Nonesuch

  Sharply, I said to Cat. ‘Have you been eating a yellow weed?’

  Something flickered in those green eyes. ‘Might have done,’ she conceded mulishly.

  ‘Show me your paws.’

  She frowned and held one out to me. All around the toes, where her coat was anyway of a lighter shade, the fur was faintly discoloured, an indistinct, urinous yellow against the blue. I let it go again in disgust. With myself. How could I have been so unobservant? A young cat with the gift, right under my nose; one, moreover, who had initiated herself into the mystery and seemed entirely at ease with her unnatural abilities.

  ‘Oh, Squash,’ I said miserably. ‘You’re a dream-catcher, too.’

  *

  That night I found it hard to sleep. I had come to the kitchen later than the others: my duties as the local dreamcatcher meant patrolling the highways at dead of night in search of damaging human dreams to hunt down and destroy. The dreams that escape from people in the small hours towards dawn are the worst, I find; so I had evolved a system which meant making two rounds: one, which I had just completed, in the early hours of darkness, and the second just before dawn; which meant I could snatch a few hours’ sleep in between. There was only so much damage a bad dream could do in a few hours out on the wild roads, I reasoned. Tonight, on the first round, there had been little to catch out on the highways. A couple of mating dreams; an odd one in which an endless herd of cows stepped out of a hole in the plaster of an old wall; some chase sequences involving formless monsters – in other words, the usual harmless stuff of Ashmore’s nightmares. I never bothered to catch and eat the obviously innocuous ones – the flying and swimming dreams, the shape-changing ones, the dull dreams that involved a lot of talk and faces in close-up. The cows, for instance, I had almost left alone as a harmless oddity; but you can never be too careful. Sometimes the odd ones can take a turn for the worse; and who wants to spend their night chasing a herd of dream cows down the highways, growing all the time as they escape their restraining membrane? It was easier, and safer by far, to catch it and swallow it down while it was still small and manageable: that much I had learned from my grandfather, the previous incumbent.

  Now, the first round of my duties done and with no barrier to the worries that had been pressing on me all evening, thoughts chattered around my head like a flock of starlings, stupid and noisy and insistent. Why wouldn’t Lydia tell me about the dead witch’s cat who had fathered her kittens? There was no shame in it: she had been forced. Was she really so embarrassed that she could not speak of it, even to me? Or did she despise me so much for not rescuing her in time that she bore me a terrible grudge and was using her distance to punish me?

  What dreams had Caterina witnessed? Blood flooded the skin of my face at the thought of some she might have seen; dreams of mine in which her mother was the centre of every atom of my attention. No wonder she never took me seriously, always laughing and mocking, and falling into that flirtatious manner with me…

  Then I started to think about the doll’s head and how it could have found its way into the knot garden. This flummoxed me entirely. I had rarely seen little Eleanor without this toy. She cried when Anna took it away from her; she slept with it in her cot at night. So it seemed unlikely that one of the big people had managed to remove it from her without there being a terrible storm of wailing and protest, which one of us cats would surely have heard and made comment on. The cry of a baby is quite the most invasive sound in the world, impossible to ignore, no matter what type of creature it is. But if it had not been one of the adults, how it had got there was a mystery; for surely no baby could crawl all the way around the house and into the knot garden? It was desperately puzzling. It made my head hurt to think of it. If I thought about it too hard, I was rewarded by a vision of the head rolling along under its own volition and that made little ripples of fear run down into my stomach.

  I changed position, rolling off the mat in front of the Aga and on to the warm brick floor. There, I came to rest against another furry flank. Lydia’s? I wondered with a brief thrill; but no: her characteristic snores located her beneath the kitchen table. Turning my head till it was awry, I could make out quite a pile of cats there: it seemed the girls had joined her. So it must be Millefleur, then, I thought comfortably. As if in response to my thoughts, she purred and stretched, and the fur of her flank gently brushed against mine. It cheered me to feel her friendly presence. I had one ally amid all the turmoil, at least. I had yet to tell her of Caterina’s discovery, since she had been in Liddy’s company all evening and I did not want to cause concern; but I consoled myself that I would discuss the mystery of the doll’s head with her the following morning. Millie was a shrewder cat than me and more perceptive by far. What a dreamcatcher she would make, I thought ruefully. But she was the daughter of a dreamcatcher; it would be one of her kittens who was destined to walk the highways.

