by Gabriel King
Tag shook his head.
‘We might find answers there,’ he went on. ‘But the danger is obvious.’
Leonora absorbed this in a kind of awed silence.
Then she said, ‘Wow! The Alchemist! What do you want me to do?’
The Mau laughed angrily.
‘Oh, you learned plenty from your predecessor,’ she congratulated Tag. ‘That one-eyed cat always knew the right thing to say.’
*
The gardens had deteriorated since Tag’s last visit. The wooden boat-house, leaning in on itself in a tall growth of fireweed and sycamore saplings, gaped emptily. The willows were rotted to the heart. The rain poured down from a thick grey sky to shred the mottled surface of the river.
It had been a difficult journey, despite Leonora’s efforts. The cats felt weary and nervous. Across the lawn, the Alchemist’s house, with its verdigris dome, its derelict iron-framed conservatories and tall uncurtained windows, seemed to be leaching the light out of the late-evening air. They were reluctant to look at it. Instead, they sheltered just inside the boat-house, watching the fox – who didn’t care about getting wet – quarter the sloping lawns, his nose to the leaf-mould, the white patch on his hind leg the only bright item in the landscape. He came back and scratched vigorously behind one ear, showering the cats with coarse red hairs. Outdoors, he always seemed bigger than himself, energetic even when he sat down. ‘I remember this place,’ he said, ‘from the days of the Old Majicou. We kept an eye on the comings and goings.’
They waited for him to say more, but he only wandered off into the boat-house, sniffing and raising his leg like any dog.
‘This rain isn’t going to stop,’ said Leo.
‘We are only putting things off,’ agreed her father comfortably. He stared up at the house. ‘We’re a bit cautious about going in there,’ he explained. ‘But otherwise we’re some damned determined animals.’
She gave him a puzzled look.
‘Come on,’ sighed Tag.
They fled across the lawns, over the wet flagstones of the terrace, and up the steps.
*
The entrance hall lay open to the weather, which had stripped and greyed the polished wood, blistered the gilt mirrors, and flecked the ornamental banister rails with rust. Double doors banged sadly in the wind. The usual detritus had blown across the floor and piled up in corners ready to be of use to mice and rats. But a new layer of litter had been added since the day of Odin’s disappearance. Someone had built a fire in the middle of the marble floor, using lumber from the adjoining rooms. Around its ashes were scattered empty gas cylinders, fast-food trays, the rags of blankets. ‘Human beings have been living here,’ decided Tag, wrinkling his nose at the sad odours of charred wood, stale food, urine.
The fox looked up.
‘If you had a sense of smell,’ he said, ‘you would know more than that.’
He had been sniffing intently about at the bottom of the stairs. Now he trotted across the room and gazed out over the lawns. ‘And yet I didn’t notice it out there,’ he told himself thoughtfully.
‘Didn’t notice what?’ said Tag.
‘That’s the thing,’ said Loves A Dustbin. ‘I don’t know. Something else has been here recently. It wasn’t human, but it certainly wasn’t a cat.’
‘Where is Leonora?’ said Ragnar.
*
Growing bored with their investigations, his daughter had taken to the stairs: by the time they thought to look for her, she was already two or three floors up.
There, gilt and marble gave way to fumed-oak panelling. The landings were narrower, the windows smaller and less well-proportioned. Cobwebs stretched in tight curves, dusty muslin set across every corner as if to trap the twilight. Underfoot was a gritty loess compounded of house-dust, fallen plaster, ash and soot expelled from ancient hearths. Small cold draughts crept forth to brush away Leonora’s footprints as she passed. The stairwell closed in above her. She stopped in a ray of light from the last west-facing window – looked up, one paw raised – ran on. It was almost dark when she reached the room below the copper dome, and found its door jammed open.
‘I didn’t feel frightened,’ she would insist later. ‘Not frightened, not at first.’
