by Gabriel King
All at once there was a roar in the darkness, and the golden triangle broke apart into its component lines, shivering in the air. One aspect of it spiralled deliberately in front of her for a moment, then it was gone; only to be replaced a second later by a small shape, a tiny golden creature which stared helplessly upward as if beset by something dark and formless, something which leaned over it in predatory rapture.
Sealink felt her heart thump painfully.
It was a kitten…
At once a great wave of empathy and love flowed out from her towards this helpless creature. Something in her recognized it, not only as a kitten in distress, but as a kitten she knew. Somehow – she could not imagine how, or why – one of Pertelot’s beloved kittens was in danger. She felt its presence, reaching out for her, and she felt, like a red blast in her head, its fury and its pain. The vision dissolved into night. This was followed by a flash, almost subliminal, of a city skyline, a city she knew well – then all was dark again.
Oblivious to fear in the heart of the dream, Sealink embraced her fate.
‘Majicou, help me to find this kitten!’
Silence. Silence and darkness. A rush of air.
Then she was back in the presence of the great cat. The tobacco-brown rosettes shifted and flowed beneath the oily sheen of his fur. He opened his mouth and roared, ‘There are miracles in this life, as there are in all lives. Take on this task and save the Golden Cat. Wish for the most impossible thing in the world with the wildest part of yourself and it shall be yours.’ He cocked his head. The one eye shone like a lamp. ‘Go now, Sealink, I—’
Suddenly he began to dwindle, his mouth opening and closing silently; then he started to spin away as if caught in the vortex of terrible power.
A wild thought struck the tigress, as if from another life. ‘The Fields of the Blessed!’ she called after his receding form. ‘Where can I find them?’
The Majicou made one last, desperate effort. Twisting for a moment out of the gravity that drew him down, he opened his mouth and roared. The howl of the wind carried his first words away. All that remained was this: ‘Be yourself. Never give up hope. I have great faith in you, Sealink!’
*
The truck drove through the night and Sealink dozed in the back, sated on crawfish. The stars shone down upon her, unchanged as ever. It was hard to imagine that the world could be such a terrible place when its skies looked so serene. But in the dark places of the earth, hidden from view? That was a different matter.
Sealink shivered, not just from cold.
She was alone in the world. Her friends and allies were either dead or thousands of miles away, caught in their own spirals of destiny. The task that lay before her was at once enormous and, in parts, obscure. The odds, of course, were weighted violently against her.
Some might regard her circumstances as hopeless, she conceded. But Majicou’s message to her, words like a precious cargo rescued from a shipwreck, had stiffened her resolve: ‘Be yourself. Never give up hope. I have great faith in you, Sealink.’
With the reckless abandon she had come to cherish as a true mark of her independent spirit, Sealink cast away her despair. She imagined it flying over the side, whirled off like a sacrifice to the winds of motion, to join the dust devils the truck left in its wake. Face into the wind, the calico cat smiled. The light of the dying sun struck off her teeth so that they gleamed with red; and the colours of her coat streamed like the war-pennants of an invading army.
*
It was almost dawn when the truck rattled down Highway 90, along the West Bank Expressway and over the Crescent City Connection to deliver Sealink back into New Orleans. In the east, the towers of the Central Business District lay black against the lightening sky.
She watched the buildings glide past and felt her spirits rise.
‘Move, and the world moves with you.’ So she had advised the Queen of Cats on the deck of a bobbing boat that was bearing them away from a city filled with horrors, a city on another continent entirely. ‘That’s what travelling’s for – putting distance between yourself and your past.’
And yet here she was: travelling straight back into the arms of her own.
Strangely enough, it felt right. Straightforward to the point of bluntness, Sealink was inclined to tackle matters head-on. She greatly preferred administering a sharp cuff upside the ear to the use of tact. And she was looking forward to applying a bit of that specialism to an old friend.
She had already marked Kiki La Doucette down as her first objective.
Sealink stored up her grudges with fastidious care, keeping them safely parcelled away in a quiet place in her head, only to be taken out and dealt with when the right opportunity presented itself. And some grudges were more significant than others.
