A bath was drawn and he was hustled into it. He had dirt ingrained, it seemed, even below his clothes. When he snuffed at his arm he smelled mint, girl and woodsmoke. He let the steaming water cradle him and wondered where she was now, in what world, under which trees.
There was cold pork in the game bag, he remembered. He would dump it in the morning.
A different morning, in another world. He had left a wood minutes ago where the sun was slanting high and bright in the sky, and yet here there was blue darkness outside the window and he could see the flash and tilt of lanterns in the yard as the men went out for their nightly check of the stock.
He was tired, though. Sleeping in the wood seemed somehow not like sleep at all, more like a semi-conscious awareness. He yawned in the hot clutch of the bath.
Where was he being taken? What was this place she brought him to, with its monsters and forests? And how much of it was here, in his own world? Was there a barrier wearing thin between the two, or was it merely him, his fancies that no one else could see?
Something had bent that trap in the wood, something big.
And he had seen the hideous shape in the yard that night. He had dug up the skull of one of its kind.
No. It was both real and unreal. It was there, waiting for him, and Cat wanted him to enter it, to view the marvels. To travel Wonderland.
SCHOOL TOOK HIM.
It was a marvel the way the days flew, flitted, tumbled past sunlit and ordinary, and wore downto autumn. The turning of the year seemed to have arrived in a wheeling rush. Now it would slow again, as Michael waited out the waning days within the confines of the schoolroom with the smell of chalk, the must of books, the voices of other children. But always, the knowledge that there was more—a whole world mere heartbeats away—there, brooding in the corners of his mind like a pot bubbling on the back of the stove.
Grammar, algebra, trigonometry, Irish, religion. These he was taught, plodding in unison with the rest of the chanting class and eyeing the amber-pale field, the crops cut now, beyond the narrow windows.
History, prehistory, the taking of fire from flint and wood, the flora and fauna of long-vanished wildernesses, tool-making, burial rites, the construction of dolmen. These he taught himself in a crazy-quilt of patchwork reading and talks with Mullan. It was a dappled, magpie education, riddled with gaps and deep in the wrong places—but wholly necessary, he was coming to believe. It fed his growing appetite for strangeness, but nourished his fellow pupils' belief in his eccentricity. Miss Glover seemed to him a confused mix of encouragement and censure. She had lent him books, but they were the wrong books and he returned them unread. Nothing she did seemed to suit him, and he remained determined to dig deep in his own chosen fields of study, scraping only desultorily at the topsoil elsewhere. From bafflement she passed into irritation and anger. Michael began to be kept behind after school, remaining alone in the ticking silence with thorny mathematical problems on his pad, Miss Glover baleful and intense at her desk and the bright day wasting away outside.
Again and again this happened, his. grandparents and his aunt adding to the punishment when he got home so that he began to feel caged, surrounded, savage. He even wondered if Cat had put some spell on him, blunted some self-preserving instinct to do as he was told.
For she had gone and left him. There was no sign of her by the river or the bridge, and the wood was empty. Perhaps, he thought, it was something to do with the season, but the wood seemed deserted of almost all life. Birds had never been common there, but there had always been other things—rabbit droppings, squirrel-gnawed nuts, owl leavings. And the tracks, of course. Now there was nothing but the rising wind in the trees. The husks of ten-foot giant hogweed swayed brittle and fantastic down along the river and the air was full of the onion-smell of ramsoms. The roof of Michael's hut had fallen in on itself and the embers of their fire were black, stonehard and cold.
There was something here, though. The hut had not collapsed. It had been torn down, the supporting sticks splintered and smashed. And here, in the ground beside it, a blurred footprint, man-like but with claws at the end of the toes and no arch at the instep. Padded, like a dog's.
Michael straightened from his perusal of the ground, staring out at the blank faces of the surrounding trees. They were nearly bare already, and the wood was full of falling leaves. He felt he was not alone, that there was a watcher out there, unfriendly, malevolent. He no longer trusted the gun as a defence, not since he had shot the thing in the wood that night and heard it blunder away unharmed. Different rules operated here. That was another reason to seek out Cat. He needed to know things, things he had not found in books. How to fight werewolves, for instance. How to ward off evil.