He reopened the highway through which he had come and the rainbow rings swept round me like a sea. Suddenly my feet were my own again and I followed him away from that cavern and into the shrieking winds of a wild road.
Behind us, a howl of rage rose and crashed like a storm.
*
‘What was that thing?’ I asked the fox a few minutes later as we lay panting beneath the great oak on Ashmore Common. ‘It said it was called the White Lady and much besides, but I did not understand it.’
Loves A Dustbin ran a long pink tongue over his long black lips and regarded me with a wary eye. He looked exhausted. ‘I am not sure,’ he admitted at last. ‘I felt a greater disruption than usual on the roads around the village from a distance and came as fast as I could. Could it be the dream maker? I asked myself and at once dismissed the thought as a superstitious fancy. But now that I have experienced its presence, I do wonder…’
I had no idea what he was talking about, but the very mention of the word ‘dream’ made me even more uneasy. ‘Who is this dream maker? Is it the White Lady?’ I asked at last, though I could tell he did not really want me to question him further.
For a while he was silent; then he barked a laugh. ‘I really did think all these tales were just nonsense to scare kittens with and it would hardly be fair for me to claim that I have much understanding of it; the thing derives, after all, from a cat’s world-view. What little I know of the dream maker I heard from an old cat who was once my friend, the oldest and wisest of all the cats I ever met. He was known, among many things, as the Majicou, but I never knew whether or not it was his true name. He had many lives and I knew him in his last two only. For a long while he was the guardian of the wild roads, and his tale is a long one and only to be recounted at a safer time than this. He once told me what he called “The legend of the dream maker”, though whether the story ever had any historical inspiration, or whether it derived merely from superstitions he did not know, but this is what I can remember of it:
‘He said that the one you call the Great Cat created the world and everything in it (though we foxes have a different tale, as you may imagine). She dreamed herself into being in the midst of the void, so that light and dark, earth and water and air sprang from her eyes, followed by every bird and creature that we know. But human beings – being greedy and impatient – escaped from the Great Cat’s eye and ran out into the new world before they were fully made, since they were still all pale and hairless, and able to walk only on two legs. They feared the One Who Had Made Them so much that they ran away from her light to make their homes in the caves and dark places of the world where they thought she could not see them. Woe for the world that she was not the Great Fox’ – a pale golden light came into his tawny eye – ‘for she would have gobbled them up without a second thought for their impertinence, and for the perfidy they would later commit against our kind. Lucky for them that the Great Cat was more benevolent, even towards her most misbegotten creations. In their caves, in the comfort of the darkness, the humans dreamed, having learned the skill from the One Who Made Them—’
‘I know!’ I burst in joyfully, for I had heard a version of this story before, long ago. ‘This is the tale old Hawkweed told me, when we were out hunting rabbits for the first time. And there was something in it about the little yellow flowers called hawkweed too. And a lot about dreams and the highways…’ I paused, feeling foolish, since I could not remember the rest of the tale at all, let alone the point he had being trying to make.
Loves A Dustbin regarded me wearily. ‘Your grandfather always said you had the patience of a gnat and the brain of one, too. That you were forever interrupting and not paying attention. Now is the time to concentrate your mind, Orlando, for there’s usually a kernel of wisdom in the middle of stories like these; and it may be that the fate of all of us, including your lost sister and poor Millie, as well as all those in your household, rests on the way we bring what little knowledge we have to bear upon the problem—’
‘Millie!’ I interrupted again, without a thought for what else he had just said, for the image of Millefleur was clear in my head and the memory of her stung. ‘You said “Millie”. Do you know where she is?’
‘I do,’ he said, but volunteered nothing more.
‘Then tell me,’ I pressed him anxiously. ‘Tell me where she is so I can rescue her.’
‘That can wait. It must,’ Loves A Dustbin said heavily. ‘For there are worse matters for us to attend to before then.’