  At last I fell into a light doze and as I slept I dreamed. It was not a pleasant dream, being a reprise of the disturbing vision that had visited me in the knot garden. I was back in the corridors of Nonesuch again, lost and pursued; but ahead of me another cat ran, a cat who knew the labyrinth of passageways well, for it darted along taking one turn after another, and I knew that if I managed to keep up with it I would surely evade the white people behind me.

  I had never seen a cat so fleet of foot; its white paws flashed like beacons in the gloom: follow me, follow me! The effort I had to make in order to keep my guide in sight made my lungs burn. Along the Long Corridor we ran, until at last I sensed a falling away, a sudden absence and, when I turned, I found my pursuers had vanished; defeated, or bored with the chase.

  I turned back and ran on, hoping to catch up with the white-pawed cat to thank it for its aid, but although I increased my pace and put my head round every open door, there was no sign of it, except for a brief whiff of a scent in the air of the hallway. I knew that scent. It hovered there around me, tantalising in its familiarity.

  Then I woke up.

  Someone in the house had cried out. At once, all my fur was on end, as if my skin were more alert than the rest of me. The cry came again: the baby, I identified, and thought little of it. Babies are always waking alone and hungry in the night. I was about to settle down, when the pitch of it intensified. I knew the sound of that cry: a child woken from a nightmare. Wearily, I hauled myself to my feet, stretched carefully, anxious that I might unnecessarily wake Millie. There was no need for concern there, though: she had gone. Off on one of her night-time jaunts, I thought. Perhaps there’ll be a warm vole or two for me later.

  Up the stairs I went and met the dream coming down.

  It hung in the darkened air, a glowing golden ball, its edges flaring uncertainly. It was small, as dreams go, but I did not like the look of that corona. Where it touched the night air, the gold ignited into a fiery red and then to a darker colour yet. It was only a few feet above my head. With luck, I thought, and an acrobatic leap, I may even catch it before it makes for a highway and then I can go back to sleep. But as if it sensed my intention, the dream soared upwards and disappeared at speed, drifting through the wall of the front hallway and out into the garden.

  I cursed my slow reactions and pelted into the scullery, where John had installed the cat door out of which we came and went at will. Once outside, I took my bearings and scrambled round to the front of the house, in time to see the dream coasting across the garden, towards the tall yew hedges. There was a small wild road that started down there, one that cut through the village to Ashmore Common, where any number of highways came together in a great tangled confluence. If it got that far, I’d spend the rest of the night hunting it.

  Across the lawn I fled and straight through the middle of the rhododendrons, careless in my haste.

  I stepped on something warm and pliant, which in turn bubbled and hissed.

  ‘Ow! Watch where you’re going, you great clumsy lummox!’

  It was Grizelda, one of the cats w
ho had escaped the Nonesuch laboratory; a generously proportioned female with a soft, spreading, brindled belly. She and a dozen more survivors were still to be found wandering the grounds of Nonesuch, as if, despite all the horrors the house had held for them, they were too afraid to venture further. Sometimes Anna fed them. But sometimes Belly and Letty, egged on by Lydia, stole the food and brought it back for their mother. If she couldn’t eat it all, she would hoard it till it became inedible. It was Millie who had informed me of this, and I was still trying to find a way to broach the subject with the girls and, indeed, with Liddy.

  ‘Sorry!’ I called back over my shoulder. ‘Dream to catch.’

  ‘Rude boy. Clear off, then!’

  None of them could see the dreams I chased: they all thought I was, as Griz put it, ‘a bit touched’.

