The Golden Cat

by Gabriel King

  But it decided to sleep the night quite near, so that it could follow them in the morning.

  ‘A dog follows,’ it thought comfortably.

  It thought, ‘That’s what a dog does.’

  *

  The outhouse was filled with a curious rhythmic clanking sound. Every shred of food was gone: undeterred, the golden kitten had continued licking one of the empty metal dishes until it fetched up in the corner, where each powerful stroke of his tongue now banged it against the wall. Animal X, meanwhile, gave himself a thorough wash, remarking contentedly how the sound of his tongue in the fur on his chest sounded much like the rasp of the kitten’s in the empty bowl. ‘Tongues are useful to have,’ meditated Animal X, ‘when you’re a cat.’ Stilton was almost asleep. He had tucked his paws up under him and let his head fall forward until his nose was almost resting on the floor. But each time he dropped off, the same thought woke him with a start, compelling him to ask anxiously, ‘Will it come back, that thing?’

  ‘I think the kitten was too much for it,’ said Animal X. He added, more to himself than Stilton, ‘I think the kitten would be too much for anyone.’

  ‘We took its food,’ Stilton’ said guiltily.

  Eating had worked on him the magic it always works on a cat: but there was still a trembling in all his limbs, and the milky third lid had drawn itself almost halfway across both eyes. ‘You don’t look good,’ Animal X thought. ‘Of course it’s hard to know how you looked when you were well.’ Out loud, confident in his answer, he said, ‘I don’t believe it had any more right to be here than we do. If it had, it would have fought harder.’

  ‘What was it?’

  This question left him on less dependable ground.

  ‘It was a traveller like us,’ he said in the end.

  ‘Sit near me,’ invited Stilton. ‘Just in case.’

  Then he said, ‘Isn’t it marvellous to be out?’

  Animal X curled round him, licked his ears once or twice, and settled down.

  ‘Sleep now,’ he said.

  Observing their preparations from the other side of the outhouse, the golden kitten abandoned its pursuit of the dish, licked its chops massively, yawned even more massively, then came over. It stood near them for a moment or two as if awaiting instructions or trying to decide how to lie down, then with a sigh fell heavily on its side on Animal X’s tail and began to purr.

  ‘Make yourself comfortable,’ invited Animal X.

  *

  His sleep was deep, with long, sensible dreams: next morning he woke as early as ever. Stilton lay beside him in a bar of pearly light. The kitten had already gone out. Animal X went to the door and looked into the garden, which was full of white mist and pale yellow sunshine.

  ‘I always liked the dawn,’ he decided quietly to himself. ‘But today I like it more.’

  The kitten had left a trail in the dewy grass to the bottom of the garden, then ploughed through the hedge into the pasture beyond, where it had sat grooming itself for a few minutes before making its way down to the little stream, to sniff around among the duck-droppings then wander off in the same direction as the current.

  After a few hundred yards the stream entered a spacious water-meadow – low-lying, greyed with dewy spiderwebs, buttered with kingcups and dotted here and there by single tall thistles – on which the mist seemed to linger despite the growing warmth of the day. There it joined a broader, deeper stream, green, thick with weeds and apparently unmoving except where it plunged over a weir with a kind of mumbling roar. Above and beside the weir the air brightened in an arc of colour, as if the falling water had laundered the mist out of it. Everything was in sharp focus. Blue dragonflies hung and darted above the water. On the bank beside this theatre of light, its head cocked attentively to one side, sat the golden kitten, captivated by the fall and rush of the water, the broad silver weight of it as it poured over the weir, the creamy white standing wave from which broke suds of foam that were tossed up into the shiny air. Animal X went and sat companionably in the close-cropped turf nearby.

  ‘What do you see?’ he asked.

  The kitten turned its face towards him. In its remaining eye gleamed a joy so quiet and pure it made him feel shy. An adult cat could only wince away from a look like that. When he was able to face it again, the kitten had forgotten he was there. It was too busy following the roar and plunge of the water across the weir, pausing to wonder how it folded itself over and danced into foam, then tilting its head a fraction to watch the process through again – unable, indeed uninclined, to release itself from that perpetual event. After a moment, Animal X asked, ‘What do you see?’

