The Wild Road

by Gabriel King

  Before she could change her mind – and without giving himself any time to think about it, either, because he was a bit afraid – Tag snatched her up by the scruff and sprang through.

  It was hardly more than a leap into greasy water, a slither across rotten ice. But as soon as he had done it, he wished he hadn’t. When he looked the way he had come, whatever direction that was, it was fog and gray moire. Ahead was worse. It was a field of shadows. It was the color of silence. It was nothing much at all. It seemed to have been left to itself, like some empty building long ago.

  ‘Majicou?’ he called anxiously. His own voice came back to him. ‘Majicou?’

  Nothing.

  Had Majicou come through in the same place? Had he come through at all? Tag shivered. He didn’t even know if he was on a highway. Easy to picture himself alone in some endless gray space, soft yet full of hollow echoes, without even the compass wind to guide him. Too easy.

  It was too easy to remember the vagus.

  ‘We’d best go on,’ he told Cy.

  When he looked down, she had gone too.

  He stood there passively. In some measure, he felt as he had the first time he tried to use the highway, in the days when he lived in his garden shed. He was equally disoriented. He was equally afraid. All he could see was fog. He had the illusion of it streaming past him. He was stationary and the cold fog was moving past him: that was how it felt. The moment went on and on, but this time he didn’t panic. If he panicked he would be lost. He began to call out regularly, ‘Majicou! Where are you?’ He called, ‘Cy!’

  Suddenly her head and shoulders popped out of the fog two or three feet above his head. ‘Here, kitty kitty!’ she called. ‘Merry Christmas!’ She was the wrong color. Her voice, papery and tired, came from somewhere else. Her face was impassive, her eyes clamped tight shut. Was it her at all? She seemed asleep or dead or carved from stone. Where it poked out of the fog, her head was wreathed in ivy leaves and shiny balls. Her mouth gaped open, and a thousand tiny colored lozenges puffed into the air with every dry, faint little breath.

  ‘No!’ cried Tag.

  He ran.

  It was a kind of highway after all. It was every road he had ever traveled, and none of them. It was a long perspective spiral of concrete – Tintagel Court! – and a back alley across which slashed the black adrenaline shadow of a cat. It was sleety suburbs, yellow-lit windows, a faint miaow from a cardboard box in a doorway in the rain. It was the vagus woods, a muddy slot to nowhere. It was a ribbon of metal. It was wrong.

  Wherever he looked it raced out in front of him, tipping and banking at ferocious speed. It split and forked and burgeoned like the branches of an enormous tree. At every junction the tabby was there waiting for him, half turned, one paw raised, to call, ‘This way. Quick, Tag, this way!’

  Her spark plug glittered. Lights poured from her mouth.

  ‘Hurry!’

  Suddenly the roads vanished, the tabby vanished. Everything went black. Tag’s sensation of rushing forward continued for a fraction of a second longer. Then, with a kind of silent pop, he burst through some invisible membrane and out into the light again.

  He was back on the kind of highway he knew. It ran through a broad shallow combe between the gentle slopes of the downs. Clouds sailed over, their shadows merging with the strange smoky bronze flicker of ghosts, which lay across the ancient land like a patina on metal. A million days – a million lives bright and dark – passed every second. All around the combe, sandstone sarsens stood like human beings twelve feet high. Their surfaces, sculpted by the ghost wind, glowed purple and rose-gray. Smooth and streamlined, pendulous and lobed, they had been arranged, as if by some massive hand, in avenues and circles, complex knots and clusters that defeated the eye. Among them sat Majicou, very upright and proud, eye like a lamp. The wild roads had returned him his power. He was as large as Tag had ever seen him. Tobacco-brown rosettes seemed to shift and flow beneath the oily shine of his fur. At his feet crouched the tabby, looking up at him with lively admiration.

  Tag approached.

  ‘Majicou?’ he whispered. ‘I’m afraid of the big stones.’

  Majicou laughed. ‘So you should be,’ he said.

  ‘Majicou, I don’t understand anything—’

  ‘Good,’ said Majicou.

  He closed his eye, the better to see.

