Once the candles had gone out the blackness of the chamber was absolute. In all my life I had never known such intense darkness; it felt almost a physical pressure. Cats have good eyes: it’s said we can see in the dark, and to an extent it’s true, for we can find and focus whatever small light there may be in our surroundings. But no one can see light where light does not exist and in that pitch-dark there was none for my eyes to find. I sat crouched, waiting for whatever might happen next.
For a long time there was nothing. Nothing, that is, except for my own sense of apprehension and a growing suspicion that something was watching me; or if not watching me, exactly, that something was aware of me and was biding its time. Then there came a subtle change in the air pressure and a strong scent filled the cavern. It came from all around; it seemed to engulf me. It was every dead thing I had ever smelled; it was rotting fungus and hatching flies’ eggs; it was soft flesh and old fish; it made my eyes water. And then a rumbling came that shuddered through the bones of my skull, through my chest and down into my legs. Where I touched the ground the vibration redoubled, till shudders of sound ran up and met the ripples running down and turned my limbs to liquid. I spun this way and that, as if I might somehow surprise the source of the noise into revealing itself, but all that followed was laughter. It was not the laugh I had heard before, which had been high and light; a child’s laugh, wayward and impish, rather than this sound: a deep, malicious roar, which made my skin crawl with such repulsion that my bollocks retreated up under my fur and the ridge of fur along my back sprang so high that I could feel the chill of the air on the naked skin between the peaks.
Then whatever it was spoke. The rumbling continued through the chamber, but the voice sounded inside my head: ‘Don’t meddle in things that don’t concern you, little beast,’ it said to me. ‘You are trespassing in the first place they made for me here. All this is beyond you; I am beyond you – for I am age itself; I am life.’
That it should address me so, angered me and somehow I found the gall to respond. ‘I don’t know what you are,’ I said into the darkness, ‘but to me you smell of death.’
‘A cat – you are a cat, aren’t you? It’s always the cats that give me most trouble – a cat should know better than to judge me so,’ it replied then, and I knew from the tickle that its scent made in my head that the thing which addressed me was female, ‘for do not cats die many times, yet cling so tight to life that they return over and over again?’
‘It is the way the Great Cat made us,’ I said, not knowing where the words came from. ‘She abhors waste.’
‘The Great Cat!’ The laughter reverberated around me. ‘The Great Whore, more like. She certainly knew how to spread her gifts widely. We have much in common, she and I.’
The smell of decay grew stronger as her poison seeped into my head. ‘I will not listen to you,’ I said loudly and closed the muscles of my ears hard against the sound of her voice. Yet even though I could feel my ears furling inwards, the muscles contracting as tightly as an eyelid shutting, I could still hear every word.
‘We want it all,’ she continued, ‘the Great Cat and I: the power and the glory, for ever and ever. The glory of living on and on; the power not to cease to exist; the glory and chaos of the sexual act, the energy and stench of it all. That’s what we seek, this power over others, and to create ourselves again and again through them. You will never understand this urge. You should leave well alone, for you will never understand – you have no greatness in you, you males.’
‘Who are you?’ I called into the darkness.
There was a laugh; a pause. Then, ‘Me? Oh, I have many names and many forms. Long ago, when I was strong and many worshipped me, I was known as Ishtar, the great mother, and the world trembled at my feet. The Phoenicians named me Balaath and Astarte, and amid the barren hills of Sinai they prayed to the Mistress of Torquoise. Others called me Isis and brought their dead for me to revive. The fools – I ate their souls and grew stronger again. They learned, after a time; and for a time I slept and made dreams for them. In Europe, they knew me as Isar and named rivers for me. Perhaps it was for the cargoes I sent them, in the night. The Iceni tried to make me theirs; but I was not for the taking. Other people carved white symbols in the chalk to summon me; or made a pyramid of bones licked by fire. I like children to call me Izzie, or the White Lady. It seems – how shall I put this?’ I could hear the sneering smile she made. ‘More friendly, shall we say?