She could understand why Kiki might want to surround herself with sycophantic hangers-on who brought her so much food she became gargantuan. Hell: yes. She could understand that.
Old insults and scratches traded down on the boardwalk when the Delta Queen had been coming into her sexual maturity; lovers lost and lovers stolen: nothing so terrible there.
But Kiki was a stealer of kittens.
She had stolen the kittens of the cemetery cats.
And she had stolen Sealink’s own. The calico considered for a brief moment how Kiki had, in fact, rescued the survivors, then dismissed the thought entirely. What remained was that she had left two to gasp out their last breaths on the river’s cold shoreline. She had raised another two in her own vile image. And she knew the whereabouts of the fifth.
Find her, then, and settle the score. If anyone knew the whereabouts of kittens, it was Kiki La Doucette.
*
When the pick-up came to a halt at the top of North Peters Street, Sealink was up and off before the doors were opened. Through the smoky half-light she trotted, purposeful and resolute, with one thought in her head: catch La Mère while she’s dozing and savage the truth out of her – get a hold on her throat that will have her wheezing for mercy. She imagined the sensation of thick, fat flesh in her mouth, a feeble pulse beating against her teeth, her claws sunk to their roots in the body of her enemy.
But when she arrived in the courtyard behind the tourist shops of the French Market, there was no sign of Kiki, nor any of her miserable retinue. The area was deserted. At the café du Monde, there was not even a sparrow to be found. She crossed a Decatur Street empty of traffic and entered the park through its ornate iron gate. An air of dereliction had settled upon the guano-spattered benches, the silent statues and summer-dusty trees; and the cathedral presided over the scene like a grim sentinel over a long-abandoned battlefield. Sealink quartered the square. She sniffed beneath the myrtles and banana palms. Old traces of cat, faint scents and urine markings. Nothing fresh. It was as if every French Quarter cat had vanished into the night.
She nosed around the waste-bins. No cats had called here, either. Humans had, though. She leapt onto the edge and, balancing precariously, helped herself to the day-old remains of a sausage po’boy. The mustard made her eyes sting but, cheerfully sustained by its greasy calories, she trotted out onto the spacious sidewalk where during the day caricaturists and mime artists entertained passing trade; and was suddenly assailed by a terrible stench.
Even through the aftertaste of mustard and ketchup the power of the smell was phenomenal. It hung in the air like a solid presence. Sealink’s eyes started to water, so that it was through bleary vision that she saw the source of the stink. Someone had fastened a large and rusty grate to the railings beside the park entrance. It stood at a forty-five-degree angle to the ground, and beneath it lay a heap of cooling, blackened ashes. Little wisps of smoke still rose from the embers, and it was this smoke that hurt her eyes so. But it was less the ashes than their provenance that held Sealink in thrall: for, bound to the grate with wire, its whole body twisted up and away from where the flames must have leapt, was a skeletal shape, all clumped and charred like ancient, flaky wrou
ght iron, the tragic remnants of its head a rictus of silent agony and outrage. In the midst of so much soot, its teeth shone white as pearls, weaponry terribly outclassed by that of its opponents.
Sealink felt her legs go from under her. She sat down on the cold, hard stone and felt shocked reaction shudder through her in waves.
Someone had burned a cat. Deliberately, and in a very public place.
Without any conscious thought, she found her feet and put them to good use. She ran and ran through the dawn-lit streets until stopped by the four-lane highway of North Rampart. On the other side of the road, the crumbling walls of the old boneyard rose up; above them, still white angels and a woman with a cross, her hand raised in greeting, or warning. Early-morning traffic rumbled past, expelling noxious fumes. Sealink breathed deeply. Even diesel oil was preferable to the stench that followed her, so she sat by the side of the road and let the exhaust smoke infuse her coat.
She sat there, motionless, in a sort of daze.
The next thing she knew, there was a screech of brakes and a shrill voice shrieking out of a car window, ‘Look – a great big one – we could get at least ten dollars for it!’
