With a sinking heart, I exited back on to the common, only to find myself confronted by the trunk of the great oak under which I had buried the human tooth. This was not where this little highway should normally have debouched; but at the time, foolishly, I thought nothing of it. The wild roads are notoriously convoluted and hard to navigate, and I had already compounded matters by entering them in an overwrought state, rather than with the clarity of mind and purpose required for a productive journey.
Dejected, I gazed across the misty common, and as I did so my eye was snagged by a sudden flash of russet. At first I thought it the flaming leaves of that garden escapee, the Japanese maple; then proper perspectives reasserted themselves and I realised that whatever it was lay closer to the ground than even the shortest tree; and, moreover, it was moving.
I narrowed my eyes. The fog swirled and the object disappeared. Only to be replaced by a more familiar shape. Dark, tattered – a cat!
It was the rightful Dreamcatcher of Ashmore.
For a moment I felt nothing but fury; then as he approached I could see that he was moving with the utmost difficulty, lurching along like a creature in pain, and whatever the red thing was, it appeared to be bearing up his weight.
At once I was running. I called his name—
‘Hawkweed! I’m coming—’
At the sound of my voice, I swear the russet object became sharply attentive. I saw, for a split second, a head, finely delineated: a pointed snout, large, triangular ears; then there was a blur of movement and all I was left with was the impression of something long-backed and brush-tailed and as big as a dog, all burnished apple-red, save for one marked grey patch along its flank; something that moved as slickly as a wave, and vanished as silently as it had appeared.
‘Grandfather!’
By the time I reached him, my grandfather was decidedly alone.
He was reeling by then, the fight long gone out of him.
‘What happened to you?’ I cried, all anger dissipated to concern. ‘Were you attacked by the great red beast?’
In response, the old cat managed a thin smile. It was more lopsided, even than usual.
‘Nay, laddie,’ he said simply. ‘What you saw was just a friend. A friend with a long and curious history, but a great and good friend to cats like us. I have a sense it will not be long before you meet him yourself.’
And he would not be drawn any further on the subject.
Instead, I asked him what had happened to reduce him to the terrible condition in which I had found him: there was a gash across one haunch so deep and vicious that the flesh appeared amid the fur as purple-red and pearled with fat as the packaged meat Anna stored in the refrigerator. One eye was hazed with partly dried blood; the other was swollen and shut tight upon itself. He limped heavily. It must have been a terrible fight. I could not imagine another cat inflicting such injury upon my indomitable grandfather.
‘It’s the highways, laddie,’ he said at last, leaning upon me to get his breath. ‘There’s a Dream out there poisoning them.’
I stared at him, uncomprehending.
He sighed, and his one good eye flickered as if he might pass out where he stood. ‘Get me home, Orlando. Get me home.’
We must have made a strange sight, my grandfather and I, as we staggered back to the cottage. We had to take the human way, for my grandfather would not be leaping fences for some considerable time to come. We came up on to the main road through the clearing mist like two lost souls. People turned their crying children away from the sight of Hawkweed’s wounds, and watched us solemnly as we passed. I fixed them with a fierce gaze, for I did not want their help, but no one moved towards us anyway. Closer to the cottage, I could hear raised voices. Some altercation appeared to have broken out between the old man who helped Anna sometimes in the garden and an old woman in horn-rimmed glasses, who had chosen this unlikely time to upbraid him for the fact that his old apple tree had some weeks ago dropped a dead branch over the hedge and into her cold frames. Perhaps he was happy for the excuse to avoid her ranting, for as he caught sight of the pair of us limping home, his face furrowed with concern. He came after us slowly, leaning on his stick, and when we came at last to the cottage reached over and fiddled with the latch on the front gate and swung it open so that we might enter.
*
Anna, her face streaked, the skin stretched tight and shiny where tears had fallen and dried, came up the road a moment later, only to see Mr Thompson apparently opening her front gate for no good reason. She quickened her pace.
‘He’s proper poorly,’ was all he said as she approached. ‘Poor old beggar.’
Anna, her thoughts already in disarray, stared at him, uncomprehending. ‘I beg your pardon? Who do you mean?’ Possibilities rattled through her head: John, meeting with an accident as he followed her at a run down Cresset Beacon? Max? (But Mr Thompson would not know him from Adam, her brain corrected immediately.) Orlando—
And there was Orlando on the doorstep, looking a little bedraggled, for sure, but not obviously ill or injured. She bent to inspect him, and found, crouched behind him at the back of the boot-bench, between wellingtons and Goretex and the stiff brush she used for cleaning the porch of leaves and cobwebs, the old cat Hawkweed.
*
Later, after a bustle of activity, I lay beside my grandfather. Above us, the springs of the spare-room bed brushed our ears. It was hot, very cramped, and not a spot I would have chosen in which to recuperate, but it seemed to suit Hawkweed well enough. Anna had opened the front door, and had run to the cupboard under the stairs, where she kept such horrors as the roaring stick that sucked the carpets. Puzzled, we had limped cautiously inside after her, but when he had heard the tell-tale creak of the willow cat basket, Hawkweed’s head had gone up as if at the crack of a shotgun, and gaining a sudden energy and awkward strength that belied his injuries, he had lithely evaded her attempts to catch him, and had instead established himself here, well out of arm’s reach, despite Anna’s many attempts to encourage him out.