‘And you, little beast. What will you call me?’
All I heard in my skull was the buzz of flies, then the scent in the cavern changed, subtly at first, so that the aroma of putrefaction lost its rankness, gradually becoming sweeter and more enticing so that my nose twitched in spite of itself. At last it became a wave of intoxifying musk that made the blood buzz in my head. It was the smell of a cat on heat, a female ready to mate, a queen offering herself to me. It was quite intoxicating.
‘You see,’ the voice went on, ‘see my power and what I can offer you; and perhaps I shall, if you leave this place, leave the Great Knot alone and go away from here. The time is at hand. It will not be for long; then you may claim your reward.’
I opened my mouth to respond but that heady perfume enveloped the scent organ which we cats have there that enables us to assess smells with the greatest accuracy, and whatever repudiation I was forming in my mind evaporated. The walls themselves seemed to press in on me then and I knew I was lost.
The air wavered minutely. I thought for a moment that I was about to lose consciousness and fall into the power of that smell, that voice, but just as my joints started to wobble a spark of brilliance fractured the gloom, then became a glow that spread out from its source in the same way as do the concentric wavelets made by a raindrop falling in a lake. The effulgence undulated and expanded, until it had filled that dark place with a spectrum of colour; then the fox appeared, shedding rings of light in mid-gallop, rings of light that broke as if on an invisible shore and melted away into the once more darkening walls.
‘Come with me, Orlando!’ he cried and when I continued to stand there like an idiot, he barked at me, and then I felt the nip of his teeth on my neck accompanied by a sharp, searing pain. ‘Run, you fool!’
He reopened the highway through which he had come and the rainbow rings swept round me like a sea. Suddenly my feet were my own again and I followed him away from that cavern and into the shrieking winds of a wild road.
Behind us, a howl of rage rose and crashed like a storm.
*
‘What was that thing?’ I asked the fox a few minutes later as we lay panting beneath the great oak on Ashmore Common. ‘It said it was called the White Lady and much besides, but I did not understand it.’
Loves A Dustbin ran a long pink tongue over his long black lips and regarded me with a wary eye. He looked exhausted. ‘I am not sure,’ he admitted at last. ‘I felt a greater disruption than usual on the roads around the village from a distance and came as fast as I could. Could it be the dream maker? I asked myself and at once dismissed the thought as a superstitious fancy. But now that I have experienced its presence, I do wonder…’
I had no idea what he was talking about, but the very mention of the word ‘dream’ made me even more uneasy. ‘Who is this dream maker? Is it the White Lady?’ I asked at last, though I could tell he did not really want me to question him further.
For a while he was silent; then he barked a laugh. ‘I really did think all these tales were just nonsense to scare kittens with and it would hardly be fair for me to claim that I have much understanding of it; the thing derives, after all, from a cat’s world-view. What little I know of the dream maker I heard from an old cat who was once my friend, the oldest and wisest of all the cats I ever met. He was known, among many things, as the Majicou, but I never knew whether or not it was his true name. He had many lives and I knew him in his last two only. For a long while he was the guardian of the wild roads, and his tale is a long one and only to be recounted at a safer time than this. He once told me what he called “The legend of the dream maker”, though whether the story ever had any historical inspiration, or whether it derived merely from superstitions he did not know, but this is what I can remember of it:
‘He said that the one you call the Great Cat created the world and everything in it (though we foxes have a different tale, as you may imagine). She dreamed herself into being in the midst of the void, so that light and dark, earth and water and air sprang from her eyes, followed by every bird and creature that we know. But human beings – being greedy and impatient – escaped from the Great Cat’s eye and ran out into the new world before they were fully made, since they were still all pale and hairless, and able to walk only on two legs. They feared the One Who Had Made Them so much that they ran away from her light to make their homes in the caves and dark places of the world where they thought she could not see them. Woe for the world that she was not the Great Fox’ – a pale golden light came into his tawny eye – ‘for she would have gobbled them up without a second thought for their impertinence, and for the perfidy they would later commit against our kind. Lucky for them that the Great Cat was more benevolent, even towards her most misbegotten creations. In their caves, in the comfort of the darkness, the humans dreamed, having learned the skill from the One Who Made Them—’
‘I know!’ I burst in joyfully, for I had heard a version of this story before, long ago. ‘This is the tale old Hawkweed told me, when we were out hunting rabbits for the first time. And there was something in it about the little yellow flowers called hawkweed too. And a lot about dreams and the highways…’ I paused, feeling foolish, since I could not remember the rest of the tale at all, let alone the point he had being trying to make.
