The fog I ran through that morning as I fled the house made a perfect reflection of my state of mind. Feelings of confusion, abandonment and impending doom tumbled and swirled in my head, and images leapt out at me as out of the dreams I had caught this last week: Liddy’s outraged face; Dellifer’s eyes as stark as the moon; menacing figures carrying baskets as quiet as the grave; Vita’s food bowl, empty and dark as a pit; wild roads that roared and howled like live things tortured: all of it a maze of meaning, and I, the solitary traveller, struggling to make his way through it all.
So it was, forlorn and desperate, that I ran through Ashmore Village. Two cars passed me, at a snail’s pace, the drivers’ faces pressed anxiously close to the windscreen. Hedges and trees loomed up out of the fog, to be replaced by a telegraph pole, a post-box, the expanse of someone’s lawn. I saw the odd pedestrian, a dog walker, a lone shopper, sneezing and coughing, swathed against the weather (even the dog, a small, miserable-looking terrier, wore a buckled tartan coat). I even thought I saw Anna and the man from Liddy’s boat: they swam up out of the mist, then were sucked back into it again as if they were ghosts.
Perhaps we are all ghosts, I have thought since then, existing briefly in a fog, unaware of the grand context into which we were born. For what possible autonomy, what force of self-will, can be exerted in such a world?
I ran the length of the main road. There was no sign of my sister.
I sniffed around dustbins and gate-posts and sheds, but the scents were as muffled as the air. I slipped through the lych gate and into the churchyard, sifted through the muted smells of turned earth and tended flowers; the sharp aroma of wet holly and yew; the tang of damp stone; the passage of human feet. Vita had not been here, of that I was sure.
I crossed the fields towards Glory Farm and the iron tracks. Nothing. Turning back towards the village, on the path to the common, though, my nose twitched. One of the rabbit runs, a much-trodden path through bracken and bramble, gave back my first clue to my sister’s whereabouts. A faint, sweet scent, slightly fishy; another, muskier. I breathed in deeply. Vita certainly, with another cat, a female, just out of heat. Could it be Liddy? My heart sprang up. I bent my nose close to the ground and followed the scent assiduously. Almost twenty feet further on, there was a scrabbling of feet and a rustle of vegetation; then the fog parted and a rabbit bolted past me, eyes liquid with fear. I stared into the swirl of mist it left behind, then touched my nose to the ground once more. Here, the scent was fainter, less distinct. I lost it for a moment, circled around in panic, and found it again. My heart beating with anticipation (Liddy, oh Lydia), I sniffed along the trail. After a while, it started to twine back upon itself, as if some sort of confusion had occurred, before coming to an abrupt halt. I lifted my head and stared past my nose. It seemed to be the entrance to a small wild road.
*
Once inside, the compass winds blew furiously, all of a tangle, so that my lion’s mane tied itself into knots and whipped me hard across the face. Usually, the highways funnelled their air currents down their length, so that the only squalls of turbulence you encountered were at multiple junctions, where nests of small highways met a major thoroughfare. Such a gale I had not encountered before. And it smelled. It smelled of something acrid and deathly; something fiery with hate. I feared for Lydia, I feared for my sister; I feared for myself. Even so I set my head steadfastly into the blow and plodded along, planting my feet firmly on the highway floor to keep my balance, but though I marched for a hundred yards in all directions, there was no sign of another living being.
With a sinking heart, I exited back on to the common, only to find myself confronted by the trunk of the great oak under which I had buried the human tooth. This was not where this little highway should normally have debouched; but at the time, foolishly, I thought nothing of it. The wild roads are notoriously convoluted and hard to navigate, and I had already compounded matters by entering them in an overwrought state, rather than with the clarity of mind and purpose required for a productive journey.
Dejected, I gazed across the misty common, and as I did so my eye was snagged by a sudden flash of russet. At first I thought it the flaming leaves of that garden escapee, the Japanese maple; then proper perspectives reasserted themselves and I realised that whatever it was lay closer to the ground than even the shortest tree; and, moreover, it was moving.