I was aghast. The dogfox knew where Millie was and he wouldn’t tell me. I felt my heart swell up until there was a terrible pressure in my chest, pushing against my ribs and up into my throat. ‘But I love her!’ I croaked at last.
‘I know,’ said the fox. He gave me a knowing look, his long face grave and still. ‘You’ve loved her for years. Even so.’
I stared at him. What had I just said? ‘But it’s really Lydia I love,’ I started, then faltered, confused. Images of the two cats danced in my head: Lydia as I had once known her – lithe and golden and proud, lying stretched out across the deck of the narrowboat, her scent pervading the air, the epitome of the Great Cat’s every line and grace, a very princess among felines, for whose favour a dozen tomcats would fight – Millefleur, the moonlight shining in her wicked eyes and flickering off the silver earring she had once worn. I thought about the strange little tuft she had on the top of her head; I remembered the way she had leapt and pounced in her lynx form on the wild roads, and how luminous her white belly fur had seemed to me that night when she had offered to lie with me. And then I remembered Liddy’s many cruelties to me and to others. I thought of how she hoarded food when the shrubbery cats were starving, how she had neglected to teach her kittens well, leaving the hard work to me, how she had flown at me in fury and then disappeared for days without a word; and how all the while I had made excuses for her, telling myself that it was only the hardships she had suffered at the hands of the witch which had driven her to such meanness of spirit. But now in my truest heart I knew that Lydia had always been this way: selfish, manipulative and as vain and shallow as the canary that falls in love with its own image in the mirror that hangs in its cage; and that her traumas had only enabled her to get away with ever greater lapses of behaviour.
Last of all, I recalled Millie’s words, spoken in anger and sadness just before her capture: how she had called me ‘a brave, beautiful cat’ and said that she loved me…
The dogfox looked at me askance. ‘Well,’ he said at last. ‘Am I right, or am I right?’
It was as if a cloud cleared in my head. ‘You’re right,’ I said.
He gave me his long, lopsided grin. ‘I usually am,’ he admitted boastfully. Then he grew solemn again. ‘But things are as they are, Orlando. We must leave Millie where she is until we have untangled this knot—’
‘But she is in danger!’ I cried out wildly. ‘She was taken by the witch’s servants, the Two Who Look Like One.’
‘She is in no immediate danger. Trust me in this, Orlando.’
I gave him a hard look. ‘I will never forgive you if anything happens to her.’
‘I will never forgive myself.’ He gazed back at me steadily and I found my panic subsiding. After a while he took a deep breath and continued, ‘Now, back to the story. Back to the dreams. The Majicou told me that some of the humans dreamed up a creator of their own to worship, one they imagined in their own image: pale and two-legged. But they dreamed her massive and powerful, to challenge the Great Cat, and so she became. She made them fertile and those who yearned hardest – and it was usually the females – were granted many dreams to fuel the fire of their desires. Those dreams are damaging to the highways, as you know; and the White Lady – or whatever else she calls herself – revels in that damage. Her favourites she rewards with long life: once, the Majicou said, he came upon one of her followers – a woman who had lived many lives, such as cats enjoy. At the beginning of her life, many centuries ag
o, she was the niece of a queen’s sorcerer, who came from a place called the Dead Lake: Mortlake, on the River Thames. There, under his tutelage, she learned of the existence of a substance humans called the Elixir of Life, which was said to elongate their lives infinitely and to maintain beauty. She made her search for this stuff her life’s work – or rather, the work of all her many lives.
‘Through the breeding of cats, and the potions she extracted from them and their young, she made her magic, though I do not think she ever perfected her recipe. I have come to believe that we have seen these magics at work, you and I, Orlando.
‘The Majicou did not know her name. But we do: Stella Herringe, the witch of Ashmore.’
‘But she died in the fire at Nonesuch,’ I said at once, frowning. A large idea was forming in my head, but as yet it was shapeless and confused.
