The Wild Road

Book by Gabriel King is a pseudonym for M John Harrison Ja

        Among human beings a cat is merely a cat; among cats a cat is a
        prowling shadow in a jungle.
        --Karel Capek
They called the kitten Tag. They fed him, and he grew. They put a collar
around his neck. They entertained him, and the world began to take on
shape.

It was his world, full of novelty yet always reliable, exciting yet
secure. He was a small king; and by the time a week was out, he had
explored every inch of his new kingdom. He liked the kitchen best. It was
warm in there on a cold day, and from the windowsill he could see out into
the garden. In the kitchen they made food, which was easy to get off them.
He had bowls of his own to eat it from. He had a box of clean dirt to
scrat in. The kitchen wasn't entirely comfortable--especially in the
morning, when things went off or went around very loudly without
warning--but elsewhere they had given him a large sofa, covered in dark red
velvet, among the scattered cushions of which he scrabbled and burrowed
and slept. He had brass tubs with plants and some very interesting
fireplaces full of dried flowers, out of which flowed odors damp and sooty.

Up a flight of stairs and into every room, every cupboard and corner! It
was big up there, and full of unattended human things. At first he
wouldn't go on his own but always made one of them accompany him while he
inspected the shelves stuffed with clean linen and dusty books.

"Come on, come on!" he urged them. "Here now! Look, here!" They never
answered.

They were too dull.

A further flight up, and it was as if nobody had ever lived there--echoes
on the uncarpeted stairs, gray floorboards and open doors, pale bright
light pouring in through uncurtained windows. Up there, each bare floor
had a smell of its own; each ball of fluff had a personality. If he
listened, he could hear dead spiders contracting behind the woodwork. Left
to himself up there he danced, for reasons he barely understood. It was a
territorial dance, grave yet full of energy. Simply to occupy the space,
perhaps, he leapt and pounced and hurled himself about, then slept in a
pool of sunshine as if someone had switched him off. When he woke, the sun
had moved away, and they were calling him to come and eat more new things.

They called him Tag. He called them dull.

"Come on, dulls!" he urged them. "Come on!"

They had a room where they poured water on themselves. Every morning he
hid outside it and jumped out on the big dull bare feet that passed. Nice
but dull, they were never quick enough or nimble enough to avoid him. They
never learned. They remained shadowy to him--a large smell, cheerful if
meaningless goings-on, a caring face suspended over him like the moon
through the window if he woke afraid. They remained patient, amiable,
easily convinced, less focused than a tin of meat-and-liver dinner. The
dulls were for food or comfort or play. Especially for play. One of his
earliest memories was of chasing soap bubbles. The light of an autumn
evening shifted gently from blue to a deep orange. Up and down the room
rushed Tag, clapping his front paws in the air. He loved the movement. He
loved the heavy warmth of the air. Everything was exciting. Everything was
golden. The iridescence of each bubble was a brand-new world, a brand-new
opportunity. It was like waking up in the morning.

Bubble! Tag thought. Another bubble!

He thought, Chase the bubbles!

As leggy and unsteady, as easily surprised, as easy to tease, as full of
daft energy as every kitten, Tag pursued the bubbles, and the bubbles--each
with its tiny reflected picture of the room in strange, slippery
colors--evaded him smoothly and neatly and then hid among a sheaf of dried
flowers or floated slowly up the chimney or blundered without a care into
a piece of furniture and burst. He heard them burst, in a way a human
being never could, with a sound like tapped porcelain.

Evanescence and infinite renewal!

Any cat who wants to live forever should watch bubbles. Only kittens
should chase them.

Tag would chase anything. But the toy he enjoyed most was a small cloth
mouse with a very energetic odor. It had been bright red to start with.
Now it was rather dirty, and to its original smell had been added that of
floor polish. Tag whacked it around the shiny living room floor. Off it
skidded. Tag skidded after it, scrabbling to keep upright on the tighter
turns.

One day he found a real mouse hiding under the Welsh dresser.

A real mouse was a different thing.