I narrowed my eyes. The fog swirled and the object disappeared. Only to be replaced by a more familiar shape. Dark, tattered – a cat!
It was the rightful Dreamcatcher of Ashmore.
For a moment I felt nothing but fury; then as he approached I could see that he was moving with the utmost difficulty, lurching along like a creature in pain, and whatever the red thing was, it appeared to be bearing up his weight.
At once I was running. I called his name—
‘Hawkweed! I’m coming—’
At the sound of my voice, I swear the russet object became sharply attentive. I saw, for a split second, a head, finely delineated: a pointed snout, large, triangular ears; then there was a blur of movement and all I was left with was the impression of something long-backed and brush-tailed and as big as a dog, all burnished apple-red, save for one marked grey patch along its flank; something that moved as slickly as a wave, and vanished as silently as it had appeared.
‘Grandfather!’
By the time I reached him, my grandfather was decidedly alone.
He was reeling by then, the fight long gone out of him.
‘What happened to you?’ I cried, all anger dissipated to concern. ‘Were you attacked by the great red beast?’
In response, the old cat managed a thin smile. It was more lopsided, even than usual.
‘Nay, laddie,’ he said simply. ‘What you saw was just a friend. A friend with a long and curious history, but a great and good friend to cats like us. I have a sense it will not be long before you meet him yourself.’
And he would not be drawn any further on the subject.
Instead, I asked him what had happened to reduce him to the terrible condition in which I had found him: there was a gash across one haunch so deep and vicious that the flesh appeared amid the fur as purple-red and pearled with fat as the packaged meat Anna stored in the refrigerator. One eye was hazed with partly dried blood; the other was swollen and shut tight upon itself. He limped heavily. It must have been a terrible fight. I could not imagine another cat inflicting such injury upon my indomitable grandfather.
‘It’s the highways, laddie,’ he said at last, leaning upon me to get his breath. ‘There’s a Dream out there poisoning them.’
I stared at him, uncomprehending.
He sighed, and his one good eye flickered as if he might pass out where he stood. ‘Get me home, Orlando. Get me home.’
We must have made a strange sight, my grandfather and I, as we staggered back to the cottage. We had to take the human way, for my grandfather would not be leaping fences for some considerable time to come. We came up on to the main road through the clearing mist like two lost souls. People turned their crying children away from the sight of Hawkweed’s wounds, and watched us solemnly as we passed. I fixed them with a fierce gaze, for I did not want their help, but no one moved towards us anyway. Closer to the cottage, I could hear raised voices. Some altercation appeared to have broken out between the old man who helped Anna sometimes in the garden and an old woman in horn-rimmed glasses, who had chosen this unlikely time to upbraid him for the fact that his old apple tree had some weeks ago dropped a dead branch over the hedge and into her cold frames. Perhaps he was happy for the excuse to avoid her ranting, for as he caught sight of the pair of us limping home, his face furrowed with concern. He came after us slowly, leaning on his stick, and when we came at last to the cottage reached over and fiddled with the latch on the front gate and swung it open so that we might enter.
*
Anna, her face streaked, the skin stretched tight and shiny where tears had fallen and dried, came up the road a moment later, only to see Mr Thompson apparently opening her front gate for no good reason. She quickened her pace.
‘He’s proper poorly,’ was all he said as she approached. ‘Poor old beggar.’
Anna, her thoughts already in disarray, stared at him, uncomprehending. ‘I beg your pardon? Who do you mean?’ Possibilities rattled through her head: John, meeting with an accident as he followed her at a run down Cresset Beacon? Max? (But Mr Thompson would not know him from Adam, her brain corrected immediately.) Orlando—
And there was Orlando on the doorstep, looking a little bedraggled, for sure, but not obviously ill or injured. She bent to inspect him, and found, crouched behind him at the back of the boot-bench, between wellingtons and Goretex and the stiff brush she used for cleaning the porch of leaves and cobwebs, the old cat Hawkweed.