‘She did. In that life, at least…’ Loves A Dustbin glanced hesitantly over at me and I thought I detected anxiety in his gaze, as if he were concerned that I might think him mad. ‘I once encountered something of this sort for myself. It was a man, that time; or it had been, once. I knew him as the Alchemist and by various foul means he had managed to preserve his life for far longer than its natural span.’ He shuddered. ‘Humans can be terrifyingly ruthless and unscrupulous in their pursuit of power, or in fleeing their fear of death. The worst of them allow nothing to stand in their way.’
There was a tiny click in my head as if an air passage had just unblocked itself. ‘It’s the child,’ I said.
‘The child?’
‘My people’s baby,’ I clarified at once, suddenly sure of my ground. ‘The witch is trying to come back through it.’
The fox frowned at me. It was, I conceded to myself, a bizarre statement, especially to anyone who had not lived in the presence of Eleanor and seen the things I had seen. For much of the time the baby seemed quite normal, as small humans go. It cried and smiled, and chased us cats about the place as any child might, but sometimes its natural liveliness and curiosity would be replaced by a kind of demonic energy. There was also the smell of it, that wavered in and out of recognisable range; sometimes the softy milky scent you’d expect from a young creature, then, within moments, the ferocious musk of the calling female. And when the smell was strongest, its eyes would change: brown-green as a fresh hazelnut they were most of the time; but when the child’s scent changed they flashed as green as a rose-chafer’s wing case, as green as malachite. I had been close to that eye colour before, held up by strong, hard clawlike hands when the witch had caught me outside her knot garden.
There was also the strange matter of the dreams: contorted and fiery, dreams in which my sister seemed to be trapped.
I had not paid enough attention, I realised, to the baby, in the midst of my own difficulties.
I told the fox all this. A long silence followed while he digested it and then I added, ‘Also, it collects things, the baby.’
Loves A Dustbin narrowed his eyes. ‘What sort of things?’
So I told him about the bits and pieces it adopted, the things which disappeared, only to reappear in the knot garden – the doll’s head, the wailing tin box, the shiny black object which contained strands of black human hair that smelled disturbingly of John, the spoon, the bone doll – and then I told him about the dreams that had followed. ‘It was as if the objects generated the dreams. And each time they did, the wild roads around Nonesuch warped in such a way that I could move through time to see where the things came from.’
The dogfox nodded rapidly. ‘That’ll be the disruption I came upon,’ he said in a matter-of-fact sort of way. ‘A great tangle of highways, many of them indistinct; some of them blocked. It’s where I saw Vita, too.’
‘She said I must chase down all the dreams and eat them up, otherwise she would stay trapped there.’
A change had come over the fox following the conclusion of this discussion. Where before he had seemed weary and old to me, now his eyes shone bright as topaz, his whole frame alive with energy. He seemed impatient, fidgety, eager to be off. ‘There’s a relationship between all these things, Orlando: the wild roads, the objects, the dreams and the witch; and between all of them and whatever it was I just rescued you from,’ he said briskly, standing up and stretching out his legs. He pushed with his nose in an irritated fashion at the haunch where the fur had paled, as if it were not responding as he would wish, then turned back to me, his gaze fierce with determination. ‘The end is in sight, Orlando. I can feel it in my bones. The child will have another object any day now. I’d say. Keep your eyes open. Chase down whatever dream it makes. I’ll be back.’
With that he was off, loping smoothly into the undergrowth.
I watched him go with a shade of annoyance. It seemed to me that he had discovered something of his own in what I had just related to him and had decided not to share it with me; rather, like my grandfather in his own high-pawed manner, he had treated me like a kitten and refused to entrust me with something he did not think me ready to deal with.
*
A few days later the next object turned up, just as the fox had predicted. I found the baby preoccupied with something in the kitchen one morning. It was sitting on the floor, crooning. Every so often it would lift the small object to its face, kiss it and murmur something to it. Then it would bang the thing on the ground, where it made sharp contact with the flagstones. I could not see, from my vantage point in the doorway, what it was, so I waited until Anna carried Ellie to her cot for her afternoon nap.