  ‘Long ago,’ he said, ‘the wildest of roads met and merged here. Aflicker with the movement of the Great Cats, this haunted plain attracted human beings from thousands of miles away. They crossed seas to come here. They hardly knew why. They buried their dead, and thought that was it. They held their feasts, and thought that was it. They built, as they always do, and thought that was it. As you see, they built – this thing, whatever it is. Less a work of architecture than of language – a response, a recognition, an answer: a plea.

  ‘They knew we had been here before them, coming and going since the Ice. They entwined their roads with ours, in the hope…’ He was silent. ‘In the hope of what?’ he asked. ‘Power? That, certainly.’

  The highways looped and hissed across one another. Through them Tag could see dimly the human roads that mimicked them. A faint gray traffic crawled this way and that in its mist of dirt and chemicals. He could hear the distant roars.

  ‘What do I know?’ said the old cat tiredly. ‘Not enough, despite all these years. Edges always leak. Our roads snake beneath and between the human ones. The boundary between our work and theirs is blurred. Everything shifts and changes as if you were looking through a ripple of clear water, through heat shimmer in summer. No pathway – great or small, human or feline, in the world or beyond it – is fixed or definite. The world is what we make it. The world is what they make it. Moment to moment…’ He sighed. ‘Power,’ he said.

  He looked down at the tabby.

  ‘Oh, the Alchemist has a special job put by for this little cat. But like all the best proxies, she is hard to manage. She turns in his hand, especially when you are near, Tag. For an instant tonight, he lost control of her to you.’

  Tag wanted to say, So it’s control that this is all about? He wanted to say, But I don’t want to control anyone. All that came out was, ‘Majicou—’

  ‘He knows you now, and soon he will fear you.’

  ‘Majicou, I don’t—’

  ‘Worse, he will remember that he had you in his hands once and threw you away.’

  Tag remembered those hands. White pain. Wrong cat.

  The tabby, who had been asleep between Majicou’s front paws, now woke. She gave a chirping pun at the sound of his voice, stuck one leg up in the air in a jaunty way, and began to lick her bottom. She stopped, tongue out, to gaze first vaguely, then with growing intentness at the clustered stones and the maze of spirit paths that wove between them. ‘What is it?’ said Majicou sharply. ‘Something there?’ She made an anxious noise. ‘Be calm, little one,’ he reassured her. ‘It’s only a change in the light: the shadows fall badly at this time of day.’ But he lashed his tail nevertheless. ‘Tag,’ he said, ‘we used one of his corrupt roads to get here. We had better leave now, before he follows us down it.’

  It was far, far too late for that.

  There were no sparks: no warning. He didn’t need Cy’s magic to bring him there, and he had come without his cats. There was no need for the proxy, except to help him aim. There was a kind of cat there: but it was him. And again, he was no kind of cat at all. And there is perhaps the wrong word, because he had brought his own place with him.

  ‘Hobbe? Hobbe!’

  Whatever the Alchemist had become, it was twelve feet tall.

  ‘Come to me, Hobbe.’

  At first Tag, staring at it in silent horror over Majicou’s shoulder, thought that its upper half was draped in the skin of some huge spotted jungle cat. Then he thought that its upper half was some huge spotted jungle cat. Finally he saw that somehow both these things were possible at the same time. Cat and cat skin ran together, except where t
he skin’s empty hind legs and tail dangled and flapped around the Alchemist’s waist. There, Tag could clearly see it as a skin, weighted down by big white bones knotted into it at intervals. The limbs beneath were human, bent and tortured into the ropy curves of the feline rear leg. Its right arm remained human too, naked pink flesh bulging out of the sloping muscular shoulder of the cat. Its right fist squeezed and squeezed at the alchemical staff prepared from the mummified foreleg of a panther. The whole travesty was bent forward oddly from the waist, unable to walk four-legged but constantly struggling to balance itself upright. Its head – Tag could not look at the head. Sometimes it resembled a cat’s head; sometimes it looked like a human head surgically defaced. There were wires and eyepieces. There was a necklace of feline skulls. The head stank. It leaked. It was in pain. The Alchemist had spared itself nothing to walk the wild roads like a cat. Everything it had done to others, it had done to itself. Until it repossessed the Mau, there was no other way. It roared and sang and danced and tottered, and around it – ‘Come on, my Hobbe!’ – around it, the combe heaved and rattled with bad light. How far had it come that night? A hundred miles? Every inch of the way the wild roads, unable to absorb it or the disaster it represented, had tried to vomit it up. They had lashed to and fro like broken power lines. They had writhed and quivered. For seconds only, they had flashed in and out of the world in displays of lightning and colored smoke. They had sprung to life in front of stunned drunks in urban alleys and children walking their golden retrievers at the lonely edges of villages or thrashed for a moment across acres of woodland in the dark. They had writhed over the city like ribbons of magnesium wrapped into a spiral by some pain that only objects feel.

