Then, around a thick trunk directly ahead, a flash of calico fur, changing patterns iridescently as it moved, a soft murmur building into a full-throated engine purr.
“Hey! Kitty!” Richard called out in surprise, recklessly dashing forward.
After only a few steps, he snagged a foot. He threw his arms in front of him to break his fall, curling his hands away to shield them from the wooden fingers and teeth.
“Myyaaaaaahhhhh.” Something dashed around his head, digging a claw into his cheek just before he crashed into the branches.
“Jesus!” A flurry of winged insects exploded from the mass of dead brush and filled his face. He flailed at them with the arm that wasn’t jammed elbow-deep into the branches, hit something a bit larger but still winged, beating against his hand, and he figured it for either a bat or a bird but he couldn’t see because things were crawling in his eyes. “Oh, Christ!” Something bit him near the wrist. Something squealed and raced down his back. Something heavy for its size. “Christ, oh, Christ, oh, Christ!” He thrashed around, forced himself over onto his back, flung his arms to detach the squealing, clinging weights and forced his eyes open, even though for a moment something was caught, struggling beneath the edge of his left eyelid.
The thing moving through the skeletal branches was a sharp-edged shadow under the glare of the afternoon sun. But even denied the fine details of its appearance, Richard could detect something distinctly primitive about the animal. It was short-legged, long-bodied, about the size of a weasel or a small wolf. It moved in and out of the fallen limbs of the deadfall with ease, as if it had been born there. Its large front teeth stabbed down through the neck of some sort of small rodent.
Suddenly the animal raised its head high into the glare of sun, and from its silhouette Richard could see it was some type of cat. But the light illuminating the back of its head gave it the glow of decay, its eyes the sheen of a dead thing’s.
It stared at Richard, then leapt once, twice, and Richard knew that a third would bring it right on top of him. He struggled with the branches holding him down, tore his hands open untangling himself. Then the cat struck him high in the forehead and he was down again, torn hands trying to shield his face. He looked between his fingers through a haze of blood, and the creature seemed somehow clearer, more definable.
Hanging upside down from the limb overhead was a gray mass of anger, the fur standing out in silver-tipped spikes, and though the thing was half in shadow, Richard was sure he could detect traces of orange and brown, traces of calico, blended into the gray.
“Myyyaaaaahhhh!”
The jaw wobbled weirdly on its hinge, then opened even farther. Richard saw a tongue caked in garbage before the cat started spitting at him. He moved his head to the side and sticky glop splattered the side of his face. He stared up and saw how its coat was veined first in silver, then in red, saw how its sides heaved, how its muscles had expanded, how its teeth had grown.
“Dragon?”
The cat looked down at him with eyes like stones. Then the animal leapt. Richard cried out and tried desperately to shield his face. But then nothing happened; the cat was gone.
He’d have to tell Serena he could not find her cat. He would make some pretense of looking in other places, but he would make sure this cat was not found again.
THE CHAOS OF the cleaning (and, he thought, perhaps the chaos generated by the cat as well) had kept the hotel’s residents almost completely absent the past few weeks. Occasionally Richard might hear a footfall overhead, or hear cabinet doors opening and closing as he passed a kitchen, but otherwise the residents had made no appearances.
And now that the big cleanup was over, caution still appeared to be the order of the day at the Deadfall. One afternoon Richard watched as two figures covered head to foot in matching suits of stained canvas crept around the front lawn with badminton rackets in their hands, swinging at lowlying branches and into the shadows beneath bushes. There was also the incident in which he was stopped walking down the third floor hall by a voice behind a door.
“Sir? Sir! A moment, if you will.” The voice was gravelly, garbled, and wet, as if the speaker’s mouth were just under the edge of water.
Richard went over to the door, putting his ear against the panel to listen. “Yes? I’m Richard, the manager. Can I help you?”
“Just a piece of information I would like to share with you.”
“Yes?” He could hear a soft, pleasant splashing sound from inside the room.
