed the scent of it and there, in the top corner of the room, pitching itself awkwardly against the ornamental coving, my prey hovered unsteadily. If it had started golden, as other dreams do, it had long ago lost its innocence. It hung there, a baleful hunter’s moon of a dream, all blood-orange and fire, its outer membrane crossed with veins of black as if poisoned by its own contents.
I could not reach it. Even the mightiest jump in my ordinary form would take me less than halfway up the wall. I stared up at it, then turned to Caterina. Her eyes gave back a doubled image of the dream and she started to growl. Little flecks of froth formed at the corners of her mouth; then suddenly she sprang up and ran at the wall, bubbling and spitting with fury. The plaster in the Painted Room was broken and uneven, little ripples and outcrops playing across its pale surface. To a lightly built cat – especially one borne up by the power of an almost supernatural loathing – it offered sufficient foothold to enable Caterina to reach high enough to snap at the lowest bulge in the dream’s sac. She caught it between her teeth, then tumbled to the floor, dragging the dream, swollen and reluctant, down with her. Without a moment’s thought I leapt upon it, pinioning it beneath my hindquarters, where it lay as senseless and unresponsive as a punctured football.
I raked at it with all four sets of claws. I ripped my teeth into it, but the membrane was strong. I pushed my head blindly into it, but the sac simply gave under the pressure and re-formed itself around my shoulders. At last I managed to hook a thumb claw into it and tear a small hole. I bit and bit at this, enlarging it so that I could wedge my head into the ghastly opening, but as soon as I did so the dream rose with a whoosh, as if it had felt the wound. It jagged its way across the room and out into the Long Corridor, where it melted through the wall and disappeared from view. I followed it, feet skittering on polished wood, down the corridor and in and out of all the rooms on that side of the house. To no avail.
Outside, clouds had drifted over the moon, rendering the darkness complete. But a cat can see even in the pitch-black and I could see the dream. It was tottering over the orchard wall, heading for the knot garden. My heart sank, but I knew I had to catch it. Up and over the wall I went, my feet barely touching the old brick in my haste. Once on the other side, it skirted the straggling box hedges and veered to one side, as if trying to keep close to the house. At the corner it wobbled uncertainly, then made the characteristic dash of a dream entering a wild road, a sudden, elongating motion, followed by a pleating, as if it had met resistance, then it was gone.
I stared after it, puzzled. There was no highway where it had vanished – at least none that I knew of and it was my job to know every wild road in Ashmore.
I ran to the spot where it had disappeared and sniffed cautiously at the ground. About a bird’s height above the gravel, my nose met a familiar resistance: the skin of a wild road. This was most bizarre, for surely there should never have been a wild road here, so close to the house. Nevertheless, I pushed my head inside and gazed around, eyes narrowed against the sudden icy blast. There was nothing about the interior of the highway that indicated it was anything less than a natural road, but even so I was taking no chances. Pulling my head out again, I found Cat sitting behind me, watching my performance with interest.
‘Stay there,’ I said sternly. ‘Whatever happens, just stay there and wait for me.’
She made a face. ‘I could help.’
‘I know, but your best help would be waiting here.’
‘What if it’s too strong for you?’ She got up hopefully.
‘It’s not.’
‘But how do you know? It might be and then I could help.’
‘Caterina, I haven’t got time for this.’
The use of her proper name had its effect. She sat down again, looking hurt.
‘If I don’t reappear, fetch Millie. She’ll know what to do.’ I wondered even as I said this just how long I could rely on my old friend being around. Then, with a final apologetic glance at Cat, I leapt into the new highway.
At once, the winds caught at me, whipping my mane back and forth across my eyes in a confusion of cross-currents. I stood for a while, trying to take my bearings. There was something recognisable about this road, but at the same time something warped. I could have travelled every highway, each lane and tributary of the wild roads of Ashmore and its environs with my eyes shut; but now I had the discomfiting sense of being entirely lost, as if one false step would carry me over an unseen cliff edge, or down into the deepest pit. I trod warily.
Up ahead, dimmed by the ice flurries and a sort of swirling mist, I could just make out the fiery red of the dream, diffused to a radiant glow, like an autumn sunset. It was drifting away from me. I increased my pace. Beneath my feet I could feel solid ground, which was dry and soft and almost warm, unlike the frost-bound earth that always hurt my pads whenever I ran the highways. And the scents of the wild that helped me to orientate myself – the loam and mulch, the standing water, the tang of life – seemed muted and far removed, as if someone had shut a door against the outside world and trapped this road inside.
I turned a corner and found myself in the place Caterina had described. It was a tunnel, or a corridor, and it was dark. The mist was not mist but cobwebs, great hanging swathes of them, though of their makers there was no sign. The dream had suspended itself in the thickest part of them, as if settling itself into a nest. Fear came down on me then like a cold hand, for it seemed to me that the dream was in its natural element and I was not. Perhaps, I thought, I should leave it to destroy this strange highway and take myself back to the world I understood. It would be so easy to walk away and relinquish this hunt. I could almost feel myself begin to step backwards towards my point of entrance, but just as I was about to do so a movement behind the dream caught my eye. I craned my neck. Illuminated by the dream globe’s carmine light I saw Vita.
