Dusting and dusting: the dust never stopped accumulating. Even as Mrs Parker has finished cleaning the china, making the mantelpiece spick and span, down it comes, spiralling in the sunlight, each mote sentient, intent, determined to settle and stay. She sweeps here and there with the duster, until her hand is a blur of movement, but it just keeps coming; more and more, until there is a scurf of it on every surface and more snowing down from the ceiling, billowing in through the window. Ankle-deep, now she runs for the Hoover; but it is already up to her knees before she reaches the cupboard; thigh-deep as her hand touches the handle. She staggers to the door, opens it, only to admit an avalanche of the stuff, rolling down from the bedrooms. The children, upstairs, have gone ominously quiet…
*
Thunder, rolling heavy overhead: a storm come out of nowhere. At the general store, Reggie Candleton watches the lightning it has generated flicker intermittently over the pond, making nightmare shapes of the willows; looming super-real, then gone back into the darkness. Orange clouds have started to gather to the north, orange as if lit by fire. No sooner has he thought this than he hears his cat outside (a cat he has not shared a house with for twenty years or more) howling piteously. He runs downstairs and opens the door to it. In it rushes, fur alight with flame, which he beats out with an old coat. When he takes the mackintosh away, the fur comes with it, to reveal inside the child he and Hilda had in their youth, which died at only four days old…
*
The wailing went on and on without respite. She covered her ears with her hands, but even this barely deadened the shrieking noise of it. She felt abruptly furious, hateful: full of hate and animal violence. It wasn’t her baby; how could it be? It was a beast, a creature, unnatural. The screaming rose by a note, as impossible to turn a deaf ear to as fingernails on metal, claws on glass. Hadn’t she buried it well enough the last time? Clearly not. Up she got, in a tangle of sheets – wet, somehow, clinging – and lumbered out into the garden. There, beneath the hedge, the baby had indeed resurfaced. There was dirt on its face, in its hair. Its eyes were black and indignant, its mouth a huge red hole of protest. She went to fetch the spade again…
*
John stood back to admire the builders’ handiwork. The new plaster gleamed, smooth and clean: a brand-new wall, which would dry to a surface perfect for the Farrow & Ball Casein Distemper (English Primrose) he had ordered and which would arrive next week, a properly traditional, rustic paint which would dry to a satisfyingly matt and chalky finish. Unable to resist the temptation to touch, he brushed his fingertips against the wall, then drew them back, disappointed to see the trailing marks they had left in the new plaster. Even as he watched, the shallow depressions deepened, became holes. Plaster began to slough off the wall, revealing the old brickwork, mottled and age-eaten underneath. He stepped back just in time. With a sigh, the wall caved in and fell in slow motion, each brick detaching itself from its fellows and pirouetting to the floor, which also began to break away under this new weight. Behind and beneath the brickwork lay a void, dark and evil-smelling. Second by second, the rubble grew. As the last brick toppled, he looked up just in time to see a crack searing its way across the newly plastered ceiling like lightning in a clear sky. He opened his mouth to scream; but before the sound could emerge, the house fell upon him and took him down with it, into the darkness.
*
I chased down a lot of bad dreams over the nights that followed, but one nightmare breeds another, it seems, and it was hard for a single dreamcatcher to keep up with the dreams of an entire village. I wore myself ragged going after them, racing down the highways till my lion’s heart was ready to burst, sleeping only during the bright hours of the day; and even then, my own dreams were disturbed and unrestful. In the end and after many arguments, in which the advocacy of both Millie and the Besom were engaged, I allowed Caterina to accompany me on to the wild roads at night, and together we hunted and swallowed down the dreams of Ashmore before they could do their pernicious damage to the highways.
Thoughts of Vita haunted me. I saw her again and again in the wooden cage, her eyes pleading at me; the witch, laughing. At last I took myself off to see the Besom. Fed on the food that Cat and I stole for her from the kitchen – Anna had been so preoccupied she had not noticed that she was missing, over the days that Ma Tregenna had been with us, a packet of bacon, two chicken drumsticks and a good-sized lump of cheese – she had put on some of the weight she had lost and a gleam of vitality had come back into her glazed old eyes. She and Griz sat and swapped reminiscences under the rhododendrons; I could hear them cackling together whenever I brought my latest bit of thievery, though sometimes when I appeared they would fall abruptly silent, as if I had intruded on the discussion of a subject too close to the bone for comfort.
