Catfantastic II

by Andre Norton

  Francie’s eyes closed. The image of Turtle’s loving little face filled her mind, Turtle, who had almost lived for her…

  I do not expect you to go on for years without the warmth of a true Partner. There is no reason why you should not share your life with a kitten of happier birth as well once this troubled companion is settled. All three of you would benefit from her presence. I do need to know now if you will accept my commission. Choose freely. Refusal will bring no penalty since I know it will spring from your doubt of your ability to meet the small one’s needs.

  “Of course, I’ll take him!” The woman paused. “He won’t actually attack me, will he?” A cat’s teeth and claws were no mean weapons when wielded in earnest.

  No, neither your person nor your property will suffer, nor will he violate your sanitary arrangements.

  “He’ll be real? A normal kitten, I mean. If I start buying food for a ghost or even just talking to one, people’re going to see me as pretty odd, maybe strange enough to cost me my job. No one’s going to want to buy a house from a head case.”

  Bastet laughed. He will be a very live and visible cat.

  “Cat? Not a kitten?”

  “Cat. Those who have been badly used, unless they died as infants, cannot return in that state. They are no longer capable of the wonder and innocent trust of life’s early spring.

  The human squared her shoulders. “When will you bring him, or how do I go about getting him?”

  I shall give him to you now.

  A thought struck Francie. “Could you let me have half an hour, Lady Bastet? I have Turtle’s things clean and ready since I’d planned on adopting another cat fairly quickly, but food’s perishable, and I don’t have any of that in the house. It’d probably be best if he could be assured from the start that he’ll always have access to that.”

  A wise and thoughtful suggestion. So let it be, Francine of the Partners. We can wait that long, he and I.

  Francie had not known what to expect in the emotionally injured waif, but even after six months had gone by, she was still a little stunned by the magnificence of the cat. Bast’s Gift, for so she had called him, was beautiful. His short coat was a gleaming black with no white hair upon it, broken only by the enormous copper eyes. He was also big, fourteen pounds of muscle rippling in a body long enough to allow him to stand on the floor and sweep objects off a table or dresser.

  At first, he had spent most of his time beneath the bed or chaise when she was in the apartment, but that open fear of her passed after a couple of weeks. Now, he absented himself only during the rare times when some of her friends were visiting her.

  His behavior was exemplary even as Bastet had promised, but he remained cold and aloof, sleeping alone and barely tolerating an occasional caress of his silky head or back.

  Gift considered it a major concession that he permitted that much contact. The care and consideration he received were excellent, in keeping with the divinity’s assurance. He had to admit that in basic feline honesty, and common politeness required that some recompense be given for it, but chiefly, he was moved by the promise the transfigured Turtle had wrung from him. They had spoken together at length before his return, and she had pleaded so earnestly that he not be cruel to her Partner! him!-that he had in the end agreed to allow limited physical approach.

  No trouble followed that lessening of his guard. Certainly, no blows came from the human’s small hand, and she made no attempt to force further intimacy from him, though it was easy enough to read her desire for a great deal more. He began to feel guilty about that but steeled himself with the knowledge that she had been fully warned about what she might expect from him and had agreed to shelter him on those terms. If the human was not satisfied, well, let her bring in a kitten as she and Bastet had discussed.

  Matters drifted on thus for some time, and Francie could see no sign that their relationship might better soon or at a future point. Despite her foreknowledge, her frustration grew in proportion to her deepening love for the beautiful animal.

  Her heart came to close to breaking the evening she unexpectedly lost the very large sale she had hoped to close that same week. The woman sat wearily on the end of the chaise as Gift jerked away from her hand. Her head lowered, and the memory of her first sight of Turtle swept over her, a minute, orphaned kitten sprawled in a shoe box, her head and legs extended, her tiny tail sticking out behind, for all the world like the little turtles Francie and her sister had kept as children. She was sincerely glad her friend had found the happy place Bastet had described and would not wrench her away from it again for anything, but how she longed for the warmth of the little tortoiseshell’s company right now. One simply could not feel like an utter failure while hugging a cat.

  A failure she was, too, or so it seemed at the moment. She had let a seemingly sure sale slide through her fingers, losing the finest commission she had ever yet been in a position to earn and drawing her boss’ well-merited anger down on her. As if that were not bad enough, she then had to come home only to be faced by her inability to reach the heart and gain the trust of one poor, formerly abused little animal…

  Suddenly, a warm, furry cheek rubbed against hers followed by the quick rasp of a tongue.

  Francie almost jerked away in her surprise but managed to control her response and raised her eyes to meet the somber, knowing ones of the black cat. “Oh, Gift,” she whispered, stroking him timidly with two gently wielded fingers. “Thank you, my little friend. I did need you just now.”

  A rumbling purr, the first she had ever heard from him, answered that, and she stroked him again. “I don’t expect you to be another Turtle. I love you for yourself, and none the less because I also loved and still love her.”