  Silence.

  ‘I’m not so keen on water myself. I don’t know why.’

  The kitten watched the weir.

  ‘It really is beautiful,’ said Animal X.

  The kitten hunched its shoulders.

  Animal X tried another tack. ‘Do you remember something like this then?’ he said. The water collapsed in thunder, the spray refreshed the air, the light split apart in delight and shimmered prismatically above it all. ‘I mean, from before they caught you?’

  The kitten turned its head and hissed at him. Its ears went back, and a low, ululating yowl proceeded from its throat. Its good eye burned.

  ‘No!’ said Animal X. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I only—’

  He gave way. He gave way again. Step by slow, threatening step, the golden kitten drove him away from the water. ‘This is ridiculous,’ thought Animal X. ‘What have I done?’ He put his haunches to the ground. He felt his own ears go back. He felt the angry yowl build in his own throat. Then the kitten lifted its head as if it had heard the weir for the first time. With a single despairing glance towards the dancing foam, as if it were giving something up for ever, it rushed off across the meadows.

  ‘No!’ called Animal X, too late. He had remembered the ducks, bickering in the shallows the night before. ‘It’s your water,’ he whispered. ‘It’s your water.’

  He was about to run after the kitten and talk to it when he heard a voice call, ‘Wait! What’s going on?’

  Stilton, waking up alone in the outhouse, had run his heart out to catch up with his friends.

  ‘Why were you fighting? Don’t leave me!’

  Animal X sighed.

  He waited.

  He thought, ‘The kitten will calm down soon. And we might as well go in this direction as any.’

  So, once Stilton had caught up, and Animal X had assured him that they would stay together, the two of them waded off into the dew in the kitten’s footsteps, unaware of the shadow that followed them across the meadows like a small cloud crossing the sun.

  *

  The kitten did calm down – though it took all day, and the day after that, and even then it seemed to keep a wary eye on Animal X and Stilton, and to walk a little apart from them. ‘I don’t know what I did,’ thought Animal X, ‘but I’d better be careful in future.’ To Stilton, he said, ‘That kitten wants friends, but it is too angry to let anyone near.’

  ‘I would be angry too,’ said Stilton.

  Animal X stared at him. ‘What do you mean?’ he said.

  But Stilton couldn’t explain.

  *

  They walked for some days without anything happening, their course bounded by the water Animal X was reluctant to cross. The stream thickened and flexed its muscles. It wound through pastureland, or along the bases of gentle chalk hills, sometimes sharing the valley with a road. The three cats were never far from human beings – there was hardly a point in their journey when they were out of sight of the grey spire of a village church – but they kept to themselves. At midday they slept beneath a hedge; as dusk gathered, they found they were wading through chilly layers of mist as high as themselves, dammed into small fields like millponds. They froze at the call of an owl, the bark of a dog from a house in the moonlight; they caught the stark reek of a vixen and heard her cry later from the ridge for a mate. They ate what they
could find, which was never enough, and they were glad of the hot afternoons.

  While the golden kitten seemed to thrive on these hardships, Stilton grew increasingly ill and tired. His fur fell off in patches to reveal, smelly, yellowish and unhealed, the burns he had come by in the explosion. The burns frightened him, and he stopped cleaning himself rather than admit they were there. He rarely complained, but crouched listlessly in the open at night, his head turned away from the other cats, talking to himself as if he was back in the cabinet. You woke, and you were immediately in the middle of his monologue, which flowed past like a stream – Oh, my owners ate some stuff, all right. They got through some stuff. But it was blue they liked the best. And none of that barely ripe supermarket stuff, either. ‘Plastic cheese wrapped in plastic!’ I often heard him say to her. ‘None of that supermarket stuff here!’ They were pretty choosy about their Stilton, those two – and then you slept again. It was comforting in a way. It went on for a night or two; then the sick cat seemed to grow so depressed he stopped talking at all. Trying to cheer him up one evening, Animal X said, ‘That’s a nice piece of Stilton you’ve got there.’

