The Golden Cat

by Gabriel King

  He said, ‘Oh, I saw you at the Library (your head was in a book, but you can’t read), listening to his endless boring stories, day after day. It was always “the Reading Cat knows this, the Reading Cat knows that,” but what is reading anyway? Reading is not so difficult. Kater Murr learned to read. Oh yes he did! But Kater Murr learned what to read. Kater Murr is a successful cat. Kater Murr has important friends—’

  ‘Kater Murr is nothing,’ said Tag. ‘You killed the Reading Cat out of jealousy. Had you already found your way to the room beneath the copper dome? I think you had. I think that was where you were taught to read. Kater Murr is a pet cat, who dabbled where he had no understanding. Kater Murr is still a doorkeeper.’

  He paused.

  ‘Though now he keeps the Alchemist’s door,’ he said.

  He left a long silence, then mused, ‘What did he offer you, Kater Murr? The chance to be a human being?’ Tag laughed. ‘Well, that’s a poor enough ambition, but you won’t achieve it, any more than your master could make himself a cat. He will finish with you soon, Kater Murr. He will use you up. Look at you! You can barely hold yourself together.’

  Throughout this exchange they had been moving towards one another in the mannered, stealthy way of male cats. Now Tag found his face so close to Kater Murr’s that their foreheads were almost touching. Despite the oceanarium glare, Kater Murr’s pupils were fully dilated, while the surfaces of the eyes themselves had a swimmy, iridescent sheen. What could he be seeing? Only light, Tag supposed. Only shapes moving through a painful light. ‘He’s far gone in some direction a cat isn’t meant to go. I’ve got his attention away from the Queen. But what am I going to do now?’ All along his scabby back, the gatekeeper’s fur was up like a scrubbing-brush. In response, Tag could only sink his weight back onto his haunches, and, rocked back and forth by the beat of his own heart, open his throat on the low and angry bubbling noises which had somehow taken up residence there. Behind him he could feel Kater Murr’s tomcats shifting slyly about as they prepared to flank him. The smell of Kater Murr’s breath was as thick as tar. Tag could see the mites in his ears.

  ‘It was bound to come to this,’ Tag thought.

  They were about to embrace when several things happened at once.

  Cy cried, ‘Behind you, Ace! Look out!’

  Leonora Whitstand Merril, unused to obeying anyone and half-blind with her own impatience, jumped out of the shadows, shouting, ‘Do you call this fair? You bullies!’

  And Ragnar Gustaffson Coeur de Lion, Egyptian silver symbol tangled proudly in his unkempt mane, burst upon the oceanarium like the seventh wave. He was followed by the dustbin fox, full of sheer bad temper at recently being lost on the Old Changing Way. Black lips wrinkled off a yellow snarl. Foam flew from his lolling tongue, and his limp had quite vanished. Sizing up the situation in an instant, these two drove straight towards the Queen. Tag stared at them. How had the situation deteriorated so fast? He shrugged, and sprang at Kater Murr. The astonished doorkeeper, bowled over in a reeking heap, squirmed and paddled himself away, then returned and took a good hold of Tag’s cheek below the left eye. Their heads went back briefly and they spat in one another’s faces and with that everything came apart for good. It was like a signal. Cy jumped up and began worrying the haunch of Kater Murr. Pertelot and her daughter, their eyes glittering with malice, addressed themselves to his astonished lieutenants. Soon the oceanarium was a mêlée of screeching cats and flying fur, at the centre of which pounced and darted a single large dogfox, giving much better than he got. Left to itself, despite the uneven numbers, this situation could only have developed in one way – several of the tomcats were already thinking about leaving. But Kater Murr was no ordinary cat—

  Some blow of Tag’s had sent him reeling. Trying to escape another, he ran full tilt into the fish-tank and slid down it with his cheek pressed to the glass. When he came to rest, the eye on that side had closed for good. The other had a glazed look.

  He groaned.

  ‘Kater Murr knows a thing or two,’ he said.

