Something in me should have recognised that by entering this savage place, I would be entering a new phase in my life and, in the process, making an unbreakable bargain with fate. But I did not stop to think, for it is hard for any cat to resist opportunity. On I went, with no idea of where I might pitch up, placing one foot before the next, head high, eyes watering, into a dark tunnel strung with dancing golden lights.
I made the most of those few minutes alone in the wild place. I let the wind riffle my new fur, used its strong currents to intuit my unfamiliar outline. I tested my muscles and tendons by harrying the globes. They evaded me as easily as the butterfly had; but the game was not yet serious.
I was just getting used to the odd gloom when I spied something in the distance. It was large: a dark, blocky mass which broke up the lights and the air currents, and I found that although I was concerned about what it might prove to be, I was unable to prevent myself from approaching. As I closed upon it, perspectives became more confusing, until I realised that whatever it was was moving quite fast towards me, a stream of golden lights racing out in front of it, as if in fear for their existence.
My fur stood on end, prickling all the way down my spine. My heart began to thump, for the shape was huge, and from the way it leapt and bounded, I knew it instinctively to be some great predator engaged upon a hunt. And no sooner had I realised this than I was overcome by a moment of worse terror: for there was nowhere for me to get out of its way. Surely it would crush me like an insect beneath its vast paws.
I had to turn tail and flee the length of the tunnel to save my life; but I discovered with sudden shock that my new body would not obey my thoughts. Instead, I found myself standing foursquare to the advancing creature, my muzzle wrinkled in a ridiculous snarl of defiance.
Whatever is the matter with me? I thought wildly. And then the golden lights spiralled around my head, dazzling me so that I blinked and blinked, and when I opened my eyes again it was just to see the great dark shape gather itself like an oiled spring and leap high over my head. An acrid whiff of something hot and bitter accompanied its passage, and then it was gone into the darkness in pursuit of its prey.
Inexplicably brave in my big new form, I found myself following the great beast.
Its smell was familiar to me – familiar, and yet at the same time very strange, like something known and loved that has in some way changed its nature: like milk that has just turned sour, or fish that has been left in the sun for too long. But what milk! What fish! It was a huge smell, and its familiarity was the most disconcerting thing of all.
Bowled along by winds that in this direction assisted rather than hindered me, I soon caught up with the hunter.
It had managed to trap a number of the lights between an eddy of air and the side of the tunnel and was swatting them with huge, clawed forepaw. They fell, dazed, to the ground, where the creature caught them up in his razored teeth, tossed them into the darkness and swallowed them down, one by one. It stood there, chewing for a moment, then turned to stare at me. Light from the smoking spheres fell upon its face. Huge eyes shone like headlamps in the gloom, yet even as the golden light fell upon it something in me recognised the twisted rictus, the permanent half-snarl of another cat’s face.
At once, I felt like the small kitten I truly was, the bravado born of adventure dwindling in the blaze of the great cat’s burning eyes.
‘Who are you?’ I felt myself saying, gripped by cold dread.
But the beast stared at me implacably and gave no answer. Then its huge jaws fell agape into a vast lopsided grin, a grin in which sharp white teeth gleamed like stalactites in a giant cave; a grin at once taunting and familiar, and I had the peculiar feeling that I knew the creature before me well: while at the same time I did not know it at all.
Then it yawned and in the depths of its throat, I caught sight of something golden and quivering, slipping down and down, its glowing light dying even as I stared.
‘Who are you?’ I asked again tremulously.
Now the creature looked crafty. Its eyes narrowed. ‘Don’t you know me, laddie?’ it crooned, and a great vibration rose up and seemed to lodged itself in my breastbone.
I shook my head wildly.
‘No, sir, I do not.’
‘Think again, Orlando.’
I stared and stared.
‘Some outside refer to me as Hawkweed,’ said the dark cat, and its voice was a deep well of sound. ‘But here, they know me as the Dreamcatcher.’
*
‘Grandfather?’