This time, my offering consisted of four pork sausages, still joined by their twisted rubbery casings. (The other four had fallen on to the floor when I had dragged them from the cold white cupboard before anyone was up, but between us Cat and I had managed to bundle them back in on to the shelf again, and Cat had licked the dust from them so that they looked as clean as ever.) But if I had expected Griz to leave us to speak in private, the sausages soon put paid to any hope that she might quietly wander off. Instead, she eyed the gleaming pink packages, licked her lips and grinned at the Besom.
‘This is the life, eh, Pol? Handsome young lad fetchin’ and carryin’ for us. Bet you never expected such luxuries in your old age, eh?’
‘Never expected to live so long,’ Ma said lugubriously. ‘Nor wished to, neither. I’ve seen too much in my time.’
‘Ma,’ I started, tentative.
The Besom had her head down to the sausages now, was chewing with the side of her mouth. ‘Mmm,’ she said indistinctly.
‘Ma, I’ve seen my sister Vita. On the highways. Here, but not here. There’s a sort of knot in the roads that run through the house, but it’s as if they twist back on themselves, and every time you think you know where you’re going, they snake around on you and suddenly you’re not where you thought you were at all, or when. And then there’s the objects, you see, the things the baby has collected. They mean something, something more than themselves, if you see what I mean, and every time a new one arrives the roads seem to change again, and if I chase the right dream, I know it will take me somewhere the object wants me to be I stopped, partly from lack of breath, partly because my speech seemed foolish and garbled even to myself, and indeed, when I looked up, Griz was staring at me as if I were mad. The Besom carried on her slow, methodical chewing. I gazed from one to the other. Obviously I was going to come by no help here after all.
But just as I stood up and made to walk away, Ma reached out with a paw and patted me. ‘I can eat, listen and think at the same time, my lad,’ she said. ‘It’s something you learn to do, over the span of the years, with application and practice and cunning. You might learn the art yourself some day. Sit down.’
I stared at her. She gazed back, her face a mask. I sat down. She winked at me, showing more of her pink old gums than I’d have preferred to see. It was clear now why eating took so long: she had barely any teeth left beyond the yellowed atrocities at the front.
‘It’s the Great Knot, Orlando. The wild rides. She makes them; or rather, she has the power to take them and shape them.’
‘The witch?’ I asked, shivering. ‘I saw her down there, she was—’
‘No—’ The Besom was impatient. ‘Not her, though she’s gaining strength again, the Great Cat curse her. No, it’s the one who came before; the Big Woman. Got a taste for life, she has, that one, stronger than all the other Old Ones put together. She’ll push so hard, she’ll turn the world over, given the chance.’
‘Who will?’
The glossy green foliage parted to reveal Lydia, with Millie in her wake, looking resigned and a little irritated, as if she had been dragged out here against her will. I felt my heart lurch.
At the sight of the half-eaten sausages lying on the dusty ground, Liddy’s head lunged forward. ‘Where did you get those?’ Her voice was sharp with recrimination. A line of spittle had started to form at the corner of her mouth.
The Besom looked at Grizelda. Griz looked at me. ‘He brought them,’ she said, careless of the consequences of such an admission.
‘I knew it!’ Lydia turned to Millie with an expression of triumph. ‘You see, my instincts are always right. I told you I could smell sausages on Caterina; I knew she’d been stealing. And I knew she wouldn’t have done it unless he’d made her, for I’ve brought her up properly, her and my other two, my treasures, all on my own—’ She turned gimlet eyes upon me and finished, ‘He’s always had the common touch, has Orlando, oh yes. He has far more care for these old ragbags than he has for me!’