Loves A Dustbin regarded me wearily. ‘Your grandfather always said you had the patience of a gnat and the brain of one, too. That you were forever interrupting and not paying attention. Now is the time to concentrate your mind, Orlando, for there’s usually a kernel of wisdom in the middle of stories like these; and it may be that the fate of all of us, including your lost sister and poor Millie, as well as all those in your household, rests on the way we bring what little knowledge we have to bear upon the problem—’
‘Millie!’ I interrupted again, without a thought for what else he had just said, for the image of Millefleur was clear in my head and the memory of her stung. ‘You said “Millie”. Do you know where she is?’
‘I do,’ he said, but volunteered nothing more.
‘Then tell me,’ I pressed him anxiously. ‘Tell me where she is so I can rescue her.’
‘That can wait. It must,’ Loves A Dustbin said heavily. ‘For there are worse matters for us to attend to before then.’
I was aghast. The dogfox knew where Millie was and he wouldn’t tell me. I felt my heart swell up until there was a terrible pressure in my chest, pushing against my ribs and up into my throat. ‘But I love her!’ I croaked at last.
‘I know,’ said the fox. He gave me a knowing look, his long face grave and still. ‘You’ve loved her for years. Even so.’
I stared at him. What had I just said? ‘But it’s really Lydia I love,’ I started, then faltered, confused. Images of the two cats danced in my head: Lydia as I had once known her – lithe and golden and proud, lying stretched out across the deck of the narrowboat, her scent pervading the air, the epitome of the Great Cat’s every line and grace, a very princess among felines, for whose favour a dozen tomcats would fight – Millefleur, the moonlight shining in her wicked eyes and flickering off the silver earring she had once worn. I thought about the strange little tuft she had on the top of her head; I remembered the way she had leapt and pounced in her lynx form on the wild roads, and how luminous her white belly fur had seemed to me that night when she had offered to lie with me. And then I remembered Liddy’s many cruelties to me and to others. I thought of how she hoarded food when the shrubbery cats were starving, how she had neglected to teach her kittens well, leaving the hard work to me, how she had flown at me in fury and then disappeared for days without a word; and how all the while I had made excuses for her, telling myself that it was only the hardships she had suffered at the hands of the witch which had driven her to such meanness of spirit. But now in my truest heart I knew that Lydia had always been this way: selfish, manipulative and as vain and shallow as the canary that falls in love with its own image in the mirror that hangs in its cage; and that her traumas had only enabled her to get away with ever greater lapses of behaviour.
Last of all, I recalled Millie’s words, spoken in anger and sadness just before her capture: how she had called me ‘a brave, beautiful cat’ and said that she loved me…
The dogfox looked at me askance. ‘Well,’ he said at last. ‘Am I right, or am I right?’
It was as if a cloud cleared in my head. ‘You’re right,’ I said.
He gave me his long, lopsided grin. ‘I usually am,’ he admitted boastfully. Then he grew solemn again. ‘But things are as they are, Orlando. We must leave Millie where she is until we have untangled this knot—’
‘But she is in danger!’ I cried out wildly. ‘She was taken by the witch’s servants, the Two Who Look Like One.’
‘She is in no immediate danger. Trust me in this, Orlando.’
I gave him a hard look. ‘I will never forgive you if anything happens to her.’