The great beast reared up, and I found myself cringing away, but all he did was to pluck one more dancing light out of the dark space above my ears. This one gave off no pungent smoke, but seemed as acquiescent as other globes were volatile. He hooked it with gleaming claws, flicked it with practised skill, and laid it at my feet, where it quivered under his great dark paw like a trapped bird. Cocking his head first left, then right, he considered it briefly. Then, as if dismissing it, he tossed it to me. Despite being taken unawares I managed to catch the thing – more by instinct than by judgement – between my teeth. It felt appalling. Quickly, I dropped it on the ground and trod on it quickly, before it could escape. I stared at it.
I could feel its horrible, slow pulse between my toes.
The wind battered at me with a roar, then subsided. Into the sudden silence, the old cat said: ‘Well then, laddie. What now?’
I looked up at him. ‘I don’t know.’ And I didn’t. What would you do with a sac of gibbous yellow pulsing away under your foot?
The dark giant craned its head at me until he was so close that his fearsome, mangled face lost all definition.
‘You EAT it, laddie!’
Even in the midst of my dream, I recognised the pattern of this coercion. I remembered the bitter taste of the yellow flowers I had been forced to chew down that afternoon. I remembered the bad consequences of that action.
‘I won’t.’
I waited for an explosion, but it didn’t come.
After a while, the dark cat appeared to shrug. ‘More fool you, then.’
So saying, it dragged the throbbing light out from beneath my unresisting paw, and tossed it high into the air. As it fell, end over end, spinning in the gloom, I could make out half-familiar shapes within the gold.
A child; another’s hand; one toy: a minor battle.
I thought I recognised one of them as the boy-half of the fair-haired twins from the cottage down the road; then child, hand and toy were inside the maw of the dark cat, and disappeared from sight.
The great cat licked his chops. He washed his face. He ran his tongue over one side of his paw and rubbed it across a cheek, through his whiskers and down his muzzle. He sighed.
‘Ah, a sweet one, that. You missed a treat there, laddie.’ As if lost in some private, dreamy thought, he started to wash the other side of his face. ‘The little ones are always the sweetest. Not strictly part of the job, though, if you know what I mean. Now some of the others—’ the old cat went on, fixing me with a stern eye, ‘the ones that smoke and sputter: they’re the ones you want to watch out for, with their dangerous fumes, their corrosive intent. They don’t taste half so good: oh, no. They’re no treat at all. Quite the opposite. A bitter harvest to reap. A sour fruit from a twisted tree, those old ones. Especially the oldest of them all, filled up as it is with all its years of terror and hate. Now that’s a hard swallow to be made.’ He paused. ‘Not that you want to know about the worst there is in store yet, eh, laddie?’
‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about,’ I began hesitantly and gathered myself to face his rebuff; but the old cat just laughed grimly.
‘Of course not, laddie. Of course not. Why ever should you, when your time has not yet come? Why should you have to experience these trials so early in an unblemished life? Not for you the onerous task, the duty to all. No burden to bear for young Orlando, eh, boy? What care you that the humans’ dreams eat into our world; what care you if our highways are poisoned, if creatures sicken and die?’
I stared at him, unable to respond, not knowing what he wanted from me, but at last all he did was to grimace and then begin to retch painfully, a dry heaving which went on and on and on. I found myself wincing sympathetically. Hairballs could be a bastard, Ginge said. A real bastard. I hadn’t managed to produce a proper one yet; but the process fascinated me.
One more retch and the old cat leant forward and with considerable effort ejected something pale and fibrous on to the ground between us. It should have been as dark as his fur; so I knew with some deep instinct that this was no ordinary hairball. What it was, I didn’t know. I took a small step backwards.
The old cat spat and stretched his neck out as if it were distressing him.
‘Days of roses still for you, laddie,’ he continued at last. ‘Chasing butterflies in the sun, sleeping as soft as a little mouse with no thought for the swift destiny that awaits. Leave all the work to your elders, eh, laddie? Let the old ones taste the poisons of this world, keep the place nice and safe for the rest of you.’
The old cat hunkered down heavily and the wind pressed its sparse fur against a skull that I suddenly saw for the first time was frail and ageing, even in its wild guise. ‘Fifteen years I been doing this. Fifteen years. Kit and cat. There weren’t no one to take the strain all that time. It’s been a hard life, hard and unappreciated. Lonely, too. There’s a few of us old beggars around these parts, but we’re not much company for each other. What young queen wants to tie herself up with a dreamcatcher, eh? Well, a few, for a while maybe; but not the ones you want, no; always the dregs. That’s what I’ve had in my life, laddie. The dregs. But what do you care? Why should it trouble you if your old granfer goes on chasing the damn things till I drop down stone dead, broken in heart and spirit? Ha!’
