Days passed and the weather improved; but the dreams – if dreams they were – haunted me. My life appeared to have reached a turning point. Something I had taken for granted seemed to have been lost forever.
I enjoyed, as blithely as I always had, the things I loved most: the way briny tuna fired its way along the sides of my tongue: play-hunting my catnip mouse; the sun on my fur in the morning: but where before I had passed unthinking from one state of delightful immediacy to the next, now I found that when I was not entirely immersed in whatever I was doing, in those moments ‘between’ things – before I fell asleep; just after I awoke; when I sat on the bare patch of grass outside the back door without any specific plan in my head – I found myself preoccupied with suspicion and doubt.
Whenever I could, I avoided my grandfather, slinking silently under a bush if I saw a dark shadow in the long grass, fleeing swiftly into another room if the old cat entered the house. And I spent less time with Vita: unfairly, I now regarded her as dull – a childish nuisance, rather than my beloved nestmate.
Instead, I sought out the company of the young male cats who hung around behind the cottages, boasting of their conquests, their speed and skill and general hardness—
‘Rats, now,’ a large black and white cat, about six months old and known for no apparent reason as Fernie, would confide: ‘They’re great fun to hunt. A bit more fight in ’em than your average mouse or shrew. More sporting, if you know what I mean.’
Heads would nod vigorously. They rarely disagreed about anything that really mattered. The group dynamic tended to favour conformity, rather than difference, and I had decided against sharing with it such philosophical difficulties as whether dreams could have physical consequences – like stained fur – opting instead for safer ground: hunting, fighting and feeding, or a combination of all three. No one noticed the yellow marks on my feet: the self-absorption of the young is legendary. Besides, personal hygiene did not figure very high in their priorities.
‘Ah, but they don’t taste that good, do they, rats?’ Ginge would shake his head sadly. ‘Rather bitter.’
‘Blackbirds, though: once you get through the feathers—’
‘Thrushes too—’ This from a small brindled cat who encouraged the others to call him Feisty, although I often heard him summoned by his owner, a little girl with long brown hair and big green and white shoes, by the name of ‘Oscar’.
‘A really good robin—’
I would join in enthusiastically, though I had never yet actually caught and eaten another living creature. It did not occur to me that neither had most of the others. Ginge and Fernie, though, spent a considerable amount of their time hanging out with some older cats down near a place they referred to as ‘the canal’. They described them with awe, and I had soon made a picture in my head of an exotic, tattered bunch of ne’er-do-wells who lay in the sun-streaked rushes by the waterside, stripping their shining claws and spinning tales of blood and guts.
Such connections conferred senior status upon Ginge and Fernie. But because I was a well set-up young cat who could run and leap as fast and as high as others a month or two older, I soon found myself further up this little pecking order than I might otherwise have expected, and it pleased me immensely, giving me as it did somewhere to belong, without complications.
Thus it was that I left my kittenhood behind, along with the sister I would now chase off with a snarl and a cuff rather than allow her to infiltrate my fragile male domain.
One day I slipped through the back door to hear Dellifer comforting Vita in the kitchen. Vita sat there miserably, head down, toying boredly with a piece of wilted spinach: ‘Never mind, darling,’ Dellifer said. ‘He’ll grow out of it.’
Grow out of it! At the time I was highly miffed.
But she was right, of course. It was, after all, her job to be right.
Yet it must have seemed to Vita that I never would. Her days without a playmate with whom to share her kittenish energies, her ravenous need for adventure, stretched out dull and interminable. Dellifer, her own youth receded to a distant blur, had no patience with mock-fights and tail-biting. ‘I’m far too busy for that sort of nonsense,’ she would say crossly, and then would go and arrange that oddly long white form along the sunny windowsill in the breakfast room and stare blankly out into the garden. Expressly forbidden to wander beyond the confines of the garden. Vita took to lying disconsolately in the flowerbeds, her only companions ladybirds and centipedes, none of whom seemed inclined to play the games she craved.
Those days rolled past in a haze of warmth and scent: first the patio roses and the foxgloves; then the delphiniums and mallows; the lady’s mantle and the montbretia; and all the while Vita waited for me to remember she was there.