“I – cannot – abide – a cat.”
And try as he might, he could not get the speaker to say more.
The oppressive heat slowly leaked out of the Deadfall over the next two weeks, supplanted by a cool, which, thanks to the contrast, actually seemed uncomfortable at times. Life was strangely slow now, as if the heat had used up all available energy.
For all Richard’s doubts and ignorance as to the efficacy of their cleaning efforts, the hotel did feel like a much more sanitary environment these days. He breathed more easily, slept more soundly, and the hotel in general was a less gloomy, less shadowy place. The windows must have been rather grimy for there to be such a difference, and yet he didn’t remember anyone actually cleaning the windows. In the midst of all those odd and complicated instructions, no one had even been assigned them.
“I can’t believe how fresh everything feels and smells around here lately,” he said to Jacob one morning as the old man busily sprinkled a green powder around the flower beds out front. “Not so much like a mausoleum.”
“Well,” Jacob stopped now and then and dug a small hole with his trowel, filling it with a portion of the powder. “Even with a structure like the Deadfall, sometimes you just have to clean some of the dread out of a place, before the situation becomes critical.”
Richard watched for a time. “Is that green stuff meant to encourage growth?”
Jacob hunched his back, vigorously attacking one corner of the bed with his trowel. “No,” he said, as stems and petals slapped at his hands and shoes. “It is to keep them a bit less active.”
Richard meant to ask what exactly he meant by that, but never got around to it.
Serena spent a great deal of time to herself these days, brooding in her room, or curled up in a library chair reading.
There was no peace in the way she held herself – she looked edgy, ready to spring. She wouldn’t talk to him about it; when he tried, she snapped at him. But he’d been the same way at her age. No one really liked growing up, the way the body, the mind, changed. He remembered feeling like some sort of animal. In fact, he remembered smelling like some sort of animal. Cornered and in a constant state of confusion. Transformed. As if you didn’t know what kind of animal you were going to turn out to be.
The next cat showed up around sunset one evening. Richard had been out on the front lawn trying to track down the source of a sound: an elusive whining somewhere between a baby’s cry and the soft keen of an injured animal grieving for itself. Usually he ignored the various mysterious sounds that traveled through the Deadfall. They were too far displaced in time and location – to pursue every one of them would have been maddening. But this particular sound was especially distressing to him. It had gone on most of the day and by mid-afternoon Richard had felt a heavy depression descending through his body. He’d gone out looking for the source of the sound, less to render aid than to stop the outcry.
He was approaching a line of singular bushes – their tiny brownish leaves recently having burst back into a fiery kind of life, having become so red he could almost feel the heat from them – when a portion of one bush flared up into a roughly ball-shaped cloud of fire which fell to the ground and rolled on to the next bush. It was only after it merged with the flame-colored leaves that Richard realized it had been a cat: a red tabby Persian with bright copper eyes discernible among the brilliant red foliage. Watching him, and wanting him to know it was watching him.
For a few brief moments Richard act
ually thought about calling Serena so that together they might coax the cat out; she would have a replacement for Dragon, which could only cheer her up again. But then he knew he wouldn’t mention it to her at all, and hoped that this new cat would make no further dramatic appearances while she was around.
Less than a half hour later, he caught sight of a huge blue cat perched on the edge of the porch roof. A Russian Blue, if he wasn’t mistaken. He’d once dated a woman with a Russian Blue, and this one could have been the twin. That one had been an incredibly gentle cat. This cat had a presence which projected anything but.
Its eyes seemed unnaturally light, large and flat as if painted on. But it was the mouth that was impossible: fluid and mobile, like the mouths of talking cartoon cats. It screamed silently at him and leapt. Richard instinctively covered his face; when next he looked around, the cat had disappeared.
But the deepening shadows around the edges of the front lawn were shifting. There was a nervousness in the way Richard was looking at things. Then he realized it wasn’t his eyes: the landscape had grown agitated, a fierceness barely contained.