‘I will never forgive myself.’ He gazed back at me steadily and I found my panic subsiding. After a while he took a deep breath and continued, ‘Now, back to the story. Back to the dreams. The Majicou told me that some of the humans dreamed up a creator of their own to worship, one they imagined in their own image: pale and two-legged. But they dreamed her massive and powerful, to challenge the Great Cat, and so she became. She made them fertile and those who yearned hardest – and it was usually the females – were granted many dreams to fuel the fire of their desires. Those dreams are damaging to the highways, as you know; and the White Lady – or whatever else she calls herself – revels in that damage. Her favourites she rewards with long life: once, the Majicou said, he came upon one of her followers – a woman who had lived many lives, such as cats enjoy. At the beginning of her life, many centuries ago, she was the niece of a queen’s sorcerer, who came from a place called the Dead Lake: Mortlake, on the River Thames. There, under his tutelage, she learned of the existence of a substance humans called the Elixir of Life, which was said to elongate their lives infinitely and to maintain beauty. She made her search for this stuff her life’s work – or rather, the work of all her many lives.
‘Through the breeding of cats, and the potions she extracted from them and their young, she made her magic, though I do not think she ever perfected her recipe. I have come to believe that we have seen these magics at work, you and I, Orlando.
‘The Majicou did not know her name. But we do: Stella Herringe, the witch of Ashmore.’
‘But she died in the fire at Nonesuch,’ I said at once, frowning. A large idea was forming in my head, but as yet it was shapeless and confused.
‘She did. In that life, at least…’ Loves A Dustbin glanced hesitantly over at me and I thought I detected anxiety in his gaze, as if he were concerned that I might think him mad. ‘I once encountered something of this sort for myself. It was a man, that time; or it had been, once. I knew him as the Alchemist and by various foul means he had managed to preserve his life for far longer than its natural span.’ He shuddered. ‘Humans can be terrifyingly ruthless and unscrupulous in their pursuit of power, or in fleeing their fear of death. The worst of them allow nothing to stand in their way.’
There was a tiny click in my head as if an air passage had just unblocked itself. ‘It’s the child,’ I said.
‘The child?’
‘My people’s baby,’ I clarified at once, suddenly sure of my ground. ‘The witch is trying to come back through it.’
The fox frowned at me. It was, I conceded to myself, a bizarre statement, especially to anyone who had not lived in the presence of Eleanor and seen the things I had seen. For much of the time the baby seemed quite normal, as small humans go. It cried and smiled, and chased us cats about the place as any child might, but sometimes its natural liveliness and curiosity would be replaced by a kind of demonic energy. There was also the smell of it, that wavered in and out of recognisable range; sometimes the softy milky scent you’d expect from a young creature, then, within moments, the ferocious musk of the calling female. And when the smell was strongest, its eyes would change: brown-green as a fresh hazelnut they were most of the time; but when the child’s scent changed they flashed as green as a rose-chafer’s wing case, as green as malachite. I had been close to that eye colour before, held up by strong, hard clawlike hands when the witch had caught me outside her knot garden.
There was also the strange matter of the dreams: contorted and fiery, dreams in which my sister seemed to be trapped.
I had not paid enough attention, I realised, to the baby, in the midst of my own difficulties.
I told the fox all this. A long silence followed while he digested it and then I added, ‘Also, it collects things, the baby.’
Loves A Dustbin narrowed his eyes. ‘What sort of things?’
So I told him about the bits and pieces it adopted, the things which disappeared, only to reappear in the knot garden – the doll’s head, the wailing tin box, the shiny black object which contained strands of black human hair that smelled disturbingly of John, the spoon, the bone doll – and then I told him about the dreams that had followed. ‘It was as if the objects generated the dreams. And each time they did, the wild roads around Nonesuch warped in such a way that I could move through time to see where the things came from.’
The dogfox nodded rapidly. ‘That’ll be the disruption I came upon,’ he said in a matter-of-fact sort of way. ‘A great tangle of highways, many of them indistinct; some of them blocked. It’s where I saw Vita, too.’