  His outline wavered. The air around him crackled and spat. Every cat present felt its hair stand on end. They stopped fighting and regarded one another warily, while large slow bluish sparks, wandering aimlessly about at head-height, discharged themselves in perfect silence against the spiral stairs. Kater Murr tried to get up. He convulsed. He seemed to shoot out from himself in all directions at once, and the assembled cats felt him pass through them like a ripple in the air. Then he was gone, and in his place had appeared the dream-cat, the avatar, the gatekeeper’s savage icon of himself. It was the size of a small horse. Its fur was coarse and orange. Black markings chased each other down its sides like drawings of flames. Every bunch-and-pull of its muscles brought forth a reek of ammonia, pheromones and death. It lifted its blunt muzzle, and gave a coughing snarl. Cats ran about in panicky circles, friend and foe alike: there was nowhere to hide. The New Majicou’s voice rang out.

  ‘Look away!’ he advised them.

  At that, the air temperature fell steeply. There was an intense flash of light, a smell of snow. The oceanarium walls drew back like sliding doors and vanished, leaving the animals to huddle together under a vertiginous grey sky. Hoar-frost formed instantly in their whiskers, and they could barely hear themselves think for the howl of the wind. Snow filled the air like fog. The spiral staircase, bearded with ice, remained visible for a moment. Then it too vanished.

  ‘This is absurd,’ said Loves A Dustbin to Ragnar Gustaffson.

  The King looked down. His medal had frozen into his ruff. ‘It is some bad weather even for a professional like me,’ he was forced to agree.

  Only Cy, huddled up between Leonora and Pertelot, seemed unconcerned. ‘Woo!’ she said. ‘It’s raw-John blind here. It’s white-eyed Jack!’ She craned her neck to stare up into the rushing snow, her eyes gleaming with excitement. ‘No-one’s identifying themselves out there tonight. But look!’

  Out of the icy air he came – out of the moil and rime of it all, out of the bitter, driving wind – the New Majicou, white tiger of the postglacial snows. His eyes were a fierce and freezing green. His long legs flexed and stretched, flexed and stretched. His huge paws thudded soft and rhythmic on the ice. He might run for ever, his old friends thought, the light spilling off his fur like that, and each movement would be full of the same force and clarity. He was a picture. He was a million miles away and yet more present than the ground beneath them. He seemed always to be arriving, expanding, rushing forward to the encounter Kater Murr had made inevitable: at the same time, somehow, he was always already there—

  They stepped around one another warily. Light flickered off the edge of an eye, the point of a bared tooth. A front paw was spread and displayed, an attitude struck then folded. There was a sudden, coughing snarl, then a flurry of violence. It was hard to see what was happening through the shifting veils of snow. Two huge bodies collided with a groan like cars in a fog, disengaged immediately, began to pace around one another once more, turning this way and that in anticipation of some advantage lost even as it was gained. Suddenly they embraced again, less briefly. They writhed and fell. Hind claws raked and ripped, fur flew like raw and rusty wire. Then they were up and pacing restlessly again, panting for breath, trembling with blood-chemicals, looking for an opening. But now Kater Murr seemed quite blind.

  ‘Go home, Kater Murr. Be a cat.’

  ‘Did I hear someone speak?’

  To the watchers, everything seemed confused, too quick, too real. It was finished in an instant. Sabre teeth flashed across a bared orange throat. Blood-heat warmed the air. Kater Murr looked surprised. ‘Kater Murr is a cat among cats,’ he said, watching his life stream away into the ice. ‘His body hurts, but what does he care?’

  His rank smell overpowered everything for a moment – then another smell, of musk and winter, powder snow on an icy wind, washed it away. There was a distant, fading roar.

  The watching animals shivered. (‘
I didn’t want him to die,’ whispered Leonora Whitstand Merril. ‘He was a cat like us.’) The next time they looked, the oceanarium had reassembled itself around them. It was warm and dry. The fish circled endlessly in the heat of the electric lamp. The only sign that anything had changed was the corpse of Kater Murr, which lay sodden and used-looking, like a doormat in the rain, a little way away from the foot of the spiral stairs. His lieutenants had seized the day, and were gone.

  ‘Wow,’ breathed Cy. ‘Home again!’

  The fox looked around, shook himself suddenly and went to the doors to keep an eye on the night. ‘Cats!’ he was thinking. ‘What can you say?’

  One by one, they relaxed. The New Majicou had transported them briefly to some country of his own. It had been a country without consequences for them: but he looked exhausted. He licked gingerly at his wounds, while his friends gathered round him, all trying to talk at once. For his own part, he seemed to be waiting for something, and every so often cocked his head as if he was trying to listen to a voice in the distance.