Cats in twos and threes suddenly sprouted from the bushes, slunk out of the shadows spread under the trees, dropped from darkened eaves, jumped into the warmth of windows. Then there was a scream like a baby’s scream and all movement stopped, the cats became shadows and stone, and a cat very much like Serena’s Dragon crept slowly up the Deadfall drive toward Richard.
The cat halted a couple of feet in front of him, tilted his head and gazed up and held Richard’s eyes, then murmured and moved his pink tongue in and out, yawned enormously and moved a paw up to rub his face. That was all that was required to make Richard feel utterly foolish: this was a kitten after all. No demon. No fire-breathing dragon, either, but unmistakably Dragon, Serena’s lost cat. Richard stepped forward and crouched. “Here, kitty, kitty,” with one hand outstretched. Serena would be so pleased.
But Dragon moved, first side to side like a weaving snake, which made Richard hesitate and draw back, then the cat bounded away, batting at fireflies as he went, leaping to snap at a flapping moth, running and tumbling across the blackening lawn. “Kitty, kitty,” Richard called again, thinking how stupid he must sound, how he had never called the cat this way, and walked briskly after, thinking he could deliver Dragon into Serena’s arms before she went to bed.
Richard tried following the cat as he shuttled across the lawn, in and out of bushes and clumps of vegetation, up one tree and down another, passing through light and passing through dark. Sometimes Richard could hold the cat in his eyes and sometimes he could not. When he could not, he imagined the animal’s progress, dreamed the dance in and out of this world and the worlds beyond and in between. The cat was some sort of messenger, but Richard wondered if it was a message he really wanted to hear.
Then he came upon the cat again, cast in the circle of a security light that had just switched on in the thickening gloom. There were four or five working lights scattered somewhat randomly along the Deadfall roofline; there were many more, which did not work, had been painted over, or had things growing out of the sockets.
Dragon was playing with another cat, wrestling, mock stalking, embracing. But as Richard grew closer he realized this wasn’t another cat at all, but a light-gray, emaciated squirrel, struggling to get away but caught and dragged back by Dragon’s delicate but amazingly strong paws. The squirrel began to squeal, a noise Richard didn’t think he’d ever heard a squirrel make before.
Richard watched Serena’s Dragon as he played with the squirrel, but a squirrel was so much bigger than a mouse, so much wilder, surely a kitten could not play with a squirrel as it did with a mouse, but Dragon did, tormenting the squirrel, torturing it. Richard was glad Serena wasn’t seeing this – what might she make of this, Dragon scratching away at the squirrel’s belly just enough to expose the most sensitive layers of skin, but not enough to kill it, just enough to precisely heighten its agony? He didn’t want her to see things like this, to even know about things like this, even though it was everywhere. Cruelty that came unplanned, that came out of a creature’s nature.
With a final bite to the neck, Dragon ended it, and then almost immediately there came a murmuring and a rustle that stiffened Richard’s neck. He turned around as the surrounding dark began to move again, and cat after cat came out to witness Dragon shred and devour the squirrel inside the circle of light.
He had never seen so many different types of cats gathered together in one place. He recognized several Burmese: a brown, like his neighbors used to have, then a lilac, then a red. Then, bounding in front, a Siamese with a glacial white coat which shaded into a light blue as it twisted in apparent ecstasy and displayed its back.
There were more breeds here, he realized, than he could recognize. He could identify a large, plump Angora in the crowd. A couple of others might have been Turkish. There were several long-haired tabbies. A huge, raccoon-like animal slunk up the rear – he’d seen pictures of the breed. A Maine Coon cat. Several black cats of different varieties – both short-and long-haired – blended in with the others to make a neutral background of night.
Then three aristocratic-looking cats with fur a blend of gray shades strolled in front of him. They looked at him with a precise, synchronous turning of heads, and he could feel an electric charge of anxiety passing across his nerves. They twisted around and displayed their double tails.