‘She said I must chase down all the dreams and eat them up, otherwise she would stay trapped there.’
A change had come over the fox following the conclusion of this discussion. Where before he had seemed weary and old to me, now his eyes shone bright as topaz, his whole frame alive with energy. He seemed impatient, fidgety, eager to be off. ‘There’s a relationship between all these things, Orlando: the wild roads, the objects, the dreams and the witch; and between all of them and whatever it was I just rescued you from,’ he said briskly, standing up and stretching out his legs. He pushed with his nose in an irritated fashion at the haunch where the fur had paled, as if it were not responding as he would wish, then turned back to me, his gaze fierce with determination. ‘The end is in sight, Orlando. I can feel it in my bones. The child will have another object any day now. I’d say. Keep your eyes open. Chase down whatever dream it makes. I’ll be back.’
With that he was off, loping smoothly into the undergrowth.
I watched him go with a shade of annoyance. It seemed to me that he had discovered something of his own in what I had just related to him and had decided not to share it with me; rather, like my grandfather in his own high-pawed manner, he had treated me like a kitten and refused to entrust me with something he did not think me ready to deal with.
*
A few days later the next object turned up, just as the fox had predicted. I found the baby preoccupied with something in the kitchen one morning. It was sitting on the floor, crooning. Every so often it would lift the small object to its face, kiss it and murmur something to it. Then it would bang the thing on the ground, where it made sharp contact with the flagstones. I could not see, from my vantage point in the doorway, what it was, so I waited until Anna carried Ellie to her cot for her afternoon nap.
When I knew the child was asleep, I jumped up on to the chair beside the cot and craned over the wooden bars, my front paws braced carefully on the top rail to ensure I could make a swift getaway if it was required. In Ellie’s hands the thing gleamed dully; but her fingers obscured the larger part of it. Frustrated, I stretched a paw into the cot and snagged the coverlet with a claw. The drag of the fabric moved the sleeping child’s hand a fraction, but still I could not see. I pulled again, harder this time, and the object slid free. I found myself staring into the face of a green-eyed girl in a rich, elaborate robe, whose hands rested in her lap, where lay a pair of soft grey gloves. It seemed innocuous enough. I blinked and, as I did so, the picture shifted almost imperceptibly, so that where I had glimpsed the pretty girl, I now thought I had glimpsed an ancient, naked woman clutching a pair of unhappy-looking blue-grey kittens by the throat so hard that their eyes bulged. I recoiled, horrified.
With a wail, the baby woke up.
I was so transfixed by the painted miniature that I did not react fast enough, and suddenly Eleanor had grabbed me by a leg and had dragged me into the cot. I twisted and fought, but she was appallingly strong. A moment later her chubby hands were around my throat and she was squeezing with a strength that belied her apparent nature. I stared up, only to find the eyes of the witch upon me.
‘Ca—’ she said and squeezed harder.
I felt my limbs go soft and useless in her grip. This is it, I thought then. Inconsequentially, I heard a car start up outside and then pull away, the sound droning off into the distance. Anna going out somewhere, I thought, leaving me with her monstrous child. This is my death. But not my first death, the thought came to me, and probably not my last. Will I come back? I wondered, and was still pondering this when the door to the room came fully open and John walked in.
I knew this because the baby greeted him.
‘John,’ she said, quite distinctly. And again, ‘John.’
It was not a child’s voice, but that of a fully mature woman: low and soft.
At once, the pressure on my neck relaxed so that I could suck in a breath. The inside of my head went from soft and muzzy brown to a series of electric blues and reds. White-yellow lights shot across my vision; then I was assailed by a powerful sexual scent and, when I looked up, the child’s eyes had taken on that disconcertingly piercing green.
I leapt out of the cot.
John watched me leave the room with a bemused expression on his face, as if he were not quite sure where, or even who, he was.
