‘Never mind,’ Caterina was cooing. ‘We’re here now. It’s all right, now.’
The creature shifted uncomfortably at our arrival and turned its head to regard us. Its eyes were as dull as currants. It regarded us grimly, uncomprehendingly, then turned away again as if negating our very presence.
It was the Besom. The last time I had seen her she had certainly been old and worn; but now she was little more than a wraith. The spirit had – in the weeks since our last meeting – simply gone out of her, leaving behind this terrible, dying husk, less cat than carcass.
‘Ma,’ I urged. ‘Ma, it’s Orlando. Speak to me.’
Again the uncomfortable shifting of weight and this time there emerged a whisper as scratchy as teasel.
‘What did you say, Ma?’ I encouraged.
The old cat blinked at me and her eyes were dull with reproach. ‘Go away,’ she said more distinctly. ‘Go away and let me die in peace.’
*
The old lady who fed the Besom had mysteriously gone away, it turned out. She had last been seen one evening climbing awkwardly, with the aid of two tall men in dark clothing, into a large white van whose blue light had strobed quietly through the holly, casting a bewildering maze of jagged shapes across the already neglected lawn. She had not returned. No one came. The house had remained cold and closed. Those who prided themselves on knowing such things said she’d died, but Ma, who had a nose for death, was unconvinced. She’d waited patiently through the first week, sleeping in the front porch to ensure that she would be the first to welcome the old woman home, but she had not reappeared. Ma grew hungry and weak. She drank rainwater out of the deep, furred leaves of umbellifers. She ate slugs and late-summer beetles worn to a slow daze by the passage of the year. A rabbit run over on the road outside sustained her for a week, even though she had to stand off two magpies and a crow for the unappetising leavings. The crow had eventually given up and flown off, unimpressed by the increasingly flattened corpse, leaving the magpies to leer at her from the hawthorn opposite the cottage. The knowing gleam in their blue-black eyes gave back the clearest of messages: we can wait; you’ll be next.
Driven as much by a determination to thwart the carrion birds as by any true wish for survival, Ma – a proud cat not suited to the indigent life – had been reduced to making door-to-door calls to the nearest houses to beg for food. She had been chased off by dogs, bullied by farm cats a quarter her age and terrorised by children with fireworks. Pickings had at best been slim and even sleep had offered no escape from her plight. Within moments of closing her eyes, exhausted after another day spent on her nerves, she dreamed of food. These were not comfortable dreams. Increasingly, the food that came to her at night, or in snatched naps in daytime hedges, reversed the natural order of the world upon her. Tins of cat food gloatingly revealed their nightmarish origins; sardines reared up out of saucers and tried to swallow her head first; the long-dead rabbit, scoriated and dried to a dark-red jerky, lifted its mashed skull and gnashed gleaming white jaws at her. It was all too much to bear.
At last she had crawled away into the thickest undergrowth, determined that the magpies should neither be able to see nor pick at her, and willed herself to die. She had been there for four days now, but death was evasive.
Caterina was stricken. ‘I saw the rabbit,’ she said at last. ‘On the highway that runs across the Common, just after full moon, about a week ago. It was horrible, and it laughed at me, all stretched and red, all sinew and exposed bone, but I ate it down all the same.’
The Besom opened her mouth as if to cough, but no sound emerged and at last I realised she was smiling.
‘Little dreamcatcher, eh? I wondered why the rabbit hadn’t been back to taunt me. Come here, child, let’s have a look at you.’
Cat darted a glance at me, then moved closer to the ancient cat, who reached out a slow paw. I saw where the hair had come away in patches along her arm so that you could see the mottled black-and-pink brindle of the skin beneath. It was so thin it looked like a stick, an old and weathered stick marked by fungal growths. Gently, she touched Caterina on the face and although Cat looked briefly alarmed she did not flinch.
‘Bless you, child,’ the Besom said. ‘I can see it in your eyes. It’s a noble profession, though a tough one for a girl.’