*
Later, after a bustle of activity, I lay beside my grandfather. Above us, the springs of the spare-room bed brushed our ears. It was hot, very cramped, and not a spot I would have chosen in which to recuperate, but it seemed to suit Hawkweed well enough. Anna had opened the front door, and had run to the cupboard under the stairs, where she kept such horrors as the roaring stick that sucked the carpets. Puzzled, we had limped cautiously inside after her, but when he had heard the tell-tale creak of the willow cat basket, Hawkweed’s head had gone up as if at the crack of a shotgun, and gaining a sudden energy and awkward strength that belied his injuries, he had lithely evaded her attempts to catch him, and had instead established himself here, well out of arm’s reach, despite Anna’s many attempts to encourage him out.
Dellifer had spent some time attending to his wounds.
‘Cat spit cures all,’ she said at last, quoting that old feline adage. She gave the area around his flank another lick for good measure. By the way Dellifer was fussing around him I could tell that she was more agitated by his demeanour than by the nature of his injuries. I watched her practical ministrations with a certain shame at my earlier outburst, but she said nothing to reproach me.
When my grandfather’s face had been cleaned of the caked blood, it looked only as fearsome as it did normally, and I found it much easier to watch him as he slept, debilitated from his exertions. Waiting for him to wake up again, though, I found frustrating in the extreme. Not only did I want to know what had happened to him on the wild roads, and what might have become of my missing sister: I was also desperate for any news of Lydia.
It is well known that a cat has the ability to wake any sleeper by the power of a stare, but if my grandfather felt the weight and imperative of my gaze upon his sleeping face, he gave no sign of it; no doubt being entirely too well versed in repelling such unwanted attentions. And completely exhausted from his experience on the highways, my conscience reminded me sharply.
After what seemed an eternity, he yawned and an eye opened blearily. At once, Dellifer was upon him, asking how he was, whether she should lick his forehead some more; if he wanted something to eat. Eventually, Hawkweed suggested he might manage a small vole, to keep his strength up; and sent her off, knowing it would take her an age to find one at this time of the year.
I could barely wait for her to leave the room before launching into my own inquisition.
‘So, Grandfather, tell me now, quickly while she is gone: whatever happened to you? And did you see Vita, and my friend Lydia?’
The old cat’s eyelids flickered wearily. Then he fixed me with a pale and one-eyed stare and said in an irritated fashion, ‘Can’t you leave me be for just a little while, Orlando? There is nothing that can be done for now.’
But I persisted, and in the end Hawkweed hunched himself uncomfortably over his elbows and sighed deeply. ‘I will come to Vita in due course, Orlando; but first I must tell you about the Dream. I had hoped I would never have cause to tell you about it, laddie. It’s been dormant for so long now, I truly thought it laid to rest. I should have known better...’ his voice trailed off, husky with despair.
I leaned forward, willing him to continue. After a while he coughed – or rather, retched phlegmily, then after a moment’s hesitation, as if he was considering hawking the contents up on to Anna’s carpet, he reconsidered and swallowed them down again. He blinked several times as if they tasted particularly vile. ‘The Dream,’ he said vaguely, as if in a dream himself. ‘Ah, the Dream. Human fear is a terrible thing, Orlando. Perhaps the most terrible thing there is.’
I frowned. Why was it he could never speak in a straightforward manner to me? Why must he always beguile me with riddles?
‘When I was a lad,’ he began again, and my spirits sank. Here was I, awaiting urgent news, and my grandfather had started reminiscing about his distant youth. I wondered if his recent experiences had finally brought on the senility I had perceived in the oldest cats of the village: cats who sat on doorsteps and windowsills gazing vacantly out at the world, a thin line of spittle drooling from one corner of the mouth; or, like Old Niggle, whose owners would no longer allow him in the house for fear of his incontinence and unstable temper, a cat who lay out in bushes beside the road ready to waylay passers-by with a loud string of obscenities, or to follow them pathetically, reciting tales of his derring-do, back in the good old days when he’d been the alpha male and had a harem of willing females awaiting his thorough attentions...
But my grandfather was not to be deterred by my evident lack of interest in his early exploits; nor was his vicious temper in any way softened by his injuries.
‘Orlando!’ he hissed, a paw snaking out to cuff me soundly about the ear.
