For the rest of that day Millefleur was my rock.
I was filled with fury, a glorious, intoxicating, dangerous fury; a fury that burned in my head like a sun; a fury that coursed through the muscles of my shoulders and jaws, filling me with raw and brilliant power as the two of us ran the length and breadth of Ashmore, running and roaring, as if to do so was to rage against the world.
She was my rock, because she would not let me stop: she understood, I think, that the mindless corporeality I had given myself up to was far preferable to the maudlin stupor I might otherwise sink into, left to myself and the knowledge that my whole world was falling apart before my very eyes. For with my grandfather gravely injured; my sister vanished; my stepmother killed not a dozen yards in front of me, without Millefleur and her wild energy, I think I might simply have cast myself into the nearest wild road and offered myself as a sacrifice to the Dream, in the hope that having taken the only able dreamcatcher in the area it might be propitiated and travel on to terrorise another area.
Ostensibly, we concentrated our efforts on searching for Vita – howling her name like wolves bereft – but secretly, all the while we went bowling down lanes, burrowing through bramble heaps, bursting through hedges, it was Lydia who was at the heart of my quest.
However, we found no sign of either of them; and what we did find was infinitely more disturbing. Scorched trees; burned grass. Mangled highways, trailing the residues of the life they channelled into puddles on the sodden, freezing ground; dead and broken-backed animals flung wantonly here and there as if by a massive hand. A rat, its hind legs trailing uselessly along the ground, made its painstaking, implacable way across the main road, on a beeline for its nest, as if the very action of reaching this familiar territory would heal its fatal wound.
‘Not even to a rat,’ Millie said below her breath. ‘This should not happen even to a rat.’
She took the thing cleanly between her jaws and carefully severed the vertebrae in its neck. Then she carried it, flopping out of either side of her mouth, and laid it in the ditch, where she covered it with moss. I watched all this, astonished, but said not a word. Between us, we despatched two badly injured squirrels and a buck rabbit; a crow and a bleeding badger cub, its head all caved in where it had been dashed against a tree. And then we ran and ran, as much to clear the stench of death from our heads as to cover the ground.
As last, heart pumping and lungs protesting, I found that I had to call a halt. Had I not, I think Millefleur would have run beside me without a word of reproach until her great heart gave out. I fell down on to my side, panting like a dog, and she joined me there, her breath steaming into the dark and freezing air.
‘Where are they, Millie?’ I managed at last through great heaving gasps. ‘Why is there no sign of them?’
She looked at me oddly then. ‘They?’
I realised my error and hastily covered my tracks as best I could. ‘Vita, I mean. Where can she be? How could any cat vanish so completely?’
The tabby-and-white held my gaze steadily, and I knew then that she could see right through my skull, into the selfish thoughts that lurked there, thoughts of a beautiful, arrogant, golden cat, not my own lost sister. ‘The highways have her,’ Millie said cryptically. ‘They have her now. We can do no more.’
I stared at her, aghast. ‘We can’t just give up on... her.’
Millefleur sighed. ‘I think we must, Orlando,’ she said quietly. ‘They have swallowed her down further than you or I can go: and if you keep on searching with such fervour, you’ll wear yourself to nothing, and what use will that be?’
*
Defeated, exhausted, we trailed back to the cottage. In through the cat-door we crept, into the dark and silent kitchen. And it was then I realised, with a terrible surprise and guilt, that I was ravenous: for there, where Anna always placed them, were the two food bowls on the floor beside the cupboards, and they had recently been refilled. Millie’s stomach growled like a bear’s. Her eyes gleamed, and then suddenly we were both applying ourselves with rapt attention, choking the dried pellets down as if they were caviar and we, beggars at a feast. We were just chasing the last few flavoursome morsels around the bottom of each bowl when Millie’s fur suddenly stood on end and she leapt away in shock. Still chewing, I looked up. I could see immediately why she’d reacted in the way she did, for there in the doorway was an apparition: a hunched, dark shape, moonlight reflecting from its single eye.
It was Hawkweed, my grandfather, Ashmore’s dreamcatcher – and a sorrier-looking cat I had never seen.