‘Come back with us to Nonesuch,’ Cat said suddenly. ‘There’s plenty of food at the house and warm places to curl up. I’ll watch out for the dreams; you’ll sleep easier there. And you can tell me stories. About dreamcatching.’
Ma Tregenna blinked. She resettled herself as if contemplating the proposition. At last she spoke. ‘En’t nothing to look forward to. Best leave me be.’
Cat looked appalled.
‘We can’t just leave you,’ I interrupted in as reasonable a voice as I could manage. ‘It wouldn’t be right.’
‘It’s my time,’ the Besom said obstinately. ‘You’re too young to understand.’
‘You’re right,’ I agreed. ‘I don’t understand. We can help you: we want to help you. I spend my time trying to ward off the bad things of the world, to preserve life and health: I won’t leave you here to die.’
‘Death’s not so bad when you reach my age,’ Ma Tregenna returned, her tone maudlin. ‘I feel him coming to me, like an old friend…’
This was too much for me. With a huge effort I grabbed her by the back of the neck and picked her up. She was as light as a kitten, all her substance gone to heat and bones. Her dusty fur filled my mouth. For a moment she wriggled like a worm on a hook, then, as if sensing her struggle was useless, subsided. It was not until I got her safely back to Nonesuch and laid her down in the warm kitchen that I realised that, maybe in some instinctive response to the pressure of my jaws on the scruff of her neck, some memory of the way a parent had once carried her about, she had relaxed so entirely into my care that she had fallen fast asleep.
*
When she awoke, though, it was a different matter entirely.
I was dozing peacefully in a little square of sunshine on one of the upstairs landings when there came a piercing howl from down below. At once I was on my feet, my spine tingling as if someone had drawn a hot wire through it. I did not recognise the voice of the cat who had howled; was not even sure at that moment that it was a cat I had heard. I skittered down the uncarpeted stairs and dashed along the corridor, my feet slipping sideways on the polished wood, only to collide in the kitchen doorway with the Besom’s scrawny rump, emerging backwards at speed.
We fell over one another in a tangle of limbs; then, despite all her weeks of malnourishment, the Besom gathered her feet under her and bolted past me as if pursued by all the hounds of hell.
I stared after her. A voice from the kitchen made me turn back.
‘Here, cat, come here—’
It was the baby. It giggled. In one chubby fist it held a long-handled silver spoon, which it waved purposefully at me. An innocent enough object, the spoon, yet I found I could not take my eyes from it. The light gleamed dully off its scratched surfaces, offering reminders of its many pasts. I shivered and with effort drew my eyes away. Ellie grinned at me. There was a strange expression in her green, green eyes. Her other hand reached out to grab me. I ducked my head away from it and at the same time found myself backing away in awful parody of Old Ma Tregenna. Then I, too, took to my heels.
I caught up with the Besom, finally, under the rhododendron bushes in the garden, being comforted by Griz.
‘There, Pol, there. Don’t shiver so. Never thought to see you again, not after all this time, not after that fox come and drug you out. Left us all behind and never a word, but we didn’t begrudge it you, not after what you went through.’
My amazement must have been clear, for Griz now turned her attention to me, though she still spoke to the Besom. ‘Poor lad. He doesn’t have a clue what he’s dealing with here, does he?’
It was true: I didn’t. I sat down and listened as Grizelda and Old Polly Tregenna
told me their desperate, tragic tales.