Shocked beyond words at the speed of this geriatric invalid, as I had so quickly been categorising him, I stared at him open-mouthed.
‘A fool you are and a fool you will remain if you do not pay attention to what I tell you.’
He was not the first to have called me a fool. Someone else had done so recently, though I could not remember then how it had come up. Lydia, most like: Lydia, certainly...
‘When I was a lad,’ my grandfather started again, ‘my own grandfather, that great old dreamcatcher Fidelius the Black, came to me one night. “Hawkweed”, he said, “there are many dangerous things in this world, but none so potent as a woman’s jealousy and fear”. And he explained to me how he had observed from a lifetime or more on the highways, how women’s dreams often differed from men’s. He had noticed that they sometimes dreamed deeper and darker than their male counterparts, and he believed that while men channel their daily frustrations and energies into work and sport and even war, women have fewer outlets for their wilder sides; moreover, he said to me, some women love more fiercely than any man, sometimes with a powerful and dangerous force. And if something were to come between such a woman and the object of her desire, well, it would engender great peril.
‘Now, I have to say to you, Orlando, that human emotions were a mystery to me then, and remain a mystery to me to this day: what I do know, however, is that they can be truly destructive.
‘I was barely more than a kitten, not much older than you are now, when he told me this, and perhaps things are different in the world now; but I had seen so little of it then, had not experienced any sort of love for myself—’
I wondered whether my grandfather could see the flush I could feel prickling beneath my fur in the gloom of the bedroom.
‘—so I had no idea of what he was telling me. Then, in that maddeningly oblique way that dreamcatchers sometimes have,’ he gave me an odd look, which might have involved a wink, since the gleam of his good eye seemed to flicker for a moment, ‘he suggested I come on an excursion with him. We walked through Ashmore Village on the human roads and I was already becoming bored and thinking my grandfather was wasting my time, when we arrived at some grand gates. There he stopped; and I began to reassess matters. There is something about the old manor house that has always made me uneasy: even then, I tended to avoid it in my explorations of the village.’
I recalled my own single excursion into the grounds of the big house; how the dream that had caused the rift between me and Liddy had goaded me to the top of the great tree.
‘We made our way through the great gates, and as we did so, the light of the new day shifted through indigo, to the soft grey of a woodpigeon’s wing, before emerging at last as a cold and ominous red,’ my grandfather went on. He told me how he and Fidelius had run across the dewy grass, quick and nervous, in full and open view; how they had skirted the orchard and taken cover in the lee of the strange little mazy garden that was planted there.
I was holding my breath now, captivated by my own grandfather’s narrative. I knew the garden to which he referred – a labyrinth of low shrubs in an intricate design – for I had glimpsed it as I fell from my precarious perch in the cedar tree, clutching on to the dream.
‘We sat there, Orlando, and we watched. We watched as a woman came out of the house. A tall, thin, old woman.’
This was less than exciting. I had been waiting for the appearance of a monster; and all he had to offer me was a crone. There were lots of old women in Ashmore, and there was nothing more terrifying about them than the threat of a cup of water being thrown over you if they thought you might be about to do something amongst their peonies.
But then he told me how she had walked around that maze in the oddest fashion. Not as if she were going anywhere, but as if she was bewitched and unable to take more than two steps in any single direction. She was,’ he stated again, ‘an old woman: a very old woman – all folds and wrinkles and swollen joints – but I could not take my eyes off her, and neither could Fidelius, for she had a powerful magnetism, even to the eye of a cat, something strong and... animal.
Then he told me how, at the heart of the pattern, she had opened a jar and started rubbing its contents all over herself. As meticulous as a cat she had been in her grooming, and by the time she had finished, and shaken the last few drops on to the ground as if as an offering, a transformation had taken place.
‘Where before her skin had been thin and grey, wrinkled and spotted with age, now it glowed as pink as the dawn, as soft and luminous as a rose petal. I do not know if there is such a thing as magic in the world, Orlando; nor whether the word “witch” still has any true meaning. Nor do I know much about the nature of humans’ anatomy; but I do, now, know about age, and I am telling you, laddie, that the woman who went back into the house then was a far younger woman than the one who came out.’
