There it was again: suddenly a strong whiff.
Something old and powerful, old and sad…
My eyes snapped open. Anna was standing with her back to me, facing the broken chair and the wooden thing that lay upon it. I was sure, without having any understanding of how I knew this, that some part of whatever it was that had smelled so strong to me in the dream was now in her hand, close to her face. In a minute she would turn and I would see what it was she had found, and I knew then with absolute certainty that I did not want to see it at all. A convulsion of disgust shook me, a ripple of reaction that ran from the crown of my head to the tip of my tail. Before she could move, I got to my feet and quickly padded out of the room, aware that if I were to look back over my shoulder, I would see Anna staring after me, the object held wonderingly in her hand.
I did not look back. Instead, I ran down the corridor, fled down the stairs and hurtled into the kitchen, where I surprised whichever occupant was in residence. There was a flurry of activity, then a small blue shape leapt past me and on to the table.
‘What’s the matter, Uncle O?’
I looked up. It was Caterina. She was sitting on a pile of cookbooks, her tail curled over the edge, her left paw, which was clearly on the mend, set tentatively before her on the table. Her eyes were round with surprise.
‘Hello, Squash.’
At the sound of her pet name she grinned at me and relaxed. ‘Your fur went funny,’ she said. ‘It was all spiky. I thought you were getting chased by something.’ She paused, uncertain of her ground. ‘A… dog, or something.’
I laughed. ‘No dogs here. Squash.’
‘Then what was it?’ Trust Caterina to be so insistent.
I looked around to make sure we were not overheard. ‘A smell.’ It sounded ridiculous even as I said it, but Cat looked unperturbed. ‘A musty smell,’ I went on, ‘musty, and… perished.’ I stopped. That wasn’t it; not quite. ‘But somehow still alive,’ I finished inadequately.
Cat looked at me oddly. ‘Foul,’ she supplied.
I stared at her. ‘Dusty and old, and with a tang of human to it.’
We both shivered.
*
In the middle of the storm that afternoon, the two men who looked like one came back. Something about them – their sharp eyes, their quiet voices, their intent expressions; or maybe just their identical smell – made me uneasy; and not just me, for an hour or two later I heard Anna’s voice raised against them and the angry sound of her quick heels on the wooden floor. Even when they had gone, pulling away down the drive in the huge silver machine that growled like a great beast, their presence seemed to linger in the house. There was some tension between Anna and John after that: the air appeared to crackle with it like the aftermath of the lightning I had watched from the scullery window. In the next couple of days this edginess seemed to insinuate itself into all the other occupants of the house. Scraps broke out between Belly and Letty, then between Letty and Cat, who had foolishly tried to intervene. The baby wailed and grizzled through the night, causing Anna to have to get up and tend to her, though it seemed that no matter what she did, Ellie would not be appeased. Dreams came thick and fast on the wild roads around the house, and I wore myself thin with exhaustion hunting them down and despatching every last one.
One night, disturbed by Eleanor’s incessant howling, I watched John take his reluctant turn with the baby, and marvelled at how a child that had for hours been little more than a writhing, shrieking thing that would not be picked up and comforted by its mother could so abruptly become still and tranquil in the presence of its father. All he had to do, evidently, was to speak to her softly, then pick her up and she became as pliant as a kitten. They sat together on the chair by the cot, John looking out through the uncurtained window into the mysterious shadows of the garden and Ellie resting with her head over his shoulder, half asleep and half not, the moonlight making silver snail trails of the path of her tears. I sat there for a few moments more, soothed by the sudden welcome silence, and applied myself to removing an annoying burr that had lodged itself in the tangle of fur under my left haunch. I had just got the elusive thing between my teeth and was starting to prise its little hasps clear, when there was a movement in the room behind me.
‘Shall we go and see Orlando?’
I heard John say something which involved my name, then he was moving up and away from the chair, and the baby was awake and watching me with those wide green eyes of hers. I observed them come towards me – a creature with two heads that moved quietly through the dark. Stilled by surprise, one paw poised between rest and flight, suddenly I found I could not move.
