CatFantastic

  When Dr. Mercer brought him home, she first filled an old clay dish with water and another with canned fish and placed it on the floor for his approval. For some reason, she put an old pillow near the dishes, beside the coal cookstove. Then she scooted a year's worth of research literature to one side and sat on the couch, watching and waiting for the cat's verdict. He sniffed the fish, sniffed the water, sniffed the pillow, then paced the perimeters of his new domain.

  Papers slid under his paws, the musty smell of old ink and a tinge of green mold filled his nostrils, and his claws flicked across the linoleum and across the hardwood, until he padded onto carpet and clicked back again, back and forth from the parlor to the bedroom to the kitchen. Then he leaped lightly onto the desk, the bed, the sofa, and the chairs, feeling knowledge, wisdom, information, and also vast amounts of ignorance and misunderstanding push against his pads.

  Dr. Mercer observed his survey with amused tolerance, the same feeling her flat aroused in him. "You're quite the pacer, aren't you? To and fro, to and fro, like a weaver's shuttlecock. Very well, then, Shuttle it is."

  Perched high atop a trembling tower of tomes on ancient Egyptian archaeology, the cat regarded her thoughtfully for a moment, then blinked his approval.

  Miss Rosamund had never called him anything except "cat." His other name had been long forgotten, even by him. "Shuttle" would do.

  In a short time Shuttle and Dr. Mercer developed a congenial relationship, based on mutual respect and interests.

  During the wet, windy days when Dr. Mercer ventured into the gray world beyond their snug flat to reach her classes and practice her profession, Shuttle drowsed on the books, soaking up images of sun-warmed sand, tall fronded trees, and the heavy green Nile snaking through the dusty tombs of kings and queens, the ancient burial grounds where mummies lay dry as autumn leaves, withered in their wrappings and desiccated until their own cats would not have known their smell.

  He learned of the classification of pottery shards by period and design, the intricacies of hieroglyphics, the blueprints of tombs, the interesting things canopic jars held, and about the ka or soul.

  Dr. Mercer was cooperative in broadening his education. About the time he had napped on the top book of every pile in the house, she would come home with some new problem and a whole new layer of knowledge would be shuffled to the top.

  Thus Shuttle's education as an Egyptologist, ranging over a period of months, was thorough and comprehensive if not especially chronological.

  Not all their time was spent in study. On occasion, colleagues or students would stop by, and long discussions and arguments would ensue while they drank sherry and catnip tea. Shuttle liked to lie along the top of the couch, basking under the reading light, pretending it was the hot sun of Thebes. He stretched so the warmth could penetrate his fur, until his body extended the length of the cushion, his tail tickling Dr. Mercer's neck. He added occasional comments, but even human beings intelligent enough to read heiroglyphics were ignorant of his language, though Dr. Mercer, being his personal protegee, understood more than most.

  He felt as if he had known her since he was a kitten, and longer, so well suited were they and so comfortable together.

  At any rate, he grew very attached to her, and when she first came home, he would seat himself on her lap and allow her to warm her hands in his fur and at night he would first curl next to her head to lull her to sleep with his purr, then lie for mutual warmth near her feet. She was very considerate and moved carefully, even in her sleep, never thrashing about as Miss Rosamund had done. Once she was quite asleep, he would often proceed with his own research, mapping out excavations in the sand in his commode, or lying on the books in the windowsill, to gaze across the rooftops at the thrashing sea and watch the wind scatter clouds across the moon's wan eye.

  Dr. Mercer, even while deep in her studies, would rub his ears or tweak his tail affectionately as he passed her chair. Sometimes when he lay near her book, she would seek out his fur with her fingers or read him passages and then argue with him as if she expected him to concur with her opinion. He usually did. She was unusually bright.

  And then spring, a season he always anticipated with relish, betrayed him. Dr. Mercer pulled odd smelling receptacles from the closet and began packing heavy, functional clothing he had never seen before, things in desert colors, and a hat. She never wore hats. He sat on the cases and watched with avid interest for a while. He thought the cases smelled something like the books. Like Egypt. The dust was old dust, sand and mummies, he imagined.

