The Wild Road

by Gabriel King

  Each time a cage was removed, Tag and his friends ran about behind the diminishing pile, looking for new places to hide.

  Each time it got more difficult.

  Eventually, the human looked down. It stopped. It bent forward.

  ‘Well now,’ it said.

  ‘Run!’ called Mousebreath. ‘Run for it!’

  Tag ran.

  Long before he reached the square of icy moonlight at the end of the van, he felt hard hands catch at the loose fur behind his head. A great, round, pale face, pocked with open pores and stubble, loomed above him. He smelled its breath: very old food. He hissed and darted his head at it, teeth bared. The face disappeared. The hands slipped for an instant, then fastened around his body just below his ribs, where they tightened cruelly. He writhed and spat. He shrieked and bit. There was a yell and he was free again, scrabbling toward the doors. He fell over the edge and out into the night, where he found his companions trying to evade the other cat catchers: three gross human figures doing a kind of quiet, savage dance in the falling snow.

  A thin fog of their own breath blurred their outlines, gave to their actions the ponderousness of slow motion, dampened their dull cries. Between their feet, tangled up in their legs, always managing to slip desperately out of reach, were three spitting cats. In a moment. Tag had been spotted, and there were four.

  Amused, the fourth cat catcher watched this dance from the back of the van. Then it reached into a pocket of its coat and carefully shook out what it found there.

  ‘Run!’ Tag gasped, when he saw it. ‘Run!’

  But by then – although they tried – it was too late to run anywhere.

  The net was already over them.

  Tag felt himself lifted into the air. Thin nylon mesh cut his face. He got one of his front legs out, but this only allowed the mesh to slip over his elbow and embed itself in the soft skin beneath. The more he struggled, the worse it hurt. The four of them were crushed in together, with Mousebreath at the bottom, howling in fury and terror. Tag felt him kicking out repeatedly like a dying rabbit, to no point or purpose. The net began to spin, drawing the visible world out into a gray blur. Tag got glimpses in quick succession of the frozen pond, a house standing on its own, a big raw hand reaching up. Then the van again.

  From inside it, a smell of imprisoned cats welled into the cold night. Stale fear, stale urine, inadequately covered feces. Tag got a confused impression of the new cages, stacked up against the walls so that only a narrow aisle was left between them. Cat faces stared rigidly out at him in a brief moment of hope. Then the net spun and he was looking across at the pond again.

  An irregular fifty-yard oval, fringed with spiky reeds and trees whose trunks were leaning and grotesquely split. The water, gray and glistening, flush with its flat grassy banks, looked sugary, inert, part frozen. He had time to see a movement out there – time to wonder what it was – before the motion of the net turned him to face the van. Hard human hands reached down. Human smells immersed him. He was pulled in, and the doors began to close. But not before Mousebreath’s struggles had spun the net one last time.

  The snow had stopped. A bleak yellow moon licked the racing clouds. The square was silent and still. Dull reflections seemed to flicker at the far end of the pond, where the wind was moving something to and fro. A leaf or a branch. No. It was something too big and vague for that, some kind of motion the brain couldn’t easily grasp. Tag narrowed his eyes. His heart began to race.

  Because he was a cat he understood what was happening long before the human beings did. It was too late for them. All they heard was a grunting roar, echoing off the trees. All they saw, as they turned to one another in horror and dropped the heaving net, was a black cat bounding toward them across the surface of the pond, its teeth bared, its big hard pads throwing up sprays of water, its glossy shoulders and haunches moving like a machine. It was diminishing as it came but was still larger than any cat a human being ever saw –

  The Majicou!

  It was the Majicou, caught in the instant of his power, emerging from the highway like some vast Brazilian jaguar from its arboreal gloom, his breath as hot as iron smoke in the frozen air!