And then he told me of the robin, the bird that had landed in the centre of the knot garden and pecked at the ground where those last few drops had fallen: how it had flown away full of vigour, its breast feathers as red as new blood.
‘I saw that bird again, Orlando. I saw it only a few days ago.’
I stared at him, my mind working hard. ‘But Fidelius has been dead for many years,’ I said slowly. ‘And everyone knows the little birds live for only a few seasons...’
He nodded, his one eye enigmatic.
Was this another of his fairy stories, designed to teach me something of the Great Cat’s wisdom?
Hawkweed was silent for a moment, remembering. Then he told me many things about the nature of the world, and about Ashmore village in particular, that I had rather not have known.
He told me about the nine lives of cats: how there was something that humans called reincarnation that could bring you back, when you had lived out your natural span, if not in this life, then in another. ‘And it’s all tied up with wild roads, you see, Orlando,’ he said.
I did not, but for once in my life I kept quiet.
‘The highways run, as you know, all over the world, channelling its energies – all the dreams, all the souls of the world – and it is up to us, the dreamcatchers, to keep those highways clear and hale. It is fear, laddie: fear’s the thing that does most damage; in life, in dreams. Fear of ageing; fear of death; fear of loss – of power, or love. If you get enough fear running through the wild roads, the consequences are terrible: death and corruption will tear their way out of the highways – and not just in dreams, laddie; but in souls; and that’s a fearsome thing indeed. A really frightened soul does not want to die: it will come back again and again, seeking an escape from death itself.
‘There are places, Orlando, where the highways also run through times as well as through the geography of the world. Some of these wild roads have hardly any true existence of their own, but are merely echoes of old memories, old cat-lanes from a bygone age remembered fondly by those who once used them, or in stories told by mothers to their kittens. In time, they fade, seal themselves off and die away. But some, laddie, stay open and alive because an especially strong dreamer has entered the system, a dreamer driven by fear. Such a dreamer can drive the highways to double back on themselves, as the dreamer seeks previous, happier times in its evasion of death. Here, in Ashmore, we have such a rare configuration. We have had it all my life, and for as long as any of my forebears can remember, for Ashmore is a very old village. And, since luck is against us, we have here in the village the strongest dreamer I have ever heard tell of.’
Now, this was all very interesting in a rather pointless way, but it was of no practical use at all.
‘Look,’ I said, more brusquely than I had intended, ‘none of this helps us to find Vita. Besides, you still haven’t told me why you upped and left me to eat all the dreams of the village for the past few days.’
A spasm of pain crossed Hawkweed’s face; then he sighed.
‘Orlando and Vita. Vita and Orlando. Silly names, silly cats. Why I have been cursed with two such idiot grandchildren, I will never know; and one of them destined to take over my job.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘I will, given your insistence, pass over the more theoretical aspects of this matter; but you may soon wish you had known more. Let us, then, get to the meat of recent events, since you have the attention span of a gnat.’
Clearly, he was feeling better.
‘I upped and left you to it, as you so eloquently put it, in order to protect you from the Dream, laddie.’ He emphasised the word with the rolling ‘r’ he used when particularly irritated with me. ‘It’s back, you see, Orlando: the one, the worst of them all. Only ever happens when the three of them come together, and she starts to lose her man again to the younger one, and panics.’
‘Which three? What do you mean?’ Now I was completely thrown.
Hawkweed stared at me as if were being deliberately obtuse. ‘The witch, her cousin and your Anna,’ he said succinctly. ‘The witch loves him; he loves Anna, and she – well, from her dreams. I’d say she loves him too. And that’s what sets it all in motion, yet again: their infernal triangle. Life after life after life they keep on making this pattern—’
‘But why,’ I interrupted rudely, wanting this to be over with, ‘why if they keep making this pattern can’t they see what they’re doing and stop it?’