There was a din of doors opening and slamming and a clamour of voices, and Sealink ran for her life. A big tenwheeler missed her by inches, its airhorn blaring wildly. A station-wagon swerved around her; in the other direction, a truck jammed on its brakes and its tyres screeched against the tarmac. The last car came straight at her. She just had time to see a pair of hands clutching the steering-wheel with white knuckles, a manic face leaning forward, mouth open in fury or triumph, and then there was darkness. Hot metal seared the fur on her back. A fiery pain and burning fur. Vile fumes engulfed her. Sealink had time to feel a terrible, sad irony at this useless loss of life, then suddenly there was light and air again and she realized that the car had passed right over her. She stared wildly around, barely able to believe her luck, then scrambled for the sidewalk and fled through the gates of the St Louis Cemetery.
Inside the boneyard all was quiet.
Round the back of one of the tombs she sat down and inspected the damage. It really wasn’t too bad, considering. A patch of fur in the middle of her back was dark and sticky, the fibres fused together by the heat. It tasted nasty when she licked it. But the worst casualty was her tail. Sealink had always been vain about this attribute. Her tail had been the subject of a thousand compliments and admiring glances. It was a barometer of her inner climate: held high and tip-curled when she was happy; thin and lowered when, rarely, she felt depressed; and when it fizzed and dilated, a wise cat took to its heels. But now, where before she had carried a great and gorgeous plume, a strip of skin and fur had been torn right off the end, so that it ended in raw pink on one side and ragged hair on the other.
Sealink gave a little wail of despair.
‘Where y’at, sister?’
She looked up, startled. It was Hog, the big stripy neuter.
‘Hell, honey, forget me: all I lost’s my tail. Should be grateful for small mercies, huh?’
Hog dropped silently off the mausoleum to land in front of her. He inspected the wound solemnly. ‘Say you had a narrow escape there, lady. Unlike the rest of us.’
‘Hog, where is everyone?’
‘They’s mainly gone. We lost Téo, you know.’
Sealink nodded dumbly.
‘Heard the Pestmen took her.’ He regarded the calico askance. After a pause, which Sealink failed to fill, he continued, ‘Some kids took old Tulane, put him in a bag. We never seen him again. An’ Azelle, she wandered off, said she was goin’ to search for her babies.’ His eyes went blank with memory. ‘Others, they just lay down an’ died, of the sickness, y’know. They was glad to go by then. Kiki’s band stole two of our remainin’ kitties – slipped through the gates when there was no moon and carried ’em off. They laughed at us – too sick, too tired and slow to stop ’em.’ He sighed.
‘We’ve had a few new arrivals since then. Owners kicked ’em out, decided they didn’t like cats after all. Now we’re all starvin’ together—’
He stopped abruptly, for he had lost the calico’s attention. She was staring above his head, eyes round with surprise. Her whiskers trembled. Then her coral lips stretched into the most beatific of smiles.
‘My, my – fallen on hard times, have you, my angels? Seems there may be a little justice in the world after all.’
Crouched on top of the tomb above Hog, under the protective hands of a praying plaster child, were two large tabby cats, their coats a little thinner, their expressions a little less assured, their mannerisms a little less arrogant than the last time Sealink had seen them, in the dusty storeroom of the Golden Scarab bookshop.
Kiki’s helpers.
Venus and Sappho.
Sealink’s daughters.
And even as she recognized them she remembered something else, something that had evaded her all this time.
*
Life had recently dealt the erstwhile bookshop cats a number of setbacks; but the revelation of one half of their parentage left them speechless with disbelief. Sealink watched with slow, grim satisfaction as the information settled and was absorbed.
‘Well, I guess you never could accuse Kiki of behaving towards us in a motherly way,’ Sappho said eventually. ‘She’d upped and gone by the time we were thrown out. Didn’t leave any forwarding address.’
‘She can’t have gone far, not being so fat’n’all,’ said Hog. ‘But no-one’s seen her around in the last day or so.’
‘Not since the burning.’ Venus hung her head.
Sealink turned upon her. ‘What do you know about that?’
‘I heard it was a cat who crossed her was burned.’
The calico shook her head slowly. ‘None of this makes sense to me. Whole world’s gone crazy. Sure wasn’t Kiki who raised that grille and tied that poor creature up; nor who struck the match, neither.’
‘But she bin there, in the square. I bin seeing her, cher.’
