Here’s what you remember: wooden floors, big cold windows that let in the forest, yellow light falling across the hallway. A world outside the two-up two-down suburbs, something you’d never seen in the houses of family or friends you had slept in previous to that trip; to lie on those hard planks and feel the breath of the earth coming up between the cracks like dew, and to think about the soft and sweaty loam of the forest you had crawled through that afternoon while your parents took stock. Your father, who had inherited the property from his father, grumbling about this season’s latest damage, those corners and edges where rain or spiderwebs or mould attempted to gain a foothold, to turn the inside back outside again. Your mother, humming as she unwrapped the rough woollen blankets from their hiding places in the walls, shaking the time off of them; it has been two days and the excitement within you has been tempered by familiarity. You don’t feel fearful of the woods, not yet. Steps up and down the long corridor with the windows all over, no curtains necessary. There’s nobody else around for miles in any direction, privacy afforded by thick, shaggy pines, looking vaguely uncomfortable in the summer heat as if they haven’t dressed right for the occasion.
And how could it be otherwise; this is your first time visiting the land of your father’s father, who died before you were born – he was important, his name in the old tongue meant ‘commander’, although he commanded nothing except for this patch of woodland, which was enough for him. You wish you had met him. Your father has little interest in nature and spends most of his time in the high-backed chair, reading his magazines.
Those windows, those windows like glass walls that took up the whole room, impossibly thin, why do you remember those in particular? Why hasn’t the artwork on the living room wall survived, or the hangings of old hunting equipment in the entranceway, which instead survive as a brownish tangle that loomed above your head? The answer is obvious; any room for other memories of that world has been colonised, pushed out by the time you spent in front of those enormous windows, watching the woods outside as the afternoon sun yawned through the needles.
Through the overlapping branches as tight as fencing, there is a cat moving stripewise. Much bigger than a housecat should be, but the same shape, clad in the same saggy fur that defines domestic pets with steady meals. It stalks perpendicular to the long house, a silhouette in green. Sometime is wrong. Father can’t see it. By the time he turns round at your screams it will be gone. Mother believes you. A cat, she repeats, translating through your snot and tears, soft hand on your forehead checking for an overheated brain. Oh but darling, just a cat, what was so bad about a cat? That’s only-
What was it about the cat?
Another day. Another trip? You are taller, maybe, but still soft, new. Your parents have left you at the lodge – a long trip into the village to pick up supplies, you would get carsick – and you are waiting at the window with an obscure fear at your breast. The hope it doesn’t appear and the hope that it does, that it ends this charade, collapse and comingle. A half-wail, half-cough erupts past the treeline, thick as ever. A knock at the front door distracts you for a second.
The cat is lazing at the forest margin when you turn back, as if it’s always been there. Now you see clearly. This time, the fear silences and bestills you.
It has an old man’s face, a fleshy head erupting from where the cat’s face should have been. Liver-spotted and drooping, two milky-blue eyes focusing on nothing. Cracked purplish lips mouthing something, muttering words while the cat-body shifts and sways with unconscious precision. You watch as it approaches the window, unsure if it can see through the glass, if it can see at all. The words become clearer, a constant stream, never varying or stopping for breath.
-such a funny fellow, yes, especially on the sundays, yes, when we were all blessed, such fun today, a fellow on the day, a special day, fun fun-
You take a step back, away from the garden and the woods, and the head snaps to you with those blind and unfocused eyes, confirmation that it means nothing but ill. It keeps speaking the same nonsense, but faster now, louder. It slinks up and down the length of the building, perhaps seeking an entrance, which it mercifully does not find. It mumbles by the front door. And then, at the crunch of tires on gravel, it melds back into the heat-shocked pines, tail upright and twitching.
Alexander James 