"There's someone up there! We're being watched! We're being watched!" he called out to the sect, bringing the ceremony to a standstill. Hundreds of heads flicked up at the same time to try to catch sight of me through the gaping hole in the ceiling. Suddenly there was nothing I wanted so much in the world as for this cockamamy circus to be a nightmare. But the pompous performance bore the title "Reality," and contrary to expectation, its leading role had been awarded to none other than Yours Truly.
Noisy confusion reigned below, but I had neither the inclination nor time to find out what they were planning against me. No doubt they would be up here in a few seconds.
I looked frantically around the room. A rotten beam had become loose at one end of the ceiling and dangled low into the room. Exactly over it was a tiny opening in the ceiling through which I might be able to squeeze myself, and so find a way into the attic. The other alternative, whose outcome was much more uncertain, was the stairway. However, going up to the attic that way seemed a daring and time-consuming enterprise, and I didn't have time to try it out.
"What are you idiots waiting for? Go upstairs! Bring him back!" I heard the Lord's Anointed One shout. Then the pounding and scrabbling of hundreds of clawed paws started up. They were already under way.
I instinctively chose the beam. I sprang on it, digging my claws deeply into it. The beam gave, squeaking, and dipped down into the room. I knew that the slightest vibration would loosen the other end of the beam from its fastening and cause it to crash down with me on it. And then? How on earth was I going to escape from this nightmare then?
I heard wild thumping on the stairway. They would soon flood into the room. I had no other choice. With as much force as I could muster, I catapulted myself on my hind legs upwards, and actually managed on my first try to poke my head and front legs through the tiny hole. At the same time, the beam loosened under me with a groaning sound and slammed down in front of the paws of the mob that had just stormed into the room.
I squeezed through the hole and found myself in the attic. One last glance at the scene below confirmed what I had feared. After some furious curses, the hunting party ran out of the room to find a way up the stairs to the attic.
I only had time to give my new surroundings a brief examination. The room, a maze of nooks and crannies, was crammed with the remnants of Doctor Frankenstein's laboratory, whose spirit I had always sensed were in the house. The innumerable surgical instruments with their threatening sharp and curved forms, the operation lamps, anesthetic equipment, electrocardiogram apparatus, hypodermics, reagent beakers, retorts, and microscopes, as well as even more complicated machines and utensils that I could hardly identify, let alone guess their function, were so dusty as to be unrecognizable. Most of them were corroded, or simply demolished, and yet had lost almost nothing of their awe-inspiring aura. I asked myself why they had been abandoned to rust slowly away. Nowadays physicians refuse to install anything in their offices more than a year old that doesn't require an army of computer specialists to operate. But a few good business deals could have been made with this junk in the Third World. Its intimidating effect only half diminished, the dead laboratory gave me a sad look, as if I were a magician that could return it to life.
But I could think over all these incongruities when I wasn't being pursued by members of a sect that continuously jabbered about sacrifices and very likely also made one occasionally.
God, Claudandus, or whoever is responsible for miracles had pity on me. Just as I had suspected when we moved in, the roof was heavily damaged and pierced with large holes. I ran straight to the opposite gable wall, where the roof sloped down from the right to the floor and where there was a narrow crevice of about a foot.
Just as I was slipping through the crack to get outside, about thirty brothers and sisters stormed into the attic; they didn't exactly look like the type that had come all this way to sell me a Bible. My kind are better sprinters than long distance runners, so only the strongest of the pack had made it this far. Yet those who were still in hot pursuit seemed all the more enthusiastic about my capture and probably about what they were planning to do with me afterwards.
Standing in the gutter and gasping for breath, I had an unobstructed view of our district. It had begun to get light. It was one of those stirring moments when the sun had already begun its magical re-creation of an orange-blue firmament but was itself still invisible. The wide rectangles of roofs and terraces spread themselves out before me, giving me reason to hope for a successful escape. Somewhere in this rambling confusion of backyards there simply had to be a little corner where I could hide from my pursuers. However, the dizzying abyss under my paws warned me not to try any overly daring maneuvers. The network of garden walls looked like an ingenious labyrinth from above, a totally unsolvable puzzle, as complicated a puzzle as the whole involved affair in which I had now become a part for keeps, whether I liked it or not.
I ran breathlessly up the mossy roof, reached the first rooftop, and hastened on to the neighboring building. My pursuers had decreased in number