*
Late one afternoon, on my way to join my peer group at the garages, I was practising pouncing techniques on a fantastically iridescent rosechafer beetle I had found on the dusty path behind the house. I had now perfected a leap into which I had incorporated an elegant half-twist, the added torque of this manoeuvre transferring considerable power to my landing paws and to the eventual ‘kill’. I was looking forward to showing off this new weapon in my hunting arsenal: I thought Fernie, in particular, would be impressed by it.
Thus engaged, I did not notice a long dark shadow bend sinuously around the corner of the house and slink up behind me.
‘Hello, laddie. Been avoiding your old granfer, have you?’
Shocked out of the perfection of my inner game, I landed awkwardly. The rosechafer picked itself up out of the dust and, lifting up its great green wingcase like an old woman raising her skirts, legged it into the long grass with considerable relief.
‘No, of course not, Granfer,’ I lied.
The old cat’s muzzle split lopsidedly into an unattractive grin, but his eyes remained hard and cold. ‘Glad to hear that, laddie. Wouldn’t like to think my own blood was trying to dodge me. Especially when there’s important work to do.’
He cuffed me lightly across the top of the head, but whether by design or accident his thumb-claw nicked the edge of my ear.
I winced. ‘How do you mean, Granfer?’
‘Come with me, laddie, and find out.’
The old cat set off at a deceptively fast lope across the gardens so that I had to run to keep up with him. We passed the garages where Ginge and Fernie, Feisty and Stripes and Seamus were leaping up at a snail upon the brick wall. When they saw us, they all stopped what they were doing and stared. For a moment, I had a vision of them as kittens playing together in a carefree world, a world from which I was excluded; then I trotted obediently after my grandfather, the weight of five pairs of eyes upon my retreating back.
Hawkweed led me behind the cottages, along the side of a wire-netting fence surrounding a tennis court, across a well-manicured lawn scattered with metal hoops, across a gravelled driveway, over a rickety close-board fence, in and out of the intricately planted bean canes in a vegetable garden, and through a tiny hole in the hawthorn hedge that bordered the common.
In the middle of a stand of crab apples and goat-willows, he stopped and sat down so suddenly that I nearly ran into the back of him.
‘Well, Orlando,’ – and at this I shivered, for my grandfather rarely called me by my given name – ‘do you have any questions for me? Anything that might have concerned you since that night we ran together?’
My mind went blank. I stared down at the ground. Woodlice bumbled through the soft leaf mould. One of them ran up to my foot, turned round and scurried back the way it had come. I looked up suddenly.
‘I do have a question, Granfer.’
‘Well ask it then, laddie: don’t delay. Life gets shorter every second you waste, though you’re too young and stupid yet to realise it.’
I looked him in the eye. ‘Why, since that night I came with you in your dream, have my paws gone yellow? And how can I make them white again?’
Hawkweed laughed evilly: ‘That’s two questions, laddie, and a statement that begs a few more. That night you came into my dream, eh? What a fool you are, laddie, to think it a dream. I see we have a long way to travel together: a long way indeed. But all you want to ask is why your feet have gone yellow?’
I nodded emphatically. At this precise moment it was the only thing I wanted to know.
‘That’s not just a stain on your fur, laddie.’ The old cat leaned forward and leered at me. His snaggled teeth were startlingly white and sharp. ‘It goes right through to your soul.’
I felt my mouth fall open, at first, I thought, in shock: but then a shout of laughter broke out and flew into the air. I closed it again quickly and the laugh was abruptly silenced. My grandfather was staring at me, and I noted with a certain grim satisfaction the light of surprise that had appeared in those baleful yellow eyes.
Hawkweed recovered himself with alacrity. ‘You may laugh now, laddie, but you’ll be laughing on the other side of your face soon.’
As I was considering this possibility, wondering whether this was how one laughed when one’s face had been smashed about as my grandfather’s was, my world turned upside-down. In an eyeblink, the old cat had launched himself upon me and was gripping my throat between teeth that stopped just short of drawing blood. I could feel the pinpricks of those sharp points through my fur, the power of those jaws around my windpipe. Just one bite, one prolonged application of pressure, and I knew I would be choked to death. Black stars danced in my eyes and the inside of my head felt soft and heavy. My legs, which had been resisting frantically, began to relax. Then something in the balance of the world changed and the compression around my throat receded, and as I began to come back into myself, I heard a voice deep in my head, intoning:
‘Enough of this foolish defiance. There are things in this world which I know and you do not, and it is time for you to learn them. There will be times when you want to run away and forget you were ever the wiser; times when the weight of your knowledge will bow your head down and make your heart stiff with grief. Other cats will spurn you: some will fear you; many will despise you – I know, for so it has been for me. But you cannot – you must not – turn aside from your fate. I, for one, will not let you. You may be young and thoughtless now, but soon you will be old and careworn, like me. Enjoy the time between the two, Orlando: the transition is precious and fleeting: and you have a great deal to learn if you are to survive the pitfalls of the journey.