I opened my mouth to protest, but it was Millie who stepped into the fray. ‘Lydia!’ She was furious. ‘Do you have no shame? Do you have no fellow feeling at all? These cats have been through as much as you, shared the same fate, and yet you’d deny them food when you’re as fat as butter! Look at you; you’ve all but doubled in size since coming to Nonesuch, as if you think you can keep the bad things of the world at bay just by eating till there’s no more to eat. And as for bringing up the girls on your own. I’ve never heard such a shocking lie. Poor Orlando. All this time he’s been here for you, loving you, taking care of you, raising your kittens as if they were his own, and all you do is turn your nose up at him, look through him as if he doesn’t exist.’ Her voice crackled with emotion. ‘You treat him abysmally and he loves you all the more, as if he cannot help himself, poor idiot. I watch the two of you playing out these little dramas you love so much and my heart breaks to see a decent, brave, beautiful cat like Orlando – a tomcat who should be fathering kittens of his own with a queen who would give herself to him completely – twisted round your selfish, miserly paw. You are a cruel, cold trollop, Lydia. You should have stuck with the witch and that handsome stud cat of hers, and left Orlando for me, who loves him more than all the world!’
My jaw dropped open. I stared at Millie, who looked away from me, her eyes crazed and damp. Then Lydia began to laugh. She threw her head back and howled with it, a harsh, clattering sound that rose through the winter leaves like the mocking of a magpie.
It brought the child to our hiding place. Crashing through the leaves, she came at us, waving her stick gleefully. Anna was some way behind her, her face closed and pale.
‘Wor!’ Eleanor said. And, ‘Ca’!’
At the sight of her Grizelda and the Besom quailed, then shot away, their fur standing on end as if they had been electrified. Millie hissed and ran right past me towards the lawn, followed by Lydia, bowling me over in her panic. Like a fool, I lay there and watched them go. My legs felt leaden, my heart as heavy as a stone.
Eleanor stumbled on, flailing her stick around, missing me by inches. That galvanised me. Getting my haunches under me, I leapt away after Liddy and Millefleur, but was almost trodden underfoot by another pair of humans emerging at speed from the rhododendrons, preceded by half a dozen of the cattery survivors, who scattered wildly across the lawn. I stared back at the pursuers. Two men, in identical clothing, one with a white plastic sack in his hand. Lydia and Millie had also stopped and looked back to see what the cause of this new commotion might be and the other cats streamed past them.
At the sight of the Two Who Look Like One, Lydia’s eyes widened and she began to mew in consternation. Millie’s head whipped round. I saw her take in the two men, saw how they came at her and Liddy, hands outstretched.
‘Run!’
I heard the voice, shrill and desperate in my head, but no sound emerged. Of their own accord, it seemed, my cowardly feet bore me away and when I looked back all I could see was a confusion of movement, a blur of bodies, a struggle, and then the Two Who Look Like One were dashing across the lawn, heads down, and there was something in the sack, something that distorted the white plastic with desperate limbs.
Anna came running out on to the lawn after them, her hair wild and mud on her knees. She shouted something and one of the men glanced back, then urged the other on towards the big silver machine parked awkwardly half on the grass, half on the gravel. They flung themselves into it and roared away down the drive, spraying stones as they fled.
In the back window, a cat scrabbled desperately against the glass.
It was Millie.
*
‘We have to leave. It’s not safe here any more.’
‘This is my home and the girls’ home. We’re not going anywhere.’
‘The witch is on her way back,’ I said, knowing I’d never be able to explain what I meant by this to Lydia, who, refused to see anything beyond the plainly visible. ‘Those were her helpers. Why do you think they were here, if not to prepare for her return?’
Liddy looked at me. ‘By taking Millie? What good will that do them?’
I had no answer for that, of course.
‘Anyway,’ she went on, extending an elegant foreleg and examining a spot of mud that had dared to dry below the dew claw, ‘what do you think we’re going to do – sleep in a ditch?’
‘You didn’t manage so badly the last time you left here,’ I said waspishly and immediately regretted it.
Lydia’s face became closed and hard. Then she got up and stalked into the next room. There, the three girls lay curled together for comfort. They looked up as I followed their mother in, their faces identically inimical. I knew without a word being said that they blamed me, somehow, for Millie’s abduction.