  They were sitting at the base of the wire fence at the edge of a conifer plantation. Midges danced in ghostly pagoda shapes above their heads. It was almost dark, but the birds were still singing competitively from their pulpits high in the tops of the trees. Warmth seemed to spill out of the woods, where the trees had stored it up in secret all day; warmth and shadows and a smell of resin so strong it made the cats blink.

  After a moment or two, Animal X prompted, ‘It’s rather a lot for one cat, though, isn’t it?’

  ‘I haven’t got any Stilton.’

  This came out with such quiet matter-of-factness Animal X was unable to think of a reply.

  After more silence, Stilton added, ‘I’ve never had any.’ He looked across at Animal X. He seemed to be forcing his eyes to open so that his friend could see all the way into them to the pain inside. He said, ‘I never had owners or a family or a mate called Tabs. I’m just an old cat who lived in a pen. I never had any of those things.’ He let his eyes close and looked away again. ‘I don’t even know what Stilton is,’ he admitted. ‘Any more than you do.’

  ‘But to talk about it like that—’ said Animal X.

  ‘Oh, I learned it all from a cat in the cabinets,’ whispered Stilton. ‘He’d come from the outside, just like you, long before you, or Dancey, or any of the others arrived.’ He shuddered, then gave a frail laugh. ‘Maybe he made it up too.’

  ‘I don’t understand why.’

  ‘To give myself a life,’ said Stilton. ‘I was born in that place. I was bred to go in the cabinets, I had no other purpose, and I’ve had no life but that until now, but I don’t mind.’ He said, ‘I don’t even mind if I die now. Do you want to know why?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Animal X.

  Stilton looked up at the dark wall of trees behind them, the midges dancing above his head.

  ‘Because I’ve been here and seen all this,’ he said. ‘And I’ve had a friend who took care of me.’ His head drooped and he stared at the floor. ‘I’m tired,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to talk about cheese any more.’ Then he said, ‘Everyone minds dying. I don’t know why I said that.’

  Throughout this exchange, the golden kitten sat upright, gazing with a kind of ancient impassiveness out across the thistly pasture, the tapetus lucidum of its single eye blank and reflectant in the last eggshell-green light above the river. Who knew what it was thinking, or if it was thinking at all? Silently, it rose to its feet, stretched, and looked down at the sick cat. In that light it seemed bigger than itself. It stood over Stilton and began to lick him gently. Stilton offered up his tired face to the long, slow, careful passes of its tongue. He closed his eyes, and the kitten licked the mucus from them before it passed on to his ears, across the top of his head, and down his withered little sides and the burns that hurt him so much. After a moment, he sighed, and began to relax. The kitten gave a single, grunting purr which seemed to echo away across the fields. The stars appeared, one by one. A car whirred along some nearby lane. Suddenly it was pitch dark and off in the woods a brock was coughing. Stilton, who had begun to doze, woke up and shivered anxiously. But he was soon asleep again, and all that could be heard was the quiet rasp of the golden kitten’s tongue.

  ‘You were listening, then,’ thought Animal X. ‘I knew you were.’

  10

  The Kind and the Cruel

  In the middle of the night, as the moon crept towards the horizon and the constellation cats know as the Leopard faded into the beginning of a new dawn, Red came awake, bolt upright.

  Red had never regarded himself as a cat with much imagination. He didn’t share the resident ferals’ love of superstition or ritual; hell, he never even thought about his own future. But something had just entered his dreams with such force that it had propelled him out of a deep sleep. He remembered the elusive thought that had occurred to him that afternoon, a curious sense of distortion and loss. He had dismissed it at the time, unable to trace its origin. But now he knew exactly what had triggered it.

  Kittens.

  Every feral community fizzes with them: little bundles of fur tumbling and chewing, mock-fighting and mewing.

  Where were the kittens?

  In Kiki La Doucette’s feral court, there was not a single kitten to be seen. Not one. Every cat there had been adult – skinny, sure – but full-grown.