‘Now, close your eyes and pay attention to what I say.’
I did as I was told, but deep in the recesses of my body my heart raced like a cornered mouse. The voice droned on above and beyond me, and soon I was not listening to it at all: rather, with my head pressed hard against the ground, I found I was listening to the blood beating around my body, the thump and pulse of my heart, and then my senses became attuned to different, deeper rhythms below me; below the leaf mould and the centipedes, the worms and the mites; and at the same time above me, in the trees, the clouds and the sky. It was as if I could feel the heartbeat of the world: powerful, firm, inexorable. The voice went on, and I found that as I lay there, my own heart beating steadily in time to the rhythm of life itself, the words fell into my head like some complex backbeat.
‘...wild roads, Orlando. The animals’ highways. Invisible to the eyes of humans, they run wherever there is life: they are life, laddie – they carry it through the body of the world, and without them we are nothing. If they fail, all life fails: if they wither and die, then so do we. We are all wild things on the face of the world, and how we live and fight and dream together determines the health of that world. Listen to me, Orlando, and learn.’
And, in a strange sing-song voice I had never heard my grandfather use before, Hawkweed told a tale passed from one cat to another through the history of the world, and there amongst the scrubby undergrowth of a small English wood, caught in the beating heart of that world, I listened.
*
‘Long, long ago, before the world was born, the Great Cat lay lazy in the darkness and groomed Herself. And one day as She groomed, the realisation dawned upon Her that She was lonely. She licked and smoothed and considered this matter. Aeons passed, and still She groomed. She groomed until Her fur gleamed; She groomed until Her tongue ached; and still She was lonely. For millennia. She licked Her gleaming flanks, and at last as She licked, so hills and woods and plains emerged where before there had been stripes and spots and whorls; She licked until rivers and seas and lakes became established in their beds and courses. She made a world for Herself, of Herself; a world to cherish and groom forever. But still She was lonely. So She reached down into the wildest part of Herself and She dreamed. Dreams are powerful things, and the Great Cat’s dreams were the most powerful of all; for they were true dreams that bore with them the gift of life. She lay lazy in the darkness and She dreamed of creatures who would inhabit Her world and keep Her company: She dreamed of birds and fish and insects, mice and rabbits, frogs and magpies; voles and fleas and fledglings, hedge mice and moles; ducks and corncracks, shrikes and shrews and stoats; all manner of beasts. She dreamed them into being: and then She dreamed of Herself, enjoying the world She had made, and out of Her dreaming eyes there leapt the cats.
‘All the wild things of the world ran and hunted and played; and when they were tired they slept and in turn they dreamed: natural, ingenuous dreams that mirrored the running and hunting and playing of their days. But the Great Cat dreamed too long, and soon She became trapped in the toils of the first nightmare. Before She could swallow it down, something else struggled up through Her dreaming mind, and swam towards the light of the world. And as it fought its way out, it learned. It learned the power of the Great Cat’s dreaming, and it, too, coveted the ability to make the world anew in the form of its dreams. And so it was that humans entered the world – as wild as all the other creatures, but with the wildest power of all: a ferocious imagination.
‘The humans imagined themselves kings of the world; and so they became. They hunted and killed as many of the other creatures as they could find, and even though the Great Cat dreamed hard. She found She was powerless to stop their destruction, for they were so many, and She was only one. And so She dreamed into existence the wild roads, for Her creatures to travel out of the sight of humans and carry with them the natural energies that would keep the world alive and well.
‘But She had reckoned without the wildness of humankind. No matter how “civilised” the humans became, still there was a part of them that was drawn to these highways. When they slept, their dreams would rise up out of them and fly out to join with the other wild things on the wild roads. And there they caused terrible harm: for the wildest dreams of the wildest humans were too powerful and corrosive for even the wild roads, or the cats who travelled them, to contend with. Dreams of greed and lust, hatred and revenge: they invaded the highways; and where they settled, the fabric of the roads was fatally damaged, poisoned and twisted by their force. Where the worst dreams corroded the highways, they burned right through, so that the clean energies of the world spun away into the darkness, and creatures sickened and died. And as the best of the world was poisoned and dissipated, so the balance was spoiled, and fear crept out into the night. Fear gave way to anger, and anger generated violence, and violence brought death and pestilence in its wake.