The old cat shrugged. ‘Twists of time, twists of fate, who knows? The old one knows it all: she remembers each life; but the other two – I watch their dreams and still I’m not sure how much they recall. Little flashes, jolts of memory, but no sense of the pattern they make. The witch, though, she knows it’s coming round again, yet no matter what she does, it seems, still she loses the game. And she’s older now: her soul’s frailer. Her powers are not what they were. So when she feels that loss creeping up on her again, her terror grows, and so does the Dream. Now, it’s stronger and more destructive than it’s been in any of my lifetimes.
‘Yet I thought, in my arrogance, that if I could track it down at last, I might be able to put an end to it once and for all; and if that had been the case I would never have had to burden you with the knowledge of its existence, let alone enrol you in its pursuit. But, unfortunately, here I am,’ – he indicated his wounded body – ‘and it’s still out there, gaining strength. You may have noticed how over the past few days the people of Ashmore have been suffering more nightmares than usual. Nightmares breed nightmares, Orlando, and even with both of us working separately, we have not been able to catch them all; yet the more that are left, the more the Dream gathers its own momentum. Last night was the worst possible time your idiot sister could have picked on which to take her first trip on the wild roads.’
I looked away, feeling absurdly and needlessly guilty.
‘Do you know, Orlando, who took her on to the highways last night?’
I shook my head, though I had my suspicions.
‘The Dream is loose on the wild roads of Ashmore, laddie; and last night I tried to confront it. Had it not been for the young cat who was with Vita, I might have died.’
I stared at him.
‘I was searching up and down the little westway,’ he went on. ‘All night I’d been coming across disturbances in the air currents, dreams behaving in a strange fashion, tumbling in the wrong direction to the prevailing compass wind as if drawn by something altogether more powerful. Something more powerful than nature is an awesome thing indeed; nevertheless, I decided to follow them. All those convoluted little highways between the canal and the common, they were in turmoil by the time I arrived. Something unnatural was indeed there: I could sense it in my whiskers. By the time I got to the locus at the old holly, where the roads fan out into the village, my fur was standing on end, as if I had blundered into an electrical storm.
‘I turned a corner, and there it was: the Dream, flowing like the Great Fire, scorching the wild road around it; and behind it, trapped by a loop of burning highway, were two young cats; both female. I believe one of those cats was your sister Vita. It can be hard to perceive the identity of cats on the wild roads; but something about the eyes—’
He broke off.
‘And the other cat?’ I asked, too quickly.
‘I do not know who she was,’ Hawkweed said grimly. ‘It was all such... confusion. For, as I appeared, the Dream sensed an enemy and came straight for me. Vita’s companion leapt at it, knocking it away from me, though not before it had done some damage. Then there was howling and smoke and the highway writhing like a live thing, till it burst open, and I was thrown clear.’
I held my breath and waited.
Hawkweed sighed. ‘I believe it had not yet gathered its full power; or we would none of us have stood a chance.’
‘But what about Vita and her friend?’
My grandfather looked shamefaced. ‘I do not know, Orlando. I was in a bad way; even so, I tried to re-enter that wild road. But I was slow and disorientated, and by the time I had managed to crawl back inside, the Dream had gone, and so had those two cats; though I thought I might have seen just the flick of a striped tail in the distance. Despite my wounds I searched the area for hours, aided by the good friend you later found me with.
‘I fear, laddie, that Vita may have fallen prey to the Dream.’
I felt the blood drain from my face, my heart become chill. Surely he couldn’t mean—
‘Is she dead?’ I heard my voice: too loud, disembodied, nothing to do with me at all.
There was a scuffling noise; a faint thud, and a terrible shriek.
‘Dead?’
Dellifer had returned at just the wrong moment. The vole lay prone on the carpet between us like an accusation.
The old wet nurse confronted Hawkweed, eyes blazing. I had never seen a more discomfiting sight: it was as if a kitchen mop had suddenly gone feral. ‘Where is my foster child, Dreamcatcher Hawkweed? What has happened to my little girl?’
He quailed before her. ‘Ah, Delly, Delly,’ was all he could say.
I thought she would strike him then; but instead she drew herself up, spat with contemptuous accuracy into his open eye, and declared venomously: ‘You have never loved another soul but your own.’
