The Dark Yule

by R. M. Callahan

  “Oh?” he asked, though I could tell he wasn’t much interested. Probably the conversation he wished to resume was more self-indulgent talk upon his own exploits.

  “You know a lot of cats,” I put in quickly, before he could begin on any of his, admittedly fascinating, adventures. “I’m looking for some cat who knows about astronomy.”

  “Don’t we all?” Solar asked, cocking his head.

  “Beyond the basics. I want to know, what’s the likelihood of a new moon and the winter solstice coinciding? I mean, how often does that happen?”

  “Hmm.” Solar closed his tawny eyes for a long moment, before snapping them back open. “Well, based on the larger cycle synchronizing the calendars of the sun and the moon, I’d estimate about once every nineteen years. Maybe more. It depends, you see, on how you calculate the day, and how closely you require the solstice and the new moon to—”

  “Yes,” I interrupted, “but about every nineteen years, thank you. You’re sure?”

  “Not at all. There are far too many variables. Do you want the two to coincide between dawn and dusk? Then you might be doubling that estimate, or more.”

  “Oh.”

  “On the other hand, be a trifle more flexible about your definition of the ‘new moon,’ and it could occur quite regularly.” He cocked his head the other way, ears crisply alert, brown-gold eyes taking me in. “Why?”

  “I told you,” I said. “There’s been…trouble…at home.”

  I relayed the incidents of the past week as succinctly as I could. As I went on, I could sense the stilling of conversations all around me. Tails lolled and twisted with suppressed interest; ears casually flicked in my direction even as their owners studiously looked elsewhere. By the end of my narrative, the ten or so cats on the hearth and under nearby tables were a rapt audience—not that any would ever admit it!

  Solar appeared to be pondering my story, his paws pressed tidily together in front of himself, his large, maned head hanging. I was patiently awaiting his response, and thus was startled when some cat touched me from behind. Not just touched me—put both paws upon my back!

  I might have reacted poorly, had I not also caught the distinctive whiff of milk, and sensed the tininess of the paws that were buried deep in my shaggy fur. Twisting round, I beheld, as I’d fully expected, a very little kitten indeed, young enough to still be rather shaky on her paws. She was a tortoiseshell, with a distinct yellow stripe that ran askew of her nose, and had greenish, somewhat prominent eyes.

  “You’re from Kingsport?” she asked me.

  “That’s what I said,” I told the kitten.

  “I was in Kingsport, a few lifetimes ago,” she said. The kitten’s brow furrowed into fuzzy wrinkles of concentration. “Maybe more than a few.”

  “Did you have a good life?” I inquired politely.

  The kitten slid down off my back. The wee thing, hardly bigger than my two paws put together, settled herself onto the warm stones between Solar and I.

  “I did not,” she said clearly. “It was a terrible life. But that’s not what’s important. What’s important is that I was there when the trouble occurred.”

  “What trouble?” I pounced upon the statement as keenly as if it were a mouse.

  “Around Yule.” She yawned, exposing a very pink tongue. “The Dark Yule, they called it. The solstice without a moon.”

  “Tell me,” the kitten went on. As she spoke, her language took on some of the rhythm and cadence, not of a spritely kitten, but of a weary old cat. “You said time has slipped out of joint? Have you seen streets and houses, or even animals and people, that have not existed in years?”

  “Yes,” I said, considering the spectral horse that had reared above my head. “Exactly.”

  The kitten sighed, tiny ribs visibly expanding and collapsing in an exasperated huff. “So it was when I was there.”

  “Yes, but…what happened?” I pressed. I glanced at Solar, but he was blinking at the fire.

  “Nothing much,” the kitten yawned again. Bedtime, I wanted to tell her. “The Dark Yule passed, and by sunrise all was as it had been.”

  “Huh.” For the first time, it occurred to me that I might have been overreacting. Would this all really resolve on its own? “That was all?”

  “Yes,” said the kitten. “That is, except for the stranger.”

  “The stranger?”