Tag could see it, a little pointed black shape against the gray dimness.
He could smell it too, sharp and terrified against the customary smell of
fluff balls and seasoned pine. It knew he was there! It kept very still,
but there was a lick of light off one beady eye, and he could feel the
thoughts racing and racing through its tiny head. All the mouse's fear was
trapped there under the dresser, stretched taut between the two of them
like a wire. Tag vibrated with it. He wanted to chase and pounce. He
wanted to eat the mouse: he didn't want to eat it. He felt powerful and
predatory; he felt bigger than himself. At the same time he was anxious
and frightened--for himself and the mouse. Eating someone was such a big
step. He rather regretted his bravado with the pet shop finches.

He watched the mouse for some time. It watched him. Suddenly, Tag decided
not to change either of their lives. His old cloth mouse had a nicer smell
anyway. He reached in expertly, hooked it out, and walked away with it in
his jaws. "Got you!" he told it. He flung it in the air and caught it.
After a few minutes he had forgotten the real mouse, though it probably
never forgot him--and his dreams were never the same.
That afternoon he took the cloth mouse with him up to the third floor
where he could pat it about in a drench of cool light.

When he got bored with this he jumped up on the windowsill. From up there
he had a view of the gardens stretching away right and left between the
houses. However much he cajoled or bullied them, the dulls never seemed to
understand that he wanted to go out there. It fascinated him. His own
garden had a lawn full of moss and clover that sloped down toward the
house, where a steep rockery gave way to the lichen-stained tiles of the
checkerboard patio. Lime trees overhung the back fence, along which--almost
obscured by colonies of cotoneaster, monbretia, and fuchsia--ran a dark,
narrow path of crazy paving. Cool smells came up from the garden after
rain. Wood pigeons shifted furtively in the branches all endless sunny
afternoon, then burst into loud, aimless cooing. At twilight, the sleepy
liquid call of blackbird and thrush seemed to come from another world; and
the greens of the lawn looked mysterious and unreal. Dawn filled the trees
with squirrels, who chased one another from branch to branch, looting as
they went, while birds quartered the lawn or hopped in circles around the
mossy stone birdbath.

Transfixed with excitement, Tag watched them pull up worms.

That afternoon, a magpie was in blatant possession of the lawn, strutting
around the birdbath and every so often emitting loud and raucous cries. It
was a big, glossy bird, proud of its elegant black-and-white livery and
metallic blue flashes. Tag had seen it before. He hated its bobbing head
and powerful, ugly beak. He hated its flat, ironic eyes. Most of all he
hated the way it seemed to look directly up at him, as if to say, My lawn!

Tag narrowed his eyes. Angry chattering sounds he couldn't control came
from his throat. He jumped off the windowsill, then back up again.
"Wrong!" he said. "Wrong!"

But the bird pretended not to hear him--though he was certain it could--and
unable to bear its smug proprietorial air, Tag sat down, curled his tail
around himself, and closed his eyes. After a while, he fell asleep,
thinking confusedly, My mouse. This seemed to lead him into a dream.

He dreamed that he was under the Welsh dresser, eating something. Somehow,
the dark gap beneath the dresser was big enough for him to enter; he had
followed something in there, and was eating it. The soft parts had a warm,
acrid, salty taste, and he could hardly get them down fast enough. Before
he was able to swallow the tougher bits he had to shear them with the
carnassial teeth at the side of his jaw, breathing heavily through his
mouth as he did so. That was enjoyable too. Just as he was finishing
off--licking his lips, snuffing the dusty floor where it had been in case
he had missed anything--he heard a voice in the dark whisper quite close to
him, "Tag is not your true name."

He whirled around. Nothing. Yet someone was there under the dresser with
him. He could almost feel the heat of its body, the smell of its breath,
the unsettling companionable feel of it. It had quietly watched him eat
and said nothing. Now he felt guilty, angry, afraid. His fur bristled. He
tried to back out from under the dresser, but now everything was the right
size again and he was stuck, squeezed down tight in a dark space that
smelled of wood and dust and blood with a creature he couldn't see. "Tag,"
it whispered. "Listen. Tag is not your true name." He felt that if he
stayed there any longer, it would push its face right into his, touch him
in the dark, tell him something he didn't want to hear ...

"Tag is my name!" he cried, and woke up--to a loud, rapid hammering noise
near his ear. While he slept, the magpie had flown up from the garden. It
was strutting to and fro on the ledge directly outside the window,
screeching and cawing, flapping its wings against the glass, filling the
whole world with its clamor. Now its face was right next to his, and its
chipped, wicked beak was drumming against the glass and it was shouting at
him.