It was a tall room with a ceiling shaped like an inverted tulip, braced by a tangle of old wooden beams. The walls had once been distempered white. Along them ran scarred workbenches topped with planished zinc, above which were mounted long glass-fronted cabinets, bookshelves and sample-cases. The cabinets were crowded with strangely-shaped glassware, retorts and alembics glinting in the last of the light. There were rows of containers on shelves; medical tools on hooks; liquids, cloudy or clear, plain or coloured, in which objects seemed to float. Crumpled in a corner – as if it had been thrown down yesterday in a fit of elation or disappointment, or just at the end of a long day’s work – lay a worn leather apron covered in burns and cuts.
‘The Alchemist!’ she whispered. Tangled up in that castoff garment she might discover the mystery of her own birth, find herself at the heart of it all. ‘The Alchemist!’
The cold air, heavy with an odour at once visceral and corrosive, made her eyes water. Up under the ceiling, night gathered. Leonora could hear the faint distant susurration of the rain on the copper dome; but the room itself was so quiet, she thought, that silence itself would bring an echo there. She went about cautiously, sniffing one item, patting another in case it was alive, standing up on her hind legs to examine a third and instead catching sight of her own distorted reflection in the shiny retorts and beakers set out on a table. Papers. Hundreds of open books, their pages curled and blanched. Something unpleasant in a jar – she quickly looked away. She was reminded of the Reading Cat’s domain, of a life so intensely focused it seemed to open on a vast illusory inner freedom. ‘No wonder he was defeated in the end,’ she whispered.
Then she realized there was no dust on the books.
The sound of the rain diminished. The silence was like an object, there in the room with her. Leonora began to back carefully towards the door.
Someone had been here before her. It was easy to see now which cabinets had been closed for years and which had been opened yesterday. It was easy to see which books had been flung down in impatience, which glassware knocked over, barely an hour ago, in clumsiness or rage. It was easy to see how the dust had been disturbed, but less easy to interpret the fresh scuff-marks on the tiled floor.
Leonora had almost reached the door when the air in the centre of the room began to fluoresce faintly. A few whitish sparks formed about a foot above the floor and drifted to and fro, first attracted to then repulsed by a strange, smoky twist of light. The light was breathing. Leonora could hear it. Sparks went in and out. Then, after a moment or two, a small convulsion like a sneeze took place, and a current of warm air was expelled into the room. Sparks whirled up now, as if from a bonfire. She heard faint music. There was a popping sound, an apologetic cough. Leonora could not move. There was a flaw in the solid world, a discontinuity which grew and grew, then parted like rubbery human lips in the fabric of that nightmare place, onto a darkness which curdled and took shape before her—
*
Ragnar Gustaffson and Loves A Dustbin reached the top of the house just in time to hear Leonora’s shriek of anger. When they burst into the room beneath the dome, it was full of brown shadows, disconnected movements, something that looked like smoke. Ragnar Gustaffson stood there confusedly for a moment, his eyes watering in the chemical reek, convinced the house was on fire.
‘Leonora!’ he called.
‘I can’t see her!’ yelped the fox. ‘I can’t see her!’
‘Leonora!’ they called together. ‘Leonora!’
But the New Majicou, arriving a little later, and entering the room with a curious mixture of calm and reluctance, narrowed his eyes and said nothing at all.
Leonora had backed deep into the gap between two wooden cupboards, and now – wedged fast, bubbl
ing and spitting as much with loss of dignity as fear – faced the danger with bared claws. Above her, pacing angrily to and fro like a tiger in a cage, loomed a thing half cat, half man, the two halves shifting and roiling one into the other, one moment joined, the next separate, never quite properly connected, like shapes in a dream. It was bigger than any real human being. It was there, but it wasn’t there. It was like a drawing made on smoke, yet under its onslaught the cupboards splintered and shook, and a single cumbersome sweep of one upper limb – neither arm nor leg, hand nor paw – was enough to clear cabinets and glassware off the wall and onto the floor. All the while it was groaning and roaring, and in its queer, grunting voice there was as much pain as rage.
The New Majicou watched it for a moment.
Then: ‘Be quiet,’ he told Ragnar and the fox. ‘This is for me to deal with.’
‘But—’ began the fox.