  The kitten blinked in affirmation. “He was found clinging to a spar in the harbor the next morning, half-frozen and out of his mind. He said he’d gone back to Old Kingsport, to the ancient Yule rites. He said he’d met his relations in an old house and descended to the crypt of the church, but the humans said his footprints only led off a cliff. In the end they had to take him away to the big hospital in Arkham, because he wouldn’t stop screaming about the churchyard. I heard it all from the nurse’s cat.” The kitten stopped, her eyelids drooping.

  So this had happened in Kingsport before. In fact, it seemed to be a downright regular occurrence, though Solar’s astronomical babble had left me thoroughly confused as to how regular. And yet…

  “Did you see any night-gaunts at that time?” I asked the kitten. “Or other things that didn’t belong?”

  “Not in the material realm,” she answered. She paused to clumsily lick her paw. I resisted the very strong urge to put her under my own paw, and groom her properly.

  “The ghouls didn’t abandon the graveyards, did they?”

  The kitten widened her already buggy eyes at me. “No.”

  “So…” I hesitated, not wanting to offend what was presumably an elder, yet needing to state the case. “It’s not really the same. Your Dark Yule, I mean, and what’s happening now.”

  “That’s just the trouble,” said the kitten gravely. “Why is yours so uncanny? The Dark Yule has occurred several times a century for three centuries at least. The ghouls never left then.”

  Ah! Good point! My tail thrashed across the stones, as I tried to puzzle out the answer. What made my experience of the Dark Yule different from this kitten’s?

  “Tell me, Elder,” said Solar, speaking up at last, though his gaze remained fixed on the fire. “This man who says he went to Old Kingsport. He was a wizard? Or sorcerer? An occultist, of some type or other?”

  The kitten blinked again. “I don’t know. I never saw him myself.” She licked her paw again, considering. “I suppose he must have been, to know how and when to slip through the gap, and physically enter the old time.”

  “Yes,” said Solar. “I suppose he must have been.”

  There was a curious stiffness to Solar’s way of speaking, and I stared at him with frank curiosity. The dashing cat merely dropped his head upon his chest, and resumed his contemplations.

  “Well, that’s immensely helpful,” I told the kitten. “Thank you very much, Elder. I do hope,” I added politely, “that this new life fares better.”

  The tiny tortoiseshell chuckled. “Don’t you worry about me. I finally found my path from the Lair to the dreamlands, and I intend to stay in Ulthar a long, long time. I’m done with the material realm and its dangers. But I do wish you luck in Kingsport.”

  She twisted round to lick, very ineffectually, her fuzzy tail; once again I was possessed with the mad desire to groom her from head to toe. But I did not wish to disrespect her. “If you have more questions,” the kitten added, “they call me ‘Bug’ in this lifetime. I’m never far from here.”

  “Thank you,” I responded, with genuine warmth—it was a profoundly generous offer. Most cats do not like to incur future impositions, or even the chance of them. I dipped my head low, and got to my feet.

  “I’ll walk you out,” said Solar at once, also rising, so suddenly he nearly knocked the feeble little kitten over. I glanced back to see Bug, apparently unperturbed, settling back down upon the hearth. Her eyelids fluttered closed, and her thin chest quivered with the rhythmic rise and fall of a purr.

  “Your problem is an occultist,” Solar told me,
as soon as we’d stepped through the propped door of the Arched Back Inn.

  “How do you know?” I asked, sweeping my ears toward him, the better to catch every nuance.

  “Because I was a wizard’s cat, once. I’m familiar with their meddling ways.” His tone was so intensely bitter, I could nearly taste it on my own tongue.

  I stopped dead in the street. One of the town’s infamous three-wheeled carts was forced to careen around me—but the driver knew better than to curse at a cat in Ulthar.

  “Did your wizard…meddle?” I probed.

  “Of course,” said Solar, with a hint of a hiss. The fur on his back lifted, just a little. Stepping forward, I nudged him out of the street, into a nearby alley too small for carts.

  The friendly bumping of shoulders seemed to take him a little out of himself, and his fur rested flat once more. His tail lingered over my back, entwining with my own. “Perhaps my views are unduly biased,” he went on, a little more calmly, as together we watched the colorful traffic pass us by. “But I truly believe that’s your answer. Kingsport’s troubles are the result of some human magical tampering, no doubt about it.”