  *

  ‘Well then, Mercury,’ said Pertelot, when things had settled down again. ‘It’s harder to be the Majicou than you thought.’

  ‘I always thought it was hard,’ said Tag.

  ‘Other than the defeat of that wretched animal, what have we gained from this?’

  ‘Nothing.’ He shrugged. ‘Everything. Whose answer would you like, mine or the New Majicou’s? Two worlds are crossing in front of me, Pertelot, and I can no longer reconcile them.’

  But Pertelot would not be put off like that. She was the Mau. Love and demand were never separate in her. Her tantrums, her fits of melancholy or prophecy or overwhelming love, were a way of navigating the world. She smelled of cinnamon and almonds. Her eyes were still full of Egypt, which he imagined as a landscape of the senses rather than the heart, a palette of harsh colours and exciting speech, a place where the very dust was infused with bravura tastes and smells. Tag thought, ‘She is the thread that links our past to our future. Her needs drive us all.’ Sensing this, she was able to persist, ‘Will I ever see my missing children again?’

  ‘I believe you will, and soon.’

  The fox had followed this exchange intently, his yellow eyes glittering. Now he got to his feet, shook himself, and, blunt nails clicking arhythmically on the concrete floor, limped across to warn, ‘The night isn’t over yet, Majicou.’

  Tag cocked his head again, as if he could hear something more than the thrum and mumble of the onshore wind across the oceanarium roof.

  ‘Did I say it was?’ he asked.

  After a moment he added, ‘I wish you’d call me Tag.’

  *

  The cats slept in a heap: two bodies here curled yin and yang – two heads there resting on the same flank – more paws than you could imagine. The fox watched over them for a while, grinning his feral grin as he tried to work out who was connected to what; then, giving up, went off to doze on his own by the door, thinking, ‘I rather like them. But I’d prefer cubs.’ While, behind the glass, exalted by the light pouring down, the fishes turned and danced. All was calm in the oceanarium until, perhaps two hours before dawn, Kater Murr’s bedraggled remains began to stir.

  It was some internal rearrangement, the fox thought, some contraction of the ligaments: the faint paradoxical gestures of rigor. A paw twitched. The stuffed-looking head, with its glassy eyes and snaggle-teeth, seemed to settle minutely. That would have been that for an ordinary cat – but not for Kater Murr. His outline seemed to shift. The air around him flexed and creaked. Suddenly, the fox’s mouth was filled with a bad taste. Head low and hackles stiff, he approached the corpse. Warm draughts curled round it briefly, lifting dust into his eyes.

  ‘What’s this?’ he asked himself.

  He thought he had better alert the New Majicou: but, as soon as he turned away from the corpse, a polite cough came from behind him, then another noise which, once it had begun, went on and on—

  The cats woke up to find him darting round them in desperation, nipping at their ears, their noses, their tails, yelping, ‘Wake up! Wake up!’ They jumped to their feet, fur on end, blinking in sleepy alarm. The electric light pulsed slowly and nauseously; while, inside the tank itself, lightning seemed to flicker as the panicked fish twisted to and fro. ‘Wake up!’ All they could tell was that the half-dark was full of the drone of some faulty machine. A strong, insistent wind, rattling and banging at the oceanarium doors until it tore them open, deafened the cats and made them stagger. A stinging litter of plastic straws, cigarette-ends, grit, sheets of newspaper and discarded fast-food cartons blew into their faces, to whirl past and be sucked up into the great spinning inverted funnel of shadow which had issued from Kater Murr’s body and now tottered over them like a humming-top about to run down – a smoky, uneven vortex twice as tall as the fish-tank, bulging and bending and losing its definition, but growing denser second by second as it sucked the rubbish up into itself.

  Rags and Pertelot stared up in horror.

  ‘I smell heartbreak, Ace,’ said Cy, prudently backing away; while Leo, ambushed by memory, stood stock-still and whispered to herself in a kind of hushed delight. ‘I knew. They were down there under the earth. I knew they were down there, all the time!’

  The fox stared at her as if she was mad.

  ‘What’s happening?’ he demanded.

  Tag said, ‘The doorkeeper has become the door.’

  Then he said, ‘Run! We must all get out of here! Out of here and up the hill! Run!’