He faltered into the kitchen and now I could see the extent of the damage. One eye was swollen tight shut. His fur, customarily oily and unkempt, was bedraggled and disordered, streaked with dried blood. He favoured one hind leg; for the deep wound across the haunch on the other side still wept a noxious pale fluid. How he had even managed to get down the stairs, I could not imagine.
‘No luck, laddie?’
I shook my head. ‘She’s gone, Granfer. Vita’s gone.’
The old cat licked his teeth thoughtfully. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Thought so. Gone through the knot. Gone to ground.’ He took a pace towards me, saw Millefleur, and stopped dead.
‘Aha,’ he said, and his voice was hoarse and rasping, ‘my saviour, if I am not mistaken: the beautiful lynx?’ The grin he gave her was awful to behold, as if the muscles of his face were warring to express different emotions at once: mad fury; misery; a brave attempt at gallantry.
The sensible, competent Millie became strangely bashful and coy, and I began to perceive something of the sexual power my old grandfather had once wielded. I cannot say it pleased me much.
‘My father was a dreamcatcher, sir: it was my pleasure to help in whatever way I could.’
Hawkweed’s ears twitched. ‘Your father, you say?’
‘Fingal Whitethorn, sir.’
‘From up past Westley?’
She nodded.
‘Old Thorny!’ The visible eye went misty. ‘Fingal Whitethorn’s daughter, well I never. A fine dreamcatcher, your father was, my dear: light on his feet and fast as a viper’s tongue, and such a one for the ladies—’ here he caught himself in a most uncharacteristically sensitive fashion ‘—before he met your mother, of course.’
Millie grinned. ‘And for a long time afterwards, I fear, but she always knew it about him; he made no secret of his appetites.’
‘Saved by the father, and then again by the daughter,’ Hawkweed mused. ‘Now that must be some kind of record.’ He regarded Millie steadily, then brought the weight of that single-eyed stare to bear on me. ‘She’s a rare baggage, Orlando: she’ll do you well. Very well indeed.’
Millie flushed and looked away.
‘And there I was,’ he guffawed, ‘thinking you was some numpty lad mooning around after that little bit of golden fluff down at the canal: that girlie down on the boat where I gets my sardines. She’s no better than an alleycat, that one, for all her fine airs and graces. Even had the gall to give me the wink once. Lucky for her, I had other things on my mind.’ He licked his mangled lips.
Shocked to the bone at this horrible perspicacity, I opened my mouth to deny all, defend my beloved, challenge my grandfather’s lack of chivalry: then thought better of it, for had I risen to his bait I am sure he would happily have turned upon me and demonstrated his vicious temper. In his current condition, that was not wise.
Without missing a beat, the old dreamcatcher went on: ‘Now this fair maiden’s daddy, he wouldn’t have hesitated: he’d have been all over her like a vet’s fingers! Had a few scraps in our time, he and I, over the ladies, till he moved over to Westley. Damn good job for me he came back into Ashmore when he did, though, or I’d have been a goner.’
And he went on to tell us of his first, and almost fatal encounter with the Dream, many years before. ‘Thought I knew it all, I did. I’d been dreamcatching for the best part of a year, and nary a surprise or a problem. Then the nightmares started: little things at first – funny-looking monsters dreamt up by the kiddies; a few dead relatives and sucking pits. I welcomed the challenge at the time: bit of fun, I thought, at last. Then they began to get a bit stronger, a bit more frequent. Certainly kept me busy for a while. But nothing I couldn’t handle: I was pretty fit in those days.’ He grimaced at Millie. ‘Then this great fiery black thing appeared; led me a proper dance it did – all over Ashmore: aye, and further. Those highways that run from round the manor house to down near the common, they’re as tangled as a rat’s nest: follow one for any distance and you find yourself in Timbuktu – and not even this Tuesday! Some of ’em’ll take you right back to the days of Queen Bess, and beyond: witch-hunts and cat-burnings, not pretty at all...’
Now I had no idea what he was talking about. He must have received quite a blow to the head, I thought, from this latest episode, and I glanced anxiously at Millefleur, concerned that she was a witness to my grandfather’s obvious senility, but her attention was unwavering. Indeed, she watched my grandfather as if he were some kind of hero.