  One day she snapped the clasps shut and bent down and picked him up, so that his face was so close to hers his breath clouded her spectacles. "Sorry, old dear, but duty calls. Monica Thomas will be here to see to you. You'll remember Monica. I believe you liked her." Nonsense. He barely knew the girl although he was, of course, polite to all of their guests. "I'll miss you, but if I took you along you'd have to undergo quarantine back here, all that sort of thing, and you'd hate that. I will think of you often. I'll be digging outside Bubastis. You'd approve of Bubastis. Sensible people. Thought cats were divine."

  And then she was gone and Monica Thomas came. Monica Thomas did not really care for cats as much as she cared for the professor's lovely flat far from the dormitory, where she could study Shuttle's and Dr. Mercer's books at her leisure and, more often, entertain in private. She put all the books back on the shelves and screeched at Shuttle when he sat on the tables or touched his claws, even in thoughtful kneading, to the upholstery. She shut him out of the bedroom many nights, away from the window. Sometimes she would condescend to pat him, but she disliked getting his hairs on her clothing. She let his food get stale or, worse, sometimes forgot to set it out.

  At first he was patient, for what is time to a being with nine lives? But by the second round of the moon, he felt Egypt through the pattern in the rug, through the polished hardwood; he felt it through his claws and bones and in the fighting hairs of his back and tail and in the sensitive places where his whiskers touched the world around him. And he knew. All was not well in Egypt.

  Monica did not agree. She came in brandishing a letter from Dr. Mercer, chirping to Shuttle that his mommy had said hi. When she went to bed that night, Shuttle hopped upon the desk and sniffed the letter. Her scent was on the paper, salty and faint but distinctive. He lay upon it, warming his stomach with it and absorbing the message. If he were human, he would have been reassured. "We have made a find. Of course, it's too early to know quite how important it will be, but already we have located the entrance to the tomb and the shrine. Unfortunately, work has slowed down as our fellahin have deserted us. Some complaints about odd noises at night. Negotiations are in progress, however."

  What she said was not as significant as her scent and that of the paper. It carried danger, wrongness. Shuttle scratched at the bedroom door and tried to explain to Monica that he needed to look out the window, to see if he could see Egypt, to divine the nature of the problem. She threw a house slipper against the door, but in the morning fed him fresh food and chucked him under the chin as if he were a mewling kitten. "Don't cry, chum. She'll be back in a few months."

  Months! He should have insisted on accompanying her.

  He spent the day staring at the sea, leaving it only to return, his claws clicking back and forth on the floor. He scratched at the sill and at the door. He had to get to Egypt. But it was no use. He was locked in. At last, exhausted, he fell asleep on the desk, on the letter and the book whose place Monica had marked with it.

  And at noon he rose and walked through the window, across the housetops, and with a mighty leap crossed the sea and all the countries between to Dr. Mercer's tent. She was sleeping, mosquito netting draped over her, her hair matted with sweat. She smelled wonderfully like herself, only more so, but she twitched and moaned in her sleep. Shuttle purred and she quieted, and he padded out into the night.

  The tents would have been easy for him to penetrate as a flesh-and-blood cat
. For his ka-form, they were less substantial than the heat waves that rose from the sand: Most of the tents held sleeping scientists, sleeping students. The native workers, he knew from conversations, would be at their villages. He kept poking, barely interspersing himself with the fabric of a tent before pulling out again, until he found the ones he sought.

  Naturally, in his higher form, the cook tent did not tempt him, especially since the odors were old and complicated by disinfectant some conscientious scientist no doubt forced on the native cook.

  No, the tents that interested him were those where finds were already being cataloged and recorded. He knew that the answer to the wrongness must lie there, or part of it.

  It came to him through the canvas, so that he hesitated before entering. He hissed and all his soft fur spiked into quills. The pottery shards were there, neglected, on a side table, along with a typewriting machine that bowed the rickety table in the middle with its weight. On the center table were jars and transcriptions, bits of jewelry, and whole pots. He barely noticed them. It was the stack of cylinders, piled like firewood on top of and underneath the third table that sent twitches from whisker to tail tip.