Dellifer had spent some time attending to his wounds.
‘Cat spit cures all,’ she said at last, quoting that old feline adage. She gave the area around his flank another lick for good measure. By the way Dellifer was fussing around him I could tell that she was more agitated by his demeanour than by the nature of his injuries. I watched her practical ministrations with a certain shame at my earlier outburst, but she said nothing to reproach me.
When my grandfather’s face had been cleaned of the caked blood, it looked only as fearsome as it did normally, and I found it much easier to watch him as he slept, debilitated from his exertions. Waiting for him to wake up again, though, I found frustrating in the extreme. Not only did I want to know what had happened to him on the wild roads, and what might have become of my missing sister: I was also desperate for any news of Lydia.
It is well known that a cat has the ability to wake any sleeper by the power of a stare, but if my grandfather felt the weight and imperative of my gaze upon his sleeping face, he gave no sign of it; no doubt being entirely too well versed in repelling such unwanted attentions. And completely exhausted from his experience on the highways, my conscience reminded me sharply.
After what seemed an eternity, he yawned and an eye opened blearily. At once, Dellifer was upon him, asking how he was, whether she should lick his forehead some more; if he wanted something to eat. Eventually, Hawkweed suggested he might manage a small vole, to keep his strength up; and sent her off, knowing it would take her an age to find one at this time of the year.
I could barely wait for her to leave the room before launching into my own inquisition.
‘So, Grandfather, tell me now, quickly while she is gone: whatever happened to you? And did you see Vita, and my friend Lydia?’
The old cat’s eyelids flickered wearily. Then he fixed me with a pale and one-eyed stare and said in an irritated fashion, ‘Can’t you leave me be for just a little while, Orlando? There
is nothing that can be done for now.’
But I persisted, and in the end Hawkweed hunched himself uncomfortably over his elbows and sighed deeply. ‘I will come to Vita in due course, Orlando; but first I must tell you about the Dream. I had hoped I would never have cause to tell you about it, laddie. It’s been dormant for so long now, I truly thought it laid to rest. I should have known better...’ his voice trailed off, husky with despair.
I leaned forward, willing him to continue. After a while he coughed – or rather, retched phlegmily, then after a moment’s hesitation, as if he was considering hawking the contents up on to Anna’s carpet, he reconsidered and swallowed them down again. He blinked several times as if they tasted particularly vile. ‘The Dream,’ he said vaguely, as if in a dream himself. ‘Ah, the Dream. Human fear is a terrible thing, Orlando. Perhaps the most terrible thing there is.’
I frowned. Why was it he could never speak in a straightforward manner to me? Why must he always beguile me with riddles?
‘When I was a lad,’ he began again, and my spirits sank. Here was I, awaiting urgent news, and my grandfather had started reminiscing about his distant youth. I wondered if his recent experiences had finally brought on the senility I had perceived in the oldest cats of the village: cats who sat on doorsteps and windowsills gazing vacantly out at the world, a thin line of spittle drooling from one corner of the mouth; or, like Old Niggle, whose owners would no longer allow him in the house for fear of his incontinence and unstable temper, a cat who lay out in bushes beside the road ready to waylay passers-by with a loud string of obscenities, or to follow them pathetically, reciting tales of his derring-do, back in the good old days when he’d been the alpha male and had a harem of willing females awaiting his thorough attentions...
But my grandfather was not to be deterred by my evident lack of interest in his early exploits; nor was his vicious temper in any way softened by his injuries.
‘Orlando!’ he hissed, a paw snaking out to cuff me soundly about the ear.
Shocked beyond words at the speed of this geriatric invalid, as I had so quickly been categorising him, I stared at him open-mouthed.
‘A fool you are and a fool you will remain if you do not pay attention to what I tell you.’
He was not the first to have called me a fool. Someone else had done so recently, though I could not remember then how it had come up. Lydia, most like: Lydia, certainly...
‘When I was a lad,’ my grandfather started again, ‘my own grandfather, that great old dreamcatcher Fidelius the Black, came to me one night. “Hawkweed”, he said, “there are many dangerous things in this world, but none so potent as a woman’s jealousy and fear”. And he explained to me how he had observed from a lifetime or more on the highways, how women’s dreams often differed from men’s. He had noticed that they sometimes dreamed deeper and darker than their male counterparts, and he believed that while men channel their daily frustrations and energies into work and sport and even war, women have fewer outlets for their wilder sides; moreover, he said to me, some women love more fiercely than any man, sometimes with a powerful and dangerous force. And if something were to come between such a woman and the object of her desire, well, it would engender great peril.
‘Now, I have to say to you, Orlando, that human emotions were a mystery to me then, and remain a mystery to me to this day: what I do know, however, is that they can be truly destructive.