  I caught up with Ellie’s dream just as it slipped into the highway. Without pausing to make an elegant entrance, I leapt after it. The wild roads are curious places: travelled only by the animals and invisible to the eye of all others, including birds and humans, they channel the life force of the world. The highways feel inimical to life, so Great Cat gives us access to our most primal selves when we travel on them, so that the smallest of tabby cats can be transformed into huge, barred tigers, whether sabre-toothed or Siberian; into jaguars and lynxes, leopards and caracals. In the world that is visible to the human eye most cats appear as innocuous as I am – a marmalade cat of medium size – but like me each of them has a great cat lurking inside, in order to withstand the hardships in that raw and primal world. Cruel winds blow constantly, filled with flurries of snow and shards of ice, no matter what the season outside. Hawkweed had always said the Great Cat kept them so cold to encourage us to run: Speed makes heat, laddie, he’d say to me, and heat is life.

  The dream globe was giving off a powerful heat of its own. Now that it was on the highway, its corona was burning brightly. I would have to catch it quickly, or it would begin to damage the fabric of the road. Virulent dreams can burn a hole right through a highway, allowing all its energy to drain away, lost for ever. The more that happens, the more creatures sicken and die – at first the small ones, with few reserves to draw upon: the shrews and the sparrows, the mice and the dragonflies; but then it is the rabbits and the foxes, pets and ponies, owls and cows. And if the balance is fatally changed – if too many bad dreams pollute the highways with their freight of greed and guilt, violence and lust – then folk start to perish, too. I took a pride in the health of my domain. Since I had vanquished the witch’s dream, we’d had no trouble in Ashmore.

  It was an inexperienced dream, this one. Babies’ dreams, though they burn brightly, are often slow and uncertain, as this one was. It hobbled against the roof of the highway, easily in reach of my great paws. As a lion, I leapt; as a lion, I knocked it down and caught it in my jaws. It was always the best moment for me, savouring my transformation from small domestic cat to great cat as I sprang for my prey and felt my huge teeth close down upon it, caging it in my mouth. I bit down, expecting an easy swallow.

  But the dream resisted. I felt it pulse, trying to force my jaws apart. It was strong – far stronger than I had expected – and cunning, too: for it went slack and lifeless a moment later and as I took a great gulp of air to wash it down, it slipped rapidly out into the highway winds once more and, catching a powerful blast of air, evaded my flying claws.

  I chased it in earnest then, angry at my gullibility. My granfer would have been furious with me. But at last it was caught in an eddy, which trapped it against the wall of the wild road, and I hooked a claw through it and threw it to the ground. There, I stood on it with all my weight and pressed my muzzle to its shining membrane, curious to see what was giving this little dream such potency.

  Inside, distorted by the curve of the dream skin, I saw this:

  A little girl, standing with two adults on a long, flat expanse of bright sand. The sun beat down; I could feel the heat of it through the membrane. In the distance, where the beach made a great sweep around a bay, water washed in and out, the startling, electric blue of a summer damsel fly. The big people, fully clothed, had their arms round one another, utterly absorbed. The woman leaned into the man and they kissed. The child stared at them, its green eyes hard with resentment. It wore a single thick, wet piece of fabric out of which arms, head and legs emerged, pale and chubby, its skin all goosefleshed from the onshore breeze that ruffled its dark hair. In its hands it clutched an object. I squinted at it.

  And then I shuddered. Part of the object I recognised; though the last time I had seen it, it had looked very different: older and broken, worn away by a passage of time.

  It was a doll, perfect in every detail. It had a full head of bright golden hair and blue eyes with black-lashed, rocking eyelids. With its gaze still fixed upon its parents, the child shifted its grip on the doll. There was a sudden wrenching motion and the head came away from the pink plastic body. With a silent scream, the child flung the head away from it with all the force of its not inconsiderable will and ran up the beach, fat tears bursting over its crimson cheeks. The head hit the woman hard on the breast. Her hands flew to the place where it had struck, her mouth a perfect ‘O’ of shock. She turned to say something to the man, but he had his back to her now and was running after the child.

  Then I sensed something else, as if a shadow lurked behind this seemingly harmless dream. I could feel another emotion underlying the small jealousy of the child, powering the nightmare along.