  The purring continued, this time a genuine rather than a forced response. Bast’s Gift knew misery and unhappiness, none better, and he would indeed be cruel if he did not help Francie. She was good and certainly not worthless like she had felt herself to be. It was a pleasure for him and an honor to use his power to comfort in her cause.

  If the cat did not greet his human at the door each evening after that, he did rouse himself to rub against her legs, and he gradually took to sleeping at the foot of her bed.

  He also began to play, or work out, rather, with her, an advance she particularly welcomed. She had feared he might lose his sleek form and fine muscle tone if he maintained too sedentary an existence. Francie would wrap her arm in a towel or sweat shirt and wrestle with Gift, allowing him to release both energy and aggressive tension. To the black’s credit, although he rabbit punched with his hind legs and used both claws and teeth to grapple with the padded arm, he never forgot himself and either scratched or bit in earnest.

  For still more active sport, she used a device consisting of a short fishing rod with a string attached to its tip and a small piece of cloth tied to the cord. It provided a lively, moving target, and they battled it around the apartment several times a week in very vigorous sessions lasting half an hour or more.

  Of the other toys that had intrigued and occupied Turtle for nearly all of her long life, he took no notice. Only one type of plaything drew and held him, life-sized mice fashioned of real fur. Ordinarily, Francie would have refused to have anything to do with the things, but when her sister Anna had brought one of them on her last visit to the city and Gift had reacted so favorably to it, she had swallowed her scruples and bought more of them.

  She soon discovered that several were necessary. No sooner did she give Bast’s Gift one than it would vanish beneath some dresser or chest from which she would then be summoned to retrieve it. When this happened for the third time in the space of an hour one Saturday morning, she gave her innocent-looking comrade a quick look. Was this the stirring of the playful mischief that should be so basic a part of a young cat’s personality but which had been entirely absent from his behavior thus far?

  Bast’s Gift came to enjoy their time together, although he was not as yet willing to ease
up any further on the guards he had set about himself. Francie seemed to be everything Turtle had said, but humans were humans. She was far the bigger and stronger of them, and there was little he could do to protect himself from her if she went into a rage against him, nothing except try to keep his heart from breaking along with his body.

  It happened in the end, as he had been telling himself it must. The woman flung open the door of the apartment, and he cowered down, sick with the terror of the fury he could read and smell on her.

  Francie saw the cat’s body shrink in upon itself and realized what had happened. She dropped her bag and tote on the table and went to her knees near him. “It’s not you, baby. You’re about the brightest, best thing in this whole city, at least as it impacts on me. I was just furious with something I’d read in the paper.”

  Because he had never unleashed his claws on her, she braced herself and swept him into her arms despite her uncertainty as to what he might be driven to do in his fear.

  The cat merely lay against her as she held him close, listening to her voice more than to her words and to that which lay behind it. His dread faded under the magic of it.

  “I’d never intentionally hurt you or be mad at you, my own little friend. It’s this ‘Jaws-of-Life Burglar’ that’s got me going.” Her mouth hardened. “Only now, it’s ‘Jaws of Death.’”

  Francie did not think it strange to be explaining herself thus to an animal. She had always done that with Turtle as well. She refused to walk around in dead silence like some sort of zombie except when she uttered a command or endearment just because there was no other member of her own species present. Humans were articulate beings. They spoke in sentences, put their thoughts into words, and she felt no constraint against doing precisely that when the occasion arose, whatever her company. Indeed, since her interview with Bastet, she felt courtesy required no less from her, that she was dealing with a creature of sensitivity and intelligence, albeit of abilities and gifts very different from her own.

  The cat understood her way of talking by then; her meaning if not all her words. He knew what the paper was. Every evening after supper, or earlier in the day on holidays, his care giver went through a ritual of sitting down with the thing to the nearly inevitable souring of her mood.

  It was a mystery he could not comprehend. When a cat encountered an unpleasant situation, he endeavored to avoid future contact with it, but Francie continued to court distress day after day. It was an astonishing display of idiocy on the part of a normally highly sensible individual.

  The woman continued to stroke him, but her thoughts drifted back to the story that had so aroused her. For the better part of a month, the Jaws-of-Life Burglar had been in the news on and off. He normally struck moderately prosperous middle-class neighborhoods, cutting screens or glass or jimmying insecure locks in the manner of most of those engaged in his profession. He apparently preferred these easier targets even as did his peers to judge by the number of dwellings ransacked in the manner characteristic of his work in his signature raids, but every once in a while, he would strike a more efficiently guarded place. The bars and gates thwarting most of his kind posed no barrier to him. He cut right through them using a Forcible Entry Tool, the implement made famous by fire and police rescue units throughout the country, or something closely modeled upon it.

  Anger rose in her as it did every time she heard the case mentioned. Those tools, or the Jaws of Life as they were more commonly known, had saved countless people trapped in fires and in the twisted wreckage of vehicle accidents. It infuriated her that an invention created to bring aid in time of crisis and dire peril should be used instead by the vermin infesting the great city to wreak still more misery upon its decent inhabitants, misery and now something more dreadful.