‘Ugly bastard it was, and stinking to high heaven. Finally ran it to ground out to the west of the village, in amongst the roots of that big old ash tree that came down in the last storm. Had the beggar cornered, but then it turned on me, kept multiplying all over the place: just didn’t have enough feet or mouths to keep it down, and it growing all the time. That was where your dad came in: he’d felt the vibrations all the way past Westley and knew it was trouble. Leapt on it, he did: a great big leopard with a fearsome jaw on him; but the thing saw him coming...’
Memory hazed the dark yellow eye.
‘Went straight down his throat, growing and growing. Choked him to death, and not a thing I could do to stop it. Then up it came again, spewing out of his face like streamers of black vomit; it gathered itself, knocked me stupid and hurled itself off down the roads again before I could come to.
‘Poor old Fingal. Knew he was dead as soon as I saw him – not a leopard any more, you see: just plain old Finn, that scruffy black and white lad.
‘And now it’s back. And you and I, laddie, have to go out there and face it.’
I stared at him in disbelief. ‘You must be out of your mind.’ The words came tumbling out before I could call a halt to them.
Hawkweed drew himself up, his undamaged eye crackling with fury. I thought that he really would strike me then – even in his invalid state – as he had when I was a recalcitrant kitten who crossed his will; and I am sure the same thought had occurred to him, for I saw one forepaw give a twitch of intent. But he just stood there, swaying just a little – the old warrior, survivor of a thousand highway skirmishes, battered and damaged by his latest encounter – and a mad battle-light shone fiery in his eye.
‘You coward!’ he roared. ‘You boneless, weak-kneed, shrinking puppy!’ Saliva shot out of his mouth, between the twisted teeth, and spattered on me: a tangible shower of invective. He trembled in his rage.
It took all of my resolution to square my shoulders to him and not cower away as he expected. ‘You are injured, Granfer. You are not fit to go out.’
‘There is no choice in this, Orlando,’ he growled. ‘I will go out there to find it, with or without you.’ He clenched his ruined jaw, took a staggering pace forward.
‘If you go alone, you will die!’ I cried, furious at his wilfulness.
He laughed. ‘With Delly gone, what’s left to me?’
I was horrified. ‘You knew?’ This latest piece of tragedy I had been hoping to keep from him until he was stronger.
‘You must think me stupid, laddie!’ He gave me a look of deepest contempt. ‘I felt her pass: yet you could not, standing barely ten feet away! I wonder, Orlando, will you ever really make a dreamcatcher? I think you do not have it in you.’
Then he pushed me firmly to one side and shambled past, his hind leg dragging, his tail kinked like a broken pennant. A few seconds later, the cat-flap clattered and he was gone.
Millie and I looked at one another helplessly.
‘I can’t let him do this alone.’
Millie nodded slowly. ‘If you go, I will come with you.’ It sounded almost like a threat.
‘No!’ This came out more forcefully than I had meant, but I was full of anger. I amended my tone. ‘Millie, you cannot even see the dreams – you will only be a hindrance to us—’
Now it was her turn to be angry. ‘A hindrance? Had it not been for me, that old reprobate would be dead by now!’
‘I know that, I do. But, Millie, if my grandfather and I pursue the Dream, who will look for Vita?’
She bowed her head, then her chin came up and she gave me a direct look that made me squirm. ‘That’s a cruel shot, Orlando. I feel responsible for your sister, and you know it. But you heard your granfer: Gone through the knot. Gone to ground. Vita’s gone. And with any luck so has that stuck-up tart from the canal you’re so worried about. And since you clearly don’t want me around, you lads – you dreamcatchers – may as well go and pursue your death or glory without me.’ And with that, she turned her back on me and marched outside, her tail defiantly high.
*
Out there, I found my grandfather clawing pathetically at the beech hedge. He had pushed one shoulder into the sparse branches and was now stuck, his strength failing. I crammed in behind him and flattened a way through until we were out into the next garden, our breath steaming like rivers into the freezing air.