‘Do nothing unless I ask it of you.’
With that, the New Majicou stepped into the centre of the room. What happened next was unclear.
‘Look away from me!’ he ordered.
There was a ripping sound, like the one that sometimes precedes a peal of thunder; and an extraordinary flare of light, which died quickly down through the spectrum to black. A cold, invigorating wind seemed to fill the space below the dome. There was a smell of snow. For an instant, Ragnar and Loves A Dustbin were confused enough to hallucinate a second huge figure in the room, a white tiger of the ice, cold green eyes in a charcoal-striped mask, teeth bared in a roar that shook the air in their lungs. Leonora’s assailant, seeing it too, turned and ran straight into the nearest wall. There was a quick flicker or ripple, and it was gone. Immediately, the cold wind died, and Tag was only Tag again, a silver-grey domestic cat standing rather tiredly in the centre of the room under the appalled gaze of his friends. ‘You’re safe now,’ he said, and went to sit by himself near the door. He seemed preoccupied, as if the encounter itself had been less interesting than the possibilities it suggested.
Ragnar Gustaffson stared up at the wall into which the apparition had vanished. ‘That is a trick,’ he said. ‘If you can do it.’ Then he set about coaxing his errant daughter out from between the cupboards. Loves A Dustbin, meanwhile, approached Tag and stared intently into his eyes. What he saw there didn’t seem to reassure him.
‘Take care,’ he advised.
‘I can only do what I can do.’
‘Yet you mustn’t exhaust yourself.’
‘What do you expect from me?’ said the New Majicou impatiently.
The fox looked away.
‘I saw your mentor burn himself to nothing, doing too often what you have just done,’ he warned. It seemed as if he would say more – then he appeared to shrug, and went on instead, with a kind of morose satisfaction, ‘I knew something was wrong as soon as we arrived. I could smell it.’ He looked around disgustedly. ‘Any smell up here has been masked by these chemicals.’
‘I’m trying to think, actually,’ said Tag. ‘Would you mind leaving me alone?’
*
A little later, when he seemed in a better temper, Leonora went to thank him.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘So you should be, Leo. It would have killed you.’
Leonora shivered.
‘What was it?’ she said. ‘The Alchemist?’
‘No,’ said Tag. ‘It wasn’t.’
But she could see that something about the question had made him think.
“‘No cat has ever wanted to walk like a man,”’ he whispered to himself. ‘Majicou used to say that. No cat has ever wanted to walk like a man. Unless—’
‘What?’ said Leo.
‘I don’t know,’ Tag said.
But he was on his feet now, and quartering the room as if by will-power alone he could force things to give tip their secrets. ‘Come on, Leo!’ he urged. Ragnar and the fox, who had been sitting in a corner talking to one another in low voices, raised their heads to watch him. He studied the contents of splintered cabinets, eyed drifts of broken glass as if they might speak. He sniffed and coughed over the bitter spilled liquids of the alchemical trade. He took a moment to look up into the roof. Everywhere he went, books were piled in disarray, their covers stripped, their pages like broken white wings in the gathering darkness. It was the books which brought him to a halt.
‘Look at this, Leo,’ he said.
He said, ‘My pride is to blame for this.’
He laughed.
‘What we have just seen here was a sideshow,’ he told himself. ‘Not the main event. I saw that plainly, yet—’
His tail lashed from side to side.
‘I have been a complete fool!’ he cried.
‘Ragnar! Loves A Dustbin! Think back,’ he asked them, ‘to the battle with the Alchemist. We were scattered in disarray across Tintagel Head. He loomed above us like death. Everything was lost, until the birth of the kittens! The Alchemist stared down at them, cried out something like dismay, and faltered. In that moment, we had him. But we never asked ourselves why! We never asked what he had seen, what he had guessed, or why he lost his nerve so completely.