‘And so it went on, night after night: the humans dreamed and the highways succumbed to a more powerful and more savage force.
‘The Great Cat looked down upon Her dying world in despair, and She sighed. Her breath drifted out over the wild, forgotten places of the world, where it passed like a breeze, until it fell upon a small, insignificant-looking yellow flower, a flower borne up by a furry green stem and leaves covered in a soft mousy down – and it was these hairs that caught and held the Great Cat’s breath. All the yearning that She felt for Her world to be safe was drawn down through its leaves and stem, down into its roots. And when it reached the roots. Her sigh spread to the next plant. And where roots could spread no further, the plant sent downy seedheads to drift upon the winds to establish new plants, here, there and everywhere it could avoid the invasions of humankind—’
‘It’s hawkweed!’ I interrupted, scrambling upright.
The cat who shared its name now regarded me steadily, his ruined face stern. ‘It was indeed that plant which placed its mark upon you. You’ve been initiated to your task, laddie: now it’s time to learn what it means to be a dreamcatcher. Do you understand?’
I could feel my brow furrow. With my eyes open and my airways operating normally, back in the recognisable world again, the story seemed implausible and infantile, the meanderings of an old cat trying to persuade an idiot youngster to save him an unpleasant chore. Moreover, I suspected some perverse, unfair motivation, and probably another cruel trick. My throat ached where the old cat had gripped it. I examined the tell-tale stains on my paws, then stared belligerently at my grandfather.
‘I wanted an explanation, and all you give me is a fairy tale—’
The old cat silenced me with a look. ‘If you had not interrupted my fairy tale, laddie, you might have learned its true conclusion. Since you have, you deserve to remain at a disadvantage. Let that be a lesson in itself, Orlando: do not leap in where a little thought might save the day.’ He clicked his teeth in disgust. ‘There’s no respect any more. You youngsters think you know it all, when you hardly even know how to lick your arse clean.’ He turned away, splayed his back legs and started suiting action to words.
I watched out of the corner of my eye, a little revolted by my grandfather’s crudity. I was, however, rather sorry that I had interrupted: obviously there was more to the tale than I had realised. While Hawkweed groomed, I tried to make sense of it all; but yellow flowers and murder and horror and enormous cats and a world made from fur and spit all got tangled up in my head so that I was left more confused than I had been to begin with.
By the time the old cat completed his cleaning routine the sun was starting to sink between the trees like some great distant fire, sending scintillas of red light shooting through the silhouetted branches.
Hawkweed surveyed the sky thoughtfully. ‘Time for a more practical lesson,’ he declared.
*
The moon rose over the hawthorns to light our way as I followed my grandfather with some trepidation into the middle of a gorse thicket. Scents wafted up out of the earth as if the night had released another, secret world; one filled with smells of extraordinary interest, smells that made my skin twitch and my nose strain. Rabbits! At this stage in my life I had never actually seen a rabbit, let alone caught one; even so, the image rose as instinctively into my mind as the scent rose from the ground. Soon my head was buzzing with excitement. It was dark, and here I was, out on the common with Hawkweed, surrounded by the scent of warm, wild prey.
The smell got stronger. Soon I could feel it deep in the bones of my face, fizzing around my sinuses, suffusing my skull. Saliva flooded my mouth. Blinking, I swallowed hastily before my grandfather caught me drooling.
‘Get down, laddie!’ Hawkweed hissed suddenly, dropping to a crouch, and I flattened myself hard against the earth. He moved along with jerky little jabs of his legs, elbows as high as his shoulder blades, like a badly wound clockwork toy: but his head and spine remained in a straight, straight line, and his eyes did not waver; only the tip of his tail twitched out of true.
The next thing I knew, there was a confusing flurry of movement. Light and dark furred shapes spun like dervishes. Stifled growling, as of a furious cat with its mouth full of something which squirmed and fought: then an eye-watering shriek that fled for a moment out into the night skies, only to be cut short by a terrible crack that echoed off the nearby beech trunks. Then nothing but an eerie silence.