A small orange cat, alarmed at the noise of our bulldozing efforts, watched our progress from the top of a shed. It was Ginge. Our eyes met, and I saw in his a shock of recognition, then his gaze slid away and he sloped off the roof and out of sight.
And so it was a few minutes later, that my grandfather and I were once more out on the roads of Ashmore Village, the dreamcatcher with his reluctant apprentice in tow. On the green in front of the pond, a long-legged tabby-and-white cat sat stony-faced and watched us go without a word. I knew from her slope-shouldered, ear-flattened demeanour that Millie did not expect to see either one of us again.
*
It was the coldest night I can ever recall. The moon sailed negligent and aloof behind high cloud, beaming her white light down upon the glacial chill of the ground, which pressed freezing upon our feet. Frost-blasted plants lay limp and blackened where we passed; and the night hours had made an arctic waste of the Ashmore pond, which had frozen over from shore to shore, all save one small pool where the scarlet tips of willow branches brushed a still-liquid surface. This area had been colonised by a sparse population of ducks and moorhens who clustered there in sullen silence, as if offended at having to share their own meagre body-heat with barely tolerated neighbours.
We walked for some time, on the surface of Ashmore: or rather, my grandfather hobbled and shuffled painfully along, spurning all my attempts to aid him, while I trudged unenthusiastically behind him with the cold setting deep into the bones of my face and legs.
It was, strangely enough, a relief to get into the wild roads. From hobbling invalid to great cat, I watched him transform as the energy of the highway entered him, coaxing out the jaguar within. The broken face filled out: the jaw grew long and heavy; the damaged eye sprung open to gleam as bright as any car’s headlamp. The only clue to his true injuries showed in a slight stiffness of the hind legs as he ran.
In addition, it appeared to be just a little warmer inside the highways than it was outside. It was usually bitingly cold on the wild roads, the winds bearing a bitter edge that would penetrate even the thickest of coats, but on this occasion, I remember noting that the temperature seemed less savage than normal, especially around those roads that bisected the common. However, I imputed no more sinister reason to this observation than to think it must mean my body was calibrating itself to the change between the outside world and the highways. Perhaps if I had paid more attention to what my senses were trying to tell me, we might have avoided disaster.
But disaster was pressed from my mind by the sheer difficulty of keeping up with my grandfather. Restored in body and spirit to his rightful quest, Hawkweed roared and leapt down the spiralling vistas of the village’s highways with all the awful vigour I remembered from those first days. We ran so fast, I could hardly believe he had time to take notice of any clue to the whereabouts of our quarry, but he galloped along, impervious to my existence, his paws thundering, muscles bunching and stretching, and hesitated not once as we reached confused junctions and confluences of roads. Even in their new configurations, where the Dream had tossed them about, or they had twisted to avoid it, he appeared to have no doubts, though by now I was entirely lost.
This disorientation was compounded by the fact that the highway winds, usually so consistent in their force and bearing, were blowing in all directions at once so that at one moment my mane flew into my eyes, then was blasted flat against my skull. It was an exhausting experience, this persistent battering of the senses; and made all the more frustrating by the complete absence of our quarry.
By now, it was dead of night, the worst time for nightmares, they say: the time, I shuddered to myself, when the Dream would be gathering more power to itself from the dreams attracted on to the highways from the sleeping village. It was unnerving, to say the least; but my grandfather, charging headlong down gloomy tunnels and tenebrous passages, seemed not one whit concerned for his own safety. Or mine.
At last, of all places, in the highway behind the church, he stopped.
He sniffed the air. Even I could tell, with my less tutored senses, that it had a faintly sulphurous taint; but Hawkweed was the master in such matters. He curled his black lip and gathered the odour high into the roof of his mouth where lies in cats a powerful olfactory organ. There, he trapped it with his great tongue, pressing it hard, as if to squeeze from it every iota of information. I saw him taste the air, if such a thing can be accomplished.
His pupils flared darkly, as if with sudden passion.
‘I knew it!’ he declared triumphantly. ‘It is her Dream again: it is the one. Ah,’ – he inhaled deeply – ‘the bitterness, the jealousy: oh, the anguish of it all!’
And then he was off again, with me at his heels, running now like a hound, his nose to the floor of the highway, tracking his prey, and all around us, the air grew warmer.