  I bit down hard and tasted the dark gloat of satisfaction I had intuited there. As I did so, the scene on the beach began to slip away, as if someone had tilted a glass and let its contents slop over the side; and suddenly there was the child again, older now by a year maybe, all dressed in black, amid a dozen grown people, all in similarly sombre garb. The adults talked in low voices, but I could not hear what they said; even so, the meaning was clear enough. The woman was dead, dead of a lump in the breast. Once more I saw the doll’s head propelled by malice and some dark thing I could not understand, striking the woman’s chest again and again; the picture reversing and repeating, and all the while the child hid its face in the scratchy wool of her father’s trouser leg and smiled and smiled with vicious, secret glee. I could feel her thought forming, even as I began to swallow: I did it then. Perhaps when I am stronger I can do it again…

  Revulsion shivered down my spine. I gulped and choked on the foul stuff, gulped and choked again. The dream fought me, but I took it down, mouthful by grim mouthful, until it was gone. It left a taste behind that was as bitter as wormwood.

  *

  I stayed on the highways till dawn, then made my way wearily back to the house. I needed to talk to Millie about the doll’s head and the dream. She would reassure me it meant nothing, I told myself. Children are jealous beasts, just like kittens and cubs. We all harbour vile thoughts, which come and go as fleetingly as whim. The imperative of this need to hear Millefleur’s sensible voice drove my exhausted feet up the lawns, across the drive, under the car and in through the cat door. I found Liddy and the girls in the kitchen; all asleep except for Cat, who was sitting with all four paws pressed neatly together like the ornament of an ancient foreign cat that Anna kept on the mantelpiece.

  ‘Where’s Millie?’ I asked softly.

  ‘Oh, she went off for a wander somewhere last night,’ Cat returned blithely.

  I scrutinised her. ‘When last night, exactly?’

  ‘After supper.’

  I frowned. ‘Are you sure?’ I remembered the warmth of her body, the way the fur of her flank had tickled against me with each inhalation.

  Cat laughed. ‘Silly old Uncle O! Of course I’m sure, I walked down to the gate with her to see her off. She said to say goodbye’ – her voice dropped guiltily – ‘but I forgot and fell asleep.’

  My heart began to thud.

  Then who was the cat who had lain against me in the night?

  5

  They secu
red the house with child-proof gates. This made things difficult for the builders, who were quick to complain and almost immediately began leaving the gates open for easier access to the upper floors. Anna seemed to spend her time arguing with them. When this produced no result, she was reduced to going round every couple of hours to make sure the gates were shut. She complained to John. John preferred, he said, to be kept out of arguments of this kind. He had to maintain some sort of relationship with the people doing the real work.

  Anna stared at him. ‘I do real work,’ she said and stormed off. ‘Bloody men,’ she complained to Alice Meynell later. ‘What are they like?’

  ‘The pits,’ said Alice. ‘If you want my opinion.’

  Part of the trouble was that Alice’s physicist had proved to be as free a spirit as herself. While Alice admired this quality in a man at the end of an affair, she wasn’t so sure about it at the beginning of one. Also, he had recently decided to spend two weeks of the coming summer in Baja without her, on the grounds that he wanted to do some thinking about turbulence in hydrodynamic systems. ‘That means he’s going surfing,’ Alice explained. She was losing her patience with him, she said. ‘I’m thinking of becoming celibate anyway.’

  ‘Of course you are,’ Anna agreed.

  Alice lifted her head and sniffed. ‘Anna, I think you need to change your baby.’

  ‘I wouldn’t change her for the world,’ said Anna. ‘Oh, that. You wouldn’t like to do it, would you? If I go anywhere near her with a nappy there’ll be bedlam.’

  ‘Nobody in their right mind would like to do it,’ was Alice’s response. She approached Eleanor, pretending to hold her nose. ‘Pooh,’ she said. ‘Nasty pooey little girl!’ Eleanor, whose sense of humour was exactly what you’d expect in a child not yet two, found this highly amusing. She giggled accommodatingly and allowed herself to be swept up. ‘Want to know something weird?’ Alice asked Anna when she had finished.