Stumbling over the dead rodent in her urgency, she fled from the room. I heard an exclamation from downstairs as she bolted past Anna. Then she was gone.
‘I’m going after her,’ I cried.
My grandfather looked pained, but said nothing to stop me.
*
Dellifer was quick, but not as fast as a determined young tomcat. I caught up with her on the edge of Ashmore Common.
‘It’s my fault,’ she wailed. ‘First you; now your sister. I should have stood up to him when he took you for a dreamcatcher. I should have kept a better eye on Vita.’ A sob racked her. ‘I should never have let him bring me here!’
By ‘here’ I imagined she must mean Anna’s cottage, which she hardly ever left. ‘Nonsense,’ I said, as soothingly as I was able. ‘Dellifer, if you hadn’t come to us, we would have died.’
‘Perhaps it would have been better,’ she said in a strange tone, obviously in no mood to be reasoned with.
She turned from me, ran blindly on to the common, and hurled herself into the first wild road she came to. Dismayed, I flung myself after her. Inside, it was oddly quiet, as if even the highway winds had lost the will to blow. I rounded a corner, and there she was, small and white in the perpetual gloom. It took me more than a moment to register the wrongness of this. Then I stared and stared. Of all the cats I had ever seen on the highways, Dellifer was the only one to remain as she was in the outside world. No lion, no tiger or lynx, she – but Dellifer as she ever was: thin and white as a skein of string.
I came to a halt behind her, shaking. ‘You’re... you,’ I pointed out, stupid with shock.
She turned, cocking her head. I had forgotten how deaf she had become. From my great height I looked down at her. One of my paws could have crushed her flat, even by accident: and even as this peculiar thought came to me, I was overcome by her courage. To enter the wild roads at the best of times required fortitude; a strength of spirit made rather easier by the comforting knowledge that in entering, you would at once be transformed into your primal self, your inner great cat. To enter the highways knowing not only that they were in turmoil, but also that you had to do so in your frail domestic form, took a bravery I knew I could never aspire to.
‘They did things to me at that place,’ she said in a tone I had never heard from her before. She did not look at me as she spoke. ‘It was such a long time ago now. Many lives past. I was barely older than a kitten myself, and pregnant with my first brood. I don’t even recall now who the father was... not that it matters, given their fate. One of the old brutes she kept there, I suppose. Still remember the smell, though: ah yes. Old piss corroding metal cages. That awful stuff she brewed up. No cat should ever be allowed to smell such a thing. And to think the woman had some in our house, had the temerity to open it right in front of me...’
I had no idea what she was talking about now. Instead, I asked loudly, ‘So what happened to your kittens, then?’
‘Never got as far as that, my darling. Never fully born. But I’ve been producing milk on and off ever since the day she took them from me, in that life and in others since. If it had not been for old Hawkweed and his friend the fox, I’d be there still. I pray you will never be trapped in your own fate as I have been. I regard it as my curse. That, and this body I can never escape.’
The fox... A memory flickered at the edge of my thoughts. Foxes were red, weren’t they? The red of an autumn leaf, Dellifer had once said to me; the red of Reynard... The thought fled, to be replaced by a sudden searing understanding: Hawkweed had fetched Dellifer to us for her milk. It had never been her own choice. I felt stricken, and it must have showed in my face.
‘Not your fault, my dear, not at all. The young are never to blame for the sins of the old ones. And that’s why we must find Vita, my darling. She is an innocent in all this, and she must stay that way.’
And so we searched, Dellifer and I, up and down the highways of the village for hours and hours. It still being daytime out in the world, the crowd of dreams had yet to emerge, which made our progress easier; even so, our search made two things clear to me. The first was that the wild roads of Ashmore had been disarranged so catastrophically that even I was not entirely sure of where we might next emerge; the second was that there was no sign at all of Vita and Lydia.