I squinted into the gloom, the fur on the back of my neck and spine itching with curiosity. Cautiously, I edged forward.
Something in the darkness ahead began to hiss and bubble and I drew back, suddenly afraid that what I had just heard had not in fact been Hawkweed getting the better of a rabbit, but some other terrible predator which had lain quietly in wait for just such an opportunity to ambush my grandfather.
And when the moonlight fell squarely on the figure in front of me I was still not entirely sure this was not the case: for the creature that raised its head was a fearsome sight indeed. Its face was masked with gore, through which its teeth gleamed like the teeth in a death’s head. Its eyes glittered with inimical lustre.
‘Chow down, laddie,’ it said. ‘You’ll need to line your stomach for our next task.’
The rabbit, neck broken and belly open to the night, steamed gently into warm air. I had never experienced anything like it before – chicken and game casserole, tuna chunks and minced turkey in gravy all came out of the can with a distinctly homogenous chill to them – so the sudden heat of fresh rabbit-blood on my tongue took me so greatly by surprise that I leapt backwards as if bitten. Hawkweed appeared to take no notice of my discomfort, engaged as he was in eating the rabbit’s head. He wrapped his jaws expertly around the skull, positioning the cutting edges with practised care, and bit down hard so that a second snap of bone echoed into the trees. This was followed by such grotesque crunching sounds that I thought I might just wander home while my grandfather was thus distracted and see what Anna was serving for supper that evening. Tinned food seemed rather more tempting than all this gory ravaging. For the first time I found myself wondering whether the lads at the garages had been scrupulously truthful about their hunting exploits. No one had ever mentioned the sound of a skull cracking, the snap of a neck breaking; the mess and heat of it all.
He who hesitates is lost.
I could have turned at that moment – while Hawkweed busied himself amidst convoluted tissue and dark cavities – and run swiftly and silently back through the gorse, out on to the dark common and along the road to the golden light at Anna’s kitchen window; I could have slipped through the cat-door into a world of central heating, processed food, ownership and dependence for the rest of my life. But just as I was about to turn intent to action, my grandfather’s eyes rose up over the corpse of the rabbit and glared right at me, and I felt myself flush with shame. All my self-will slipped away.
‘Well don’t hang about, laddie, or there’ll be none of the damned thing left!’ So saying, Hawkweed applied himself to his meal again and the rest of his unwelcome pronouncements came to me though muffled chewing— ‘...least you can do to show your appreciation of your old granfer’s efforts... still show you spineless youngsters a thing... might just give you some backbone...’
I approached. Now the smell of the prey was not so strong, for the night air had cooled the carcass. What lay before me now, gleaming softly in the moonlight, bore no resemblance at all to the image of the rabbits I carried in my head. I closed my eyes and tried to think of it as something that might have slipped out of a can. Not being able to see it helped, and soon I was tearing away at the rabbit as if I had not eaten in days. It tasted different to the food I was used to: salty and tangy in a way that made my tongue buzz with sensation; then after a while I was shearing and swallowing without even registering the taste, and my fur was sticky with blood. Sated, I reeled away.
Hawkweed was sitting at a spectator’s distance, with his tail curled neatly around his hind paws. The sleeked fur of his head looked newly groomed and his snaggled teeth glinted in a grimace that lay somewhere between a leer and an ironic grin.
‘The warm ones are the best, ah yes; the warm ones are the best.’ He leaned forward. ‘That’ll be the easiest kill you ever eat, laddie, but just remember: the first one’s free.’
*
Half an hour later, I had finally managed to strip my whiskers of the last of the rabbit-blood and Hawkweed was becoming impatient.
He shook his head sadly. ‘The Great Cat Herself was never so clean. Shake a leg, laddie, and let’s be off. They’ll all be dreaming by now.’
The moon had sailed clear of even the highest trees so that their shadows preceded us as we walked across the marshy corner of the common, crossed a small stream and made our way into the woods.
The wild road we entered on this occasion was very different to the one I had dreamed of. It was smaller, for a start, and the winds inside it were neither so strong nor so cold. However, the sensation of pushing my way through the initial resistance felt exactly as I had originally imagined it, and once inside I could feel my body responding to the demands of this strange place, taking on the larger, wilder form I recalled so well. I regarded my huge new paw with grim satisfaction, and felt the blood of the great cats flow through me. This time, though, I felt oddly comfortable with this curious state of affairs, as if I were returning to my proper element.