I blamed myself, too. Over and over I thought how different things might have turned out had I been able to croak out that single word of warning; if I had got in the men’s way, tripped them up; if they had taken me instead. As it was, I had chased the silver vehicle down the drive, out of the gates and on to the lane outside. At the junction with Village Road I had almost caught it, though I thought my lungs might burst with the effort, but then it had leapt away from me with a tremendous surge of power and I had lost it as it sped away, fishtailing round the corner, and headed towards the main road for Drychester and the towns beyond. Millie’s face as the car accelerated away was the face of a cat that has lost all hope.
*
I wandered far and wide on the highways, searching for any sign of her, but to no avail. I popped out into unfamiliar streets in towns I had never before visited. I asked every cat, dog, bird and rat I encountered if they had seen her; but many of them ran from me, and I realised too late that I had stepped into their path straight from a wild road and still wore my lion’s mane. I tried and failed to find the fox. Loves A Dustbin, to enlist him in my quest. I quartered the gardens of country houses as old as Nonesuch, or so new they had no scent at all. Of Millefleur, or the Two Who Looked Like One, I found no trace.
The days that followed Millie’s disappearance were terrible indeed. The girls squabbled with each other constantly. Bickering turned to hisses and howls; hisses and howls to sudden outbreaks of violence. Little tufts of blue fur drifted in the air; there were spots of blood on the mat in the kitchen. Lydia ignored me entirely and for once I did not care.
The things Millie had said before she was taken kept coming back to me. I lay in empty rooms and contemplated them. In the quiet moments between times – before I slept, when I awoke; exiting the wild roads after a night’s work; while grooming the burrs and thorns of winter from my coat – her words echoed in my skull. I walked in the garden in the rain and thought about how she had described me. How she had described herself: Who loves him more than all the world…
The phrase went round and round in my head until I found I had to get up and do something, anything, to displace it. I explored the house from cellar to roof. I found rooms I had never discovered before, rooms that had been shut as if for centuries, for the dust lay as thick as fur on every surface. I disturbed spiders and mice, moths and woodlice. I watched John standing vacantly in the knot garden as though someone had switched him off. I came upon Anna, asleep, with tears drying on her face; I watched the baby crawling and toddling around the corridors when no one was paying attention to her.
The baby puzzled me. It was as much the way she smelled as her random behaviour, her odd outbursts, her avid interest in us cats; even the bizarre and resonant objects she adopted. Some days her scent was the scent of a young creature: warm and softy and milky; but I began to realise that on the days following a particularly hard night of dreams, especially those times when I had been forced on to the labyrinthine highways of Nonesuch to tackle a witch dream, she had started to smell very odd indeed. It was not merely that she smelled adult, or that very occasionally, and for a fraction of a second, she gave off the heady aroma of a fully grown and willing female – all salt and tang – but that she had many scents all intermingled, so that if you approached from one side she smelled sweet and musky; from another like a thing dead in the earth for months, a thing that worms and centipedes have found, a thing with eggs laid in its belly; while underneath it all was the innocent baby smell that suited her appearance. She conformed to nothing in the scent map of the world my grandfather had so painstakingly taught me; yet all things were present within her, as if she represented the entire world, the old and new, the fresh and the rotten, both love and hate; gentleness and a black, tearing violence.
She scared me, if truth be told. The other cats kept out of her way without the slightest understanding of why they did so beyond a cat’s natural avoidance of the unpredictable feet and grasping hands of an unsteady but curious child; but they had not seen the dreams she generated as I had.
Even so, I was nagged by the sense that she was the mystery to which all the other recent events – the discovery and dream life of the significant objects, the recent preponderance of nightmares in the village, the convolution of the highways through the house, my sightings of Vita, even the disappearance of Millie – were somehow connected and so I kept a close watch on her.
One afternoon, when Anna was working in the kitchen and Eleanor was playing beneath the table, I found myself drawn by the presence of another of the magical objects. From my vantage point, carefully out of hand’s reach under one of the kitchen chairs, I saw that although the baby appeared to be engaged in a game that involved the throwing around of a number of pieces of brightly coloured plastic, amid much clapping of hands and shouting, the object of her true attention lay all the while in her lap. I could not see it as such, but I could feel it, as though it were a pebble dropped into a pond, generating ripples that spread out and out towards the shore. Without moving closer it was hard to spy it out and I spent many frustrating minutes waiting for a clear sight of this new toy. At last, apparently aware of my interest, the baby picked the thing up and cradled it in her hands. She looked me squarely in the eye, a look at once blank and yet challenging. Then she held the object out towards me.