‘I was barely more than a kitten, not much older than you are now, when he told me this, and perhaps things are different in the world now; but I had seen so little of it then, had not experienced any sort of love for myself—’
I wondered whether my grandfather could see the flush I could feel prickling beneath my fur in the gloom of the bedroom.
‘—so I had no idea of what he was telling me. Then, in that maddeningly oblique way that dreamcatchers sometimes have,’ he gave me an odd look, which might have involved a wink, since the gleam of his good eye seemed to flicker for a moment, ‘he suggested I come on an excursion with him. We walked through Ashmore Village on the human roads and I was already becoming bored and thinking my grandfather was wasting my time, when we arrived at some grand gates. There he stopped; and I began to reassess matters. There is something about the old manor house that has always made me uneasy: even then, I tended to avoid it in my explorations of the village.’
I recalled my own single excursion into the grounds of the big house; how the dream that had caused the rift between me and Liddy had goaded me to the top of the great tree.
‘We made our way through the great gates, and as we did so, the light of the new day shifted through indigo, to the soft grey of a woodpigeon’s wing, before emerging at last as a cold and ominous red,’ my grandfather went on. He told me how he and Fidelius had run across the dewy grass, quick and nervous, in full and open view; how they had skirted the orchard and taken cover in the lee of the strange little mazy garden that was planted there.
I was holding my breath now, captivated by my own grandfather’s narrative. I knew the garden to which he referred – a labyrinth of low shrubs in an intricate design – for I had glimpsed it as I fell from my precarious perch in the cedar tree, clutching on to the dream.
‘We sat there, Orlando, and we watched. We watched as a woman came out of the house. A tall, thin, old woman.’
This was less than exciting. I had been waiting for the appearance of a monster; and all he had to offer me was a crone. There were lots of old women in Ashmore, and there was nothing more terrifying about them than the threat of a cup of water being thrown over you if they thought you might be about to do something amongst their peonies.
But then he told me how she had walked around that maze in the oddest fashion. Not as if she were going anywhere, but as if she was bewitched and unable to take more than two steps in any single direction. She was,’ he stated again, ‘an old woman: a very old woman – all folds and wrinkles and swollen joints – but I could not take my eyes off her, and neither could Fidelius, for she had a powerful magnetism, even to the eye of a cat, something strong and... animal.
Then he told me how, at the heart of the pattern, she had opened a jar and started rubbing its contents all over herself. As meticulous as a cat she had been in her grooming, and by the time she had finished, and shaken the last few drops on to the ground as if as an offering, a transformation had taken place.
‘Where before her skin had been thin and grey, wrinkled and spotted with age, now it glowed as pink as the dawn, as soft and luminous as a rose petal. I do not know if there is such a thing as magic in the world, Orlando; nor whether the word “witch” still has any true meaning. Nor do I know much about the nature of humans’ anatomy; but I do, now, know about age, and I am telling you, laddie, that the woman who went back into the house then was a far younger woman than the one who came out.’
And then he told me of the robin, the bird that had landed in the centre of the knot garden and pecked at the ground where those last few drops had fallen: how it had flown away full of vigour, its breast feathers as red as new blood.
‘I saw that bird again, Orlando. I saw it only a few days ago.’
I stared at him, my mind working hard. ‘But Fidelius has been dead for many years,’ I said slowly. ‘And everyone knows the little birds live for only a few seasons...’
He nodded, his one eye enigmatic.
Was this another of his fairy stories, designed to teach me something of the Great Cat’s wisdom?
Hawkweed was silent for a moment, remembering. Then he told me many things about the nature of the world, and about Ashmore village in particular, that I had rather not have known.
He told me about the nine lives of cats: how there was something that humans called reincarnation that could bring you back, when you had lived out your natural span, if not in this life, then in another. ‘And it’s all tied up with wild roads, you see, Orlando,’ he said.
I did not, but for once in my life I kept quiet. r />
‘The highways run, as you know, all over the world, channelling its energies – all the dreams, all the souls of the world – and it is up to us, the dreamcatchers, to keep those highways clear and hale. It is fear, laddie: fear’s the thing that does most damage; in life, in dreams. Fear of ageing; fear of death; fear of loss – of power, or love. If you get enough fear running through the wild roads, the consequences are terrible: death and corruption will tear their way out of the highways – and not just in dreams, laddie; but in souls; and that’s a fearsome thing indeed. A really frightened soul does not want to die: it will come back again and again, seeking an escape from death itself.
‘There are places, Orlando, where the highways also run through times as well as through the geography of the world. Some of these wild roads have hardly any true existence of their own, but are merely echoes of old memories, old cat-lanes from a bygone age remembered fondly by those who once used them, or in stories told by mothers to their kittens. In time, they fade, seal themselves off and die away. But some, laddie, stay open and alive because an especially strong dreamer has entered the system, a dreamer driven by fear. Such a dreamer can drive the highways to double back on themselves, as the dreamer seeks previous, happier times in its evasion of death. Here, in Ashmore, we have such a rare configuration. We have had it all my life, and for as long as any of my forebears can remember, for Ashmore is a very old village. And, since luck is against us, we have here in the village the strongest dreamer I have ever heard tell of.’