  He stalked toward the table, sniffing, but he knew from the outline of the ears, from the shapes of the snouts pushing their silhouettes against the shadowed canvas, that these were cats. Dead cats. Very old dead cats. Desecrated, deformed, bereft of beauty. He growled uncertainly, his tail jerking. Suddenly, something stirred in the far corner, rustling like a mouse then trumpeting like an elephant, and he shot straight into the air and dashed through the tent wall.

  When he was safely on the outside, he heard the snoring resume, and realized the mouse and elephant had both been no more than another sleeping scientist. Cautiously, he slipped paw by paw back into the tent and stole past the scientist. He recognized the fellow, of course. Dr. William Parsons. Good pottery man, Dr. Mercer said. Apparently not much for cat mummies, from the casual way they were left lying on top of each other. Much as the mummies repelled him, Shuttle was fascinated by the wrappings, cloth wrapped in intricate patterns around the bodies, paws, and tails. A gummy black substance such as that used on human mummies covered the cats. One stiff was all he needed. What had become of these creatures, he wondered? And what was it about them that felt so wrong? He stopped wondering, stopped sniffing, and stared for a long moment. In his head a chorus of plaintive mews rasped across the ages and he opened his mouth and caterwauled, spooking himself all over again.

  He leaped from the tent, leaving Bill Parsons, oblivious to ka-ish caterwauls, still sleeping soundly, if noisily. The expedition had had unusual luck, locating its first finds shortly after commencing the dig. Dr. Mercer's letter had taken almost a month to reach Monica. The tomb now stood open, with a guard sleeping by the door. A series of ditches and stakes marked the site of the temple and the shrine. The tent town of scientists and their assistants ranged in a crescent surrounding the site.

  The shrine was little more than a small stone mound at one end of the crescent. The mound was hollow as an oven and the door was ajar. Shuttle could not bring himself to enter that place. The smell of mummies and misery hung heavily within, and the mews such as he had heard within his head echoed and re-echoed through the shrine. This, then, had been the sepulcher of those unfortunate members of his race now lying like so many mackerel wrapped by the fishmonger within Parsons' tent.

  The tomb gaped at the other horn of the crescent. A less grisly object of study, more worthy of his scientific attention, he decided. He could hardly be expected to assist Dr. Mercer with her problem, whatever it was, before he had made a survey of the site.

  He wafted inside, past the guard, whose head lolled at an angle that looked most uncomfortable to Shuttle, who was himself an expert on comfort.

  The tomb was set in the side of a hill. Inside was a downward sloping path. The interior was not as elaborate as the tombs of pharoahs, but quite commodious enough for the dead. Shuttle tried to bump the tops off the decorated chests with his head but found his hardest butts made no impact. He stood on his hind paws and put his front ones on the lips of urns, sniffing the lids for oils, perfumes, or entrails. The odors were strong enough even after so many decades to cause him to curl his lips back over the scent glands at the side of his mouth, as a highborn person might curl theirs in distaste.

  His paws made' no sound on the tiles beneath them, across which grains of sand bounced and skittered like frightened insects, of which there were also a few. He disdainfully ignored them in the interests of science.

  The top of one of the jars had been removed and Shuttle was thrusting his head into its mouth when he heard the scrape, the slither, and the shuffling noise. He froze, suspended by his chin and front paws, as a whisper of chill seeped through the desert warmth that had formerly permeated the open tomb.

  And over the scrape, slither, shuffle, the sad mewling cried out within him once more. He shot out of the tomb so quickly that he almost tangled in the bandages of the figure limping relentlessly toward Bill Parsons' tent. This further alarmed him so that he thrust himself across the remaining distance, through tent and mosquito net, to land on top of Dr. Mercer's waist, between her rib cage and her hip, where he dug in so hard that had he had the foresight to bring his body with him she would have borne his mark for weeks.