*
I ran and didn’t stop running till I reached a series of highways I knew like the back of my paw, highways I was certain were uncontaminated by the strange disruptions at Nonesuch. The freezing winds scoured through me, a series of vicious, icy combs removing from my fur every trace of the vile scent that had clung to me.
I lost myself for a while in my lion form, let my mind meld down into pure sensation as my massive paws struck the iron-hard earth and my muscles bunched and stretched endlessly, on and on. I turned sharp corners, took minor tributaries, let the compass winds blow me where they would. Outside, I could see glimpses of a pleasant afternoon, a land waking from frost, mists burned off in the hollows, the sun low and bright across a sky so pale it was almost white. I caught snatches of birdcall: Too cold; fly south.
Yes, yes! To the lake!
A brace of barnacle geese.
My berries, my berries!
No mine; keep your thieving beak off them!
A pair of male robins, puffed up with belligerence facing each other off on the top of a hawthorn, glimpsed as a double blur of vermilion.
I heard the caw of crows circling an ash tree in which a barn owl sat hunched up and disorientated, its hoots of protest a haunting counterpoint to the rasping chorus of its attackers.
Dead rabbit still warm; come eat! A magpie to its mate.
I thundered on till my lungs ached from my exertions and at last burst out of the wild road on to the summit of Cresset Beacon, my head swimming with images, alive and clean again with the tastes and scents of the natural world.
I took a couple of paces forward, shook my mane in the chilly air.
There was a gasp, then the sound of voices.
Standing right in front of me, very close together, were two people. Shocked by their proximity, I let out a roar and took a step forward. The woman was staring straight at me, her eyes round with surprise and a sort of savage, triumphant delight. Her companion looked entirely terrified.
It took a moment for me to realise that they were seeing me in my wild form, which no human should ever witness: it upsets their sense of their place in the world.
It took another moment after that to recognise them as Anna and the man from the church, who smiled and was kind to us cats, but who had lately begun to smell very odd. I turned at once and leapt back into the highway from which I had issued.
*
That night the dreams came thick and fast. The folk of Ashmore were beset by nightmares of rot and pain, and the taste of them was bitter. But still I did my job. My old grandfather would have been proud of me, I thought. I dragged the last of the smoking dream globes down from the roof of the wild road and trod upon it hard. It squirmed beneath my toes, but I was used to that. The first dreams I had caught, under Hawkweed’s stern eye, had disconcerted me with their writhings and attempts to escape – I had lost more than one of them into the highway winds and had to chase them like a fool – but I was rather more proficient now. I bent my head to the gelatinous casing and bit into it so that its liquids spilled out over my toes in a hot gush. I knew now that the solution in which the dream swam was not the crucial element; rather, it was the matter of the thing that must be despatched before it could flee out on to the wild roads. I examined the contents. Another corpse dream: this time a woman, standing over her own dead self, her face a mask of disgust and panic. Such a fear of death that humans have. Such a horror of the grave. It is so easy for the cruel to terrorise them. I was almost beginning to feel affectionate towards the people of the village, for they were my charges and I their guardian: to me fell the task of keeping them safe from the harms that came by night. I remembered my grandfather making pronouncements like this, and had always thought him arrogant and self-deluded for doing so. But now I saw the truth of it and for the first time in my life I felt as if my role of Dreamcatcher of Ashmore held something of value after all. It was a strange feeling. I ate the dream down, corpse, woman and all; and just as I was swallowing the last morsels a great wind came and with it something that roared past, scorching the very tips of my ears.
My head shot up at once. There, in the ceiling of the highway, a fiery dream globe blazed and hissed. It had an aura of dark-red flames that shaded almost to black where they joined the main sac and glowed an incandescent white at the head of each leaping tongue. It hovered overhead as if to taunt me; then, against all possibility, turned once more into the howling wind and headed back in the direction from which it had come.
Every time it got out of my sight I would round a corner and there it would be, idling its time as if waiting for me to catch it up, bobbing in the turbulence overhead. Yet as soon as I leapt to catch it, it would disentangle itself from the twisting energies of the highway and dodge away from me to continue its journey.