  Where the hell were the kittens?

  ‘Sealink.’ He nudged her urgently. The calico seemed the most down-to-earth, no-nonsense female he’d ever encountered. Perhaps she’d be able to provide a sensible explanation. ‘The kittens! Sealink, wake up!’

  The calico was fast asleep, and Red could do nothing to wake her. Even as he watched, her ears twitched; then smooth black lips drew back from sharp teeth in a snarl. For a moment he thought he had her attention, but when her eyes blinked open, the third lid was closed tight across the pupil so that moonlight struck eerily off the milky-white membrane.

  Her paws jerked.

  Sealink was running. It was dark and icy cold. She was nowhere she recognized; nowhere she had even been, and certainly nowhere she wished to be again. The landscape through which she ran was featureless – the highway to end all highways – a black plain scoured by howling winds, winds that seemed designed to strip fur from skin and flesh from bone.

  She had no clear idea why she ran, for the compulsion that drove her was deeper than thought. Something lay ahead of her, giving off a dull green light. No matter how hard she ran, this glow remained elusive, always the same distance away as it had been when she first sighted it, although her lungs burned from her exertions. At the same time, she sensed something behind her, and she knew by the way her spine prickled with heat that this something was gaining on her, inch by inexorable inch. She felt her lips draw back from her teeth with the effort, felt the desperate fluidity of her limbs as they gathered and flexed, gathered and flexed.

  And then the voice was closer.

  In the teeth of the wind, Sealink heard it.

  It had a double tone, the first low and booming, like the drone of a pipe-organ, so deep that it shuddered in her bowels; the other was a voice she had heard before, vaguely familiar, but somehow distorted. It said:

  ‘I am one who became two; I am two who become four; I am four who become eight; I am one more after that.’ In and around the echo of these words, the demonic wind roared and subsided; roared and subsided. ‘One more after that. After that. After that.’

  ‘But you can’t help us any more,’ Sealink thought. ‘I saw you die.’

  Ahead, the glow deepened and spread. It rose from the dusky horizon like smoke from a bonfire and billowed towards the calico, who now stood rooted like a tree, her heart thumping in her chest. It twisted and twined for a moment above her head – a hieroglyph of greeny-gold light. Sealink stared at its incomprehensible shape, which was like that of a keyh
ole drawn on empty air, a keyhole without key or door. As she did so, a hot wind blasted past her – so that her fur felt as if it had been scorched – and ripped into the symbol like a dark hand, dashing it down so that it trembled apart and spilled away like mist. The great voice reverberated through the darkness.

  ‘No Golden Cat. No kittens. If I die, all die!’

  Then it was gone into the distance like spent thunder and the calico was left alone and shaking.

  ‘Sealink!’

  ‘No!’

  The calico thrashed and came to her feet in a sudden, galvanic motion, fur on end. Red backed away. She looked completely mad, and the bite she had given him earlier still twinged.

  ‘Sealink: I’m sorry for waking you—’

  She stared at him, wild-eyed, her flanks heaving.

  ‘The kittens—’ The dream rumbled on through her head.

  ‘I know—’

  The calico blinked. ‘What?’

  ‘Kittens. I haven’t seen a single one, not even with Kiki. Sealink, something very strange is going on around here. I mean – kittens – they’re everywhere usually.’ He gestured widely. ‘I remember this place, teeming with kittens: you couldn’t move without falling over one of ’em. Feral cats have tons of kittens. We’re known for it. Where the hell are they all?’

  Gradually the focus came back into the amber eyes. The dream faded with cold finality. ‘Damned if I know, honey; came back here to look for my own, and received a real cruel answer: so don’t ask me to give you any more answers about kittens.’

  A shaft of red struck the water in front of the hollow. It blazed across the mighty river and lit the warehouses on the Algiers bank so that for some seconds they appeared to be on fire. On the near shore, every rock and blade of grass was touched with the unearthly light of dawn.

  ‘Red sky in the morning, Great Cat’s warning—’