In the darkness of my night, in the brightness of my day

And today in excitement nobody asked for: frightened by the noise of the lawn guys who came to the house this afternoon while I was out at a PT appointment and picking up the keys for the new apartment, Hestia contrived to take refuge behind the refrigerator in the summer kitchen and was still there when derspatchel and I got home, although this was not immediately apparent when Autolycus ran to meet us and there was a conspicuous absence of other little cat. By now we are used to her seeming disappearances into thin air, but she was not in any of her known hiding places, not under the blankets on the futon, not behind the piled kindling on the grill, not behind the dismembered tabletop which leans up against the kitchen cabinets. I turned off the fan so that we could listen for noises; she did not mew even in response to our voices or the shaking of treats, but eventually we heard a thin little rustle and Autolycus started nosing around the front of the refrigerator. Rob shifted away some of the boxes and we shone a flashlight into the thin gap to the left-hand side where the cabinets don't quite meet. We saw a little movement, a little black fur like the tip of a tail. It moved away, so we knew she was alive, if silent, but we weren't quite sure how she had gotten in. I had been afraid of her ending up behind the refrigerator ever since we moved in. Specifically, since it's located at a break between counters and there's a visible gap between its back and the wall, I had worried about her recklessly leaping the counters and falling in. As we discovered, she had just wriggled her way beneath the cabinets and then slunk along the low, dusty tunnel formed between the wall, the cabinets, and the piled boxes until she dead-ended behind the refrigerator. I cleared off a countertop and shone the flashlight at an angle behind the appliance and there was a small cat sitting with her tail curled around her front paws, normally black, currently a distressing floury grey with back-of-the-refrigerator shmutz. I blinked at her slowly and she blinked back; then I had to race upstairs and out the front door and ask the lawn guy who was talking to my mother to tell his partner who had just started a leaf blower directly outside the door of the summer kitchen to turn it off, please, because as soon as it started up Hestia had recoiled and flattened herself into the farthest, most disgusting corner of the refrigerator gap. (The lawn guy with the leaf blower, to his credit, turned it off.) We lured her out patiently over about the next forty-five minutes, primarily with a combination of soft talking, jingly feather, and a dish of food placed under the overhang of the cabinets. Autolycus kept trying to eat it despite having a dish of his own. Maybe she took that as an incentive. She came forth covered in cobwebs and dust and paint flakes and nothing you want to think about. We washed her with paper towels in a basin of warm water in the dry sink, dried her off, gave her treats for being a brave cat. I changed my shirt because I had had to hold her carefully, though she never brought out the claws. She only hissed once and it was at her brother. We blocked the entrance to the refrigerator run with different boxes and petted everyone a lot. She's fine now, curled comfortably on the futon while her brother relaxes on the scratch box, but that was completely unnecessary. Have some news.

1. Two years after the discovery of HMS Erebus, a hundred and seventy years after the two ships were trapped in the ice off King William Island, sealing the fate of Sir John Franklin and his disastrous expedition through the Northwest Passage, HMS Terror has been found. You couldn't ask for a better ghost ship—hatches battened, gear stowed, glass still in the windows, resting gently on the seabed of Terror Bay as though it sank straight down, sixty miles south of its last believed location. Kelp swaying rustily in cold currents, pale and red weeds thickening the helm's double wheel. "The ship's bell lies on its side on the deck, close to where the sailor on watch would have swung the clapper to mark time."

2. I never read Peter Ackroyd's Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994), but I just found out there's a film adaptation. According to the Guardian: "We'll get to the juicy and suspenseful murder mystery in a moment, but all discussion about The Limehouse Golem must begin with Bill Nighy. As Scotland Yard detective John Kildare, Nighy and his late Victorian suits seem like they've stepped out of a painting. It's not just the way he looks or talks, but his elegant stride, his mercurial humour as he scrutinises clues and the way he deflects questions or reminders about his station in life. He is a greatly respected man, but one who will likely never get the position he deserves thanks to suspicions of 'not being the marrying kind'." Plus feminism, plus music-hall, plus I should hope some golem folklore, just play this movie in my city already, okay? In the meantime, I guess I'll read the book.