Then, suddenly, it was before us. At first, I could tell only by the way Hawkweed’s fur ruffled and then stood in spikes down his backbone; by the set of his head and the line of drool that fell slowly from his eager mouth. Then a deep rumble began in his chest, and before I knew it, my fur had also crested in its own primeval display of fear and challenge. I paced forward to stand beside my grandfather, and saw, for the first time, the Dream.
For now, it lay, pacific enough, curled into a twist in the highways as if resting. It was like no other dream I had seen: for it was black, and a dark red glowed at its heart like an ember in the middle of a sleeping fire. Where other dreams were gold and smooth as lozenges, this one was a tatterdemalion thing: a jagged, unruly mass of excrescences and tentacles. Even resting, it radiated a powerful heat, and at last I realised our error. This Dream was too terrible for any cat to defy: it had permeated the highways in a five-mile radius with its uncanny heat; it had broken many wild roads apart and diverted the course of others; it had smashed aside anything in its way with random violence, and now it lay before us.
‘Grandfather,’ I said softly, but if he heard me he did not acknowledge it.
Instead, he advanced upon the thing as if he thought to catch it sleeping and make an easier dispatch of it. His jaws opened wide and he angled his head for the best line of attack.
The Dream stirred.
Tattered black arms floated out from it to wave gently in the highway winds, like fronds of weed in a pool. The dreamcatcher threw back his head and roared, then with a mighty leap – a leap designed to culminate in a killing blow – Hawkweed fell like a hammer into the centre of the Dream. It shuddered and sighed under the impact. More tentacles unwrapped themselves from its mass and drifted outward as if in surrender. It gaped, as if it were yawning at the disturbance of its sleep.
The tatters rose lazily; and now, rather than weed, it was an anemone: a great flower of black with a beating red heart, a heart upon which my grandfather stood, biting down ferociously.
There was a sudden upheaval. The Dream rose up. It was enormous.
‘Granfer!’ I cried, for suddenly I could not see him: black upon black, the Dream had him in its embrace.
I hurled myself into the fray. My jaws closed on it and I was rewarded by a mouthful of foul juice, as caustic as bile. My tongue and gums smarted; my eyes stung. Still I bit down.
Terrible images assailed me then: cages of cats, howling like banshees; a woman with burning eyes butchering a kitten. A towering house: a cold, white room; the stench of death; the sweetness of decay. Maggots, blowflies, great knots of twining worms all poured out of it, to be followed by more abstract horrors – a chaos of limbs and eyes and teeth and hair, bound into abominable combinations, which unleashed themselves and shot apart. Clawed hands came snaking out to clutch and rend; and great shags of black hair whipped around our feet and wrapped our throats. The heat was appalling: it was as if what drove the demon was a fire at its heart. It vomited atrocity after atrocity at us, which hung in the air twitching and shrieking before drifting off into the highway winds like scraps of ash.
‘Keep fighting, Orlando!’ my grandfather cried from the depths of the monster. ‘Each wound saps its strength.’
As if to prove his point he raked the Dream viciously with a razored paw. Black fluid bubbled out until it writhed and wailed. We fought on, and on, and all the while, the moon dipped lower in the sky beyond the wild road, heralding the possibility of an early dawn; but I feared that if we did not defeat it soon, we would never see it.
There came a moment when I thought we had our enemy beaten: lion and jaguar, our heads met, jaws clashing, as if the Dream had somehow emptied itself out into the air and left us biting on a hollow sac. I raised my head in anticipation of a victory, and even as I did so, I realised my mistake: for all the Dream had done was to withdraw itself into one corner of its membrane as if gathering its strength for a final onslaught. Black streamers came hurtling out of it, wrapped themselves around my grandfather and began to tighten their hold. His eyes went wide with shock.
‘Grandfather!’ I yelled, and gathered my hind legs to spring into the mêlée.
I got no further. Something was holding me by the tail. I whipped around, expecting to find myself entwined by hellish tentacles, but there, behind me, its sharp teeth meeting in my flesh, its feet planted foursquare against my leverage, was the burnished creature I had seen the previous day, aiding my grandfather as he limped across the common.