Hawkweed got up and shook out each foreleg in turn with little galvanic convulsions. Then he started to walk stiffly down the tunnel.
I watched him go. About twenty paces away, he turned and stared back at me. Dull golden light shone off his great eyes.
‘Well? Come on then, laggard.’
*
Caught up in the weird internal logics of the dream, I found that I had little hesitation in following my unfamiliar grandfather deeper into this cold, windy place. When Hawkweed began to run, so did I. I felt the ground rushing past beneath my new paws and delighted in the power of my muscles as they propelled me effortlessly on and on.
After a while, I became aware of a subtle change in the light outside the tunnel through which we ran. It was an eerie effect, as if somehow I occupied two worlds: one which was dark and cold and urgent, full of blasting air; and another, less tangible but still visible if I narrowed my eyes: a world in which darkness gave way to streaks of red and gold and green; as if all colour that had once been here had somehow been pressed by the speed of our racing bodies out through the tunnel walls into the world outside.
Then we rounded a sharp curve and there, ahead, bumping against the unseen roof of the tunnel were a dozen or more yellow lights, vibrant in the gloom, giving off a faint, bluish smoke where they touched the boundaries of the highway. Sulphurous and acrid, it burned my nostrils, made my head ache. Hawkweed stopped beneath them. Their golden glow broke over his muzzle, haloed out around his ears. They limned his straggly whiskers and eyebrows with light, and gave back reflections of themselves deep within his unwavering eyes. An odd heaviness came over me as I watched Hawkweed scrutinise the globes, then stand up on his back legs to draw one gently out of the darkness. Pacing the small distance between us, he set it down in front of me.
This time, I did not back away. Rather, I found my paw reached out to secure and trap the thing. My claws extended themselves and sank gently into its surface, which initially gave way beneath my toes with a strange passivity; then I met a faint but definite resistance. I remembered then how, when slinking through the bushes in the back garden, trying to ambush Vita, I had once trodden on a much-deflated rubber balloon, lying bereft beneath the hydrangeas. How its surface, slick with dew and slug-trails, succumbed to the pressure of my claws, but in its new, shrunken state, somehow managed to repel a puncture. The globe felt a little like that, but less tangible, as if at any moment it might change its nature and squirm between my toes and away into the night. And as I felt that insubstantial but defiant pulse beneath my paw, I became aware in that moment of two things: firstly that the fear I had felt for the great cat beside me had somehow changed its nature, too; and secondly that I was going to eat the golden sac, despite the whiffs of acrid fume that now spilled from it.
I bent my head to it and felt the approving gaze of my grandfather upon me. Inside the yellow light, shapes swam indistinctly. I rolled it over with a paw and peered closely.
There!
Something twisted sinuously. I ducked my head back, perturbed.
‘It ain’t going to bite you, laddie.’ These words emerged as through a half-stifled yawn.
I reapplied myself to my task.
As I watched, something protruded through the membrane of the globe.
An elbow!
Then, a foot!
I stared, fascinated. It appeared to be some sort of long, pale, many-limbed creature, but then as it moved again I realised that it had two heads. The heads separated, then came back together. The beast rolled; then half of it peeled away, and when I squinted I could suddenly see that what I had thought to be a single organism was in fact comprised of two, joined awkwardly at the hip.
I watched, amazed, as they rolled again, and then, quite suddenly, recognised the top half of the partnership. It was the man who lived behind the church. The young, rather heavy one who had chased Ginge off the comfortably warm bonnet of his beaten-up old truck, and had thrown a potato at me for digging for a beetle in his garden. (Even at the time I suspected the man had thought I was doing something else entirely.)
And now here he was, tiny and naked, determinedly positioned between a pair of long brown legs belonging to a young woman with ferociously short yellow hair.
I tapped the ball gently and it rolled along the windy ground. The young man held on grimly to his partner as if completely unaware that his world was turning end over end. His eyes were wide open, triumphant and delighted by the good fortune his dream had accorded him; the woman’s were shut.
