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Save Point: Sphynx Kitten

Somewhere Near Exmoor, 1983

I have acquired a kitten, a catling, a baby cat, but it turns out it is actually a sphynx. We go travelling in the deep places, in the desert, in the brightness of the sun at noon, and and encounter our fair share of battle, and mayhem, and carnage.

Once the dust has settled, vultures are attracted to the battlefield. By now the sphynx kitten has grown small white feathered wings. When the boldness of the vultures grows too great and they flock at us both, trying to peck at us with their beaks and, as they see it, secure all the food for themselves, she leaps at them and brings one down briefly, scaring the lot of them off, at least for now.

"Nice move," I tell my sphynx kitten.

"Don't mention it," she says.

Now, much later, we are on an explore deep into the countryside of a much greener place, investigating some disturbing implications near a great old house that has been there far too long. I make my way along an old packed dirt path, crouching, leaping along where possible on all fours as though I was a cat myself, and she follows. We should be safe, provided we keep low.

The back of the ancient house incorporates an exceeding curious structural feature, whereby a river emerges from solid rock underneath the house itself, originating out of basements and sub-sub-basements and cellars and all manner of other, more suspect deep places. The house itself is literally built down around this feature, to either side, with ancient stone and brick work keeping the water out. Although the building has been set here for advantage and access to the depths created by the river, it also means that there is no decisive way the inhabitants of the house can prevent access by way of the river itself - which, furthermore, lies beneath the outlook of their field of view.

Once again we enter the deep places, this time down beneath the stones.

First we scout out an open space to the right of the river facing inward, just to establish that the area is actually clean. Turns out, that it is actually a sort of river flat that has been incorporated into the cellars for structural reasons, and which must flood over whenever the river overflows its banks, carrying off the stormwater in the season of rain. It seems to have been untouched for ages, is dry, cool, dusty. There is a small shallow runnel of the river, off to one side, where the level of the floor is lowest.

More interesting are the things that have been washed up from the river by those occasional storms, becoming beached, stranded upon the wide river flat. There are numerous, small objects made of some sort of metal, like ancient and battered silver, but oxidised like bronze, yet to a pale shade of purple. They glow ever so faintly in the dark, just enough to make local irregularities and outcroppings in the stone visible.

My first instinct is to collect some quickly and get out of there, but second thoughts suggest it would be better to leave them all where they lie. Things that radiate in the darkness are probably corrosive to living flesh.

We make our way further in by climbing, inward and upward, over outcroppings of curious gnarled and crumbled stone, friable, filled with irregular holes and loosely connected fragments, like an etched breccia of broken rock. We are now out and overhanging above the river, and climbing with great caution, because the stone keeps breaking and moving underfoot.

At one point, my sphynx kittens' claw jags suddenly, tearing away a small scree of rock that tumbles and crumbles downward only a few handspans distance before coming to rest. Revealed beneath the disturbed material of the breccia is the darkened, long ossified curve of what appears to be an animal skull, grinning sightlessly up. There is something wrong with the stratigraphy of this, something Jungian yet inconsistent, but I do not have the time to think it through so very carefully and determine what it is. Something terrible happened here. Something terrible may be happening here once again.

We press ourselves low to the highstanding point of the breccia outcrop, so that we cannot be seen. The skull does not complain, and I do not fear to touch it, for it has become clean with age. From here, we can look all the way down into the vastness of the main cellar.

(Although, of course, it is not the only cellar, or the biggest, just the main one, and the highest, or from a certain point of view, the least deep.)

The main cellar is the size of a small ballroom, and just as high, its volume casually dwarfing the entire house above. Light shines faintly downward through dust, entering from high above where there must be narrow windows, set low to the ground around the periphery of the entire house.

Beyond the river mouth, which we are now high above, the irregularities of the floor have been paved over with smooth stone flags, and the entire surface then smoothed and plastered to create one continuous surface with no cracks or gaps. The dust lies thick upon the floor, as well. Set up at intervals within the vast space are large bookcases, like some impractical or surreal vision of an ancient library.

From between the shelves, She looks at us, and we crouch lower.