  Black winds tore across the Old Changing Way. Ghost light withered to ash. The ash blew about, so that the Alchemist breathed as it came the brief lost lives of cats. It had bent everything so it could enter. It had pulled everything open with dances and chemistry, chants and bones and endless neurological interventions. It was standing still and rushing forward at sickening speeds. It knew how to do that. Every cat it had ever killed came with it, trapped and bottled to move it on its way.

  ‘Hobbe!’ it called. ‘Hobbe, Hobbe, you’re the devil!’ It shambled down the megalithic avenues toward them, coughing and choking and waving its great staff.

  Whatever it had made itself, it wasn’t a cat. It was wrong.

  ‘You’re the very devil, Hobbe, and I know you’re here!’

  When Majicou heard this, he turned around slowly, and the adversaries faced each other for the first time in hundreds of years. They were silent. The old cat sat. His master swayed and stank. Their heads were on a level. The same light that bleached the Alchemist’s string of skulls and marrowbones burned dull emerald in the eye of the cat. The man leaned forward a little on its shattered legs, then rocked back again. Sensors buzzed and whirred in its sockets. It seemed puzzled. ‘Is that you, Hobbe? You’ve grown.’ Then a gurgling laugh. ‘Oh you’re the very devil, for a cat!’ Majicou seemed to stretch upward though he remained sitting, front paws placed between rear paws, as straight and alert as the soapstone cat in a Middle Eastern tomb. He seemed to grow a little. He yawned, then said quietly, ‘Go away. This is too soon. It is too soon for both of us.’

  ‘Oh my. Hobbe has learned to speak!’

  ‘You come here like some dead thing and hope to defeat me? Look at yourself. I am the Majicou!’

  ‘You’re the devil.’

  ‘Go while you can. These roads won’t bear you long. Look how they buckle and fade around you!’

  ‘That’s what the devil says, is it?’

  But for Cy, this exchange might have gone further. At first, terrified by the presence of her tormentor, she had pushed herself into tlie thick fur between Majicou’s hind feet. Now she jumped out and, tumbling forward with the wobbly aggression and misplaced feet of a kitten, bit the Alchemist where his ankle had once been.

  ‘Your head in my mouth!’ she hissed.

  The Alchemist pointed at her with his staff. ‘Be quiet,’ he ordered. A long green spark leapt from the staff to the plug in her skull. Her legs splayed and she fell down.

  ‘No!’cried Tag.

  ‘No, Tag!’ warned Majicou.

  But Tag didn’t hear him.

  Even the leap of a domestic cat has grace, power, the signature of danger. In Tag’s earliest attempts on the bird life of the gardens, there had been a kind of physical intelligence, the sense of internal forces ordered, compressed, then released as a long parabolic arc. When, evading him, the garden thrushes had murmured, ‘Nice jump, son,’ that had not been all irony. He had leapt, in his way, like a small snow tiger, and given them a sense of what it was to be alive. Now, the arc of his leap seemed infinitely prolonged. He rose in slow motion, and kept rising; and as he rose, he shifted and changed and grew. He was the color of pewter above, pure white beneath, and striped charcoal gray in horizontal bands across his great thick forelegs. His paws were armed and spread. His blood was full of fire. In the moment of his epiphany, he measured fifteen feet from nose to tail, and his eyes were like chips of broken ice. When his jaws opened, the roar that issued from them sent Cy the tabby bowling across the combe like crumpled tissue paper.