I trailed it all the way back to Nonesuch. There, the highways made their usual weird, contorted transitions through the history of the house. I glimpsed previous incarnations of rooms as I ran: windows shuttered and curtained; undraped and broken with the moon shining through on to dust and dereliction; chandeliers and candlelight; people dancing across rich carpets; banqueting at long tables; couples grappling with one another in dark corners, bent over furniture, on all fours on the bare floor. I saw cats, too – real cats and ghost cats – a skein of life winding its way between the human inhabitants. Some watched the people with undisguised curiosity; some sat nervously grooming themselves, ears twitching, ready for flight; others were more shade than substance, their eyes wide and haunted. After a while I realised that one of them, amidst this tide of events, was always still and as solid as myself.
It was a neat-looking tabby cat with a slightly ragged ear. ‘You’d better hurry,’ it said, ‘or you’ll lose your dream. It would be a shame to come so far and then fail, wouldn’t it, Orlando?’
It was Vita.
‘She didn’t boil you, then, the witch?’ I found myself asking stupidly.
‘She’d like to,’ Vita said. ‘Isn’t it what she does with all cats?’
‘Can’t you come with me?’
Vita shook her head sadly. ‘The highways are all tangled up. The Great Knot is tightening. You have to eat the dreams, Orlando, or I’ll be tied right up in the middle of it. Now hurry after the dream. She’s drawing it to the courtyard.’
I must have looked puzzled, for she added, ‘The one with the cages. Where the witch kept her breeding females.’ Her eyes went misty and her voice dropped almost to a whisper. ‘I saw Mother there. She was pregnant with us, but she knew me all the same. “Tell Orlando I’m very proud of him,” she said. Then she added, “He will avenge us all.’”
I stared blankly at her for a moment, trying to digest this latest strangeness, but she got up and, with a flick and a twist of her now adult body, dived into a tributary of the wild roads that made up this part of the Great Knot.
*
I followed the main highway along the Long Corridor, to the room where one wall had been painted with a garden scene. There, the walls were flushed with jumping red light and I knew I had found my prey. It was waiting for me there, unsteady with some trapped emotion, some intention to wound and damage. As I entered the room, it swooped down like a hawk and set my mane alight. Suddenly, my head was engulfed in fire. I couldn’t think straight. I could feel my heart thundering in my chest, as the awful smell of burning hair brought back to me the memory of the last fire I had been in – in this very house, this very spot almost, the winter before last, when the witch had burned along with many of her cats. I had barely made it out alive. So it thought to burn me, did it? We’d see about that. A combination of fury and smoke was making my eyes water: I blinked fiercely, but by the time my vision was clear, all I could see was the dream coming at me again. This time I gave a mighty leap and pinioned it between both front paws. Even with the flames blazing into my scalp, I held on for grim death.
The dream twisted in my grip like a maddened rat. It was horribly strong. Just as I thought I had the better of it, it drew away from me so hard that I thought my teeth would be pulled from my head. Over and over we tumbled, until I was not sure where I was; all I could see was the blur of the dream sac before my eyes and a wild mist of dark smoke. I could smell myself burning: not just the awful acridity of charred hair, but the sweeter smell of scorching flesh. With all the effort I could muster, I bit harder and after what seemed an age, the dream made a sighing sound and relinquished a gush of sticky liquid that burst out over my head, extinguishing the flames in my mane.
I threw it down then, as roughly as I could, and trapped it between my paws. I snarled at it; I roared my hatred and triumph as I felt its life force dwindling. At last it gave up its contents to me. A man sat in one of the upstairs rooms at Nonesuch on a tall chair. His dark hair was caught back in a tail; but I knew him instantly as John, or some earlier version of John, even though he had his back to me. He was hunched over, his right hand working with a fine brush at a tiny oval picture. Beyond him, where rays of pale afternoon light filtered through the thick diamond panes to illuminate the far side of the room, I could see the head and shoulder of a woman, framed by a fall of long black hair. I pushed my head further into the dream, the better to understand what I was seeing.