*
The witch kept coming back, they said, though she stayed as long as she possibly could, making magic out of the kittens she stole, magic she made in pots in the laboratory behind the courtyard full of cages, where both Griz and the Besom had once been imprisoned. I remembered what Old Ma Tregenna – Pol – had said to me when I first knew her: that she had no kittens of her own and regretted it bitterly. She had no kittens of her own because the witch had taken them – as she had taken Griz’s litters – time after time. The terrible thing, according to the Besom, was that the kittens who had a dreamcatcher both for father and mother were the most efficacious in the magic the witch made, so that the more litters she bred from Ma and the blue stud cat, the stronger and apparently younger she became. The irony of it all was hard to bear; for the woman had no understanding of the significance of the bloodlines she was thus abusing, no knowledge at all of dreamcatching or the inherent power it produced in the offspring. It was a burden the Besom bore in misery. Mated time and again to Circassian Gogol II, the witch’s handsome familiar, a dozen or more kittens removed from her care, she had gone progressively mad, until at last the russet fox with the grey-spotted haunch had come and blasted a wild road through the very wall of the courtyard, as he had again some years later – as Griz reminded me – to rescue my own mother, and had borne her away. It was something he could do only in the cause of dreamcatchers, he had said, though she had no idea what he meant by this at the time.
I listened to what they said and let the terrible significance of it all seep through my skin, down into my heart and bones. Then I went back into the house and sat in the Long Corridor, to ponder further over those images, to weave connections – tenuous and unlikely though they seemed – between what the old cats had told me and what I had seen for myself and failed thus far to understand; and to wait for the inevitable dream to come and find me, as I knew it would.
I did not have long to wait. I even knew, this time, what I might expect to encounter, in theme if not in detail.
So when the first frayed, fiery globe howled over me, I was ready for it; ready, too, for the dizzying descent through the dream corridors of Nonesuch, the tumble not only through place, but time. The dream, too, seemed to recognise my increased awareness of the game, for it feinted and dodged away from my great paws like prey from a predator, instead of bumbling, insensate, along walls and ceilings, till caught up into the flow of the highway’s’ energies. Through a Nonesuch that I could identify – the house immediately before its current renovations – it drew me first across landings redolent with a heavy, musky perfume, so that I half expected the tall, green-eyed woman – pale-skinned and unburned – to slip round a corner at any moment, that taunting half-smile on her face, her hands ready to scoop me up and take me to the place of cages; but soon the landscape changed its nature. The house darkened. First there were shutters on the windows; then musty thick curtains; then a stretch of bleak, cobwebbed passage in which the night sky showed through holes in the raftered roof; but always the highways we travelled were lit by the febrile light given off by the flaming aura of the dream.
At last, after many twists and turns which finally disorientated me, the dream swooped down through a low arched doorway I had never previously encountered anywhere in the house and disappeared into the chamber beyond. There I knew it remained, for the reddish light it emitted pulsed intermittently, but always at the same intensity. I entered the chamber cautiously, my whiskers bristling with anticipation at what I might find within. My anxiety was not misplaced. The dream globe hovered in the far corner of the room as if to provide me with the very illumination with which I might best appreciate the scene before me. In the middle of the chamber, half turned away from me, stood a woman. From her stance and frame, and for all the elaborate generosity of her full-skirted brocade costume, I could tell that, like the Besom, she was a creature at the end of its mortal tether, all worn out to skin and sinew. She was busy at something I could not quite see. A brazier full of glowing coals, over which a large dark cook pot was suspended from an iron tripod, stood off to one side of the room, framed by a clutter of stacked boxes and shelves lined with clay vessels, jars and scrolls of paper, barely visible behind the clouds of vapour that came belching up out of the steaming cauldron. So fascinated was I by the fact that for all the red-lit detail thus presented to me I could make out no scent at all, as if my nose had abruptly stopped working, that I hardly noticed the exact moment at which she turned to face me, but became all of a sudden aware – like the crawl of an insect upon the skin – of her eyes upon me. Her green, green eyes…
They were not the eyes of a crone, those eyes, but of a young, young woman. I blinked and my perceptions reordered themselves. The eyes – and indeed the face – were clear and smooth; but below the pale white chin the neck was all turkey-wattled and parched, mottled with liver spots and blue veins; and from there down, the body was that of a crone, as twisted and gnarled as an old ash tree that has seen too many winters and longs only to die.