I roared at it, but it did not let go. A mad light burned in its tawny eyes. I whipped around in fury, swiping at it with huge forepaws, but it danced neatly sideways.
‘Get off me!’ I yowled in frustration, for my grandfather was now in the throes of the Dream, but all the fox did was to grin and constrict those inimical jaws a further notch.
What happened next will haunt me forever. I remember it only in a series of flickering images: the Dream rearing up so that the highway was forced to arch above it: my grandfather thrashing in its grasp; the highway beginning to tear itself apart under the force of their struggle, silently, like the teeth in a zipper unravelling one by one; a sudden roar of hot wind which scorched the whiskers off my face; then being whirled into the air as the highway convulsed, and falling at immense speed. The fox fell past me and vanished from view; but other images came. I do not know whether they were real or in my head alone, for they were very strange. I saw the world outside the highway, spiralling around and around; at one moment full of black light and white frost, then bright with August sunshine; the cottages by the pond crouching in the darkness were replaced by haycarts in an open field and people sweating as they worked in breeches and long dresses; empty trees stood stark against a moonlit sky, but crows rose cawing into blue air out of a giant, green-faced oak...
And then the ground – hard, frozen, cold as stone – came up and hit me.
I lay there, breathing hard, disorientated and confused.
Everything was deathly quiet: for a second. Then all hell broke loose. The gentle little highway that ran behind the church, past the pond and out to Ashmore Common was being ripped apart. It arched, maybe twenty feet above the frozen pond, almost translucent in the night air, and great rends showed in its sides through which spilled gouts of black and violent jets of steam. Inside it, two figures were locked in struggle, one holding the other with many arms, worrying at it as a terrier will worry at a rat.
One more shake and a single black shape came plummeting out of the broken highway. It was Hawkweed, free of the Dream at last. Twenty feet up and on his back, I saw him twist expertly, with the age-old skill and instinct of the falling cat. His tail whipped the air; his legs swivelled and splayed. Feet first, he hit the frozen pond.
For a moment he stood there, incongruously magnificent: a huge black jaguar, limned with silver light, roaring his defiance at his retreating enemy. Then a zigzag of cracks snapped their way across the ice, and down he went.
Without a thought for my own safety, I ran straight out over the crust towards him, my paws skidding uncontrollably on the pond’s slippery skin. It took the momentum out of my charge, and though I was more fortunate than my grandfather (for even thin ice will bear the weight of a small domestic cat) by the time I reached the jagged hole where he had gone down, all I could see, far below in the murky depths, was the amber light dying out of one outraged eye.
*
I do not know how long I sat there, staring into the dark, weed-tangled water, calling my grandfather’s name; but by the time I finally gave up all hope, the moon had gone and there were icicles in my fur.
The rage that had consumed me earlier that day deserted me when I needed it most. In place of the burning sun of fury I had felt at Dellifer’s needless death, all I had left at the thought of Hawkweed’s dramatic end was a cold pit of dread, hanging heavy inside me. I had failed my own grandfather. We had had the old enemy in our jaws, and I had let it go at the crucial moment. If I could have offered myself to the Great Cat then in place of the old dreamcatcher, I would happily have done so, for I was indeed the useless, snivelling, weak-kneed puppy; the fool of fools; the coward of cowards; all those things of which he had so often accused me.
As the cold deepened, my sense of horrible anticipation grew heavier. Slow and exhausted, it took me a long time to understand the irrevocable reason for my dread. It was not just that I had failed Hawkweed; it was that now he was finally gone, I was alone. Alone, to bear the burden he had been grooming me for all this while.
I was now the sole dreamcatcher of Ashmore, and as such I was facing a terrible challenge. It was now my fate, and mine alone, to hunt down and eat the Dream that had killed my grandfather, as it had killed so many dreamcatchers before him.
Weary in body and soul, I dragged myself to my feet. My legs and rear were numb with cold as I slipped and slid my way awkwardly across the pond to the rushes at its edge, but by the time I had reached the churchyard, hot aches had begun to flare up inside my skin. Strangely enough, the pain from this return to feeling proved to be all I needed to ignite my resolve.