‘Once I had recognized and accepted what happened in that moment,’ he told them, ‘so much of what has been hidden was made clear to me! There was no Golden Cat in the Mau’s litter – only three odd but delightful kittens, each with a clear and recognizable quality of its own. We have asked ourselves again and again which of them might wear the mantle – Leo the dancer, full of subtlety and life; Isis the singer, whose voice speaks to the unseen, the way between the worlds; Odin the hunter, closer of the circle. None of them has yet turned out to be what the Alchemist was seeking – the magic animal whose creation he had worked towards for three hundred years—’
‘Yet the Golden Cat has been with us since the moment Pertelot gave birth.
‘Oh, it is a paradox, I admit, but I should have resolved it sooner. It is a tangled skein, but that is no excuse. Still—’ here he stared grimly round. ‘—I am the Majicou, and I believe we are still in time to retrieve the situation. Leo, stay close: without you they can do nothing. Hurry! We must get back to the oceanarium!’
Racing to keep up, his friends followed him back down the stairs, across the sodden lawn and into the highway by the boat-house.
Part 3
The Bright Tapestry
17
The Fields of the Blessed
So it was with all the brazen opportunism of her earlier life that much later that day Sealink strolled up to a busy bait-shop in the middle of a small fishing-town and listened intently to a group of men leaning against a dusty pick-up, drinking beer as the sun went down. When the group split and two of them climbed into the truck and pulled away, bound with their haul of crawfish for the Friday market, they left with an extra load on board: a thirteen-pound calico cat, already intent on making herself at least a fourteen-pound cat by the time they arrived at their mutual destination, by availing herself of their abundant hospitality…
*
In the dream it had seemed both extraordinary and perfectly normal that the Majicou, that mystical guardian of the roads, should appear to her and speak warmly, as to a lifelong friend. When first he had shown her his face it was in his guise as old black tomcat, a little greyed and ragged, his single pale eye stern yet gleaming with vitality. Yet it was in this embodiment that she found him most awesome, for she could sense that this manifestation was in some way a display, most likely directed not at her, of his burning will and self-determination – a measure of his true power.
‘I apologize,’ the Majicou said. ‘My experiment with the Mammy and her bones was not entirely successful. I must, it seems, try something more straightforward. I can only pray I am granted the time…
‘Come with me, Sealink, trust me—’
The next moment, the black cat was gone, and Sealink found herself slipping deeper in the dream, into a more profound and wilder place by far.
And
so it was that a creature four or five feet tall with shoulder-blades as sharp as knives, its fur of a savage, shiny black, dappled like woodland shade with faint tobacco-brown rosettes, came to be sitting nose to nose with a glorious tigress with paws as big as plates and teeth like scythes, the orange, black and white harlequin patches of a calico’s coat strained by packed muscle to a network of vibrant bars and stripes. The scent that rose between them was rank and untamed and their great, stony eyes rested unblinking upon each other.
Equal to equal now, Majicou opened his mind to the tigress. At once, a succession of images passed before her like beads on an abacus, shuttling past one after another as if propelled by an unseen hand.
At first there was darkness. Then, as if from a great distance, she perceived a blur of movement, whirling and dancing like a dervish. She felt wind in her fur, a cold subterranean wind, and with it came a profound rumbling that vibrated inside the chambers of her skull. Mesmerized, she found she could not look away. She felt its pull upon her, deep inside the marrow of her bones. It was a feeling at once unpleasant and addictive.
For a moment she gave herself up to it, allowed it to draw upon her, like a tick upon a sheep. Then, revolted, she pulled free.
She heard the Mammy’s voice, and behind it the deeper roar of the Majicou: The wild roads are dying…
She saw the badger, untouched but with its life sapped away. She saw the white tomcat at the Farmer’s Market, how his skin had slipped between her teeth, her own exhaustion on the roads…
And then she saw, spinning out of the vortex, something small and golden. It eddied before her in the darkness – a tiny golden triangle. She stared at it. She had seen it somewhere before. She remembered an earlier dream. Yes, she had seen it there. She remembered how the sunlight had struck off the armadillos’ bone-pile. Yes. But there was somewhere before that, somewhere important…
Concentrating hard on anything other than food was not something Sealink was used to. It made her head hurt. And, the more her head ached, the more elusive the symbol became.