‘Don’t play with the damned thing: eat it!’ Hawkweed commanded.
I squared my shoulders. I pressed down with one paw on the globe till the image distorted. When it was unrecognisable, I lifted it gingerly to my mouth and held it behind the bars of my teeth. A faint wriggling reminded me of its contents. Something in terms of perspective and world order seemed wrong in eating down two human beings, however tiny, but I did it anyway.
It slipped down my throat far more easily than I would have imagined, and I could trace its passage, cool and slippery, to my stomach. It felt rather as if I had choked down a small frog. Except for the aftertaste, which was like nothing else I have ever tasted.
‘Well done, laddie,’ the old cat said, and his voice was warm with approval.
I glowed. I basked. It was a rare moment, and I was going to make the most of it. As well I might: there were not too many more like that to come.
‘Your first dream swallowed. First of thousands: trust old Hawkweed on that; and probably one of the sweeter ones, too. Nothing quite like a bit of illicit lust to make it slip down easy.’ He laughed unpleasantly.
I stared at my grandfather, bemused. Illicit lust. I had no idea what he was talking about.
No idea at all.
*
The next morning, I awoke, late and stiff-necked and feeling at odds with the world. The sunlight slanting in through the gap in the curtain made my eyes sting. The birds in the trees outside were singing their little heads off. At once, I was filled with irritation. With a groan, I rolled over to burrow under the cushions, and instead found myself nose to nose with my sister. The sun struck pale green lights deep in the iris of her eyes, making her expression quite unreadable. Then she gave a low growl in the back of her throat and reared up at me.
I rolled quickly on to my back and threw up my paws in defence. What a time to pick for a game, I thought wearily.
Then I stared.
Vita was saying something to me through a mixture of purrs and snarls, but I didn’t hear a word of it, transfixed as I was by the sight of my own feet.
My paws had gone yellow!
I stared harder, my mind churning. Somehow, since I had last looked at them, the scallops of white around my toes had taken on that same ugly yellow staining I had noticed on my grandfather’s fur.
And when I finally was able to focus on what my sister had to say as she launched her attack on me, it confirmed my worst fears.
‘You left me alone!’ she cried. ‘You left me alone in the middle of the night. Orlando! Where did you go without me?’
*
The staining just wouldn’t come off, no matter how hard I tried, though I punished the yellowed fur with the roughest part of my tongue. Ashamed, I hid the marks from Dellifer when she came to groom me, feigning an impatience I did not feel, so that instead of her brisk but comforting attentions, she tutted at my fidgets and shyings and left me to myself. I retreated to the old sofa, curling up with my paws tucked uncomfortably tight beneath me, and felt as if I had been set apart from the rest of catkind.
*
‘I won’t be bullied in my own home by a cat,’ said Anna.
The old tom had stayed away for a day or so, as if to register his displeasure at Anna’s spying, then resumed his visits to the cottage. He no longer seemed at ease in the kitchen, however. He spat at Dellifer, ate nothing, and if Anna so much as spoke to him, would back into a corner and hiss until she returned to whatever she had been doing. She had put herself beyond the pale with him, and her attention was unwelcome.
‘If you don’t want to be here, you know where the door is.’
He yawned.
‘This is ridiculous,’ said Anna.
Eventually a truce was declared – or restored – between them. But he kept a weather eye on her, and was careful never to be followed again. She would sometimes see him leaving the garden via the old board fence on the left, into the garden of her neighbour on that side, Mrs Lippincote – known in the village as ‘Old’ Mrs Lippincote to distinguish her from her own daughter-in-law, who worked at the florist’s in Drychester. Anna could hardly pursue him in that direction. One evening, drying her hair at the window of the spare bedroom (the electrical socket there was more conveniently placed than the one in her own room), she watched him slink across Mrs Lippincote’s lawn and disappear into a planting of cotoneaster.
She rapped loudly on the window. ‘I can see you!’ she called. ‘You needn’t think I can’t!’
He barely looked up. He was in no hurry. He knew he had got his own way. And to be honest, rapping on the window was no more than a gesture: though the old cat remained a puzzle, Anna was happy with her life at the cottage. She watched her kittens, she did her work. She ate well and slept late. If she thought about John Dawe, she admitted it to neither Alice nor Ruth.