*
Even in the grim light before dawn, the Dream was not hard to track.
I did not even have to use the highways to follow its destructive progress. Scorched trees, sere grass, flattened bushes: the Dream had torn through the village like a whirlwind. A large white dish dangled uselessly off one of the cottages on the old terrace; Christmas wreaths had been whipped off doors; small branches lay scattered in the road. I found the blond twins’ pet guinea pigs with blood oozing out of their eyes and nose, their sturdy cage a mess of chicken wire and splintered wood, their bedding straw strewn all over the garden. A chimney had collapsed through the roof at one of the alms cottages, and at the corner of the lane that led to the manor house a small wire-haired terrier stood barking madly, its lead wrapped around a broken lamp-post, its owner, who had presumably suffered a disturbed night and had risen in the early hours to take its restless dog for a walk, lying insensible beside it.
This last act of destruction seemed to have taken some of the sting out of its havoc: from here its path became hard to track. But I knew now where I was going: I knew where it had come from, and where it was returning, and I started to run.
*
There were lights on in the old manor house, but the Dream was not inside. As I crept through the towering stone gateway, I could see how a baleful glow dully illuminated its trail across the gardens. Skirting the open ground, I ran quickly towards the cedar where I had caught the dream I had followed from Lydia’s home, trying to keep as much under cover as I could manage. To the far east, a corner of sky was showing a glimmer of red light, a tremulous promise of dawn.
The Dream drifted languidly around the corner of the manor house and disappeared from view.
I seized my opportunity and galloped up the garden until I reached the herbaceous borders. From inside the house, I could hear raised voices, but I was past the stage of caring what people said or did to one another when they were conscious. Moving cautiously, I skirted the corner just in time to see the Dream float over the old orchard wall. I watched while it sailed aimlessly over the naked branches of the fruit trees, casting a morbid light, the unnatural antithesis to a shadow, as it passed, and then, brushing the wall on the other side, fell out of sight once more.
Cautious to the end, I walked around three sides of the orchard before catching up with my quarry, where it hovered over a collection of low-lying hedges, cut close and neat to form a complicated pattern. Over the centre of this convolution it bobbed gently, its streamers hanging from it like some particularly virulent jellyfish.
Then it floated to the ground, as if it had finally reached its destination.
With my tail low, walking down on my hocks, I crept around the edges of the knot garden. It took a little while to find an entrance, and when I did, I found I had to weave a path dictated by the complex planting, if I was to stay out of sight. Who knew what senses the Dream might possess? I did not intend to test the numerous eyes I had seen jumbled in its midst.
Approaching the middle of the pattern, I risked a glimpse over the hedges, and there was my enemy, a pool of black, pulsing quietly in the centre of the maze, as if recharging its energies.
I wasted no time. Had I stopped to think for even a moment, I might just have taken to my heels, and not stopped running till I was past Ashmore, into Westley and far, far beyond. Had I stopped to think, it might have occurred to me that out here beyond the wild roads I was no more than a small domestic cat, singularly lacking in the armoury with which I had failed to stop the Dream before. But I had the heart of the lion, if not its weight and size, and I launched myself upon the monstrosity with all twenty claws extended and my jaws open wide.
It was like falling upon a creature that should have been long dead, for all it smelled and gave beneath me, but even so, it squealed like a rabbit when an owl breaks its back and twisted in panic beneath my grip. I felt its panic, and it fuelled my efforts, so that I bit and ripped and swallowed and tried to ignore the burning liquids that shot from the thing, and the shreds of horror that peeled away from its bulk, biting back at me with discorporate mouths. I gulped down its bitter guts, blanking my mind against the images with which it tried to break me; all but one. It was failing, and I could sense my victory, when it threw up an effigy that set my heart racing: a small golden cat, held in a mechanical vice, rolling her beautiful eyes in pain and despair.
It was Lydia.
I blinked and stared, my teeth still embedded in the Dream’s membrane, but the image burrowed away from me and out of sight. Frenzied, I went after it, burying my head in that noxious sac so that vile fluids burst open, soaking into my fur, my ears, my nose. I felt myself choking. I felt the Dream’s glee.