The man was painting: a tiny portrait of a young woman, richly dressed. He worked with his face close to the painting, adding minute strokes of colour to a glorious brocade robe. Without the brown and crackled patina it had acquired over the intervening centuries, the detail of the work was miraculous. I moved in closer, for something nagged at me, something out of true; and there, beyond him on a plush settee, sat the witch.
Naked and wrinkled she was, and as old as the hills, her skin stretched tightly across her thin frame like the skin on a chicken’s carcass. Her lips were moving, for she talked soft and low to him throughout this whole procedure, and her eyes – as green as a spell – never left his face. In her lap there cowered two kittens, a pale blue-grey. She held them tightly around their necks, so that they struggled for air. Their little eyes bulged with panic. One of them managed to free a tiny paw and strike out at its captor, drawing a long thin line of red across the back of her hand. The witch swore in fury and looked down at her wound.
As soon as her gaze was averted from him, the man stirred from his stuporous task, looked up and shook his head. He seemed confused, disorientated. He glanced once at the woman on the settle in front of him, then down at the painting he had made. He frowned and opened his mouth to speak, but at that moment the witch looked up and said something to him and he settled back to his task without a word.
Then those wicked green eyes met mine, and she said something to me and laughed, showing me her empty gums. There was a thin wail, a sickening crunching sound, and then silence. I dragged my eyes from her face. The kitten that had scratched her lay limp as a rag in her lap, its head skewed awkwardly, its neck broken.
With a rage I had not known I could summon, I opened my jaws wide and flew at her. With fangs and claws I tore at her and the rest of the fabric of the dream until there was nothing of it left.
Then I lay where I was in a daze.
*
When I finally came back to myself, I was lying in a room I had not seen before. It was roughly circular in design and white, with thick plasterwork into which small holes appeared to have been hollowed out, and someone seemed to have been storing odd bits and pieces in these rough niches. I went up to one wall where the plaster was coming away to reveal patches of shining rock and sniffed cautiously. Back came the age-old scent, the aroma of mulch and leaf mould, water upon stone, that I had smelled not so very long before. But now, instead of the pitch darkness I had endured here when the candles were burned out, the room was illuminated by a single shaft of pale moonlight from a small hole high up in the roof, out of which a slow drift of soil was falling. Another time entirely, I thought; and when I looked down at the ground, I found that my paws were no longer those of a lion, foursquare and great-clawed, but those of a cat and a filthy one at that. The wild road which had caught me and the dream in its toils had spewed us out on its contorted passage and left us here, in the White Lady’s room. A huge, complicated knot pattern covered most of the surface of the floor and at one end, where the gloom deepened, I could just make out the first steps of what appeared to be a narrow staircase. A later addition, I thought disconnectedly, made when the house was built to enable the witch to come and go in peace. I was about to see where the stairs would take me, when there was a great commotion overhead, followed by a small avalanche of earth. Then a pair of child’s hands – incongruously white – appeared through the hole in the ceiling, followed by Eleanor’s head.
Her eyes gleamed as she saw me. ‘Ca’!’ she cried, and, ‘kill you!’
She lurched down, her face demonic with triumph at having cornered me at last; then her expression changed to one of panic. ‘No, Mummy, no!’ she shouted, and there was a struggle in which Ellie appeared to be the loser, for a moment later she was visibly hauled backwards. With fury, she waved her arms around. Something flew out of her hand and struck the ground a few feet away from me. A second afterwards she was gone and the moonlight filtered down, serene and uninterrupted.
I approached the object with a heavy heart. I already knew what it would be. There it lay, face up in the dust and cobwebs: a tiny miniature painting encased in silver. Under its cracked brown glaze a pale, tranquil girl in a rich robe sat with her hands lying in her lap, demurely clutching a pair of soft grey gloves.