I thought about Lydia a lot as we ranged around the highways. Dellifer was never one for idle chatter, and now, determined and despairing, every iota of herself concentrated on peering myopically through the gloom, she had not a word for me. Lydia, with her golden fur and her gleaming eyes: what sort of transformation overtook her as she entered the highways? I wondered. Hawkweed had mentioned her striped tail – a tiger, then, or a... surely something grand and gorgeous. What a pair we would make, together on the wild roads! I thought about the immense courage she had shown in saving my grandfather from the Dream and my heart swelled. No wonder she was so contemptuous of me, a sad dreamcatcher who could be distracted by some piddling human fantasy from mating with a creature so fine.
We came back, at last, to the confluence of roads that had used to debouch at the woodland pond on the edge of the old orchard. I could sense their geographical position had changed, but not by much. What did seem to have happened, however, was that more roads had been added: or perhaps some of the wider highways had been split by the violence of the Dream’s convulsion. A knot had occurred. We followed one small tributary, then another, and ended up back in the same place. We took a third highway, which crossed and recrossed itself until my head was entirely turned around. As we emerged into the confluence again, from a different direction altogether, we were able to make out a figure, sitting motionless in the dark. ‘Vita!’ Dellifer called, at the same time as I cried ‘Liddy!’ But as we approached, I saw at once that it was neither of these cats. Silver and barred, with ears that sprouted tufts of fur as feathery as spring barley, I knew her at once; and my heart sank like a stone.
This was the cat my grandfather had seen with my sister. This was the one who had saved him from the Dream: it was Millefleur, descended from a dreamcatcher herself, who had danced with me on the highways in her beautiful lynx form; Millefleur, whom I had spurned.
‘Millie!’ I called, and my voice rose into the still air like a howl.
Her head came up and she stared at us wildly, her eyes like lamps. She was crouched over something, guarding it between her front paws as if it was the most precious of objects. At once, Dellifer and I were running.
I suppose I had thought to see my sister lying there, injured, perhaps even dead; so I was mystified to find the lynx protecting what appeared to be a single silver ring, spotted with blood. Dellifer, however, did not appear mystified at all; instead she hurled herself at the lynx, spitting and hissing, claws out to rake and tear. ‘You!’ she shrieked. ‘You... harlot, you deceiver!’
I was entirely bewildered.
Millie batted the old cat away with a careful paw; claws sheathed, she held her at arm’s length, where Dellifer fizzed and bubbled like a witch’s familiar.
‘Stop this! I have done nothing to harm Vita—’
But Dellifer was not to be appeased. ‘Evil. You are evil. What have you done with her?’
I got between them and spoke loudly and distinctly into Dellifer’s better ear. ‘She would do nothing to harm Vita, Delly. I know her. She... she has a good heart.’
Now Dellifer rounded on me. ‘You would say that, wouldn’t you? I smelled her on you when you came back that night; just as I smelled her wicked temptress’s scent in the kitchen when she gave that... thing to Vita.’ She indicated the silver ring. I frowned, puzzled.
Finally, Millie lost her temper with the old cat. ‘You have a nerve, you old hag,’ she said coldly, and her eyes were steely, ‘to accuse me of smelling evil. Do you think to hide your own stench, by accusing others? I knew as soon as I came into that house where you had come from. Once the witch has touched you, you carry her smell always. You have the stink of death upon you, the touch of the Dream itself.’
At this, Dellifer gave an ear-splitting howl and, elbowing her way past Millie and me, fled down the highway and out into the world at a random exit.
I have to admit I could follow none of this exchange at all, but to see poor Dellifer further upset was more than I could bear. With a furious look at Millie, I turned and chased after her, yet again.
*
What happened next happened so suddenly I was never very sure of the sequence of events; nor even of the time period in which they took place. You will think me mad, I know, and I cannot blame you for it; but if I tell you that I saw Dellifer – long and thin and pale as a streak of light – run out on to the village’s misty main road, turn to look back at me as if I had called her name, and be bowled over under the wheels of a great dark vehicle, you might understand some of my confusion. A confusion helped not at all by the sight of a tall woman with long dark hair and a flowing black coat exiting the gleaming car and, reaching without hesitation beneath its gleaming chassis, extracting the limp body of a small white cat, which she smiled upon with great tenderness, before stowing it on the back seat and roaring away into the distance.
And this time when she looked at me and smiled, she appeared to have her full complement of teeth.