John knelt beside me and set Ellie down on her feet. She gleamed at me, then reached out with one hand.
‘That’s right,’ John said. ‘Pat him nicely.’
The baby lurched at me. Something cold banged down painfully into the top of my skull, then rattled away on to the floor. As I spun round to see what it was that had hit me there burst from behind me a monstrous giggle.
‘Bad girl,’ I heard John say. ‘Naughty Ellie. Didn’t you want your toy?’
On the floor before me lay a complicated shiny black thing. Part of it had sprung apart as if broken, and from inside it a handful of dark stuff had scattered across the bare boards like a grotesque collection of spiders’ legs. I sniffed at the strange bundle, then jumped back, sneezing. It had a reek to it: musty but still vigorous, still imprinted with its own clear signature. Whatever it was had certainly once been alive. But it had nothing to do with spiders.
I knew the smell of it, but I could not place it. It haunted me for the rest of the day, but by dawn the next morning I knew only too well what it was and wished I did not.
*
That night I completed my first excursion around the village’s highways, having dealt with a number of small and relatively harmless dreams. Most of them were children’s nightmares, in which nebulous monsters loomed out of the golden dream sacs, then dissipated to nothing at the first bite; but some had been more serious. In one, a man had stood in the path of a thundering beast, bigger than a car by far, all hot metal and screeching and burning oil. He had remained there, unable to move, time and again as it had come for him. Time and again he went down in its tracks and turned to see the same event occurring from another angle, from his blind side, from behind, spinning to meet it face to face. It was a hard dream to catch and harder still to swallow. The metal beast, though it dwindled as soon as the sac was opened, tasted foul and bitter; and the man fought me as he passed. The ghosts of his screams haunted my inner ear for hours, even though I knew the dreamer whose nightmare I had swallowed now lay quietly in his bed, snoring in untroubled sleep. In another, a woman knelt before a tall, fully dressed man and began to divest herself of her clothes, her gaze never leaving his face. Off came her coat and her shirt, and the thin, strappy thing she wore underneath. Her breasts were large and golden-white, the nipples like flower buds. Through her eyes I watched him looking at her, calm and dispassionate, unmoved by her vulnerable pale flesh. She cupped her breasts in her hands and offered them up to him, but all he did was to blink and frown as if puzzled, then take a step backwards. With a moan, she pulled at the skin till blood came; then she reached inside the cavity she had opened and held out her hands to him. They were red and wet, and full of something that beat and twitched. He stared at it for a moment, then shrugged and turned away. I swallowed him first and he tasted of nothing at all.
After that, the wild roads had been quiet and I had returned home. All the lights were out and the moon was high over the house, gliding over the tall chimneys. It was just past waxing point, a strong three-quarter moon, and it lit my way as clearly as a winter sun. So when Grizelda leapt out at me from the cover of the rhododendrons I was not taken by surprise, much to her dismay. ‘Hello, Griz,’ I said, before she had even had time to hiss at me.
‘Oh,’ she grumbled, ‘you’re no fun.’
I grinned
. Griz was a big cat and older than me by some years, but she was attractive all the same, with her slanting golden eyes and soft belly. ‘Sorry.’
‘On your own again, are you?’
I looked at her. ‘Just me and my shadow.’
‘Fancy some company?’ She winked at me, her meaning suddenly clear.
‘I can’t,’ I spluttered, suddenly as embarrassed as a yearling boy. ‘I’m on duty…’
She roared with laughter so that her brindled coat jounced and gleamed. ‘Chasing moonbeams again, are you?’
‘I’ve got work to do,’ I said carefully. ‘Dream-catching.’ She looked at me askance and I knew she didn’t believe a word of it. Like many of the cats we’d rescued she’d been bred in the laboratory and knew next to nothing about the world outside. ‘Making sure the dreams don’t damage the highways. It’s my task, as the Dreamcatcher of Ashmore,’ I finished lamely. I sounded pompous even to myself.
