Trigger Warning

The woman in the green sweater moved over to Shadow. She was not holding a drink. She had dark, short hair, and a crop of freckles that spattered her nose and cheeks. She looked at Shadow. ‘You aren’t in local government, are you?’

Shadow shook his head. He said, ‘I’m kind of a tourist.’ It was not actually untrue. He was travelling, anyway.

‘You’re Canadian?’ said the muttonchop man.

‘American,’ said Shadow. ‘But I’ve been on the road for a while now.’

‘Then,’ said the white-haired woman, ‘you aren’t actually a tourist. Tourists turn up, see the sights and leave.’

Shadow shrugged, smiled, and leaned down. He scratched the landlord’s lurcher on the back of its head.

‘You’re not a dog person, are you?’ asked the dark-haired woman.

‘I’m not a dog person,’ said Shadow.

Had he been someone else, someone who talked about what was happening inside his head, Shadow might have told her that his wife had owned dogs when she was younger, and sometimes called Shadow puppy because she wanted a dog she could not have. But Shadow kept things on the inside. It was one of the things he liked about the British: even when they wanted to know what was happening on the inside, they did not ask. The world on the inside remained the world on the inside. His wife had been dead for three years now.

‘If you ask me,’ said the man with the muttonchops, ‘people are either dog people or cat people. So would you then consider yourself a cat person?’

Shadow reflected. ‘I don’t know. We never had pets when I was a kid, we were always on the move. But—’

‘I mention this,’ the man continued, ‘because our host also has a cat, which you might wish to see.’

‘Used to be out here, but we moved it to the back room,’ said the landlord, from behind the bar.

Shadow wondered how the man could follow the conversation so easily while also taking people’s meal orders and serving their drinks. ‘Did the cat upset the dogs?’ he asked.

Outside, the rain redoubled. The wind moaned, and whistled, and then howled. The log fire burning in the little fireplace coughed and spat.

‘Not in the way you’re thinking,’ said the landlord. ‘We found it when we knocked through into the room next door, when we needed to extend the bar.’ The man grinned. ‘Come and look.’

Shadow followed the man into the room next door. The muttonchop man and the white-haired woman came with them, walking a little behind Shadow.

Shadow glanced back into the bar. The dark-haired woman was watching him, and she smiled warmly when he caught her eye.

The room next door was better lit, larger, and it felt a little less like somebody’s front room. People were sitting at tables, eating. The food looked good and smelled better. The landlord led Shadow to the back of the room, to a dusty glass case.

‘There she is,’ said the landlord, proudly.

The cat was brown, and it looked, at first glance, as if it had been constructed out of tendons and agony. The holes that were its eyes were filled with anger and with pain; the mouth was wide open, as if the creature had been yowling when she was turned to leather.

‘The practice of placing animals in the walls of buildings is similar to the practice of walling up children alive in the foundations of a house you want to stay up,’ explained the muttonchop man, from behind him. ‘Although mummified cats always make me think of the mummified cats they found around the temple of Bast in Bubastis in Egypt. So many tons of mummified cats that they sent them to England to be ground up as cheap fertiliser and dumped on the fields. The Victorians also made paint out of mummies. A sort of brown, I believe.’

‘It looks miserable,’ said Shadow. ‘How old is it?’

The landlord scratched his cheek. ‘We reckon that the wall she was in went up somewhere between 1300 and 1600. That’s from parish records. There’s nothing here in 1300, and there’s a house in 1600. The stuff in the middle was lost.’

The dead cat in the glass case, furless and leathery, seemed to be watching them, from its empty black-hole eyes.

I got eyes wherever my folk walk, breathed a voice in the back of Shadow’s mind. He thought, momentarily, about the fields fertilised with the ground mummies of cats, and what strange crops they must have grown.

‘They put him into an old house side,’ said the man called Ollie. ‘And there he lived and there he died. And nobody either laughed or cried. All sorts of things were walled up, to make sure that things were guarded and safe. Children, sometimes. Animals. They did it in churches as a matter of course.’

The rain beat an arrhythmic rattle on the windowpane. Shadow thanked the landlord for showing him the cat. They went back into the taproom. The dark-haired woman had gone, which gave Shadow a moment of regret. She had looked so friendly. Shadow bought a round of drinks for the muttonchop man, the white-haired woman, and one for the landlord.