"Call yourself a cat? Call yourself a cat?"

And he fell off the windowsill and hit his head hard on the floor.

Everything went a soft dark brown color, like comforting fur. When he woke
up again, the bird was gone and he could hear the dulls preparing their
food downstairs, and he thought it had all been the same dream.
Tag had lived in the house for two months. It seemed much longer, a great
stretch of time in which he was never unhappy. He never wanted for
anything. He doubled in size. His sleep was sound, his dreams infrequent
and full of kitten things. All that seemed to be changing. Now, as he
curled up on the velvet sofa, he wondered what would happen when he closed
his eyes. Each time he slept, he lived another life--or fragments of it, a
life of which he had no understanding.

In one dream he was walking beneath a sliver of yellow moon, with ragged
clouds high up; he heard the loud roar of some distant animal. In another,
he saw the vague shape of two cats huddled together with heads bowed,
waiting in the pouring rain; they were so hungry and in such trouble that
when he saw them, a grief he could not understand welled up inside him
like a pain. In a third dream, he was standing on a windswept cliff high
above the sea. There were dark gorse bushes under a strange, unreal light.
There was a sense of vast space, the sound of water crashing rhythmically
on rocks below. In the teeth of the wind, Tag heard a voice at his side
say quietly, "I am one who becomes two; I am two who become four; I am
four who become eight; I am one more after that." It was the voice of a
cat. Or was it?

"Tintagel," it said. "Tag! Tag! Listen! Listen to the waves!"

All the dreams were different, but that voice was always the same--quiet,
persuasive, companionable, frightening. It wanted to tell him things. It
wanted him to do things.

All the dreams were strange; but perhaps this was the strangest dream of
all.

He dreamed it was evening, and he was sitting on a windowsill while behind
him in the room, the dulls ate their food, talking and waving their big
arms about. Tag stared out. It was dark. There were clouds high up,
obscuring the waning moon, but the moonlight broke fitfully through.
Something was happening at the very end of the garden. He couldn't quite
see what it was. Every night, he sensed, animals went along the path down
there, entering the garden at one side and leaving at the other. They were
on business of their own, business to enthral a young cat. It was a
highway, with constantly exciting traffic.

In the dream there was an animal out there, but he couldn't see it clearly
or hear it. For a moment the moonlight seemed to resolve it into the shape
of a large black cat--a cat with only one eye. Then it was nothing but a
shadow again. He shifted his feet uneasily. He wanted to be out there; he
didn't want to be out there. Clouds obscured the moon again. He put his
face close to the glass. "Be quiet!" he tried to tell the dulls. "Watch!
Watch now!"

As he spoke, the animal out there seemed to see him. He felt its eye on
him. He felt its will begin to engage his own. He thought he heard it
whisper, "I have a task for you, Tag. A great task!"

Behind him in the room, the dulls laughed at something one of them had
said. Tag shook himself, expecting to wake up. But when he looked around,
he was still in that room, and he had never been asleep. As if sensing his
confusion, the female got up and, putting her face close to his as if it
wanted to see exactly what he was seeing, stared out into the darkness. It
shivered. "You don't want to go out there," it said softly. "Cold and
dangerous for a little cat like you. Brrr!" It stroked his head. The purr
rose in Tag's throat. When he turned back to the garden, the one-eyed cat
had gone.
Early one morning, before the household was awake, Tag saw the sun coming
up, carmine colored, flat and pale with promise. A few shreds of mist hung
about the branches of the lime trees. Soon, three or four sparrows and a
robin had alighted on the lawn and begun hopping about among the fallen
leaves. This was all as it should be. Tag hunched forward to get a better
look. My birds! he thought. But then they flew up suddenly, to be replaced
by his enemy the magpie, who strode on long legs in a rough circle around
the birdbath, shining with health and self-importance. It stopped,
stretched its neck, opened its beak to reveal a short thick purple-gray
tongue, and let forth its abrasive cry.

"Raaark. Raaark."

Oh yes? thought Tag. We'll see about that!

But what could he do? Only jump on and off the windowsill in a fever of
frustration. At last he heard the dulls getting up, and there was
somethi...