‘You should be concerning yourself with more than dreams, my lad,’ she said, and her tail flicked with impatience. ‘Fine fellow like you and no kittens to your name.’
I stared at her.
‘Well, anyone with half an eye can tell that them little blue girlies ain’t nothing to do with you,’ she carried on cheerfully. ‘Seen a lot of strange things in my time, but never a blue kitten come from an orange father. It wouldn’t be natural, would it?’
I regarded her warily. ‘So you know who their father is, then?’
‘Oh, yes. We all do, the girls out here and me. Her ladyship’ – she cocked her head at the house – ‘may give herself airs and pretend she’s the cream on the milk, but some of us know different. Bred her to the Russian, she did, the witch.’
‘The Russian?’
‘Big blue chap. Witch’s best stud beast. Handsome in his way. Wouldn’t have said no myself, in different circumstances, if you know what I mean. But not like that.’ She shuddered.
I found myself trembling. ‘Didn’t she have any choice, then?’
The big cat gave a short laugh. ‘Not the first time, she didn’t.’
I looked at her stupidly. ‘The first time?’ I echoed. ‘She went to him more than once?’
‘She didn’t take the first time. And, silly girl, suddenly all she wanted was kittens. So she offered to go in Fig’s place the next time the witch came. Persuaded Fig to feign illness, then wailed and sang like she was on fire. She didn’t know what the woman did to them, you see, the kittens, I mean.’ Griz’s face hardened at the memory. ‘She soon lost her eagerness when she found out. Too late by then, of course, or it would have been if you hadn’t come and rescued us.’
I remembered the cold room crammed with cages; the reek of urine and fear, the dull eyes of the prisoners. All those cats; all those lost kittens…
‘What did the witch do to them?’ I asked then, though I hadn’t meant to. I didn’t even want to know.
Grizelda’s golden eyes were glazed now. She was staring at a point above my head and suddenly I could see the toll her experiences had taken on her. She was older than I had thought, for there was grey around her ears and the fur was thinning on her forelegs. ‘She took three broods from me and four from Evie, before she died. Brood after brood after brood and no way out of it. I still hear my lot, each voice distinct, crying for me as she took them away. Never saw any of them again.’
I could think of nothing to say. A pause fell between us, lengthened, became uncomfortable. A night bird flew overhead, the moonlight making of its wings a silver cowl. I watched it circle the garden silently, then slip away over the dark yew hedge and into the woods beyond, and wished I too could soar up and away from the dark places of the world…
‘Boiled them, she did.’ Griz’s voice cracked through my reverie and for a moment I thought I had misheard her, but when I dropped my gaze from the night I found her watching me with an intense focus, her eyes glittering as if rain had suddenly fallen from a clear sky. ‘That evil woman. She boiled them, my first kits. Three of them, there were: a little girl same colour as me and two dark boys. She took them from me after their first feed. You could hear…’ She stopped and after a moment I could hear her trying hard to stifle a sob.
I hung my head. I knew how the man had felt now, the one in the dream rooted to the spot as the machine bore down on him again and again. Something in me had known this – if not in the appalling detail revealed by Grizelda, then in the rough shape of things – something visceral in me, something without words, had recognised disaster when it chanced upon it, there in that grim courtyard. I stared at the ground and found myself selfishly wishing I had not come this way home, that I had skirted the lawn and run up along the orchard wall, and maintained my foolish ignorance. But even as I thought it, I felt the shame rise in me, that I could try to avoid this truth simply by not thinking about it, when Griz and Liddy and the other cats in the laboratory had lived through it and gone on living with the knowledge and, in Lydia’s case, the results of the experiment. That took a great deal more courage than I had in me, I suspected.
After a while Griz regained her composure and started to speak again. When I looked up, her eyes were clear and sharp, her jaw set like a tomcat’s ready for a brawl. ‘The boiling didn’t suit her purpose, though, it seems. She never bothered with boiling the rest, though I dare say something equally terrible happened to them. She boiled up something in that room, though, that much I can tell you. I’ll never forget the smell of it, not if I live to be twenty.’
