One night the two of them wakened me in the middle of the night. Glory said, “Falija found something she thinks we ought to see, Grandma.”
“Fine,” I said. “We’ll go see it in the morning.”
“No,” she said. “Falija says it has to be now.”
I wavered between outrage and curiosity. Curiosity won. I put on shoes and a big sweater. Falija led the way down to the road, up the valley, until we got to the rise before the cemetery.
Glory said, “I don’t go in there, Falija.”
Falija said, “I’m not taking you in there. We’re going up the hill.”
So we clambered up the ridge of the rise, past the cemetery fence, and onto a big flat rock between two thimble-apple trees. Beside the rock was some deep grass where we could sit in the moon shadow of the trees, and the fiddlebugs were making a noise so much like a ringing in the ears you couldn’t tell if it was inside or outside your head.
“There,” whispered Falija.
Down the hill two little girls were running stark naked, hand in hand, along the meadow, and behind them some other children, all naked, some of them paired off and some alone. Along behind them came Lou Ellen.
That’s when I realized I was dreaming again. I had that same, misty feeling I’d had down at the ferry pool. The naked children gathered around Lou Ellen. Glory started to get up, and Falija put a claw into her arm. “Don’t,” she said. “They’ll run away if you go down there.”
Some older, familiar-looking children came through the trees. They were as tall as grown-up people, but they had no breasts, and there was no hair on their bodies. I thought I should know them, but I couldn’t remember who they were.
“They’re all children,” Glory said in confusion.
“Well,” Falija said, “not so much children as just young, and they’re all the same person, really. Some grown larger, some not.”
“Why not?” Glory whispered.
“Oh,” Falija whispered. “Where they are, they don’t need to be old. They’ve already learned everything they can.”
I was dreaming again. I had to be. A woman wearing red robes that billowed and flowed around her like a rosy cloud came out of the woods. She stood for a time, watching the children until they wandered into the trees on the far side. Lou Ellen was with them. I had never seen her with that expression of joy on her face. Bliss, I’d call it. Absolute bliss.
“Who is that woman in red, Grandma?”
“I can’t quite remember,” I said.
I remembered when I wakened in the morning, though. It was the woman who had taken Wilvia away, and it had all been a dream. Even after I found my big sweater there on the bed, I told myself I’d just been chilly in the night, that was all.
School started the next week. Glory, Bamber Joy, and I went down to Ms. McCollum’s store to buy school supplies. I always went in first and paid Ms. McCollum for the children’s supplies while he and Glory sat on the stoop enjoying a cold drink. This time, I heard heavy footsteps coming onto the front stoop, and two men came slamming in, walked up to the counter, and asked Ms. McCollum if there was anybody in town who had a new cat.
Ms. McCollum looked as though she didn’t know whether to laugh or get angry. It was a silly question, but at the same time, it sounded threatening. She had to swallow before she answered, very slowly. “I guess everybody in the valley has a new cat at least once a year. There’s kittens everywhere you look.”
“Not a kitten, ma’am. This is a dangerous kind of cat from another world.”
“There’s a lady over in Remorseful who sort of collects cats, but they’re just ordinary cats. I sure haven’t heard about anything like that.”
I knew she meant Dorothy Springer, a retired schoolteacher who had a barnful of cats and spent her whole pension feeding them and having the vet fix them. The two men didn’t react; they just stood there for a minute, silent. They sounded so mechanical, I had the strange idea that maybe they were shifting gears, or waiting for instructions. Then, with not so much as a thank-you, they turned around and left.
When we got home we told Falija about it, and the hair on her neck rose until she looked like a lion.
“They didn’t come from your people,” Glory said to Falija. “Your people know where you are.”
“Her people?” I asked, with lifted eyebrows.
“She means my parents,” said Falija firmly. “Anyone sent by my people would know exactly where I am.”
“We’ve got to be sure no one else in the family says anything,” Glory said in a worried voice.
All this was extremely upsetting. I had spent months sorting out what I chose to believe was real from what I had dreamed from the fictional stuff that was left over. At least, I thought I had. Now this new thing! A threat from who knows what from who knows where against someone who shouldn’t exist in the first place!
I cleared my throat, turned toward Glory, and said in my most portentous voice, “You had a cat earlier in the summer, but it went away some time ago, didn’t it?”
Glory stared at me for a minute before she caught on. “Yes. Of course. The lady who left it with me came and got it.”
I said, “The family hasn’t seen it for some time.”
Glory shook her head and grinned at me. “No, ma’am.”
I was invited to supper that night, and at the table, Glory said, “I kind of miss the cat I was keeping for that lady. None of the barn cats are very friendly. Maybe Ma Bailey’ll give me one of her kittens.”
I said wonderingly, “The cat you were taking care of. Is it