It began to constrict, as if every remaining part of itself was a muscle. The world started to darken around me. I struggled to breathe. So this is the end of it all, I thought dully: first Dellifer, then Hawkweed, and now the hopeless apprentice dreamcatcher...
Then there was a cry and something thumped hard into one side of me, and a second later, something else slammed into the other flank. My head shot back out into the air and I rolled, gasping, to the ground. Black stars filled my eyes. A terrible caterwauling split the night: a high-pitched yipping; a bubbling yowl, and the moaning wails of the Dream under assault. I staggered to my feet, only to find the fox who had prevented me from saving my grandfather now, inexplicably, savaging my enemy. And beside him, up to her elbows in black bile, was my friend Millefleur.
My heart welled up inside me and I set to again with renewed will. Between the three of us we drove the thing around that maze. It tried to flee, but found itself hemmed in, the fox blocking its exit in one direction, while Millie and I attacked it from another.
The Dream did not go quietly. It thrashed and shrieked, and lashed out with its ragged tentacles, but at last we got it cornered.
‘Orlando,’ the fox said, addressing me for the first time. ‘This unnatural thing must be yours to despatch. It is your task: it was what you were born and raised to do. You are the seventh Dreamcatcher: it is the Seventh Dream. I know this better than most: it has been my task, and that of your grandfather, to ensure you were brought safely to this point in fate and time. Only you can kill it, Orlando; and only here.’
I stared at him, still muddled from the lack of oxygen and the poisons I had inhaled. The image of Lydia, bound in her world of pain, tormented me, and in the end it was that which drove me forward, a feral grin stretched across my face. I leapt upon my enemy for the last time, bit it to the core and felt it burst its viscera over me with a savage satisfaction. I think now that I had somehow decided that Liddy was trapped inside it, and that by rending it in such a manner I would somehow release her from its toils; but all that emerged from the Dream, at last, was a sigh of anguish, even of relief.
I lay, stunned and exhausted, in a stinking pool, the bile drying to tacky peaks in my fur in that freezing dawn, gluing my eyelids shut. Millie sat beside me, and with much spitting and many frank expressions of disgust, started to groom my spattered face. The fox gazed down at me over her shoulder.
‘You did well, Orlando,’ he said, his voice husky. ‘Hawkweed would be very proud.’
But I could not think straight. I barely knew who or where I was. I opened my mouth, but all that came out was, ‘Lydia—’
Millefleur’s head shot back as if I had bitten her and her eyes became unnaturally bright. She emitted a small, strangled cry, then turned and ran.
The fox gave me a disappointed look. ‘Alas, a hero; but still a fool.’
I struggled upright and stared after Millie’s disappearing form, her tabby fur eloquent with the new sun’s red light as she fled across the lawns, and a terrible, inexplicable sadness flooded into me.
‘But, why?’
The fox shook its head. ‘Females are complex, jealous creatures, my friend. And males are stupid and blundering. It’s a rather unfortunate combination. One of Nature’s rare mistakes.’
‘Like the Dream?’
The fox looked at me curiously. ‘You really are the fool your grandfather said you were. I thought he exaggerated. I said, “Give the lad a chance, he’ll learn: it’s his destiny to learn.” However, I must say that you’re slower even than I expected, which is most alarming.’
This pleased me not at all. I was just about to ask him who the hell he thought he was, to appear and disappear at will and issue such ungenerous pronouncements, when I heard a door creak open behind me.
‘Run!’ the fox cried urgently, and took to his heels.
But as if to set the final seal of logic on his judgement, I was, inevitably, too slow. A naked crone had emerged from the house and when she saw me, she smiled. I quailed before her and my paws made pathetic little mimes of running as she bent to examine me. I closed my eyes as if to banish her presence, but a pair of hands caught me firmly around the ribs, taking the last of my precious breath, and though I struggled feebly I was hauled up and away and borne into the house my grandfather called the Nonesuch.
The last observation I could make before unconsciousness took me was this: I recognised that crone’s mouth; that hair, those eyes. I had swallowed them down, in all their vile, myriad forms, a dozen times in the past hour alone.