I had not seen my sister for some six or seven seasons, ever since the highways had swallowed her, and she was much changed. But those white socks against her tabby coat were unmistakable; as was the reproach in her eyes. She sat upon what appeared to be a tall chair of black wood, and the light from the dream was in her eyes, as if a fire were raging inside her skull.
‘Eat the dream, Orlando,’ she said softly, though her voice carried easily to me across that open space. ‘You must eat all the dreams she sends, or I will be trapped here for ever.’ She stared at me for a moment or two more as if imprinting me with her fiery gaze, then she jumped down from the chair and ran away from me. In the gloomy light, all I could see of her as she fled was the flash of her white feet, the recurring image I had seen in my sleep time after time. Then I realised who it was I had sensed beside me all those nights as I dozed, whose hot breath I had felt upon my neck, whose scent had surrounded me when I awoke.
‘Vita!’
My voice echoed hollowly in that place and I knew from the sound that I was somewhere in Nonesuch, but it was not a part of the house I recognised, or at least the house as I knew it, for there were silken runners on the floor beneath my feet, rather than the dark polished wood that was there now; and when I ducked under the white shrouds to run after my sister, the old portraits were back, rich with colour as if freshly painted. This was disconcerting, but I refused to be put off my pursuit of Vita. However, before I had gone more than a few yards down this odd version of the Long Corridor I found myself back where I had started, with the dream looming red before me.
I ran past it again, for surely I had missed my way. But even as I ran, I knew I could never have turned a full circle and not noticed it. And indeed, a few seconds later I was back where I had begun once more. Was I dreaming, too? But the dream I pursued here was real; I had felt the heat from it scorching my fur as I passed. I could see the shadows its fiery corona cast. My image loomed huge and attenuated upon the walls of that highway: a gigantic lion stalking its prey. Except that I had run past my prey twice and given it not a thought.
Eat the dream.
I did not know what she meant by the rest of what she had said, but I would eat this dream and every other dream I found. I would do my job as Ashmore’s dreamcatcher. I reached up and pulled the fiery dream down from its nest of webs, and it came almost willingly into my paws, as if ready to give up the half-life it had found here. It did not resist me even when I bit into it and started to gnaw a head-sized hole.
Beyond the viscous membrane the dream contained one of the clearest scenes I had ever seen in any globe. I was inside a room panelled in dark wood, a gloomy effect only heightened by the lengths of black muslin that had been draped across the single mullioned window. Candles, tall and yellow, burned at intervals along the mantelpiece and from two ornate wall sconces, and these gave off the scent of burning tallow I had smelled in the Painted Room. No modern candles these, with their synthetic wax and clean tapers: instead, plumes of dark smoke coiled in lazy spirals from these towers of animal fat, to leave greasy spirals on the beamed ceiling. I was in Nonesuch, in one of the downstairs parlours, I realised, recognising the pitted wainscoting, the carved pattern of ivy and roses along the central rail. But where this wood was dark with age, the wood in the room I knew had been lightened and limed to an almost buttery finish, and again I felt disorientated, as if someone had picked me up and spun me round many times before setting my feet back on the floor. The room swam. I turned round. Against the back wall stood a tall, ladder-backed chair in ebony wood and upon this was curled a small tabby cat with all its paws tucked neatly beneath its tail.
In the centre of the room a tall woman in a long dark dress – her glossy black hair pinned up into an elaborate knot – stood over the body of a man in a long wooden box. She was facing towards me and when I turned to regard her she looked up briefly. Her eyes flashed at me, green and dangerous, then she bent to her task again. A silver implement flashed in her hand as she worked and when she straightened she held a small twist of dark hair between her fingers, and this she first laid against her cheek, then stowed inside the pendant of the shiny black necklace she wore. Again that sense of disquietude came over me; for surely the woman was holding in her hand the same black necklace the baby had thrown at me that very afternoon? I began to feel distinctly queasy and, as I did so, the perspectives shifted eerily again, so that I was almost floating in mid-air; for when I looked down I found that I could see the man in the box. He was very like John: dark-skinned and thin in the face, though this man was older and tireder than the John I knew, his cheeks withered and fallen in, his hair greying at the temples. A high, stiff collar supported his lolling head and his hands were crossed upon his chest. I could see small cuts and abrasions on his knuckles and wrists. His eyes were open and staring.
They say a cat, staring into the eyes of a dead man, can make out the last image that the man saw, imprinted upon his retina. I do not know if this is true; but what I did see in the eyes of John-not-John was unmistakable.
It was terror, pure and simple.
I gagged as I ate the dream down, piece by piece, though for once the occupants went quietly, without a fight, as if this were the last, most peaceful, scene in a long and destructive dream. But as I swallowed the dream woman, the cat on the chair opened one eye, then winked at me and slipped away. I could not see her feet, but I knew that it was Vita all the same, checking to ensure I was carrying out my appointed task.
*
‘You were ages; where have you been?’
As soon as I exited the strange highway, I found Cat waiting for me exactly as I had asked her to, though the gravel in front of her paws was churned up into little heaps and lumps as if she had dug her toes into it in frustration and impatience.
‘I’m not sure it’s a matter of where,’ I said softly, ‘but rather of when.’