  Mousebreath, by now in a very dangerous state of mind indeed, finally got a claw into the net and gutted it like a fish. At exactly the same moment, the cat catchers dropped it and jumped out of the back of the van. Majicou bore down on them. Unnerved, they jumped back in, only to be confronted by the tortoiseshell, snarling up at them demonically as he tore off the remains of the net. For a moment they were paralyzed. Then they broke. There was a brief struggle for the driver’s seat of the van. The starter scraped. The engine caught. The vehicle raced out of the square, wheels spinning, rear end sliding, back doors hanging open. Tag, Cy, and Mousebreath tumbled out into the road like lost luggage, but Majicou barely let them get their breath.

  ‘Quick now! Follow me!’ And he turned and sped off toward the pond.

  ‘Wait!’ called Tag.

  ‘No time!’

  At the edge, Tag halted uncertainly.

  Mousebreath ran into him. Cy tumbled past them and slithered a little way across the ice on her bottom, looking aggravated.

  ‘Wait!’ they called.

  But the black cat wouldn’t listen.

  ‘No time! This ice will bear you as long as you run!’

  And he sped out in front of them, ten, twenty, fifty yards into the distance, growing larger as he approached the strange, smoky flicker on the far bank. A dozen cats spooled out onto the ice and streamed away in the night air after the one-eyed cat, bowling Tag over in their haste to escape.

  There was no option. ‘Come on then!’ cried Tag. Suddenly they were bounding across the ice together, throwing up spray like tigers in a rice field. Moorhens woke up and scooted for the bank. Startled mallards took to the air left and right. Tag ran. The ice held him up. Tag ran; they all ran; far in front ran Majicou. Their breath was hot in the freezing air. Cold and hunger meant nothing to them. They shed without thought the iron heat of their lives. On and on they seemed to run until the pond became a gray nowhere and movement all that had meaning – They were cats. They were cats! – then the highway had recognized and accepted them, and in one seamless gesture they were somewhere else. ‘We’re safe here for the moment,’ said Majicou. His voice was hollow and echoing. Out of immediate danger, and with the whole world to choose from, the other cats from the van were already wandering off in different directions. Majicou watched them go. He focused his single eye on Tag. ‘Now tell me quick!’ he said. ‘The Queen – where is she?’

  Tag stared at him. ‘She’s not here.’ He was bewildered. ‘You can see she’s not here. She fell in the canal.’

  He sat down tiredly. He admitted, ‘I’ve lost Sealink too.’

  ‘And the fox?’

  ‘The fox died,’ Mousebreath offered. He asked the black cat, ‘Who are you?’

  Majicou ignored him.

  ‘Pray that she is with the fox,’ he said. He lashed his tail, paced to and fro. ‘If he’s not there to help, the Alchemist will have them both!’

  Mousebreath shrugged. ‘He didn’t look as if he could help himself last time I saw him. Let alone anyone else.’

  The great cat stared.

  ‘Then the game is lost. This afternoon I dreamed she was near me – or have I yet to dream it? – but then she was gone again. Why didn’t I act then? Why didn’t I act?’

  Tag looked round bemusedly.

  ‘Where are we?’ he said. ‘And where are Cy and Ragnar?’

  ‘I’m here,’ said Cy. ‘I’m me.’

  ‘Ragnar? Ragnar!’

  ‘Ragnar!’

  Their voices no longer echoed. They were off the highway, in a bleak-looking spot on the downs above a village. They stared at each other anxiously; they stared anxiously about. They stopped calling out. There was no comfort to be had up here for city cats. Only Mousebreath had seen anything like it before, and even he was shocked. Everyth
ing was harsh black and white in the snowlight. It was bitterly cold. They felt their small size under the wheeling arc of the night. The wind made them cling together and press close around Majicou as he led them down a short steep slope, through a gate and a thicket of elder and hawthorn, to the door of an empty barn. Downslope was dead bracken, an earthy path winding away, the beginnings of fields. Upslope, back through the gate, Tag could see a great ridge – but not yet the two iron-hard ruts at its summit, worldly markers of the wildest road of all, stretching away under the moonlight to Tintagel in the deep west. In the end he had to admit, ‘I think we’ve lost Ragnar too.’

  Majicou sighed exasperatedly.

  ‘This is all my fault,’ said Tag, hoping that Majicou would say it wasn’t.