  Always in the past, the violated houses and apartments had been empty, but last night, that part of the pattern had been broken. The burglar had found the occupant at home, perhaps by his intention.

  There had been no bars to delay him or to arouse anyone inside with the noise of their breaking, just a screen over a window left open to admit the pleasant evening breeze. The intruder had sliced through that without difficulty and slipped into the living room from his perch on the fire escape.

  Marian Sayer, the apartment’s tenant, had been sleeping in her bedroom. The police either had not known at the time of the writing or had not divulged the sequence of events that followed, but when a neighbor had investigated the door boldly left ajar by the culprit when he had gone out that way, she had found the bedroom literally coated in blood, its unfortunate resident terribly dead, dismembered, her body completely severed at the waist, by the powerful cutter. The reporter had been careful to note that no one could say at what point death had ended the nightmare for her.

  At least, his sympathy was clearly with the victim, Francie thought bitterly. That was more than could be said for his associate whose editorial followed the account. That individual dwelled instead on the killer, on the inner anguish and pressures and perhaps the early physical sufferings which might have driven him to strike against either woman or society in general in so brutal a manner.

  Her eyes glittered coldly. If that butcher was sick, well and good. Let him be treated medically instead of jailed if he was caught alive, but she would save her sympathy until he was either dead or otherwise so confined that he was no longer a threat. A rabid beast was not responsible for its actions, either, but it still had to be prevented from spreading its infection to other creatures.

  A case without apparent motive or significant clues had to be slow in the solving, and other tragedies, other scandals, soon replaced it in the headlines and in people’s minds, Francie’s along with the rest as she turned her attention and energies to the living of her own life with its specific demands and interests.

  The woman woke out of a fitful sleep. By the bonging of her clock in the living room, she knew it was just three, and she sighed. It was still villainously hot. There would be no relief tonight now, she thought unhappily, and none at all tomorrow according to the weatherman. That meant no relief for her. The technician would not be coming until the day after that to fix the air conditioner, if it could be repaired at all.

  She heard it then, a muffled scratching sound. There was a simultaneous hiss from Bast’s Gift, and the cat leapt from the foot of the bed to the stacked boxes on top of the wardrobe which formed his favorite retreat when strangers were present.

  Another noise, soft in reality but clear as a trumpet call to her straining ears.

  Francie’s heart beat so fast and hard that it seemed louder to her than the rattle that had set it racing. She slipped off the bed and crouched in the deeper shadow near the table by the closet.

  A figure loomed in the doorway, a man, nearly as big in fact as he appeared to be to her terrified eyes. The features were clear enough, but she could make no hand of reading them save that he seemed annoyed at finding the bed empty.

  He spotted her, and his mouth curved. It was more like a spasm than a smile. Certainly, any pleasure it mirrored had nothing to do with joy as she knew it.

  Her own lips parted in a scream that would not become audible. The intruder held something in his hands, both hands. She recognized it all too readily and stared at it with fascinated horror. The tool was the smallest of its line, but it was still enormous even without the gas generator powering it harnessed to its wielder’s back. It reminded her of a great pair of pliers…

  The man took a step toward her. He said nothing, and he did not take his eyes off her to look about the room. He had not come for cash or property but for another person, another woman, to rend in response to the irresistible demand of the compulsion swelling inside him. He fondled the handles of his weapon in anticipation as the Jaws spread wider.

  An ebony streak shot from the wardrobe to the back of his neck. Claw-clad paws tore forward, raking face and the left eye, gouging deeply so that blood that looked black in the lace-filtered moonlight
poured from the ravaged cheeks and the shredded pulp in the socket.

  The killer seemed unaware of pain, at least to the extent that it did not appear to affect either his purpose or his ability to carry it through. He shook his head violently to dislodge his tormentor, and when he failed to do so, he hafted the big cutter to strike backward with it.

  A second challenger hit him in that moment, a small, tortoiseshell spirit of fury who rent his hands with teeth and claws that did not merely look like fire in the dim light but seemed actually to be fire.

  This time, the man gasped, the first sound he had uttered, and the Jaws clattered to the floor.

  With a tremendous, jerking effort, he flung Turtle from him, tossing her hard against the wall beside them. She should have been smashed, or dazed at best, but her reactions were sharper in her new nature. She braced herself for the strike, used the energy of the blow to fire a run up the wall, thus dissipating rather than absorbing its force. The spirit cat dropped to the ground in a battle crouch, hissing fiercely, her eyes aglow with a light of their own making that would have told any sane witness the nature of the creature he faced.

  Bast’s Gift did not waste those precious seconds. He continued to punish the killer’s head, so ripping forehead and scalp that in two places, thin strips of flesh hung from the bone. Periodically, he scored the back of the hand instinctively raised to defend the remaining eye.

  Turtle sprang back into the fray, this time joining the black in going for the vulnerable head.

  Francie watched in dread. The attack was definitely affecting their enemy, but he was not defeated. His hands were free, and he was lashing at his small assailants. They were both so positioned as to make difficult targets, but he would not be long in throwing them off and finishing them if he could land a solid blow, as he inevitably must soon do.