I felt the hairs rise on my neck and spine.
It was a bone doll. I had never seen one before in Ashmore, could not even explain how I knew this for a fact. They say that cats twine through time like the skeins that hold the world in place; they say we have been closely associated with witches, that cats and the craft have been intimately joined. They say that dreamcatchers in particular have lived many lives. Maybe once, in one of mine, I had encountered an object such as this, for how else to explain the repulsion I felt for it? I found myself backing away across the room, until my rump hit the skirting board and there was nowhere left to go. The size of a small kitten, it squatted in Eleanor’s hand, a grotesque replica of a human woman, its fat, thick legs set wide apart and its mouth carved open in an obscene utterance. The baby turned the figurine back towards her and gazed lovingly at its crude, demonic face; then she turned it back to me again. Her own expression had taken on an identical form to the bone doll’s: eyes slitted as if in some intense pain or pleasure, mouth yearning out a soundless cry.
I felt the room spin. A moment later, without the slightest idea of how I had got there, I found myself deep in the knot of Nonesuch’s highways. Lights flickered and faded, chill draughts blew my fur in all directions, cobwebs brushed my face. Behind me, as if through a mist, I could still see the kitchen as a distant glow. If I squinted hard, I could make out the shape of Anna standing at the stove, her red jumper vibrant in the surrounding gloom of the highway. Of the child there was no sign at all. Slowly I turned round. There was nothing to see on either side except nondescript walls, as if the house were hiding its locations from me, making sure I had no starting point in the maze it had constructed. Ahead of me, however, there was a light, albeit faint and greyish, but a light all the same. Knowing that I was being herded into it like a sheep into a pen, still I went towards it. Cats are curious animals; sometimes we cannot help our natures.
The highway began to tilt downwards as I made my way forward so that when I looked back, the glow of the kitchen had disappeared and all there was behind me was darkness. I shivered then. This was the first time the highways had swallowed me without my permission, the first time I had entered them without a goal in mind: a dream to catch or a journey to make. I could not decide whether, like other wild roads, the highways of the house were a natural phenomenon, part of the Great Cat’s creation, or if they had somehow sprung into existence as a result of the witch’s magic; or whether their true nature lay somewhere between these two points. Whatever the truth of the matter, I gave myself up to their logics. It appeared that they had something to show me and I braced myself for whatever that might be.
I did not have to wait long for the puzzle to present itself. There came a peal of laughter from the lightening tunnel ahead of me. I picked up my pace. A moment later I was in what I could only describe as a cave.
Someone, or something, had hollowed a circular chamber out of the rock here, of a size to accommodate the height of a standing human and of a length to afford sufficient space for three or more to lie at full length. The floor was of soft earth, barely compacted by the passage of feet. The chamber gave back nothing more than an aroma of mulch and leaf mould, water upon stone; and the acrid scent of melted tallow. If I opened my mouth to flehm, to taste the smell, as it were, I caught the faintest echo of burned feather and cold ash. The walls of the chamber were lit by candles: tall yellow pillars, their surfaces roughly moulded as if by hand, the length of them matted with drip marks. Shadows leapt and jumped across the small space. I stepped boldly into the circle of light and there, in the centre of the floor, lay a burned-out fire. Criss-crossing it in a complex pattern were a number of long white bones, laid in a collapsed pyramid. A small heap of black ash sat in the midst of these, the centre of the pile disrupted, as if by a hand. The laughter came again, disembodied; above me, very close. I jumped back, just in time to avoid being hit by something. The object – heavy and pale – fell with a thud into the middle of the ashes, sending up a plume of dust. I looked up and saw above me a small hand, stark white against the ceiling of the chamber. For a moment it seemed to hang there, then it disappeared, as if it had been swallowed by the darkness.
The laughter echoed away into silence.
I moved forward into the light again. In the centre of the extinct fire lay the bone doll, but even as I bent my head to nose at it, the lights flickered as if blown by a great wind and all the candles went out.