3. Courtesy of asakiyume: the lost songs of St Kilda. I don't want to call them ghost songs, because they were handed down by memory; they are still alive. I still need to see Michael Powell's Edge of the World (1937). I love the book about its making so much.

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) is desperately misnamed but incredibly good. Rob and I watched it tonight before he went home; it's almost a slipstream movie, overall closest to a noir but veering quite deliberately between genres in a way that means the audience cannot predict an ending, because the same suspense would resolve differently for a screwball romance than for a Gothic melodrama than for a true film noir. The plot is a constellation of four characters, three of them linked by a traumatic event in their adolescence, two of them more closely than the third suspects or the fourth cares about. Barbara Stanwyck stars as one of the more complexly damaged characters I've seen her play, a steel magnate now dominating the mill town she spent her childhood desperately trying to escape; Kirk Douglas had his film debut as her husband and I am not at all surprised that he turned out a star, because he is not yet thirty, almost impossibly handsome (he's got dimples everywhere), and his self-destructing district attorney is arrestingly unlike his later forceful image; Van Heflin was fresh off his wartime service with the Army Air Corps and has charisma coming out of his ears as a professional gambler who makes an accidental prodigal's return by rubbernecking the sign for his long-left hometown and cracking up his car thereby; and Lizabeth Scott in her second feature is no femme fatale but a sweet, tough kid who's more of an adult despite her criminal record than the power couple ruling Iverstown with all respectability. Lot's wife is a recurring image in both dialogue and action, the danger of being frozen in the past, petrified by it. We'd have called the picture Pillar of Salt, unless that was likely to disappoint crowds who came looking for a Biblical epic. It gets some interesting stuff under the radar and some equally interesting stuff out in the open. Having seen Van Heflin most characteristically in fucked-up roles, I really enjoyed him as a rakish, honest-where-it-counts hero. I may try to write more thoughtfully about it at some future point, but it's unlikely to be this week, since I have to spend Wednesday and Thursday moving and tomorrow getting ready. Toward that end, sleep.

The shock to my body as we tumbled in

I dream of drowned men often; I dreamed of one last night. We were in the wreck of the Terror, which looked in my dreams like the cabin of a much older sailing ship, more than half a reef with flat-bladed kelp and sponges and soft corals, a thick lunar swirl of silt underfoot. The light was glacier-blue. I can't remember feeling cold except inside my lungs, where I was breathing water. If we'd been above sea level, I would have said that he was floating, but eighty feet down he looked like he was sitting cross-legged on the water, watching me. He shouldn't have drowned, if he was one of Franklin's men; he should have died of starvation, scurvy, lead poisoning, exposure. One of his crewmates might have butchered and eaten him. He didn't look like a malnourished corpse; no one had jointed him for his meat or cracked his jaw for his brain. He had a thin-faced winter pallor under a dark scurf of beard and his feet were bare despite the heavy wool of his sailor's jacket, which in the dream told me he was dead more clearly than anything else, because a living man would have had his boots on and all the insulation he could find. He said nothing to me. I didn't expect him to. We were under water. (It made sense at the time.) So many of the dead I dream about are younger than I am and I don't know what that reflects, unless something about historical mortality. The ship around us made sounds like pack ice, creaking, burring, singing. The rest of the dream was something muddy with shouting and stress and I woke with my jaw aching even worse than usual. Nobody in these dreams ever comes with names; they are symbols, composites. I still felt, looking at his face in the silt-falling ice-light, that I should have known it.

I have a smothering headache. Just in time for moving, I may be coming down sick. I spent most of my afternoon at the Somerville Department of Traffic and Parking and then on hold with Eversource and National Grid. I got home, made some more phone calls, ate dinner, felt awful. I am sitting on the carpet square in the summer kitchen, with only the side lights on so as not to attract the vortex of bugs that so badly marred last night; Autolycus has curled himself onto my lap in the computer-displacing way that he seems to find deeply satisfying—of course you love me better than the laptop, which almost certainly is true; I love the information on my laptop and the access, but in a fire I'd go for the cats first of all—and is purring like a drain, occasionally and sleepily licking the inside of my arm. Starboard cat. Hestia settled underneath the bed, just behind me. Port cat. Soon we will have a secure home.