Already, there were golden lights in the highway.
I gazed at them, remembering.
I remembered the thing that had hovered over Vita’s head. I thought about the shapes I had seen in it, and in those others on the wild road.
I thought about the one I had eaten.
I considered the yellow on my paws.
I recalled the story of the hawkweed and the Great Cat’s sigh, and although the connections still eluded me, dancing as erratically in my head as the golden globes danced against the roof, I could feel the shape of a theory forming—
‘There!’ Hawkweed leapt ahead of me, head as alert as any pointer’s watching the kill fall from the sky. ‘See there, laddie: that’s one!’
I started, my mind shaken once more into randomness, the thoughts falling this way and that, like a child’s snow-globe turned upside-down.
‘Wh— what?’
‘Now you earn the rabbit, laddie. Now’s your chance – bring it down; go on!’
Up above me, hovering in the gloom, was the largest golden light I had so far seen. It wobbled in the air currents, distorting to left and right, as if something inside it were struggling to get out. Its edges had started to flare into the fiery corona I had learned to recognise as belonging to those dreams most destructive to the highways. And indeed, where it bounced against the side of the wild road, it burned and smoked, releasing a horrid stench into the air. Already I could see the damage it had done, for the outside world shone more brightly beyond it than it should. I could feel the way the energies around me, inside me, were drawn to that thinning, as if they wished to pour themselves away into the night. What then? I thought, still confused by my granfer’s lesson. If the wild road were to burn through, here and now, would we be ripped out into the world outside, unnatural in our giant forms, there to wisp away to nothing? Or would we fall choking on the ground, two small domestic cats, defeated by forces beyond their control?
‘Go on, Orlando!’ My grandfather’s voice broke through my grim reverie, and his face was avid and urgent. ‘Catch it, laddie; embrace your fate!’
I felt my spine prickle, as if every hair there were rising to meet a challenge: rising not from fear, but because of some other emotion, something that burned inside me, something that buzzed in the deep cavities of my skull. The golden globe smelled like prey. It gave off the bitter tang of the hunted and the terrified.
At once I was all predator.
Unbidden, my hind legs gathered and, muscles bunching and releasing, I leapt high into the swirling air and took the thing cleanly in my jaws.
It squirmed briefly in my mouth.
I laid it upon the ground of the highway and held it down, quite professionally, I thought. I was just examining my catch more closely and congratulating myself on the dexterity with which I’d carried out the whole manoeuvre, when the yellow sphere pulsed like a trapped jellyfish. I dug my claws in tighter—
As I did so, something dark rushed up at me, so that I jerked my head away. It was a dog! A dog inside the golden light! I recognised it with the instinctive dislike of his species, but still I managed to hold on. A scarred muzzle was pushing at the membrane of the globe, distending it. I trod down harder, and the muzzle withdrew. I rolled the sac under my foot, and saw a human running. The perspectives were all wrong: the human was tiny; the dog running after it, mouth agape, a soundless bark wrenching spasmodically at its head, was vast and threatening. Suddenly, the human fell over and its skirts flew up, revealing veined and lumpy legs, stockings ripped – by teeth? The dog, triumphant, stood over the fallen figure with menacing intent. Its jaws worked furiously, but no sound came out. I could see the whites all around the human’s eyes, the muscles stretching fear across its face. It was the woman who ran the local post office, an old human whose clothes smelled musty and of long-dead cats, who could be counted on to open a can of sardines for you if you mewed outside her kitchen door. Overcome by horror, I sank my teeth into the globe, felt its outer surface break beneath the carnassials I used for shearing through food. Something wriggled against my gums, then it burst in my mouth with a foetid rush.
Appalled I leapt back, shaking my head from side to side to try to rid myself of the taste. Little globules of yellow spilled across the highway.
‘No!’ A cry of utmost dismay from my grandfather.
I whirled around.
‘Catch it! Catch it!’ Hawkweed’s voice was pitched high with panic.
Bewildered, I turned back to do as I was told, only to see the tiny black dog shrugging its way out of the clinging shreds of the golden globe. Or rather, the once-tiny black dog: for as it emerged from its prison into the winds of the wild road, it was growing, and growing...
‘Kill it!’
