Deborah stirred sleepily in his grasp. Vaguely it came to her that Freirs must be entering the house to use the bathroom; it was understood that he was free to do so. Odd, though: he'd always gone outside, so far as she knew…
She listened, half dreaming, for the fall of his footsteps in the kitchen below. Instead she heard a soft tapping noise – as if (and she was to remember this later) the hard plank floor down there were being touched, ever so lightly, by four tiny rakes.
A sound. Had that been a bump on the stairs? She stirred herself awake for a moment, then lapsed back into dream. Dimly she sensed Azariah, the older orange male, wriggle out of his accustomed place by her feet to investigate.
Silence. The dream reclaimed her. There was a warming fire encircling her, warm as Sarr's brawny right arm. But the fire grew louder, it hissed at her, and she knew that it was the breath of some great beast…
And then skinny old 'Riah came scurrying back up the stairs and buried himself beneath the bedclothes, trembling like a frightened child. She could feel him, and she wondered what could be wrong, how could anything tremble so when there was fire all around?
Now, from the stairs, came another sound – a low, insistent purring – and later she would remember thinking, as she listened to that sound, How could there be a purring from the stairs? Weren't all the cats in bed with her and Sarr?
The purrs continued, steady, almost seductive, reaching from the darkness of the hall. Suddenly, as if in response – as if, for cats, the sound held a note of beckoning – she felt two soft balls of fur dislodge themselves from somewhere near her legs, drop upon the rug at the foot of the bed, and pad into the hall.
There was an audible swish, like the sound a springy young sapling makes as it snaps back into one's face… A swish – followed by two bumps.
And then she and Sarr were waking, sitting up confused and frightened and horrorstruck, for they were hearing a sound coming from below, a sound they'd never heard before, the sound of cats screaming.
Before she knew what was happening, Sarr had leaped from the bed and was pounding downstairs. He reached the bottom in time to see Toby, Azariah's little orange double, give a final twitch of his limbs and, faintly in the moonlight, the slim black tail of Habakkuk disappear out the kitchen door.
Toby was dead by the time Deborah came downstairs. Neither of them ever saw Habakkuk again.
July Nineteenth
Dear Carol,
Sorry I haven't written in a while. It's easy to lose track of time out here, and I've really been pushing myself to get through that summer reading list. There's also been some trouble with one of the cats – that heavy grey female, you may remember her, the old one who originally belonged to Sarr. She's been acting very wild, and last week she ran off into the woods. We thought she was gone forever, but it seems that last night she came sneaking into the house and murdered two of the kittens, one of whose bodies she seems to have made off with.
Toby, the little orange one, was my favorite of the bunch. (Remember how he liked to have you pet him?) The other one, Cookie, was the smallest and, I suppose, probably the easiest to carry away.
The Poroths seem to be taking the two deaths like the deaths of children. Sarr woke me around half an hour ago, tapping on my screen and calling gently, 'Jeremy… Jeremy… ' He was carrying his axe like a sidearm and sounded very grim – almost shell-shocked, in fact: his voice was deep, subdued, filled with grief and confusion. He informed me, in all seriousness, that in a few minutes they're going to be holding a funeral service for the two cats and they'd like me to be there.
I tell you, Carol, this summer started off like Currier amp; Ives, but it's ending up like Edward Gorey. I don't know which is more bizarre: what that damned Bwada did last night, or the Poroths' sweetly crazy notion of holding a full-scale funeral for a couple of dead cats, or the fact that I, here just for the summer and relatively unaffected by all these goings on, am already wondering what I ought to wear to the goddamned thing.
Anyway, I don't want to be late and hurt their feelings, so will end this and try to get it in the day's mail. Do come out again – soon. I mean it. I want you here to help keep things sane.
XXX
Jeremy
He lies rigid on the bed, staring sightlessly at the ceiling. The sheets have dried now, the sun has come up, and his limbs no longer tremble. He has lain here unblinking for almost twenty hours; for the final ten of them he has not moved a muscle, save for the nearly imperceptible rise and fall of his belly. The room around him, the street outside, the formless living mass that is the city, all these are forgotten. He is not here. He is across the river now, belly to the ground, moving through the forest on all fours.
Contact has finally been attained.
Contact! – a linkage of the minds, just as, so long ago, the Master promised. He sees through its eyes now, feels the roughness of the forest floor through the pads of its feet, listens with ears more acute than any human's for the rustle of small creatures in the leaves. He smells the scent of pine boughs, marsh water, putrefying flesh; he feels his muscles ripple like a tiger's. Its body moves now to his will.
He feels the creature's fury, shares the memory of last night – the discovery of the ruined altar, scattered pebbles, shattered skulls -and shares, too, the hunger for revenge. They will pay, the race of men.
That, too, the Master has promised.
Stealthily he presses through the undergrowth to the forest's edge, slips through the long grass bordering the stream, and swims across with a confidence and ease no cat has ever felt. Selecting a likely maple on the other side, he lopes easily up the trunk; it is as effortless as running on the ground. Creeping out along an upper limb, he settles down to watch.
The three of them are gathered in an empty field, their figures ungainly and stiff as they stand intoning words out of a book. Before them lies a freshly dug hole and a small blanket-wrapped form.
For the first time in ten hours there is a flicker of movement on the Old One's wrinkled face, a nearly infinitesimal twitching at the corners of the lips.
And that same moment, as it gazes upon the proceedings from its perch in the tree, the animal's mouth widens into an almost human smile.
Unpleasant day.
Cats' funeral went off well; proved, in fact, to be rather touching, even to my jaded amp; allergic eyes. It was held out beyond Deborah's garden. Sarr had dug a small hole for the body, which was wrapped in black cloth. The other body – well, God knows what Bwada's done with it.
The Poroths, too, were dressed in black, but that's normal for them. I wore my best shirt amp; pants, the ones I'd first arrived in, amp; did my best to seem concerned: when Sarr quoted Jeremiah and asked, appropriately, 'Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?' I nodded with all the gravity I could muster. Read passages with them out of Deborah's Bible (Sarr seemed to know it all by heart, Deborah almost all), said amen when they did, knelt when they knelt, amp; tried to comfort Deborah when she cried. Asked her if cats could go to heaven, received a tearful 'Of course.' But San-added that Bwada would burn in hell…
What concerns me, apparently a lot more than it does either of them, was how the damned thing could have gotten into the house. Deborah said, with real conviction (though I don't think she'd believed it until this incident), 'The devil taught her how to open doors.' Sarr nodded solemnly amp; added, 'She was always a smart cat.'
He reminded me of an outlaw's mother, still somehow proud of her baby.
Yet after lunch he amp; I looked all over the land for Bwada so that we could kill her.
Took the same route we'd gone over twice already: barn, storeroom, beneath porches, even down among the pines that grow on the other side of the stream. He called her, pleaded with her, amp; swore to me she hadn't always been like this.
We could hardly check every tree on the farm, unfortunately, amp; the woods must offer the perfect hiding place for animals even larger than a cat. So of course we found no trace of her. We did try, though; we searched all the way to the old garbage dump at the far end of the road.
But for all that, we could have stayed much closer to home.
