Black Creek Crossing

He lay still, not even breathing, his hand hovering near the lamp.

The sound came again.

What was it? An owl?

But it didn’t sound like an owl — it sounded like him trying to sound like an owl!

What—

And then he knew! It had to be Jared — or maybe Zack — playing a trick on him.

Or maybe signaling him to come out! He and Jared had snuck out at least half a dozen times last summer and never come close to getting caught. Chad slid out of bed and pulled on his clothes. Going to the door of his room, he listened, then opened it a crack and listened again.

The hall outside was dark and silent, but he could hear his father snoring even through the door to his parents’ bedroom.

Closing his door, Chad went to the window, unlatched it, and raised the lower casement. It creaked a little, and the counterweights in the frame rattled, but he knew that even if his mother was awake, she’d have her earplugs in to cut down the racket of his dad’s snoring.

“Jared?” he called softly.

There was no reply, except for the same strange hooting sound that had brought him to the window. A cold draft of air flowed in the open window, a draft unlike anything Chad had felt before. The cold seemed to reach inside him, and for a terrible instant he had the feeling he was dying.

Holding perfectly still, he strained his eyes and ears, searching for the source of the sound that had caused him to suddenly freeze.

But he saw nothing, and a moment later realized he heard nothing either — not even the last of the crickets and frogs that were so loud during the summer that they kept him awake, and which he’d still heard outside when he’d gone to bed tonight.

Now the night was utterly silent.

Why? What had silenced the frogs and crickets?

He listened with concentration, and then, from no more than a few feet away, was startled by a loud screeching.

Chad jumped, banging his head against the frame of the open window.

What was it?

An owl? A cat?

He turned in the direction from which the sound had come, and at first saw nothing. But then he saw something glimmering in the blackness, barely visible.

Chad’s pulse quickened as he strained to see better.

The glimmer turned to a glow, and then the glow came into focus.

Eyes.

Two darkly glowing eyes, the pupils huge, were peering at him from a branch of the tree that was just far enough away to be out of his reach.

An owl. That’s what it had to be — a screech owl! He’d imitated it better than he thought!

Chad waved his arms toward it, certain it would leap from the branch and fly away. But instead of seeing an owl burst out of the tree’s canopy in startled flight, something as black as the night outside came through the window. For a terrible instant Chad felt as if the darkness itself was reaching for him, but a fraction of a second later he knew he was wrong.

A cat!

A black cat, with a single white blaze in the middle of its chest.

Angel’s cat!

Claws that felt like acid-tipped scalpel blades suddenly slashed deep into the bare flesh of his shoulders, and teeth sank into his neck.

A scream of pain and shock choking in his throat, Chad lurched backward, tumbling to the bedroom floor. He tried to get his hands on it to tear it away from his throat before it killed him, but before he could, the cat was gone.

Gone so quickly and so completely that for several seconds Chad wondered if anything had actually happened at all. But then the pain of the cat’s claws sinking into the flesh of his shoulders began to burn, and he pressed his hands against his neck, terrified that the animal might have torn open his throat. Stumbling from his bedroom down the hall to the bathroom, he turned on the cold water and began washing his neck and shoulders even before turning the light on.

The coolness of the water soothed the burning of his wounds, and after using a washcloth to wipe most of the water away, he turned on the light and looked at his reflection in the mirror.

Nothing.

Not a cut anywhere — not even a scratch!

Then, as he stared at his image in the mirror, he saw it.

The cat’s face, its lips pulled back to show its teeth, looming behind him, just over his right shoulder.

Spinning around, Chad raised his arms to fend off the cat’s attack once more.

And again he saw nothing.

For almost a full minute he stood trembling in the bathroom, his heart racing, too terrified even to turn off the light and go back to his room.

He searched the bathroom then, even looking in the shower and behind the old-fashioned claw-foot bathtub, for any sign of the cat, but the cat had vanished even faster than it had vanished from the tree outside.

If it had been in the bathroom at all.

As his heart finally slowed back to normal, Chad told himself he couldn’t have seen anything in the mirror, that it had to have been his imagination playing tricks on him.

But what about before, when he was peering out the open window and the cat had attacked him and he’d felt the pain of its claws sinking into his flesh?

Could he have imagined that too?

How?

How had it happened?

Maybe nothing had happened.

Maybe he had imagined it all.

But when he went back to his bedroom, Chad left the light on in the bathroom, and when he went to sleep, he left the light on in his room too.

The black cat slipped through the night like a wraith, moving silently in the darkness, no sound at all betraying its presence. Rather, it was the silence itself that signaled every living thing within its reach that something was wrong.

That danger was nearby.

And sensing the danger — the presence of the wraithlike creature — every living thing took on a stillness that lay over the night like a cloak so dense that even the light breeze of the autumn night died away.

But even the cloak of silence wasn’t enough to slow the cat as it moved toward its prey, for there was nothing in the night the cat could not hear.

Nothing it could not see.

Nothing it could not sense.

After it had passed, the silence slowly lifted.

Crickets concealed beneath the bark of trees once more rubbed their wing covers together.

Tree frogs in the gardens began to puff out their throats once more.

Birds in their nests and on their perches twittered softly in their sleep.

Even the leaves dying on the trees began to rustle as the breeze in the air came back to life.

Moments later farther down the street, the black wraith slithered silently up a tree, then moved out onto a limb.

Dropped onto a steeply sloping roof.