Pieces of the dark started breaking off around him. He made a staggered turn and tried to walk swiftly, but not too obviously, away.
His foot kicked into softness with a hard center. He looked down at a rag doll cat chewing at the offending shoe. Feeling the cats behind him beginning to turn, he glanced back at hundreds of bright, focused eyes.
The cats had been focused on the squirrel, leading and playing with the squirrel. Now they were focused on him. He jerked his shoe away from the snarling ragdoll and started trotting toward the front door.
Several brightly-colored bodies shot past him, then slowed down to keep pace. Other cats shouldered them aside and trotted along, grinning up at him. Soon there were a dozen cats keeping pace with him, running ahead, falling back. As if they knew, with amused confidence, they were in a race they were going to win. At the middle of the group were a couple of larger cats – mountain cats, wild cats – cats you might expect to see in a zoo.
Richard reached the front apron of the Deadfall and started up the porch when the dance of light and shadow overhead made him look up. The line of the porch roof was jammed whisker to tail with cats. They peered down at him as one creature, their numbers thickening the shadows massed above the Deadfall.
Cats crowded so closely to the edge of the roof that the ones in front began tumbling off, twisting and stretching out their backs during their descent until the legs came around, feet ready to cushion their landing. They dropped in front of Richard and shot behind him, gathering together again so that he was surrounded.
Suddenly he felt a sharp tearing at the back of his ankle – he twisted around and found Dragon clamped onto his lower leg, biting down with all his might. Richard kicked and kicked, but could not shake the cat loose. He dragged his leg, cat attached, to a wooden box beside the front steps where they kept a variety of brooms, clippers, shovels. He reached in, grabbed a shovel, and tried beating on the cat without hitting his own leg. The cat howled and dug deeper with teeth and claws, until in agony Richard dropped the long-handled tool.
At that moment the front door of the Deadfall slammed open and a ball of fire shot out, made a high, brilliant arch and landed in the middle of the cats with an explosion of sparks. With a ragged howl that chorused and echoed throughout the feline mass, the cats scattered to shadow.
“Richard! Come on! Move your feet!” Dazed, Richard looked up at the doorway. Jacob stood there, motioning vigorously with both hands. “Come on! Before they understand it was just a burning ball of rags!”
Dragon released him and went after
them.
Richard trotted up to the porch and leapt to the first step, then through the door past Jacob, who smelled strongly of gasoline. “All those cats –”
“A field of kitties,” Jacob said. “It appears that Serena’s Dragon has turned out to be King of the Cats!”
“King of the Cats?”
Jacob’s eyes were brilliant in his soot-coated face. “Surely you don’t imagine human beings are the only ones to engage in politics? I know you must have heard of alpha males and such.”
“But that’s hardly politics.”
“Politics was born the day the first creature opened its eyes to the realization that it wasn’t a physical part of everything else. That made it lonely, and that made it angry. That was the day the real darkness first came, the beast was born, and politics along with it.”
“So we have a political problem here?”
“At least. And a pest control problem of somewhat major proportions. I would have suggested that we throw out a few mice to pacify them, but I think one of our guests has eaten them all.”
Richard glanced down at his hands, which had been feeling alternately hot and clammy. He hadn’t felt the claws go in, but the backs of his hands were criss-crossed with thin lines of blood. He looked back up at Jacob. “Maybe one of the guests might help.”
“No, Richard – that runs counter to the contractual understandings we have here. We’re staff, they’re guests – the lines don’t cross. Besides, most of the guests would not help in any case. Remember that they are of a different world – it simply rubs up against ours now and again. Most of them would be quite unable to parse what the fuss was all about.”
“So what do we do? Bring out the flame throwers? Stay inside our rooms with the doors locked? I’m about ready to do that.”
“We do what people have done throughout the ages when serious political problems arise – we take out the king.”
Richard glanced around warily. He could hear a distant, directionless scratching. “So do you have a shotgun?”
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