  He had never felt so glorious.

  It being too late to halt matters now, Majicou hissed in annoyance and leapt too.

  Master and apprentice struck together. Their adversary roared and staggered backward. The whole story was told in a frozen instant. One black cat, one silver. The curve of the leap, the bared white teeth, the paws extended for the prey. The ears flattened on the great heads. But between that instant and the next, the Alchemist had opened its defaced mouth to the endless sky and raised its staff. There is always another instant. A whining Egyptian music filled the air. The cat skin flapped and danced. Bones jigged in the bad light. Shadows, expelled like flocks of birds, fled between the megaliths on winds full of black sleet and ash. The combe itself seemed to fold and buckle like a wet cardboard box in the rain. Unable to bear the Alchemist any longer, the highway writhed, emitted the plangent groan of a stretched catgut string, and broke. Tag was himself again. He fell through grey moiré –

  – to land almost instantly in the middle of two lanes of human traffic. It was four in the afternoon, raw cold and dark not far away. Of the Alchemist and his false highway there was no sign. Visibility was poor: low cloud, drifting mist, rain streaming in from the bleak downs north of the road. Everything looked brown and smeared, as if water were running down the very air. Spray, ripped in tufts and plumes from the wheels, obscured things further. Headlamps glared through this, their light rippling away into brassy reflections from the surface of the tarmac. Drivers squinted. Windshield wipers banged uselessly. Homs blared as the huge vehicles drifted slowly back and forth across one another’s paths.

  Old and vulnerable away from the wild roads, Majicou lay half conscious in the middle of the road, soaked in a sour mastic of dirty water and oil.

  The little tabby was trying to pull him to safety from under the wheels.

  Three eyes stared bright and blank with fear at the vehicle bearing down on them. It towered up like the side of a house, black water streaming diagonally along its sides to break away into its slipstream in a brown spume. Tag, who had fallen to earth ten yards away, watched Majicou raise himself groggily and then subside. His back legs seemed useless. Had he been hit already? The tabby buried her teeth in his scruff and redoubled her efforts. Losing her grip suddenly, she tumbled over backward and was forced to dance away from the oncoming monster just as Tag, closing the gap, darted straight into its path.

  ‘Majicou!’

  Majicou looked up.

  ‘Go back. Tag,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve got you,’ Tag said.

  He felt the old cat’s fur in his mouth. He felt the old cat’s heart race.

  ‘Tag, go back!’

  The truck hit them both.

  Tag felt a bang and saw thin
gs at strange angles. The inside of his head went limp. He hung on to Majicou. Wheels were everywhere, black and shiny as flint. A length of frayed blue rope whipped back and forward in the slipstream of the wagon. For a split second, as the world was tilting away, Tag saw this and remembered a kitten chasing blue string up and down a pink carpet. Then the underneath of the thing, all rust and caked black oil and whirling shafts, was above him. He tugged at the old cat with all his might. He heard, through the roar of the machine, through the terror and confusion inside his skull, the furious screech of a cat in pain.

  ‘Majicou!’ he called.

  Something picked him up and threw him aside. There was an unbearable pain in the side of his head. The world folded up into it and vanished.

  *

  He woke. It was more pain, and he was looking up into a sky of dull, slate-colored clouds. He seemed to be moving, though it was hard to say how. His own legs were quite still. He was lying down motionless, but at the same time inching along slowly under this shifting gray sky. Rain fell into his open mouth. He heard loud, urgent noises, and great shadows passed over him, filling him with fear. Everything stank of oil. Everything was vague but threatening. When he shook his head to clear it, consciousness swung away from him into a soft mass of charcoal-gray feathers.

  *

  He woke again.

  Dread went through him, and he dragged himself upright immediately. The world spun but held. The side of his head felt as if it had been scraped raw. He was in the short grass at the side of the road, where all was gray with mud and the chemicals of human transport. He had no memory of getting there, but, to judge by the light, only a few minutes had passed since he’d been run over. He wondered where he was and how it had happened. He thought he might be on the Caribbean Road. Perhaps he had been hit as he pulled the tabby from under the passing wheels.

  ‘It’s my own fault,’ he told himself.