  Instead, Majicou asked himself wearily, ‘What else can go wrong?’ He looked frail and old now – a one-eyed cat worn out by long responsibility. ‘Nothing,’ he concluded. ‘We had better go in where it’s warm.’ But a few moments later, when they had got inside the barn, he found that he had lost Tag too.

  *

  The bracken was hard work. But after a mile or so it gave way to beechwoods, a little beaten path, and rather easier going.

  By then, though his pads were numb and he was already tired, Tag had begun to enjoy himself. The moon was low. The path ran here and there across little empty ditches and exposed root systems. There was no shelter. In the tunnel between the tall trees, the snow had been too powdery to cover; instead, a light salting picked out the line of a gnarled stone here, a broken branch there. Tag trotted and loped; stopped to listen, one paw raised; told himself, ‘Better be off!’ and fled across the view, quick, silent, barely visible, until the edge of the wood brought him up short, and he was looking straight down into the valley.

  Everything was laid out so clearly for him!

  A mesh of steep-sided little lanes each with its handful of houses. Gardens, asymmetric and overgrown. Spinneys thick with dog rose and rhododendron. A tall gray building with an ivy-covered tower at one end. If Ragnar was down there, he could be found. Everything was so close that Tag could hear the ducks, grumbling sleepily from the pond. He stood – haunches down, front legs straight, every nerve alert – on a fallen tree and watched. A minute. Two minutes. Nothing was moving. There was no danger. Thirty seconds more, and he would go down there.

  But he never did.

  As he launched himself off the damp black trunk of the dead beech, he heard his name called.

  ‘Tag.’

  ‘Ragnar! Are you here?’

  Nothing.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Tag,’ said the voice again.

  There was a laugh.

  Just out of sight, something moved quietly between two trees. Tag looked around puzzledly. ‘Majicou? Who’s there?’

  ‘Tag.’

  It was a kind of whisper.

  This time he heard it move – whatever it was. It made the noises you would expect of a large animal trying to shift its position silently in thick cover: a rustle, a furtive scrape. Tag shivered. The moon was down. Even so it was easy to see that the woods were empty. Beeches are cold, elegant trees, and nothing grows beneath them. The ground rose away, open and scoured, limned here and there with dusty snow. There were only roots and stones to see. There was no cover in the woods. There never had been.

  ‘Who are you?’ he said.

  Scrape.

  ‘I’m you.’

  There was a hot, fetid smell.

  ‘I’m—’

  Something huge, stalking something small: a terrible incongruity. Something stalking from an undergrowth that wasn’t there –

  Scrape.

  Behind me! thought Tag. He whirled around.

  Nothing.

  ‘Tag.’

  Scrape.

  Did he see it? Did it allow him to see it?

  He was never sure. A twist of light – of less than light – fell on something as it poured itself around the tangled roots toward him. A smell of ammonia and rotten meat. It was almost as if he were watching it stalk someone else. He wanted to warn them, but he couldn’t speak. Panic raced up through him, and he went off like a rabbit in the night – ‘Tag’ – a flickering white blur making desperate – ‘Tag’ – figure eights around the bases of the trees and then – ‘Tag, Tag, Tag’ – straight out of the wood and down the slope and into the village, crying, ‘Help! Majicou! Help!’ until he saw the icy surface of the duck pond in front of him and flew across it without a thought, to the safety of the highway.

  Night on the highway, as iridescent as reflections on oil. Here, Majicou had said, time had some other meaning. Echoes sped away in all directions. To the north, the great chalk ridge loomed against the sky. Above it burned white stars. All along it the smoky ghosts of cats streamed east and west. On its lower flank lay the village, vibrating faintly with a thousand years of itself. A village viewed by cats – barns and butter chums, open windows for them to come and go. And beyond it the pond, its banks debatable and its willows sketchy. Tag looked around. The compass wind lifted his fur, cooled his fear a little. It was familiar enough. He had come this way an hour before, running like a proper cat with Majicou. He was an old hand now. He looked behind him once, shivered, turned his face into the wind, and trotted forward slowly at first and then faster and faster as he felt the highway move in him and bring him in touch with that tireless, burning, interior gait.