I stared in horror, as the creature grew from the size of a shrew, to the size of a vole, to a rat—
Then I was knocked sprawling to the ground. Hawkweed hurled himself at the dog, catching it awkwardly by the leg; but as he did so, its swelling muscles prised his jaws open and it escaped again. Now it was the size of a small cat and where it touched the highway, its fur singed and smoked, and the tunnel walls caught light.
‘Help me, Orlando!’
Suddenly my paralysis evaporated. I wanted to flee in the opposite direction, putting as much distance as I possibly could between myself and this wild road, my grandfather, the horror I had accidentally released. Instead, I found myself leaping at the snarling beast, jaws wide and fury flaming through my veins. I remembered the rabbit. I clawed my way up the dog’s shoulder until I reached its neck and sank my teeth down into the bones there. My head bumped against Hawkweed’s. Together we bit down with the primordial power of felidae jaws and the beast howled. Foul juices ran down my chin. Then there was a sharp crack and the thing fell limp beneath us.
It was as large as a pony.
At once, the acrid flames that licked the walls of the wild road smouldered and died, leaving scorch and thinning in their wake. The creature on the ground beneath us seeped slowly away, until only the foulest of smells remained.
*
In a cottage on the main road of the village, the widow Lippincote turned in her sleep and pulled straight the bedclothes that had become twisted around her feet as she fled from the avatar of her nightmare. After a few moments, her breathing eased and she started a new dream: one of summer meadows and a young man with cornflower-blue eyes, running his hands up legs that were smooth and young and varicose-free.
*
Chest heaving, I turned to face my grandfather.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘They’re dreams, laddie, the golden lights. Only cats see them. Cats like you and me. Everyone dreams, Orlando: cats and humans and horses and elephants. But some dream worse than others. Some dreams, they’re as light and sweet as butterflies, but some are dark and vile. Those are the ones you have to watch for: they’re the ones that do the damage. It’s human dreams that do the worst hurt, laddie. Humans think they’re civilised—’ He laughed bitterly. ‘They think they’re better than us: stronger, wiser. Oh yes. But dreamcatchers, we know the truth. We’ve seen it all – the gluttony and the lust and the terror, and the things they do in the name of those emotions: the stealth and the hate, the violence of it all. Civilised? Hah! What they don’t ask, people, is where their wildness went.’ His eyes flared briefly in the reflected gold of another dream as it drifted by. ‘Doesn’t just vanish. Oh, no. Nothing ever vanishes, laddie. Nothing is ever lost.’
He fell silent, considering this proposal. I shifted uncomfortably. Biting the dog had made my stomach twist with repulsion. I thought I might throw up. But my grandfather was not yet finished with his lecture.
‘Humans are every bit as wild as the animals they despise. Wilder, I believe. Wilder and more dangerous than the maddest dog—’
‘Then why,’ I butted in, ‘did we just save the old woman from that one?’
Hawkweed regarded me with disgust. ‘We didn’t save her, you fool. That’s not our job.’ He clicked his teeth angrily and his eyes glittered. ‘We’re here for the wild roads, for the health of the world, to keep the highways safe from the corrosive power of their bloody dreams. If we didn’t do this, my lad, you’d soon see a difference. It can start small if the damage is slight: lack of sleep and niggling tempers, minor illnesses that just won’t clear up; little creatures running slower than usual. Soon it’s arguments and fighting; children hit for no good reason; animals run over for the sheer hell of it; a malaise fallen over an entire area; even the weather becoming unnatural. But once you get the really nasty dreams out there, the true nightmares, then it’s plague and violence and death, laddie. Plague and violence and death.
‘We do the Great Cat’s will, Orlando, keeping Her highways clear and healthy. And how does She reward us?’ He retched and spat. ‘She curses us, laddie. That’s how.’
*
Back home later that night I passed the food bowl that Anna had put out for me in the kitchen. Tuna imperial, my nose told me, the one with shrimps and other seafood mixed in with the fish. I bent to sniff it, but suddenly the sight of a piece of squid obtruding from the mixture reminded me of the rabbit; and when I remembered the fur of the rabbit, suddenly the taste of the dog was in the back of my throat.
Gagging, I raced back through the cat-flap, feet slipping sideways on the slippery quarry tiles, made for the first flowerbed I came to, and threw up with considerable gusto. I stood there for several minutes afterwards, heaving and blinking. Up had come most of the rabbit: I had expected that. What puzzled me was a mass of longer black strands.
They looked like dog hairs...