‘The smell of what?’
It was Caterina, ears pricked and face sharp with attention.
Griz turned to face the newcomer with remarkable speed, given her size. ‘Old chicken carcass I chanced upon behind the dustbins. Squash, so full of life that smell was, it could almost walk.’ She laughed quickly; too quickly.
Cat regarded her suspiciously. ‘I’m sure that’s not what you were talking about,’ she said primly. ‘I can tell when adults think they’re being clever in hiding things from me. But if you don’t want to tell me, that’s your business. However’ – she fluffed herself up – ‘I didn’t come here to talk to you; I came to find Orlando, to tell him something important.’
Griz gave Caterina what she would have called ‘a look’, then swished her tail from side to side to show her annoyance and headed back into the depths of the rhododendrons. ‘Remember,’ she called to me over her shoulder, ‘if you need some company, you know where to find me.’
Caterina’s eyelids composed themselves into two straight lines, and beneath them the warm amber eyes turned to hard topaz. I knew that expression from long contemplation of her mother: it was one that spoke of being upstaged, of having lost a carefully fought advantage; of jealousy.
‘What was so important that you had to be rude to old Griz?’ I asked.
Cat glared at me. ‘I thought that since you’re supposed to be our dreamcatcher, you might like to know that there’s a big fiery dream caught in the Long Corridor.’
I looked at her aghast, then gathered my haunches under me and fled up the lawn. I pelted through the cat door so fast I skinned an elbow on the way through, slipped over on the quarry tiles and skidded into the maze of hallways beyond the kitchen. But when I reached the Long Corridor there was no sign of the dream that Cat had reported, or of any other disturbance. The newly plastered walls were bland and unthreatening, now that the rows of old portraits had been removed, and gave back nothing to my questing senses other than the pervasive smell of chemicals and something vaguely faecal, something that reminded me oddly of the fields beyond the canal on the way to Glory Farm where the large black-and-white animals moved slowly across the green, cropping the grass with their big yellow teeth. I was comforted by the smell, for it was not the one I had come to dread, but something more natural and somehow cleaner. And it was a relief to me that the paintings had been taken down. I had always found them disturbing in a way I could not explain – it might have been their age, the way the old surfaces had craz
ed and yellowed, and then darkened to an almost uniform black-brown so that it was hard to make out any details, as if time itself had deliberately laminated them, trapping the dirt and dust of centuries inside untold layers of grime in order to obscure and withhold the impressions they carried. I was particularly glad that the portrait of the woman with green eyes – which seemed to be the only portrait out of them all that had been regularly cleaned – had been put away; for I could sense that dead gaze on me whenever I walked beneath it, following me with a questioning smile, as if taunting me with a connection I had failed to make.
At the top of the corridor I turned the corner and found myself in the Painted Room. Here, I felt the air shiver as if agitated. A faint scent of char curled around my nose.
I opened my mouth to scent it better and was invaded. Acrid and violent, the smell of smoking hair and burning fur insinuated itself through me, and suddenly I was back in that same room, the girl in the big boots and her man in the leather jacket behind me, and the awful burning upstairs, and I was yowling at the top of my voice that Anna and John were trapped in the chamber with the witch, but the people were being dense and going the wrong way, and the air was thick with smoke, the fumes were in my lungs and my fur was on fire…
‘Get up, get up!’ Cat nosed at me furiously. ‘What are you doing, lying down here, Uncle Orlando? The dream is getting away.’
And just as suddenly I was back in myself again, and the scent of burning was faint and distant: the scorching of a dream globe and no more, reminiscent of the whiff made by melted candlewax, though stronger, more animal. I followed the scent of it and there, in the top corner of the room, pitching itself awkwardly against the ornamental coving, my prey hovered unsteadily. If it had started golden, as other dreams do, it had long ago lost its innocence. It hung there, a baleful hunter’s moon of a dream, all blood-orange and fire, its outer membrane crossed with veins of black as if poisoned by its own contents.