  For a sickening moment, I considered Morwen, chanting in her attic. Had I unwittingly encouraged her to unbalance the metaphysics of our town, and crack open the gap between realms? No, I reassured myself, the trouble had begun long before Morwen had resumed her practice. This mess was the cause of Morwen’s magic, not the other way about.

  “I’m sure you’re right,” I said. “I told you, the photographers—”

  “Yes,” Solar interrupted, “but I don’t believe you understand how serious, how sinister, their motives may be.”

  His shoulders hunched, and he crouched low upon the sidewalk, ducking phantoms.

  “I don’t know anything about Kingsport,” he warned me, his eyes darting alertly from me, to the traffic, and back again. “But I know something about the old rites of Yule. Those are dark ceremonies, Spice. The things some humans venerate—that they sacrifice to—are unspeakable.”

  Solar shuddered from head to toe. I pressed against him, trying to comfort him through the sheer weight and warmth of my body.

  “They pay terrible prices to acquire terrible powers. I know you hope to protect your family,” said Solar, coming at last to the pitch. “But I’m warning you that you’re in far over your ears.”

  “Well, I’ve known that since the beginning,” I quipped.

  Solar sighed. “Of course you won’t listen. What proper cat takes advice, even from another cat? But just take this into consideration, Spice. In my last material life, I was a black cat, and my human was a wizard. I lived with him, and ate his mice, and sat by his grimoire as he summoned, for many long years. Then the planets aligned in a certain way, and a great ritual had to be done in haste. He needed the fat of three black cats…”

  I leaned away from Solar, guessing what I was about to learn, and not wanting to know.

  “I’d partnered with the cook’s cat. Our litter of two was in the kitchen. Spice,” Solar said quietly, his fur rising at the very memory, “they hadn’t even opened their eyes yet…but our kittens were both black. He killed my newborn daughter, and my son. And then he killed me.”

  My ears were laid stiffly flat against my skull. I could feel the hairs along my tail quivering as it puffed.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said at last.

  Solar shook his head, swinging his handsome, golden ruff—a color nearly the opposite of black, I noted. “I scratched him up before he killed me, at least,” he said more cheerfully. “And I believe my mate did some very nasty things to his pie. But please, Spice,” he said, resuming his former solemnity. “If these men are what you think they are, then stay away from them by any means possible. And if you must engage—and I feel certain, knowing you, that you will—then by all that’s holy and unholy, take great care.”

  “I will,” I promised him. I rubbed against him, and purred my thanks, and blinked myself awake before he could share any more horrors.

  I sprang down from Morwen’s chair, and stretched long and heartily, from my tail down to the tip of each claw. Morwen and Her Husband were cooking dinner, and the shrieking of my baby sounded over the top of their mingled voices. Meat smells drifted up the stairs, delicious even when spoiled by cooking, and through the dusty window shone a sliver of the waning moon.

  It was good to be awake, and to be alive. I would return to my human companions below, and do my best not to think of two newborn kittens, and what had been done to them and their father centuries before.

  10

  Foetid

  For a full night and a day I heard nothing from anyone. In the material world this was for good reason: snow. It had now snowed more than I could ever remember, and the streets were doubly hushed by both the holidays and the sheer impassibility of the weather. The plows did their work, of course, but only truly determined drivers crept down the iced-over streets. The rest remained indoors.

  From the wide front window I observed our neighbors’ houses. Pine trees, both real and artificial, were carefully erected in living rooms and parlors. They were strung with colored lights and hung about with shiny baubles. A wreath adorned almost every front door, and more lights were being constantly tacked onto rooftops. I watched the man across the street fall off his roof, in fact; luckily he landed in one of the head-high drifts his snowblower had created. When the kitchen window was open I could hear Christmas music coming from three directions, so that old-fashioned carols vied with the latest, ear-piercing hits.