  Even as he spoke, the vortex hummed and darkened, drawing in a gale which smelled of rain and the sea and carried with it larger objects from outside – an orange lifebelt, billows of nylon fishing-net, some slats from a wooden bench. The oceanarium seemed to wince under this onslaught. Its doors flapped wildly for an instant, were wrenched off their hinges, and toppled end over end towards the vortex, disintegrating as they went. Splinters filled the air.

  ‘Run as hard as you can!’

  But running of any kind was out of the question. Instead, they assembled themselves in single file behind the King’s reassuring bulk and, step by step, head down, his great mane rippling back in the gale, he led them towards the door. The entire structure creaked and flexed around them as they dragged themselves along.

  At the door Pertelot Fitzwilliam stopped.

  ‘Mercury,’ she cried. ‘What is happening?’

  He laughed suddenly.

  ‘Wait and see,’ he said.

  When she had gone, he looked up at the vortex once more. It bellied towards him briefly, breaking up into the loose whirl of litter you might see at any street corner on a windy day. Then a note or two of music was played, on reeds and finger-drums, and a human figure became visible. ‘Bring me your kittens,’ the figure said. ‘Bring me all the kittens.’ Mutilated in some way, and wearing a mask, it held its arms in stiff, hieratic positions. There was a deep, hollow groan of pain, and a different voice said clearly, ‘Tag, we can still defeat him if we keep our heads.’

  Tag withdrew hastily. The last thing he saw was Kater Murr, who could still be made out at the toe of the vortex, where it tapered down to a single point gliding here and there at random an inch or so above the dead cat’s fur. Tag expected to see him sucked up like everything else, but he simply lay there while it buzzed and groaned above him, his teeth drawn back in a terrible grin.

  ‘This was what he wanted,’ the grin seemed to say. ‘Kater Murr was no ordinary thing.’

  *

  Five cats and a fox stood above a seaside town in the hour before dawn, waiting to see what would come next. The sky above the bay was full of rushing cobalt blue cloud, a layer of grey impasto obscuring its junction with the sea. There were no lights in the cottages that tumbled away down the windy hill to the harbour.

  ‘Cold here,’ said Cy to Tag. She looked up at him. ‘Get closer,’ she ordered. When he didn’t reply, she purred anyway. ‘Hey, don’t worry, Ace,’ she advi
sed him. ‘It’ll all come out in the wash. Get it?’

  He stared at her.

  ‘I’ll never understand you,’ he said.

  She wriggled with pleasure.

  ‘What’s to understand?’ she said. ‘Girls just want to have fun.’ She looked down at the oceanarium. ‘It’s a roary old night,’ she said grimly.

  ‘It is,’ said Tag.

  He left her for a moment and went to talk to Ragnar and the fox. ‘There isn’t much cover here,’ he said, staring across the hilltop. It was desolate and exposed – tourist-worn grass, one or two concrete benches, a litter-bin, some small gorse bushes and outcrops of rock.

  ‘We’d be better off in the streets,’ the fox suggested.

  Ragnar Gustaffson agreed. ‘It would be harder for that thing to follow us there.’ He shivered. ‘In the tombs, it was not good at corners.’

  ‘There are human beings down there,’ said Tag.

  ‘Why should we care?’ said the fox. ‘None of them knows what is happening up here.’

  ‘It is not their part to know,’ said the King.

  ‘No,’ thought Tag, with an unkindness that rather surprised him. ‘Their part is to sleep, while the secret world revolves round them. They will never know what happened here.’ Aloud, he said, ‘Ragnar is right. We must try to make sure their houses don’t fall on top of them.’

  This gave Loves A Dustbin some amusement.

  ‘After all,’ he said, ‘they have always done the same for us foxes.’

  ‘Even so, my friend,’ said the King. ‘Even so.’

  He looked down the hill. Shortly after their escape, the oceanarium had begun to make the sound of a chord played on a church organ. They could feel it vibrating in the deep cavities of their bodies. Powerful currents of air rushed into the gaping doorway from every direction; the walls shook and juddered and shifted on their foundations. It seemed as if the building itself was alive, drawing down the wind the way a sea creature filters the water for food. All the waste paper in the town came flapping and dancing up the hill. The telephone wires tautened and bowed. Even the beach-sand had begun to move upwards, in little trickles and drifts.