Her jaws clacked at me then, emitting a torrent of words from which I could take only a tone of malice and contempt; then the dream globe floated down from its position on high to drift tantalisingly in the air before me, as if the old woman had commanded its sacrifice.
With one eye on the crone, I swiped the dream on to the flagstones and pressed down hard with my paw. The old woman sighed, as if the pressure of my foot were somehow squeezing the air from her lungs, but the dream resisted not at all, beyond the faint pulse of its half-life, even when I sank my lion’s claws through its feeble skin. There was a sudden release of pressure, followed by a hot wet gush.
The crone smiled, then, and those full red lips drew back to reveal pale and withered gums, and stumps of teeth as sulphur-yellow as any rat’s. So, I thought to myself, even as I bent to my task, your magic may make its mark on the outermost skin, but it cannot reach through to the bones of you; then I gulped the dream down.
The chamber spun around me, woman and words, pots and parchments, ceiling, shelves and stone floor all rearranged themselves until I felt myself both inside and out of the dream, and could barely discern one from the other, for it seemed the place in which I had stood now shivered in and out of time, through a darkness so complete I could see nothing beyond my own nose, to the burning light of a roofless day, in which neither chamber nor witch owned existence, and back to a space lit by the flickering of wall sconces and tall candles. There, as before, a woman stood tending a pot over a fire, her back half turned to me. Behind her, shelves lined the walls of the chamber, though the pots upon them were arrayed differently and charts now lay scattered across the floor. I was just pondering the subtle differences the scene was offering me when suddenly my sense of smell returned with a vile, invasive gust. A heavy musk filled the air, followed by something more unpleasant and yet more cloying.
The dream, I told myself, it’s only the dream. Then I heard my grandfather’s voice in the back of my skull. Eat it down, Orlando, he ordered me. Eat the dream!
I swallowed and swallowed, but even as I did so the smell became taste, foul and perverse, an offence against nature; and abruptly identified itself as the unmistakable flavour of burned hair, boiled flesh—
Bile scalded the back of my throat. I gagged and retched, but the dream stayed down.
‘They say the lion is a noble beast,’ the woman said. ‘They call him the king of beasts.’ Her words buzzed in my head like flies on a carcass. “‘Who contains the power of the sun, the fiery principle, but is also death.” The Mother Goddess Ishtar rides upon a lion, for even his power can be mastered, and she is greater even than death.’ She laughed. ‘And my cousin Isaac the Alchemist has made his life’s work the quest for the Animal Stone, for long life and the key to all knowledge. He has boiled down all manner of things to reach the purifying ingredient known as the Green Lion, whose blood may bring him to the heart of the mystery! How well I kno
w that cats contain magic, when rendered to their essence and stirred with purest silver—’
Like maggots to the blowflies were the meanings to her words: they crawled about in my skull like the hatchlings from eggs that had been laid there.
Then she turned to face me and I saw that the woman was Stella, but not Stella: for she was small and compactly made, rather than tall and straight and thin, and that her hair was brown, not black; that she seemed less finely made than the woman I had seen in the life, as well as in the dreams. But the eyes: they were that same remarkable cattish green.
‘But now, my little lion, you are no better than I. Worse, in truth, for I have never stooped so low as to consume the flesh of my own kind!’
And now she laughed long and hard, and I saw that in this dream, or whatever unreality it was, she had no teeth at all; but it was not this, nor indeed her bewildering words, that arrested me, but her outstretched hand. In its bony talons she clutched a gleaming, long-handled silver spoon. I recognised that spoon, though it was shinier and newer-looking than the one I had expected to see. I followed her gesture as she pointed with the spoon beyond me into the shadows of the chamber at my back.
There, in a cage of dark wood, was my sister Vita.
‘I caught her skulking through the Great Knot,’ the witch said. ‘Through the shifting circles of the wild rides, and none are permitted to trespass there without paying my price. I have plans for this little one.’