  It would serve her right, too. What was wrong with their nice flat and her teaching position that she had to leave him in the care of Monica Thomas to come to this horrid place? He trembled like a brown leaf in a high wind, huddling next to Dr. Mercer. That awful mewling! How could she be deaf to it?

  But suddenly another sound touched his flattened ears. Low and strangled, gargling and full of loathing fear, and then, cut to dead silence. The silence lasted only a moment before Shuttle's sensitive ears detected the slow scraape, slither, shuffle, scrape, slither, shuffle, scrape, slitherr, shufffle, scraaape, slitherr! shuffleSLUMP, SCRAPE, SLITHER, SHUFFLE, DRAG! and the dusty stench of the collection of moldering bandages was within the tent, its hands clawed toward the mosquito netting, ready to dispatch Dr. Mercer as it had no doubt already dispatched Bill Parsons and who knew how many others? Dr. Mercer stirred and mumbled in her sleep, and half wakened to the mummy's presence, as she had not to Shuttle's. She began to leak that strangled cry.

  That was too much for Shuttle. Mummy's curse, for it was obviously the manifestation of that phenomenon that had haunted at least two other excavations that was now attempting to claim his own colleagues, was all very well. He himself was sometimes cranky when awakened from a long nap. But this tent was Shuttle's territory and Dr. Mercer was his companion. Ears flat, fur bristling, fangs bared, claws unsheathed and body four times its normal size, Shuttle launched himself through the mosquito netting at the bandaged apparition, ready to rend it bandage from bandage.

  The necessity did not arise. Murderous the mummy might be, but it was an exceptionally well-brought-up spook, nevertheless. Being a supernatural sort, it at once perceived Shuttle and his displeasure, and fell to the ground in a gesture of submission and humility Shuttle recognized from the reproductions of scrolls and paintings in Dr. Mercer's books. This gruesome thing had probably murdered Bill Parsons, but Shuttle, licking himself thoughtfully while watching the mummy grovel, could not bring himself to attack this unusually sensitive and courteous example of Egyptian eternity.

  He did spring at it a little, to shoo it off, then followed it from Dr. Mercer's tent, battling at the bandages it dragged to let it know that he meant business. It returned to the tomb, past the body of the guard, now an empty husk whose ka had apparently had more pressing matters to attend to than guarding the tomb.

  The mummy returned to its coffin and case, settling itself in with a sigh of dust. It did not replace the lid. That did not reassure Shuttle. Certainly the mummy was obedient now, with a cat-ka to show it its place, but Shuttle had no idea how long he could maintain his present state. Surely, his ka must return to his body again soon
and then Dr. Mercer would be once more at the mummy's mercy. And, of course, the rest of the expedition also would be in danger, but he concerned himself with only one aspect of the situation at a time.

  The piteous mewling was louder now, closer, but it seemed to Shuttle that it was less a complaint and more a summons. He leaped onto the rim of the mummy case and followed his nose, until he peered over the head-end of the mummy case, where he observed a small mound, little more than earth and sand from the look of it. To this mound he was drawn and he began scratching, scratching, his incorporeal claws flinging ancient ghost-dirt and ghost-sand to either side of him until the real dirt and sand collapsed over a small casket. He took two paces backward as the lid of this casket began to wiggle. The mewling increased in intensity. He extended a delicate paw and shipped the damned thing away, startling himself that he wasable to do so, since he had grown used to having no substance. Within the casket lay another cat mummy, golden rings in the ears, bound with basketlike strips confining body, paws and tail. Lovely latticework. Probably indicated a lot about period, craftsmanship, the people who made it. But from within, now, came the compelling cry, "Release us."

  Shuttle set a tentative paw on the bandage. "Release us," the cry rasped again. He pawed loose an end and took it in his teeth. It felt gummy, tasted of dust and ancient herbs. To his surprise, his tugging had some effect. At first the bandages crumpled beneath his teeth and paws, but as he came to the deeper layers, they simply unwound. The sticky substance dissolved as he burrowed deeper into the mummy, so intent upon his labors, upon stilling the cry, that he did not notice at once when the dust rising from the corpse turned to vapor and the vapor formed into a cat-ka.