A new voice had joined the group. It belonged to a colour-point with a squashed-in face that Sealink recognized vaguely from her last visit to the old cemetery.
‘Hey, there, Celeste. Where you been?’ asked Hog. ‘We been worried for you, thought you was a goner.’
The colourpoint gave him a gummy grin, revealing three ivory teeth and a furred tongue. ‘Don’t y’all worry about me, bébé. I too skinny and too wily for those humans. ’Sides, how could I stay away from my chéri?’ She rubbed her dry old cheek against his head until he purred. Sealink watched in surprise. Hog might have lost his balls, but he didn’t seem to have lost his touch.
‘Ouai, I seen Kiki, sure enough. It was after the crowds had moved on, and the light was fadin’. She was sittin’ there, watchin’ that poor dead critter, and she was smilin’. And as I watched, a little gust came out of nowhere like a little whirlwind, y’know? – and there’s des mouches – big blue flies – cornin’ out of it – like the fellas you get around trash – and they’s hummin’ and buzzin’ fit to bust. Made my head itch to hear ’em. Then all the dust and bits of garbage and the ashes from le mort gets caught up in this wind, and it’s all whirlin’ and spinnin’, and the buzzin’ gets louder and louder; and Kiki, she’s still just sittin’ there smilin’ and smilin’ with her big yellow teeth, comme ça—’ Celeste gave a hideous parody of a contented cat’s grin ‘—and her coat’s all ruffled, and her eyes go all lazy like someone’s strokin’ her; and then she starts to talk to it. Made me shiver up my spine to see her.’ She shuddered theatrically. ‘World ain’t right when a cat talks to the wind. C’est crack.’ She lowered her voice. ‘But when the wind talks back—’
The boneyard cats stared at her. ‘The wind spoke?’
The colourpoint’s skin twitched as if reliving an earlier repulsion.
Her audience stared expectantly.
‘I heard it sigh—’
She stopped suddenly.
‘What?’ cried Venu
s impatiently. ‘What then?’
Celeste scratched her ear. ‘I ain’t sure if I should tell you this next bit or not. Y’all t’ink I gone nuts.’
‘We won’t, I promise,’ Hog said gently. He held the colourpoint’s amber gaze for a moment or two till she carried on.
‘Eh bien – Now of all my faculties, it’s my hearin’ bin least affected, so y’all got no cause to t’ink I gone deaf or crazy, y’hear? On all that’s sacred, I heard it sigh, and then all those flies they spoke wit’ a man’s voice.’
Sealink frowned. ‘Honey, run that past me again?’
‘I know flies don’t usually talk—’
Sealink squinted at her.
‘—but I know what I heard. The wind, it sighed and it buzzed, and then it spoke with a human’s voice, and it said, quite clearly: Come here, my dear: I need your soul, too. And then there’s this other voice, deep and dark, like it’s tryin’ to drown out the first one. A cat’s voice. So then I lissen real good: and it sayin’, over and over: Save the kittens. For the sake of all cats, save the kittens… And then there’s a great roar from inside the wind, and then, well then, chers, then I took off as fast as my old legs’d carry me, and even so, I swear I could hear the buzzin’ of those flies and Madam Kiki laughin’ at me all the way.
‘There’s witchery abroad, mes chers, witchery and mayhem.’
*
Later that night the boneyard cats sat huddled together inside one of the larger tombs. There was nothing left to eat. Sealink had searched the garbage cans in the nearby projects and come away empty-pawed. She had, in fact, discovered the remains of some spicy chicken in one plastic sack and without a second’s pause had wolfed it down, and only then found herself trembling with embarrassment at her own greed; but the shame barely outlasted the taste of the spices.
In order to assuage her conscience she went out to look for more, and discovered her luck had not, after all, deserted her. Some kids, returning with take-out from a local Chinese, were fooling around on their bikes. Remembering the hunting cry from the car window, she skittered between the wheels, causing quite a stir. Shouting and pedalling furiously they had given chase; but the calico, slimmer and fitter after these lean weeks, was quicker. She nipped up and over the wall and doubled back to where they’d dropped the food, seized a fragrant carton between her substantial jaws and legged it back to the cemetery.