  ‘We run!’ he called to his friends the ghosts. They streamed past silently and silently agreed, ‘We run.’

  He had come this way an hour before. He remembered a vast sweep of downland cupping the village, the barn beneath the ridge. He remembered woods, but not these…

  Every stride took him further in. The air was thick and oppressive. It smelled of mold. The trees were close, tangled, strung with vines and moss. Many of them had fallen down and lay across his path rotten with beetle larvae, plated with thick white bracket fungus. But he still had his confidence, and he leapt them with contempt. His great heart beat within him. He loved to stretch his legs and leap. He was Tag: a cat. When the ground turned black and boggy, his broad pads bore him up. He splashed through hidden pools and streams. Dense growths of bramble and thorn tugged at his fur – he felt nothing. Ashen glades, gray trees, the trickle of black water. He wondered when the highway would begin again. He heard a voice.

  ‘Tag.’

  It was a thick whisper. It filled his mouth like dusty fungus spores. It filled his nose with the smell of rotting meat, the smell of something caged by its own appetites. It was at his elbow, yet it filled the whole wide wood.

  It was the whole wide wood.

  ‘Tag!’

  The highway had trickled away from him into groundwater and sand. He was his own size again, and something was pursuing him between the moldy trunks of trees. When he ran now, it was not the oiled gait of the predator but the sudden terrified scramble of the prey.

  ‘Tag.’

  He ran until he couldn’t run any longer. Then he nosed into the undergrowth and crept through the root systems where the earth smelled dank and decomposed until he could push himself into a damp cranny between two stones like knuckles.

  ‘Tag—’

  It couldn’t follow him into such a small space. But it knew where he was. It settled down. It would wait patiently for him to come out again, whispering his name now and then in a disappointed but cajoling fashion. Confusion and fear lay on him. His pads were split, his face grazed and cut. His fur lay on his thin pink body in dirty tufts and draggles. He had forgotten Majicou. He had forgotten Ragnar. He had forgotten why he left his friends. He had forgotten who he was. He couldn’t stop shivering long enough to lick himself, or stop listening long enough to rest. He didn’t dare curl up. Instead he stared and stared ahead, his eyes black, his lips drawn back in an endless snarl.

  ‘Oh, Tag.’

  And that was how Majicou found him, just after dawn, in the lee of a beech tree less than a mile from
the barn. A cold milky light fell through the woodland in slanting columns. It picked things out in pastel colors, diffusing them at the same time so that they seemed to overspread their own edges. It questioned everything it saw.

  Majicou thought he had stumbled across a dead squirrel.

  How can a sound be muffled, yet at the same time echo? How can a voice you have never heard seem like your own? At first, all Tag would do was huddle like a kitten into the warm curve of the black cat’s body and repeat, ‘It chased me. It chased me.’

  ‘Did it name itself?’

  ‘It said it was me.’

  ‘Hush,’ said Majicou. ‘You’re safe now.’

  He said, ‘Old forces have been awakened, and are traveling the highways again, out of control—’

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘I don’t know how to describe them, Tag. Discarded things. Bits of the ancient life that went astray and were somehow never subsumed. Now the Alchemist has woken them without knowing it. They might yet be his downfall.’

  This meant nothing to Tag. He was hungry. He licked energetically his disordered fur.

  ‘Are they gods?’ he said.

  ‘You might say that,’ agreed Majicou. ‘If cats had gods, I suppose that is what they would be like.’ He thought for a time. ‘They are ourselves,’ he said. ‘What you met was some old fragment of the cat life. Some ancient experience of hunting, perhaps, cut loose from its rightful place and time.’

  ‘Or some experience of being hunted,’ Tag said. He shuddered. ‘It made me feel so small!’

  ‘These things have no real force of their own, though at times they can be—’ Majicou sought for the right word ‘—marshaled. You were a little young yet for an encounter like that. Perhaps you shouldn’t have looked for Ragnar on your own.’