  This was all too little, too late. Plastic lights would not keep the dark at bay; cheerful songs would not strike fear into wicked spirits’ hearts. Shadows roamed freely now, sliding their way up snowed-in streets, crouching beneath porches, inserting long fingers into the cracks under windows. Ghosts seemed more active than usual, too, and more attentive as well: a sour-looking woman in a bonnet, dragging a dead child by his wrist, stared unblinkingly at our house until I scratched a Mark under every window, and pissed on the front door rug. Only then did she wander off, pulling the young boy’s corpse behind her. Unlike the grieving mother I’d seen in the graveyard, whose shade was trapped by her sorrow, I sensed that this mother was doomed to wander for darker, bloodier reasons.

  Her presence blended eerily in my mind with Solar’s doomed children, until I thought I heard weak, frightened mewing at every door. Once I was certain I heard kittens in the attic, and raced up the stairs, through the open door. What I saw was not the storage-cum-magic room to which I was accustomed, but a cold, cheerless garret, with a little girl tucked into a narrow bed. Her face was covered with dozens of painful white blisters, and she looked as startled to see me as I was to see her.

  Kitty? she asked, and stretched out a trembling hand—but I’d already dashed madly back down the stairs, my coat puffed to twice its usual size in sheer terror. When I at last dared to creep back up and peek around the door, the attic was as it had always been.

  Soon after that, my baby cried out suddenly, and I sprinted to the family room, fully prepared to do battle. There I discovered he was only shrieking gleefully at a TV program; still, I chose to take no chances. Positioning myself on the arm of the couch, I refused to budge from my baby’s side, even when Her Husband tried to shoo me away. Fortunately he seemed unusually tired, and after only a feeble protest at my presence, drifted off to droolly, snoring sleep upon that same sofa.

  Long hours passed watching my baby watch television. Growing impatient with the lack of communication, I kept trying to drop into the dreamlands, but I was getting too much sleep and not enough exercise. It was a downright chore to make it past the grim forest where unconscious dreamers wandered, into the more splendid lands. But no matter how long I lingered in Carter’s sunset city, or roamed around the cobblestone streets of Ulthar, or even investigated the fish-laden waters of the Isle of Orlab and the congested highways of the great capital Dylath-Leen, I could not find my friends. From o
ther cats I heard twisted and exaggerated (or sometimes dismissive) accounts of what was happening in Kingsport, but no concrete developments, and certainly no word concerning our two suspicious strangers.

  By sunset on the day of the Dark Yule, I had grown quite frantic. I now paced the floor by the front door restlessly, for I had been screamed out of the kitchen by Morwen, who still baked with a fervor that bordered on obsession. Observing Her Husband, who couldn’t stay awake, and my baby, who was pitching almost continuous tantrums, I thought I knew why.

  “Morwen,” I said, poking my head around the corner of the kitchen. “Are you still mad?”

  She didn’t answer. She was bending over (with some difficulty) to peer at yet another tray of cookies in the oven. Already the counters were heaped with foil-wrapped treats. She could have fed a holiday-themed army.

  “Morwen,” I addressed her again, sidling cautiously onto the kitchen’s well-worn linoleum. “I know you’re upset.”

  Damn it! Ignoring me, my human cursed and slammed a fist into the glass oven door. She continued to yell something I couldn’t understand—probably something technical about baking (which I don’t understand anyway). In answer, my baby howled in despair, unchecked by Her Husband, who continued to snore on the couch.

  Morwen shouted something at my baby, and stood up—too fast. She put a hand on the underside of her belly, and groaned.

  “Easy, Morwen,” I cautioned, daring to come a little closer. She rubbed her belly, and lines of exhaustion replaced those of irritation…but her expression also softened, just a little. “That’s right,” I encouraged her. “Think of the baby.”

  I wound myself around her ankle, and purred. She reached down suddenly and seized me, lifting me up into a wildly uncomfortable hug. I endured, and continued to purr, as she buried her face in my fur and squeezed.

  “Baking won’t help,” I advised her, though struggling to breathe. “Sure, the baby’s crying and your husband’s no help, but what’s really upsetting you is the Dark Yule. Making a few dozen more cookies won’t fix that.”