Eight feet was an obstacle that was impossible to overcome. But I couldn't afford the slightest hesitation. My pursuers, having recovered from their shock, rushed in my direction, their faces disfigured by wrath. With little reflection, I bounded up on the next best paper mountain and from there blindly to the hatch. There was no alternative but to ram my entire body right through the tiny opening.
Pain shot like hellishly hot lava through my body when, as I feared, I succeeded in making anything but a smooth landing. My head grazed the sides of the hatch, giving me a hefty blow and scouring the left side of my lips. My front paws found a temporary hold. Trembling, I swung from the hatch, while the bloodthirsty mob below sprang up again and again, trying to snap at the lower half of my body as if it were reward meat for the best athlete.
Slowly, using all my strength and concentrating on nothing but what would happen to me if I plopped down, I drew myself up bit by bit until I was finally in the hatch. A last look down ensured me that this bad film was not over by far. As soon as Kong and his underlings realized I was escaping, they likewise vaulted up on the paper piles and made enthusiastic preparations to pursue me.
I left the hatch and ran headlong into the garden. A regular flood awaited me. Everything the sky had to offer seemed to be pouring down that evening. What came beating down and soaked me to the bone within seconds could hardly be called rain anymore—it had to be the Atlantic Ocean itself. The raindrops had turned into daggers that hit my body with painful blows. The rain fell so heavily that you couldn't see more than a yard in front of yourself. And, as if to announce Judgment Day, lightning flashed and thunder boomed over and over again.
I ran to the garden wall that was straight ahead and mounted it, sometimes leaping, sometimes climbing. At the top, gasping for air, I shook the raindrops from my fur and looked back at the hatch. They'd made it! First Kong, then Herrmann and Herrmann slipped through the opening and rushed toward me. The watery end of the world didn't seem to impress them in the least.
While the whole of Niagara Falls showered down, causing little floods in the garden, I ran aimlessly and heedlessly along the walls, farther and farther away, turning where the wall topography dictated, to the left and right, trying all the while to persuade myself that I had shaken off my pursuers. But they would appear again and again out of the curtain of rain, hot on my heels, their wavering silhouettes betraying no tiredness at all.
Finally I had to stop in my tracks to think things over. Continuing to flee without a plan made no sense, for sooner or later I would hit the back wall of a house and have to wait in fear and trembling until the trio caught up with me. On the other hand, it would be sly, if not a stroke of genius, to jump into some garden and to take a quick look around for an open cellar window or some remote, dilapidated garden shed. It just had to be possible to find a place where I could hide myself quickly.
Although the rain limited my range of vision, the garden below, with its great size, seemed to me best suited for such an operation. The grounds were asymmetrical, with no recognizable order, wildly overgrown with trees and bushes that had plastic garden furniture spread around them. An artificial pond in the middle overflowed with water to enlarge the habitat for its stock of toy fish. The weathered old building that belonged to the garden was cloaked in eerie gloom and had an ominous aura.
The only snag to the whole business was that, from my vantage point on the wall, I could hardly see any spot below where I could land that wasn't hidden in the shade of the trees and the wall. But this was a risk I just had to take.
From that moment on, events developed in a manner so surreal that, when I now look back, they seem like yet another nightmare. I was immediately tugged into a whirlpool of immeasurable terror, and everything that had previously occurred only seemed like a timid overture to what was to come.
Without giving any more thought to where I would end up, I sprang down from the wall, landing, to my relief, in knee-high grass. I wanted nothing so much as to vanish as soon as possible and find a hiding place when suddenly a powerful, long-lasting lightning bolt harshly illuminated the garden. When I recognized what I had nearly stumbled over, I froze on the spot.
She lay directly at my paws, her azure-blue eyes gazing dreamily off at the furious discharges in the night sky. She was a snow-white Balinese with a characteristic brownish sheen on her face, ears, paws, and tail. Her long coat, the most prominent feature distinguishing her from a Siamese, was soaked with rainwater, and her silky hairs had stuck together in ugly knots so that her fine-boned body now looked like a crumpled garment that had just been taken out of the washing machine. The face in the long, wedge-shaped head gave no hint of the monstrosity she had confronted a short while ago but had an expression of now being farther removed from this cruel world than ever before. No blood flowed from the huge wound