When I knew the child was asleep, I jumped up on to the chair beside the cot and craned over the wooden bars, my front paws braced carefully on the top rail to ensure I could make a swift getaway if it was required. In Ellie’s hands the thing gleamed dully; but her fingers obscured the larger part of it. Frustrated, I stretched a paw into the cot and snagged the coverlet with a claw. The drag of the fabric moved the sleeping child’s hand a fraction, but still I could not see. I pulled again, harder this time, and the object slid free. I found myself staring into the face of a green-eyed girl in a rich, elaborate robe, whose hands rested in her lap, where lay a pair of soft grey gloves. It seemed innocuous enough. I blinked and, as I did so, the picture shifted almost imperceptibly, so that where I had glimpsed the pretty girl, I now thought I had glimpsed an ancient, naked woman clutching a pair of unhappy-looking blue-grey kittens by the throat so hard that their eyes bulged. I recoiled, horrified.
With a wail, the baby woke up.
I was so transfixed by the painted miniature that I did not react fast enough, and suddenly Eleanor had grabbed me by a leg and had dragged me into the cot. I twisted and fought, but she was appallingly strong. A moment later her chubby hands were around my throat and she was squeezing with a strength that belied her apparent nature. I stared up, only to find the eyes of the witch upon me.
‘Ca—’ she said and squeezed harder.
I felt my limbs go soft and useless in her grip. This is it, I thought then. Inconsequentially, I heard a car start up outside and then pull away, the sound droning off into the distance. Anna going out somewhere, I thought, leaving me with her monstrous child. This is my death. But not my first death, the thought came to me, and probably not my last. Will I come back? I wondered, and was still pondering this when the door to the room came fully open and John walked in.
I knew this because the baby greeted him.
‘John,’ she said, quite distinctly. And again, ‘John.’
It was not a child’s voice, but that of a fully mature woman: low and soft.
At once, the pressure on my neck relaxed so that I could suck in a breath. The inside of my head went from soft and muzzy brown to a series of electric blues and reds. White-yellow lights shot across my vision; then I was assailed by a powerful sexual scent and, when I looked up, the child’s eyes had taken on that disconcertingly piercing green.
I leapt out of the cot.
John watched me leave the room with a bemused expression on
his face, as if he were not quite sure where, or even who, he was.
*
I ran and didn’t stop running till I reached a series of highways I knew like the back of my paw, highways I was certain were uncontaminated by the strange disruptions at Nonesuch. The freezing winds scoured through me, a series of vicious, icy combs removing from my fur every trace of the vile scent that had clung to me.
I lost myself for a while in my lion form, let my mind meld down into pure sensation as my massive paws struck the iron-hard earth and my muscles bunched and stretched endlessly, on and on. I turned sharp corners, took minor tributaries, let the compass winds blow me where they would. Outside, I could see glimpses of a pleasant afternoon, a land waking from frost, mists burned off in the hollows, the sun low and bright across a sky so pale it was almost white. I caught snatches of birdcall: Too cold; fly south.
Yes, yes! To the lake!
A brace of barnacle geese.
My berries, my berries!
No mine; keep your thieving beak off them!
A pair of male robins, puffed up with belligerence facing each other off on the top of a hawthorn, glimpsed as a double blur of vermilion.
I heard the caw of crows circling an ash tree in which a barn owl sat hunched up and disorientated, its hoots of protest a haunting counterpoint to the rasping chorus of its attackers.
Dead rabbit still warm; come eat! A magpie to its mate.
I thundered on till my lungs ached from my exertions and at last burst out of the wild road on to the summit of Cresset Beacon, my head swimming with images, alive and clean again with the tastes and scents of the natural world.
I took a couple of paces forward, shook my mane in the chilly air.
There was a gasp, then the sound of voices.
Standing right in front of me, very close together, were two people. Shocked by their proximity, I let out a roar and took a step forward. The woman was staring straight at me, her eyes round with surprise and a sort of savage, triumphant delight. Her companion looked entirely terrified.